SUBSECTION 2 How love tyrannizes over human beings. Love, or heroical melancholy: its definition and the part affected.

You have heard how this tyrant Love rages among animals and spirits. Now let us consider the passions it causes among human beings.

Cruel Love, to what will you not drive mortal hearts?

How it stirs the hearts of mortal men—

I shudder to tell it—

I am almost afraid to relate it, astonished and ashamed: it has produced such stupendous and monstrous effects, such foul offences. Love did indeed—I cannot deny it—first unite provinces, build cities, and, through continual reproduction, create and preserve humanity and increase the Church. But when it rages, it is no longer love: it is burning lust, disease, frenzy, madness, hell.

“It is hell, an incurable force, a mad frenzy.” This is no virtuous disposition, but a violent disturbance of the mind, a monster of nature, intelligence and art, as Alexis describes it in Athenaeus: “bold as a man, timid as a woman, headlong in fury, unbroken by toil, honey mixed with gall, a caressing blow,” and so forth.

It subverts kingdoms, overthrows cities, towns and families, ruins and corrupts people, and massacres them. Thunder and lightning, wars, fires and plagues have not harmed humanity as much as this burning lust, this brutish passion. Let Sodom and Gomorrah, Troy—as Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan will confirm—and I know not how many other cities bear witness: “and there was before Helen,” and so forth. Every succeeding age will agree. Joanna of Naples in Italy, Fredegund and Brunhild in France: all histories are full of these basilisks.

Besides all this come daily duels, murders, bloodshed, rapes, debauchery and extravagant spending to satisfy lust; poverty, shame, loss, torture, punishment and disgrace; the loathsome diseases that follow, worse than raging or pestilential fevers; repeated attacks of gout, the pox, arthritis, palsy, cramps, sciatica, convulsions, pain and burning, which torment the body; that deadly melancholy which crucifies the soul in this life; and everlasting torments in the world to come.

Although they know that these and many other miseries, threats and torments will surely fall upon them—and despite the rewards and exhortations offered on the other side—through their own weakness, a depraved nature or love’s furious tyranny, they allow themselves to be led like an ox to the slaughter. “Easy is the descent to Avernus”: they plunge headlong into their own destruction. They commit sexual offences with animals; men, “leaving the natural use of women,” as Paul says, “burned with lust for one another, and man with man committed filthiness.”

Semiramis coupled with a horse, Pasiphae with a bull, Aristo of Ephesus with a she-ass, Fulvius with a mare; others with dogs, goats and so on. From these unions monsters are sometimes born—centaurs, woodland spirits and prodigious apparitions to terrify human beings. Nor do they have intercourse only with animals, but with other human beings, in what is commonly called the sin of sodomy. This vice was once frequent among those peoples of the East—namely Greeks, Italians, Africans and Asians.

Hercules had Hylas, Polycletus, Dion, Perithoon, Abderus and the Phrygian; others also report that Hercules loved Eurystius. Socrates often visited the gymnasium for the sake of handsome young men and feasted his eyes on the disgraceful spectacle, as Philebus, Phaedo, Rival Lovers, Charmides and Plato’s other dialogues amply testify. As for what Alcibiades says about that same Socrates, I gladly keep silent; indeed, I recoil from it, so greatly does it incite lust.

But Theodoret censures him in the final chapter of his Cure of Greek Maladies. Indeed, Plato himself admires his Agathon, Xenophon his Clinias, Virgil his Alexis, and Anacreon his Bathyllus. As for what is recorded about the monstrous lust of Nero, Claudius and the others, I would rather you sought it from Petronius, Suetonius and the rest than expected it from me, since it exceeds all belief. But we are complaining about ancient times.

Among Asians, Turks and Italians this wicked vice has never been more frequent than today. Sodomy is the Romans’ Diana; in some places among the Turks there are establishments for these practices—

Those who entrust seed to rocks—ploughing the sands;

There are frequent complaints about it, even between married couples: wives report their husbands’ illicit intercourse to the magistrate by turning a shoe the opposite way. Among Italians no sin is more familiar or more prevalent; following Lucian and Achilles Tatius, they defend it in written books. Giovanni della Casa, bishop of Benevento, calls it a divine work, a delightful crime, and even boasts that he has enjoyed no other sexual pleasure. Nothing is more usual among monks, cardinals and petty priests. This frenzy leads even to death and madness.

Angelo Poliziano laid violent hands upon himself for love of a boy. And it is truly dreadful to say how fiercely this detestable crime raged among our own people within our fathers’ memory!

For when, in 1538, the most prudent King Henry VIII had the monasteries of the hooded orders and the colleges of priests and vowed religious inspected by the venerable doctors of law Thomas Lee and Richard Layton, so many whoremongers, catamites, debauchees, men who practise anal intercourse, pursuers of boys, pederasts, sodomites and Ganymedes were found among them—I use Bale’s words—that you would have thought each establishment a new Gomorrah.