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I learned this because at our monthly G.K. Chesterton meeting at Eighth Day Books, the annual American Chesterton Society meeting was highlighted. Someone at the meeting mentioned Susan Hanssen of the University of Dallas -- and someone else said she knew her work.
So I looked her up and found her faculty page and then found this article, '“Shall We Go to Rome?”—The Last Days of Henry Adams' in The New England Quarterly, Volume 86, Issue 1, March 2013.
The article is well-written and was fun to read aloud because of the quotations from Adams' letters, so clearly in his familiar voice, speaking to friends.
Of course, I read his famous books years ago, but I did not know about this story of his last months.
One of the best passages comes when Hanssen describes how
Adams wrote: “I’ve a mind to go back to Rome and renew our youth. To die in Rome is not so swell a thing as it used to be but it is a decent thing to do, still. . . . If I get abroad again, I hope to see you. Why not at Rome as of yore?”11 Going to Rome to renew one’s youth was something of a euphemism for conversion, an echo of the traditional entrance prayer with which the Tridentine liturgy of the Mass began: “Introibo ad altare Dei / Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam” (I shall go up to the altar of God / To God, who renews my youth). Rome evidently struck Adams as youthful compared to the sickly, dying civilization of America . . . (pp. 8-9)
Adams had suffered three blows in succession before this crisis: the sinking the Titanic (he was ticketed to go on its return voyage); the defeat the Republican Party in the 1912 Presidential election, bringing Woodrow Wilson to the White House, and a massive stroke. He recovered best from the latter, it seems.
He met Father Cyril Sigourney Fay, a famous priest but didn't really take instruction from him. As I read the article, it seemed to me that Adams had certain devotional leanings, and really wanted company along the way, but also wanted an intellectual path into the Catholic Church that accepted his Augustinian/Thomist philosophy:
Adams’s letters to Elizabeth Cameron, in particular, show him longing for a companion on his journey. He lists among his “remedies for insomnia” aspirin, songs to the Virgin, stoicism, contrition, tears and howls, and discussing the Trinity. (p. 15)
He couldn’t even get the Catholics, not even the Catholic theology professors, to read and understand his chapter on Thomas Aquinas in Chartres. Modern Catholics were Bergsonians, Pragmatists, Kantians, Modernists, Americanists. (p. 16)
Adams sought some coherence:
In their project to convert Adams, Father Fay and the Chanlers did more harm than good by enlisting their intellectual heroes to visit him. Among them were Arthur Balfour, who had just published Theism and Humanism, a work that influenced C. S. Lewis; Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution was the rage among young converts like Jacques Maritain; Cecil Chesterton, who had converted in advance of his more famous brother; and Shane Leslie, editor of the Dublin Review. 63
But Adams the Thomist was too much of a troglodyte to be handed across the chasm of faith by this chain gang of assistants. Years before, he had written to Margaret Chanler that he preferred Thomas Aquinas to all his contemporaries who were attempting to combine Catholicism with varieties of modern philosophy. “St Thomas said all there was to say. . . .” (p.24)
You'll need to read the rest there as Professor Hansen narrates the books he was reading, his comments upon them, and his delay in making a decision.
Henry Adams died on March 27, 1918.
I had one thought: did he ever read The Roman Catechism (The Catechism of the Council of Trent)?
Image Credit (Public Domain): 1885 photograph of Adams by William Notman
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