Rapture

Rapture (pronounced rap-cher)

(1) Ecstatic joy or delight; joyful ecstasy; bliss, beatitude, exaltation.

(2) The carrying of a person to another place or sphere of existence.

(3) In Christian theology, the experience, anticipated by some fundamentalist Christians, of meeting Christ midway in the air upon his return to earth.

(4) The act of carrying off (archaic).

1590: A compound word, the construct being rapt + ure (the suffix -ure was from the Middle English -ure, from the Old French -ure, from the Latin -tūra and was used to create a word meaning (1) a process; a condition; a result of an action or (2) an official entity or function).  Rapt was from the Medieval Latin raptūra, (seizure, rape, kidnapping), from the Classical Latin raptus (a carrying off, abduction, snatching away; rape (the future active participle of rapiō)).  In the sense of “carrying off”, the English use was in parallel with the Middle French rapture with the meaning drawn from the Medieval Latin raptura (seizure, rape, kidnapping, carrying off, abduction, snatching away) and the word rape is a cognate of this.  The sense of "spiritual ecstasy, state of mental transport or exaltation" is recorded by circa 1600 (as “the raptures”), the connecting notion being a sudden or violent taking and carrying away.  The meaning "expression of exalted or passionate feeling" in words or music is from the 1610s and from here it became frequently used in sacred music and art.

El rapto de Europa (The Rape of Europa (1628-1629)), oil on canvas by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Prado Museum, Madrid.  It follows a 1562 work in the same vein by Tiziano Vecelli (circa 1489-1576 and known in English as Titian).

The earliest attested use in English is with women as objects and in the seventeenth century it sometimes carried the meaning of the verb “rape”.  The use of the word “rape” in the sense of “carrying off” in so much art and sculpture from Antiquity and the Middle Ages is the cause of much misunderstanding in modern audiences.  Sense of "spiritual ecstasy or state of mental transport” was first recorded in the 1630s and rapture as a verb meaning "to enrapture, put in a state of rapture" (implied in raptured) became widely used.  The adjective rapturous (ecstatically joyous or exalted) dates from the 1670s, the adverb rapturously having emerged a decade earlier.  The verb enrapture, a creation apparently of the church, is attested from 1740.  The adjective ravishing, dating from the mid fourteenth century and meaning "enchanting, exciting rapture or ecstasy" (present-participle adjective from the verb ravish) is now probably associated with Mills & Boon romances but the origin was sacred, the figurative notion being "carrying off from earth to heaven"; the adverb was ravishingly.

A Rapture, by Stereo Alchemy, starring Lindsay Lohan, Petey Wright, and Sofia Boutella (from the album God of love).  Directed by Yu Tsai.

In Christian eschatology, the rapture refers to the end of days when all Christian believers (both the living and resurrected dead) will rise into the sky and join Christ for eternity, a vision in Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 4:17)). 

Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

Rapturists prefer this to less exclusive second comings such as those mentioned in Second Thessalonians, Matthew, First Corinthians and Revelation.

Home Thoughts from Abroad (1845) by Robert Browning (1812–1889)

I

Oh, to be in England now that April’s there

And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England—now!

II

And after April, when May follows

And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows!

Hark, where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge

Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—

That’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over

Lest you should think he never could re-capture

The first fine careless rapture!

And, though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

All will be gay when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children’s dower,

Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Rapture (2019) by Roberta J Heslop (b 1973), oil & acrylic on canvas.