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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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

But to return to my former task. The final great torment and trouble of a distressed mind is not so much doubt about election, or the belief that the promises of grace have been smothered and extinguished within them—indeed, entirely blotted out—as the heavy wrath of God that also seizes them, an utterly unbearable pain and grief of heart. They think themselves already damned, suffering the pains of hell and more than words can possibly express. They smell sulphur, speak familiarly with devils, hear and see chimeras, monstrous, unfamiliar shapes, bears, owls, grotesques, black dogs and fiends, hideous cries, terrifying noises, shrieks and pitiful lamentations. They are possessed,

and through inability to endure it they roar and howl, curse, blaspheme, deny God, question his power, renounce religion and are constantly ready to harm themselves by hanging, drowning and so on. Never, since the world began, has any miserable person been in so wretched a condition.

I answer such people with God’s mercy and justice: God’s judgments are hidden, not unjust. His counsel is secret and his judgment just; by it he spares some and severely afflicts others in this life. His judgment is to be worshipped and trembled at, not searched out or investigated by mortals. He has reasons reserved to himself that our frailty cannot grasp. He may punish everyone if he wishes, and justly, for sin. When he does so to some, it is to make way for his mercy, so that they may repent and be saved: to heal and test them, exercise their patience and make them call upon him, confess their sins and pray to him,

as David did in Psalm 119:137: Righteous are you, O Lord, and just are your judgments. As the poor tax collector did in Luke 18:13: Lord, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner. To place confidence and assured hope in him, as Job did in 13:15: Though he kill me, I will trust in him. Burn, cut, kill, O Lord, says Augustine, provided you save my soul: kill, cut to pieces and burn my body, O Lord, to save my soul.

A slight illness, one stroke of affliction or a little misery will often humble someone more, convert him sooner and bring him home to knowledge of himself more effectively than all those exhortatory discourses, the entire theory of philosophy, law, medicine and theology, or a world of instances and examples.

Thus what they regard as so unbearable a scourge is a clear sign of God’s mercy and justice, his love and goodness: they would have perished if they had not perished; had they not been brought to ruin in this way, they would have been ruined for ever.

Many a worldly person is lulled asleep in perverse complacency and foolish presumption, numbed by his sins and entirely insensible to them. I have sinned, he says, and what harm will come to me? Ecclesiasticus 5:4. And, Nonsense! How will God know? So, with a reprobate mind, he goes down to hell. But here, Apollo pulls the ear: God pulls them by the ear through affliction and will bring them to heaven and happiness;

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted, Matthew 5:4. Rightly considered, to be troubled in this way is a blessed and happy condition. It is good for me that I have been afflicted, Psalm 119. Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word. Tribulation produces patience, and patience hope, Romans 5:4. Such troubles and calamities drive us away from the stake to which our complacency has tethered us.

Affliction, then, is a school or academy in which the best students are prepared for graduation into divine life. Though it is deeply troublesome and grievous for the time, know that it comes by God’s permission and providence. He witnesses your groans and tears and is always present with you. The very hairs of your head are numbered; not one can fall to the ground without God’s express will. He will not allow you to be tried beyond measure; he disciplines us all by number, weight and measure. The Lord will not extinguish the smouldering wick or break the bruised reed. He tests us, says Augustine, not to overwhelm us, but to crown us; he allows you to be tried for your good.

As a mother treats her sick and weak child, refusing to reject it but watching over and tending it with every tenderness, so God treats us. He does not forsake us in our miseries or abandon us for our imperfections, but supports and receives us with all tenderness and compassion. Those he loves, he loves to the end.

Romans 8: Those he has elected, he has called, justified, sanctified and glorified. Do not think, then, that you have lost the Spirit or that God has forsaken you. Do not be overcome by heaviness of heart, but say with David, I will not fear though I walk in the shadows of death.

We must all pass not from delights to delights, but from the cross to the crown, through hell to heaven, just as the ancient Romans placed the temple of Virtue on the way to the temple of Honour. We must endure sorrow and misery in this life.

This is nothing new. God’s best servants and dearest children have been afflicted and tested in this way. Christ cried out in the garden, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He was God’s Son by nature, as you are by adoption and grace. In his anguish Job said that the arrows of Almighty God were within him, Job 6:4; God’s terrors fought against him and their poison drank up his spirit. In chapter 13:26 he says that God was his enemy and wrote bitter things against him; in 16:9, that he hated him. So heavily had God’s wrath seized his soul.

David complains that his eyes were wasted away and sank into his head, Psalm 6:7; that his moisture became like the drought of summer, his flesh was consumed and his bones tormented. Yet neither Job nor David finally despaired. Job would not let go, but still trusted him, acknowledging him as his good God: The Lord gives, the Lord takes; blessed be the name of the Lord, Job 1:21. See, I am vile; I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes, Job 39:37. David humbled himself, Psalm 31, and received mercy on confessing.

13231.To their thinking and as they suppose mark the sufferer’s experience within Burton’s account. Antiques means grotesque figures; chimeras are fantastic composite creatures. His language of possession belongs to the book’s historical religious and medical framework.

13233.The original prints and and; the accidental repetition is retained at left and reduced to one and in the modern rendering. Impatience here means inability to bear suffering. The final sentence continues the imagined extremity of the sufferer’s complaint.

13234.Oppose means set against as an answer. The Latin maxim is translated before Burton’s English expansion. This is his theological interpretation of affliction; retaining its force does not turn it into a modern explanation of illness.

13235.Publican means tax collector. The Latin prayer and Burton’s separate English version both remain, including their different ordering of the verbs. Burton presents this as an address to God amid affliction, not an instruction to inflict bodily injury. The precise Augustinian source remains unresolved.

13236.Parænetical means exhortatory or intended to urge right conduct; Physick means medicine. The comparison concerns the force of lived affliction against accumulated instruction.

13237.The Latin paradox and its English explanation are separately preserved. The first undoing is temporal distress; the second is final destruction. The claim belongs to Burton’s argument for consolation.

13238.Eccles. here abbreviates Ecclesiasticus, also called Sirach, not Ecclesiastes. Cynthius is Apollo; the phrase comes from Virgil, Eclogue 6.3–4, where the god checks the poet’s ambitions. Burton turns the pagan admonition into an image of divine correction. The following question recalls Psalm 73:11.

13239.The Psalm quotations are 119:71 and 119:67. Burton compresses Romans 5:3–4, omitting the intervening experience or proven character. His abbreviated chain is retained. The stake image presents complacency as a fixed attachment from which suffering drives a person.

13241.Commencements are university degree ceremonies, extended metaphorically to divine life. Number, weight and measure recalls Wisdom 11:20; the numbered hairs and falling image combine gospel assurances. Smoaking flax is a lamp wick. The scan reads coronet, crown, not curet, heal. Exact Augustinian loci remain unverified.

13242.Observe and keep means watch over and care for. Piety here includes compassionate devotion, rather than religious observance alone. The final phrase recalls John 13:1.

13243.Burton adapts Romans 8:29–30: the verse’s sequence is not quoted exactly, and sanctified is added. The final assurance paraphrases Psalm 23:4. His expanded sequence and wording remain in the body.

13244.The paired temples make virtue the necessary route to honour. Here through hell extends the metaphor of extreme suffering in the present life; it should not silently be made into a new doctrine about the afterlife.

13245.The cry of abandonment is spoken on the cross in Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34, not in the garden; Burton’s conflation remains visible. Job 6:4 supplies arrows, poison and terrors. The enemy image is at 13:24; bitter things at 13:26. Visited here means afflicted or tested.

13246.The moisture image is Psalm 32:4; the passage combines several laments. Job 39:37 follows Geneva numbering for what is Job 40:4 in the King James Bible; the added repentance in dust and ashes is Job 42:6. Psalm 31 is retained, though confession and forgiveness particularly recall Psalm 32:5.