A cathedral is a bet placed across generations. The mason who carved the north transept at Chartres knew he would never see the spire completed; he cut the stone anyway, with the same care as if he were building his own house. More care, probably.
What strikes me is not the faith but the project management. Hundreds of workers, over decades, with no Gantt charts, holding a shared vision of something none of them would live to inhabit. We have lost the ability to think on that timescale. We can barely commit to a five-year phone contract.
There is a kind of stubbornness in stone that I find admirable. It does not ask whether the project will be finished. It simply holds.