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The Agony in the Garden: the visions of Evan Roberts and the 1904​-​5 welsh revival

by John Harvey

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The Agony in the Garden: the visions of Evan Roberts and the 1904-5 welsh revival 34:57

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During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Nonconformists in Wales expressed an almost prophetic instinct that a religious revival would soon sweep the country – one that would usher in a new era of spiritual prosperity, and the beginning of Christ’s millennial reign. Such fin de siecle optimism appeared well founded. In 1904, Wales experienced a period of unparalleled religious fervour, resulting in 100,000 converts in Wales alone.

The revival was accompanied by a variety of paranormal phenomena including visions of Christ and the devil, auditions of angelic voices, tongues speaking, and the appearance of strange lights in the sky. These phenomena connected the present and everyday reality with the biblical and heavenly worlds. The visions, in particular, were significant in that they became a feature both of the ministry of Evan Roberts, and of many believers’ spiritual consciousness. The visions, together with other perceptual manifestations, represented a tendency unprecedented in the history of Calvinist Nonconformity to visualize spiritual concepts -- providing Nonconformists with incorporeal emblems of religious experience.

While the revival occurred on the cusp of the twentieth century, the influences that shaped the character of its visualization had their origin in the previous hundred years, and earlier. The paper discusses: the significant role played by the visions and the other phenomena in the progress, propagation, and authentication of the revival; how they articulated invisible religious concepts such as temptation, conviction of sin, doubt, faith, and redemption, and the spiritual battle between good and evil (at the heart of the revival); the visions in the context Spiritualism and psychic photography; Robert’s physical and mental constitution; the visions’ iconological and iconographic roots in the visionary traditions of Christianity, nineteenth-century biblical pictures of supernatural persons in Protestant emblem books, the imagery of hymns and sermons, and narratives about spirits; and the visionaries’ mode of apprehension.

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released May 4, 2021

Personnel: John Harvey.

Context: Paper presented at 'Revival, Renewal and the Holy Spirit', Centre for the Advanced Study of Religion in Wales conference, University of Wales, Bangor, UK (June 23–26, 2004).

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John Harvey Aberystwyth, UK

I’m a practitioner and historian of sound art and visual art, and Emeritus Professor of Art at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, UK. My research field is the sonic and visual culture of religion. I explore the sonic articulations of the Christian religion by engaging visual, textual, and audible sources, theological and cultural ideas, and systemic and audiovisualogical processes. ... more

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