SOURCE: "Religion versus Morality According to the Elder Henry James," in The International Journal of Ethics, Vol. XLII, No. 3, April, 1932, pp. 289-303.

[Perry was an American philosopher and biographer whose two-volume biography of William James won the Pulitzer Prize for that genre in 1935. In the excerpt below, he argues that James, Sr., was an antinomian, or one who believes that under the gospel dispensation of grace the moral law is of no use because faith alone is necessary to salvation.]

Morality and religion are related in many ways. For example, each may be taken as the sanction of the other—belief in God as a foundation for morality, or the moral law as a proof of God. These aspects of the question I omit altogether. The point to which I wish to direct attention is the relation between the moral life and the religious life. In some sense it is doubtless true that when the moral life reaches its highest stage of perfection it passes over into the religious life. We have a set of terms such as "saintliness," "piety," "blessedness," "spirituality," which suggest that this form of life is super-moral. Now, granting this, our question is as follows: Should we think of the religious life as consummate, perfected morality; or should we think of it as something distinctly different, which supersedes morality? Shall we say that on some level of spiritual growth religion is opposed to morality, or shall we insist that in religion morality is continued and fulfilled?

Throughout its entire history Christianity has been attended by a somewhat disreputable camp-follower called "antinomianism," often allowed to join in the feast, but never recognized as a regular member of the family, and often an occasion of scandal. The persistent Christian heresies, repeatedly scotched but never killed, such as Arianism, Pelagianism, Gnosticism, Pantheism, Socinianism, threw a flood of light upon the meaning of Christianity. They were reefs and shoals which threaten the shipwreck of Christianity and which the Christian must perpetually avoid, but though they lie off the Christian course, they are the landmarks by which that particular course is bounded and charted. Some of these persistent heresies attack Christianity in its moments of lowered vitality—in the dead of spiritual night; but antinomianism is a malady of excess rather than of deficiency, and the Christian has to fear it most in the morning hours when his Christian heart is beating high. Stated very freely this heresy consists in the belief that the Christian life is so different, so greatly and so gloriously different, from the secular life, that the rules of the secular life no longer obtain; or that to one experiencing the unnatural elevation of Christian faith and love, nothing else matters, including morality. It is a sort of Christian inebriety, uplifting and invigorating, but judged by standards of spiritual hygiene, toxic rather than benign. It embraces the false and blinding affirmation that because the spiritual life is a greater or fuller life it therefore contradicts, annihilates, displaces, and supersedes the moral life; whereas in truth the spiritual life owes what claims it has upon us to the fact that in its greater fulness the moral life is embraced and completed.

In order to illustrate the psychology and logic of antinomianism, the causes which dispose Christians to it, and the reasons, good and bad, by which they justify it, I should like to introduce a great man of religion, who is less well known than he deserves to be and than he is likely to be in the near future. I refer to the elder Henry James, spiritual as well as physical parent of two more famous sons. I said that antinomianism sprang from an excess rather than from a deficiency of Christian zeal. James, if he was a Christian at all, was an intense Christian. When I raise doubts as to his being a Christian at all I mean that he was not a literal or an institutional Christian. He was a Christian, as he was a Swedenborgian, in his own peculiar way; and he regarded organized religions, like morality, as works of the devil because they encouraged the individual to magnify his private importance. But he believed what he took to be the spiritual essence of Christianity with a depth of feeling and insight, and with an inexorable consistency, that distinguished him greatly among the half-hearted worldlings of his time.

Before turning to James's antinomianism let me first call attention to his insistence upon the divine immanence. James heaped scorn upon those theisms or deisms which separated God from men by all space and all time, or which taught (as he said of Carlyle) "that God worked one day out of seven and rested the remaining six" [quoted in Philosophical Remains]. God is the form which human life assumes in its perfect fulfilment, and man is the medium by which God finds self-expression. The "divine-natural humanity," which is James's central idea, is both God and man, God approached from below or man viewed from above.

. . . . All existence real and personal is thus hierarchically distributed, each successive from being a natural unit or marriage of two discordant forces, and becoming by its own subsequent spiritual variety the basis in its turn of a still higher unity. The lower forms in every case are what give subjective or constitutional identity (that is, body) to the higher form. The higher form again in its turn is what gives objective or creative individuality (that is, soul) to the lower forms. The mineral gives material existence, or body to the vegetable; but the vegetable gives spiritual being or soul to the mineral, by calling forth its uses to a higher unity. The vegetable gives material existence or body to the animal form, which latter again endows the vegetable with spiritual life or soul in calling forth its uses to a superior style of being. So the animal in like manner gives visible or bodily constitution to man, while man gives invisible or spiritual soul to the animal kingdom by evoking its various uses to his own higher development. And so also man in his turn gives visible form or bodily manifestation to God, while God again gives creative substance, soul, or unity to man in calling forth man's various subserviency to His own infinite and uncreated unity [in Substance and Shadow].

God, then, is the "higher unity" of humanity into which human individuals enter and in which they find their consummation. There is a genuine metamorphosis. "And so, indeed, of all unity," says our author [in "Faith and Science," North American Review (1865)], "it never means a mere mental aggregation of particulars, but the evolution of a distinctly higher form of life than the particulars themselves, taken together, supply."

In what respect, then, does this higher, spiritual, or divine form of life differ from that of the immediately lower level from which it evolves? Precisely what is the crucial point of the change? What is it that is transcended and left behind? Our author's answer is unmistakable and emphatic. That which is cast off as an outworn garment, a broken chrysalis, or useless scaffolding, is morality. At the moment when life becomes spiritual it not only ceases to be moral but must consciously negate morality, and recoil with loathing from that which hitherto it has struggled to attain. In the following characteristic passages James describes the revulsion of feeling which he himself experienced:

The more I strove to indue myself in actual righteousness, the wider gaped the jaws of hell within me; the fouler grew its fetid breath. A conviction of inward defilement so sheer took possession of me, that death seemed better than life. I soon found my conscience, once launched in this insane career, acquiring so infernal an edge, that I could no longer indulge myself in the most momentary deviation from an absurd and pedantic literal rectitude; could not, for example, bestow a sulky glance upon my wife, a cross word upon my child, or a petulant objurgation on my cook, without tumbling into an instant inward frenzy of alarm lest I should thereby have provoked God's personal malignity to me. There is indeed no way of avoiding spiritual results so belittling, but by ceasing to regard morality as a direct, and looking upon it as an inverse image of God s true life in us. If my moral consciousness constitute the true and eternal bond of intercourse between me and God; that is to say, if he attribute to me all the good and evil which I in my insane pride attribute to myself,—then it will be impossible for me to avoid all eternity either a most conceited and disgusting conviction of his personal complacency in me, or else a shuddering apprehension of his personal ill-will [quoted in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James].

.... Accordingly every man whose aspirations are elevated above the ground, every man who desires above all things to ally himself spiritually with the Divine spirit, finds his great controversy to lie with himself; with this moral temper of his own mind; finds the sole hindrance of his aspirations to lie in this ferocious pride of selfhood, which is indeed an every way indispensable soil for the future spiritual plant, but a soil nevertheless from which the plant is bound sedulously to grow away. Such a man perceives at once that his moral life is not the end of his being, but on the contrary a wholly subordinate means to that end, which is spiritual life or cultivated conformity to God, growing out of his unaffected acknowledgment of human unity: so that far from cherishing the pride which is instinctive to morality, pride of selfhood, pride of character, pride of differential righteousness, he daily unlearns that foolish conceit, and cultivates instead relations of the tenderest amity and equality with all other men [quoted in Substance and Shadow].

This passage not only expresses our author's view that morality is an "inverse image of God's true life in us" but indicates the ground of the indictment. Morality represents the individual man as an object of praise or blame, to himself or to fellow-man or to God. It imputes desert to a man in his own right, and must lead either to self-righteousness or to morbid despair according to the laxity or strictness of the judgment. Of these two evils the former is the worse, since a man is more likely to remain self-centered if he thinks well than if he thinks ill of himself. The moral sentiment is "the sentiment of what is due to one's self," and it is better to feel that nothing is due to one's self, for in that case one is more likely to leave off thinking of one's dues. The social as distinct from the moral sentiment is the sentiment of what is due to one's neighbor, and conscience, in the peculiar sense in which the author uses this term, is the limitation of the moral by the social sentiment; in other words, the rejection of self which springs from the acceptance of others. Therefore, the only good conscience is an evil conscience. "Conscience was always intended as a rebuke and never as an exhilaration to the private citizen." "Its efficacy is distinctly purgative, not nutritive."

What shall we say of this condemnation of the moral in the name of the religious consciousness? The answer is, I believe, that James has mistaken an accident of the moral life for its essence. A complete morality will pass beyond the sphere of self-development or self-perfection to social relations of justice and benevolence. James sees that as well as we do. That which he attacks under the name of morality is not selfishness, in the sense of a disregard of the rights or happiness of others. Everybody condemns that. What James condemns is a much more subtle and insidious thing. He condemns moral self-consciousness.

The most subtle and insidious case of it, which he therefore condemns most vigorously, is self-approbation, or the attitude of the man who, being just or benevolent, thinks well of himself for it. The most dangerous form of pride, the devil's most skilful maneuver for trapping unwary souls, is the pride of humility. It is like a quicksand in that the harder one tries to extricate one's self the more deeply one is bogged. But curiously enough James's own repudiation of morality illustrates the same predicament. We find him condemning his self-approbation and approving his self-condemnation. We find him, in other words, like the very moralists whom he denounces, occupied with himself, or with the state of his soul. The man who labors with himself in order to induce in himself a state of utter self-forgetfulness is likely to become intimately acquainted with himself; the man who goes abroad preaching the gospel of self-forgetfulness is likely to remind of themselves those who had never thought of themselves before. These paradoxes arise in all cases of self-knowledge, where the posture of the person known must reflect that of the person knowing; just as it is impossible that one should see one's self in a mirror without seeing one's self in the posture of a man looking at himself in a mirror. This difficulty limits and largely falsifies the results obtained in psychology by the method of introspection; and gives rise to the peculiar paradox, that whatever opinion one holds regarding one's self can scarcely be true in that one becomes a different person from the very fact of holding such an opinion.

What is the practical conclusion to which this difficulty drives us? That the best way to forget one's self, is to forget one's self, that is, remember somebody else. The best way to spread self-forgetfulness is not to exhort people to forget themselves but to interest them in their neighbors, or in some quite impersonal cause. This does not mean that self-forgetfulness is not a good thing, or that one has not aimed at it, but that one has devised an indirect way of achieving it. The man whose memory is balked, and who puts the problem aside in the hope that what he seeks will then spontaneously occur to him, does not abandon his quest but adopts a superior strategy—like the general who substitutes a feint or a flank-movement for a frontal attack. So the way to be righteous without being self-righteous is to adopt the right course, and then follow it, with one's eye on the goal. There is an initial selection of the cause, and it may be necessary from time to time, at a fork in the road, to take further counsel with one's self. But otherwise the thing to do is to run the course.

Now I said that James mistook an accident of morality for its essence, meaning that the essence of morality is right conduct, and that the accident is the fact that one must from time to time inquire "Am I or am I not right?" It is important that this inquiry should not be allowed, as it sometimes is, to defeat the very object for which it is instituted, as an army is paralyzed by perpetually holding councils of war. It is quite conceivable that after having judged correctly at the outset a man should continue throughout his life to be righteous without ever reflecting upon the fact. He might, for example, love his neighbor and his God, and never deem himself either charitable or pious. He would then be charitable and pious; he would possess these virtues in his own right as a private person; and he would be worthy of an approbation which happily he would never pronounce. He would be a self or a person with moral attributes; though he would be unconscious of himself, and unaware of his attributes.

Our author's failure to distinguish clearly between personality and self-consciousness, between righteousness and self-righteousness, leads him into the serious error of supposing that since the spiritual or religious life transcends the latter it must transcend the former. In the religious life, transported as we are by love of God and neighbor, we cease to be occupied with ourselves; and this he interprets as meaning that we cease to be ourselves. Thus in an unpublished letter [to Mrs. Francis G. Shaw (1860)] he says:

Now Swedenborg tells us that the word cannot be understood spiritually, save in so far as we put away from our minds three ideas, those of space, time and person, i.e., put away all that separates one man from another, and view henceforth all men as one in the Divine sight. . . . .

In another passage [quoted in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James] our author says:

Just in proportion, accordingly, as a man's spiritual knowledge improves, will his contempt for himself, as an unmixed spiritual tramp and irredeemable vagabond, increase and abound. We might very well bear with an uninstructed or inexperienced child, who, shut up to the companionship of its doll, constructed all of sawdust and prunella, looks upon it as spiritually alive; but one has no patience with an experienced, instructed man or churchman, who undergoes precisely the same hallucination with regard to his own worthless doll of a selfhood. . . .

And yet "this worthless doll of a selfhood" is somehow a necessary stage of spiritual development!

Now it is intelligible that the private selfhood of men should be a necessary condition of the existence of a unified humanity, if that selfhood is an ingredient of a unified humanity. But if what one means by the unified humanity is precisely that condition which is reached after private selfhood has been eliminated, then it is indeed hard to see how the way for this achievement has been paved by generating the very element which is to be eliminated. The preliminary step toward the divine life, we are told, is to make ourselves persons; the second step is to unmake ourselves as persons. It would seem to follow, then, that after the second step we are just where we would have been if we had never taken the preliminary step. Why, therefore, take the preliminary step? It is a hard saying that the way to pass from an intermediate point to one's destination is to return to the point of departure. Tell men that personal morality is a step toward something better that lies beyond—and they will then seek to achieve morality; though they will not arrest their movement there, but will fix their eyes on a more distant goal and set their pace for the longer course. But tell them that morality is the inverse of the supreme good, that it lies in the opposite direction, and they will very naturally and properly save themselves the trouble of passing that way. It will be difficult to persuade men that a false start is the best beginning, or that they should first move into a cul de sac from which they must back out before they can resume their journey.

Our author suggests that we must learn by the method of trial and error:

We require just such a fixed and fallacious cosmical scheme as this in order to give us cumulative experience, or to enable us to learn by failure and suffering what spiritual dolts we invariably are in our individual right, and so be led at last to seek God's salvation by studiously allying ourselves in unity with our kind [quoted in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James].

This might be reasonable if we supposed that men were left to grope their own way at random in the dark, though even then one would hesitate to say that a wrong guess is the necessary preliminary to a right guess. But we are asked to believe that under the wise and benevolent providence of God the only way by which a man can discover that he is nothing is by first affirming and then renouncing the belief that he is everything. Outside of Alice through the Looking Glass or the Hegelian philosophy this savors strongly of nonsense.

But there is a further difficulty which is fatal to such a view, and, I venture to think, to most forms of religious mysticism. Human life upon its highest level, in which, as our author phrases it, each man "cultivates. . . . relations of the tenderest amity and equality with all other men," is what one means by the divine life. In participating in the perfected human life the individual achieves union with God. But then, owing to excess of piety, one denies those very human individuals whose relations generate and compose God—so that God proves in the end to be composed of nothing. God is everything and men in their severalty, or speaking distributively, are nothing; but God is composed of men, and therefore everything is composed of nothing.

This difficulty is as gratuitous as it is fatal. In order that men living in relations of tenderest amity and equality, united by bonds of love, shall thereby generate a new life, a divine-human life, in which their aloofness and mutual disregard shall be transcended, it is not in the least necessary to suppose that they cease to be a plurality of persons, and are dissolved like drops in a stream. Indeed such a life is unthinkable unless there be persons to love and persons to be loved—unless these be other than one another and lead in some measure lives of their own. Multiply the connecting relations as you will and you only increase the necessity of the terms which shall sustain these relations. Stress the variety and subtlety of the bonds by which a man shall be united to his fellows, and you magnify the rôle of the personalities which shall support and reconcile these bonds. The divine life lies in some sense beyond the merely personal life, but it is an achievement of personality, built not only upon persons but out of persons.

The indictment of morality in the name of religion is not complete. There are two further charges which remain. The first of these I shall dismiss briefly, since the issue is similar to that which has just been discussed. Morality, it is argued, assumes the form of rules which are harshly imposed and abjectly obeyed, whereas the spiritual life is one of spontaneity and freedom. The lawbreaker, therefore, the man who defies convention, manifests the higher life, if not in what he does, then at any rate in the way he does it.

The liar, the thief, the adulterer, the murderer, no doubt utterly perverts the divine life which is latent in every human form; he degrades and defiles self-love, in lifting it out of that free subordination which it will evince to brotherly love in the Divine-natural man: but he nevertheless does all this in the way of a mute, unconscious protest against an overwhelming social tyranny, which would otherwise crush out the distinctive life of man under the machinery of government and caste [quoted in The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James].

This charge against morality, like the first, is an echo of the author's reaction against Calvinism. The answer to the charge is that the enforcement of moral rules is (like moral self-judgment) accidental; the important thing is their observance. That lying, theft, adultery, and murder should be proscribed is an unfortunate necessity which has nothing to do with their viciousness. They are vicious because they are inhumane, because they contradict that regard for the general good which is the essence of right conduct. If one avoided them from love of mankind rather than from fear of penalties, that would be better, because then one's heart would be right and not merely one's overt behavior. But because a spontaneous righteousness is better than a legal righteousness it does not follow that whatever is spontaneous is therefore better than whatever is legal. James seems to share the view not uncommon in his age, and widespread in the preceding century, that man will fall into ways of right conduct by virtue of a sort of naïveté or childlike innocence. But there is a spontaneity below as well as above the level of legality, and he who resists the law usually sinks to the first instead of rising to the second. The man who objects to a rule against adultery, whether enforced by the state or by public opinion, is usually a man who wishes to commit adultery, rather than a man who wishes to be allowed to avoid adultery spontaneously. If he is himself inwardly disposed to fidelity, the chances are that he will not notice the rule since his action will never bring him into collision with it. In short, if the religious life is to be conceived as transcending the constraint of law, it must be conceived as a life in which the law, being freely chosen and instinctively observed, is in no need of being enforced. This is the only justifiable interpretation of "Christian liberty." It is not that the Christian because he is regenerate may therefore do as he pleases, but that he will therefore please to do what is right. The religious life, in short, is not above the content or substance of the law, but is above the human frailty or wilfulness which requires its being imposed as a forced obligation.

The third and most serious charge contained in this antinomian indictment of morality is the claim that the moral distinction between good and evil is not an absolute or final but only a provisional distinction. It is true that this view mitigates the difficulties which arise from the first charge, but only at the cost of difficulties which are even graver. Morality takes its distinctions seriously, praises moral good such as justice and benevolence, and denounces moral evil such as lying, theft, murder, and adultery. Conscience praises self-forgetfulness and brotherly love; and denounces pride and selfhood. In the antinomian view the higher religious insight tells us that the opposing terms of these antitheses, the good and the evil of these lower levels, are both good, as being proper parts of the spiritual or divine life. Let me quote further from the letter cited above:

. . . . For we being absolute creatures of God are without any substance in ourselves, and hence are what we are, laugh and cry, eat and drink, love and work, aspire and triumph, only by virtue of His infinite tenderness imparting, or as Swedenborg phrases it, communicating Himself to us, and permitting us if we please to put His love to the basest uses, in order that at last we may through sheer disgust of our own loathsome performances turn ourselves freely to Him and demand with humble hearts at last the guidance of His unerring laws. . . . For the power by which all this deviltry is enacted is literally God in use, and He never for a moment shrinks back but lets our whole play play itself out to its last gasp of naughtiness, in order that by our spontaneous reaction against such horrors we may finally swing into cordial sympathy with Him, and that eternally. He is really our life at all times, when we are going down to hell as much as when we are ascending to heaven: only in the former state He is humiliated, despised, trodden under our clownish feet, crucified by all our selfish and cruel lusts: and in the latter glorified, exalted above the heaven of heavens, by the heartiness of our spiritual graditude and adoration.

Now this is to be interpreted to mean that the divine or spiritual life itself embraces both heaven and hell. The crucifixion is not, as supposed in the traditional theology, a symbol of the painful necessity of reconciling human sin with divine justice. In that case the crucifixion would be contingent upon the regrettable fact that Eve succumbed to temptation in the Garden of Eden. For James the crucifixion symbolizes the universal and necessary principle that the perfect life is not the painless or sinless life but the life of suffering and of overcoming.

Let me cite from another letter to the same correspondent:

Life means individuality or character; and individuality or character can never be conferred, can never be communicated by one to another, but must be inwardly wrought out by the diligent and painful subjection of evil to good in the sphere of one's proper activity. If God made spiritual sacks merely, which he might fill out with his own breath to all eternity, why then of course evil might have been left out of the creatures' experience. But he abhors sacks, and loves only men, made in his own image of heart, head and hand, in whom accordingly he may dwell in himself, and find all his goodness of heart, and wisdom of head, and power of hand eternally reproduced. . . .

The spiritual or divine life is the human life on all its levels of baseness and exaltation, relished for what it is, as a struggle and an overcoming; relished for its high seasoning, its rich flavor, and its intoxicating effects. The new standard by which the old evil has taken on the aspect of good is an "aesthetic" as distinguished from a moral standard. It is on this issue that William James broke with his father. The philosophy of the father is that which the son calls "subjectivism," or "gnostical romanticism," according to which, as he says, "the final purpose of our creation seems .. . to be the greatest possible enrichment of an ethical consciousness, through the intensest play of contrasts and the evident diversity of characters. . .. Not the absence of vice, but vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat seems the ideal human state" [quoted in Will to Believe]. The avoidance of this view was the principal motive that drove the younger James to pluralism. His arguments are well known, and I will not elaborate them. Granting their premise their force is undeniable.

The premise is the validity of ordinary standards of morality. The practical effect of subjectivism or aestheticism is to condone moral evil. If the important thing be the richness of the experience rather than purity or honor, why should one not sin like David in order to repent like David? If the play's the thing, why should one not play the devil's part? If sin and suffering are necessary parts of the picture, why should we spoil the picture by eradicating them? There is no answer to these questions on the assumption of the aesthetic standard; they are fatal questions on the assumption of the moral standard; and they are unavoidable questions on the assumption that God is both all-embracing and all-perfect.

But there are objections to this view on its own grounds. The problem of evil cannot be escaped by any shifting of standards. All that can be achieved is to change its nature. Aesthetic good can embrace moral evil, but it cannot embrace aesthetic evil. Now it so happens that there are sins which are unrepented and sufferings which lead to no ultimate rejoicing. Furthermore, and this is the crux of the matter, if life's a play, the poor players are for the most part unaware of it. As William James has remarked [in Will to Believe], "it feels like a real fight." It is a curiously imperfect dramatic situation which all of the actors and most of the audience mistake for reality. Judged by the aesthetic standard itself, how could a world be more cursed than to be filled with sensitive beings on which its effect was totally lost, and in which the emotion enjoyed by God and his favored friends was at the expense of the pathetic eagerness and blind suffering of uninitiated multitudes?

Happily our author has the merit of inconsistency. Not only did he practice better than he preached, and remain faithful to that morality which he professed so to despise, but he preached better than he practiced. Freed from the antinomian errors which I have pointed out, the core of his doctrine is this. That human life perfected, moralized, and socialized, is one and the same with the divine life. That the force by which the moral life reaches its highest level, where it merits the name of divine, is the force of universal love. That a man moved by this passion can never feel that his task is done so long as any of humanity are left in pain and ignorance and sin. Finally, that love has a genuine transforming or regenerating effect in which the old divisive will is superseded; so that men in doing what they themselves most want, at the same time minister most fruitfully to the happiness of mankind.

But let us give our brave author the last word:

. . . . For the social sentiment, the sentiment of human society, human brotherhood, human equality, exhibits the two warring loves of the human bosom, self-love and neighborly love, interest and principle, pleasure and duty, in such perfect unison as that neither can possibly prompt anything contrary to the other, but both alike stand eternally pledged to the promotion of an entirely new spirit in man, a spirit of the widest fellowship of the freest and tenderest unity with every other man. This social development constitutes an absolutely new nature in man, a Divinely renewed heart and mind, which shall make all Divine ways easy to follow. . . [in Substance and Shadow].