The Education of Henry Adams

The education he received bore little relation to the education he needed.

Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) found himself torn between two ages: an America bound by republican virtue and the dawn of the twentieth century. Born into a family of presidents and statesmen, Adams' aristocratic sensibilities are profoundly shaken by the increasingly centralized power of the federal government as well as the rapid advance in science and technology. He eventually realizes that his traditional education was insufficient in preparing him for the age of automobiles and machines; as a result, self-education was needed to grasp the new principles of a technologically advanced society.

Upon reading his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, I was most interested in his somber outlook on the passing of Christianity into the darkness of moral relativism. Although a self-proclaimed faithless agnostic, Adams realized that what was Good, Beautiful, and True in the world was inevitably based in religion, particularly Catholicism. During a trip to France to study the great cathedral of Chartres, Adams felt his soul yearn for something beyond his settled understanding, but he could not latch on to something he clearly saw was fading away. And as mankind hurtled toward a century of mass murder and nuclear bombs, Adams looked back upon Christianity and wondered what had gone amiss:

The Virgin herself never looked so winning -- so One -- as in this scandalous failure of her Grace. To what purpose had she existed, if, after nineteen hundred years, the world was bloodier than when she was born? The stupendous failure of Christianity tortured history. The effort for Unity could not be a partial success; even alternating Unity resolved itself into meaningless motion at last.

What was this life all about? Adams wondered. Today our world is remarkable in that it is both highly centralized under collectivist democracy yet atomized to the point where humans have never felt so alone. Or, as Walker Percy says, lost in the cosmos.