Subsection 5. Melancholy as a passing state, loosely so called; the different meanings of the word.

Melancholy, the subject of our present discussion, is either a passing state or an established condition. As a passing state, it is the temporary melancholy that comes and goes with every small occasion of sorrow, want, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion or disturbance of mind: any sort of care, discontent or anxious thought that causes anguish, dullness, heaviness and distress of spirit, opposing pleasure, mirth, joy and delight, and making us peevish or dissatisfied. In this loose and imprecise sense, we call someone melancholy who is dull, sad, sour, listless, out of sorts, solitary, or in any way upset or displeased.

No living person is free from these melancholy states: no Stoic, no one so wise, happy, patient, noble-minded, godly or holy that he can claim exemption; no one so composed that he does not, sooner or later, feel its sting in some degree. Melancholy in this sense is the mark of mortality. “Man born of woman is short-lived and full of trouble.”

Zeno, Cato, even Socrates—whom Aelian praises so highly for a balanced temper that nothing could disturb him, always keeping the same serene expression whether coming in or going out, whatever misfortune befell him—were greatly tormented by it, if we may believe Socrates’s disciple Plato.

Quintus Metellus, whom Valerius presents as an example of complete happiness, was the most fortunate man then living: born in the flourishing city of Rome, of noble parentage, handsome, accomplished, healthy, rich and honoured; a senator and consul, fortunate in his wife and children, and so on. Yet even he was not free from melancholy: he had his share of sorrow.

Polycrates of Samos, who threw his ring into the sea so that he might share in other people’s unhappiness, and miraculously recovered it soon afterwards in a fish caught while he was angling, was not free from melancholy states.

No one can cure himself; even the gods had bitter pangs and frequent passions, as their own poets portray them. In general, our life is like the sky: sometimes fair, sometimes overcast, stormy and calm. As a rose has flowers and thorns, and the year brings a mild summer, a harsh winter, drought and then refreshing showers, so our life is interwoven with joys, hopes, fears, sorrows and slanders. Pleasure and pain follow one another in turn.

From the very fountain of delights Something bitter rises to sting amid the flowers.

“Even in the midst of laughter there is sorrow,” as Solomon says. Even amid all our feasting and merriment, as Augustine concludes in his commentary on Psalm 41, there is grief and discontent. “Among our delights, something cruel is always choking us.” Here, for a pint of honey you will probably find a gallon of gall; for a dram of pleasure, a pound of pain; for an inch of mirth, an ell of mourning. These miseries wind around our life as ivy winds around an oak.

It is utterly absurd and ridiculous for any mortal to expect an uninterrupted course of happiness in life. Nothing is so prosperous and pleasant that it contains no bitterness, no cause for complaint or discontent. Everything is bittersweet, a mixture of feelings, like the black and white squares of a chessboard. People, families and cities have their falls and declines: now trines and sextiles, then squares and oppositions.

We are not here like the angels, the celestial powers and heavenly bodies, the sun and moon, completing our course without mishap and continuing steadily for so many ages. We are subject to infirmities and miseries, interrupted, tossed and tumbled up and down, blown about by every little gust, often troubled and unsettled by the slightest occasion: uncertain and fragile, as is everything we trust in.

Anyone who does not know this, and is not prepared to endure it, is unfit to live in this world—as one writer laments of our times. He does not understand its nature: pleasure and pain are always linked, following one another in a circle. Leave the world, then; be gone from here if you cannot bear it.

There is no escaping it: you must arm yourself with patience and courage, stand firm against it, and endure hardship as a good soldier of Christ, as Paul advises, bearing it steadfastly.

But so few can accept this good counsel or put it into practice. Instead, like so many brute beasts, they give way to their passions, willingly subjecting themselves to them and plunging into a labyrinth of cares, woes and miseries. They allow these to overwhelm their souls and cannot arm themselves with the patience they should. It therefore often happens that these passing states become established conditions.

As Seneca observes, repeated emotional disturbances, when neglected, become a disease. Just as a single catarrhal discharge, not yet habitual, produces a cough, while a persistent and long-standing one causes a wasting disease of the lungs, so do these provocations to melancholy. People are affected more or less according to the strength or weakness of the humour itself, and the ability of their bodily constitution or rational soul to resist it.

What is no more than a flea bite to one person causes unbearable torment to another. What one can readily overcome through exceptional moderation and composure, another cannot endure at all. At the slightest occasion of supposed insult, injury, grief, disgrace, loss, setback, rumour and the like—especially if solitary or idle—he gives way so far to emotion that his bodily constitution changes, his digestion is impaired, his sleep disappears, his spirits grow clouded, his heart heavy, and the regions beneath his ribs become disordered. Wind and indigestion suddenly assail him, and melancholy overwhelms him.

It is like a man imprisoned for debt: once he is in jail, every creditor will bring a claim against him and probably keep him there. If any discontent takes hold of a sufferer, all other disturbances immediately attack him—for “they rush through the opening they are given.” Then, like a lame dog or a goose with a broken wing, he droops and wastes away, until he is brought into that unhealthy established condition, the disease of melancholy itself.

Thus, just as the philosophers distinguish eight degrees of heat and cold, we may distinguish eighty-eight of melancholy, according to the different ways the affected parts are seized by it, or have been plunged more or less deeply into this hellish gulf, or have waded further into it.

But all these melancholy fits—however pleasing at first, or displeasing, violent and tyrannical towards those they seize for a time—are called melancholy only in a loose sense, as are the people affected by them. They do not last, but come and go as particular things provoke them. The melancholy we shall examine is an established condition, a serious or chronic illness: a lasting disease, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, fixed rather than wandering. Just as it took a long time to develop, so now, whether pleasant or painful, having become established, it will be hard to remove.