Henry Adams on TV

[Terrance]

christine karatnytsky wrote:
> Has anyone here ever read HA on Chartres and I-forget-which-other
> Cathedral?  (That's the book I *didn't* buy today.)

Jane, meet us at the Fez, I'll be the river man and you can
be the man in the shed. 

Mom said, converts make the best Catholics. And I said, that
depends on what they convert too. She didn't laugh. 

Marshall McLuhan, influenced, as Pynchon was, by Catholic
philosopher
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, converted to Catholicism in
1937. Pynchon's early heroes include, Dante, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald,, James Joyce,  all were catholic,  in fact the
chain that connects   T.S. Eliot (a major influence) and
Joyce to Dante and St. Augustine and Henry Adams is so
obvious I don't know why critics have neglected to even
mention it. Did I mention the cross-eyed Sabastian and the
headless virgin? Farina and Pynchon? 

Notes: 
Adams was the product of Boston's Brahmin class, a cultured
elite that traced its lineage to Puritan New England. He was
the great-grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John
Quincy Adams, both presidents of the United States.
While in France, Adams pushed further into the recesses of
history in search of "a fixed point . . . from which he
might measure motion down to his own time." That point
became medieval Christendom in the 13th century. In
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (printed privately, 1904;
published, 1913) he described the medieval world view as
reflected in its cathedrals. These buildings, he believed,
expressed "an emotion, the deepest man ever felt--the
struggle of his own littleness to grasp the infinite."
Adams' attraction to the Middle Ages lay in the era's
ideological unity; a coherence expressed in Catholicism and
symbolized by the Virgin Mary. 
The Education of Henry Adams (printed privately, 1906;
published 1918) was a companion volume to Chartres. The
Education remains Adams' best known work and one of the most
distinguished of all autobiographies. In contrast to
Chartres, the Education centred upon the 20th-century
universe of multiplicity, particularly the exploding world
of science and technology. In opposition to the medieval
Virgin, Adams saw a new godhead--the dynamo--symbol of
modern history's anarchic energies. The
Education recorded his failure to understand the centrifugal
forces of contemporary life. The book traced Adams'
confrontations with reality as he moved from the
custom-bound world of his birth into the modern, existential
universe in which certainties had vanished. 
Neither history nor education provided an answer for Henry
Adams. Individuals, he believed, could not face reality; to
endure, one adopts illusions. His attempt to draw lines of
continuity from the 13th to the 20th century ended in
futility. Adams concluded that all he could prove was
change. 
In 1908 Adams edited the letters and diary of his friend
John Hay, secretary of state from 1898 to 1905. His last
book, The Life of George Cabot Lodge, was published in 1911.
In two speculative essays, "Rule of Phase Applied to
History" (1909) and Letter to American Teachers of History
(1910), Adams calculated the demise of the world. Basing his
theory on a scientific law, the dissipation of energy, he
described
civilization as having retrogressed through four stages: the
religious, mechanical, electrical, and ethereal. The
cataclysm, he prophesied, would occur in 1921. How literally
Adams intended his prediction remains a point of dispute. 

One part of Fitzgerald's Catholicism-the weakest, least
important part, in fact-is
obvious in his life and in his fiction. He was born and
reared a Catholic, and he had
a cousin, Thomas Delihunt, who was a Jesuit priest and whom,
in 1924, the fully
apostate Fitzgerald would still list beside Theodore
Roosevelt and Garibaldi as one
of his heroes. His first novel-that scandalous, marvelous,
twenty-three-year-old's
astonishing bound into fame and fortune-opens with scenes
among wealthy
Catholic families. This Side of Paradise is dedicated, in
fact, to Sigourney Fay, the
worldly priest who stood for a time as spiritual (and
surrogate) father to the author,
and Fay appears, very lightly disguised as Monsignor Thayer
Darcy, throughout the
book's semi-autobiographical tale of a handsome, pampered,
and yet still idealistic
young Princeton student named Amory Blaine. 
So, too, Fitzgerald published two explicitly Catholic short
stories in the days of his
great success. There was the bizarre tale "Atonement," which
he originally intended
to be part of The Great Gatsby, about a boy who lies in the
confessional and a
priest who goes mad. And there was "Benediction," which
appeared in his first
collection of jazz Age stories, Flappers and Philosophers,
and tells the story of an
upper-class Catholic girl who (on her way to give up her
virginity to her lover) stops
off to visit her brother at a Jesuit seminary in Maryland.
In an early piece of
juvenilia called "The Ordeal," Fitzgerald wrote of his own
youthful visit to his Jesuit
cousin, and in "Benediction" he transfers from himself to a
nineteen-year-old girl
the visitor's experience of being simultaneously an outsider
and in the presence of
genuine righteousness. The story ends with the girl's almost
deciding not to meet her
lover. 
Of course, in the world of modern literary criticism and
biography, there's almost no
mention of any of this-for Fitzgerald, like every other
important author, has been
redefined as a good, red-blooded, all-American, atheistical
secularist. But in this one
case, the redefinition has considerable truth. Fitzgerald
didn't want to be merely a
kind of Catholic writer, composing his books for the
Catholic ghetto in America. 
He didn't want, in fact, to be any kind of Catholic writer.
The declassse world of
American Catholicism mostly embarrassed him, and if F. Scott
Fitzgerald was the
first writer from a Catholic background to achieve canonical
success in American
writing (leaving aside the question of Theodore Drieser),
you'd hardly know it from
him. 
Marshall McLuhan was a skeptic, a joker, and an erudite
maniac. He read too deeply from Finnegans Wake, had too
great a fondness for puns, and never allowed his fun to be
ruined by the adoption of a coherent point of view. He was
dismayed by any attempt to pin him down to a consistent
analysis and dismissive of criticism that his plans were
impractical or absurd. His characteristic comment during one
academic debate has taken on a mythic life of its own. In
response to a renowned American sociologist,
McLuhan countered: "You don't like those ideas? I got
others." 
In a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, with
whom he had a long friendship, McLuhan argued that in the
modern electronic environment, it is inadvisable to be
coherent. "Any moment of arrest or stasis permits the public
to shoot you down." McLuhan preferred to make his rebuttals
in the form of a quip. As he explained to Trudeau: "I have
yet to find a situation in which there is not great help in
the
phrase: 'You think my fallacy is all wrong?' It is literally
disarming, pulling the ground out from under every
situation! It can be said with a certain amount of poignancy
and mock deliberation." 
McLuhan's idea that media are extensions of man was
influenced by the work of the Catholic philosopher Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the use of
electricity extends the central nervous system. McLuhan's
mysticism sometimes led him to hope, as had Teilhard, that
electronic civilization would prove a spiritual leap forward
and put humankind in closer contact with God. 
But McLuhan did not hold on to this brief hope, and he later
decided that the electronic unification of humanity was only
a facsimile of the mystical body. As an unholy imposter, the
electronic universe was "a blatant manifestation of the
Anti-Christ." Satan, McLuhan remarked, "is a very great
electric engineer." 
Though he enjoyed observing the battles of the day as they
were played out in the media, McLuhan was deeply attached to
the church and suspicious enough of worldly goings-on to be
immune to large-scale politics or reformation movements. He
put his faith in Christ. When challenged by a British
journalist about the deleterious effects of electronic
culture, McLuhan responded that he had "no doubt at all that
Christus
vincit. That is why a Christian cannot but be amused at the
antics of worldlings to 'put us on.'" The true Christian
strategy, McLuhan believed, was "pragmatic and tentative." 
Pragmatic and tentative hardly seem the right adjectives for
one of our era's greatest provocateurs. But in light of his
Catholicism, McLuhan's pragmatism makes sense. Mystics are
attuned to the voice of the Holy Spirit coming in directly,
and they are the great demolishers of doctrine. Pragmatic
does not mean practical, but nonsystematic. Tentative does
not mean weak, but provisional and willing to change course
under the influence of new revelations. 

For the pragmatic Penn vs the principled new englander see
the chicago chapter of The Education of Henry Adams.