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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Treatment of Despair Through Medicine, Good Counsel, Consolation, and So On.

Melancholy is the devil’s bath, as Serapio holds—the devil’s bath, inviting him into it. Just as a sick person frets and raves during attacks, saying and doing he knows not what, so the devil violently compels such disordered souls to think these damned thoughts against their wills. They cannot help it. Sometimes continuously, sometimes in attacks, he exploits their reduced power to resist: he exaggerates, minimizes, affirms, denies, condemns, confounds the spirits, troubles the heart, brain, humours, organs and senses, and wholly dominates their imaginations.

If such thoughts proceed from the sufferers themselves, they are weaker and more moderate, less violent and monstrous, and less frequent. The devil commonly suggests things contrary to nature, contrary to God and his word: impious, absurd things that a person would never, or could never, conceive unaided. They strike terror and horror into the sufferer’s own heart.

For if the sufferer is asked whether he approves of such thoughts, he answers—and his own soul truly tells him the same—that he abhors them as much as hell and the devil himself. He would gladly think otherwise if he could. He has thought otherwise and desires with his whole soul to think so again; he resists and sometimes has good impulses mingled with the rest.

Thus these blasphemous, impious and unclean thoughts are not his own but the devil’s. They proceed not from him but from a disordered imagination, disturbed humours and black vapours that injure his brain. They are your afflictions and the devil’s sins, and he shall answer for them: he forces you to do what you abhor and have never consented to.

Although he has sometimes attacked so secretly and prevailed so far as to make you assent in some degree to these wicked thoughts and take delight in them, they have not proceeded from a settled will within you; they are thoughts that you afterwards reject and abhor.

Therefore do not be excessively troubled or dismayed by such suggestions, at least if they give you no pleasure, because they are not your personal sins, bringing God’s wrath or displeasure upon you. Disregard and ignore them; let them go as they come. Do not struggle too violently or distress yourself too much. Instead, as our Saviour said to Satan in a similar case, say, Begone, Satan; I detest you and these thoughts.

It is Satan’s part to thrust evil upon us, says Augustine, ours not to consent. As Satan labours to suggest it, so we must strive not to consent, and that will be enough. The more anxious and preoccupied you are, the more perplexed, troubled and entangled you will otherwise become.

Besides, all who are so troubled and disordered must know that, although these are most accursed and grievous sins, they can still be pardoned. Through God’s mercy and goodness they may be forgiven if the sufferers repent and are sorry for them. Paul himself confesses in Romans 7:19: He did not do the good he wished to do, but the evil he did not wish to do; it is not I, but sin dwelling in me.

It is not you, but Satan’s suggestions, his cunning, subtlety and malice. Take comfort, then, if you are penitent and grieved, or desire to be so: these heinous sins will not be charged against you. God’s mercy is above all sins; if you do not finally reject it, you will without doubt be saved.

No one sins against the Holy Spirit except the person who wilfully and finally renounces Christ and despises him and his word to the end, without which there is no salvation. From that grievous sin may God in his infinite mercy deliver us.

Take hold of this as your comfort, and also meditate on God’s word. Strive to pray, repent and be renewed in mind. Guard your heart with all diligence, Proverbs 4:13. Resist the devil and he will flee from you; pour out your soul to the Lord with sorrowful Hannah; pray continually, as Paul commands; and, as David did in Psalm 1, meditate on his law day and night.

Yes, but this very meditation ruins everything when misdirected, making many people far worse. They misunderstand all they read or hear, to their own downfall. The more they search and read Scripture or theological treatises, the more they bewilder themselves, like a bird in a net, becoming more entangled and plunging into this perverse gulf:

Many are called, but few are chosen, Matthew 20:16 and 22:14. Such passages of Scripture, misinterpreted, strike them with horror; they immediately doubt whether they belong to this number. They construct God’s eternal decree of predestination, absolute reprobation and such tables of destiny to their own ruin, and strike against this rock of despair.

How can they be assured of their salvation, and by what signs? If the righteous are scarcely saved, where shall the ungodly and sinners appear? 1 Peter 4:18. Who knows, says Solomon, whether he is among the elect? This grinds their souls. How can they tell that they are not rejected by God? But I ask in return: how can they tell that they are?

No certainty can come from the devil, for he is a liar from the beginning. If he suggests anything of the kind, as he all too often does, reject him as a deceiver and an enemy of humankind. Do not debate with him or believe him; refuse him stubbornly, as Saint Anthony did in the wilderness when the devil attacked him in various shapes, or as the charcoal-burner did. Treat him in the same way.

When the devil tempted him with the weakness of his faith and told him that he could not be saved because he was ignorant of religion’s principles, he pressed him further about what he believed and what he thought of this or that doctrine and mystery. The charcoal-burner said that he believed as the Church did. But what, the devil asked again, does the Church believe? As I do, said the charcoal-burner. And what do you believe? As the Church does, and so on. When the devil could get no other answer, he left him.

If Satan summons you to answer, send him to Christ. Christ is your freedom, your protector against cruel death, raging sin and that roaring lion; he is your righteousness, your Saviour and your life. Though Satan says that you are not among the elect, that you are rejected and forsaken by God, still hold your ground,

13166.The Latin bath image and Burton’s English restatement both remain. The precise Serapio attribution has not been verified. Crazed means impaired or disordered, and fits means episodes or attacks. The catalogue describes Burton’s model of compulsion; it does not establish supernatural causation.

13167.Remiss means slackened or less intense. The contrast in intensity and origin is Burton’s proposed distinction, not a reliable modern means of identifying the cause of an unwanted thought.

13168.The original shifts between singular and plural; the modern text follows the individual sufferer through this sentence. Motions means inward impulses. Approval and resistance, rather than the thought’s mere presence, become central to Burton’s argument.

13170.Crosses means afflictions or burdens. Burton places the moral responsibility outside the unwilling sufferer while also invoking a bodily explanation through humours and vapours. The margin attributes the counsel to Perkins without a precise locator.

13171.A confirmed will is a settled, deliberate disposition. Burton extends the distinction beyond absolute absence of assent to partial or temporary assent that is later rejected. The qualification in some sort is retained.

13172.Avoid is an imperative meaning depart or begone; it does not mean that the sufferer should avoid a place or activity. The phrase recalls Matthew 4:10. Burton qualifies his advice with if they please thee not; that condition is preserved.

13173.The Latin maxim and Burton’s explanatory English both remain. Sollicitous means anxiously concerned. Burton warns that excessive attention to the thoughts can deepen distress. The exact Augustinian source remains for verification.

13174.The quotation combines Romans 7:19 with the following verse, 7:20, and shifts from reporting Paul to his first-person words. Burton turns from denying culpability for involuntary thoughts to the additional assurance of pardon where sin has occurred.

13175.Finally means conclusively or to the end, anticipating the definition in the next sentence. The promise retains Burton’s condition concerning the rejection of mercy.

13177.The scan prints No mans sins, a grammatical irregularity rendered No one sins. Hemmingius is Niels Hemmingsen. Burton gives one theological definition of the sin against the Holy Spirit; the exact passage in Hemmingsen remains unresolved. The marginal prayer names the Lord Jesus Christ and ends Amen, details retained in its translation.

13178.Guarding the heart belongs to Proverbs 4:23, not the printed 4:13. The other allusions are James 4:7, Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 1:15, 1 Thessalonians 5:17 and Psalm 1:2. Printed locators remain visible; the note supplies the distinctions.

13179.Burton now raises a difficulty with his own advice: religious reading can intensify distress when interpreted against oneself. Pusle means puzzle or perplex; precipitated means hurled headlong.

13180.Predestination concerns God’s determination of salvation; reprobation concerns exclusion from it. Fatall tables evokes determinations or registers of destiny, possibly the schemes used to set out such doctrine. Burton’s Matthew 20:16 wording is present in the King James tradition but absent from some modern textual traditions.

13181.The reversal challenges the certainty of self-condemnation. Elect means chosen for salvation. Burton gives no biblical locator for the question attributed to Solomon, and its exact source remains unresolved.

13182.The liar from the beginning recalls John 8:44. Anthony’s resistance to demons in different forms is narrated in Athanasius’s Life of Antony, especially sections 8–10. Collier here is a charcoal-burner; the anecdote’s immediate source is not specified.

13183.The story makes refusal to enter an endless dispute a defence against temptation. The circular exchange is deliberately retained rather than supplied with doctrinal answers absent from the source.

13184.The roaring lion is the devil of 1 Peter 5:8. The modern text makes the shifting references of he explicit so that Christ’s protection is not confused with Satan’s accusation. The following Horatian fragment introduces a protective wall.