The circuitous journey stands as one of the master tropes of the Romantic imagination and, by extension, of depth psychology’s understanding of individuation and spiritual development. M.H. Abrams, whose Natural Supernaturalism (1971) provides the most sustained scholarly anatomy of the concept, traces the figure from its Neoplatonic origins in Plotinus — where the soul’s emanation from and return to the One describes a necessary arc — through its theological elaboration in Augustine and the Christian pilgrimage tradition, to its Romantic philosophical apotheosis in Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and their successors. What distinguishes the Romantic inflection from its ancient precursor is the crucial substitution of an immanent spiral for a simple circle: the returning traveler arrives at a higher unity, not mere restoration, having been transformed by the suffering and self-division encountered en route. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is the paradigm case — the spirit departs, becomes estranged, and returns to itself comprehendingly enriched. In the depth-psychological register, Jung’s serpentine ‘individual way’ and Moore’s polytropos soul path echo this pattern, insisting that circuitousness is not deviation but the very form of genuine growth. The term therefore carries irreducible tension between teleological confidence (there is a home to return to) and phenomenological honesty (the route cannot be straightened).
the figure of the circuitous journey homeward, which in other Romantic philosophers is a recurrent but passing allusion, Hegel developed into the sustained vehicle for his Phenomenology of the Spirit
Abrams identifies Hegel’s Phenomenology as the canonical literary-philosophical elaboration of the circuitous journey, transforming a passing Romantic allusion into a fully sustained structural principle.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
Schelling represents the general course of human history, so conceived, as a circuitous journey which constitutes the plot of a double Homeric epic
Schelling explicitly names the circuitous journey as the macro-structural form of all history, mapping it onto the Iliad (centrifugal alienation) and the Odyssey (centripetal reintegration).
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
the circuitous quest candidly reverts to its ancient prototype in the Christian pilgrimage through exile back home, where one who is at once the father, the bridegroom, and the bride stands waiting
Abrams demonstrates that the Romantic circuitous quest is a secularized transformation of the Christian pilgrimage archetype, retaining its erotic and familial figuration of the divine goal.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
In all versions of the fall as a falling out of unity, redemption is regarded as a process of reintegration
The circuitous journey is grounded in a fall-from-unity theology or metaphysics: departure is construed as fragmentation, and the return journey constitutes redemptive reintegration.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
The typical Romantic design differs from the circular monism of the Neoplatonists in two chief aspects; and these differences are all-important
Abrams distinguishes the Romantic spiral — a circuitous journey that arrives at an enriched, higher unity — from the Neoplatonic circle that merely returns to an unchanging origin.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
the path traced by the history of culture, not only in the race but ‘in every son of Adam,’ is a circuit from an instinctual self-unity, through self-opposition and self-division, to a higher harmony
Hegel’s philosophical reading of the Fall myth makes the circuitous journey a universal developmental structure applicable to both world history and individual human experience.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
the process of representative human experience is a fall from self-unity and community into division … represented in the plot-form of an educational journey in quest of a feminine other
In Novalis, the circuitous journey takes the narrative form of a Bildungsreise in which the protagonist wanders through alien lands and returns home transformed, enacting the fall-and-reintegration pattern at the level of literary plot.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
everything that is vital rather than merely mechanical … moves round upon itself in a circle
Coleridge grounds the circuitous journey in a broader organicist philosophy of mind and nature, contrasting the living circle of reason and imagination with the straight-line motion of mere mechanism.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
the dead natural elements ‘burst into life’ and, benign again, move the Mariner along on his own circular journey, amid oblique but insistent revelations of his homesickness
Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is read as an enacted circuitous journey — literal circumnavigation encoding a spiritual departure, punishment, moral awakening, and return to origin.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
the concluding stage rounds back, on its own higher level, upon the primitive concept of Being which has inaugurated the entire system — it is ‘the ultimate result in which philosophy returns into itself’
Hegel’s entire Logic is structured as a circuitous journey in which each dialectical circle composes a larger spiral, returning to and comprehending its starting point at a higher level of self-awareness.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
the poet repeatedly figures his own imaginative enterprise, the act of composing The Prelude itself, as a perilous quest through the uncharted regions of his own mind
Wordsworth’s Prelude embeds the circuitous journey at both biographical and meta-poetic levels, figuring the composition of the poem itself as a Dantesque and Odyssean voyage homeward.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
Plotinus had illustrated his abstract doctrine of the circular course of the soul by an allegoric reading of Homer’s epic, in which the return of Odysseus to his native land is interpreted as a parable of the return of the many to the One
The Odyssey’s homeward voyage functions as the founding literary figure for the Neoplatonic and subsequently Romantic circuitous journey, establishing the narrative template of exile and return.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
By a fusion of the pilgrimage in Hebrews, the circular journey of the Prodigal Son, the culmination of the Book of Revelation, and the imagery of the Song of Songs, the goal of the composite journey is at once a country and a city and a home
Augustine synthesizes multiple scriptural journey narratives into the composite template of the circuitous journey, fusing spatial, relational, and eschatological registers of the return.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
The individual way leads in directions that seem absolutely wrong. One doesn’t realize when one swings to the left that left exhausts itself and swings to the right again.
Jung articulates the depth-psychological equivalent of the circuitous journey: the individuation path is necessarily serpentine, its apparent deviations being intrinsic to its eventual arrival at the goal.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
Odysseus is called ‘polytropos,’ a man of many turns — a good word for the path of soul. … The soul makes its unsteady way, delayed by obstacles and distracted by all kinds of charms.
Moore extends the circuitous journey into a soul-centered hermeneutic, contrasting the direct ascent of spiritual literature with the labyrinthine, multi-textured wandering that characterizes the soul’s path.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
A pilgrimage involves not a settled and determined lockstep march to a fixed point, but a winding, turning, looping, crisscrossing, occasionally backtracking peregrination
Kurtz and Ketcham apply the circuitous journey to the spirituality of imperfection, arguing that authentic pilgrimage — like recovery — is structurally non-linear, its wandering being constitutive rather than incidental.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994supporting
Having explored the circuitous path of how the lives of James, Jung and Wilson intersected … we’re now ready to take a deep dive into the nature of the journey within.
Peterson applies the circuitous journey metaphor to the biographical and psychological convergence of James, Jung, and Wilson, framing the inner work of the Twelve Steps as itself a form of the journey within.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting
Journey, educational [Bildungsreise], 191-192 … see also Circuitous journey, Education of the poet, Pilgrimage and quest
The index cross-reference confirms that Abrams treats the circuitous journey as a master category subsuming the Bildungsreise, the poet’s education, and the pilgrimage-and-quest tradition.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside
Wordsworth, William … circuitous journey in, 284-288
The index entry attests to a discrete, sustained treatment of the circuitous journey in Wordsworth’s poetry within Abrams’s larger argument.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside
I stand like an alien [Fremdling] before her and understand her not … I am solitary in the beautiful world, and so am an outcast from the garden of Nature
Hölderlin’s Hyperion dramatizes the nadir of the circuitous journey — the moment of maximum alienation — as the necessary precondition to the eventual turn toward reintegration.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside