May 2022 Print

By Michael Warren Davis

Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918) came from good stock. He was the grandson of our sixth president and the great-grandson of our second. His father Charles Francis served as Lincoln’s envoy to the United Kingdom, ensuring the British did not intervene in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Henry himself was a distinguished historian, but is remembered today for his droll autobiography The Education of Henry Adams.

Modern Library named his Education the best nonfiction book of the 20th century. Albert Jay Nock called Henry the most accomplished member of his dynasty. Russell Kirk said that he “represents the zenith of American civilization.” He was the archetype of the Boston Brahmin, the Eastern Establishment, the WASP aristocrat. He was also a fanatical medievalist.

This is made abundantly clear by his second most famous work, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. The book was inspired by a pilgrimage to France, which he took with his closest friend, the artist John La Farge. Together, they opened a little rift in time. Adams—the quintessential American, the “child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”—came face to face with medieval Europe. And to his amazement, he found new life. “The man who wanders into the twelfth century is lost,” he wrote, “unless he can grow prematurely young.”

By the time he arrived in France, Adams had already begun to grow somewhat disillusioned with the United States. He felt the country wasn’t living up to the promise of its Founding Fathers. He was no democrat; like his great-grandfather, he was deeply suspicious of “the popular will.” But he was too much a product of the Enlightenment to be anything else. He was a republican down to his bones. So, he became a something of a misanthrope.

In the Middle Ages, though, he found something quite different. To him, the Gothic symbolizes the ardor and passion of the Middle Ages. The Neoclassical, meanwhile, represents the narrow rationalism of the Enlightenment. The Gothic sprang up organically from the soil of Christian Europe. The Neoclassical is artificial, affected, self-conscious. So Adams writes that,

In 1058, when the triumphal columns were building, and Taillefer sang to William the Bastard and Harold the Saxon, Roland still prayed his “mea culpa” to God the Father and gave not a thought to Alda his betrothed. In the twelfth century Saint Bernard recited “Ave Stella Maris” in an ecstasy of miracle before the image of the Virgin, and the armies of France in battle cried, “Notre-Dame-Saint-Denis-Montjoie.” What the Roman could not express flowered into the Gothic; what the masculine mind could not idealize in the warrior, it idealized in the woman; no architecture that ever grew on earth, except the Gothic, gave this effect of flinging its passion against the sky.

When men no longer felt the passion, they fell back on themselves, or lower. The architect returned to the round arch, and even further to the flatness of the Greek colonnade; but this was not the fault of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. What they had to say they said; what they felt they expressed; and if the seventeenth century forgot it, the twentieth in turn has forgotten the seventeenth. History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

(Readers couldn’t help but notice that the Founding Fathers were fond of neoclassical architecture.)

The medieval Catholic, like the modern American, believed in equality. There’s a crucial difference, however. The Enlightenment sought to make all men equally “high.” The philosophes believed human beings were fundamentally good. They sought to unite mankind in the pursuit of a more perfect society. The Middle Ages sought to make all men equally “low.” Before the majesty of Christ, mere rank meant nothing. Bishop or baron, sire or serf—all were subjects of Christo Rege and His mother, the Queen of Heaven. Standing at the door of Mont Saint Michel, Adams reflects:

The Empress Mary is receiving you at her portal, and whether you are an impertinent child, or a foolish old peasant-woman, or an insolent prince, or a more insolent tourist, she receives you with the same dignity; in fact, she probably sees very little difference between you. An empress of Russia to-day would probably feel little difference in the relative rank of her subjects, and the Virgin was empress over emperors, patriarchs, and popes.

In the Middle Ages, men were made equal by humility, not in pride.

Adams was also astonished by the incredible variety in the intellectual life of the Medieval Europe. Back then—to use the author’s striking phrase—”Poetry and metaphysics owned the world.”

He exulted in the Song of Roland and the Lancelot-Grail. He was carried off by the Latin lyrics of Adam of Saint Victor. (I bet not one in a million Catholics today knows Adam’s work—I didn’t). Above all, he adored Dante. “The whole Trinity, with the Virgin to aid, had not the power to pardon him who should translate Dante and Petrarch,” he quipped. They must be read in their own pure Italian, or else not at all.

He was also a perceptive reader of medieval philosophy. He praised Saint Thomas Aquinas in the strongest possible terms, almost presenting himself as a Thomist:

Saint Thomas is still alive and overshadows as many schools as he ever did; at all events, as many as the Church maintains. He has outlived Descartes and Leibnitz and a dozen other schools of philosophy more or less serious in their day. He has mostly outlived Hume, Voltaire, and the militant sceptics. His method is typical and classic; his sentences, when interpreted by the Church, seem, even to an untrained mind, intelligible and consistent; his Church Intellectual remains practically unchanged, and, like the Cathedral of Beauvais, erect, although the storms of six or seven centuries have prostrated, over and over again, every other social or political or juristic shelter.

Compared with it, all modern systems are complex and chaotic, crowded with self-contradictions, anomalies, impracticable functions and outworn inheritances; but beyond all their practical shortcomings is their fragmentary character. An economic civilization troubles itself about the universe much as a hive of honey-bees troubles about the ocean, only as a region to be avoided. The hive of Saint Thomas sheltered God and man, mind and matter, the universe and the atom, the one and the multiple, within the walls of an harmonious home.

Yet he’s equally enamored of a very different saint: Francis of Assisi. Adams recalls an episode from the life of Saint Francis recorded by his companion Brother Leo. One of the early Minorites asked Francis if he could keep a psalter. According to Leo, Francis said,

“Once you have a psalter, you will want a breviary. And when you have a breviary, you will sit in a high chair like a great prelate, and say to your brother, ‘Bring me my breviary!’ ” As he spoke, blessed Francis in great fervour of spirit took up a handful of ashes and placed them on his head, and rubbing his hand around his head as though he was washing it, he exclaimed, “I, a breviary! I, a breviary!” And he repeated this many times, passing his hand over his head. And the friar was amazed and ashamed.

It’s a hilarious mental image, but Francis was deadly serious. As Adams points out, the Poverello had a deep aversion to Scholastic philosophy. He said that the Schoolmen would be condemned on Judgment Day “and, with their dark logic (opinionibus tenebrosis) shall be plunged into outer darkness with the spirits of darkness.”

How could the Medieval Church honor two such strikingly different figures? First of all, because they knew that neither was infallible. Francis certainly had a point about the dangers of intellectual pride. And besides, he never knew Thomas. The Angelic Doctor was only a year old when the Little Poor Man died.

More importantly (says Adams), men of the Middle Ages were more tolerant than we are:

A Church which embraced, with equal sympathy, and within a hundred years, the Virgin, Saint Bernard, William of Champeaux and the School of Saint-Victor, Peter the Venerable, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Dominic, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Bonaventure, was more liberal than any modern State can afford to be. Radical contradictions the State may perhaps tolerate, though hardly, but never embrace or profess. Such elasticity long ago vanished from human thought.

Adams was in his glory in the Middle Ages. He relished “its contradictions”—”the strange mixture of passion and caution, the austerity, the self-abandonment, the vehemence, the restraint, the love, the hate, the miracles, and the skepticism.” It broke his heart, reflecting on how much the West had lost.

Worst of all, however, it lost its Lady.

I knew Adams loved the Virgin. I didn’t know quite how much until I read Stephen Schmalhofer’s Delightful People (Cluny Media, 2020), one of the best studies of American Catholicism on the market.

Mr. Schmalhofer recalls how, one morning, Adams was walking on the beach with his friend Father Cyril Fey. It was a feast of Our Lady. Father Fey said he would put off saying his breviary until they’d had their afternoon drive. Adams wouldn’t hear of it. “Our Blessed Lady will not tolerate that sort of thing,” he thundered. “Today is her feast and she wants her office said on time.” So, he marched the priest up to his room to say his prayers. “She’s my only hope,” he explained to Father Fey.

It’s a pity—a tragedy—that Adams never converted to Catholicism. He never seemed to be able to escape his own seventeenth-century mind. And yet, after he died, his niece Mabel found a poem on his desk. It was called “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres.”

But when, like me, he too has trod the track
Which leads him up to power above control,
He too will have no choice but wander back
And sink in helpless hopelessness of soul,

Before your majesty of grace and love,
The purity, the beauty and the faith;
The depth of tenderness beneath; above,
The glory of the life and of the death.

Near the end, Adams makes a promise:

But years, or ages, or eternity,
Will find me still in thought before your throne,
Pondering the mystery of Maternity,
Soul within Soul,—Mother and Child in One!

I hope that’s true.

Requiescat in pace Henry Brooks Adams, a sinner.

Our Lady of Chartres, ora pro nobis.