Cathedrals in Paris

When I was living in Paris I was of course awestruck by the sheer size of the Parisian Cathedrals, and even more struck by the idea that these cathedrals lifetimes to create. Let’s take the most famous Cathedral as an example, Notre Dame, it started construction in 1160, and finished construction in 1250, but all the elements really weren’t done until 1345. 1345! That’s 185 years!

Now lets take into consideration the average lifespan around that time period. On average the ancient Greek population (around 1100 bc) lived 35 years, and on the whole this remained the average lifespan in Europe up to the nineteenth century. So lets do a little calculations, being a little optomistic and figure that a person would live to be 45, this is 45 of hard labor, poor food, poor living conditions, 0 medicine.

So if the average life is 45, and it took 185 years to complete that means You could start construction on a church, and at the end of your great grand kids lives the church will be completed. That’s 4 generations required to build a Cathedral. That’s an amazing commitment to your God. Now just take a look around. What epic monuments do we have now. Goudi’s Cathedral in Barcelona will not be completed before the end of my life. The crazy horse memorial in South Dakota. The Crazy Horse Memorial doesn’t even have a completion date set, I mean it took 50 years just to carve the face on the mountain! If the monument is ever completed it will certainly be many generations from now.