rapture

Most people, at least in the United States, are familiar with the word rapture as it relates to the apocalyptic Christian doctrine. But that’s a relatively recent development in theology, starting in the eighteenth century and only picking up steam in the nineteenth, and it is one that is largely restricted to American evangelical churches. The word, however, is much older and its original senses are more familiar globally.

The noun rapture comes from the medieval Latin raptura, appearing in Anglo-Latin in the eighth century, which is the past participle of the verb rapio, meaning to snatch, seize, pillage. The Latin verb is also the source of our verb to rape. And many of the early uses of rapture in English are in reference to the abduction and raping of women.

The earliest use of rapture recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from George Chapman’s 1594 poem Shadow of Night. It appears in the poem’s dedication to his friend Mathew Roydon:

It is an exceeding rapture of delight in the deepe search of knowledge, (none knoweth better then thy selfe sweet Mathew) that maketh men manfully indure th’extremes incident to that Herculean labour.

Chapman, as we shall see, was extraordinarily fond of the word, uses it here in the sense of a condition of delight or enthusiasm. This poem was Chapman’s first significant literary work. He would go on to become famous for being the first to publish complete English translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. (When I was a student at the University of Toronto, the English Department’s softball team was named Chapman’s Homers, the second-best softball team name ever, bested only by the name of the Centre for Medieval Studies’s team, the Papal Bulls.)

But the word has a darker sense, that of abduction and rape, which is just as old as the sense of a state of delight. Francis Sabie, in his 1595 Fissher-mans Tale, writes:

Oh then what massacres of them we made,
Ful thirty thousand Turks we slue before
They entred in the ports of Belo towne,
We rushed in before they shut the gates.
Then cride Mathias, Priams famous towne,
Nere bought so deare the rapture of faire Hellen,
As Belo shall now my Lucinas rape.

And Chapman uses it to refer to sexual violation in his c. 1615 translation of the Odyssey:

For, should ye kill me, in my offred wreake,
I wish it rather; and my death would speake
Much more good of me, then to liue and see,
Indignity, vpon indignity:
My Guests prouok’t with bitter words and blowes;
My women seruants, dragg'd about my house
To lust, and rapture. 

(I warned you that Chapman was extraordinarily fond of the word. He uses it eleven times in his translation of the Odyssey alone.)

The idea of rapture being a carrying off to heaven is almost as old. Chapman uses the phrase divine rapture to refer to the transport of the mind into ecstasy. He does this in the dedication of his 1598 publication of his translation of the description of Achilles’s shield from the eighteenth book of the Iliad: 

Spondanus, one of the most desertfull Commentars of Homer, cals all sorts of all men learned to be iudicial beholders of this more then Artificiall and no lesse then Diuine Rapture; then which nothing can be imagined more full of soule and humaine extraction.

(The Oxford English Dictionary has this citation, but it misidentifies the source as Chapman’s Seauen Bookes of the Iliades of Homere from that same year.)

Chapman’s use in that dedication is still more of transport of the mind to ecstasy than it is a physical carrying off to the heavens, but he uses it in this latter sense in this 1609 poem Euthymiae Raptus; or the Teares of Peace:

Nor how to Humane loue (to Earth now giuen)
A lightening stoop't, and rauisht him to heauen,
And with him Peace, with all her heauenly seede:
Whose outward Rapture, made me inward bleed.

The Christian doctrine of the rapture does not appear until the eighteenth century. We see it in Thomas Broughton’s 1768 A Prospect of Futurity:

I would observe likewise, that, as the Coming of Christ and the Resurrection appear to be coincident Events, and the Change of the living to be the Work of a Moment; it is reasonable to think, that the Change of those, who shall be caught up in the Clouds to meet the Lord in the Air, will be effected at the Instant of, or during their Rapture. The natural Bodies, they had at the Sound of the Trump, will become Spiritual Bodies by the Time of their Junction with the glorious Retinue of their descending Redeemer.

While there is some discussion of the bodily ascension into heaven of the believers among eighteenth-century theologians, the full flowering of the doctrine wouldn’t appear until the nineteenth century and the writings of the dispensationalist theologian John Nelson Darby. In his 1848 An Examination of the Statements Made in the Thoughts on the Apocalypse, by B. W. Newton, Darby writes:

The last paragraph of this chapter first states, as already noticed, without any proof at all, that there are just exactly the two things: Christ secretly exercising the power of God’s throne; or coming forth in the exercise of the power of His own peculiar kingdom, without any transitional state or other condition of things, the one beginning in the instant the other ends. Whereas it is certain that the immensely important fact of the rapture of the church takes place between the two, whatever the interval, and that Christ cannot receive the power of His own peculiar kingdom below, till this has taken place. Nor can this rapture take place till after He has left the throne, from whence it is evident the harvest cannot either (at any rate an important part of it).

The doctrine that the saved will be bodily taken up into heaven has no place in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or the mainline Protestant churches.

Back in 2019, I encountered another use of rapture, one based on the theological concept but used in a completely secular context, that is the exodus from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Burning Man festival. A friend of mine who lives in Berkeley, California posted this on her Facebook feed:

Anyone not getting raptured want to go to Nerd Nite East Bay on Monday?

After someone asked what she was talking about, she went on to explain in a comment:

raptured = the burning man rapture, or what happens to the Bay Area when everyone goes to burning man. Nerd Nite east bay is a monthly night of entertaining science-based presentations. You know, for nerds.

Burning Man, for those unaware, is a week-long festival held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada at the end of August. Tens of thousands of people attend each year. The capstone event of the festival is the burning of a giant, wooden effigy of a man, hence the name. I was very familiar with Burning Man—I’ve never attended myself, but having lived in the Bay Area, I knew many people who went each year—but before her post I’d never heard rapture used to describe the emptying out of the Bay Area each year.

So there you have it. Ecstasy, rape, apocalypse, and Burning Man, all in one word.

Sources:

Broughton, Thomas. A Prospect of Futurity. London: T. Cadell, 1768, 229. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Chapman, George. Achilles Shield. London: John Windet, 1598, sig. A3r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Euthymiæ raptus. London: Humphrey Lownes, 1609, sig. Fv–F2r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Homer’s Odysses. London: Richard Field and W. Jaggard for Nathaniell Butter, 1615, sig. Ee2r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Σκìα Νυκτòς. Shadow of Night. London: Richard Field for William Ponsonby, 1594, sig. A.2. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Darby, John Nelson. “An Examination of the Statements Made in the ‘Thoughts on the Apocalypse," by B. W. Newton” (1848). In The Collected Writings of J. N. Darby, vol. 8. William Kelly, ed. Kingston-on-Thames, England: Stow Hill Bible and Tract Depot, 1971, 1–320 at 16. Archive.org.

Latham, Ronald E., David R. Howlett, and Richard K. Ashdowne. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. raptura, p.ppl. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. rapio, v., raptus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, December 2008, s.v. rapture, n., rapture, v.

Sabie, Francis. The Fissher-mans Tale. London, Richard Johnes, 1595, sig. Cv. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Louis Licherie (1629–87). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.