"A Reverent and Obedient Evolution:" Jonathan Edwards, the New Science, and the Socialism of Henry James Sr.

Unlike other nineteenth-century critics of Darwin—who cherished a six-day creation and the fixity and permanence of species and who were repulsed by the relegation of Adam and Eve to the status of apes—Henry James Sr. was a religious socialist who believed that evolutionary science had little relevant to say about true origins, which he construed to emerge exclusively through a process of "spiritual creation." He therefore subsumed the ideas of Darwin, Huxley, and their scientific forerunners within the edifices of Berkeleyan idealism and Swedenborgian spiritualism that accommodated in renovated form, at least to James's satisfaction, the tangible foundations and ultimate grandeur of evolutionary theories constructed by naturalists. James's philosophy of spiritual creation and origins sidestepped the evolutionary descent of multiple species from simpler common ancestors; nor, as scholarship has shown, was James troubled by theories concerning descent, mutation, natural selection, adaptation, and extinction.¹ For James, true origins result from spiritual evolution, an idea according to which a phenomenalistic universe awaits spiritual creation and redemption via the infusion (or "communication," as James would have phrased it) of preexisting true Being into the vacant, provisional forms that God is said to make in order to transform into a socialistic Divine–Natural Humanity ("F&S"; SC; SSh).² James further commandeered evolutionary rhetoric to declare as inevitable—indeed as the very end of history—the unfolding of this socialistic, spiritual process of creation and redemption.

The current study seeks to reconcile this evolutionary dimension of the philosophy of James with revelations, appearing only in the past decade, about his significant debt—beyond what was already known about his Calvinistic background—to works of Jonathan Edwards that extol the virtue of disinterested benevolence.³ Granted, James the socialist disdained Calvinistic tenets of original and imputed sin. Still, he appears to have found in Edwards's The Nature of True Virtue (1765)—and, most likely, in its conceptual predecessor, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746)—enchanting visions of disinterested benevolence supportive of spiritualized socialism. At issue is religious socialism, of the sort John Humphrey Noyes thought to characterize successful communitarian experiments in midcentury North America.⁴ Still, despite recent disclosures about James's enchantment with spiritual evolution, on the one hand, and Edwardsian theology, on the other, scholars have yet to identify or to explain the harmony of New Science with the spiritual outlook as espoused in the socialistic philosophy of the elder James.

That felicitous commingling of Darwinian and Edwardsian ideas in the philosophy of James might at first seem unlikely, since James rejected hierarchical theology and limited atonement and since he was contemptuous of ruthless models of social organization, whether Malthusian or Spencerian.⁵ But just for that reason, I suggest, James cast his socialist agenda in the mold of spiritual evolution flowing from rapacious capitalism toward the equality of human relations that he thought to be foreshadowed in the visionary theology of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Swedenborgian spiritualism appealed to James because the Swedish mystic had advocated a Divine–Natural Humanity and had posited essential correspondences between the fullness of divine Being and the phenomenalism of sublunary forms awaiting the Creator's infusion of true substance. Swedenborg had, moreover, cherished ideas about disinterested benevolence that James deemed pertinent to nineteenth-century socialistic discourse.

As argued elsewhere, the theological disinterestedness of Swedenborg had an Edwardsian resonance for James. That association of ideas was circuitous, inasmuch as Swedenborg had derived his appreciation for the "virtue" of disinterested benevolence from Nicolas Malebranche's De la recherché de la vérité (1674–75). Edwards likewise seems to have found the ideas of Malebranche a buttress to his perspective on virtue predicated upon general love and selflessness.⁶ Since there is no indication that James studied Malebranche, James would likely have associated Swedenborg's respect for disinterested benevolence and general love with a more recognizable, Edwardsian true virtue.⁷

Thus, while following Swedenborg in rejecting the Calvinistic tenet of a retributive God, James nonetheless valued, as a cornerstone for spiritualized socialism and its evolutionary advent...