The Sacred Mind. William James and Modernist Epiphany

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. In the end, I propose that James’s conclusions can illuminate some important reasons for the popularity of epiphanies in modernist times. His interpretation of the religious impulse as ultimately 'love of life' resonates with the personal metaphysics of Tozzi, Mansfield, and some of their contemporaries, whilst his hypothesis that religious experiences come from a connection with the subconscious provided them with new inspiration to explore altered stated of consciousness in the form of non-divine illuminations. In this sense, modernist epiphanies can be regarded as the manifestation of a modern, Jamesian mysticism sitting at the intersection between the heights of the spirit and the depths of the subconscious.