Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams

First published: 1904, private printing; 1913, republished

Type of work: Essay

The Work:

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is the study of two great medieval buildings, one a Norman abbey and the other a Gothic cathedral. In the author’s mind, however, the book has a far wider purpose. Henry Adams set out to evoke the mood of an era in France, the eleventh to the thirteenth century, in all aspects: art, theology, philosophy, and music. Behind this wider purpose is still another. Adams subtitled the book A Study of Thirteenth Century Unity, asking that it be read along with his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), in which he discusses what he called twentieth century multiplicity.

Adams was a historian, and his two books suggest a theory of history and an attitude toward history. Western civilization had moved from unity to multiplicity, from a God-centered culture in which faith was the major force to an uncentered culture of competing ideologies and conflicting scientific theories. Adams’s attitude is one of quiet regret, and his survey of medieval France is informed by an intellectual’s poignant yearning. This emotional longing for the order of a medieval culture is more than balanced, however, by the rigorous intellection Adams exercises. Translations of old French lyrics, incisive summaries of Thomist theories, detailed analyses of architectural subtleties—these are among Adams’s self-imposed duties in the book. Scholars agree that Adams fulfilled his duties with grace and considerable accuracy.

Adams’s method is deceptively casual. In the preface he announces the desired relationship between himself and the reader: An uncle is speaking to a niece, as a guide for a summer’s study tour of France. Readers soon see that the genial uncle has planned the course of study quite rigorously. It operates partly in the way that Adams’s own mind tended to operate, by emphasizing opposites. Adams concerns himself with contrasts: St. Michel and Chartres, the masculine temperament and the feminine, Norman culture and French culture. All this is within the major contrast of the thirteenth century and twentieth century. Adams also uses the device of paradox. He insists that his purpose is not to teach, yet the book is a joy only if the reader’s intellect stands alert to follow Adams’s careful exposition.

By 1904, when the book was privately printed, Adams had befriended several of the young American scholars who were awakening universities in the United States to the importance of the medieval period. Adams himself had done sporadic writing and study in this realm years before. The book can be usefully thought of as an old person’s legacy to a new generation, an unpretentious structure of affectionate scholarship, carefully built with some of Adams’s finest prose.

Basically, the book contains three parts. The opening chapters deal with Mont-Saint-Michel on the Normandy coast. A transition chapter enables Adams to traverse the route to the cathedral town of Chartres. Six chapters examine the great cathedral, leading the reader to see its full symbolic meaning. The six concluding chapters then attend to history, poetry, theology, and philosophy—the medieval setting in which the jewel of the cathedral shines. Adams’s focus is medieval France, and his book begins at the offshore hill of St. Michel, where the great abbey was built between 1020 and 1135. Instantly, the salient characteristics accumulate, for later contrast with those of Chartres: isolation, height, energy, modest size, utter simplicity, dedication to the archangel St. Michael (representing the Church militant).

As Mont-Saint-Michel “was one of the most famous shrines of northern Europe,” so in French The Song of Roland (twelfth century) achieved unequaled eminence. How song and shrine complement each other is Adams’s theme in the second chapter. The song and the shrine represent the militant temper of the time just before the Battle of Hastings; both exalt simplicity, directness, and intensity, and both display a certain naïveté. This was France of the eleventh century. Next it is the early thirteenth century that draws his attention, “the early and perfect period of Gothic art.” On the Mount this period is seen in the ruins of the ancillary buildings (the “Merveille”): great hall, refectory, library, cloisters. The tour of the Mount completed, Adams sums up the meaning of the entire complex, using his key word, “unity”: “It expressed the unity of Church and State, God and Man, Peace and War, Life and Death, Good and Bad; it solved the whole problem of the universe.”

The uncle goes now to Chartres. As the fenestration of St. Michel’s great hall looked ahead to the glass of Chartres, so the choir and facades of Coutances, along the way, prepare the niece for Chartres, as do Bayeux and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. For Adams, Chartres is the climactic shrine, the central symbol of its age and of his book. Readers arrive at Chartres in chapter 5, with a distant glimpse of the two spires. Adams, perhaps at his most genial, explores the facade, especially noting the contrast between the magnificent “old” tower of the twelfth century and the “new” tower completed in 1517. This is a chapter of immense detail perfectly handled. The detail gradually rises into symbolism. For Chartres is the church of the Virgin, “the greatest of all queens, but the most womanly of women.” It is her palace, the utter opposite of St. Michel: feminine, elaborate, gracious, a building larger and later than the abbey. Minute examination of the portals and porches concludes chapter 5.

With a bit of the avuncular humor that accounts for the charm of the book, Adams insists on another chapter of delay—“ten minutes to accustom our eyes to the light.” This is a ruse. The interior dimness symbolizes the dim past that Adams’s literary art seeks to evoke. This chapter characterizes the Queen of Heaven, who demanded light, convenience, and color in her church space.

Next follow one hundred pages that function on several levels. There is narrative, a progressive tour through the church; description, an examination in detail of windows, apses, chapels; evocation, of an era and its art and faith; symbolism, the meaning of the Lady to the architects and worshipers; the meaning of the iconography; and the significance of the age itself. Adams reaches the high point of his interest and his art, besides demonstrating considerable proficiency as a master of architectural detail.

In his chapter on “The Three Queens,” Adams next turns to one of his favorite doctrines. He has been posing as one of the Virgin’s faithful, so that it is no surprise to see him declaring the doctrine of woman’s superiority. The twelfth century held this view, insists Adams: Chartres was built for the Virgin. Secular women of the century held power also. These were Eleanor, queen of France; Mary of Champagne; and Blanche, queen of France. They created the institution of courtly (“courteous”) love. The subject of courtly love leads Adams on to a lighthearted discussion of thirteenth century song, chiefly a synopsis of Auscassin et Nicolette, Adam de la Halle’s “Li Gieus de Robin et de Marion,” and the famous Roman de la Rose. In his discussion of poetry and architecture Adams says that in this period, “Art leads always to the woman.” Specifically, art leads to the Virgin. Adams now takes up the miracles of the Virgin. They make up a special branch of literature and demonstrate that the sympathetic Virgin “was by essence illogical, unreasonable and feminine”—a pitying “power above law.” Here again is the contrast between the Virgin and St. Michael.

Abruptly turning from the “feel” of the Middle Ages, achieved through study of its art, Adams now attends to its “mind.” This subject is introduced by way of Abelard, theologian and dialectician at Notre Dame de Paris. Adams constructs an abstract debate between Abelard and his teacher, William of Champeaux, to bring up the issue of unity versus multiplicity, which will concern him through the rest of the book. The problems of unity and multiplicity were several: How can God be One and yet be a Trinity? How can people in their diversity become one with God? For the moment the focus is on Abelard, the man who sought God by the force of reason. He is the direct opposite of the “illogical” Virgin and of the equally illogical mystic, Francis of Assisi, whom readers meet also. Adams thus continues his method of displaying the age by means of its opposites.

Whether such opposites as scholasticism and mysticism could be reconciled is part of Adams’s problem in the last chapter. The great reconciler was Thomas Aquinas, whose all-encompassing Summa Theologica (c. 1265-1273; English translation, 1911-1921) Adams elaborately compares to the detail and grandeur of the Gothic cathedral. Aquinas showed how to fuse God’s trinity with His unity. Even more important, he showed how God, the One, permeates all being, creating the great multiplicity and diversity of humankind and the universe.

Adams sums up some of the paradoxes and polarities he has already dealt with. One unusual thing about the Church of the Middle Ages was its multiplicity: It harbored mystics and rationalists, the holy Virgin and the abject sinners she pitied. Even greater was the Church’s unity. Aquinas demonstrated how God and the individual, Creator and created, formed a grand unity that the age celebrated instinctively in art, architecture, and song. Here was the medieval worldview.

Adams’s final point is comparison. The Thomist explanation of God’s creativity can be compared usefully to a modern dynamo and its production of energy. The dynamo is the key symbol of The Education of Henry Adams, the sequel to Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. The true subject of the autobiography is the century in which multiplicity won.

Bibliography

Adams, Henry. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980. Contains a helpful introduction and place of this work in the writings of Adams. Illustrations of Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, other works of medieval architecture, and scenes of medieval life from illuminated manuscripts aid in visualizing Adams’s description of medieval monuments, culture, and society.

Byrnes, Joseph F. The Virgin of Chartres: An Intellectual and Psychological History of the Work of Henry Adams. London: Associated University Presses, 1981. Studies the intellectual and psychological development of Adams, particularly regarding women. His ideals culminate in the medieval symbol of the Virgin as expressed in Chartres Cathedral.

Kazin, Alfred. “Religion as Culture: Henry Adams’s Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.” In Henry Adams and His World, edited by David R. Contosta and Robert Muccigrosso. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1993. Kazin, a prominent literary critic, interprets the book as reflecting Adams’s desire for unity, a quality Adams discovered in thirteenth century French architecture.

McIntyre, John P. “Henry Adams and the Unity of Chartres.” Twentieth Century Literature 7 (January, 1962): 159-171. Explains the historical method that Adams used in writing Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Demonstrates how Adams achieves a unified conception of medieval history by using Romanesque and Gothic architectural monuments as documents of social and cultural history.

Mane, Robert. Henry Adams on the Road to Chartres. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. Examines Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by looking at the personal and educational background that led Adams to write on Chartres. Also analyzes the literary work itself.

Samuels, Ernest. Henry Adams: The Major Phase. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1964. The third of a three-volume biography of Adams. Contains an extensive examination of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres within the context of Adams’s life.

Schroth, Raymond A. Dante to “Dead Man Walking”: One Reader’s Journey Through the Christian Classics. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2001. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is one of the works included in this overview of Christian literature. Schroth describes Adams’s book as “all of Christian history symbolized in one cathedral.”