The different meanings and definitions of despair and the people and parts affected

There are many kinds of despair, some holy and some unholy, as one writer distinguishes them. Drawing on Cicero, he defines unholy despair as distress of mind without any expectation of better things: a sickness of the soul without any hope or expectation of improvement. It commonly follows fear: while evil is anticipated, we fear; when it is certain, we despair.

According to Thomas Aquinas, second part of the second part, distinction 40, article 4, it is a withdrawal from the desired thing because it is thought impossible: holding back from what is desired because of some supposed impossibility.

Because they cannot obtain what they want, people become desperate and often either succumb to this passion through death itself or attempt impossible feats beyond human power. In some circumstances this desperate disposition is not much to be condemned: in war it often produces extraordinary courage, as Josephus, The Jewish War, book 1, chapter 14, Lambert Daneau, Political Aphorisms, page 226, and many political writers maintain. It makes people surpass their own courage and turn in a moment from an abandoned, powerless company into conquerors.

The defeated have one hope of safety—to hope for none.

In such circumstances, when they see no escape and must either kill or be killed, they take courage and often beyond hope, beyond all expectation, deliver themselves. Fifteen thousand Locrians fought a hundred thousand Crotoniates. Seeing only one outcome—that they must all die—they resolved not to leave the world unavenged. They launched a desperate assault and defeated their enemies. There was no other cause of their victory, says my authority Justin, than that they had despaired.

When William the Conqueror first landed in England, he sent his ships back so that his soldiers would have no hope of retreat. Bodin excuses his countrymen’s defeat at the famous battle of Agincourt in Henry V’s time by this resort to despair: a few desperate men, surrounded by their enemies and beyond all hope of surviving, fought like so many devils. Of this battle Froissart says, all history could produce nothing like it: history can scarcely parallel how a handful of Englishmen defeated a royal French army.

He therefore warns soldiers never to attack desperate people. Following Frontinus and Vegetius, Guicciardini gives the same advice in his Memoranda, part 2, page 25: do not block an enemy who is withdrawing.

There are many such kinds of despair, when people have lost hope of succeeding in a petition or despaired of better fortune. Despair makes the monk, as the saying goes. Despair also causes death itself: how many thousands in such distress have killed themselves and many others? For someone who cares nothing for his own life has another person’s life at his command.

An Etruscan soothsayer, as Paterculus tells the story, found himself and his dear friend Fulvius Flaccus being taken to prison by Opimius, without hope of pardon. Seeing the young man weep, he said, “Why do you not do this instead?”—do as I do—and dashed his brains out against the doorpost as he entered the prison: striking his head against the prison doorway, he immediately died, his brains spilling out. Thus he died in despair.

But these are broader, less precise uses of the word. When I speak of despair, says Zanchi, I do not mean every kind, but only that which concerns God. It is opposed to hope and is a most destructive sin, through which the devil seeks to entrap people.

Musculus distinguishes four kinds of despair: concerning God, ourselves, our neighbour or anything to be accomplished. But his division can easily be brought under the previous one. All kinds are opposed to hope, that sweet moderator of the passions, as Simonides calls it. I do not mean the empty hope that fanciful people invent for themselves, which according to Aristotle is a dream of the waking, a waking dream;

I mean divine hope, which springs from trust and anchors the drifting soul. Hope sustains farmers: even in earthly affairs hope revives us, but in spiritual matters it gives us still greater life. Without hope we would be the most miserable of all people in this life, as Paul says. Without hope the heart would break; for though they are punished in the sight of men, their hope is nevertheless full of immortality (Wisdom 3:4).

Yet hope does not lift us as high as despair casts us down. This violent, bitter passion of despair is the most grievous of all disturbances, as Patrizi maintains. Some divide it into final and temporary despair. Final despair is incurable and befalls the reprobate; temporary despair is a rejection of hope and comfort for a time, which may befall the best of God’s children. It commonly proceeds from weakness of faith, as when David, in distress, cried, “O Lord, you have forsaken me”—but only for a time.

This ebbs and flows with hope and fear; nevertheless it is a grievous sin. Yet one kind of despair is not wrong: when, says Zanchi, we lose confidence in our own resources and rely wholly upon God. But that is not the kind meant here.

This destructive kind of despair is the subject of our discussion: the soul’s murderer, as Augustine calls it. It is a terrible passion in which the afflicted person believes that death alone can bring relief and is fully resolved to harm himself. So acutely does he feel his burden, and so unable is he to endure his cross, that he hopes death alone will free him from his misery—though the outcome is otherwise—and chooses with Job 6:8–9 and 17:5 to be strangled and die rather than remain in his bonds.

The part affected is the whole soul and all its faculties. Joy, hope, trust, confidence, and present and future good are lost; fear, sorrow and the like take their place, as will be shown under the symptoms. The heart is grieved, the conscience wounded, and the mind darkened by black fumes rising from those unending terrors.