Virgin Legacies

by poputonian

Upon visiting the awe-inspiring Chartres Cathedral in France, Henry Adams, intellectual and sage descendant of two presidents, concluded that the Virgin herself was responsible for its creation:

At last we are face to face with the crowning glory of Chartres. Other churches have glass — quantities of it, and very fine — but we have been trying to catch a glimpse of the glory which stands behind the glass of Chartres, and gives it quality and feeling of its own. For once the architect is useless and his explanations are pitiable; the painter helps still less; and the decorator, unless he works in glass, is the poorest guide of all, while, if he works in glass, he is sure to lead wrong; and all of them may toil until Pierre Mauclerc’s stone Christ comes to life, and condemns them among the unpardonable sinners on the southern portal, but neither they nor any other artist will ever create another Chartres. You had better stop here, once for all, unless you are willing to feel that Chartres was made what it is, not by artist, but by the Virgin.

If this imperial presence is stamped on the architecture and the sculpture with an energy not to be mistaken, it radiates through the glass with a light and colour that actually blind the true servant of Mary. One becomes, sometimes, a little incoherent in talking about it; one is ashamed to be as extravagant as one wants to be; one has no business to labour painfully to explain and prove to one’s self what is as clear as the sun in the sky; one loses temper in reasoning about what can only be felt, and what ought to be felt instantly, as it was in the twelfth century, even by the truie qui file and the ane qui vielle. Any one should feel it that wishes; any one who does not wish to feel it can let it alone. Still, it may be that not one tourist in a hundred — perhaps not one in a thousand of the English-speaking race — does feel it, or can feel it even when explained to him, for we have lost many senses.

Edmund Morris, writing the modern-day introduction to Adams’ 1906 autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, which itself was written uniquely in third-person, tells us that Adams was “too rationalistic to be religious,” but adds that he “nevertheless believed in an ordered universe.” Relating Darwin and religion, Morris further stated that Adams’ reaction to Darwinism “was somewhat blunted by an agnostic unsentimentality.” So where, then, did Adams get his expressive awe of the Virgin Mary? Perhaps the answer is revealed in his third-person autobiography, where he talks about the Virgin as a force, or as a symbol of power:

… he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres — perhaps at Lourdes — possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles — but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power — only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

Adams then went on to set mortal men apart from the force of the Virgin, and, perhaps too, from women:

Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no symbol, unproved or unproveable, that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian’s business was to follow the track of the energy; to find where it came from and where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions. It could scarcely be more complex than radium; it could hardly be deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed more perplexingly than other radiant matter. Adams knew nothng about any of them, but as a mathematical problem of influence on human progress, though all were occult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the Virgin easiest to handle.

Nearing the end of the introduction, Morris writes about Adams:

It is his confidence that Chaos can be controlled, once its hidden energies are understood and embraced, which speaks to us even now, even more than his exquisite prose style. We, no less than the disillusioned generation that made The Education a phenomenal bestseller in the years immediately after World War I, are confronted by a future that seems to reject old certainties. Just as Adams’ first readers had to adjust to a fairly complete transformation of the world’s social and political order, so must his latest confront such imponderables as, say, the decline of print culture in the West, and the unbalancing of the gender equilibrium in Eastern abortion clinics.

One may take such new issues and leaf through The Education in search of applicable wisdom. Almost at once the book falls open at:

Of all movements of inertia, maternity and reproduction are the most typical, and women’s property of moving in a constant line forever is ultimate, uniting history in its only unbroken and unbreakable sequence. Whatever else stops, the woman must go on reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vital condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind.

By his shock use of the word mind, instead of body, Adams at once transmits a message of comfort. Unable as he naturally was to imagine social engineering by sonogram, his faith in das ewig Weibliche, and his “Dynamic Theory of History” (which perfectly fits today’s explosion of cybercommunications), persuade us that sooner or later, oppressed women in China and India will get wired, and wise to, the manipulation of their wombs by men.

Now I understand everything.

May the force (de femme) be with you.

Merry Christmas.
UPDATE: For clarity, I should be more explicit in saying that I believe Adams was fascinated by the power of the female, or das ewig Weibliche. I do not think that Adams was endorsing religion. I believe he was laying out a connection between the female role in the continuity of history, the symbolic power of the Virgin, and the role of men, who historically have always had to be busy ‘doing things’ — like building churches and burning bridges. As people here have probably gathered, I am not a religious person and what Adams penned above helps convince me of the practical manifestations of religion, both good and bad.