In his book The Hunchback of Notre Dame Victor Hugo described the architectural marvel of the Notre Dame Cathedral in four to five pages. The description’s length was really irrelevant to the book’s plot. After seeing the damage done to the cathedral during the de-religionization and riots of the French Revolution, however, Hugo sought to garner support for its restoration by relating and emphasizing its beauty.
In one passage the main antagonist, the archdeacon of Notre Dame, Claude Frollo, states in French, Ceci tuera cela, which means, “This will kill that.” “This” refers to the printed book, while “that” denotes the church. Frollo continues later to insult the one who made printed books possible by calling Johannes Gutenberg, the creator of the printing press, a German pest.
Hugo through Frollo conveyed a certain anxiety of the times. The Notre Dame Cathedral symbolized not only the power of the church but also control over accessibility to knowledge, intellectual achievement, the art of handwriting manuscripts, the accumulation of truth in church libraries, the hearing of sermons from the pulpit, and, ultimately, the best of Paris.
The book symbolized not only the new technology of the printing press but also freedom of thought, universal access to knowledge, mobility of ideas and truth, potential for religious and political change, and an equalizing effect of opportunities to all classes, ending a class of people like Frollo himself.
It was not the form of the publications that birthed our movement.
Ceci tuera cela conveyed the anxiety that the changes the printing press would bring would destroy not only the architectural sophistication of the Notre Dame Cathedral but also of the church, Paris, Europe, and civilization itself. Books could be censored, changed, and redacted, but architecture was literally set in stone. The latter was seen as the highest form of art and communication, where beauty and truth effervesced into a building.
The church today lives in a similar era in which communication and culture are undergoing change. This change brings a similar Ceci tuera cela angst. With the advent of mobile devices, ironically it is the printing presses that are now under threat.
Yet while the church as a global missionary movement was started from these presses and the publishing ministry, it was not the form of the publications that birthed our movement. It was the ideas written in those printed pages—ideas that pointed people back to the plain study of His Word; ideas that pointed to the dependence on the righteousness of Christ; ideas that pointed up to our High Priest’s ministry in the heavenly sanctuary; ideas that pointed forward to the second return of Jesus—that made the difference.
Today those same ideas remain potent, but can now take new forms and go further, through social media, digital platforms, videos, and podcasts. With artificial intelligence, holograms, neuro-linked communications, quantum computing, virtual and augmented realities, who knows how the message of soon-returning Savior could be communicated with fervor, love, urgency, and biblical accuracy to a dying world?
Frollo was wrong. This didn’t kill that.
The anxiety of Notre Dame fading away in the wake of the printing press was premature. We still marvel at the forms of previous generations, walking around them with our mobile cameras and spending incredible amounts to repair them when burned. But we also must translate our message into forms for the next generation. We must constantly think of new ways and methods for the tried-and-true gospel message of the three angels to reach the world.
Notre Dame still stands. Books, magazines, and presses will continue. But how much further and more creatively should the Advent message spread in the upcoming years before Christ’s soon return?