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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Symptoms of Despair: Fear, Sorrow, Suspicion, Anxiety, Horror of Conscience…

Symptoms of despair: fear, sorrow, suspicion, anxiety, horror of conscience, terrifying dreams and visions.

As shoemakers, whenever they deliver shoes, keep crying that leather grows dearer and dearer, so I may justly speak of these symptoms of melancholy. Those of despair are the most violent, tragic and grievous, far beyond the rest. They can be expressed only negatively, as the loss of all happiness, and are unbearable: for who can bear a wounded spirit? Proverbs 18:19.

Consider what Timanthes did in his picture of Iphigenia about to be sacrificed. Having painted Calchas mourning, Ulysses sad and Menelaus most sorrowful of all, and displayed all his skill in expressing different emotions, he covered the head of the maiden’s father, Agamemnon, with a veil and left each spectator to imagine his feelings. Such true emotion and sorrow in their highest degree, as his were, could not be portrayed by any art.

What he did in his picture, I will do in describing the symptoms of despair. Imagine whatever you can: fear, sorrow, furies, grief, pain, terror, anger; all that is dismal, ghastly, wearisome and distressing. It is not enough; it falls far short. No tongue can tell it, no heart conceive it. It is hell in miniature, an extract, a pure essence, a compound, a mixture of every deadly affliction, cruel torture, plague and bewilderment.

There is scarcely an illness for which medicine offers no remedy; for every wound, surgery will provide a salve. Friendship helps poverty; hope of freedom eases imprisonment; petitions and influence reverse banishment; authority and time wear away disgrace. But what medicine, surgery, wealth, favour or authority can relieve, sustain, soothe or dispel a troubled conscience? A peaceful mind cures all those troubles, but all of them together cannot comfort a distressed soul. Who can silence the voice of despair?

Everything found separately in other forms of melancholy—the horrible, dreadful, pestilential, cruel and savage—comes together in this. It exceeds even melancholy in its highest degree: a burning fever of the soul. They are driven mad by this misery, says Jacchinus, who lists fear, sorrow and despair among melancholy’s ordinary symptoms. They suffer great mental pain and horror, disturbance of soul and restlessness, full of unceasing fears, cares, torments and anxieties. These prevent them from eating, drinking or sleeping; they find no rest,

Unceasing impiety does not stop even at mealtime; Frenzied rest and raging dreams torment them.

Neither in bed nor at the table Will despair allow any rest.

Fear takes away their contentment, dries their blood, wastes their marrow and changes their appearance. Even amid their greatest pleasures—singing, dancing and lovemaking—their souls remain tormented, says Lemnius.

It consumes them entirely. I am like a pelican in the wilderness, says David of himself in temporary distress, an owl because of your indignation. Psalm 102, verses 8 and 10; and Psalm 55:4: My heart trembles within me, and the terrors of death have come upon me; fear and trembling have come upon me, and so on. At death’s door, Psalm 107:18: Their soul loathes every kind of food.

Their sleep, if they get any, is disturbed by terrifying dreams and fears. Peter slept peacefully in chains because he knew God protected him. Cicero likewise argues for Roscius of Ameria’s innocence—that he did not kill his father—because he slept so peacefully.

Those martyrs in the early Church were cheerful and joyful in the midst of persecution. But it is very different with these people: tossed endlessly on a sea without rest or respite, they can think of nothing pleasant. Their conscience will not let them be at peace. In perpetual fear and anxiety, if they have not yet been arrested, they constantly fear that they will be, and are ready to give themselves away. Like Cain, they think everyone will kill them:

And roar from grief of heart, Psalm 38:8, as David did, and as Job did, 20.3.21.22, and so on: Why is light given to someone in misery, and life to those with heavy hearts, who long for death and, if it does not come, search for it more than for treasure, and rejoice when they can find the grave? They are generally weary of life, with trembling hearts, sorrowful minds and little or no rest.

Terror and trembling everywhere, fear on every side and terror all around.

Fears, terrors and alarms in every place, at every time and season. Many stubbornly reject food and drink, looking for a knot in a bulrush and imagining guilt where none exists, as Weyer writes in On Witches, book 3, chapter 7. Many of them refuse food and drink and cannot rest, continually magnifying and imagining serious offences where there are none.

God’s fierce wrath burns within their souls, and despite their continual prayers and appeals to Christ Jesus, they find no release or relief, only intolerable torment and unbearable anguish of conscience. Unable to endure it, they often murmur against God, rave, blaspheme, become atheists and seek to harm themselves. Deuteronomy 28:65–66: In the morning they wish for evening, and in the evening for morning, because of what their eyes see and the fear in their hearts.

Marin Mersenne, in his commentary on Genesis, mentions a despairing friend whom he went with others to visit and encourage to patience. When they urged him to trust in God, he burst into blasphemous, atheistic speeches, too dreadful to relate: Who is this God, he said, that I should serve him? What good will it do if I pray? If he is present, why does he not help? Why does he not free me, worn out by imprisonment, hunger and squalor? What have I done? And so on. Away from me with such a God!

Another acquaintance of his broke out into similar atheistic blasphemies: after his wife’s death he raved and cursed, heedless of what he said or did. For the most part, so it is with them all. Many, at their worst, think they hear cries and see visions, converse with devils, and are tormented, possessed and already in hellfire, damned and utterly forsaken by God. They feel no mercy or grace and have no hope of salvation. Their sentence of condemnation, they believe, has already been passed and cannot be revoked; the devil will certainly have them.

13013.The shoemaker’s ever-rising price introduces Burton’s claim to an ever-higher degree of suffering. The quoted biblical verse is Proverbs 18:14, although the source prints 18:19. The printed citation remains in the text; the subsection on prognosis that follows later gives 18:14.

13015.Pliny, Natural History 35.73, describes Timanthes’s painting and the veiled father; the margin uses an older chapter division. Burton’s Chalcas is rendered Calchas. Deciphered means depicted or represented. The example concerns the limits of representation, which Burton applies to despair.

13016.Epitome is a condensed representation; quintessence is the purest concentrated essence. Feral means deadly or disastrous here. The accumulation of images is preserved rather than reduced to a diagnostic label.

13017.Physick is medicine; chirurgery is surgery. Burton’s absolute claims form part of this rhetorical description. They should be read alongside his later subsection on treatment, where medicine and counsel work together.

13019.The Latin adjectives are all translated. Jacchinus is cited through his commentary on Rhazes; the compressed marginal locator is retained pending direct collation.

13021.The first line adapts Juvenal, Satire 13.211, printing impietas, impiety, where the consulted Latin text has anxietas, anxiety. The second adapts Lucan, Civil War 7.764, changing quos agitat to exagitat; the marginal citation names only Juvenal. The source reading is retained and translated, rather than silently corrected. The following English couplet is Burton’s separate rendering.

13023.The bodily effects reflect the physiological account transmitted by Burton and Lemnius. Countenance is facial appearance; dalliance here is amorous intimacy. The margin names embraces with a spouse; its abbreviated hujus is expanded in transcription.

13024.Burton combines phrases and locators. The pelican and owl occur at Psalm 102:6; wrath at 102:10. The next quotation spans Psalm 55:4–5. His printed references remain. Meats means foods generally. Temporally here indicates distress for a time.

13026.Peter’s sleep in chains is in Acts 12:6. Tully is Cicero. In For Sextus Roscius 23.64–65, the sleeping sons are the two sons of Titus Caelius, introduced as a comparison in Roscius’s defence. Burton transfers the circumstance to Roscius himself; that alteration is preserved and identified.

13029.Primitive Church means the early Church. Cain’s fear is in Genesis 4:14. The sentence’s apprehended means arrested. Burton’s Seneca margin gives letter 106, but the relevant passage is Moral Letters 105.7–8; the original locator is retained. The unanchored Philostratus margin has been placed with the preceding passage on troubled sleep; its parallel is Life of Apollonius 7.14, rather than the printed book 1.

13030.The printed Job locator is disordered. The quoted questions and longing correspond to Job 3:20–22. Burton’s sequence of numbers remains in both columns, with the correct location supplied here.

13031.The Latin line’s repeated sounds and words reinforce the sense of inescapable fear. Its exact source remains unlocated. Burton follows it with an English restatement, which is retained separately.

13032.Wierus is Johann Weyer. The proverbial knot in a bulrush means inventing a difficulty where there is none. Burton explicitly describes imagined guilt, a qualification important to the surrounding discussion. The printed short title and locator remain for edition-specific verification.

13033.The biblical wording about morning and evening comes from Deuteronomy 28:67, following the fear described in verses 65–66. Burton’s locator is retained. The paragraph states his theological interpretation of the suffering and its possible consequences.

13035.Mercennus is Marin Mersenne. The first-person questions belong to the distressed friend quoted within Mersenne’s account, not to Burton. Although Burton calls the words too fearful to relate, he then gives them in Latin; that contradiction is retained, and the Latin is fully translated.

13036.The account continues to report what the sufferers think and feel. The translation makes that framing clear without replacing Burton’s historical language with modern diagnoses. His sweeping generalization, for the most part, remains.