The Sacred Mind
MHRA working papers in the humanities December 20, 2018 DOI: 10.59860/wph.a056ddb (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that William James's description of religious experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience closely parallels the accepted definition of literary epiphany, and suggests that James's work may have influenced how modernists such as Katherine Mansfield and Federigo Tozzi conceived and portrayed ecstatic moments. Proposes that James's conclusions illuminate reasons for the popularity of epiphanies in modernist times. |
Abstract
The modernist age in Europe (1890s-1930s) is often regarded as a time of spiritual crisis, yet at the outset of the twentieth century religious sentiment enjoyed a renewed attention fostered by contemporary science. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901–02) proposed a study of religious feeling in a modern psychological perspective that became widely known in England and beyond. This paper considers the substantial affinities between James’s description of religious experiences and the critically accepted definition of literary epiphany, suggesting that his work might have inspired the way in which some modernists across Europe conceived and portrayed their ecstatic moments. Two case studies, from the Anglophone author Katherine Mansfield and the Italian Federigo Tozzi, are considered in close reading. Finally, a reflection is proposed about how James’s conclusions can illuminate some important reasons for the popularity of epiphanies in modernist times. Readers who are familiar with the concept of literary epiphany are very likely to have encountered the words of James Joyce: ‘by an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture, or in a memorable phase of the mind itself ’.1 Joyce’s formula is the most popular definition, but this type of illumination has been independently noticed by other authors before and after him. One of the reasons why the Joycean definition was so successful is that it foregrounds the physiognomic affinity between this type of insight and a deeply rooted aspect of the human psyche: the religious sentiment. Epiphanic moments are sudden insights, triggered a-logically by commonplace occurrences, which arouse in the subject a sense of truth, often accompanied by the impression of transcending time and space, and by a temporary selfoblivion. Their literary lineage within Western culture is usually traced back to classical antiquity, on the one hand, and Christian theology on the other, and their evolution is understood as a progressive abandonment of supernatural 1 James Joyce, Stephen Hero. Part of the First Draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by Theodore Spencer (London: Cape, 1960), p. 216.