EPIPHANY

A sudden moment of illumination or revelation of truth, often inspired by a

seemingly simple or commonplace event. The term, originally from
Christian theology, was first popularized by the Irish fiction writer James
Joyce, who evoked the epiphanic realizations of his characters in his
collected short stories entitled Dubliners.
Epiphany means "a manifestation," or "showing forth," and by Christian
thinkers was used to signify a manifestation of God's presence within the
created world. In the early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
entitled Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944), James Joyce
adapted the term to secular experience, to signify a sudden sense of
radiance and revelation that one may feel while perceiving a commonplace
object. "By an epiphany Stephen meant a sudden spiritual manifestation."
"Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The
soul of the commonest object. . . seems to us radiant. The object achieves its
epiphany." Joyce's short stories and novels include a number of epiphanies;
a climactic one is the revelation that Stephen experiences at the sight of the
young girl wading on the shore of the sea in A Portrait of the Artist, chapter4.
The Feast of the Epiphany is celebrated in the Christian calendar on 6
January each year, and commemorates the revelation of Jesus divinity to
the Magi, the three wise men who had followed the star to Christs
birthplace. Derived from Greek, the word epiphany means a sudden
manifestation of deity. In Christian theology, it also means the
manifestation of a hidden message for the benefit of others, a message for
their salvation. Joyce gave the name epiphany to certain short sketches he
wrote between 1898 and 1904, and the idea of the epiphany was central to
much of his early published fiction.