Faith & Spirit Quote by Mary Astell

Astell’s line hits like a polished blade: it weaponizes devotional language against the everyday bargaining women were expected to do with their own desires. “The Soul debases her self” isn’t gentle piety; it’s a charge of self-betrayal. By personifying the soul as “her,” Astell makes the spiritual argument unmistakably gendered. In a culture that trained women to treat marriage, male approval, and social status as destiny, she reframes misplaced attachment as a kind of internal humiliation: the self lowering itself to something smaller than it is.

The intent is double. On the surface, it’s orthodox: love God above all. Underneath, it’s a critique of how women are taught to misdirect their capacity for devotion. Astell’s era prized female “virtue” while limiting female agency; devotion became one of the few sanctioned forms of intensity. The subtext is that women’s affections are not trivial ornaments but powerful forces that can either ennoble or enslave. If you must give your heart, she implies, don’t hand it to a husband, a fashion, a court, or a reputation that can be revoked on a whim.

The rhetorical trick is austerity: “any thing but her creator” leaves no loopholes, no sentimental exceptions. It’s also shrewdly protective. By anchoring dignity in relation to God, Astell offers a form of independence that a patriarchal society can’t easily confiscate. In that sense, the quote is both devotional and insurgent: a moral rule that smuggles in a politics of self-respect.