The Sky Is the Roof: France's Secret Cathedral

 

Can an entire cathedral be a secret place, overlooked by most people?

The answer is  yes when it comes to the Cathedrale de Jean Linard, which is hidden away in the rolling Berry countryside near the tiny village of Neuvy-Deux-Clochers.

Jean Linard was a potter. Then he was a sculptor, an engraver, and a painter. When he bought an old flint quarry in 1961, he began - as one can, apparently - to construct a cathedral in his backgarden.

He did this for nearly fifty years, until his death in 2010.

He was inspired by the Facteur Cheval, who built a fantastic palace in Drome over thirty-three years simply because he tripped over a stone and liked it's shape.

And he was inspired by Gaudi, who began the Sagrada Familia in 1882 and whose church still isn't finished.

What these men had in common - Linard, Cheval, Gaudi - was that they had an idea, and they pursued it with a stubbornness so complete it became, in the end, a kind of holy endeavour.


When Rita and I arrived at the gate of Linard's cathedral, we stood for a moment and did something that modern life makes increasingly difficult: nothing.

The mosaics assembled from salvaged objects - broken plates, coloured tiles, fragments of things that had been something else - covered every surface. 

Ceramic figures gazed out from walls. 

All religions were represented, all gods present, crammed together in an ecumenical chaos, and as the cathedral stands open to the sky, Linard himself once described it as the tallest cathedral in the world, since it's roof is the heavens. 

When we, after our visit, drove away through the Berry countryside past fields and the occasional small château, we talked about slowness.

About the specific quality of attention that a place can demand when it has been made by one person over decades, adding pieces to something that would never be finished and never needed to be.

About how the broken things that Linard collected - the fragments of old crockery, the salvaged tiles, the objects that had lost their original purpose - became, in his hands, not evidence of decline but material for construction.

We throw things away very quickly now. Objects, beliefs, relationships, selves. There is allways a newer version available. The old one was fine, but the new one has better features and a cleaner design.

Jean Linard's cathedral is made entirely of things that were, in one sense or another, done with.

And it has a roof that is the entire sky.

I am not sure it can be put more better than that.