Alphonse Ratisbonne

Ratisbonne had no interest in Christianity and reportedly wore a miraculous medal only to mock a friend's piety; then, in the church of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte, he was seized by a vision he could neither explain nor resist. James uses the episode to probe the borderland between psychology and grace — whether such instantaneous upheavals are pathology, suggestion, or something the categories of either cannot hold. Ratisbonne's later life as a priest and missionary to Jews makes his case, for James, both a puzzle and a proof of religion's power to reorganize a personality from the root.