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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Subsection 4. Sorrow as a Cause of Melancholy.

Subsection 4. Sorrow as a cause of melancholy.

In this catalogue of passions that so greatly torment the human soul and cause this illness—for I shall speak briefly of them all, in order—sorrow may justly claim first place within the irascible appetite. An inseparable companion, it is melancholy’s mother and daughter, its epitome, symptom and principal cause, as Hippocrates puts it. They beget one another and move in a circle, for sorrow is both a cause and a symptom of this disease. How it is a symptom will be shown in its proper place.

That it is a cause, everyone acknowledges. “Grief has caused madness in some people, and other incurable diseases,” says Plutarch to Apollonius. A cause of madness, a cause of many other diseases, and a cause sufficient by itself to produce this affliction: so Lemnius calls it. So do Rhazes in the Continens, book 1, treatise 9, and Guianerius in treatise 15, chapter 5. Once it takes root, it ends in despair, as Felix Platter observes, and may well be coupled with despair, as in the Tablet of Cebes.

Chrysostom, in his seventeenth letter to Olympias, describes it as a cruel torture of the soul, a grief beyond expression, a poisonous worm consuming body and soul and gnawing the very heart; a perpetual executioner, unending night, profound darkness, a whirlwind, a tempest, an unseen fever burning more fiercely than any fire, and a battle without end. It tortures more cruelly than any tyrant: no torment, no strappado, no bodily punishment compares with it.

It is unquestionably the eagle that the poets imagined gnawing Prometheus’s heart; and no heaviness compares with heaviness of heart, Ecclesiasticus 25:15–16. Every disturbance is a misery, but grief is a cruel torment, a domineering passion. Just as in ancient Rome all lesser magistracies ceased when a dictator was appointed, so when grief appears all other passions vanish. It dries up the bones, says Solomon in Proverbs 17. It makes its sufferers hollow-eyed, pale and thin, furrows their faces, gives them lifeless looks, wrinkled brows, shrivelled cheeks and dried-out bodies, and utterly disorders their constitution.

As Eleanor, that sorrowful exiled duchess, laments to her noble husband Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in the work of our English Ovid:

If you saw those eyes whose sweet and cheerful look Once gave you, Duke Humphrey, such joy and pleasure, Grief has stripped me of all beauty so completely You could not say, “This was my Eleanor’s face.” Like a hideous Gorgon, and so on.

It hinders digestion, chills the heart, takes away appetite, colour and sleep, thickens the blood—Fernel, On the Causes of Diseases, book 1, chapter 18—contaminates the spirits, according to Piso, overthrows the natural heat, destroys the healthy condition of body and mind, and makes people weary of life, crying out, howling and roaring from sheer anguish of soul.

David confessed as much in Psalm 38:8: “I have roared because of the very unrest of my heart.” And in Psalm 119, part 4, verse 4: “My soul melts away from sheer heaviness”; verse 38: “I am like a wineskin in the smoke.” Antiochus complained that he could not sleep and that his heart fainted with grief. Christ himself, “a man of sorrows,” sweated blood through the apprehension of grief, Mark 14. His soul was sorrowful to the point of death, and no sorrow equalled his.

Crato, in consultation 21, book 2, gives an example of someone made melancholy by grief; and Montanus, in consultation 30, of a noblewoman whose illness had no other cause. I. S. D., in Hildesheim, completely cured a patient who had been severely troubled with melancholy for many years. But afterwards a slight occasion for sorrow brought back his former attacks, and he suffered as before.

Examples abound of sorrow causing melancholy, despair and sometimes death itself; for “Death comes from heaviness,” Ecclesiasticus 38:15. “Worldly sorrow causes death,” 2 Corinthians 7:10. “My life is wasted with heaviness, and my years with mourning,” Psalm 31:10. Why was Hecuba said to have been turned into a dog, or Niobe into a stone, except that grief left her numb and senseless? The emperor Severus died of grief—and how many tens of thousands besides?

So fierce is his grief, so great its madness.

Melanchthon gives the reason: a great quantity of melancholy blood gathers around the heart, and this accumulation extinguishes the good spirits, or at least dulls them. Sorrow strikes the heart, makes it tremble and waste away in great pain. The black blood drawn from the spleen and spread beneath the ribs on the left side causes those dangerous hypochondriacal convulsions that occur in people troubled by sorrow.

2823.Burton puts sorrow within the irascible appetite here, although Aquinas’s division in the preceding subsection places it in the concupiscible faculty (I–II, q. 23). The discrepancy is preserved. The reference to Hippocrates concerns prolonged fear and despondency; the elaborate reciprocal “mother and daughter” model is Burton’s exposition, not presented here as a literal Hippocratic quotation.

2827.“Table” means a depicted scene: the Tablet attributed to Cebes is an allegorical account of human life, populated by personified conditions and choices. Burton groups Grief with Despair; his exact Latin wording remains uncollated. The preceding saying is located in Consolation to Apollonius 2, 102C, transmitted among Plutarch’s works, where it forms part of a quotation from a poet. The Latin version used by Burton remains unidentified.

2829.Olympias was the recipient of Chrysostom’s letters from exile. The letter number and Burton’s Latin wording remain to be collated. “Ague” means fever here; the strappado was a form of suspension torture. The escalating images preserve Burton’s account of grief as both bodily and spiritual torment.

2832.“Temperature” means the balance or constitution of the humours, not a thermometer reading; “riveled” means shrivelled. Ecclesiasticus is also called Sirach. Burton’s biblical numbering is preserved pending version-by-version collation; the proverb about dried bones is Proverbs 17:22. His Prometheus allusion makes the heart the seat of grief.

2834.Burton’s “English Ovid” is Michael Drayton; the speaker is Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, in a verse epistle to Humphrey. A Gorgon is a terrifying mythological figure. The fifth quoted line, “Like a foule Gorgon, &c.”, is visible in the scan and is retained; the precise Drayton edition remains to be collated.

2838.“Concoction” means digestion, “stomack” appetite, and “natural heat” the innate warmth believed to sustain life. Burton’s unmatched closing parenthesis after Piso is retained on the original side and resolved syntactically in modern English.

2840.Psalm 119, part 4, verse 4 corresponds to verse 28: the psalm’s fourth group of eight verses begins at verse 25. The following printed “38” is an apparent reversal of 83, the wineskin passage. Burton’s reference is preserved in the body. The sweating of blood belongs to Luke 22:44; Mark 14:34 supplies the sorrow unto death. “Man of sorrows” recalls Isaiah 53:3. The marginal “Marc. 6. 16. 11.” is defective; Antiochus’s sleepless grief is in 1 Maccabees 6:10–11.

2844.The physicians’ cases illustrate both an onset attributed to grief and a relapse after apparent recovery. I. S. D. remains unidentified; the initials are retained rather than expanded speculatively. The precise Crato, Montanus and Hildesheim cases await source collation.

2848.The death-from-sorrow wording appears at Sirach 38:18 in the consulted numbering, rather than Burton’s 38:15. Hecuba and Niobe illustrate emotional numbness; “stupid” means stupefied. Herodian 3.15.1–2 describes Severus’s illness, Caracalla’s attempt to hasten his death, and his end chiefly through grief. This supports the substance of Burton’s reference, without identifying his Latin version. Bizzarri’s Bothwell passage remains unlocated.

2849.Adapted from Statius, Silvae 5.5.23. The consulted Latin reads “tanta mihi feritas” (“such fierceness in me”); Burton substitutes “illi est,” shifting the reference to another person. The modern version follows Burton’s altered text.

2851.“Hypochondriacal” refers to the region beneath the ribs. Melanchthon’s Book on the Soul, Corpus Reformatorum 13, columns 126 and 129, supplies the stricken heart and humour drawn from the spleen. Column 129 describes obstructions and dangerous hypochondriacal diseases, rather than Burton’s flatus or convulsions. The consulted witness therefore confirms the account’s substance, but does not settle Burton’s wording or source edition. The English and marginal Latin remain separately translated as printed.