PSI Annual Journal 2005-6

Abstract: A variety of recent attempts to define the concept of “religious naturalism” as a religio-philosophical perspective distinct from other forms of naturalism point to the early years of the 20th century as the era in which this concept finds its genesis, with scant acknowledgement of some historic “disguised precursors.” The argument presented here is that the 19th-century spiritualist movement in America is not disguised, but virtually unrecognized as a forerunner to contemporary religious naturalism. Furthermore, the history of internal schisms within the spiritualist movement in American, especially relating to the life and work of Andrew Jackson Davis, provides a historic example of the distinction drawn in recent articles between religious naturalism and natural religion.

INTRODUCTION
One has only to browse the pages of the Institute for Religion in the Age of Science’s periodical Zygon over the past five years to discover a renewed interest in the religio-philosophical perspective called “religious naturalism.” Central to this context is a discussion that has produced a variety of definitions that distinguish religious naturalism from other forms of naturalism.
“Religious naturalism is a belief in the natural order as understood by ongoing scientific investigation, supported by a strong and positive emotional feeling about the wonder and efficacy of that natural order.”

“It is therefore the goal of this book to present an accessible account of our scientific understanding of nature and then suggest ways that this account can call forth appealing and abiding religious responses—an approach that can be called religious naturalism.”

“Religious naturalism is that variety of naturalism that involves the belief that there are religious aspects of this world that can be appreciated within a naturalistic framework.”

What unifies these definitions is the confluence of mode, or the scientific enterprise, to the resulting human responses that often accompany the expansion of our understanding of the universe and how it works, or meaning Unlike other forms of naturalism, specifically natural religion—or as it has come to be known in our own contemporary context, Intelligent Design—that utilize science in an apologetic effort to justify particular religious perspectives or doctrines, the focus of religious naturalism is the process of discovery within the natural world that compels adherents to deeper levels of wonder and awe. The comparison here might best be understood as the difference between proof and progression of the religio-philosophical enterprise.

While some argue that the philosophical antecedents to modern conceptions of religious naturalism can be traced as far back as the 17th-century writings of Baruch Spinoza, the 19th-century works of Samuel Alexander, and the 20th-century works of George Santayana, John Dewy, and Ralph Burhoe, among a variety others, missing from this list is one major precursor to contemporary forms of religious naturalism, namely the work of 19th-century spiritualists such as Andrew Jackson Davis.

Simply defined, as a religious movement, spiritualism was “a varied set of beliefs and practices related to the conviction that the living and the dead could be in meaningful communication.” Given this definition and the propensity of most historians of the era to marginalize the spiritualist movement as a “symptom of restless, troubled society … [placing] it in the same category as Mormonism, Shakerism, Millerism, and Grahmism—antebellum movements which Alice Felt Tyler viewed as the unstable product of “Freedom’s Ferment,” its omission as an antecedent to religious naturalism is understandable. Tyler notes of this that

The period was one of restless ferment. An expanding West was beckoning the hungry and dissatisfied to an endless search for the pot of gold. Growing industrialization and urbanization in the East, new means of communication and transportation, new marvels of invention and science, and advances in mechanization of industry, all were dislocating influences of mounting importance. And increasing immigration was bringing into the country thousands of Europeans who were dissatisfied with the difficult condition of life in their native lands. Nor did religion place any restraint on the unrest; recurring revivals, emphasis on individual conversion and personal salvation, and the multiplicity of sects, all made religion responsive to the restlessness of the time rather than a calming influence upon it.

However, a thorough investigation of spiritualism and the “harmonial philosophy” upon which it was founded challenges its marginalized status, suggesting the movement was more a rationalist attempt to emancipate the human spirit and institutionalized religion from the fetters of orthodox supernaturalism and ecclesiology. As such it stands alongside other emancipatory movements of the age such as women’s suffrage and abolition.

In this light, a more nuanced definition of spiritualism can be found in the work of Catherine Albanese.

Spiritualism, in short, brought together a theology of materialism (one could talk easily to spirits because they were matter, albeit highly refined) with an empiricism that insisted on the tangibility of scientific “proof” of spirit visitation and a social program that would translate the experience of spiritualism into a new science of the perfect society. Here, the refinement of matter in its ordered harmonies would approximate the refinement of matter in the spiritual realm.

As a demonstration of democratic populism, the spiritualist movement not only sought to expand the cosmological constructs of the age to advance the potential benefits of humankind’s relationship with the divine transcendent, or “Divine mind,” as well as deceased forebears, it also sought to emancipate individual adherents, especially women, from the vestiges of an archaic cultural morass that absented many from religious leadership within the dominant religious communities of the era. Or, as Andrew Jackson Davis so aptly entreats:

Fear not, for Error is mortal and can not live, and Truth is immortal and can not die! Duty demands serious analysis and investigation of all conspicuous subjects. Truth may be found in the following Revelation: if so, Nature must be the standard by which all men may judge whether the truths therein contained are pure, practical, and elevating. No arbitrary or external standard shall be recognised [sic] as suitable to test the truth of what is herein presented, or the character of the truths which may be herein contained. The verdict of Nature, and not of men, is required. Inasmuch as all terrestrial creations are the spontaneous productions of the Divine mind, no truth is lessened by disbelief—no error is made true because the learned receive it as such. Nothing can be changed that is unchangeable, by man or his actions. Then press onward! Exercise your choicest gift, which is Reason — and fear no corruption from truth, though new; and expect no good from error, though long believed. I have been impressed to speak the things contained in the following pages, not because truth was before undiscovered, but in order to give it a new and attractive form, and a power to instruct, purify, and elevate the race.

Such lofty ideals would be tested, however, by the evolution of the spiritualist movement from its philosophical base in the work of Davis to the popularization of the movement and its almost maniacal focus on the phenomenon of spirit manifestations. Herein lies the nexus within the history of spiritualism between a philosophy akin to religious naturalism and the phenomenological praxis of the séance, as well as the personal history of Davis himself, that is most demonstrably natural religion within the framework of a burgeoning religious liberalism.

The Philosophy of Spiritualism: The Life and Work of Andrew Jackson Davis

Born in Blooming Grove, in Orange County, N.Y., on August 11, 1826, and reared in nearby Dutchess County, near Hyde Park and Poughkeepsie, Andrew Jackson Davis came from rather unusual circumstances. He was the last of six children. His father, Samuel was an alcoholic and worked at various times during young Davis’ life as a shoemaker, weaver, and farmhand. His mother, Elizabeth, a woman of strong religious faith, and superstition, was greatly admired by her son, but died when Davis was still a boy. In his autobiography, the Magic Staff, Davis also relates the sudden death of his brother, Sylvanius, which, according to his mother, was foreshadowed by the child’s encounter with a field sprite that appeared to him in the form of a dancing light on the edge of a field near the Davis home.

Of his mother, Davis relates,

My cherished mother was one of those very few persons who never doubt the incomprehensible. Her native faith was supported by irresistible evidence. She never saw the new moon over her left shoulder, never began anything on a Friday, never dreamt about crossing muddy water or combing her hair, and never saw certain shadows in the distance, but the circumstance was in due time succeeded by some sort of domestic trouble; between which affliction and the signs, the believing woman never could detect the slightest discrepancy. Although the husband would refuse all credence, with his ejaculatory and significant “Poh!” yet she never swerved a hair’s breadth in her own belief.

His father was skeptical of this mode of foreshadowing and denied that the experience had anything to do with Sylvanius’ death. Davis also defends his father’s nature, describing that though he habitually rejected any of his wife’s or another’s extraordinary explanations for natural events, and that he was intemperate much of the time, he “was neither profane, uncharitable, or irreligious … that he seemed ever ready to condemn penuriousness and dishonesty, as well as every expression of religious disbelief.”

Bound to a life of poverty, the family moved a variety of times during Davis’ youth, a reality that lent itself to malnutrition and a lack of long-term formal education. It is probable that such circumstances were the impetus for his interest in and sensitivity to the waves of innovation that were beginning to spread across the country.

As a youth, Davis’ introduction to organized religion began in the Presbyterian church, where he recounts being taught of a “God clothed in Calvinist attributes, also in His eternal decrees of election and reprobation and also in many other points of faith ascribing unamiable qualities to the Diety.” The experience excited Davis to begin to question religious leaders “about evidence supporting oppressive religious doctrines.” Often consigned to hell by those who admonished that he not question accepted biblical precepts, Davis went about exploring other Protestant churches, including the Methodists, but found that his craving for experiential insight into the ways of the divine went unsatisfied, until he was introduced to Universalism, probably through a friendship he developed with the Rev. Abner Rogers Bartlett in Poughkeepsie, of which he relates “by another year I was introduced to Universalism. Its teachings were more congenial with my better nature … [but] I couldn’t believe the Universalist system of theology as a whole.”

This quest for religious understanding also attracted him to the millennial expectation of the Millerites, and shortly thereafter he became entranced with the study of mesmerism. Prior to this, and well before puberty, Davis had already recorded psychic experiences, recalling, at the age of 12, for instance, the experience, while working on a farm shepherding that he “several times heard strange music and voices, and an intimation was given him that he should go to Poughkeepsie,” a command that he eventually convinced his father to heed when they relocated to Poughkeepsie a few months later.

Also, as if to foreshadow his medical career, Davis recounts the experience of a feverish illness during which his doctor had warned that he not be given cold water, that he heard a voice saying it was alright for him to “drink the sweet water of maple trees” whereupon he recovered after drinking the sap of trees ordered tapped by his mother on that occasion.

His career as a clairvoyant can be said to have formally begun in 1843, at the age of 17, when he volunteered to be a subject for hypnosis by William Livingston, a local tailor, even though days earlier Davis had been unable to be hypnotized by a traveling mesmerist. During this session in Livingston’s home, witnesses confirmed the experience of watching the young Davis diagnose and suggest a treatment for various illnesses of observers.

His reputation spread quickly, eventually reaching abroad, as spiritualism began to take hold of the European continent as well. He variously provided diagnoses and treatments while in trance, eventually requesting, at the behest of his spirit guides, a small fee for his service. These same guides also advised his eventual separation from William Livingston after what is probably the seminal turning point in Davis’ career.

In 1844, Davis reported, after a trance experience that carried him unconscious some 40 miles into the wilderness from his home, that he had been gifted with guidance from Swedish philosopher Emmanual Swedenborg and Greek philosopher-physician Galen. The experience with these two historic figures helped to clarify Davis’ vocation as a philosopher-physician.

The experience of Swedenborg hinged on an exegetical interpretation of a scroll handed to Davis that read, in part, “As they were, so they are; As they are, so they will be!” a message that helped to clarify the mystical vision of a flock of white sheep, which Davis interpreted to represent the evolution of humankind from a state of “universal confusion” to a state of unity and happiness, typifying the notion of “Peace on Earth.” In this Davis began to understand the transformative role of his harmonial philosophy.

Galen appears to Davis with the gift of a “magic staff” that he gives to the youth as a confirmation of Davis’ commission as a physician.

The rod was very straight and beautiful, having the appearance of highly-polished sliver. The parts were neatly adjusted one to another, and when arranged on the rod, formed a staff far exceeding in beauty any I had ever beheld. I saw that the pieces remained whole when disengaged from the rod. These he took in his hand, and unfolded them piece by piece, until they completely separated. The small pieces now assumed the diamond form, especially when closely observed.

“Here,” said he, “on these little blocks,” presenting them to me, “is the name of every disease with which the human race is afflicted. …

“In the inside of these blocks you will find a composition which, when applied, will palliate or remove the disease named upon its exterior. Of this compound make you a quantity suggested at the time you examine the diseased individual, and sufficiently strong to be well adapted.” He restored the pieces to their respective places, and quickly joined the cane, so that I could not see any possible means to disunite its parts again.

“Take this,” said he, handing the cane to me, “and preserve the charge devotionally; for it is a work of a lifetime, demanding equal attention, reflection and application.” I received the precious gift with ineffable delight and gratification.

The importance of this experience in the life of Davis cannot be understated. Returning from this adventure he reports “an entire change of programme [sic]” in which he voices frustration with those gathered to observe his talents, describing the observers as “plenty of large-eyed and open-mouthed seekers” searching for “signs and wonders.” Feeling penned-in by the gathered crowd, he reports, “My spirit, all unseen by the insensate crowd, was passing through an important crisis.” That crisis, as it turns out, was to turn away from the public demonstrations that had occupied most of his time with Livingston up to that point, and concentrate solely on “prescribing for the sick,” a turn that also caused a parting of the ways of operator and subject.

Shortly thereafter, however, Davis took up with Bridgeport physician S.S. Lyon, who left his medical practice to team up with Davis, touring New York and other areas giving clairvoyant medical diagnoses and lecturing. It is during this phase of Davis’ career that the Rev. William Fishbough enters the domain of the seer from Poughkeepsie.

Fishbough, a Universalist minister, whom Davis heard in Poughkeepsie as a visiting minister, was summoned after the seer intuited the need for a scribe to pen forthcoming insights while entranced, later to be published as The Principles of Nature.

Fishbough, astonished by Davis clairvoyant prowess, especially the seer’s description of an eighth planet in the solar system, which scientists later discovered in the orbit around Uranus, wrote to The Universalist Union in November 1846,

Who will shrink from any light on such a subject, or having such objects and tendencies, in a blind and bigoted affection for some paltry, despicable, sectarian tweedledom or tweedledee? And what folly so foolish as to close the mental eye to the almost demonstrative evidence which this very phenomenon presents, of future and immortal existence, the goal of the highest and holiest hopes of man? Reader, let truth prevail, though all hereditary and conventional forms of belief be sacrificed!

Equally astonishing to many was Davis’ foretelling of technological advancements such as the automobile, which he describes in his 1856 work, Penetralia, saying

Carriages will be moved by a strange and beautiful and simple admixture of aqueous and atmospheric gases so easily condensed, so simply ignited, and so imparted by a machine somewhat resembling our engines as to be entirely concealed and manageable between the forward wheels.

He also foretold air travel, describing aerial cars that “will move through the sky from country to country, and their beautiful influence will produce a universal brotherhood of acquaintance.”

Prophecy aside, Davis was perhaps best known for the “harmonial philosophy” that he outlined in The Principles of Nature (1847) and the five volumes of his The Great Harmonia (1850-1856). He describes within these works his own exalted mental state and its descendent connection to his physical nature, approximating the normal condition of all persons, and calling his trance state a “superior condition” because of the proximity of his essence in trance to that of the “great positive mind” that pervades all spheres of existence.

Centered on a strikingly Swedenborgian-style cosmology, Davis describes a well-ordered, hierarchical universe composed of seven concentric spheres. God occupies the center of this expanding cosmos, and is the source of life and the laws that govern it, acting as a “spiritual magnet … which attracts upward the human soul.” Extending influence through the surrounding spheres, this Divine Mind then reaches the outermost ring of the universe, wherein lies all corporeal life. Inhabiting each sphere are spirits at various stages of development, who are initially positioned in the sphere that corresponds most meaningfully to the wisdom each gained as an earthly being. Each sphere of spirits passes on to those below influences received from those above, with the more self-centered aim of moving closer to and eventually returning to “the source from which it sprang.”

Embodying a vision of spiritual progress, Davis’ cosmological construct exemplifies a core aspect of the “kinetic revolution” of 19th-century Western culture and thought in which the world was conceived more in developmental terms. In fact, the cosmos was conceived as a homocentric enterprise, created for the purposeful evolution of humankind from corporeal body back to a state of pure spirit and unity with the divine.

Furthermore, as Bret Carroll describes, Davis’ cosmology exemplified the burgeoning trend in American religious liberalism away from a single experience of conversion toward a more progressive notion of the evolution of the soul.

Echoing Horace Bushnell, a Congregationalist theologian whose Views of Christian Nurture (1847) emphasized gradual spiritual growth and urged parents to cultivate their children’s souls, Spiritualists virtually ignored the idea of conversion and understood spiritual life as an ongoing process of nurture and orderly development under the tutelage of parentlike spirits.

That the cosmos was hierarchically structured points to another Spiritualist adaptation of antebellum sensitivities toward potential chaos produced by an unstructured society. Again Carroll notes, “Spiritualists trying to imagine the structure of the spirit world hearkened back to the older notions of social order and hierarchy which had shaped the republican model of society and the notion of the ‘great chain of being’ that pervaded nineteenth-century Western biological discourse.”

Science played a significant role as the arbiter of Davis’ orderly universe. Spheres operated according to lawful principles, and truth was acquired through the wisdom gained from direct experience or scientific inquiry. Religion was not the enemy of science, and true spirituality embraced the scientific endeavor as a vehicle through which to expand humankind’s knowledge of the laws of nature and beauty.

Such knowledge included a denial of the supernatural positing that the universe was solely composed of matter, in ever-refining form, ultimately blurring the line between the physical and spiritual world. Unlike Transcendentalists who affirmed Swedenborg’s view that the realms of the sacred and profane were ultimately merged, Spiritualists like Davis argued that the spirit world was amenable to empirical study because it also found its genesis in matter itself, first as it related directly to the senses and then through ever-refining spheres.

That matter itself was the subject of refinement may be the core principle that lead Davis to move from the stage to the exam room and then back into the public arena in an ardent attempt to improve social conditions that were primary symptoms of humankind’s coarse spiritual state. In 1863, Davis formed the Children’s Progressive Lyceum, which he described as “an association for the mutual improvement of children of all ages, and both sexes, from two years to eighty.” Later in life he founded the Moral Police Fraternity as an agent of crime reduction, education, giving aid to the poor and helping the unemployed find work.

In order to spread the gospel of divine harmony, in 1847 Davis established the spiritualist newspaper the Univercoelum, “which emphasized the apocalyptic theme and predicted the imminence of a new and more perfect era.” The periodical was short-lived, however, with its final issue published two years later; its demise being the disappointment of its editors and staff, most former Universalist ministers, because of the weak response of the public and Davis’ refusal to take on the guise of a new messiah. Davis did, however, publish some 30 volumes by the time of his death in 1911.

Given the prolific manner in which Davis sought to communicate the positivist message of his harmonial philosophy, it seems strange that he would in the end disassociate himself from the growing spiritualist movement. It is to some of the rationale for this separation that we now turn.

The Phenomenology of Spiritualism

Most scholars trace the advent of modern spiritualism to the mysterious activity of the Fox sisters in 1847, four years after Davis began his career as a seer. Shortly after the family of John D. Fox moved into a new home in Hydesdale, N.Y., daughters Maggie and Kate attracted growing public attention for their ability to communicate with disembodied spirits through sounds that snapped in the air in answer to the girls’ and observers’ queries. Although they would later be proven a fraud, interest in the ability to communicate directly with those in the hereafter grew exponentially in the years after their more public performances, especially in New York City.

Reports varied concerning the number of adherents to Spiritualism in the late 19th century, ranging from just under a million to the 11 million estimate of one Catholic critic (which would have accounted for 1 in 3 Americans at the time). The movement’s popularity, energized by the popular spectacle of the séance, gave birth to the new profession of the medium, and as Braude has shown, opened the door for women to be recognized as especially adept at this form of religious leadership.

Davis, however, became increasingly uncomfortable with the growing focus on the outer “manifestations” of spiritualism, to the detriment of the inner truths contained in his harmonial philosophy. The interest here is understandable insofar as the séance provided a vehicle for comforting many who grieved the loss of loved ones and those who, observing communications from the deceased, confirmed various liberal doctrines pertaining to the afterlife, which was largely attractive to Universalists.

This discomfort reached its zenith in early 1863 with the establishment of the National Association of Spiritualists (1863-1869), an organization that David worked mightily to persuade not to become the mere instrument of mediums. In 1865, he helped to defeat a resolution at the second national convention of the association that would have excluded from membership “progressive reformers” and admitted only “Spiritualists.”

Davis’ frustration with the movement’s growing emphasis on the material nature of the cosmos found its final outlet in the publication of The Fountain with Jets of New Meaning, which condemned particular “errors or superstitions.”

He labeled as erroneous the belief that departed spirits were at all times subject to the summons and could be “called up” or made to appear in circles. In addition, he decried the notion that spirits ignored the laws of “solids and substances” and performed any action merely to “astonish the investigator.”

In 1878, Davis made a final move away from popular Spiritualism by founding, with a small group of sympathizers, the Harmonial Association of New York, which he addressed at its first gathering saying,

[They] have rejected the cornerstone. It is rejected day by day, whenever a spirit communication is substituted for the intuitive dictates of reason … every time public or private duty is neglected to listen to tests, or whenever an hour is spent fruitlessly in dark circles, which hour might have been devoted to some needful friend, or spent with a wise book. …

[M]odern spiritualists … to a large extent are far more inclined to spend their time in gathering in “circles” and “séances” singing “the Sweet Bye and Bye,” and “We are Waiting for the River,” with other like dreamy and languid songs, and to straining their ears to catch signals from, or perhaps their eyes to catch glimpses of, supposed dwellers in that far-off land than to engage in any earnest effort leading to either self-improvement or the elevation of human society about them.

As if to demonstrate the depth of his commitment to the philosophical and medicinal core of his philosophy, Davis entered the U.S. Medical School in the early 1880s, an institution that attracted a number of esoteric healers, largely at Davis’ invitation, and the fact that he had convinced the Harmonial Association to endow a chair at the school.

The school closed three years later as a result of a lawsuit filed by a number of prominent New York physicians who argued it had no basis in law. Davis was active in raising funds for the school’s defense, and in the end received his degree from the dissolved institution because the New York State Legislature allowed the confirmation of degrees in 1883.

His break with mainstream Spiritualism, as well as his divorce from Mary Fenn Davis, brought renewed criticism, and inclined Davis to retire to Boston, where he set up a medical practice that solely occupied him until shortly before his death in January 1910.

Davis’ legacy, as Robert Delp notes,

must be viewed against the background which encompasses the entire spectrum of American reform. He was in no sense merely the founder or philosopher of another sect but the uncompromising enemy of “sectarianism.” It is as a “man of his age”—a representative American—that Davis is best understood, for in an extraordinary prophetic manner he incorporated in Spiritualism … the host of reforms which “fermented” in the early decades of the nineteenth century and later became the substance of American democracy.

Conclusion
The distinction between the philosophical work of Andrew Jackson Davis and phenomenological dynamics of modern American spiritualism exemplifies the distinction between religious naturalism and natural religion in two significant ways.

If we accept Cavanaugh’s definition of religious naturalism as an enterprise founded upon a belief in natural order and supported by the scientific enterprise, then Davis’ harmonial philosophy must be granted the status of historic antecedent, for central to Davis’ philosophy was the role of human reason and the unity of universal matter governed by the laws of nature.

Second, as evidenced by the evolution of modern spiritualism and its focus on the phenomena of spirit manifestation, we see at play here (albeit through the lens of 19th-century cultural turmoil and transformation) an attempt to verify the existence of an afterlife that corresponded to material existence down to the last mansion in heaven. The fact that the séance became a popular litmus test for verifying the accepted religious belief in an afterlife, especially as many Universalists conceived it, suggests that it exemplifies natural religion, which as we have stated before is an enterprise that uses science to justify particular religious doctrine.

Although one may argue as to the legitimate use of the word science in a modern context when referring to 19th-century Spiritualism, it is clear that the science of the day, empirically based, lent itself to the philosophical unification of the physical and spiritual world. It is interesting to note that this enterprise continues even today, as can be attested by the continuing work of the Institute for Religion in an Age of Science and other modern institutions.

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 2005-6