AWAKENING (Protestant [English: Revival]). - This name designates in Protestantism collective religious movements often followed by extraordinary psychic phenomena that bring about numerous conversions. It initially provoked mass conversions, under the action of Methodism and, later, through imitation or even through the direct influence of Methodism itself, also among other Protestant denominations (Lutherans, Calvinists, Baptists, etc.).
I. MANIFESTATIONS
The first manifestation of Jan. 1, 1739 is narrated by John Wesley: "The Messrs. Hall, Kinchin, Whitefield, Hutchins and my brother Charles took part in our 'love feast' at Fetter-Lane with about seventy others of our number. Toward three in the morning, while we persevered in intense prayer, the power of God descended mightily upon us, so that many began to cry out, no longer able to contain their joy, while others fell face down on the ground. When we had somewhat recovered from the fright and the stupor that had seized us in the presence of His Majesty, we began to sing with one voice: we praise you, O God, and acknowledge that you are the Lord" (Journal, cit. in bibl., II, pp. 121-25).
The words of the text "love feast" indicate the origin of the Methodist r. Wesley had taken the idea of feasts of this kind from the Moravian Brethren; immediately sensing the danger of such manifestations, he did not want his followers to be considered "enthusiasts" or "illuminati," whom the Anglican Church treated with severity; moreover, there was the risk of having preaching forbidden, and this concern shows through in his Journal (II, p. 130).
The Methodists have always attributed great importance to the r. as a "testimony" of true "regeneration." When Methodism spread to North America, the Baptists too adopted its procedures and obtained the same results. There the r. took on a new form, that of the camp-meeting. The adherents gathered in a camp to listen to sermons; the breath of the spirit manifested itself through sacred dances: "Many visitors, says a witness, fall ill and die in the camp itself. Amid the anguish of the struggle against sin and the fear of death, all the passions seem to be unleashed" (V. Dixon, L'Anatome nouvelle, part 2, ch. 14). In these camps or in the churches the r. reached the violence of a veritable spiritual storm. Sometimes it spread among the entire population of a district, and numerous cases of madness and suicide occurred (cf. C. Jannet, Les Etats-Unis contemporains, Paris 1876, pp. 354-58).
The Methodists, however, had had predecessors in their r.: the Camisard "prophets" of the Cévennes with analogous manifestations, and the Moravian Brethren who had given the example of them to Wesley himself. Similar procedures had also occurred among the Quakers; the Baptists imitated them, especially in America. In Lutheranism there were the conventicles of Pietism (v.); cases of "r." are also cited in the Reformed (Calvinist) Church, both in Switzerland and in France, though with manifestations far more modest than in the United States, where the camp-meetings represented the paroxysm of the "revival" type.
In Geneva, where the Calvinist confession had fallen, at the beginning of the 19th century, into a kind of faded Arianism, there was an r. under the influence of Robert Haldane (1764-1842), who in 1816, in Geneva, exercised a profound influence over a certain number of young Calvinists, who provoked, not without many conflicts among themselves, various "r." movements first in Switzerland and then in France. Among these young men are remembered: E. Empaytaz (1790-1833), in whom one sometimes notes the influence, prior to that of Haldane, of the famous Madame de Krudener, confidante of Tsar Alexander I; Henry Pyt (1796-1835), founder of a dissident Calvinist church; Francis Samuel Gaussen (1790-1863); Francis Auguste Gonthier (1773-1834), who was readily compared by Protestants to Fénelon; Caesar Malan (1787-1864), beloved disciple of Robert Haldane, of individualist tendencies; Henry Merle d'Aubigné (1794-1872), friend of Gaussen, a prolific and passionate writer, popular historian of the "Reformation," but not very objective. In France one can name, in the same period, Bost, Naff, Cook, Roussel and above all Monod (1802-56), renowned pastor in Naples (where he personally experienced the r.), then in Lyons, where he was excommunicated by the Consistory and founded an evangelical church (1833). He was then professor in the Protestant Faculty of Montauban, and finally head of the orthodox Calvinists of Paris against the liberal minority.
II. THEOLOGICAL MEANING
It was especially among Methodism that an attempt was made to give a truly theological importance to the phenomenon of the r. It seems, however, that something of Methodist doctrine is to be found, in attenuated forms, among other Protestant denominations. Those who attended the "conventicles" of piety considered themselves Christians different from the others. It emerges from Wesley's diary that he introduced among the Methodists the distinction between the baptized and the regenerate. For Wesley, the great event of the Christian life is the r. He calls it, with Johannine terminology (Jn 3:8), "the new birth." In all the other Christian churches, "the new birth" was attributed to Baptism; Wesley's originality lay in having introduced another element besides the justification conferred in Baptism (Works, V, p. 212). Ordinarily, moreover, when Baptism is conferred in infancy, the r. occurs only in adulthood or at most in adolescence. It confers on the "regenerated" soul a new sense, the sense of the divine; it grants the faculty of feeling God. Before this great change takes place, however much man exists through the work of God, he does not for that reason experience God; he does not feel His presence, he does not have the intimate awareness of His presence, he does not experience this divine breath of life (cf. Works, V, p. 223 ff.).
Wesley regarded the phenomena of the r. as a certain proof, a "testimony," of regeneration. Here precisely Methodist mysticism differs profoundly from Catholic mysticism, because Wesley gives an enormous importance to these "physical" manifestations, and when they occurred he hastened to invite all his hearers to pray for those who were "touched by Grace." Asking himself: "Can this sudden, instantaneous change be easily distinguished from an illusion or from an imagination?", he answered: "Certainly, with the same ease with which light is distinguished from darkness; such a change brings with it a peace that surpasses all understanding; an indescribable joy, full of glory, the love of God and of all humanity fills the heart" (Works, V, p. 68).
Bibliography8 works
Leone Cristiani