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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Subsection 2 Love’s Origin, Object, Definition and Divisions

“Nothing can please our ears or soothe our minds more than music.” Fine houses, pictures, orchards, gardens and fields, a fine hawk or a fine horse are most welcome to us. Whatever pleases our eyes and ears we call beautiful and fair. “Pleasure belongs to the other senses, but grace and beauty to these two alone.” As the objects vary and differ, so they affect our eyes, ears and soul itself in different ways.

This leads some to distinguish as many kinds of love as there are objects. One beauty arises from God; on this and on divine love Saint Dionysius, many Church Fathers and more recent writers have written whole volumes—On the Love of God, as they call them—and many works of exhortation. Another arises from his creatures. There is beauty of the body, beauty of the soul and beauty arising from virtue, “the beauty of the martyrs,” Augustine calls it, “which we see with the eyes of the mind”: which we see with our mind’s eyes. This beauty, Cicero says, if we could perceive it with our bodily eyes, “would awaken wondrous love for itself”: it would arouse wonderful affections and transport our souls.

This other beauty, arising from outward parts, and the graces proceeding from the gestures, speech, various movements and proportions of creatures, of men and women—especially women, which made the ancient poets always place the three Graces in Venus’s company, attending her and holding up her train—are almost infinite. The loves they arouse take different names from their objects: love of money, covetousness; love of beauty, lust; immoderate desire for any pleasure, concupiscence; friendship, love, goodwill, and so on. Love is either virtue or vice, honourable or dishonourable, excessive or deficient, as will be shown in its place: heroic love, religious love, and so forth.

These may be reduced to two divisions according to the principal organs affected, the brain and liver: “love and friendship.” Scaliger in Exercise 301, Valesius and Melanchthon support this distinction from Plato’s “to love as a friend” and “to love erotically,” presumably from Pausanias’s speech, which makes two Venuses and two loves.

“One Venus is ancient, without a mother, and descended from heaven; we call her celestial. The younger was begotten by Jupiter and Dione, and is the one we commonly call Venus.” Ficino, commenting on this passage in chapter 8 and following Plato, calls these two loves two spirits—or, in our terms, good and bad angels—continually hovering about our souls.

“One raises us to heaven; the other casts us down to hell. The good one stirs us to contemplate that divine beauty for whose sake we practise justice, perform all godly duties and study philosophy. The other is lower and, though bad, still deserves regard; for in fact both are good in their own natures. Begetting children is as necessary as discovering truth. It is called bad because it is misused and draws our soul away from contemplation of the other towards baser objects.” So far Ficino.

Saint Augustine, in book 15 of The City of God and his exposition of Psalm 64, says much the same. “Every creature is good, and may be loved well or badly.” And “two cities make two loves: Jerusalem and Babylon, one the love of God, the other the love of the world. We all belong to one of these two cities, and by examining ourselves we may soon discover which.” One love is the root of all evil, the other of all good.

Likewise, in chapter 15 of his book On the Love of the Church, he takes the four cardinal virtues to be nothing but love rightly ordered. In The City of God, book 15, chapter 22, he calls virtue the order of love. Thomas follows him in the First Part of the Second Part, question 55, article 1; question 56, article 3; and question 62, article 2, confirming and explaining this at length.

Lucian makes a similar division of his own: “One love was born in the sea, and is as changeable and raging in young men’s hearts as the sea itself, causing burning lust. The other is that golden chain let down from heaven, which with divine rapture transports our souls, made in God’s image, and stirs us to comprehend the innate and incorruptible beauty in which we were originally created.” Beroaldus expresses all this in one of his epigrams:

If the teachings of divine Plato tell the truth, There are twin Venuses, and love is doubled. The heavenly Venus was born of no parent; She binds holy men in chaste love. But the other Venus is spread throughout the world, Binding the minds of gods and mortals: Wicked, seductive, wanton, and so forth.

If divine Plato’s teachings are true, There are two Venuses, two loves. One is from heaven, always unbegotten, And binds our souls in unity. The other, known throughout the world, Binds the hearts of gods and men. Wicked, wanton and seductive, She rules whom she will, wherever and whenever.

Origen likewise follows this twofold division of love in his commentary on the Song of Songs: one comes from God, the other, he holds, from the Devil—taking the term in its worst sense. Many others repeat and follow this distinction. Both kinds, to omit all subdivisions, cause a particular kind of melancholy through excess or deficiency, when they are misused or degenerate, as will be shown in the appropriate place.

In another treatise Augustine divides this love, which we may use well or badly, into three: “God, our neighbour and the world: God above us, our neighbour beside us, the world beneath us. In the course of our desires, God has three relations, the world one, our neighbour two. Our desire for God proceeds either from God, with God or towards God, and this is its proper course. It proceeds from God when it receives from him the means and reason for loving him; with God when it contradicts his will in nothing; towards God when it seeks and finds its rest in him.”

8241.“Neotericks” means recent writers; “parænetical” means exhortatory. The unanchored locator is placed with Dionysius, The Divine Names 4. Cicero, On Duties 1.15, invoking Plato, describes love awakened by visible moral beauty; Burton’s differing Latin and English remain. Augustine, Exposition of Psalm 64.8, compares inward beauty with the martyrs’ bodily suffering. This is a contextual parallel, not an exact match for Burton’s compressed phrase; see Block 110.

8242.“Extreme parts” means outward or external parts. “Concupiscence” means strong desire, often sexual desire. The syntax moves from beauty and its graces to the kinds of love they inspire; the modern version makes that transition explicit.

8244.Burton associates love with bodily organs under the older account of the faculties. The Greek verbs distinguish affection or friendship from erotic love. Pausanias’s account of two Aphrodites and two loves is in Plato, Symposium 180d–181c; Burton uses the Roman name Venus.

8247.The first Venus is described as motherless, born from Heaven; the second as the daughter of Jupiter and Dione. The Latin margin calls the second “Common Venus,” while Burton’s English says she is commonly called Venus. Both formulations are preserved. “Spirits” continues the philosophical sense of daemons, which Burton then compares to good and bad angels.

8251.The body reverses the relationship given in the margin: “two cities make two loves” versus “two loves make two cities.” This difference is preserved. The text presents moral assessment as a question of the object and manner of loving, not simply whether love exists.

8252.The four cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, courage and temperance. The printed title de amor. Ecclesiæ appears to point to Augustine’s On the Morals of the Catholic Church 15.25, which treats the four virtues as forms of love; its title form is retained in the original and translated literally here. The City of God 15.22 does define virtue as the order of love. Thomas is Thomas Aquinas; Burton’s compressed references to the Summa require full collation.

8254.“Divine fury” means inspired rapture. The passage mixes classical images with the Christian language of creation in God’s image. The exact Lucian passage and the intermediary behind this wording remain unresolved; the attribution is Burton’s.

8255.The Latin prints Plaontis for Platonis; the modern version gives the evident name Plato. Burton supplies an eight-line English rendering after the seven Latin lines, whose final “and so forth” marks an abbreviated quotation. Both versions are retained separately; the exact Beroaldus source remains for collation.

8256.Canticles is the Song of Songs. Burton’s qualification distinguishes the Devil from the non-evil philosophical daemon discussed earlier. Origen’s exact wording and Burton’s intermediary remain for collation; the twofold scheme is presented as Burton reports it.

8258.The parallel is De substantia dilectionis 5, transmitted under Augustine’s name. Heidelberg’s catalogue of Pal. lat. 193, item 15, identifies chapters 1–5 with Hugh of Saint Victor’s Institutiones in Decalogum 4 (PL 176, 15A–18B). Burton’s attribution remains as transmission evidence, not verified authorship. “Ordinarily” means in due order; the parallel has ordinate. The three, two and one describe the directions of love explained next.