Religious epiphanies across traditions and cultures

282 Pages·2017·2.14 MB·English

by  Kellenberger

religious
epiphanies
across traditions
and cultures
JAMES KELLENBERGER
Religious Epiphanies Across Traditions
and Cultures
James Kellenberger
Religious Epiphanies
Across Traditions
and Cultures
James Kellenberger
Department of Philosophy
California State University
Northridge, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-53263-9 ISBN 978-3-319-53264-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53264-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931535
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To Anne
Acknowledgements
Some of the material in Chaps. 17 and 19 appeared previously in
“Miracles,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 10, 1979,
and is used with kind permission from Springer. I am grateful to Joseph
Runzo-Inada and to Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewer for sev-
eral helpful suggestions. Special thanks are due to Grace Jackson and
April James for their editorial support, and to Sangeetha Kumaresan for
her support in the production of this book.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Part I Traditional Epiphanies
2 High-Relief Epiphanies 9
3 Quiet Epiphanies 21
4 Dialogue Epiphanies 29
5 Unconscious Epiphanies 43
6 Epiphanies of Unknowing 53
Part II Prophetic and Mystical Epiphanies
7 Prophetic Epiphanies 65
8 Mystical Epiphanies 81
ix
x Contents
Part III Epiphanic Encounters
9 Epiphanic and Near-Epiphanic Encounters 99
10 Possession 115
11 Sacred Mountains, Rivers, and Heavenly Bodies 127
12 Epiphanies Without God 139
Part IV Epiphanies in the Modern Period and Today
13 Epiphanic Prayer 149
14 Visions and Apparitions in the Modern Period 159
15 Contemporary Epiphanies 181
16 Epiphanic Nature 199
17 Miracles 211
Part V Issues
18 Concerns About False Apprehensions 223
19 Further Issues 237
20 The Nature of the Religious Reality Experienced
in Epiphanies 257
21 Conclusions 271
Bibliography 277
Index 285
1
Introduction
A religious epiphany is the appearance or manifestation of God, or a
god or goddess, or of the divine or religious reality as received in human
experience. Epiphanies occur in various religious traditions and some-
times alongside them. This book has two major goals. The first is to pre-
sent and consider the rich variety of religious epiphanies as they have
occurred in human experience. The second is to attend to and address
concerns and issues that arise in relation to religious epiphanies.
Not all epiphanies are religious epiphanies. As we will see, there are
many kinds of religious epiphanies, but there are also “epiphanies” that
make no reference to God or any religious manifestation. Before we
take up the main concerns of this book, these senses of the word should
be acknowledged. For instance, there are epiphanies in a popular sense,
recognized by contemporary dictionaries, that have no overt religious
significance. In these cases, an epiphany is a sudden realization, a “flash
of light,” that might be about anything from one’s true motive to the
way out of a difficult personal problem to how to fix the plumbing.
This popular sense of an epiphany, sharpened somewhat, may be
given a literary application. Morris Beja, who says “although ‘epiphany’
is a theological term, it is not necessarily a religious concept,” observes
© The Author(s) 2017 1
J. Kellenberger, Religious Epiphanies Across Traditions and Cultures,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53264-6_1
2 J. Kellenberger
that Stephen in James Joyce’s Stephen Hero uses “epiphany” to refer to
“sudden illuminations produced by apparently trivial, even seemingly
arbitrary, causes.” Beja goes on to identify a novelistic sense of epiph-
any as a sudden realization, given in an evanescent moment and aris-
ing from the commonplace or trivial, perhaps prepared for over time.
It has the character of a revelation that does not arise logically from
direct statements or evidence but from a trivial or insignificant incident.
Literary epiphanies in his sense, Beja says, are not rationally founded.
Thus, Oedipus’ realization or anagnorisis in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex
that he has killed his father and married his mother does not qualify
as an epiphany, for Oedipus comes to this understanding through
what he is told by a messenger and a shepherd toward the end of the
play. Beja draws examples of the use of epiphany in his sense from sev-
eral modern authors, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, and
William Faulkner. They range from the realization by a woman of “what
men felt” to the depths of human “mortal anguish,” and the true role
assigned to negroes in one’s culture, all occurring as sudden, unbid-
den insights.1 Though these realizations are more profound than may
be many epiphanies in the popular sense, they are clearly not religious
epiphanies.
Beja’s novelistic sense of epiphany, like the unvarnished popular
sense, is coherent and applicable, but it is not, as he acknowledges, the
same as the religious sense. Still, as with the popular sense, it shares
certain characteristics with the religious sense, for religious epiphanies
can also be sudden and revelatory, and are not derived as a rational
deduction. Having noted the popular sense and Beja’s literary sense,
we should nevertheless set them to one side, for our concern is exclu-
sively with religious epiphanies. There is, however, another noteworthy
sense of “epiphany” that contrasts with the religious one. In this sense,
an epiphany is a radical change in one’s life, affecting one’s personal-
ity, values, and direction—a metanoia in Max Weber’s sense—that can
be described nonreligiously. Bruce Grierson is a contemporary author
1Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1971),
pp. 13–18, 134–135, 173, and 206–207.