I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions . . .
—Joel 2:28
From the outside, Montmartre’s Sacré-Cœur Basilica presents something of an aesthetic problem. It is a striking edifice, needless to say, soaring up as it does at the very summit of Paris, a bright white riot of demi-ovate domes and cupolas, elongated arches, and intrepidly clashing decorative motifs. But it is also very much a product of its time, with a little too much fin de siècle preciosity about it. If one views its alleged fusion of Romanesque and Byzantine styles at a sardonic slant, it can look suspiciously like a meretricious pastiche, full of late Romantic medievalist and orientalist clichés. Contemplated at a distance, under the Parisian sky, it all sometimes seems not so much an organic expression of the spiritual aspirations of French culture as a patently synthetic memorial to them, concocted from equal parts morbid nostalgia and sugary fantasy.
On the inside, however, it is very different: more austere, more a matter of softly golden stone and muted sunlight.
On the inside, however, it is very different: more austere, more a matter of softly golden stone and muted sunlight. There is, admittedly, that huge, hideous mosaic from the 1920s in the apse (a titanic Christ with a gilded heart, flanked by the lesser colossi of the Blessed Virgin and
