Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
Tuesdays, 5:30-7:00 pm ET | April 7-June 30
After his wife’s suicide in 1885, Henry Adams tried to think through the topsy-turvy contemporary world and his own life in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1913). He views the High Middle Ages as a civilization that had built and nurtured a transcendental unity as he leads the reader on a pilgrimage back in time, through a veiled confession, to a homecoming. Adams introduced Americans to a half-forgotten past. This seminar is a prelude to The Education of Henry Adams which will be offered in the summer.
Text: Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, 402 pp., paperback ISBN 9780691003351
Reading Load: 25-30 pp./week.
Leader: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga is an alumnus of St. John’s College, Annapolis, and past president of the large Northern California Alumni Chapter. He has led seminars with Symposium for 20 years and with other organizations for the last 25 years.
Henry Adams died at eighty in 1918. If we place ourselves within his lifetime, rather than look back upon it, we see just how unstable, uncertain, and fraught his world was. And if ever there were insiders, he was one. When he was 10 the United States had duplicated its territory at the expense of Mexico, and with that came mass migrations and brutal Indian wars. His first 23 years were a time of wealth such as his grandparents could not have dreamt. That all came crashing down with what Northerners called the Civil War and Southerners called the War of Northern Aggression, followed by Reconstruction, military occupation, martial law, a mass exodus of planters to the Empire of Brazil, sharecropping, African American migration North, the forced incorporation of the Southern economy and society into the Northern one. Then another explosion in wealth, the Gilded Age, a massive restructuring of the American economy by railroads, the first corporations that replaced small business groups such as Astor & Co. The closing of the frontier in 1890. The admission of the US into the club of European powers after the Spanish-American War in 1898. During the last decade of his life America became more urban than rural following a long and accelerating trend. And in the last years of his life, the entry of the US into the Great War that broke the stalemate and forced the capitulation of the Central Powers, the end of the Ottoman Empire and division of the near and middle East, the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Central Europe, the end of monarchy in Germany and the imposition of Weimar, Versailles and Revanchist reparations aimed at economically crippling Germany to the advantage of France and Britain (or so the latter thought), Versailles and the beginning of de-colonialization (with disastrous consequences for the decolonialized). It was more than enough to make anyone dizzy, and risk being shocked, paralyzed, or crazy. To all this Adams had a direct, front row seat as it were. He chose to try and make sense of this, to understand what was happening, and to bring to that essay his great gifts as historian, poet, diplomat, and thinker.
He knew perfectly well that the changes America was suffering were but her part of global changes. He was too learned a historian and too incisive a thinker, to go back for his bearings, as many would have been tempted to do, to the America of his grandfather President John Quincy Adams, or of his great-grandfather President John Adams, or even the America that welcomed his forebearer Henry Adams of Barton-St. David, Somerset in 1632, for he knew all these to be of one piece. No, he went back to his Norman ancestors of the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Centuries, and not in England but on the Continent, in France. He reiterated a technique used by the first historian Herodotus in his Inquiries (that is what the Greek word “historia” means). To understand the Hellenes, the Greek-speaking peoples, let us examine the barbarians around them.
The result was a diptych of two great books, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1913), “the Virgin””, and The Education of Henry Adams (1918), “the Dynamo”. He intended Mont St. Michel and Chartres as the prequel and foil to the latter, the key to understanding The Education. He sees the High Middle Ages as a civilization that had built and nurtured a transcendental unity, and in order to understand what that is from the inside he leads the reader on a pilgrimage back to the 11th through the 13th Centuries of Latin Christendom, from Mt. St. Michel, through the Song of Roland, medieval Latin poetry, the Crusaders, the Court of Love, the guilds and corporations, Chartres, the rulers of France, Our Lady the Blessed Virgin Mary, Peter Abelard, Adam of St. Victor, Francis of Assisi, to the great artist Thomas Aquinas, and also through a veiled confession to a homecoming.
Adams introduced Americans to that half-buried, half-forgotten past-present, as his close friend HH Richardson introduced the Romanesque architecture; as this book inspired Ralph Adams Cram to perfect the Collegiate Gothic in buildings such as Princeton’s campus and St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue; as John D. Rockefeller and JP Morgan helped establish The Cloisters; as Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler rediscovered Aquinas and the medieval university in the 20s and 30s. Adams was the first professor of medieval history in Harvard University (1870-1877), and as such was the first to hold history seminars at an American university—one of his graduate assistants was Henry Cabot Lodge. Let an American master show us how we may make sense of our crazy world. Indeed, we shall see how much Adams was ahead of his time.