The miracle of Maglavit (1935) and the Romanian psychology of religion.

This paper examines the debates around the "miracle of Maglavit", a shepherd's vision of God that took place in 1935 in Romania and attracted much contemporary popular and intellectual interest. The debates drew in arguments from doctors and theologians, who discussed the psychology of divine revelation and tried to elaborate the implications that such an event could have for the life of the Romanian nation. The paper places these debates in the context of wider contemporary discussions about psychology and religion. I argue that what Maglavit shows is that, in Romania at least, public debates about visionary experience in the 1930s were not only debates about its psychology, but of a psychology thoroughly imbricated with political concerns.

From ecstasy to divine somnambulism: Henri Delacroix's studies in the history and psychology of mysticism.

This article aims at placing Henri Delacroix's (1908) book on the psychology of mysticism in the context of debates in the psychology of religion in the earlier part of the 20th century. I argue that Delacroix's work was authored as part of a wider debate that Delacroix maintained with the American school of the psychology of religion regarding the role of emotions in religious experience. As I show, Delacroix sought to counter the primacy of the affective in religious experience, which the Americans maintained, and to introduce the notion of a developmental logic into the mystical life. In addition, Delacroix also tried to disengage mysticism from an exclusive focus on ecstasy, as well as to offer an account of the value of mysticism based on the existence of a specific mental state that underscored it. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).