I suppose that 'Batter My Heart, three-person'd God' as a homosexual rape
fantasy is a preferable reading to that which conjures up images of
battered cod and deep-fried Mars bars. Doesn't rape have to be
non-consensual but this is more like a plea for the overcoming of false
modesty.
Best wishes,
Richard R
> Hannibal,
>
> Thank you for this explanation. I'm afraid that I betray my lack of
> knowledge of scholarship each time I post a comment to this list. I
> would not have guessed that the readings you describe for either Teresa
> or Donne would exist. But that's surely because I generally shun
> critical writing (I'd read more of it if I could, but I have too little
> time left and too many original texts I still want to study).
>
> Your last statement:
>
>> I think my broad point is that we need to take greater pains to
>> understand early modern religious experience in its own terms.
>
> is so telling. To truly understand religion, or art, or even science
> from late Medieval times within that period's own frame of reference --
> rather than through projection our own age's common viewpoint, with all
> its laughable errors (future generations will readily identify these,
> though we can't easily see them ourselves) -- would appear to be almost
> impossible.
>
> For example, the possibility of a representation such as "Petrarchan"
> appears not to have been conceivable to humans until centuries after
> Petrarch's own time -- if Owen Barfield's study of the past is to be
> believed. In his "History in English Words" he says that the
> identification of a world view with a particular human being was not
> something that was ever conceived until the Renaissance; or, there is
> no record of such a conception prior to that time.
>
> I mean, it wasn't conceivable then that the world could "validly" be
> seen in a "Petrachan" manner or in "Aquinas's way", etc. You couldn't
> just select a perferred point of view and move on, as we do today. No,
> in those times, there was only ONE world, and it existed outside of
> humans, "out there" in the perceivable phenomena. And most of those
> phenomena themselves were actually objective living organisms, or else
> representations of creatures, gods, nymphs, who normally chose to
> remain invisible to humans, wrapping themselves within, or hiding
> behind, the veil of the perceivable phenomena. Try "seeing" the world
> that way today. It's difficult!
>
> Hence, to appreciate what Petrarch, or Dante, or Teresa were
> experiencing and thinking as they wrote their works is indeed almost
> impossible for a modern person. How do we wipe away from our eyes, our
> own vision, the mechanical universe (which didn't exist in Medieval
> times) and see and feel the sun as a living being, image of God, every
> day when we walk outside? How can we read their writings within the
> reference frame of the reality they themselves lived?
>
> It's quite difficult -- if not impossible.
>
> Just one example of our difficulty: invocation of the muses. To us,
> this looks like artifice; perhaps we even think it "cute". I highly
> doubt Medieval and earlier writers looked at it that way. To them, it
> was a prayer to the actual, literal source of the words that would
> (they hoped) be transmitted to them from the gods, which they would
> then record. They conceived themselves as "scribes". Hence, Dante:
>
> When Love inspires me with delight,
> Or pain, or longing, I take careful note,
> And as he dictates in my soul, I write.
>
> [Purgatorio, Canto 24]
>
> I don't think he was lying to us, or saying this with tongue-in-cheek.
> This is how he felt what we would call "the artistic process" happened,
> how he felt his work was formed, deposited within him. His job was not
> to create (only Love and the gods can create realities out of nothing),
> but rather to sift and sort and select and, ultimately, record/write.
>
> Well.. I'm again surely showing my lack of scholarship, since I have
> read almost no criticism of Dante, either! These are merely my own
> opinions.
>
> I do thank you very much, Hannibal, for your very interesting initial
> comment and especially for taking the time to provide further
> explanation.
>
> Regards,
> Kevin
>
> ----------------------------------------------------
>
>
> On Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:37:55 -0500
> HANNIBAL HAMLIN <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Kevin,
>>
>> I didn't express myself very well, I'm afraid. I didn't mean that I
>> don't take her seriously (I do), but that many, especially American
>> academics who assume a particular secular worldview, tend to read her
>> religious experience in non-religious terms (sexual, psychological,
>> political). The same thing has often happened with Donne, another
>> writer who blurs boundaries between the sexual and spiritual/secular
>> and sacred (so that "Batter My Heart," for instance, becomes a
>> homosexual rape fantasy).
>>
>> I think my broad point is that we need to take greater pains to
>> understand early modern religious experience in its own terms.
>>
>> Hannibal
>>
>>
>
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