Category: Quotes & Commentary

Ask the Pastor — What of John Donne’s Divine Ravishing?

Dear Pastor,

I wonder what you think of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14, “Batter My Heart.” ? It ends with a rape of the soul. But he links it to chastity. The paradox is present.

 
Jayson Grieser
 
 
Jayson,
 
Donne’s couplet in question,
 
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
 
I think one has to understand the points of perspective in order to dissolve the paradox. We, as humans, will always be ravished either by God or by the devil. As such, it is never a matter of being “ravished” or “not being ravished,” it is always only a matter of “ravished by whom.”

I think what Donne is getting at is akin to Luther’s prose in his, “On the Bondage of the Will,”

 
“Man is like a horse. Does God leap into the saddle? The horse is obedient and accommodates itself to every movement of the rider and goes whither he wills it. Does God throw down the reins? Then Satan leaps upon the back of the animal, which bends, goes and submits to the spurs and caprices of its new rider.”
 
So, man is always a ravished being, just as man is always a rode being. If we are ravished by the devil it is a ravishing unto corruption. If we are ravished by God it is a ravishing unto chasteness and purity. Man, having no free will, will thus only be a ravished being. Either we will be ravished unto purity by God or we will be ravished unto impurity by the Dragon.
 
Donne uses the “ravished” language but in my estimation he is using the language from Lucifer’s perspective when he uses that language. If he were to speak from God’s perspective he would have written instead something like,
 
Except you possess me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you keep me.
 
But that doesn’t make for as good poetry. I hope that helps.
 
Thank you for stopping by Jayson and thanks for a thoughtful question.

 

The Way Madmen Speak

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Barack Obama

Only a madman, one might think, would dare to speak of changing the entire milieu — “building a new society” — or even to speak as if such a thing were possible. And yet this is the current political idiom. It is seriously out of touch with a set of traditions whose good effects it takes too much for granted; it fails to appreciate them, as it fails to appreciate the human situation.

Joe Sobran
Pensees

1899 Vision of New World Order

How long has the vision for a New World Order been around?

Consider this quotation from a book by Rev. Charles Ferguson written in 1899,

“The ecclesiology of a democratic Catholicism is the ultimate form of social organization. The Church is to stand as the ecumenical democracy, the international republic of humanity in the day when the superstition of State sovereignty shall become incredible and the huge, meaningless political aggregates shall lose their strength. The strength of the wrangling empires is in their mutual jealousy and fear — a relic of the feudal tradition and the old ethnic isolation. Already the profounder antagonisms are not those that separate nations, but those that separate classes. Men are drawn together in these days not by the blood- bond, but by unanimity in ideals; as the new social order is born not of the flesh but of the spirit. The hulks of empire may rot by the sea for a time, but the life and motion will go out of them with the rise of the tide of catholic democracy…

The genetic kind of faith which is the very breath of the modern spirit, which is the spring of science and of humanizing enterprise, which believes, in spite of doubt, that this unintelligible world is at bottom reasonable, confronting the antagonisms of classes and nations with a fixed assurance that there is a justice that is best for all, making the strong the willing slaves of the weak, and convincing the people of the equality of souls ” the faith that is preparing the triumph of democracy, creating a new and inspiring literature and clearing the way for a commerce that shall claim the markets for the man ” this faith is not bred in sectarian churches.
 
And no reform of the sects will avail to produce such faith, no revival of their spirits, no purification, disinfection or purgation. The quickening of the desire to improve their spiritual condition would but intensify the evil. It is necessary to unchurch the sectarian churches before they can serve the common cause of souls. Their existence is a contradiction, and their safety is to turn against themselves.
 
The modern democratic order is the true continuator of the historic Church. And the success of that order is the success of the Great Adventure.”

 

Horror and the Modern Church

“Modern critics can not understand the genre of Horror because they can’t understand the Enlightenment, and they can’t understand the Enlightenment because they are inside it so to speak, espousing its goals; the critics, virtually to a man, espouse its values so completely they can’t conceive of any alternative to it as the project which orders their lives.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 296

There is something in this quote that the modern Church needs to hear as a principle. The modern Church, like Jone’s critics, too often are of little use to Christians today because the modern Church has swallowed the Enlightenment core principle of Egalitarianism. The modern Church can not fight where the fight is of most import because the modern Church is inside the Enlightenment and holds as dear to God the Enlightenment’s most core principle. This does not mean that the modern Church can never give profitable counsel. It DOES mean that any counsel the modern Church gives pertaining to the most animating issue of our time (Egalitarianism) — an issue owned by the enemy — is counsel that smells of the sulfur that besots our enemy. In the words of Pogo, In the modern Church “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

In time the modern Church will overwhelmingly fall on the sodomite marriage issue, on the Confederate flag issue, and on the Transgender issue because the modern Church owns as a principle of Christianity the core principles that drive those issues. Borrowing from Jone’s, “Egalitarianism is the project that orders their lives.”

Christopher Isherwood & Disordered Affection

Christopher Isherwood was specific in his memoir about the need to have sex outside his class (with boys) and found it even more exciting when he was unable to speak the language of the person he had sex with.

Once learning German Isherwood reported that “it was a little saddening, because the collapse of the language barrier had buried the image of the magic German boy.”

E. Michael Jones
“Monsters from the Id.”

This quote reveals that which so often motivates sexual perversion. In God’s design, the radical personality differences between male and female (in general) and between two individuals (in particular) is simply not strange enough to satisfy a pervert. Rushdoony has a statement where he says that physicians were reporting weirder and weirder levels of sexual freaks as the person resorts to new methods of arousal. In Isherwood’s case, he cites not only same sex attraction, and not only the overleaping of economic class, but he also got a thrill out of going across language barriers in his conquests. The same idea is back of all sin: God is not truly God; the sinner instead is truly God and he will leap across boundaries with impunity. The language fetish is also revealing in what he says about being disappointed to learn German. Ordered knowledge is too, well, orderly. The pervert prefers the thrill of disorder and chaos and wants it to pervade his sexual romps as far as possible.

Hat Tip — Habakkuk Mucklewrath for the analysis