Abstract
The contemporary period has not been without epiphanic experiences and visions. In this chapter we will consider the contemporary period to be a period of the contemporaneously predominant society of the West and the world characterized by respect for science, technological innovations (ranging from gas lights and electricity to automobiles and computers), and increasing urbanization. The contemporary period of concern is that of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries within that social milieu, in which contemporary epiphanies in various forms, including visions and locutions, have occurred. In this chapter we consider epiphanic experiences that date from the nineteenth century and the twentieth century, drawing upon reports in two psychological studies, one of which is William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. We also consider a twenty-first century near-death experience that is epiphanic in nature. And, finally in this chapter, we turn from first-hand reports of epiphanic experiences to Flannery O’Connor’s literary evocation of a kind of epiphanic encounter that is hardly traditional but seems to be possible within contemporary society.
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Notes
- 1.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Modern Library, 1902), pp. 65–71.
- 2.
As we noted in Chap. 13, and as several of James’s examples illustrate, the sense of God’s presence may be felt in prayer. Unlike mystical experience, a feeling of God’s presence may be nearly commonplace in the experience of the religious. Evelyn Underhill observes: “Such a sense of the divine presence may go side by side with daily life and normal mental activities of its possessor; who is not necessarily an ecstatic or an abstracted visionary, remote from the work of the world.” Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (New York: Meridian Books, 1995), p. 243.
- 3.
William R. Miller and Janet C’de Baca, Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 2001), pp. 7–8, 18–20, and 36. Bruce Grierson, as we noted in the Introduction, uses “epiphany” with regard to a radical change in a person’s life, to refer to the change per se, with no reference to the divine. Grierson’s concern is very close to Miller and C’de Baca’s concern with quantum change, but Miller and C’de Baca, using “epiphany” to mean a religious epiphany (as we have), recognize the religious dimension of those quantum changes that they term epiphanies.
- 4.
Miller and C’de Baca use William James’ four criteria, augmented by five more offered by Walter Pahnke, to identify or characterize mystical experience, and they note an “overlap” between the characteristics of mystical experience and “quantum change experiences.” Quantum Change, pp. 72–74. Whether the experiences that inform mystical quantum changes would all compare with St. Teresa’s experiences we need not pursue. That they are epiphanic is, as we will see, very clear in some cases and arguably so in all the cases.
- 5.
Miller and C’de Baca, Quantum Change, pp. 93–94 and 99. This subject identifies himself as Don Eaton. Otherwise Miller and C’de Baca, like James, maintain the anonymity of their subjects.
- 6.
Miller and C’de Baca, Quantum Change, pp. 104–106.
- 7.
Ibid., pp. 110–113.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 114.
- 9.
Ibid., pp. 118–120.
- 10.
Ibid. Quantum Change, p. 91.
- 11.
Oliver Sacks, “Seeing God in the Third Millennium.” Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/seeing-god-in-the-third-millennium/266134.
- 12.
Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), p. 133.
- 13.
Alexander, Proof of Heaven, pp. 29–31 and 38–41.
- 14.
Ibid., pp. 45–48 and 68.
- 15.
Ibid., pp. 68–70.
- 16.
Ibid., pp. 48, 49, 76, 83, 156, and 161.
- 17.
Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium (New York: Riverside Books, 1996), pp. 133–134. We noted William James’s report of his experience under the influence of nitrous oxide in Chap. 8. During his experience James wrote or dictated pages of phrases, “which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcription were fused in the fire of infinite rationality.” In The Varieties of Religious Experience James says of the depth of truth that seems to be revealed under the influence of nitrous oxide that it
fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense.
The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 378. Bloom observes of his own experience under the influence of nitrous oxide: “I had a grand religious revelation, unveiling the secrets of Eternity, and exulted that I was returning to bear the good news, only to discover on coming up out of it that the truth had abandoned me utterly” (p. 134).
- 18.
Ibid., pp. 147–148.
- 19.
Wise Blood was originally published in 1952. It is reprinted in Three by Flannery O’Connor: Wise Blood, The Violent Bear Iit Away, Everything that Rises Must Converge (New York: Signet, 1983), pp. 1–120.
- 20.
Three by Flannery O’Connor, p. 2.
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Kellenberger, J. (2017). Contemporary Epiphanies. In: Religious Epiphanies Across Traditions and Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53264-6_15
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