The Spiritual in the Secular: Transcultural Encounters from Ibsen to Chinese Modern Drama

This article reinterprets modern realist drama as a site of secular spirituality, where aesthetic form sustains the sacred under conditions of modern secularity. Employing a phenomenological–theological framework, it integrates Charles Taylor’s account of the secular age, Mircea Eliade’s sacred–profane dialectic and hierophany, and René Girard’s anthropology of sacrifice. Through textual and performance-historical analysis of key works—Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and An Enemy of the People (1882)—together with Chinese modern drama shaped by Ibsenization, including Hu Shi’s translations, Lu Xun’s critiques, and Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm (1934), the article argues that realist theatre fulfils religious functions in secular culture: revelation as truth-telling, confession as critical self-disclosure, and renewal as ethical transformation. In early twentieth-century China, the encounter between Ibsen’s moral realism and indigenous moral traditions generated a distinctive spiritual humanism, in which theatre assumed ritual and didactic functions traditionally associated with religious practices.