A review of 'Esther: A Novel' by Henry Adams
Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 19th. July 2018. Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R22XDA3SH735J0?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
Esther Dudley is a society woman who attends an episcopal church, St. John’s, on Fifth Avenue in New York. A talented amateur artist with her own private studio, she is commissioned at the church to paint a standing figure of St. Cecilia. She works there with several others from the congregation. There is Wharton, another artist. Wharton is opinionated and temperamental on the subject of art, and an experienced church decorator in his own right. He acts as Esther’s supervisor. Another character is Catherine Brooke, an enfant terrible from out West and cousin of Esther’s; and, there is a Professor George Strong, a paeleontologist, and another cousin. Together, they form an “ecclesiastical idyll” of mutual discussion, creativity and learning. At any rate, it is an amiable set-up with didactic pretensions and forms the main focus, and it’s pleasant enough. Now and then, Hazard the clergyman at St. John's, comes on the scene to check on progress and offer his views. As a result, Hazard suffers a serious case of love sickness for Esther and attempts to develop a relationship with her. She has mixed feelings for Hazard, does not enjoy going to church anyway, and does not consider it proper to get to know a clergyman. But she likes the chase. The pursuit is the ultimate test of Hazard’s missionary abilities.
To an extent, the attraction seems to be down to opposite values and differences, which add frisson and sexual tension to their interactions. Esther, a reluctant church-going woman, is not a believer, but not strictly a non-believer either, more non-inscrit in matters of religion and faith. She has doubts about the fundaments of Christology. This is a point of some scandal within the congregational community as gossip spreads and she comes to be regarded as a prospective clergyman’s wife - the essentials of the role implicitly include at least a profession of belief, if not confessional certitude in Christ. The assumption is that if Hazard is to associate with a free-thinker, then he must be one too and should therefore split the congregation down the middle. Faced with this obstacle, Hazard is the determined evangelist, believing that he can convert Esther both to his love and to a love of God through faith, and even that her love of God can be realised through love of him. These protestations meet with resistance from her reasoned mind, culminating in a melodramatic finale in which one party flees and the other pursues.
I think this is an intelligent and beautifully-written novel, perhaps even better-written than Adams’ first work of fiction, ‘Democracy’. As well as the prose, there are some excellent sonnets, presumably of the author’s own devising. Readers who are not familiar with theology and religious issues may struggle to comprehend some of what is said - and Adams was a very cultured and literate writer - but even the most ignorant cannot fail to enjoy the story. That said, a little patience is needed, as it only picks up towards the end. Still, it’s reasonably short in length: you might say, it’s a long novella rather than strictly a novel. Adams wrote this pseudonymously, which is rather odd. It is understandable that Adams kept ‘Democracy’ anonymous, due to his social and professional associations, but not so much with ‘Esther’. Maybe he feared a pattern of writing style being recognised? Was it, in fact? That’s unclear, but Adams also disdained what he called the “mutual admiration business” of publishing, and made little effort to publicise his fiction writing, so this novel remained obscure. Probably only a few hundred people in the world have ever actually read it, and without Adams’ enduring fame, it wouldn’t even be that – but it is a good novel. I like books of this era anyway because they hark back to a time when even ordinary people had a sense of importance and seriousness.
A number of themes in this novel were also found in Adams’ first fiction work. There is an examination here of religion and theology, especially the conflict between divinity and a rational-historical understanding of Christianity. The naming of a character as ‘Wharton’ is probably inspired by the real-life person of Charles H. Wharton, a major critic of perhaps the 19th. century’s leading Christian rationalist, a Scottish Unitarian called Joseph Priestley. Priestley sensationally argued against Jesus’ divinity, believing that reliance should be placed on the moral teachings only. I’m also tempted to speculate that the character Hazard represents Jesus and that each of the main characters represents one of Jesus’ friends – Catherine is Mary Magdalene, Peter is Esther, George Strong is John (and also, I think, Satan), Wharton is Matthew, Mr Dudley (Esther’s father) is Lazarus, and Mrs Dudley (Esther’s aunt) is Judas. Why this should be ought to become clear when you read the novel. Another theme ibid is the prejudice of American easterners against westerners, though it’s not vicious. Catherine is gently patronised by Mrs Murray in a way that gives the distinct impression that Eastern society in the late 19th. century was a recreation of upper middle-class Victorian England.
As to the significance of the eponym, Esther is a central figure in Biblical Jewry and also part of the Christian canon, but I don’t fathom much of any link between the Biblical Esther and the Esther of this novel - save that both are ‘strong’ female characters in that they are wilful and determined to control their own destinies. Adams obviously based at least his fictional characterology on typologies - John Carrington from Adams’ first novel is a clear example of this: drawn as the noble, upright Virginian. The title character in this, Adams’ second novel, is taken from the eponymous short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Set during the American Revolutionary War, Hawthorne’s story is interesting in that he uses a strong female character as an iconoclastic figure of redemption and transfiguration and bearer of all sin. Adams follows a broadly similar pattern in both his novels. Like Hawthorne, he holds that women have a mystical nature, and like Hawthorne, he uses strong female lead characters as the exemplars of a heroine typology. For instance, in this novel, Catherine Brooke is an American Saint: a female iconoclastic type redeeming America. In ‘Democracy’, Madeleine Lightfoot Lee is the confessor, in the sacerdotal sense, to Silas P. Ratcliffe, the sinner, whereas in Adams’ second novel, the gender role is reversed: Esther is the sinner, Hazard is the confessor. There is also a telling similarity between Hazard and the antagonist in ‘Democracy’, Silas P. Ratcliffe: both are demanding that the female protagonist accept their worldview and values. In a way, Hazard is demeaning Esther, just as Ratcliffe sought to smother Mrs Lee. Both female characters are strong women standing up to male power and authority. The gender dichotomy underlines the essential conflict in the story between religious orthodoxy and free-thought.
Adams here addresses the reserve power of women in society, as he did in his first novel, but he does so with greater balance this time, looking at the problems and burdens of women too. Women like Esther are under great pressure to marry, men not so much. This sometimes puts them in a quandary. Mrs Murray puts the paradox well during a dialogue in which Esther is being quizzed by her father about her continued status as a single woman, showing a strong aversion to matrimony in concept. Yet Mrs Murray remains happily married and would not dream of divorcing her “one in a million” husband. Perhaps the reason is the pressure on women to marry combined with their social nature, which demands they seek protection. Yet as Schopenhauer observed, women know their biologically-allotted task and willingly go about it, exercising their primitive power over men that no earthly institution can easily supplant. In fact, it seems even God cannot step in the way. Interestingly, much like Wilkie Collins does, Adams puts his female character in the driving seat and gives her the initiative.
Hazard, though not especially attractive in the physical sense, is a Renaissance man with a strong spirit, clearly very confident, and of genuine religious conviction, regularly preaching in a strident way to his congregation. Esther, too, has a characterful look about her – she is an “American type”, as described by Wharton, with his keen artist’s eye. Catherine is out of her element and fulfils the archetype of the naïve country girl, a provincial Westerner thrust into a metropolitan environment of university professors, learned clergy, exhibited artists and society women. As such, much of what happens in the story centres around her as her new social circle affect to, variously, educate her, condescend to her or rib her. She is too good-natured to express her annoyance at this. Catherine agrees to sit as Esther’s model, thinking it will help her be accepted among the new company she is keeping. Wharton is hyper-critical of Esther’s art, while Catherine in her innocence simply assumes that Esther’s art is “wonderful”, not having the refinement to make any critical distinctions. Wharton is estranged from his rather tempestuous French wife, a veritable Jezebel. He represents the ambition of American fine art at the time to carve out its own identity, based on the cornfields and prairies.
Hazard, though evangelical, is theologically described as a high churchman. He sees God’s presence and His goodness in everything, including church art and architecture, and he values these as meta-theological components of his mission as he seeks to make worship and devotion an aesthetic experience. Is he right? Can art affect us religiously? Can the experience of art – whether as artist or observer – fill one with divine inspiration or missionary zeal? Can art and culture change people’s views? Art is inescapably experiential: it is an objective thing that teaches us about subjective experience. Thus, art is objective-subjective: it is the ‘experience’ of a ‘thing’, and when we look at a painting or sculpture, we are interpreting subjectively an objective external reality. Art is not a Rorschach Test, but nor can there be a unity of interpretation. This raises further questions, one of which is over interpretation and experience and their interrelationship. Do we each experience things in different ways, applying our own ‘uniquely unique’ meaning and feelings to each piece? Can there be such a thing as ‘art’ with its own definitional boundary and terminus outside of which we can say that things are not art per essentiam?
Another issue is the extent to which art ought to give sovereignty to the observer rather than the artist-creator. Should a portrait painting capture the reality of the subject (realist art) or a beautification of such (romantic art) or a divination (hagiographic art)? Which is the ‘proper art’, or are all? These questions become quite relevant when Hazard commissions Esther to paint St. Cecilia on the church interior. Esther decides to model her on Catherine, and a dispute ensues as to how Catherine should be depicted: whether as the pretty, youthful woman she is, or as a divine, older saint with creases and lines on her face and other signs of age. Wharton favours the latter because he wants St. Cecilia to look divine and churchlike. Paintings and their derivatives have the appeal of ideation and generalisation: when an artist sits down to paint a model or artifact, the two-dimensational re-creation on canvas is a generalised and ideated (and sometimes idealised) version of what is in front of him. By contrast, photography and its derivatives do not tend to have this feature. To the largest extent, and whatever his creative and technical manipulative skills, the photographer is reproducing specificity and parochiality. Esther, in proposing to recreate on the church wall the vigorous woman in front of her, is reducing Catherine to photorealism a la Rene Magritte’s Treachery of Images: she is to be depicted not as a saint, merely as an attractive woman. Wharton, then, is trying to maintain the eternity, dignity and integrity of art against Esther’s degradation and treason to it and feminine flimsiness. The religious purpose of saints is to provide a model after which believers should pattern their behaviour. Wharton wants to depict Catherine/St. Cecilia plainly because saints should be serious and non-sexual, even androgynous. Using art to portray Catherine’s natural youth and beauty removes her value as a model for such purpose and instead presents her as a sexual being perhaps. For further elucidation, we may offer up the contemporary fashion models as an example: normally the women of Givenchy or Trussardi are very thin, and androgynous too. They are that way because they fulfil a purpose. They are not sexually attractive, and not physically typical of women generally, but they are apt models for clothing.
Yet still we may ask: Shouldn’t saints relate to ordinary believers? Saintliness is equated with complete purity and virtue. This cannot allow beauty in the profane, sexual sense commonly-understood. Consequently, Christianity sees virility and ordinary (profane) beauty as infelicitous. Despite this, somewhat surprisingly Hazard relents in the end and Catherine is painted as she is rather than as she would be if saintly. It’s a disappointing decision on Hazard’s part. Spiritual earnestness is sacrificed for profane beauty. Christianity’s liturgical art should point back to the Passion and bear its scars, as that is the basis of the entire Creed, in that Christ suffered for all men’s sins. In a profane and sinful Satanic world, we confuse sexual attractiveness with beauty, and this keeps us ignorant. But didn’t Christ already suffer for sins? Why do we need to recreate passion and turmoil in art? Wharton’s point is that we should recognise our sins in everything and not allow ourselves to be taken in by plaster saints.
A word about Hazard’s rationalist foil, Professor Strong. He rejects the Creed and any sort of superstitious belief entirely, however he still manages to look on the church quite objectively. Initially Strong is supercilious and rude in that way that rationalist academics can be. He pours scorn on Wharton’s artistic sensibilities and mocks Catherine. At one point, Strong asserts to Hazard that science alone is truth, which ironically is not true, or is at least misleading. The science corpus is merely a set of provisional truths. However, Professor Strong reveals a more complex understanding of things in the more in-depth conversations he has with Catherine later. Strong points out that science, religion and truth are separate things and both science and religion depend on belief. Strong implicitly rejects the modernist Cartesian paradigm, pointing out that you cannot reason yourself into faith – like love, you either have it or not. I see the point, but I am not sure I agree entirely. You can’t choose whether to love or not, but you can choose to have faith, or faith can be the ultimate result of choices, through reasoning. In the face of Esther’s struggles with herself, Strong helpfully suggests that perhaps the Roman Church would be more suitable for someone such as her, full of pride and passion. Certainly, he has a point: the liturgies of Romanism, the worship of ritual and its primeval appeal to communality, can be of appeal to a reasoned mind leery of Protestant supplicancy. This is Strong, the rational man, trying to understand the unfathomable. What is love? Can we choose to love? He equates faith with love because he assumes faith is irrational. As such, he is not giving Esther enough credit.
Tellingly, Strong contradicts himself on the point, also averring, like Hazard, that the profession of faith is a simple, rudimentary willed act: it is submission, in short, though you have to choose whether to submit or not. All doubts can be laid to rest. This seems a little simplistic to me. All of us when we make choices are heading down a particular path that will shape our circumstances and determine how our lives will work out. We all make these choices without being able to weigh everything up - sometimes we make blind decisions out of feelings rather than entirely rational judgement. Faith is something that grows on you, just as any strong social or political belief might. Even if there is a Damascene conversion, this is still the result of earlier decisions and innumerable tiny influences. If you choose not to look into Christianity, you are unlikely to ever develop faith unless you have some sort of religious experience; those who have the curiosity (or weakness, as Strong would have it) to examine superstition may reason themselves into faith. Strong’s averment also seems tautological. Of course, we can lay to rest all doubts if we want to: that is faith, in which the individual rests on hope over the natural doubts. But what is this hope, which is at the root of faith? It seems to be a choice: an acceptance of mystery over a negation of tradition and doctrine. This is also a form of loyalty. Thus, it could be argued that divine love is loyalty – not necessarily true love for God, rather love for an organisation: a loyalty to tradition. Is romantic love itself just a form of loyalty? What compromises does love demand of people? Must we accept fully the person we love? Romantic and sexual love is not unconditional, as parental love typically is, however in the period that this novel is set, divorce was harder and so the prospect of marriage required still more serious contemplation.
Hazard’s argument for faith is not particularly innovative. He starts with the Cartesian dictum, cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am” – which was a feature of the intellectual battle during the post-Renaissance 17th. century, and among the pre-cursors of modernism proper and post-modernism. Descartes was looking for an axiom, something on which he could rest with certainty and from which he could derive all other things: in short, a philosophical version of the First Cause that created everything and gives everything meaning. For Christians, an absence of First Cause implies that things have been created out of nothing, ex nihilo, and nothing has meaning. However, even if the premise is accepted, it is difficult to see how this justifies belief in superstition. The point seems to be that God must exist because otherwise nothing can be explained, but there are explanations – starting with evolution. Hazard brings this up in an attempt to reconcile religion and science, arguing that when it comes to resolving the great mystery of the physical world, consciousness, science cannot improve on religion: the “I AM” of existence is mystified to the scientist and it is only through faith in God that such imponderables can be understood. God is the Word, the Alpha and the Omega. This seems to be a way of merely shifting the goalposts: explaining one mystery by supplanting it with another. The significance of consciousness is that it concerns being. It is the stuff of life, what we are essentially. Christians use it in concept to say that everything around us may not be real, only the soul (the human stuff) is real. In reality, there is no mystery to consciousness, it may be explained entirely in evolutionary terms. We may add that the very fact that Descartes had to reason his way to God tells us that he and others of his time didn’t really believe in God. In any case, his ontological argument seems weak. Hazard then tries Pascal’s wager – which seems a rather self-interested basis for believing in God and therefore also undermines faith. What all of this suggests is a reasoning towards faith, a faith based on recognising doubts, rather than a simple belief. This placing of ‘knowing’ before ‘being’ has critically undermined Christianity and is the unintended gift of Descartes to the modern world. If you have to reason faith then it is not faith at all, it is just another falsifiable view.
Strong has a go too, but in a way that Hazard would not approve of. He seems to be Adams’ Miltonian satanic figure, straight out of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, with his pessimism about faith and human nature; he is, furthermore, figuratively Satan himself, subtly tempting Esther into an anti-Christian understanding of things that will serve his own purposes. In polemic with Esther, he tries to steer her towards what a Christian would see as the evil of nominalism in which morality is seen as extrinsic to the human being, what matters is a person’s aesthetic sense of right and wrong, and good and evil become negotiative. Strong holds that this life is everything, there is no spiritual future beyond it – or probably not. The Christian alternative is that this life is a preparation for the next, we have all sinned and are therefore damaged, and if we accept God’s grace we will be healed and can ascend to a supernatural state. If we reject God’s grace or do not have the capacity to accept it, then we will be estranged from God (which ultimately means Hell). Knowing is therefore equated with virtue. Love is all. At one point, Strong tries to suggest that any thought that is an abstract truth makes you immortal. This seems to me nonsense. Mind is matter and dies with it. Even if you have an abstract thought that is an abstract truth, it does not make you immortal. Your thought dies with you while its products and artifacts live on, but you cannot become your own thought. Your matter has a separate existence and your thoughts merge with you on death as they are simply part of matter. Ironically, Strong is reasoning himself into faith. If he is right, then truth is God and we become one with God when we accept his existence, but it is unlikely this was Strong’s intention.
In the end, Strong’s appeal to Esther amounts to saying that since all of these things cannot be disproven, they must be possible, and since even the hard sciences have mysteries as their axioms (so Strong says), science and religion are merely different paths to truth and Esther should consider which she wishes to accept. It is a weak argument. Strong’s evangelism is of the low church kind: though he does not quote the Bible, he is eschewing theology, and the richness and mystery of Christianity and its divine revelation, and instead appealing to Esther’s reasoned mind on the basis of a crude philosophical calculus. In contrast, Hazard’s evangelism is that of the high churchman: he demands that Esther submit to him on an emotional basis and that faith will follow from this, though it is still a reasoned argument in its own way, albeit fallacious: an appeal to authority, to patriarchy, to the Leadership Principle – Hazard merely being the petty leader above whom is God Himself. Hazard offers Esther a life to be lived in submission to the Father, and the possibility of Salvation through the acceptance of grace through low gradations to God. This explains Hazard’s approach to Esther’s mental turmoil: she can find the truth through him. It implies a paternalistic attitude to Esther and maybe women in general. To Hazard, the issue is not whether he should give up his faith, but whether Esther should sacrifice her own intellectual independence and trust herself to him. From his perspective, it is enough that she should love him, all else will follow, as God is love. This sounds odd, but how many regular church-going and casual believers take this approach? Most of them probably have never read the Bible, let alone studied it seriously. Most of them would probably scoff at tales of miracles of the kind that Jesus is meant to have performed as a demonstration of his holiness. But these things are fundamental to the Creed, and one who does not believe in them and accept them cannot be a Christian proper. Christianity relied on catholic and gnostic principles of worship right up until the invention of the printing press, when Scripture ceased to be the property of the Church alone, allowing the Reformation to spread. It would be difficult, actually, to overestimate the revolutionary effect of printing Scripture: Bible-based faith is non-experiential, causing adherents to turn against tradition. Belief is not very important when you have holy water, responsorials – magic is in things. But painting and architecture are not magic in and of themselves, they just allow you to be nearer to God or understand God better, not just rely on the formalism of liturgy and ritual. But once people start actually reading Scripture and the Pentateuch, then belief itself becomes an issue.
In pre-belief Christianity, ‘being’ in the religious sense is a presupposition and a priori entirely and nothing has to be explained. Once people could read the material, or have it read to them, suddenly it became necessary for them to believe in it. This presented a problem: the paradox of ‘literate’ Christianity is that it is imperatively atheistic: anybody who reads the Bible cannot believe in it. With the onset of the Scientific Revolution and the shift to mechanisation and industrialism, a ‘belief belief’ – i.e. faith and doubt as the requisites of belief - became more fundamental to Christianity instead of unquestioning ‘pre-belief belief’, and what was previously a belief in a metaphysics of reality become a belief in magic. This must have weakened Christianity, and it will be noted that the vestigial liturgies and doctrines of ‘pre-belief belief’ are almost entirely catholic, Roman or Orthodox: the liturgical catholic traditions in particular call back to paganism. Who in the industrial and post-industrial eras can possibly believe in the literalism of the Pentateuch? Or the divine incarnation? Or the Miracles of Jesus? Or the Resurrection? Or even simply Jesus as an actual historical figure? In modern times, the church must “choose between weak doctrine and weak brains”, a monitory parishioner admonishes Hazard. Which is preferable? The very dilemma is an acknowledgement that an educated and intelligent person cannot possibly believe in this stuff, and the church will go for ability. Hazard is an exception, maybe even a contraindication for modernism: he is proud of his strong dogma. The interesting thing is that many, maybe most, of today’s Christians see no contradiction in negation and probably ‘believe in belief’, as Christopher Hitchens had it, rather than believe in the dogma as a metaphysical reality. It is in that sense that they believe in the Creed itself. The broad cleave in Christianity between catholics and evangelists is really about the difference between a doctrine of belief per se and a doctrine of ritual. The ritualists (i.e. the catholics) take belief for granted, or otherwise don’t raise the subject; the ‘believers’ (i.e. the evangelists) actually expect you to believe in it. The catholics rest on apocalyptic evaluation: a grand Reckoning in which the All Knowing weighs up sins and ex post facto ratifies dispensations. The evangelists don’t care how you behave as long as you believe in Christ and repent.
Thus, we can see that Christian belief has evolved through three stages of palingenesis that dovetail with the West’s philosophical development since Constantine: the medieval ‘pre-belief belief’, the pre-modern ‘belief belief’, and the late modern and post-modern ‘belief in belief’. This is the slippage. It has been caused by the co-option of Cartesian circularity, which might better be understood as a singularity of faith-doubt. His dictum was more fully phrased: “dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum” – I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. This single line upturned 1,500 years of pre-cognitive belief. Nothing could be more radical and nothing has been. Descartes made a virtue of doubting, paving the way for postmodernism. We may say that Descartes is the Father of Postmodernism because he was rejecting implicitly belief in dogma as an a priori presupposition, though ironically he was trying to achieve the opposite: securing knowledge by establishing a kernel that is beyond doubt. The mundane result is modernist pseudo-theological exchanges such as those in this novel. The traditionalist Hazard and the modernist Esther are at cross-purposes. Hazard need not necessarily ask much of Esther: all that’s required is that she believes in the Creed because she should believe in it. Esther, for her part, is trying to be a pre-modernist and ‘believe believe’, rationally. Meanwhile, Hazard demands that she ‘pre-believe believe’, charismatically. Even if Esther could, which she can’t, she must ask a great deal of him. Like Esther, I prefer the divinity of Nature. But who is right? Can we even know? In the end, like any good work of art, the central question is left unresolved by the artist. All the important matters are for the reader to decide.
To an extent, the attraction seems to be down to opposite values and differences, which add frisson and sexual tension to their interactions. Esther, a reluctant church-going woman, is not a believer, but not strictly a non-believer either, more non-inscrit in matters of religion and faith. She has doubts about the fundaments of Christology. This is a point of some scandal within the congregational community as gossip spreads and she comes to be regarded as a prospective clergyman’s wife - the essentials of the role implicitly include at least a profession of belief, if not confessional certitude in Christ. The assumption is that if Hazard is to associate with a free-thinker, then he must be one too and should therefore split the congregation down the middle. Faced with this obstacle, Hazard is the determined evangelist, believing that he can convert Esther both to his love and to a love of God through faith, and even that her love of God can be realised through love of him. These protestations meet with resistance from her reasoned mind, culminating in a melodramatic finale in which one party flees and the other pursues.
I think this is an intelligent and beautifully-written novel, perhaps even better-written than Adams’ first work of fiction, ‘Democracy’. As well as the prose, there are some excellent sonnets, presumably of the author’s own devising. Readers who are not familiar with theology and religious issues may struggle to comprehend some of what is said - and Adams was a very cultured and literate writer - but even the most ignorant cannot fail to enjoy the story. That said, a little patience is needed, as it only picks up towards the end. Still, it’s reasonably short in length: you might say, it’s a long novella rather than strictly a novel. Adams wrote this pseudonymously, which is rather odd. It is understandable that Adams kept ‘Democracy’ anonymous, due to his social and professional associations, but not so much with ‘Esther’. Maybe he feared a pattern of writing style being recognised? Was it, in fact? That’s unclear, but Adams also disdained what he called the “mutual admiration business” of publishing, and made little effort to publicise his fiction writing, so this novel remained obscure. Probably only a few hundred people in the world have ever actually read it, and without Adams’ enduring fame, it wouldn’t even be that – but it is a good novel. I like books of this era anyway because they hark back to a time when even ordinary people had a sense of importance and seriousness.
A number of themes in this novel were also found in Adams’ first fiction work. There is an examination here of religion and theology, especially the conflict between divinity and a rational-historical understanding of Christianity. The naming of a character as ‘Wharton’ is probably inspired by the real-life person of Charles H. Wharton, a major critic of perhaps the 19th. century’s leading Christian rationalist, a Scottish Unitarian called Joseph Priestley. Priestley sensationally argued against Jesus’ divinity, believing that reliance should be placed on the moral teachings only. I’m also tempted to speculate that the character Hazard represents Jesus and that each of the main characters represents one of Jesus’ friends – Catherine is Mary Magdalene, Peter is Esther, George Strong is John (and also, I think, Satan), Wharton is Matthew, Mr Dudley (Esther’s father) is Lazarus, and Mrs Dudley (Esther’s aunt) is Judas. Why this should be ought to become clear when you read the novel. Another theme ibid is the prejudice of American easterners against westerners, though it’s not vicious. Catherine is gently patronised by Mrs Murray in a way that gives the distinct impression that Eastern society in the late 19th. century was a recreation of upper middle-class Victorian England.
As to the significance of the eponym, Esther is a central figure in Biblical Jewry and also part of the Christian canon, but I don’t fathom much of any link between the Biblical Esther and the Esther of this novel - save that both are ‘strong’ female characters in that they are wilful and determined to control their own destinies. Adams obviously based at least his fictional characterology on typologies - John Carrington from Adams’ first novel is a clear example of this: drawn as the noble, upright Virginian. The title character in this, Adams’ second novel, is taken from the eponymous short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Set during the American Revolutionary War, Hawthorne’s story is interesting in that he uses a strong female character as an iconoclastic figure of redemption and transfiguration and bearer of all sin. Adams follows a broadly similar pattern in both his novels. Like Hawthorne, he holds that women have a mystical nature, and like Hawthorne, he uses strong female lead characters as the exemplars of a heroine typology. For instance, in this novel, Catherine Brooke is an American Saint: a female iconoclastic type redeeming America. In ‘Democracy’, Madeleine Lightfoot Lee is the confessor, in the sacerdotal sense, to Silas P. Ratcliffe, the sinner, whereas in Adams’ second novel, the gender role is reversed: Esther is the sinner, Hazard is the confessor. There is also a telling similarity between Hazard and the antagonist in ‘Democracy’, Silas P. Ratcliffe: both are demanding that the female protagonist accept their worldview and values. In a way, Hazard is demeaning Esther, just as Ratcliffe sought to smother Mrs Lee. Both female characters are strong women standing up to male power and authority. The gender dichotomy underlines the essential conflict in the story between religious orthodoxy and free-thought.
Adams here addresses the reserve power of women in society, as he did in his first novel, but he does so with greater balance this time, looking at the problems and burdens of women too. Women like Esther are under great pressure to marry, men not so much. This sometimes puts them in a quandary. Mrs Murray puts the paradox well during a dialogue in which Esther is being quizzed by her father about her continued status as a single woman, showing a strong aversion to matrimony in concept. Yet Mrs Murray remains happily married and would not dream of divorcing her “one in a million” husband. Perhaps the reason is the pressure on women to marry combined with their social nature, which demands they seek protection. Yet as Schopenhauer observed, women know their biologically-allotted task and willingly go about it, exercising their primitive power over men that no earthly institution can easily supplant. In fact, it seems even God cannot step in the way. Interestingly, much like Wilkie Collins does, Adams puts his female character in the driving seat and gives her the initiative.
Hazard, though not especially attractive in the physical sense, is a Renaissance man with a strong spirit, clearly very confident, and of genuine religious conviction, regularly preaching in a strident way to his congregation. Esther, too, has a characterful look about her – she is an “American type”, as described by Wharton, with his keen artist’s eye. Catherine is out of her element and fulfils the archetype of the naïve country girl, a provincial Westerner thrust into a metropolitan environment of university professors, learned clergy, exhibited artists and society women. As such, much of what happens in the story centres around her as her new social circle affect to, variously, educate her, condescend to her or rib her. She is too good-natured to express her annoyance at this. Catherine agrees to sit as Esther’s model, thinking it will help her be accepted among the new company she is keeping. Wharton is hyper-critical of Esther’s art, while Catherine in her innocence simply assumes that Esther’s art is “wonderful”, not having the refinement to make any critical distinctions. Wharton is estranged from his rather tempestuous French wife, a veritable Jezebel. He represents the ambition of American fine art at the time to carve out its own identity, based on the cornfields and prairies.
Hazard, though evangelical, is theologically described as a high churchman. He sees God’s presence and His goodness in everything, including church art and architecture, and he values these as meta-theological components of his mission as he seeks to make worship and devotion an aesthetic experience. Is he right? Can art affect us religiously? Can the experience of art – whether as artist or observer – fill one with divine inspiration or missionary zeal? Can art and culture change people’s views? Art is inescapably experiential: it is an objective thing that teaches us about subjective experience. Thus, art is objective-subjective: it is the ‘experience’ of a ‘thing’, and when we look at a painting or sculpture, we are interpreting subjectively an objective external reality. Art is not a Rorschach Test, but nor can there be a unity of interpretation. This raises further questions, one of which is over interpretation and experience and their interrelationship. Do we each experience things in different ways, applying our own ‘uniquely unique’ meaning and feelings to each piece? Can there be such a thing as ‘art’ with its own definitional boundary and terminus outside of which we can say that things are not art per essentiam?
Another issue is the extent to which art ought to give sovereignty to the observer rather than the artist-creator. Should a portrait painting capture the reality of the subject (realist art) or a beautification of such (romantic art) or a divination (hagiographic art)? Which is the ‘proper art’, or are all? These questions become quite relevant when Hazard commissions Esther to paint St. Cecilia on the church interior. Esther decides to model her on Catherine, and a dispute ensues as to how Catherine should be depicted: whether as the pretty, youthful woman she is, or as a divine, older saint with creases and lines on her face and other signs of age. Wharton favours the latter because he wants St. Cecilia to look divine and churchlike. Paintings and their derivatives have the appeal of ideation and generalisation: when an artist sits down to paint a model or artifact, the two-dimensational re-creation on canvas is a generalised and ideated (and sometimes idealised) version of what is in front of him. By contrast, photography and its derivatives do not tend to have this feature. To the largest extent, and whatever his creative and technical manipulative skills, the photographer is reproducing specificity and parochiality. Esther, in proposing to recreate on the church wall the vigorous woman in front of her, is reducing Catherine to photorealism a la Rene Magritte’s Treachery of Images: she is to be depicted not as a saint, merely as an attractive woman. Wharton, then, is trying to maintain the eternity, dignity and integrity of art against Esther’s degradation and treason to it and feminine flimsiness. The religious purpose of saints is to provide a model after which believers should pattern their behaviour. Wharton wants to depict Catherine/St. Cecilia plainly because saints should be serious and non-sexual, even androgynous. Using art to portray Catherine’s natural youth and beauty removes her value as a model for such purpose and instead presents her as a sexual being perhaps. For further elucidation, we may offer up the contemporary fashion models as an example: normally the women of Givenchy or Trussardi are very thin, and androgynous too. They are that way because they fulfil a purpose. They are not sexually attractive, and not physically typical of women generally, but they are apt models for clothing.
Yet still we may ask: Shouldn’t saints relate to ordinary believers? Saintliness is equated with complete purity and virtue. This cannot allow beauty in the profane, sexual sense commonly-understood. Consequently, Christianity sees virility and ordinary (profane) beauty as infelicitous. Despite this, somewhat surprisingly Hazard relents in the end and Catherine is painted as she is rather than as she would be if saintly. It’s a disappointing decision on Hazard’s part. Spiritual earnestness is sacrificed for profane beauty. Christianity’s liturgical art should point back to the Passion and bear its scars, as that is the basis of the entire Creed, in that Christ suffered for all men’s sins. In a profane and sinful Satanic world, we confuse sexual attractiveness with beauty, and this keeps us ignorant. But didn’t Christ already suffer for sins? Why do we need to recreate passion and turmoil in art? Wharton’s point is that we should recognise our sins in everything and not allow ourselves to be taken in by plaster saints.
A word about Hazard’s rationalist foil, Professor Strong. He rejects the Creed and any sort of superstitious belief entirely, however he still manages to look on the church quite objectively. Initially Strong is supercilious and rude in that way that rationalist academics can be. He pours scorn on Wharton’s artistic sensibilities and mocks Catherine. At one point, Strong asserts to Hazard that science alone is truth, which ironically is not true, or is at least misleading. The science corpus is merely a set of provisional truths. However, Professor Strong reveals a more complex understanding of things in the more in-depth conversations he has with Catherine later. Strong points out that science, religion and truth are separate things and both science and religion depend on belief. Strong implicitly rejects the modernist Cartesian paradigm, pointing out that you cannot reason yourself into faith – like love, you either have it or not. I see the point, but I am not sure I agree entirely. You can’t choose whether to love or not, but you can choose to have faith, or faith can be the ultimate result of choices, through reasoning. In the face of Esther’s struggles with herself, Strong helpfully suggests that perhaps the Roman Church would be more suitable for someone such as her, full of pride and passion. Certainly, he has a point: the liturgies of Romanism, the worship of ritual and its primeval appeal to communality, can be of appeal to a reasoned mind leery of Protestant supplicancy. This is Strong, the rational man, trying to understand the unfathomable. What is love? Can we choose to love? He equates faith with love because he assumes faith is irrational. As such, he is not giving Esther enough credit.
Tellingly, Strong contradicts himself on the point, also averring, like Hazard, that the profession of faith is a simple, rudimentary willed act: it is submission, in short, though you have to choose whether to submit or not. All doubts can be laid to rest. This seems a little simplistic to me. All of us when we make choices are heading down a particular path that will shape our circumstances and determine how our lives will work out. We all make these choices without being able to weigh everything up - sometimes we make blind decisions out of feelings rather than entirely rational judgement. Faith is something that grows on you, just as any strong social or political belief might. Even if there is a Damascene conversion, this is still the result of earlier decisions and innumerable tiny influences. If you choose not to look into Christianity, you are unlikely to ever develop faith unless you have some sort of religious experience; those who have the curiosity (or weakness, as Strong would have it) to examine superstition may reason themselves into faith. Strong’s averment also seems tautological. Of course, we can lay to rest all doubts if we want to: that is faith, in which the individual rests on hope over the natural doubts. But what is this hope, which is at the root of faith? It seems to be a choice: an acceptance of mystery over a negation of tradition and doctrine. This is also a form of loyalty. Thus, it could be argued that divine love is loyalty – not necessarily true love for God, rather love for an organisation: a loyalty to tradition. Is romantic love itself just a form of loyalty? What compromises does love demand of people? Must we accept fully the person we love? Romantic and sexual love is not unconditional, as parental love typically is, however in the period that this novel is set, divorce was harder and so the prospect of marriage required still more serious contemplation.
Hazard’s argument for faith is not particularly innovative. He starts with the Cartesian dictum, cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am” – which was a feature of the intellectual battle during the post-Renaissance 17th. century, and among the pre-cursors of modernism proper and post-modernism. Descartes was looking for an axiom, something on which he could rest with certainty and from which he could derive all other things: in short, a philosophical version of the First Cause that created everything and gives everything meaning. For Christians, an absence of First Cause implies that things have been created out of nothing, ex nihilo, and nothing has meaning. However, even if the premise is accepted, it is difficult to see how this justifies belief in superstition. The point seems to be that God must exist because otherwise nothing can be explained, but there are explanations – starting with evolution. Hazard brings this up in an attempt to reconcile religion and science, arguing that when it comes to resolving the great mystery of the physical world, consciousness, science cannot improve on religion: the “I AM” of existence is mystified to the scientist and it is only through faith in God that such imponderables can be understood. God is the Word, the Alpha and the Omega. This seems to be a way of merely shifting the goalposts: explaining one mystery by supplanting it with another. The significance of consciousness is that it concerns being. It is the stuff of life, what we are essentially. Christians use it in concept to say that everything around us may not be real, only the soul (the human stuff) is real. In reality, there is no mystery to consciousness, it may be explained entirely in evolutionary terms. We may add that the very fact that Descartes had to reason his way to God tells us that he and others of his time didn’t really believe in God. In any case, his ontological argument seems weak. Hazard then tries Pascal’s wager – which seems a rather self-interested basis for believing in God and therefore also undermines faith. What all of this suggests is a reasoning towards faith, a faith based on recognising doubts, rather than a simple belief. This placing of ‘knowing’ before ‘being’ has critically undermined Christianity and is the unintended gift of Descartes to the modern world. If you have to reason faith then it is not faith at all, it is just another falsifiable view.
Strong has a go too, but in a way that Hazard would not approve of. He seems to be Adams’ Miltonian satanic figure, straight out of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, with his pessimism about faith and human nature; he is, furthermore, figuratively Satan himself, subtly tempting Esther into an anti-Christian understanding of things that will serve his own purposes. In polemic with Esther, he tries to steer her towards what a Christian would see as the evil of nominalism in which morality is seen as extrinsic to the human being, what matters is a person’s aesthetic sense of right and wrong, and good and evil become negotiative. Strong holds that this life is everything, there is no spiritual future beyond it – or probably not. The Christian alternative is that this life is a preparation for the next, we have all sinned and are therefore damaged, and if we accept God’s grace we will be healed and can ascend to a supernatural state. If we reject God’s grace or do not have the capacity to accept it, then we will be estranged from God (which ultimately means Hell). Knowing is therefore equated with virtue. Love is all. At one point, Strong tries to suggest that any thought that is an abstract truth makes you immortal. This seems to me nonsense. Mind is matter and dies with it. Even if you have an abstract thought that is an abstract truth, it does not make you immortal. Your thought dies with you while its products and artifacts live on, but you cannot become your own thought. Your matter has a separate existence and your thoughts merge with you on death as they are simply part of matter. Ironically, Strong is reasoning himself into faith. If he is right, then truth is God and we become one with God when we accept his existence, but it is unlikely this was Strong’s intention.
In the end, Strong’s appeal to Esther amounts to saying that since all of these things cannot be disproven, they must be possible, and since even the hard sciences have mysteries as their axioms (so Strong says), science and religion are merely different paths to truth and Esther should consider which she wishes to accept. It is a weak argument. Strong’s evangelism is of the low church kind: though he does not quote the Bible, he is eschewing theology, and the richness and mystery of Christianity and its divine revelation, and instead appealing to Esther’s reasoned mind on the basis of a crude philosophical calculus. In contrast, Hazard’s evangelism is that of the high churchman: he demands that Esther submit to him on an emotional basis and that faith will follow from this, though it is still a reasoned argument in its own way, albeit fallacious: an appeal to authority, to patriarchy, to the Leadership Principle – Hazard merely being the petty leader above whom is God Himself. Hazard offers Esther a life to be lived in submission to the Father, and the possibility of Salvation through the acceptance of grace through low gradations to God. This explains Hazard’s approach to Esther’s mental turmoil: she can find the truth through him. It implies a paternalistic attitude to Esther and maybe women in general. To Hazard, the issue is not whether he should give up his faith, but whether Esther should sacrifice her own intellectual independence and trust herself to him. From his perspective, it is enough that she should love him, all else will follow, as God is love. This sounds odd, but how many regular church-going and casual believers take this approach? Most of them probably have never read the Bible, let alone studied it seriously. Most of them would probably scoff at tales of miracles of the kind that Jesus is meant to have performed as a demonstration of his holiness. But these things are fundamental to the Creed, and one who does not believe in them and accept them cannot be a Christian proper. Christianity relied on catholic and gnostic principles of worship right up until the invention of the printing press, when Scripture ceased to be the property of the Church alone, allowing the Reformation to spread. It would be difficult, actually, to overestimate the revolutionary effect of printing Scripture: Bible-based faith is non-experiential, causing adherents to turn against tradition. Belief is not very important when you have holy water, responsorials – magic is in things. But painting and architecture are not magic in and of themselves, they just allow you to be nearer to God or understand God better, not just rely on the formalism of liturgy and ritual. But once people start actually reading Scripture and the Pentateuch, then belief itself becomes an issue.
In pre-belief Christianity, ‘being’ in the religious sense is a presupposition and a priori entirely and nothing has to be explained. Once people could read the material, or have it read to them, suddenly it became necessary for them to believe in it. This presented a problem: the paradox of ‘literate’ Christianity is that it is imperatively atheistic: anybody who reads the Bible cannot believe in it. With the onset of the Scientific Revolution and the shift to mechanisation and industrialism, a ‘belief belief’ – i.e. faith and doubt as the requisites of belief - became more fundamental to Christianity instead of unquestioning ‘pre-belief belief’, and what was previously a belief in a metaphysics of reality become a belief in magic. This must have weakened Christianity, and it will be noted that the vestigial liturgies and doctrines of ‘pre-belief belief’ are almost entirely catholic, Roman or Orthodox: the liturgical catholic traditions in particular call back to paganism. Who in the industrial and post-industrial eras can possibly believe in the literalism of the Pentateuch? Or the divine incarnation? Or the Miracles of Jesus? Or the Resurrection? Or even simply Jesus as an actual historical figure? In modern times, the church must “choose between weak doctrine and weak brains”, a monitory parishioner admonishes Hazard. Which is preferable? The very dilemma is an acknowledgement that an educated and intelligent person cannot possibly believe in this stuff, and the church will go for ability. Hazard is an exception, maybe even a contraindication for modernism: he is proud of his strong dogma. The interesting thing is that many, maybe most, of today’s Christians see no contradiction in negation and probably ‘believe in belief’, as Christopher Hitchens had it, rather than believe in the dogma as a metaphysical reality. It is in that sense that they believe in the Creed itself. The broad cleave in Christianity between catholics and evangelists is really about the difference between a doctrine of belief per se and a doctrine of ritual. The ritualists (i.e. the catholics) take belief for granted, or otherwise don’t raise the subject; the ‘believers’ (i.e. the evangelists) actually expect you to believe in it. The catholics rest on apocalyptic evaluation: a grand Reckoning in which the All Knowing weighs up sins and ex post facto ratifies dispensations. The evangelists don’t care how you behave as long as you believe in Christ and repent.
Thus, we can see that Christian belief has evolved through three stages of palingenesis that dovetail with the West’s philosophical development since Constantine: the medieval ‘pre-belief belief’, the pre-modern ‘belief belief’, and the late modern and post-modern ‘belief in belief’. This is the slippage. It has been caused by the co-option of Cartesian circularity, which might better be understood as a singularity of faith-doubt. His dictum was more fully phrased: “dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum” – I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. This single line upturned 1,500 years of pre-cognitive belief. Nothing could be more radical and nothing has been. Descartes made a virtue of doubting, paving the way for postmodernism. We may say that Descartes is the Father of Postmodernism because he was rejecting implicitly belief in dogma as an a priori presupposition, though ironically he was trying to achieve the opposite: securing knowledge by establishing a kernel that is beyond doubt. The mundane result is modernist pseudo-theological exchanges such as those in this novel. The traditionalist Hazard and the modernist Esther are at cross-purposes. Hazard need not necessarily ask much of Esther: all that’s required is that she believes in the Creed because she should believe in it. Esther, for her part, is trying to be a pre-modernist and ‘believe believe’, rationally. Meanwhile, Hazard demands that she ‘pre-believe believe’, charismatically. Even if Esther could, which she can’t, she must ask a great deal of him. Like Esther, I prefer the divinity of Nature. But who is right? Can we even know? In the end, like any good work of art, the central question is left unresolved by the artist. All the important matters are for the reader to decide.
