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

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

Modernity has not eliminated the sacred so much as displaced it, a transformation that becomes especially legible in realist drama’s reconfiguration of religious meanings into immanent ethical experience. The decline of traditional religion did not erase the sacred; it dispersed it into new forms of expression—literature, philosophy, theatre, and the moral imagination itself (Taylor 2007). Among the modern arts, realist drama occupies a distinctive position: it translates metaphysical longing into ethical inquiry and transforms the stage into a space where the human search for truth supplants divine revelation. The moral conflicts enacted in realist theatre illuminate the ways in which modern humanity continues to seek redemption, not beyond the world but within it1.

In this sense, realist drama functions as a representational and performative medium that both registers disenchantment and stages forms of ethical recognition through which the sacred is rearticulated within secular experience. It reflects the disenchanted condition of modern life while offering a renewed sense of spiritual coherence (Lukács 1971). The stage becomes a site of ethical awakening, where suffering acquires meaning and conscience is dramatized as the last refuge of belief2. The following sections trace how modern realism reconfigures religious meaning into immanent ethical experience, shifting from revelation to recognition across its aesthetic forms, theoretical vocabularies, and transcultural histories.

This article argues that realism functions as a secular medium of sacralization, translating theological forms into publicly staged experiences of moral responsibility. Bringing Taylor, Eliade, and Girard into a single phenomenological–theological frame, realism is treated as a set of dramaturgical procedures—disclosure, self-reckoning, conflict over responsibility, and the testing of communal bonds—through which “religious functions” (revelation, confession, renewal) are performed under secular conditions. These procedures are first demonstrated in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People, then traced in their rearticulation through Chinese Ibsenization (Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Cao Yu), where they are renegotiated within local moral vocabularies and social reform debates. On this basis, a transcultural account of realism is proposed in which what travels is not doctrine but a transferable ethical-ritual form that makes moral stakes experientially compelling across different publics.

1.1. Reconfiguring the Sacred in Modern Realism

In the disenchanted landscape of modernity, the decline of organized religion has not extinguished humanity’s longing for transcendence. That desire, once oriented toward divine revelation, has migrated into the aesthetic and ethical domains of culture. Modernity continues to seek modes of meaning capable of sustaining spiritual life without theological foundations. Among these, realist drama—with its devotion to moral complexity and its unflinching portrayal of human struggle—emerges as a privileged site where spirituality endures without dogma. This displacement of transcendence finds support in Mircea Eliade’s phenomenology of religion, which shows that modernity’s desacralization does not abolish the sacred but recontextualizes it within human creativity. His reflections on “sacred time” and “cosmic order” reveal that the sacred now manifests in new cultural forms—art, theatre, and aesthetic experience—that have become integral to modern spiritual life (Eliade 1959, pp. 116–18). The realist stage transforms everyday experience into a site of moral encounter. Within this aesthetic space, ethical conflict, guilt, confession, and renewal assume the structure of ritualized experience, functioning as the secular equivalents of liturgy and prayer. Theatre thus becomes a sanctuary of immanence, where silence evokes reverence and dialogue becomes the voice of conscience. In this performative setting, the sacred is not abolished but translated into the ethical drama of human life. As Girard’s anthropology of sacrifice suggests, the sacred is not abolished but continually displaced into the symbolic and ethical fabric of human life (Girard 1977).

Such a transformation redefines the religious function of art within secular modernity. Realist drama does not communicate doctrine; rather, it stages ethical situations in which truth-telling, culpability, and self-reckoning become publicly legible. In this sense, theatre does not replace religious ritual; it offers an alternative medium through which experiences of confession and renewal can be rehearsed as ethical practices. The realist stage thus becomes a space where questions of value, responsibility, and moral meaning are intensified through performance, dialogue, and the audience’s reflective judgment.

1.2. Reconfiguring Faith Through Moral Realism

Realist theatre reconfigures the sacred by translating theological structures into moral forms. Its commitment to truth and integrity performs a spiritual role once reserved for religious ritual3 (De Botton 2012). This movement from divine revelation to ethical recognition articulates a post-theological form of spirituality—an immanent theology grounded in moral responsibility.

This transformation can be further clarified through the philosophical insights of Charles Taylor, Mircea Eliade, and René Girard. In Taylor’s account of the secular age, modernity entails not the loss but the relocation of the sacred within human experience—the discovery of “fullness” in the texture of ordinary life. The sacred no longer stands outside the world; it becomes manifest in moments of authenticity, compassion, and ethical attunement. Eliade’s distinction between the sacred and the profane deepens this perspective by revealing that secular culture does not eliminate the sacred but retains its ritual structures of meaning. Each aesthetic act that unveils truth or restores moral order thereby performs a gesture of sacralization within the everyday world4.

Girard’s theory of mimetic desire introduces a deeper anthropological dimension, revealing how human culture is structured by imitation, rivalry, and the ritual transformation of violence into order. Realist drama, by staging moral conflict and reconciliation, re-enacts this sacrificial logic in secular form (Girard 1991). The conflicts of domestic and social life replace mythic battles, yet the logic of redemption endures. Through the protagonist’s suffering, the audience’s empathy, and the restoration of order, realist drama re-enacts a moral ritual that echoes ancient structures of sacrifice and renewal.

1.3. Reconfiguring Secular Humanism Through Ibsenization

The spiritual potential of realism attains its most profound articulation in the phenomenon known as Ibsenization the global diffusion and transcultural refiguration of Ibsen’s moral theatre as a medium of ethical and spiritual renewal. Henrik Ibsen’s plays, grounded in the everyday realities of nineteenth-century Europe, nevertheless dramatize metaphysical questions of guilt, freedom, and redemption that once belonged to the domain of theology5 (Wang 2024). Nora’s departure in A Doll’s House represents more than a social rebellion; it enacts a form of spiritual awakening—an exodus from illusory faith toward moral authenticity. Likewise, Dr. Stockmann’s defiance in An Enemy of the People transforms empirical truth into a prophetic act of ethical conscience.

When Ibsen’s dramas entered the intellectual and theatrical circles of early twentieth-century China, they encountered a culture already preoccupied with the tension between enlightenment and salvation. Chinese thinkers and dramatists such as Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and Cao Yu discerned in Ibsen’s moral realism a paradigm of ethical awakening and spiritual renewal (Wang 2024). They reinterpreted realism not as a vehicle of social critique but as a path of spiritual renewal—a means of reconstructing moral order within the conditions of secular modernity.

In this context, theatre assumed the character of a public ritual. Performance was no longer mere entertainment but a ritualized form of self-examination—a collective confession enacted through aesthetic practice (Bell 2009). Audiences assembled not to witness miracles but to encounter truth. The theatre thus functioned as a secular confessional—translating the grammar of sin and redemption into the ethical idiom of sincerity and moral reflection (Turner 1982). Accordingly, realist performance helped reframe spiritual aspiration as a matter of ethical attention.

This encounter between Western modernism and Chinese humanism reveals how realism transcends aesthetics to operate as a universal medium of spiritual mediation. It rearticulates the sacred not through institutional religion but through ethical consciousness—locating holiness within conscience, community, and the shared pursuit of truth. As realism travels across cultures, it assumes the form of a global ritual of communication, through which art becomes a site of moral transcendence and a living expression of spiritual humanism.

2. Reconfiguring the Sacred in Modern Realism: Toward a Theology of Moral Realism

Modernity, long interpreted as an age of disenchantment, marks not the death of the sacred but its transfiguration into new modes of presence and experience (Taylor 2007). What once belonged to theology now unfolds within the spheres of aesthetics, ethics, and collective imagination. The idea of moral realism—the artistic pursuit of truth and ethical authenticity—embodies this transposition of the sacred into secular form. It signifies not merely a representational mode but a reorientation of spiritual life, wherein faith is internalized as moral perception. Within this horizon, religious humanism emerges as a mediating vision that reconciles the loss of transcendence with the persistence of spiritual longing.

2.1. The Secular Age and the Immanent Sacred

Charles Taylor’s account of the secular age portrays modernity not as the eclipse of belief but as a condition in which faith becomes one possibility among many, while the longing for transcendence endures as a constitutive feature of human experience6. The secular world is far from spiritually empty; it is structured by what Taylor calls “immanent frames,” within which moral and affective life continue to bear a sense of depth and orientation toward meaning. For Taylor, the modern self inhabits a field of tension between disenchantment and re-enchantment, where transcendence no longer vanishes but is refracted through human experience. This condition gives rise to a form of secular spirituality—a lived faith grounded in ethical authenticity rather than in doctrinal authority.

Within the theatrical realm, realism enacts this very negotiation between transcendence and immanence. The stage becomes an immanent locus of the sacred—where human action assumes the weight of divine command, and ethical responsibility reconfigures the authority once held by theology (Carlson 2004). The moral realism of modern drama locates redemption within the lived realities of social life: salvation no longer descends from transcendence but unfolds through recognition, empathy, and the truthful encounter with conscience. In this aesthetic of immanence, the dramatization of moral conflict embodies what Taylor calls “the fullness of ordinary life”—a mode of transcendence experienced through human dignity and moral courage7.

Realism’s fidelity to the concrete, the truthful, and the everyday does not abolish the sacred but reconfigures it. In a secular age, the sacred no longer resides in a transcendent realm but unfolds as an interior horizon of consciousness. Through the representation of moral struggle, theatre becomes a site of disclosure where the ordinary is transfigured into the luminous presence of meaning (Read 1995, pp. 182–84). The authenticity embodied in gesture, dialogue, and ethical choice becomes a modern sacrament of meaning—an aesthetic liturgy through which the secular subject re-encounters the affective depth of faith, transposed into the register of ethical experience rather than metaphysical belief.

2.2. The Phenomenology of the Sacred in Modern Aesthetics and the Thought of Eliade

Mircea Eliade’s phenomenology of religion refines this account of secular spirituality by demonstrating that the sacred, far from vanishing in modernity, persists as a mode of manifestation embedded within the structures of everyday experience. (Eliade 1959, pp. 8–18). Even in societies that proclaim their secularization, the impulse toward sacralization endures as a latent structure of consciousness—manifesting itself in aesthetic creation, ritualized behavior, and the persistence of mythic imagination.

The structure of theatrical realism reflects this enduring dynamic of sacralization. Every dramatic performance, even when grounded in the ordinary, re-enacts a ritual separation between stage and audience—a symbolic threshold that recalls the ancient distinction between the sacred and the profane, transforming the theatre itself into a modern site of hierophany (Carlson 2001). For Eliade, modern art becomes a renewed vessel of hierophany—the manifestation of the sacred within the profane realities of culture. In realist theatre, this disclosure does not occur through miracle or myth but through moral verisimilitude: the truthful enactment of suffering, guilt, and ethical choice. Each act of recognition on stage—each moment when a character confronts conscience or speaks truth—constitutes a contemporary revelation of the sacred structure that underlies secular existence8. The theatre, in this sense, is both aesthetic and sacred; it becomes a medium of self-transcendence in which the disciplined embodiment of human truth assumes the character of ritual and the resonance of revelation.

Eliade’s insight that “the sacred is real, and the real is sacred” clarifies why realism continues to bear spiritual intensity within the conditions of secular modernity, where revelation persists through the truthful apprehension of the everyday9. Realism does not abolish the sacred; it relocates it within immanent ethical life. When the everyday is represented with fidelity to suffering, responsibility, and consequence, it becomes a scene of moral recognition and self-scrutiny. Moral realism thus dispels consoling fictions while intensifying the audience’s engagement with truth and accountability in ordinary experience.

2.3. The Anthropology of Sacrifice and the Moral Drama of Girard

René Girard’s account of mimetic desire and scapegoating provides an anthropological vocabulary for thinking about the persistence of the sacred in social life. In Girard’s model, cultural order is destabilized when imitation generates rivalry and escalation, and communities seek to contain such crises by concentrating conflict onto a substitute victim through sacrificial mechanisms (Girard 1977). Religion, on this view, is less a set of doctrines than a repertoire of practices through which violence is redirected and communal cohesion is restored. From this perspective, tragedy and theatre can be read as cultural forms that dramatize comparable dynamics of crisis and resolution, staging how conflict intensifies, how blame is assigned, and how a provisional sense of order becomes imaginable.

Within moral realism, this sacrificial structure endures, transposed from ritual violence into ethical revelation. The conflicts represented in realist drama—domestic, social, and political—are not merely empirical narratives but enactments of the sacrificial form, in which moral truth emerges through suffering and reconciliation (Girard 1977). Rather than treating these plots as mere empirical narratives, we can read them as dramatizations of the social processes through which blame is concentrated and dissent is managed. In many such dramas, a central figure comes to bear disproportionate censure or exclusion, making visible the mechanisms by which collective order is stabilized. Audience response, in turn, does not replicate an ancient rite but can involve a comparable work of moral evaluation, as spectators are invited to assess the costs of consensus and the ethical meaning of suffering.

Girard’s insights into the dynamics of violence and redemption shed light on the spiritual depth of realism. When characters like Nora in A Doll’s House or Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People confront lies, hypocrisy, or collective injustice, they reenact the archetype of the scapegoat who redeems through exposure. Their moral courage, their willingness to bear social condemnation, constitutes a modern version of sanctity (Johnston 1992). Their suffering shows how realist drama links truth-telling to the risk of exclusion, as ethical disclosure often entails the loss of intimacy, status, or social belonging.

In this transposition, theatre inherits the function once performed by religion: the restoration of moral order through the dramatization of conflict. The sacred does not vanish; it is translated into ethical responsibility and artistic truth. Girard’s anthropology thus converges with Taylor’s secular spirituality and Eliade’s phenomenology: all point to a continuity between the sacred and the secular, a migration rather than a rupture10.

2.4. The Theology of Moral Realism in Secular Modernity

Taken together, these perspectives provide a conceptual framework for reading moral realism as a mode of secular spirituality and ethical formation in modernity. Taylor elucidates the conditions of modern faith, Eliade reveals the forms of its persistence, and Girard discloses the mechanism through which moral meaning is renewed11. Their synthesis allows a reconsideration of realism not as an aesthetic of disillusionment but as a practice of belief.

From this perspective, moral realism fulfills a double vocation of critique and consecration. It unmasks the illusions of ideology while affirming the sacred depth of human experience as a site of revelation. Its truth is not empirical but soteriological: to represent reality is to participate in its redemption, transforming aesthetic perception into an act of moral grace (Lukács 1971). Through realism, art takes on a priestly vocation—interpreting suffering, confessing guilt, and mediating the hope of renewal. The stage thus becomes a liturgical space of reconciliation between faith and modernity, where the divine is transposed into ethical integrity, and the audience gathers as a communion of witnesses to the moral drama of human existence.

Such a vision redefines spirituality not as withdrawal from the world but as deep immersion in its moral reality. The artist, like the mystic, seeks the sacred in the profane, transmuting the ordinary into revelation. Realism thus emerges as both an aesthetic discipline and a spiritual vocation—a moral theology for an age that has lost its gods but not its longing for grace. This reorientation further prepares the ground for understanding how realism evolves into an interpretive framework of moral and spiritual renewal within modernity.

3. Ibsenization as Moral Realism: The Spiritual Reorientation of Modern Drama

The emergence of modern drama in the late nineteenth century marked not merely an aesthetic revolution but a profound reorientation of moral and spiritual life. Realism, as a dramatic method, displaced the metaphysical architecture of tragedy and reconstituted the stage as a site of ethical revelation within immanent experience. In this transformation, Henrik Ibsen stands as a pivotal figure. His theatre reconceived drama’s purpose—from the representation of divine destiny to the disclosure of conscience as a sacred act. The stage, once an arena of divine judgment, became a ritual mirror where human responsibility, guilt, and renewal could be enacted with the gravity once reserved for religious ritual. Through Ibsen’s works—especially A Doll’s House (1879) and An Enemy of the People (1882)—the realist aesthetic assumed a distinctly spiritual vocation, translating the structure of theological drama into the moral drama of truth and transforming faith in God into faith in revelation through conscience (Johnston 1992).

3.1. The Sacred Structure of Ibsen’s Moral Realism

Ibsen’s dramaturgy replaces the classical hierarchy of gods and heroes with a modern hierarchy of ethical will. His characters do not seek salvation through divine intervention but through the courage to face truth. In A Doll’s House, Nora’s awakening transforms domestic life into a stage of spiritual emancipation. Her final act of departure, often interpreted as social rebellion, also enacts a ritual of self-liberation—a secular form of exodus. The closed household, filled with moral deception and patriarchal control, functions as an allegory of spiritual imprisonment. Nora’s leaving is not merely an exit from marriage but a symbolic passage from false faith to ethical authenticity. The door she closes behind her resounds like a liturgical gesture—the renunciation of illusion for the sake of inner truth (Wang 2024).

Similarly, An Enemy of the People recasts the public sphere as a modern sanctuary of conscience. Dr. Stockmann’s disclosure of the contaminated baths elevates hygiene into moral metaphor: the polluted waters reflect a disordered communal soul, and scientific verification assumes the weight of prophetic parrhesia. His subsequent isolation and persecution trace a pattern of secular martyrdom—not expiation by blood but the witness of truth under censure. In Girardian terms, the town’s cohesion seeks a scapegoat; in Eliade’s terms, the assembly becomes a site where the sacred manifests through ethical revelation; within Taylor’s immanent frame, faith is refigured as fidelity to truth. Like a modern Job or Jeremiah, Stockmann confronts collective blindness, bearing hostility as the ascetic cost of conscience. The theatrical realism of this conflict exposes the ethical dimension of everyday life: the civic world becomes a theatre of belief, and the act of speaking truth assumes the gravity of confession (Wang 2011).

The essence of Ibsen’s realism resides in its moral architecture of the sacred. Every object, gesture, and silence operates as a sign within a liturgy of conscience, where material detail becomes the vehicle of ethical presence. The seemingly mundane the household key, the letter, the door, the medical report acquires sacramental density, transfiguring the ordinary into a medium of revelation through which truth discloses itself in the texture of daily life. Through this transformation, Ibsen’s stage can be understood as recovering key ritual functions without reliance on explicit religious doctrine or divine authority (Fischer-Lichte et al. 2011). The drama of moral decision thus shifts attention away from sacrificial resolution toward forms of ethical accountability: conflict is worked through not by violence but by disclosure, confession, and the public articulation of truth.

3.2. The Ethical Revelation of the Sacred in Modern Realism

In classical tragedy, the hero perishes in conflict with transcendent law; in modern realism, the protagonist awakens through the revelation of conscience within the immanent world. The passage from fate to responsibility defines the ethical conversion of modern drama. In Ibsen’s theatre, the sacred returns not as divine decree but as moral revelation—an immanent disclosure of truth within human conscience (Moi 2006). The protagonist no longer submits to the will of the gods but encounters the sacred in the epiphany of self-knowledge, where recognition itself becomes a form of grace.

This movement from metaphysics to morality mirrors the spiritual reconfiguration of modernity itself. The theological notion of grace gives way to the ethical experience of authenticity, in which transcendence is no longer bestowed from beyond but awakened within. Redemption, once miraculous and external, becomes interior and human, enacted through the conscience rather than conferred by divine intervention. The dramatic moment of recognition (anagnorisis)—when truth is unveiled and illusion dissolves—serves as the secular analogue of epiphany, where revelation is translated into moral awareness. In the silence that follows, the audience encounters not divine mystery but the immanent luminosity of truth—a clarity that sanctifies the moral imagination.

The absence of the divine does not diminish the intensity of belief; rather, it redefines belief as fidelity to a truth-process—an immanent act of ethical faith grounded in the perseverance of truth itself (Badiou 2001). The characters’ struggle for integrity embodies a post-theological faith—an adherence to conscience as the immanent locus of the sacred. In this transformation, Ibsen’s moral realism anticipates the condition of modern secularity described by Taylor: the sacred endures not in dogma but in the ethical imagination that animates human truthfulness. The stage itself becomes a liturgical space of moral revelation—a new kind of church in which speech assumes the force of prayer and action becomes the ritual of truth (McFarlane 2006).

3.3. The Redemptive Structure of Sacrifice in Moral Realism

Ibsen’s moral drama discloses a profound continuity with the anthropology of sacrifice articulated by Girard. In each play, the restoration of order advances through a scapegoat logic: a symbolic victim emerges to expose the community’s concealed violence and the exclusions that secure its fragile harmony. Nora’s social ostracism and Dr. Stockmann’s public humiliation enact this victimage mechanism, yet they also invert it. Their suffering is not expiatory bloodletting but revelatory witness: by choosing truth over conformity, they accept isolation as the ascetic cost of conscience, turning sacrifice from ritual violence into parrhesiastic disclosure. In this anti-sacrificial conversion, redemption is achieved not by eliminating a victim but by unmasking the mechanism itself, so that moral order is renewed through truth rather than through exclusion.

The audience’s emotional purification—what Aristotle termed catharsis—is the modern echo of sacrificial substitution (Aristotle 1996). The community experiences reconciliation through the contemplation of one who bears its moral burden. Yet in Ibsen’s moral realism, sacrificial dynamics are better understood as rearticulated within secular ethical life. What is staged is not ritual offering but the social and personal costs of truth-telling, as conflict is worked through in acts of disclosure, judgment, and self-reckoning. Suffering is framed primarily as a trial of conscience, and any “renewal” takes the form of ethical clarification and reconfigured responsibility. In this way, theatre translates sacrificial idioms into a pedagogy of moral accountability, making reconciliation—when it occurs—a matter of publicly negotiated truth rather than ritual violence.

This transformation of the sacrificial pattern reveals the spiritual interiority of modern realism. The drama no longer seeks to escape the world but to consecrate its moral reality. Truth becomes a sacred energy within immanence, and the moral hero serves as its living medium—a figure of fidelity to what Badiou calls the truth-process (Badiou 2001). The spectator, drawn into this unfolding, participates in a form of secular communion—a collective recognition that ethical truth entails both courage and cost. Through this participatory empathy, realism renews the social bond of the sacred that Durkheim identified as the heart of religion itself (Durkheim 1995), translating ritual solidarity into a shared commitment to truth.

3.4. The Spiritual Humanism of Moral Realism

The culmination of Ibsen’s realism is the conversion of ethics into spirituality. In his hands, the nineteenth-century stage—often confined to diversion or didacticism—becomes a theatre of conscience, where truth is enacted within the ordinary. The spectator no longer beholds gods or nobles but ordinary persons under the claim of truth, and in this reorientation the drama is democratized. So too is faith: the sacred is relocated from privilege to immanent experience, where fidelity, sincerity, and responsibility constitute a spiritual humanism available to all. The sacred, as Eagleton observes, is redistributed across human life, now residing in the dignity of moral choice (Eagleton 2014). Ibsen’s realism does not preach doctrine; it enacts spiritual experience through ethical struggle. It calls forth from both characters and audience a form of belief—not in transcendence, but in the integrity that sanctifies human truthfulness. To see truth becomes itself an act of faith, a participation in what Nussbaum describes as the moral vision of compassion and recognition (Nussbaum 2001). In this sense, moral realism transforms theatre into a locus of secular spirituality—an art that performs the enduring functions of religion—revelation, confession, and renewal—through the medium of human conscience.

The moral conflicts that animate Ibsen’s plays anticipate the transcultural vocation of modern drama. As his works crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries, they transmitted not merely an aesthetic form but a spiritual impulse—the conviction that truth, courage, and conscience could serve as immanent substitutes for transcendence. In this passage across cultures, the sacred was not abolished but translated into new ethical idioms, a process that would attain particular resonance in the spiritual reconfiguration of modern Chinese theatre (Tam 2001).

4. From Ibsenization to Spiritual Humanism: Translating the Sacred into Secular Ethics in Modern China

The introduction of Ibsen’s realism into China at the turn of the twentieth century coincided with one of the most profound cultural transitions in modern history—the reconfiguration of belief in a society undergoing rapid secularization without religious disenchantment12. The May Fourth generation, disillusioned with traditional metaphysics yet unwilling to surrender the ethical heart of civilization, sought to reconstruct moral life through culture (T.-t. Chow 1960). In that historical moment, realist drama emerged as a new vessel for moral and spiritual renewal, reinterpreting faith through ethical self-awareness and social reform13. In this process, Ibsen-influenced drama did not simply displace indigenous moral traditions but selectively adopted, reinterpreted, and strategically negotiated Confucian ethical frameworks within a secularizing cultural context. The theatre came to embody the moral and spiritual function once attributed to religion, echoing the modern belief that aesthetic experience could replace theological faith as a means of ethical cultivation and inner renewal14.

4.1. Enlightenment and the Rebirth of Ethical Faith in Modern China

The intellectual landscape of early twentieth-century China was marked by recurrent imperatives of cultural and social renewal. The pursuit of truth and freedom was framed not only as emancipation but also as an ethical project aimed at interrogating inherited norms and reconsidering moral authority. Within this atmosphere of reformist urgency, Henrik Ibsen’s moral realism offered a new medium for public self-examination. Through translation, criticism, and performance, his plays entered Chinese debates over personhood and responsibility and were often read as resources for articulating “ethical faith” in human agency without reliance on confessional theology (Wang 2003).

Hu Shi’s 1918 adaptation and advocacy of A Doll’s House exemplify the transformation of realist drama into a platform for ethical debate. For Hu, Nora’s departure signified the awakening of a modern moral subject capable of rejecting “false virtue” and assuming responsibility for self-determination. At the same time, Nora’s action could not but collide with role-ethical expectations governing marital life, often summarized as fūfù yǒubié (夫妇有别)—the principle that spouses occupy differentiated roles and responsibilities within the marital order (Mencius 3A4). This tension is crucial for understanding Ibsen’s Chinese reception: Nora circulated not because the play neatly harmonized with tradition, but because it dramatized a conflict between competing moral grammars—individual conscience and role-based obligation, personal autonomy and the maintenance of social order. Hu’s interpretation reframed this conflict in modern terms, turning the stage into a civic forum where audiences could evaluate the moral costs of conformity and the legitimacy of inherited authority.

Lu Xun likewise emphasized drama’s capacity to cultivate ethical attention by making suffering and responsibility perceptible as matters for public reflection. In both Hu Shi and Lu Xun, realist theatre is conceived as a public practice of ethical reflection. Modern drama renders moral tensions socially legible by staging conflicts of responsibility, self-justification, and consequence, inviting audiences to assess conduct and reconsider shared norms. In this sense, realism functions as a secular medium through which moral experience is clarified and made available to collective deliberation.

4.2. Confucian Spirituality and the Moral Immanence of the Sacred in Chinese Realism

The Chinese reception of realism was not simply an imitation of Western secularism; it was mediated through local moral vocabularies and long-standing debates about ethical authority. It is therefore more accurate to speak of a contested field of reinterpretation than of a unified “Confucian horizon.” Classical Confucian ethics articulates moral life primarily in relational and role-based terms, emphasizing the cultivation of humane responsiveness (ren), righteousness (yi), and ritual propriety (li) as practices that organize social trust and responsibility (Tu 1989). Yet these concepts do not straightforwardly mandate public disclosure or confession; they can also support obligations of protection, restraint, and discretion within kinship and community. In this context, the “sacred” invoked in discussions of Chinese realism is best understood not as a doctrinal claim but as a heightened valuation of ethical integrity and relational responsibility as enacted within the immanent world.

The encounter between Ibsen’s moral realism and Chinese ethical traditions generated not a seamless synthesis but a productive field of reinterpretation in which realist procedures were translated into new moral idioms. In this process, concepts associated with self-cultivation and sincerity were often mobilized to name forms of ethical integrity and moral attention that realist drama sought to make publicly intelligible. At the same time, the realist emphasis on disclosure and confrontation does not simply “parallel” Confucian cultivation; it can place pressure on role-based obligations and norms of discretion within kinship and community. What emerges, therefore, is a historically specific configuration of moral realism in which theatre stages conscience as a publicly contested experience, and in which “inner sincerity” becomes meaningful not by doctrinal revelation but through the social negotiation of responsibility, judgment, and consequence. Yet this dynamic is not straightforwardly “Confucian” Classical discussions of uprightness/straightforwardness (zhi 直) can foreground kinship loyalty and discretion, as in Analects 13.18 (叶公语孔子曰：「吾党有直躬者，其父攘羊，而子证之.」孔子曰：「吾党之直躬者异于是：父为子隐，子为父隐，直在其中矣.」), complicating any assumption that moral integrity requires exposure. Read against this backdrop, a modern ethical predicament: disclosure may be demanded for accountability, yet it also collides with expectations of familial obligation and the containment of shame. The tragedy arises from this collision, as sincerity (cheng) and ethical candor become contested demands within a family structure marked by secrecy, harm, and unequal power.

Chinese realist theatre, notably in Cao Yu, offers a vivid site for observing how realist dramaturgy shaped by Ibsenization was rearticulated within local moral horizons. In Thunderstorm (1934), disclosure unfolds as a cumulative mechanism of ethical reckoning: confrontations, recognitions, and pressured acknowledgments bring withheld histories to the surface, exposing Zhou Puyuan’s patriarchal authority as dependent on concealment and coercion15. The play repeatedly turns private knowledge into leverage: characters use revelation and to challenge Zhou Puyuan’s control, so that paternal authority is progressively stripped of _legitimacy as its hidden past returns. As these disclosures tighten the web of kinship entanglement, the domestic interior becomes a public scene of judgment in which responsibility is reassigned and inherited order collapses.

When Lu Dahai confronts Zhou Puyuan, he converts withheld histories into an immediate weapon (鲁大海 哦，好，好，（切齿）你的手段我早就领教过；哼，你的来历我都知道…) (Cao 2018, Act II, pp. 126–27) and prompts the patriarch to answer not with moral justification but with coercive speech-acts—disqualification and expulsion (周朴园 不许多说话。（回头向大海）鲁大海，你现在没有资格跟我说话——矿上已经把你开除了; （厉声）下去！) (Cao 2018, Act II, pp. 126–27). As such exchanges accumulate, the domestic interior hardens into a quasi-public scene of judgment in which responsibility is reassigned and inherited order begins to collapse.

Through such works, Chinese modern drama could be seen as intensifying realism into a practice of ethical attention (Wang 2019). Rather than assuming a simple alignment with Confucian doctrine, it is more accurate to say that realist dramaturgy was rearticulated through local moral vocabularies—especially those surrounding sincerity (cheng) and relational responsibility—in ways that supported a form of spiritual humanism grounded in moral life. Yet the ethical status of disclosure in this context is not self-evident. Classical Confucian discussions of uprightness can foreground kinship loyalty and discretion, as in (Analects 13.18), where “uprightness” is located in mutual concealment between father and son; this complicates any assumption that moral integrity necessarily requires exposure. Theatre, anchored in ordinary settings yet structured by performance, thus becomes a public space where competing moral claims—candid speech, responsibility, familial obligation, and the management of shame—can be tested and debated. In this sense, moral order is approached not as a transcendent decree but as something negotiated within immanent social relations, a view that resonates with Confucian accounts of the Way (dao) as realized through cultivated conduct rather than institutional creed (Cheng 1991, pp. 47–48).

Taken together, Chinese modern dramas influenced by A Doll’s House relate to Confucian ethics through selective and strategic rearticulation rather than simple acceptance or rejection. They adopt Confucian ethical seriousness, especially sincerity (cheng) and relational responsibility, while rejecting role hierarchies that legitimate patriarchal authority and moral concealment. Confucian concepts are frequently reinterpreted, with sincerity aligned to ethical candor and responsibility reframed as accountable conduct rather than ritual obedience. At the same time, these works strategically negotiate Confucian frameworks by staging tensions between disclosure and kinship obligation, presenting moral integrity as contested and situational. Modern Chinese realist drama thus neither preserves nor abandons Confucian morality intact, but reworks it within a secular ethical horizon structured by public judgment and accountability.

4.3. The Theatre as a Site of Secular Ritual and Moral Renewal

Theatre emerged as a salient venue for staging ritualized practices of ethical reflection and communal renewal. Through its collective temporality and symbolic intensity, dramatic performance assumed the anthropological and spiritual functions of religion described by Girard and Eliade: it reconfigured time, generated communal participation, and transformed spectatorship into a form of ethical contemplation and shared transcendence16. The theatre’s capacity to gather, unveil, and purify re-enacted the logic of ritual sacrifice, yet transposed it into a moral and aesthetic register—a transformation in which the act of offering was realized as ethical revelation and communal renewal.

Each performance of realist drama became a communal rite of moral renewal. The darkness of the auditorium, the threshold between stage and audience, and the measured rhythm of revelation together cultivated an atmosphere of sacred attentiveness. The spectators, gathered in silence, assumed the role of witnesses to truth, and through their shared contemplation entered a moral communion—a fleeting congregation in which ethical awareness acquired the weight of the sacred17. This ritual dimension reveals why realist theatre in modern China possessed such profound transformative energy. The drama of recognition, confession, and renewal offered a secular liturgy of repentance, translating the structure of faith into moral action. By performing the truth of suffering and the possibility of integrity, realism emerged as a sacramental art of the secular age—a medium through which the sacred continued to speak in human form18.

Within the Chinese modern context, realist theatre functioned as a secular ritual space in which ethical reflection and communal renewal could be publicly enacted. Through shared spectatorship, structured revelation, and the disciplined temporality of performance, theatrical events transformed individual moral conflict into a collective process of judgment and moral clarification. Rather than relying on doctrinal authority, this ritual dimension grounded ethical meaning in participation, attentiveness, and public witnessing. In this sense, theatre provided a culturally resonant medium through which moral awareness was intensified and provisionally renewed under secular conditions, helping to sustain forms of ethical orientation in the absence of institutional religious practice.

4.4. Spiritual Humanism and the Sacred Reconfiguration of Modernity in China

The moral revolution set in motion by the reception of realism in modern China discloses a distinctive configuration of spiritual modernity. Faith was reimagined as moral discipline, sustained through the attentive management of affect, conduct, and the seemingly ordinary “details” of existence. In the cultural politics of narrative, the very “details” policed in the service of nation-building (and feminized as merely popular) became the medium through which moral life was ritualized, turning aesthetic practice into an inner economy of conviction rather than doctrinal assent (R. Chow 1991, pp. 85–87). The transformation of Ibsen’s realism into a medium of moral regeneration illustrates that the spiritual crisis of modernity need not culminate in nihilism. Rather, it opens the possibility for new configurations of the sacred, grounded in the moral depth and intrinsic dignity of human life.

This Chinese path to modernity embodies what may be described as spiritual humanism—a worldview in which ethical truth takes on the revelatory function once ascribed to divine authority. The recognition of human suffering, the courage to confront injustice, and the sincerity of moral action together constitute a renewed form of in the immanence of human life. This vision resonates with Taylor’s conception of the “fullness of ordinary life,” yet it extends it through Confucian relationality, in which the sacred emerges not solely within the individual conscience but also within the web of human relations that sustain moral community19.

In this convergence of ethics and spirituality, Chinese realist drama inscribed a distinctive chapter in the comparative history of the sacred. It revealed that modernity does not extinguish the sacred but transposes it into the moral imagination of secular life. The transformation of Ibsen’s realism into a Chinese mode of religious how the search for transcendence can move across cultural and theological frontiers, generating new vocabularies of faith within ethical experience. Through the language of theatre, modern China reformulated the ancient intuition that moral life, lived in sincerity and truth, remains one of the most enduring manifestations of the sacred in human history.

5. World Drama as Sacred Mediation: Toward a Transcultural Theology of Moral Realism

The global circulation of realist theatre discloses a distinctive economy of spiritual translation. As plays traverse languages and civilizations, they carry more than dramaturgical technique; they convey configurations of moral imagination, modalities of belief, and structures of ethical affect (Damrosch 2003). In this sense, world drama operates as a form of sacred mediation, where aesthetic form becomes the vehicle through which moral truth is rendered legible across cultures. The concept of world drama thus signifies more than the diffusion of dramaturgical techniques; it designates the emergence of a shared spiritual discourse that transcends confessional and cultural boundaries. In its passage from Europe to Asia—from Ibsen to Hu Shi and Cao Yu—realism became a transreligious mode of expression, transforming theatrical representation into a practice of moral faith through which the sacred is rearticulated within human ethical experience.

5.1. The Sacred Circulation of Dramatic Form

The transnational career of realism exemplifies what may be called the sacred circulation of form. Here, dramatic structure becomes a vehicle of sacral meaning: the recurrent sequence of moral conflict, disclosure, and renewal across cultures intimates a universal grammar of redemption. In the realist mode, this grammar unfolds in the encounter of conscience and circumstance—an ordinary setting, an ethical dilemma, a moment of recognition, and a transformation of awareness. Each recurrence of this pattern—whether in a Norwegian household or a Chinese family compound—re-performs an archetypal ritual logic, relocating the sacred within the textures of everyday life.

The universality of this dramatic structure suggests that the sacred is not bound to fixed symbols but inheres in the very logic of narrative form—in the human impulse to render experience meaningful through repetition and recognition. From a phenomenological–theological perspective, theatre thus functions as an aesthetic–hermeneutic space in which spectators move through a ritualized temporality, carrying within their perception the sediment of sacred tradition. As Aronson observes through the Quem Quaeritis paradigm—the medieval Easter trope (“Whom do you seek?”) often cited as a liturgical prototype of Western theatre—each performance reconfigures spatial and temporal boundaries, transforming ordinary space into a dramatic locus of presence and expectation. In this re-enactment, consecration is not imposed from above but emerges through performative recurrence, as the stage continuously re-inscribes the possibility of the sacred within human creativity and moral awareness. As Aronson-Lehavi notes, the modern stage may be understood as a ritualized site of mediation, one that continually reconstitutes the conditions of sanctity wherever truth is performed; rather than claiming institutional authority, it opens a discursive space in which religion, secularism, art, and performance intersect in ongoing dialogue (Aronson-Lehavi 2023, pp. 12–13, 95). In this perspective, the aesthetic form of realism embodies a latent theology of moral experience—one that recognizes the sacral dimension of ethical struggle. As realist drama traverses cultural boundaries, it transmits not merely narrative content but the spiritual logic of, revealing how transcendence may be encountered within the immanent texture of everyday life.

Through translation and adaptation, realist form circulates as a transferable repertoire for staging conflict, disclosure, and possible renewal, enabling ethical recognition across audiences while being rearticulated within local cultural horizons.

5.2. Transcultural Encounter and the Revelation of the Sacred

The encounter between Western realism and Chinese cultural humanism exemplifies a transcultural revelation of the sacred. When Ibsen’s dramas entered the Chinese stage, they did not transmit a foreign theology but catalyzed a rearticulation of ethical meaning. What emerged was not conversion but revelation—a recognition that the sacred could dwell within moral authenticity rather than transcendental belief. In this sense, the translation of realism into Chinese theatre became a hermeneutic act of spiritual mediation, transforming aesthetic exchange into a mode of theological reflection grounded in human conscience.

The adaptive process—linguistic, cultural, and ethical—reveals the porous boundary between religion and art, showing how acts of translation can function as spiritual reinterpretation. In Chinese receptions of A Doll’s House the 1920s, Nora’s departure was not simply an individual rebellion but became a ritualized scene of moral awakening, continually recontextualized through performance and criticism into a public emblem of ethical emancipation that migrated from stage to social discourse. In this hermeneutic process, Ibsen’s critique of bourgeois morality was transposed into new narrative and performative frameworks that refigured “Nora” as a circulating emblem of ethical and spiritual awakening. Through these reinterpretations, the play was transformed from a theatrical performance into a cultural rite of reflection, mediating between aesthetic form and moral consciousness (He 2018). In this reframing, translation functions as a mode of ethical reinterpretation, reshaping the play’s meanings for new publics while preserving its core dramaturgical problem of moral accountability.

This phenomenon reveals the transcultural vocation of moral realism. The realism that travels does more than represent reality—it re-enacts the sacred through recognition, transforming aesthetic comprehension into an act of spiritual participation. The moment of understanding—when a spectator in Beijing apprehends the same moral illumination that once moved an audience in Oslo—constitutes a communion of conscience across cultural distance. World drama, in this account, operates as a network of circulation through which realist forms enable ethical recognition across cultural distance while being continually rearticulated within local languages, institutions, and moral debates.

5.3. The Theology of Immanence and the Sanctification of the Ordinary

Realism sustains its spiritual and ethical force by rendering ordinary life as a site of immanent moral meaning, where responsibility and truth become visible in everyday situations. Whereas traditional religious art seeks to elevate the spectator toward transcendence, realist drama reveals transcendence through immanence, sanctifying the world itself as the site of ethical and spiritual encounter (Taylor 2007). Its moral conflicts do not merely symbolize divine law; they disclose the ethical dimension of the sacred as it unfolds within human experience. The audience encounters transcendence not through withdrawal from reality but through its intensified recognition within the immanent world. This theology of immanence resonates with the modern condition delineated by Taylor and with the sacred anthropology articulated by Eliade and Girard: the sacred endures, not as a realm beyond, but as a living presence within the ordinary.

From this perspective, world drama may be conceived as a form of aesthetic soteriology—a practice of redemption enacted through artistic representation. Each performance embodies the possibility of renewal through moral recognition, transforming perception into participation. This theology of immanence entails a redistribution of the sacred within the sphere of human representation. Whereas traditional religion situates holiness within consecrated spaces and mediates it through institutional authority, realist theatre disperses sanctity across character, language, and embodied gesture. The actor assumes a ritual function of enactment, and the spectator a vocation of witnessing, together forming a participatory community of moral reflection. The stage thereby reconfigures the sacred as a drama of human responsibility, wherein truth, suffering, and forgiveness become the sacraments of ethical life. Viewed through the lens of lived religion, which dissolves the analytical boundary between the religious and the social, the theology of immanence articulated by realism can thus be understood as a democratization of the sacred through aesthetic practice. In affirming the sanctity of the ordinary, realism enacts what world religions have long intuited—that the divine is disclosed within human compassion itself, since divinity is inseparable from the human capacity for compassion (Ammerman 2021, p. 6).

5.4. Aesthetic Liturgy and the Mediation of the Sacred

The transcultural diffusion of realism indicates that aesthetic form mediates the sacred. By its discipline of sincerity and verisimilitude, theatrical realism cultivates in both actor and spectator a prayerful attention that approximates liturgical practice. The concentrated silence of the auditorium, the gathering of bodies, and the measured suspension of time together establish phenomenological conditions of worship, orienting perception toward disclosure.

Within this aesthetic liturgy, art assumes a mediatory vocation, performing the priestly work of interpretation. It transposes suffering into intelligible form and transforms moral tension into gestures of compassion. As Illman and Smith observe, a practical theology of the arts understands the aesthetic event as liturgy—not as doctrinal proclamation, but as a dialogical practice of meaning-making rooted in embodied, community-situated acts of creation. Thus, the interpretive labor of both artists and audiences constitutes a pastoral and ethical locus of transformation, wherein aesthetic engagement becomes a medium for lived theological reflection and moral renewal (Illman and Smith 2013). The stage enacts what theology terms anamnesis, a re-presentation of truth through embodied remembrance. By dramatizing moral experience, world drama renews the communal capacity for faith in ethical order and restores meaning through shared participation. In this process, the sacred re-enters through aesthetic form—not as supernatural intervention but as the imaginative realization of justice within human life.

5.5. Toward a Transcultural Theology of the Sacred in Realism

The historical and intercultural trajectory of realist drama-from Ibsen’s moral realism to its Chinese rearticulation—invites a reframing of how the “sacred” can be discussed under secular conditions. Rather than positing a transcultural theology in any doctrinal sense, this article proposes a comparative framework for describing how realist dramaturgy renders moral meaning experientially compelling across different theatrical publics. What travels is not a universal creed but a set of dramaturgical procedures through which truth-telling, self-reckoning, and the possibility of renewal become publicly legible. In this way, artistic representation can function as a site of lived ethical orientation in a secular age without requiring institutional religious authority.

Viewed through this lens, world drama does not point to a single “theological” essence so much as it clarifies how theatrical forms can sustain practices of meaning-making under secular conditions. Across Ibsen’s plays and their Chinese rearticulations, realist dramaturgy repeatedly foregrounds truth-telling, self-reckoning, and the contested possibility of renewal as public ethical experiences. The value of a transcultural approach, therefore, lies not in asserting universality but in showing how comparable dramaturgical procedures become legible across contexts while being reworked by local moral languages, institutions, and audiences. In this sense, the stage functions less as a sanctuary of belief than as a hermeneutic apparatus for discerning why belief remains compelling as a human longing for meaning, transformation, and a shared horizon of hope under secular conditions (Carlson 1993).

6. Conclusions

The intercultural development of moral realism from Ibsen to modern Chinese drama suggests that modernity did not so much displace ethical meaning as relocate it within publicly staged forms of moral experience. From this perspective, linear narratives of “disenchantment” require qualification, since modernity is better understood as a transformation of symbolic authority and moral imagination rather than as the disappearance of the sacred. As Joas has argued, the sacred persists through its relocation within cultural forms and social practices rather than through institutional continuity or decline (Joas 2021, p. 8).

At a theoretical level, the analysis aligns secular conditions, immanent forms of the sacred, and dramaturgical processes of ethical renewal to account for realist theatre as a public medium of moral orientation. In this configuration, realist drama renewed “spiritual” life chiefly by intensifying moral imagination and public accountability, enabling audiences to recognize ethical stakes within ordinary relationships and social institutions (Eide 1987, pp. 24–31). By rendering ordinary situations legible as sites of responsibility, conflict, and consequence, realist drama allows ethical judgment to emerge through processes of truth-telling, self-reflection, and negotiated renewal, sustaining moral orientation under secular conditions without presupposing theological belief.

A transcultural perspective is necessary to account for this process, since Ibsenization operates less as direct influence than as a mode of ethical and dramaturgical rearticulation. Rather than transmitting fixed ideas, realist drama circulates as a set of practices—disclosure, confrontation, and the public testing of responsibility—that acquire meaning through local moral vocabularies and social debates. Read in this way, A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People provide reference points for understanding how realist theatre frames ethical awakening through conscience and accountability. Their Chinese rearticulations, in turn, situate these procedures within the specific concerns of early twentieth-century China, as seen in Hu Shi’s civic interpretation of Nora, Lu Xun’s critical reassessment of moral awakening, and Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm, where the gradual revelation of concealed relations structures ethical reckoning within the family.

This comparative framework also clarifies how Chinese modern dramas influenced by A Doll’s House engage with Confucian ethics. The relationship is neither one of simple continuity nor outright rejection, but involves selective adoption, rejection, reinterpretation, and strategic negotiation. In some instances, Confucian ethical emphases on sincerity (cheng) and relational responsibility are retained as markers of moral seriousness. In others, inherited role hierarchies are questioned when they appear to conflict with individual dignity, accountability, or the prevention of harm. Confucian concepts are thus frequently reinterpreted rather than discarded, with sincerity increasingly associated with ethical candor and responsibility understood as answerable conduct rather than unquestioned obedience. At the same time, these dramas register the tension between disclosure and kinship obligation, indicating that moral integrity in a modern context is negotiated rather than self-evident. Thunderstorm is exemplary in this regard, as its unfolding revelations expose both the ethical necessity and the social costs of truth within a familial structure shaped by secrecy and authority.

Taken together, these observations support a more nuanced understanding of the modern transformation of Confucian morality. Modern Chinese realist drama does not simply replace Confucian ethics with Western individualism, nor does it preserve traditional norms unchanged. Instead, it rearticulates ethical life through publicly staged processes of judgment, responsibility, and moral reflection. In this sense, the transcultural encounter with Ibsen contributed to the formation of a secular ethical horizon in which theatre functioned as a reflective space for negotiating moral values under the conditions of modernity.