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MEMBER 2 SUBSECTION 1 Human love, which varies with its objects: the useful, the pleasant and the honourable
Valesius, in book 3, controversy 13, defines human love as “an affection of both faculties, appetite and reason.” The rational faculty resides in the brain, the other in the liver, as has already been said on the authority of Plato and others. Both affect the heart in different ways and carry it in a thousand directions through their mutual connection. The sensitive faculty generally overrules reason; the soul is led blindfold, and the understanding is taken captive like an animal.
“The heart inclines in different directions: sometimes people are cheerful, sometimes sad; and from love arise hope and fear, jealousy, fury and despair.” Human love thus takes different forms and varies with the object that attracts people: virtue, wisdom, eloquence, advantage, wealth, money, fame, honour or personal beauty, and so on.
In his first dialogue Leone Ebreo reduces them all to three: “the useful, the pleasant and the honourable”—probably following Aristotle’s Ethics, book 8. He discusses these at length, and assigns to them everything beautiful and fair, or desirable in any way. “Health, wealth, honour and so on belong to the useful; this is ambition, desire or greed rather than love.” Friends, children, love of women, and all delightful and pleasant objects belong to the second category.
Love of honourable things consists in virtue and wisdom, and takes precedence over love of the useful and pleasant. Intellectual love concerns what is honourable. Saint Augustine calls “the useful worldly, the pleasant carnal, and the honourable spiritual.” “From all three arise charity, friendship and true love, directed towards God and our neighbour.” I shall briefly discuss each and show how it causes melancholy.
Among all these beautiful, enticing objects that awaken love and bewitch the human soul, none is so moving or powerful as profit, or anything that promises advantage. Health is indeed precious: to recover and preserve it we will undergo any suffering, drink bitter potions and freely give our possessions. Restore someone’s health, and his purse lies open to you; he is generous, grateful and in your debt.
But give him wealth and honour, give him gold or anything that advances his interests and position, and you will command his affections and bind him to you for ever. Heart, hand, life and everything are at your service. You are his dear and loving friend, his good and gracious lord and master, his Maecenas. He is your slave, your vassal, utterly devoted, affectionate and bound by every duty. Tell him good news of this kind, and an angel has spoken; blessed is the hour that brings gain. He is your creature, and you his creator; he embraces and admires you; he is yours for ever.
No lodestone attracts like profit; no object is so beautiful as gold. Nothing wins someone over sooner than a good turn; bounty and generosity command body and soul:
Gifts, believe me, appease both men and gods; Jupiter himself is appeased by gifts bestowed.
Good turns appease both God and men, And Jupiter himself is won by them.
Gold above all is a delightful object, a sweet sight, with a splendid lustre. “We look at gold more gladly than at the sun,” says Augustine; and we would rather see it than the sun. It is sweet and pleasant to acquire and to keep. It gives savour to all our labours: the unbearable pains we take for it, degrading work, bitter jeers and taunts endured, long journeys and heavy burdens—all are made light and easy by this hope of gain. “But at home I applaud myself as soon as I gaze upon the coins in my chest.”
The sight of gold refreshes our spirits and ravishes our hearts, as the Babylonian garment and wedge of gold did Achan in the camp: merely seeing or hearing of it sets his soul ablaze with desire. It will make a man travel to the other side of the world, or stay at home and become a parasite, lie, flatter, sell himself, swear oaths and bear false witness. He will risk his body, kill a king, murder his father and damn his soul to obtain it. “A mass of gold is more beautiful,” as the writer aptly observed, than all your Greek pictures that Apelles, Phidias or any foolish painter could ever make. We are in love with it:
The foremost prayer, familiar in every temple: That riches may increase.
All our labours, studies, efforts, vows, prayers and wishes aim at getting it, at finding how to obtain it.
This is she whom the vast world serves: Money, mighty goddess of all things, mistress of fate.
This is the great goddess we adore and worship, the sole object of our desire. If we possess it, we think ourselves made for ever, thrice happy, princes, lords and so on. If we lose it, we are dull, weighed down, dejected, dissatisfied, miserable, desperate and mad. Our condition and well-being ebb and flow with our material advantage; and we are loved and valued according to our possessions and wealth. That regard lasts no longer than our riches: when they are gone and the object is removed, farewell friendship.
As long as generosity, good dinners and rewards could be expected, there were friends enough. They were tied to you by their teeth and would follow you as crows follow a carcass. But when your possessions are gone and spent, the lamp of their love goes out, and you will be despised, scorned, hated and wronged.
When Lucian’s Timon lived in prosperity, he was the great spectacle of Greece, the one everyone admired: who could compare with Timon? Everyone loved, honoured and applauded him; each offered his services and sought to claim kinship. But when his gold was spent and his fine possessions gone, farewell Timon! No one was so ugly, so misshapen, so hateful an outcast as Timon; suddenly no one was so ridiculous. They gave him a penny to buy a rope; no one would acknowledge him.
This is the world’s general disposition: advantage steers our affections from beginning to end. We love the fortunate and rich, those who prosper, or those from whom we may receive kindness in return, expect similar courtesies, or obtain some benefit, gain or profit. On the other hand, we hate and abhor the poor and miserable, or those through whom we may suffer loss or harm.