SUBSECTION 4. Prognosis of Religious Melancholy.

You can infer the prognosis from the symptoms. What can these signs predict but folly, mental confusion, madness, gross ignorance, despair, obstinacy, a corrupt understanding and a bad end? What else can superstition and heresy produce but wars, riots, disturbances, tormented souls, despair and a desolate land, as Jeremiah teaches in chapter 7, verse 34, when people practise idolatry and follow their own ways?

How could it be otherwise for them? What can they expect but blight, famine, scarcity and all the plagues of Egypt, as Amos declares in chapter 4, verses 9–10, and to be led into captivity? If our hopes are disappointed, if we sow much and harvest little, eat but do not have enough, drink but are not satisfied, clothe ourselves but are not warm, and so on, Haggai 1:6; if we expect much and it comes to little, why is this? His house lay waste while they attended to their own houses, verse 9; therefore heaven withheld its dew and the earth its fruit.

Because we are superstitious and irreligious and do not serve God as we ought, all these plagues and miseries fall upon us. What else can we expect but wars against one another, slaughter, dreadful deaths in this life and eternal damnation in the next? What but superstition has caused so many bloody battles and so much Christian bloodshed? The Spanish Inquisition, racks, breaking wheels, tortures and torments—where do they come from? From superstition.

The Frenchman Bodin, in his Method of History, calls the English barbarians because of their civil wars. But let him read about those battles like Pharsalus fought recently in France over religion, and their massacres, in which, by their own accounts, countless millions have perished in twenty-four years—whole families and cities—and he will find that ours were mere skirmishes beside theirs.

But heretics and idolaters have always made it their practice, when punished for their sins and visited by God’s just judgments, to acknowledge no fault in themselves and put all the blame on others. In Cyprian’s time he and an idolater called Demetrius disputed intensely about who caused the calamities of their day. Demetrius blamed the Christians for everything, as people always did in the early Church, as the first book of Arnobius shows.

There were no longer the usual winter rains or ripening summer heat, such seasonable springs or fruitful autumns; no marble quarries in the mountains, less gold and silver than before; farmers, sailors and soldiers were all in short supply; justice, friendship and skill in the arts had all declined. This was the Christians’ fault, and all their other miseries came from them, because you do not worship our gods—because they did not worship their gods.

But Cyprian turns it all back upon him, as his treatise against him shows. It is true that the world is miserably tormented and shaken by wars, scarcity, famine, fire, floods and plagues, and that many deadly diseases rage among us; but these things happen, not as you complain because your gods are not worshipped by us, but because God is not worshipped by you, who neither seek nor fear him.

Not, as you complain, because we do not worship your gods, but because you are idolaters and do not serve the true God, neither seeking nor fearing him as you ought. Our Catholics bring the same charge against us and call us heretics, as we do them. The Turks regard both as unbelievers, and we regard them as a crowd of pagans; the Jews oppose everyone.

Yet in truth there is a common fault in us all, and something even in the best of us that may justly deserve God’s wrath and bring these miseries down upon our heads. I will say nothing here of those futile anxieties, torments, needless works, penance, pilgrimages, false martyrdom and so on. We heap unnecessary troubles and observances upon ourselves.

We punish our bodies, as a man in Turkey did, according to Busbecq’s Turkish Embassy, Letter 3. He was very fond of music and of hearing boys sing, but very superstitious. An old sibyl, or holy woman, came to his house—the place produces many such women—rebuked him for it and told him he would suffer for it in the next world. He immediately threw all his rich and costly instruments, decorated with jewels, into the fire.

He was served from silver plate and had magnificent household furnishings. A little later another religious man rebuked him in the same way, and thereafter he was served in earthenware. Finally a decree was issued that, since the Turks themselves could not drink wine, no Jew or Christian living in Constantinople could drink any wine either.

Similarly, among Catholics fasting was first recommended in general as a good thing, then abstinence from particular foods at fixed times, and finally imposed so rigorously that it bound consciences under threat of damnation. First Friday, says Erasmus, then Saturday, and now Wednesday is in danger—Wednesday is now in danger of becoming a fast day.

Over such trifles some afflict themselves so miserably that they fall into despair and even death rather than transgress, thinking themselves good Christians in doing so, when in fact they are superstitious Jews.

So says Leonhard Fuchs, a distinguished physician of his time: We are tortured in Germany by these papal decrees; our bodies are so weakened and our possessions so reduced that, if God had not sent that worthy man Luther in time to remedy these evils, we would by now have been eating hay with our horses.

In fasting and in every other superstitious ordinance, we torment one another without cause, depriving ourselves of many good and lawful things, innocent sports, pleasures and recreations. Why did God create them, if not for our use? Feasts, merriment, music, hawking, hunting, singing, dancing and so on: God does not merely provide for our necessities; we are lovingly supplied with delights, as Seneca observes. God intended it so.

And as Plato says in book 2 of the Laws, the gods took pity on humanity’s toilsome life. In compassion for the human condition, the gods sent Apollo, Bacchus and the Muses, to lead us in joyful dances, to make merry with mortals, to sing and dance with us.