The Spirit of Notre-Dame

Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (i.e. “The Hunchback”) is exactly the kind of book that my reading plan is for. I do read books from the last hundred-thirty years; I just generally like older books better. And the schedule of reading, among other purposes, gets me to make a pact with myself to read a lot of classics I haven’t read before in the hopes of finding new favorites. Notre-Dame is now a favorite. I’ve been walking around laughing while I read it because it’s so good. But, then, I am – you know – a little weird.

If you hear anyone talking about Victor Hugo (admittedly, the chances of this oddity occurring on any given day are quite slim), it will be someone complaining about how long Les Miserables is, especially the chapter on the sewers of Paris. For me that book is not too long at all, and I love the chapter about the sewers! But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone talking about Notre-Dame, the novel. The hunchback seems to have settled into our culture’s consciousness as a character that lives in various films, not on the pages of a book.

The movies, even Disney’s, seem to follow the plot of the novel fairly closely. But there’s so much more than plot here! After all, the book itself is not named for the hunchback, a character with a story that unfolds, but for the church itself, which, with little change from day to day, stands monumentally telling its own stories. Here is a long chapter not about sewers but about the history of the architecture of the church, displaying as it does the Romanesque, medieval, and Renaissance styles in its successive layers. Then there’s a long chapter on what a person alive in 1482 would see from one of the towers of the cathedral. Who needs plot with chapters like these? Next is an amazing chapter about Quasimodo’s activities in the church. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to describe it better than my lame attribution of the adjective “amazing.” But, like poetry that can’t be translated, Victor’s beautiful language is so much a part of the description of the man who lives, breathes, and moves as the spirit of the church, I think the chapter can’t be described; it can only be read. So put it on your ten-year reading plan!

Okay, in a bizarre coincidence, I find that I have heard someone talking about this novel, and I came across the reference again just last night. I was rewatching an episode of Buffy, and in that episode, Willow and Tara, having finished reading the book for class, talk about Quasimodo and Esmerelda while Buffy tries to figure out if Charles Laughton was one of the singing gargoyles. So, yes, the point of the exchange was the joke about the Hunchback movies. But . . . but Willow and Tara with the talking about my new favorite!

Aquinas Returns

After twenty-some years of reading Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, each year’s reading highly anticipated and ultimately revelatory and rewarding, I’ve been disappointed the last couple of years. My first pass through the tome was guided by Mortimer Adler’s schedule, provided with the Britannica Great Books set. My second pass through it, during the first ten-year reading plan that I drew up on my own, got me through all parts of the work but skipped certain sections, leaving something like 15-20% to be completed later.

It seems that I did a good job seventeen years ago in picking out the highlights to read first. Covering the basics of the virtue of justice was super-interesting a few years ago. Now filling in the gaps and reading this year (in a section on sins opposed to justice) about the difference between backbiting and tale-bearing: not so much.

But the experience this year didn’t disappoint as much as it had in other recent years. The ethics of trial advocacy, for instance, really piqued my interest. For example, Aquinas says that a judge must decide according to what is proven by evidence. If he privately knows some piece of evidence to be false, he must use legal means to sift it and try to reject it. If he cannot do this legally, he must judge according to what has been proven by the legal procedure, even if he knows it is wrong. He is bound to try every legal avenue he has to keep an innocent person from suffering capital punishment. I don’t know if you agree with Aquinas’s take on this issue; I like his respect for the system and the rule of law.

Other intriguing points in this section deal with wasting the court’s time and resources in unjust causes. One who accuses falsely, for instance, and fails to prove his case is rightly bound to the punishment he sought for the other party. Accepting that rule in this country might limit the number of frivolous torte cases seeking millions! Similarly, although a losing defendant has a right to appeal (Christians may appeal without concern that they are disrespecting authority), one who loses an appeal should be punished for the appeal itself as well as for the crime or civil injury he has been convicted of.

I’m actually taking a break from Aquinas now for three years. In his place, I’ll read some other medieval theologians: Abelard, Peter Lombard, and Albertus Magnus. In my fourth ten-year plan, though, I’m going to fill in every nook and cranny of the Summa!

(That phrase reminds me of a joke – if it doesn’t exist, it should – about the Dickensian woman who ran a generous soup kitchen frequented by pick-pockets and poor girls looking for day work caring for children: she filled every crook and nanny!)