Daily Inspiration Quote by Bishop Robert South

“Passion is the drunkenness of the mind” works because it doesn’t argue with passion on moral grounds; it humiliates it on practical ones. Robert South, a hard-edged Anglican polemicist in post-Civil War England, is writing from a culture terrified of disorder: political rebellion is still a fresh trauma, sectarian fervor is a living memory, and “enthusiasm” (then a slur for overheated religious emotion) is treated as a gateway drug to heresy and chaos. In that context, calling passion “drunkenness” is not poetic decoration. It’s a warning label.

The metaphor is calibrated. Drunkenness is voluntary, contagious, and temporarily pleasurable, which lets South concede why passion feels persuasive without granting it authority. It also implies impaired judgment, narrowed attention, and inflated confidence - the classic cocktail of bad decisions. South’s intent is to shift the debate from “How strongly do you feel?” to “How reliably can you think?” He recruits a familiar vice to make an internal state legible as public risk.

The subtext is disciplinary: a mind should be governed, not merely inspired. Passion isn’t framed as evil in itself; it’s framed as a cognitive condition that mimics insight while sabotaging it. That’s a particularly Anglican move, elevating reason and restraint as spiritual technologies. South is less interested in extinguishing desire than in deglamorizing it, stripping passion of its romantic halo and recasting it as self-intoxication - an addiction to one’s own heightened certainty.