If architecture is frozen music, as Goethe said, the 51/2-years-long, $900 million restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral — almost destroyed in a 2019 fire and reopened last weekend with an elaborate ceremony for an audience of global dignitaries on site and the whole world watching — is one of the most monumental symphonic works of our time. Some 2,000 workers from 250 companies, major construction and renovation firms to small artisanal workshops, meticulously coordinated their efforts, combining modern technology and centuries-old manual skills, to re-create and renovate with passion and precision one of the most iconic manmade structures on Earth.

As the 19th century English writer John Ruskin wrote in “The Stones of Venice,” a critique of what was being lost in the Industrial Revolution with its mechanical efficiencies and standardized production practices, the medieval craftsmen who constructed the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, who shaped the blocks of stone and carved the gargoyles by hand, were practitioners of exacting yet uniquely irregular human arts that machines and assembly lines could never replicate. One of the most miraculous achievements of Notre Dame’s renovators is their deployment of skills scarcely in use anymore, on an epic scale, to retain the original materials and physical character of an 800-year-old building.

At a moment when the world is exploding with horrible wars, political chaos, climate mayhem, widespread misery and existential despair, the Notre Dame project is a gift of hope and evidence of human potential for cooperation and constructive redemption. More than space rocketry, digital wizardry and artificial intelligence for all their magic, the ancient techniques and skills of individuals, teams of construction workers, stonemasons, wood butchers, carpenters, architects and engineers who put Notre Dame back together, deep-cleaned its limestone and dismantled, cleaned and reassembled its massive 8,000-pipe organ are magic of a more profoundly fundamental order.

It’s almost enough to make one forget the monstrous crimes of the Catholic Church, the sexual abuses perpetrated by its clergy, the cruelty of its repressive institutions and the barbarism of its violence in the name of spiritual salvation. That such an institution, like other ancient religions and civilizations whose achievements are tainted by slavery and human sacrifice, could erect such awe-inspiring structures to worship its deities proves the complexity of the human being and helps to explain the kinds of oppressive excess the New England Puritans were rebelling against, and why Islam and Judaism, riddled with their own oppressions, forbid idolatry.

If all religions are one, as William Blake contended, and all mythologies partake of the same archetypes, as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell taught, we are all implicated as members of our species in its atrocities as well as its accomplishments.

I like to think of Notre Dame newly reborn out of its own charred ruins as a hopeful metaphor for the coming years of U.S. political and cultural history when the burn-it-down fury of a so-called populist insurgency to raze American institutions (for the benefit of corporate plutocrats raking riches out of the rubble) could be the prelude to a miraculous rebirth. Perhaps the devastation, suffering and chaos promised by the MAGA regime will in the end give way to an age of cooperative reconstruction.

As hard as it may be to conceive in this dreadful moment when a gang of thugs is coming to power with the potential to bring the whole edifice of democracy crashing down around us, maybe, as the French have proved, diverse people of collective goodwill can eventually come together to reconstruct and renovate the American experiment, mobilizing a mixture of Enlightenment ideals, ancient wisdom and modern technologies to craft a more perfect union. That may sound like a utopian hallucination in light of the historical record, but it’s something I’m trying to imagine.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.