“Everyone’s on a walk to Chartres,” New York Times columnist David Brooks observed in a recent lecture. “On a walk toward something transcendent, even if they don’t know what it is”—that is, people remote from religion undergo joys and griefs in life that may pull toward church, whose gravity and beauty can make pilgrims of scoffers.
The pilgrim to trail is Henry Adams, who made the trip a little over a century ago, and recorded it in a singular travelogue, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Born in 1838 into one of America’s foremost families, descendant of two presidents, Henry Adams never was much moved by the Boston Unitarianism of his upbringing. Events midlife unmoored him: continued reflection on Darwin’s theories, tumult of Gilded Age politics—as much evidence as was wanted to doubt that evolution moved from lower to higher forms—and especially the suicide of his wife Clover. That disquiet drew him to Roman Catholicism of the middle ages. He shuttled around France’s great medieval churches, and pondered poetry and theology, to write a book intended for his nieces but useful for us.
Read Full Article »