JOHN DIGGINS
381
sense of alienation could not be overcome through the study of
history since history was itself the problem: the powerlessness of
mind confronted by the mindlessness of power.
Adams turned to religion in
Mont Saint-Michel
&
Chartres.
This
work, a classic in the history of medieval architecture and culture,
has been relatively neglected by the social and political philosopher.
Yet the work exemplifies the difficulties of constructing a philosophy
of authority on the basis of religious beliefs that cannot be
reconstructed. The
Chartres
narrative was a work of imagination, but
it demonstrates that even an imaginative understanding of authority
cannot survive what Walter Lippmann would call "the acids of
modernity."
The cathedral at Chartres represented to Adams the finest
flowering of Christianity, the triumph of faith and joy over fear and
pain , expressed in the unity and harmony of geometrical design and
structure. At the center stands the statue of the Virgin Mary,
radiating the mystery of grace and love and expressing the authority
of goodness against the power of the oppressor- "an authority which
the people wanted, and the fiefs feared." But Mary hardly represents
the classical image of authority: she is neither a law-giver, a voice of
reason, an arbiter of justice, nor even a symbol of order. On the
contrary, she is an intellectual embarrassment. She questioned a
deity that would create man in order to punish him, and she offered
to the masses not strict judgment but "protection, pardon, love ."
Adams esteemed this "illogical, unreasonable, and feminine" spirit.
"Intensely human, but always Queen , she upset, at her pleasure, the
decision of every court and the orders of every authority, human or
divine; interfered directly in the ordeal; altered the processes of
nature; abolished space; annihilated time." Mary emerges as an
impulsive anarchist undermining all that is logical, abstract,
impersonal, and objective. A saint, she subverts authority in order
to express it better. In explaining his feelings to himself, Adams
enables us to understand our fee!ings, and what we feel in the
Chartres
narrative is not order and unity, as traditional scholarship
has it, but the freedom and spontaneity of charismatic authority.
The contemporary intellectual who aspires to reconcile religion,
politics, and science will find little support in the writings of Henry
Adams. For Adams could only save the spiritual idea of authority
from politics and science, from the abuses of power and the
negations of reason, by estheticizing authority itself, depicting the
