Subsection 11. The concupiscible appetite: desires and ambition as causes.

These concupiscible and irascible appetites are like the two strands of a rope, intertwined with one another and both winding around the heart. Both are good, as Augustine holds in The City of God, book 14, chapter 9, if moderate; both are harmful if excessive. However much the concupiscible appetite may seem to offer pleasure and delight, and however often our desires please us by presenting an attractive object, when carried to extremes they torture and torment us in their turn.

It is truly said that desire has no rest: it is infinite in itself, endless; as one writer calls it, a perpetual rack, or, according to Augustine, a horse-mill, always going round in a circle. These desires are as varied as they are continual. “I could more easily count the atoms,” says Bernard, “than the movements of the heart: now I think of this, now of that.” You might as well count the motes in a sunbeam as count them.

It extends to anything sought excessively, according to Guaineri, or to any ardent desire, as Fernel interprets it. Whatever its kind, it tortures us if immoderate and, according to Platter and others, is a particular cause of melancholy. “My thoughts are torn apart by my many desires”: Augustine confessed that his manifold desires tore him to pieces.

Bernard likewise complains that they would not let him rest for a minute: I would have this, and that; then I wish to be this sort of person, then that. It is therefore hard to set limits to desires: they are so various and numerous that it is impossible to grasp them all. I shall dwell only on a few of the chief and most harmful kinds, such as that excessive appetite and desire for honour which we commonly call ambition;

love of money, which is covetousness, and that greedy desire for gain; self-love, pride and the excessive desire for vain glory or applause; excessive love of study; and love of women, which will require a whole volume to itself. I shall speak briefly of the others in their order.

Ambition: a proud covetousness, or a parching thirst for honour; a great torture of the mind, composed of envy, pride and greed. One defines it as a splendid madness, a pleasant poison; Ambrose, as a canker of the soul, a hidden plague; Bernard, as a secret poison, the father of spite and mother of hypocrisy, the moth that eats holiness, and a cause of madness, crucifying and disturbing everyone it seizes.

Seneca calls it “an anxious, fearful, empty, windy thing”: a windy thing, a vain, anxious and fearful thing. For those who, like Sisyphus, roll this restless stone of ambition are commonly in perpetual anguish, always perplexed—“always they withdraw silent and sad,” as Lucretius says—uncertain, timid, suspicious, afraid to give offence in word or deed.

They are always lying and wheedling, embracing, doffing their caps, bowing and scraping, applauding, flattering, smiling ingratiatingly, visiting and waiting at people’s doors, all affability, feigned integrity and humility. If that will not do—if once this disposition possesses his thirsty soul, as Cyprian describes it, “when the brine of ambition possesses a soul eager to drink”—he will gain his object by hook or by crook. He will climb from his hole to every honour and office, if he can get up at all: flattering one person, bribing another, leaving no means untried to win everything.

It is astonishing how slavishly such men submit to every subordinate when pursuing a petition: the pains they take, running, riding, calculating, plotting, counterplotting, protesting and swearing, vowing and promising; the labours they undergo, up early and down late. How obliging and affable, how friendly and courteous they are; how they grin and smile ingratiatingly at everyone they meet! With all their feasts and invitations, they exhaust themselves and their fortunes in seeking what they would often be much better without, as the orator Cineas told Pyrrhus.

What sleepless nights, painful hours, anxious thoughts and bitterness of mind consume the time they spend waiting, distracted and exhausted “between hope and fear”! There can be no greater present torment. If they do obtain the object of their petition, sought at such expense and with such anxiety, they are still not free. Their anxiety must begin again, for they are never satisfied: “they breathe nothing but power.” Their thoughts, actions and efforts are all directed towards sovereignty and honour.

Like Ludovico Sforza, that swaggering Duke of Milan, a man of exceptional wisdom but deep ambition, born to his own destruction and Italy’s, they will struggle on even at the cost of their own ruin and their friends’ undoing. They cannot stop. Like a dog in a wheel, a bird in a cage or a squirrel on a chain—Budé’s comparisons—they climb and climb with great effort, but never finish, never reach the top.

A knight would become a baronet, then a lord, then a viscount, then an earl, and so on; a doctor, a dean, then a bishop; from tribune to praetor, from bailiff to mayor: first this office, then that. Like Pyrrhus in Plutarch, they must first have Greece, then Africa, then Asia. They swell like Aesop’s frog until at last they burst, or come down with Sejanus “to the Gemonian Steps” and break their own necks.

Or they are like Evangelus the piper in Lucian, who blew his pipe until he fell down dead. If the ambitious man happens to fail and suffer a rebuff, he finds a hell on the other side: so dejected that he is ready to hang himself, become a heretic, a Muslim or a traitor in an instant. Enraged against his enemies, he rails, swears, fights, slanders, disparages, envies and murders.

For his own part, “if he cannot satisfy his appetite, he is seized by madness”: if he cannot satisfy his desire, as Bodin writes, he goes mad. So, either way, success or failure, he is distraught for as long as his ambition lasts. He can expect nothing but anxiety and care, discontent and grief in the meantime, and madness itself or a violent death at the end.

The results are commonly seen in populous cities and princes’ courts. For a courtier’s life, as Budé describes it, is a hotchpotch of ambition, lust, fraud, imposture, deceit, detraction, envy and pride; the court, a common gathering place for flatterers, time-servers, schemers and the like—or, as Antonio Pérez has it, the suburbs of hell itself. If you want to see such discontented people, you are likely to find them there.

And as the poet observed of the marketplaces of ancient Rome: Whoever wants to meet a perjurer, I send to the Comitium; For a liar and braggart, go to Cloacina’s shrine; For rich, spendthrift husbands, look beneath the basilica, and so on.

Perjured rogues, hired false witnesses, liars, boasters, spendthrifts and the like each keep to their particular stations. They still do, and always have, in every commonwealth.