Abstract
This chapter examines Woolf’s conception of what Pericles Lewis terms a ‘secular sacred’. Rather than entailing a disavowal of, or breach with, the everyday, material realm, Woolf’s experience of the sacred has its ground in ordinary things and daily experience. Such revelations lead to her sense of the sufficiency of this world and this life—that ‘the thing is in itself enough’. Sim’s analysis draws on examples from Woolf’s diaries, essays and memoir.
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Notes
- 1.
On the Romantics’ ‘natural supernaturalism’, see Abrams (1971, ch. 6).
- 2.
Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was an agnostic and her mother, Julia Stephen, was a lapsed Christian; see Woolf’s memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1985, 90).
- 3.
One of the first studies on this topic was Morris Beja’s Epiphany in the Modern Novel (1971).
- 4.
Lewis proposes that while Romantics proposed a ‘natural supernaturalism’ modernists saw such power to reside in the social; ‘Theirs was a social supernaturalism’ (2010, 4). Indeed, the mystery of human relationships and sacred experiences that have their ground in social communion certainly find their expression in Woolf’s novels, as critics such as Kristina K. Groover have demonstrated (2014).
- 5.
This is a view echoed by many other modernist critics, for example, Douglas Mao: ‘[A] baseline assumption of a secular point of view (among the educated) coexisted with lively memories of an age when religious piety was at least a putative form’ (1998, 17).
- 6.
- 7.
Her well-known discussion in her unfinished memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, of ‘moments of being’ and her philosophy of a ‘pattern’ is perhaps the closest that Woolf comes to articulating her personal philosophy (1985, 71–3). But these accounts are allusive and open-ended and lend themselves to a range of philosophical interpretations.
- 8.
Woolf’s reading in the philosophical tradition was eclectic and extensive, ranging from Greek philosophy (particularly Plato) to British Empiricism (David Hume, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore), British and German Idealism (Bishop Berkley) and the mystical writings of her Quaker aunt, Caroline Emilia Stephen. For a discussion of some of these intellectual backgrounds, see Banfield (2000), Dalgarno (2001), Ingman (2010), McNeillie (2000), Sim (2010) and Marcus (1983).
- 9.
As Mark Hussey argues, ‘The Moorean universe, endorsed by such as [Bertrand] Russell and [Maynard] Keynes, is continually questioned by [Woolf’s] novels’ (1986, 99).
- 10.
This antipathy is clearly expressed in Woolf’s letter to her sister Vanessa Bell on 11 February 1928, in which she despairs at T. S. Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927 (1975–1980, 457–58). For one such analysis that claims Mrs Dalloway remains ‘open at some level to Christian beliefs and values’, see Griesinger (2015, 438).
- 11.
On Taylor’s account, Jaspers theorized that an ‘Axial revolution’ occurred between the fifth century BC and the start of the Common Era in which many civilizations around the globe re-imagined the locus of the sacred (2007, 146–58). As Gordon explains: ‘Whereas the sacred was previously understood as a phenomenon that attached to entities or persons or places within the world, the Axial revolution introduced a metaphysical and normative rupture between the profane sphere of everyday existence and the higher realm beyond the world, a transcendent realm toward which human beings now directed their moral striving and their spiritual devotion’ (2011, 128). Gordon’s article questions if the split between the sacred and the immanent was as absolute and irreversible in the ‘post-Axial’ age as Taylor’s study assumes.
- 12.
Lazenby suggests that Woolf’s vision and theological temper are horizontal or ‘latitudinal’ rather than vertical (i.e. it is not a theology of ascension from the immanent to the divine): ‘Woolf offers to theology a latitudinal appreciation of life in its brokenness, of life lived in “landscape-view”, as often appearing out of juncture with the possibility of resolution and unity offered by transcendent point (or arc) of reference’ (2014, 3).
- 13.
This coincides with Woolf’s comments in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ that some ‘moments of being’ were accompanied by the erasure of the ‘I’, in the sense of the egoistic ‘I’; ‘I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture’ (1985, 67).
- 14.
I discuss the embodied dimension of Woolf’s moments of being in Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience (2010, 141–55).
- 15.
For an account of Woolf’s illness, its symptoms and methods of treatment, see Lee (1999, ch. 10).
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Sim, L. (2019). “The thing is in itself enough”: Virginia Woolf’s Sacred Everyday. In: Groover, K. (eds) Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32568-8_4
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