The Spiritual Journals of Warren Felt Evans

Warren Felt Evans

Description

Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889) converted to Methodism while at Dartmouth College, became a minister, and spent his Methodist years as a spiritual seeker. His two extant journals, edited and annotated by Catherine L. Albanese, appear in print for the first time and reveal the inner journey of a leading American spiritual pilgrim at a critical period in his religious search. A voracious reader, he recorded accounts of intense religious experience in his journals. He moved from the Oberlin perfectionism he embraced early on, through the French quietism of Madame J. Guyon and Archbishop Fénelon, then into Swedenborgianism, spiritualism, and mind cure with distinct theosophical overtones. His carefully documented journey is suggestive of the similar journeys of the religious seekers who made their way into the burgeoning metaphysical movement at the end of the 19th century—and may shed light too on today's spirituality.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Warren Felt Evans
A Note to Readers
Journal I (1850-1857)
Journal II (1857-1865)
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Biography
• Spirituality
• History of religions
• Religion
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 19 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253022554
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE SPIRITUAL JOURNALS OF WARREN FELT EVANS
RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
THE SPIRITUAL JOURNALS of WARREN FELT EVANS
FROM METHODISM
to
MIND CURE

EDITED BY CATHERINE L. ALBANESE
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02243-1 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02255-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
For all the seekers I have known
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves .
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Come, come, whoever you are, Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving, Ours is no caravan of despair. Come, yet again come .
-Unitarian hymn, words adapted from Rumi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Warren Felt Evans
A Note to Readers
Journal I (1850-1857)
Journal II (1857-1865)
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS PROJECT began the day that I stumbled upon a mysterious ascription in the WorldCat online catalog concerning certain Journals of Warren Felt Evans, held at a place unknown. There was no further information, and I did not know how to track what might be related details. When I sought aid, an extraordinarily helpful librarian, Anne Barnhart, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, informed me that the journals existed in manuscript only and belonged to Dartmouth College. Thanks to the UCSB librarian, so began my own life of seeking-for an intriguing manuscript that I had a hunch would contain more than financial information or grocery lists. At Dartmouth, where I turned next, Jay Satter-field, Special Collections Librarian at the Rauner Library, was warm and welcoming. During the summer of 2010, I spent a week pouring over the journals at Rauner, and I was well-rewarded for my efforts. They proved to be a rich repository of Evans s reading, reflection, and transition from one spiritual home to the next, and I thought strongly that they needed to be published. Happily, Indiana University Press agreed. At this juncture, Librarian Satterfield made my life immeasurably easier-and my evolving project doable-by agreeing to photocopy the journals and send them to me.
As I transcribed Evans s flowing Victorian longhand, which was mostly clearly legible, Friend Google continually amazed me with abilities to track down a superabundance of obscure sources-sources that without Google s assistance would have remained unidentified, probably forever. Not to be outdone, my research assistant at the time, Philip R. Deslippe, found a host of bibliographical resources to assist me in coming to terms with Evans as I pondered the wealth in his journals. Later, Dee Mortensen of Indiana University Press and Stephen J. Stein, my co-editor in the Religion in North America series there, gave close readings to my initial drafts of the manuscript transcriptions as well as my draft introduction. The extra pairs of eyes helped enormously, as with their aid I went through my own manuscript again. Their patience with the slowness of my pace was also exemplary. And truly unforgettable at this point, James F. Lawrence, Dean of the Swedenborgian House of Studies at Pacific School of Religion in the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, read the introduction against his thorough immersion in Swedenborgian studies as well as general American religious history. His painstaking commentary and identification of relevant Swedenborgian resources-such as, especially, in the case of Horace Bushnell-proved to be true academic treasures. Finally, a generous research fund from the University of California, Santa Barbara, helped to support indexing and illustration costs, and Kay Banning was kind enough to prepare the index.
For all of this help, I remain exceedingly grateful. As authors and editors usually say, though, the results and interpretive tack I have taken remain my own-errors and all. Finally, I need to acknowledge my reigning feline triarchy-Abby, Sashi, and Felicity-who were thoroughly patient with me when I closed the door to my study to spend time alone with Warren Felt Evans.
THE SPIRITUAL JOURNALS OF WARREN FELT EVANS
Introduction: Warren Felt Evans
WARREN FELT EVANS is not exactly a household name in the twenty-first century. Yet in the late nineteenth century he was an idol and hero for an exuberant and flourishing American subculture. Evans was probably the single individual who most shaped the intellectual and practice-oriented direction of what became New Thought. In book after book, he churned out an evolving creed that incorporated mental healing and very much more. In so doing, Evans brought his initial ideas on the power of mind into touch with new ones from a liberal community of seekers, often disaffected with orthodox Christianity and turning, in combinative ways, toward Asian philosophies and religions as well as the mystical heritage of Europe.
But Evans did not simply absorb and reiterate the metaphysical ideas of others. With metaphysics his and their preferred term for forays into territory beyond the physical-territory in which mystical heritages and newly formed religious combinations blossomed in abundance-Evans was himself a religious creator and a quintessential spiritual seeker. A Methodist lay preacher from 1839 and ordained cleric from 1844, in the years between 1850 and 1865 he kept personal journals in which he reflected on his reading and thought it through in his own way. If Evans had journaled before this time, his manuscripts have not come to light. If he continued the practice after 1865-unlikely because of his escalating career as a healer and author-no manuscript records have been found.
I
In the journals Evans kept from 1850 to 1865, though, he often quoted from Wesleyan sources, especially hymn verses that he must have known by heart. In these journals, too, he recorded some details, however sketchy, of his life experience-riveting events that demanded inscription to support memory. So here he wrote of the death, in 1858, of his darling boy Osmon, not quite three years old, of congestion of the lungs. He wrote of visits and letters from his son Franklin, who had gone to fight in the Civil War, and then in 1863, the terrible news that Franklin had been severely wounded, with his right hand blown off and wounds in both legs, the right leg severely. By April 1864, the continuing narrative of religious change that Evans recorded in his journals became climactic. He inserted the letter he wrote to his presiding elder to send back his Methodist ordination credentials and withdraw from the church. A week later he registered the news that he and his wife had been baptized into the (Swedenborgian) Church of the New Jerusalem.
Founded after the death of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), the New Church, or Church of the New Jerusalem, grew from 1787 as an English movement based on biblical teachings and the writings of the Swedish seer and scientist. Swedenborg himself came from a Lutheran background, and indeed, by 1718 his father had been appointed a bishop in Skara. Thereafter, the family was ennobled, and the younger Swedenborg pursued and completed studies at Uppsala University even as he functioned as Extraordinary Assessor in the Royal College of Mines. With a fifty-year-long career in the Swedish House of Nobles, he became a Leonardo da Vinci of the north, celebrated for his technological and scientific knowledge and discoveries.
From 1743 and 1744, however, Swedenborg began to receive startling voice visions, leading him in trance to other worlds. Already a prolific writer on philosophical subjects, he had blended them with practical genius (he published titles, for example, such as Principles of Chemistry in 1720 and Philosophical and Mineralogical Works in three volumes from 1729 to 1734). Significantly, he also incorporated the Hermeticism available to him in Northern Europe until, in fact, he became a theologian. Work after work issued from his pen, most notably from 1747 to 1758 his twelve-volume Arcana Coelestia , which encompassed over seven thousand pages. It was here that he articulated in meticulous form his rendition of the ancient teaching of correspondence- as above, so below -and applied the doctrine in terms of the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus. Forms replicated other forms in language and in life throughout the vast universe. Worlds, for the mature Swedenborg, replicated other worlds. The idea of a profound correspondence running through all things would influence Warren Felt Evans strongly when he discovered Swedenborg, and it would become central to his Swedenborgian appropriation. So would Swedenborg s ideas of Jehovah Jesus and, consequently, the reality of a divine humanity. And so would Swedenborg s reading of the human world as held in existen