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Virgin's authority as a form of "beauty" which "stares everyone in the
eye and begs for sympathy." Adams made no attempt to reconcile his
image of the Virgin with traditional Protestant notions of authority
which drive man to obey for fear of being damned. Nor did he try
to
reconcile it with the reality of politics. We behold the Virgin, but her
anarchistic energies cannot be translated into Christian ethics or her
mystical imagery into political philosophy. Perhaps had Adams
attempted to reconcile the spiritual and the political he would have
had to sacrifice his ethic oflove to develop a system of rules, and thus
admit that genuine authority had become nothing more than the
power of law to impose itself. Aquinas tried to make God rational;
but Adams, perhaps sensing that rationality had become identical to
the following of rules, made the Virgin irrational.
The quarrel -between William James and Henry Adams
illustrates this dilemma. Both the philosopher and the historian
came to believe in the efficacy of religion as a source of hope, and
thus the Virgin symbolized the thesis of James's philosophical
argument in "The Will to Believe": an idea or image is valued by the
results it produces in the subjects who believe in it and act upon it.
Although Adams's idea of religion more implied a state of possession
than of action, the Jamesian penchant for the practical consequences
of a creed could be found in the most mystical of faiths, even in
miracles. "Of all Mary's miracles," wrote Adams, "the best attested
next to the preservation of the Church, is the building of it." Despite
their agreement about the relation of believing and doing, they
criticized the premises of each other's arguments. When James read
a private 1904 copy of
Mont Saint-Michel
&
Chartres,
he could only
compliment its refreshing "frolic quality" while chiding the
pessimism and historical determinism that ran through all of
Adams's other works. And when Adams read the 1902 edition of
J ames's
Principles oj Psychology,
he rejected the entire philosophy of
freedom and salvation based on Jamesian pragmatism.
For Adams, who postulated a healthy will crippled by a sick
mind, religious salvation lay beyond the reach of man. James held
that the will and imagination can alter reality, but Adams never
accepted that the content of faith could be voluntarily invoked.
Unlike James's "belief," Adams's notion of "faith" could not be
produced by the exercise of will a lone since faith makes the activity
of will possible. One cannot reason or will oneself from a state of
belief to a state of faith, for while belief remains exposed to doubt,
