Henry James Sr.

Swedenborgianism

Around 1841, James began to be interested in Swedenborgianism when he read some articles in London's Monthly Magazine on the subject by J.J. Garth Wilkinson, who would become one of James's closest friends. In his quest, he met and befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson, but did not find much satisfaction in Emerson's thought. Emerson introduced James to Thomas Carlyle. But it was in the work of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the Swedish scientist, religious visionary and teacher, that James found a spiritual home. In May 1844, while living in Windsor, in England, James was sitting alone one evening at the family dinner table after the meal, gazing at the fire, when he had the defining spiritual experience of his life, which he would come to interpret as a Swedenborgian "vastation," a stage in the process of spiritual regeneration. This experience was an apprehension of, in his own words, "a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life." ^[1]

James's "vastation" initiated a spiritual crisis that lasted two years, and was finally resolved through the thorough exploration of the work of Swedenborg and Christian mystic. James became convinced that, as he put it, "the curse of mankind, that which keeps our manhood so little and so depraved, is its sense of selfhood, and the absurd abominable opinionativeness it engenders." He remained attached to Swedenborg's thought for the rest of life, and never traveled without carrying Swedenborg's works with him.

In 1845, James again returned to the United States and began a lifetime of lecturing about his spiritual discoveries. He devoted his mornings to writing, and published a number of discursive volumes devoted to the exposition of his thought.^[2]

Social thought

In the late 1840s, James became interested in the former members of Brook Farm, an experiment in communal living at West Roxbury, Massachusetts that lasted from 1841 to 1847, and in Fourierism, the school of utopian socialism that grew out of the thought of French social philosopher Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and which was a major influence in the last several years of Brook Farm. James was interested in utopianism as a stepping stone to the spiritual life. In his view, man is:

under a threefold subjection, first to nature, then to society, and finally to God. His appetites and his sensuous understanding relate him to society or his fellow man; and his ideas relate him to God. . . . He who obeys his appetites merely finds himself speedily betrayed by the inflexible laws of nature to disease and death. He who obeys his passions merely binds himself by the inflexible laws of society to shame and seclusion. But he who obeys his ideas, he who gives himself up to the guidance of infinite goodness, truth, and beauty, encounters no limitation at the hands either of nature or society, and, instead of disease and shame, plucks only the fruits of health and immortal honor.

James was a stern critic of the "gross materiality" of American society, and found in Fourier's thought a useful critique. He held most of the leading writers of his day in low regard, with the possible exception of Walt Whitman, though he met and cultivated many of them, including Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

James was an advocate of many social reforms, including the abolition of slavery and the liberalization of divorce.

Theology

Theologically, James was out of sympathy with the naturalism of much of the religious thought of the nineteenth century. He regarded creation itself as "a purely spiritual process, falling wholly within the realm of affection and thought." The fundamental theological problem, in his view, is theodicy, or the problem of evil. His Swedenborgian solution to the problem of evil relied on breaking the bond between God and nature, or, put alternatively, between nature and reality. True reality (or God) is, in James's view, thoroughly spiritual, in a way that denizens of the natural world can scarcely comprehend. But through intuition of this true reality, James thought, liberation from the illusions of natural appearances—which include time, space, and selfhood—is possible. In such liberation lies salvation, in James's view, whereas evil—more specifically, spiritual evil, since James distinguishes this from "physical" and "moral" evil—arises from action based on the delusion of selfhood. In James's thought, "the principle of hell is selfhood and the principle of heaven is brotherly love," as C. Hartley Grattan puts it in The Three James: A Family of Minds: Henry James Sr., William James, Henry James (N.Y. Univ. Press, 1962 [orig. ed. 1932], p. 75). But James was not a slavish follower of Swedenborg. Rather, it was in Swedenborg that he found the most fecund exploration of his central insight that the source of all evil was in attachment to the self.

Later years

Although the ideas of James were received by his contemporaries with little enthusiasm, and although he was altogether out of sympathy with his age's enthusiasm for science, he never grew discouraged; in fact, some of the best expositions of his thought are to be found in the volumes of his later years. He participated actively in the lives of his children, whose education he had done so much to shape. His society was cultivated by many, who enjoyed his conversation—provided that they were strong enough to bear the sometimes devastating criticism he offered. He delighted in paradox and exaggeration and enjoyed flouting convention. But he shunned formal society, which he found uncongenial. He wrote: "The bent of my nature is towards affection and thought rather than action. I love the fireside rather than the forum."

Legacy

Thoreau's description of an encounter with James gives an idea of how his contemporaries saw and judged him:

I met Henry James the other night at Emerson's, at an Alcottian conversation, at which, however, Alcott did not talk much, being disturbed by James's opposition. The latter is a hearty man enough, with whom you can differ very satisfactorily, both on account of his doctrines and his good temper. He utters quasi-philanthropic dogmas in a metaphysic dress; but they are, for all practical purposes, very crude. He charges society with all the crime committed, and praises the criminal for committing it. But I think that all the remedies he suggests out of his head—for he goes no farther, hearty as he is—would leave us about where we are now. For, of course, it is not by a gift of turkeys on Thanksgiving Day that he proposes to convert the criminal, but by a true sympathy with each one,—with him, among the rest, who lying tells the world from the gallows that he has never been treated kindly by a single mortal since he was born. But it is not so easy a thing to sympathize with another, though you may have the best disposition to do it. There is Dobson over the hill. Have not you and I and all the world been trying to sympathize with him since he was born (as doubtless he with us), and yet we have got no further than to send him to the House of Correction once at least; and he, on the other hand, has sent us to another place several times. This is the real state of things as I understand it, at least so far as James's remedies. We are now, alas! exercising what charity we actually have, and new laws would not give us any more. But perchance, we might make some improvements in the House of Correction. You and I are Dobson; what will James do for us?.^[3]