Henry James Sr. 1811 – 1882

Henry James Sr. was an American philosopher and religious thinker and the father of the novelist Henry James and the philosopher William James. Wealthy enough to devote his entire life to thought and writing, he was for many years one of the most engaged American interpreters of the religious philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg. His Substance and Shadow, The Secret of Swedenborg, and Society the Redeemed Form of Man articulated a distinctive philosophy in which the natural and the spiritual are progressive expressions of a single divine life. He moved in the literary circles of mid-nineteenth-century New England and Europe and shaped the religious imagination of his children.

Henry James Sr. was born at Albany, New York, in June 1811, the son of one of the wealthiest Scotch-Irish merchants in the United States. As a boy he lost a leg in a stable fire while trying to extinguish a balloon experiment, an injury that shaped his lifelong distance from ordinary public life. He inherited an independent fortune, attended Princeton Theological Seminary in 1835–1837, and there abandoned the Calvinism of his father; in 1844, while reading at Frogmore, he underwent the spiritual crisis that he later called his 'vastation' and turned to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.

He moved his large family — including the future philosopher William James, the novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James — between New York, Newport, and Cambridge, and produced a series of dense theological and social writings: Lectures and Miscellanies (1852), Christianity the Logic of Creation (1857), Substance and Shadow (1863), The Secret of Swedenborg (1869), Society the Redeemed Form of Man (1879), and the posthumous Spiritual Creation.

James combined a Swedenborgian theology of the divine humanity with a Fourierist religious socialism that denounced the legalism of the orthodox churches and the moralism of Unitarianism; the universal redemption of human society, not the individual soul, was for him the centre of Christianity. He shaped the religious imagination of his celebrated children and is the great unwritten chapter behind William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. He died at Boston in December 1882.