The Religious Investigations of William James

By Henry Samuel Levinson

In this first detailed examination of <3>Varieties of Religious Experience<1>, Levinson locates James securely in the academic study of religion, demonstrates James's debts to Darwin, and reconstructs the case for the supernatural that James thought so critical to his work. The author discusses the contribution that these religious interests made to James's later work and to the shaping of his theories of pragmatism and radical empiricism.

Originally published 1981.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781469610160

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Preface

This is a book about William James’s interests in religion. It is a book of philosophical reconstruction which shows James in his own world, not ours. I have made no effort to develop a comprehensive view of James’s work as psychologist, philosopher, psychical researcher, literary critic, and public orator, though James made contributions to his studies of religion in each of these roles. But I have tried to follow James’s religious investigations wherever they led, even as they spilled over all sorts of proper disciplinary divisions that we make but that he did not.

I have found a great adventure in the story of the developments in James’s religious inquiries. Great adventures, of course, are never very tidy. They arise in situations that are so rich with detail that any impression of them fails to register important happenings. They take surprising turns and involve subplots that, pursued in their own right, would turn into still more expansive stories. Finally, they do not really come to an end so much as haunt the listener with unanswered questions and inchoate suspicions not only about characters and events but also about himself.

I began research for this book in its middle. When I was a graduate student at Princeton working on a dissertation about James, I was rather shocked to find out that no one had written a detailed commentary or analysis of James’s classic study of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and I set out to do just that. But the more I worked on that analysis, the clearer it became that Varieties was the crucial segment in a series of religious investigations that spanned nearly thirty-five years and that taxed each of James’s distinctive talents as a student of humanity. James’s 1901–2 Gifford Lectures were rooted in Victorian debates about the role of theistic religion in culture, debates to which James had already been contributing for twenty-five years. Those lectures addressed the problem of religion that many highly cultured Victorians identified with—unable to live without religion, but unable to live with religion as it was. James wrote the lectures with special emphasis on religious movements in his own America, an elite America centered in Boston, still self-conscious about its cultural debts to England yet openly celebrating its inheritance as a nation of Anglo-Saxons. The intellectual atmosphere in which he wrote was still highly charged by the pronouncements of Darwin and by the evolutionisms associated with his theories. The cultural milieu was also confusing; America was just finding itself in its new role as a world-class industrial, economic, and military power. Finally, James brought to his writing a personal history rooted in his own melancholy, his own search for self-esteem, his own longing to read the facts religiously.

Part 1 places the reader in James’s religious world, unfamiliar as it is to most. It first develops an overview of religion in America during James’s lifetime, demonstrates the bounds of his acquaintance with those religions, and then analyzes James’s religious disease and the cures that he sought to relieve it, first in personal tenacity, then in philosophy, and finally in a science of religions.

Part 2 provides a detailed study of The Varieties of Religious Experience. This section locates James in relation to the emergence of the academic study of religion; demonstrates James’s debts to Darwin; analyzes his understanding of religious facts and his methods for evaluating religious thought and action; and, finally, reconstructs the case for the supernatural that he mounted in his concluding lectures.

Part 3 demonstrates how James’s religious interests contributed direction to his work in pragmatism and radical empiricism, and, even more importantly, how his pragmatism and radical empiricism helped resolve some of his problems concerning religion. This section considers the charges of subjectivity and capriciousness brought against James’s work on religious experience and analyzes his answers to those charges. Finally, it demonstrates the emergence of a pluralistic pantheism in James’s last works and characterizes the difference that religious thought made for James’s philosophy, psychology, and cultural criticism.

The epilogue reflects on the early canonization of James’s work, focusing especially on characterizations of his religious thought. While no effort is made toward developing a comprehensive picture of James-scholarship, even in its early rounds, much is given to distinguishing the James that I present in this book from early and influential renditions.

Speculation about how readers will use a book is always fraught with danger and sometimes self-fulfilling. Perhaps some readers, starved by the dearth of comprehensive analyses of The Varietiesof Religious Experience, may turn to its middle section first. In fact, the book might be useful taken this way. But my narrative, if not James’s lifework itself, will direct them to parts i and 3, for James’s religious investigations are concatenate.

I have been studying James since I was an undergraduate at Stanford. Bill Clebsch infected me with his appreciation for James, first as my teacher and then as my most helpful colleague and demanding critic. I treasure the wealth of things that I have learned from this man, not only about James but also about teaching and writing in a university like Stanford. Clebsch read every line of this book in more than one stage of its development. He corrected more than he left standing, all to the book’s credit.

Bruce Kuklick’s visit to Stanford’s Center for Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1978–79 happily coincided with my leave from teaching. He responded to some of my work in its earliest drafts, urged me to retain my focus on Varieties, and kept me from committing various presentist fallacies.

Correspondence with John J. McDermott and H. S. Thayer helped to shape my narrative in substantive ways. So did the report made by an anonymous reader who refereed the book for The University of North Carolina Press. Among the students who have taken my seminar on James, Ned Beach must be singled out for forcing me to rethink my presentation of James’s pragmatic theory of truth.

A whole battery of critics tried to lend some elegance and direction to my talkative writing style. Mike Michalson of Oberlin College, Nicholas Selby of Palo Alto, California, and, in my own department, Bill Clebsch, Van Harvey, Lee Yearley, Ted Good, and Paula Fredriksen spent long hours, out of collegiality or friendship, turning Levinsonisms into English. My editor at The University of North Carolina Press, David Perry, also rendered great service in this respect.

Thanks are due to the staff of the Houghton Library Reading Room at Harvard University, to Eugene Taylor for kindly letting me inspect some books once owned by James that are now shelved in various locations in the Harvard Libraries, to Stanford University for some financial assistance, and to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a research stipend during summer 1979. Finally, I thank Jo Guttadauro and Shirley Richardson for turning rough copy into smooth typescript and Susan Kwilecki for helping to read proof and make index.

Portions of the book appeared in my published dissertation, Science, Metaphysics, and the Chance of Salvation (Missoula, 1978), in Reviews in American History 6 (1978), and in Publius9 (1979). I am grateful to the editors and publishers concerned for permission to reprint this material. Insofar as the Houghton Library of Harvard University is concerned, permission has been granted to quote from manuscripts in the William James Collection housed there.

I wrote this book at a desk in a corner of a bedroom at my home in Palo Alto, California. My wife, Cathy, and our two girls, Molly and Sarah, not only tolerated this invasion but turned it into a memorable and happy family affair. This book is dedicated to them.

Abbreviations

CER William James, Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920). EM William James, The Energies of Men, Philosophical Review 16 (Jan. 1907): 1–20. EP William James, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). ERE William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). HI William James, Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898). HJS Giles Gunn, ed., Henry James, Sr.: A Selection of His Writings (Chicago: American Library Association, 1974). LRHJ William James, ed., The Literary Remains of Henry James (Upper Saddle River: Literature House, 1970). LWJ Henry James, ed., Letters of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1920). MS William James, Memories and Studies (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911). MT William James, The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). PP William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1890). Prag William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). PU William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). SPP William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). SS Henry James, Sr., The Secret of Swedenborg (Boston: Fields, Osgood and Co., 1869). TC Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1935). TT William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: W.W.Norton, 1958). VRE William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1902). WE William James, What is an Emotion? in The Emotions by Carl Georg Lange and William James, ed. Knight Dunlap (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1922). WJC William James Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. WTB William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

Part I

The Problem of Religion in James’S America

Chapter 1

James’s Awareness of Religion

Religion in America During James’s Lifetime

William James lived from 1842 to 1910, a period in American religious history that was dominated by the concerns of Protestant Christians. He was born during the waning, more nostalgic years of the National Period. This was a time when preachers, journalists, and public orators simultaneously sang the praises of a young republic that was realizing the pacific gospel truth and prepared the public for civil war.

In the National Period influential people in every region of the country and every contending party spoke and wrote in terms of a cluster of self-images and concepts: the image of free individuals contributing unique talents to the community; the concepts of perfection and of progress toward it; the notion that every man is equally important in the universe; the encouragement of persuasion as distinguished from coercion in religious, social, and political affairs; and a predilection for social paternalism.¹

These were the marks of national character that James saw embedded not simply in the writings of transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and his own father, Henry James, Sr. He also found them in the pages of E. L. Godkin’s Nation, where he both received and transmitted his political education and sense of national vocation. They lay barely submerged in James’s concern for national destiny, a topic of constant conversation among friends and family during his youth and early adulthood. They were also marks burned into Christian souls that James never met in camp meetings that he never attended, meetings which occasioned the Second Awakening during the first third of the century, at Chautauqua, Ocean Grove, Junaluska, or Bayview. They were intertwined with the gospel’s message of salvation as proclaimed by Christian voluntary and missionary societies where denominational participants subordinated sectarian distinctions to the disinterested benevolence of Samuel Hopkins and Nathaniel Taylor.²

In James’s youth, God’s own premises of the republic fired the imagination of virtually every Protestant American—when every American that counted was Protestant. These people never thought of distinguishing America’s vocation from the Christian quest for salvation. To be sure, there were intense controversies and divisions between sectarian groups, between groups within those sectarian groups, and between sectarian Christians and what James called protestant Protestants, or desectarianized Christians. Old-School Presbyterians and Baptists denied the greater emphasis on the human role in redemption that New Schoolers and (in their own way) Methodists proclaimed. Unitarians affirmed the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the progress of man onward and upward forever.³ This infuriated confessionalists of various sectarian stripes.

But even the conservatives who were angered by the, actually very small, Unitarian and Universalist heresies still insisted that individuals were free from earthly kings, through creed; that progress was a moral requirement, if insufficient for redemption; that perfection was the goal, though one never won so much as gracefully bestowed; and that every man had equal importance in the universe, by clarifying the religious lack and need of humankind. Sectarian and desectarianized Christians alike accused each other of breaking the sociality of persuasion that America was destined by God to realize.⁴

Fired by the demands of the Second Awakening for immediate confrontation with God and the possibility of perfect sanctification, new religious movements emerged that would attract James’s curiosity and even invade his father’s house. Shakers, Mormons, Millerites, Spiritualists, Swedenborgians, and transcendentalists all charted ways to attain perfect harmony with the divine, whether through communal celibacy, communal sexuality, preparedness for Christ’s imminent return, reunion with the dead, openness to divine influx, or artistic inspiration.

But from the standpoint of main-line Protestant experience, the cults were embarrassing and perhaps dangerously enthusiastic examples of infidelity. Indeed, neither cults and heresies on the one hand nor right-wing confessionalists on the other increased, expanded, or triumphed during the decades immediately preceding the Civil War. During William James’s first twenty years, what triumphed was the distinctive emphasis of Methodism in virtually all the denominations. Arminian views, Finneyite techniques, and a Wesleyan attitude of think-and-let-think pervaded preachers’ sermons and lectures. Quite in keeping with the images of the National Period, the one standard for Christian doctrine and activities was the question Will this belief or act increase the chances of salvation? This was a question James himself repeated many times, even if his understanding of salvation was different from any sectarian Christian view.

The laxity on creedal issues and the emphasis on experience that followed the triumph of Methodism was double-edged, depending on how one construed experience. Where revivalists emphasized their postmillennialism, salvation and social responsibility went hand in hand both in the North and the South (laying the context for the later belligerence). Where they focused on experience as inward and identified conversion as the religious experience, salvation and social responsibility were separated. During the Civil War itself, preachers waxed thick and thin on experience, exhorting their flocks to do battle as Christian soldiers but distinguishing the religion that every Christian got in conversion—North or South—from the politics that led to killing.⁵

For the most part, the war tended to solidify the rhetoric of the National Period, not diminish it. Especially in the North, orators of the rank of Lincoln, Horace Bushnell, and Philip Schaff spoke in measured tones that urged rededication to the destiny that the republic was created to manifest. James heard his father deliver the same message on several occasions. The war was pictured as the product of the guilt of the entire nation, the baptism of blood required for rebirth, purgation of evil, and return to vocation. Southern theologians like Stephen Elliott in Georgia and Richard Wilmer in Alabama pictured the war according to the doctrine of the vox populi so dominant in the National Period: God decided what course Providence would take and used the conflict to clarify the nation’s divine mission.⁶

Postwar conditions undercut the nation’s old sense of itself, particularly as idealized from denominational pulpits. The influx of immigrants first from Western, then Eastern, Europe; the triumph of the evolutionary sciences; and the shift from agrarian to industrial power did more to dash National Period hopes than did civil war. The immigrants were generally received as aliens and imagined as a mass, not as free individuals with gifts that the country could accept and profit from. The new sciences also asked and answered questions about groups and populations, not individuals. When these sciences were introduced on the popular level, the message displaced a prospective concern for right with a retrospective comprehension of might. In his twenties, James lamented that "Darwinism, utilitarianism, history are all eulogies of mightas opposed to right" (WJC, 4478). (This was a view he would retract a decade later.)

Darwin’s view, as professed by Herbert Spencer and John Fiske, undercut the notion that every man in the universe was equally important. According to Social Darwinists, importance was measured as power, and some mutations were far more powerful than others. Coercion was the reality behind the appearance of persuasion in human affairs. Certainly the invasion of the railroads into the wheatfields and ranchlands of the West and the emergence of cities to serve industry in the Northeast corroborated the theories of Social Darwinists. The captains of industry, who voiced the paternal rhetoric, looked like predators to those who were getting hurt.

These conditions not only generated a critical period in American religion⁷ but also stimulated a spectrum of national revitalization strategies broad and intense enough to be considered the third great awakening.⁸ Dwight L. Moody’s revival campaigns, mass meetings that James read about in the papers, were singled out in the 1870s by socialists as the paradigmatic mechanism for making religion the opiate of the masses. But viewed from the standpoint of the middle class he worked with and for, his message was a clear affirmation of the old consensus. It was right wing to be sure—Moody distinguished Christian education from social reform and, thus, salvation from social responsibility—but Moody’s brand of revitalization was largely in consonance with the efforts of mainstream Protestant denominations. They expanded missionary efforts that had been initiated for freedmen after the war into movements to bring comfort to forsaken farmers in the West and to rescue the victims of the urban plight, as much from themselves as from industrial and city machines. But Moody’s urban revivals and businessmen’s prayer meetings solidified the middle classes of the North at the expense of national equilibrium. It offended southerners in every sort of church and systematically played on the themes of race and nation in ways that made new American Roman Catholics as demonic as Jews and more hateful than Buddhists on the West Coast.

Moody’s efforts permeated educated classes enough for James to think of him on one occasion as representing the mood of faith in America (EP, 21). His revivals were sanctioned by no less a voice for liberal republicanism in the Northeast than the Nation, whose editors saw the enterprise as an old-fashioned revival with modern improvements.⁹ His lay ministry was a watershed for Gilded Age Protestantism, preparing the way for Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth and Josiah Strong’s Imperial America.

For Moody, Carnegie, and Strong, America no longer yearned to serve as God’s light for other nations; instead it proposed to take on the task of Christianizing them in its own image—and to accumulate the materials to make them powerful enough to realize this ideal. This religious fervor provided the context both for the most benevolent and thankless American missionary work abroad and for yellow journalism and subsequent imperialistic ventures in Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, and the Philippines. President McKinley’s prayers for the Christianization of Filipinos echoed the slogan of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, backed by Moody-inspired money: "The evangelization of the world in this generation.¹⁰

Crusaders like Moody were complemented as much as countered by the emerging Social Gospel movements and inner-city missions like Jerry MacAuley’s Water Street Mission in New York. Many Americans during this period espoused both imperial evangelization and pacifist views: pacifism was, after all, not only a religious but a racial ideal for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who financed anti-imperialist leagues. Thus, James could urge missionaries to ply their persuasions on foreigners while making antiimperialist speeches.

On intellectual fronts, the Atlantic Monthly (a magazine for which the young James wrote) could report by 1872 that Darwinism or evolution by natural selection had quite won the day in Germany and England, and very nearly won it in America. Where Darwin’s theories were seen as conflicting with biblical views of creation and the special creation of humankind, strongholds of confessionalism reacted without any sense of inevitable accommodation. Charles Hodge at Princeton Theological Seminary, a bastion of Old-School Calvinism, found Darwin’s theory absolutely incredible. Others, like the famous infidel Robert Ingersoll, tried to bolster their religious antipathies toward sectarian denominations by ridiculing Christianity in Darwin’s name.

But religious thinkers of widely varying points of view rather quickly accepted the import of Darwin and, with his work, the significance of the new evolutionary sciences. Protestant liberals like Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn and Lyman Abbott in New York joined with desectarianized Protestants like Fiske in Boston and Old Schoolers like James McCosh at Princeton University in efforts to persuade congregations that evolution is God’s way of doing things. The proponents of progressive orthodoxy at Andover Theological Seminary found ways to argue that their understanding of the Gospel was most fit to survive, that the Bible recorded human experience as it was known in our times and in our souls.

Contemporaneous with the efforts of J. W. Draper and Andrew D. White to show incompatibilities between science and religion, thinkers still deeply faithful to Calvinism continued, quite accurately, to think of themselves as scientific empiricists ready to judge impartially the hypotheses introduced by Darwin. To be sure, northern Presbyterians held heresy trials based on biblical authority just as southern Methodists censured Vanderbilt’s Alexander Winchell for contradicting the Genesis account of creation in 1878. Two newly created denominations, Seventh Day Adventists (1860) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (1872), reasserted Protestant reliance on the Bible and its Authorities for their claims about things in the world. But, more significantly perhaps, much of the best scientific investigation in America continued to be published in journals and magazines sponsored by Protestant colleges, seminaries, and organizations—quarterlies and annuals that James read.

Radical responses to the new climate of opinion were diverse. Some pessimistic positivists and naturalists pictured man as an alien in an empty universe (the phrase is William McLoughlin’s), driven by forces beyond his control and attempting to cope with a simply brutal environment. But this mythologization of Darwin’s work was mostly continental and hardly found echoes in the United States.

Some Unitarians, a very small if influential group of liberals, committed themselves to the total displacement of theological discourse when they founded the Free Religious Association (1867) and asserted that religion is the effort of man to perfect himself. Felix Adler’s Society for Ethical Culture (1876) worked a similar vein. But these movements together could never claim more than two thousand adherents.

Far more popular and less institutional, Helena P. Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society (1875) sought to discover the fundamental truths from which the creeds of the world religions descended. Blavatsky preached a promethean brotherhood of mankind that attracted James’s attention, even after Blavatsky’s own spiritual exercises were uncovered as hoaxes. Based on vapid readings of Moses, Krishna, Lao-tse, Confucius, Buddha, Christ, and Darwin, among others, her message reached thousands of people in urban meetings across the country. The enthusiasm for Theosophy was echoed in the popular response to the World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, a conference that made Swami Vivekananda a household word in Chicago, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The parliament was hailed by Paul Carus, editor of the Monist, a speculative journal that James read thoroughly, as the dawning of a new age of religious harmony!

But the most pervasive new movement to emerge during the period was the New Thought Alliance. Most of the groups that constituted the movement were religiously eclectic, not specifically Christian. Some, for instance, played on Eastern mystical themes that had been introduced by transcendentalists before the Civil War. Others built messages on the Vedantism and bowdlerized Buddhism that were introduced into the country at the time of the World Parliament of Religions. Those influenced by Warren Felt Evans harked back beyond Swedenborg to the hermetic tradition and Paracelsus.

But all the groups of New Thought advocated the new therapeutic movement founded by the patient-disciples of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–66).¹¹ Quimby, a mental healer that James never visited but read about curiously, was convinced that cultivating healthy attitudes could cure disease, just as wrong beliefs resulted in sickness. He combined the psychological theories of Mesmer, the theology of Swedenborg, and an inspirational presence to develop an essentially optimistic message about the capacity of the individual to save himself by letting go of his erroneous ideas and grasping for the healing truth.

Thousands of people traveled to Portland, Maine, to receive Quimby’s therapy, and thousands more read the books and attended the meetings of healers who succeeded him, including Julius Dresser, his son Horatio, Henry Wood, Emmet Fox, and Ralph Waldo Trine. Those names would dot James’s Gifford Lectures more than others. He thought enough of Trine to give In Tune with the Infinite to his son Henry for his birthday. Mental healers, forgotten now, commanded audiences and followings during their time that dwarfed other novel religious movements. They brought the problems of religion, science, and health together in ways that attracted the attention of many more conventional preachers and teachers, James among them. When, for instance, Ray Stannard Baker wrote The Spiritual Unrest in 1909, he found its heart in the new religious idealism which

lays its emphasis on the power of mind over matter, the supremacy of the spirit. Its thinkers have interested themselves as never before in the marvelous phenomena of human personality, most of which were contemptuously regarded by the old materialistic sciences. The wonders of the human mind, the attribute we call consciousness, the self, the relation of mind to mind, telepathy, the strange phenomenon of double or multiple consciousness, hypnotism, and all the related marvels, are now crowding for serious attention and promise to open to us new worlds of human knowledge.¹²

When Baker wrote this, he invoked the clear-sighted observer, Professor James, as a man of intellectual prestige to back him up. New Thought advocates transmitted the new idealism to an enormous popular audience, emphasizing the role that thinking I do, I know, and I will played in the efforts of individuals to overcome disease-breeding anxiety, or what Trine called fearthought.

If messages like Trine’s departed too radically from Calvinism to suit the sensibilities of many American Christians, Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science was more assimilable. Eddy emphasized an antithesis between the spirit and the flesh, the reality of evil as expressed in the flesh, and the suffering and triumph of a divine Jesus as the way of salvation from the flesh. Thus, "That which in New Thought was the subject of the healing is in Christian Science the object of the healing."¹³ New Thinkers lay stress on the unbounded character of human possibilities, Christian Scientists on the unbounded graciousness of Jesus Christ, Scientist. Both made many Americans familiar with new ranges of life succeeding on our most despairing moments (the phrase is William James’s [PU, 138]) at a time when neurasthenia was characterized as the American disease by serious physicians concerned with thwarting a wave of mental breakdowns, especially among the educated in American society, a syndrome sensationalized in George Beard’s American Nervousness in 1882.

His Father’s Christianity

James was among the most prominent of high cultural thinkers in America concerned with the issues connecting science, health, and religion. When he died in 1910, his book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) had already been revised once and reprinted eighteen times. Academics in America, Britain, Europe, and Japan read it avidly. So did laymen in Protestant denominations as well as their Roman Catholic and Jewish counterparts. By them, James was hailed as a champion of religiousness whose religious thought emerged out of an uncommon familiarity with the many and varied modes of religious experience.

In fact, James’s acquaintance with different religions was limited by region, class, inheritance, and profession. To be sure, by the time he reached maturity he could name as many religions in America and across the globe as anyone in America. He could probably give brief characterizations of major Protestant denominations and great traditions like Christianity, Buddhism, and paganism. (Many educated persons sliced the religious world into these three pieces.) But the religions he observed firsthand were primarily religions that were active around the Boston area—especially those which attracted the attention of persons who were educated, and even more especially those which attracted the sons of heretical, desectarianized Christians like James’s father, who read Swedenborg and had friends in the transcendentalists’ inner circle.

The Christianity that James knew most intimately was his father’s: an idiosyncratic fusion of Calvinism and republicanism. Henry James, Sr., tried to articulate a Christian vision of mankind constantly laboring with God to create a universe against primordial chaos. His view was old school enough to picture God as a person and to focus on the death of personhood and the rebirth of spiritual humanity through divine grace. But it was also American enough to construe the nation’s motto—e pluribus unum—as God’s own. The God of Henry, Sr., was the only active or creative principle in things, but he was a worker for peace, not an absolute monarch. Salvation for him was neither a matter of beholding a sovereign monarch governing the universe nor one of serving his liege in some unearthly kingdom. Salvation was the actualization of the principle of democracy, the assertion that the people are rightfully sovereign, and possess the exclusive claim to the governing function (HJS, 93). For Henry, Sr., that principle was an actual tendency of the Divine Providence, felt all along the progress of human history, and marching now in open day to a complete and triumphant evolution (HJS, 96).

What is more, William James’s father claimed that the order that God and man would build together would effect that sociality of persuasion which he thought, especially in the wake of Christian interpretations of the Civil War, was so much a part of the Founding Fathers’ vision. The harmonic destiny of society was to establish a time when all coercion and restraint shall be disused in the conduct of human affairs, and when, consequently, every man will freely do unto others as he would have others do unto him (HJS, 96–97).

The millennium, which Henry, Sr., thought inevitable, would occur when e pluribus unum—one out of many—was realized. He said in this connection that it "ought not to be forgotten . . . that the form of our polity bears on its very face, that is, in its name, an indication of the spiritual change it represents. It is not America but the UNITED STATES of America, ‘one out of many’, as its motto reads, to which the expiring states of Europe bow, or do deepest homage, in sending over to these shores their starving populations to be nourished and clothed and otherwise nursed into citizenship, which is a condition preliminary to their being socialized," which meant, in his technical sense, Christianized or saved (HJS, 242).

Henry, Sr., not only expressed a variant religion of the republic but also exuded the confidence of the National Period, which his son would abandon. To be sure, he stood in counterpoint to Emerson, the period’s great exemplar, first, by pitting his humanitarian socialism against the latter’s individualism and, second, by insisting that individuals must be reborn as social beings before e pluribus unum could actually be achieved. But his democratic idealism was such that he could constantly chide the monarchies of Europe and claim that the American experiment had thus far vindicated humanity from the charge of essential depravity and had inaugurated the existence of perfectly just relations between man and man. in sum, Henry, Sr., was convinced that the American state is really become the vehicle of an enlarged human spirit. I have myself no doubt of the operation of this cause (HJS, 237, 98).

From this angle his religion was more social than political. ‘One out of many’ articulated the relations between man and man that would eventuate when both the coercion and restraint of government were displaced by the sociality of persuasion exemplified by friends. For all his confidence, Henry, Sr., did not bow down to the idol of the Nation. He called the Nation to respond earnestly to the spirit that moved it, and should move the world. He did not worship the republic per se. Indeed, he chided the polity at appropriate times. He believed that "the State has no permanent or absolute rights over the human conscience. It was never intended for anything else than a mere locus tenens, a simple herald or lieutenant, to Society, while Society itself was as yet unwholly recognized, and indeed undreamt of, as the sole intellectual truth of man’s Divine-natural destiny. Through commitment to the premises of the republic, Americans were not fighting for our country only, for our own altars and firesides as men have fought hitherto, but for the altars and firesides of universal man, for the ineradicable rights of human nature itself" (HJS, 236, 117).

His vision of salvation was articulated in a supernatural frame of reference centered on three basic terms: Creator, Creation, and Creature. If he was attracted to Swedenborg and Fourier, he still thought that Jonathan Edwards was the most adequate philosopher. Giles Gunn has said that Henry, Sr., wanted to humanize Calvinism, not overthrow it. Perhaps it would be more in line with Henry, Sr.’s own views to say he wanted to clarify how humanized Calvinism could become. The Creature, in any case, was still utterly dependent on the Creator for being itself. The Creation was given in order to be redeemed by God and man. The Creature was fallen through his own pride and had to be delivered from evil by letting go of himself (an event that was spontaneous, thus not voluntary) and by accepting divine acceptance. Human redemption came when the moral man incarcerated by "a law without him was demolished, displaced by a life within him," making him a saint. This occurred when an influx of that divine and supernatural light broke through the harshness of self-inflating self-consciousness and moralism and caused the Golden Rule to grow natural.

But this theology which William James grew up with was different from old Calvinism in substantial ways. What Henry, Sr., had to say about orthodox theism lingered on in the writings of his philosopher-son. To begin with, Henry, Sr., assumed that the Old theology was substantially the same in all the sects, from the old Romish down to the modern Swedenborgian. He conceived of sectarian differences, which he never explicated, as varieties of doctrinal drapery. The old theology posited not simply God’s disjunction from natural or merely carnal man but a belief that the separation was caused by a primal act of disobedience on man’s part. Because this was so, according to Henry, Sr., old Calvinists believed that creation is a failure and the destiny of the creature consequently extremely dubious if not decidedly wretched (HJS, 174–75).

Human redemption occurred for these old Calvinists, according to Henry, Sr., when man was reunited with God. Reunion was achieved, first, through Christ’s propitiatory sacrifice, which mitigated the punishment rightly due to man by a God whose just demands had been betrayed, and then through divine election of single individuals who were righteous enough to be saved but not able to acquire salvation (HJS, 174–75).

The elder James could no longer bring himself to adore this Calvinists’ God who had fallen below the secular average of human character, phrasing that William James echoed more than once. A democrat, the father craved a weekday Divinity, a working God, grim with dust and sweat of our most carnal appetites and passions, and bent, not for an instant upon inflating our worthless pietistic righteousness, but upon the patient, toilsome, thorough cleansing of our physical and moral existence from the odious defilement it has contracted, until we each and all present at last in body and mind the deathless effigy of his own uncreated loveliness (SS, vi-vii).

Henry, Sr.’s desire to bring the Father down from the throne, together with his commitment to a doctrine of divine immanence, led to his focus on God’s incarnation and to his inversion of the Calvinist scheme of salvation. In Calvinism, men fell collectively in consequence of the imperfection of human nature. They were elected to salvation by God when they exhibited righteous saintliness through faith. But for James, men fell individually when and because they believed they were righteous enough to receive God’s salving attention. They were saved when and because they unlearned morality and self-consciousness sufficiently to identify their lives and hopes with the being and aspirations