Its object, God; what his beauty is; how it attracts. The parts and people affected.

No one has ever yet doubted that love melancholy is a distinct species; but whether this subdivision, religious melancholy, is justified may be disputed.

Go on, Muses; do not abandon me wandering midway Along a path where no footprints lead, Where no wheel marks testify to earlier chariots.

I have no pattern to follow, as I have in some of the other parts, no one to imitate. No physician has yet written a separate account of it as of the other kind. All acknowledge it as a very notable symptom, some as a cause, but few as a species or kind. Aretaeus, Alexander, Rhazes, Avicenna and most of our later writers—Gordon, Fuchs, Plater, Bruel, Montalto and others—list it as a symptom.

“Some seem to be inspired by the Holy Ghost”; some claim to be prophets, some are devoted to new opinions, some predict strange things “about the state of the world and of Antichrist,” says Gordon. Some will prophesy the end of the world almost to the day, and the fall of Antichrist, according to their predispositions or upbringing; for, as Du Laurens maintains, this is how melancholy works upon them.

If they have been strictly religious, all their meditations tend in that direction and eventually produce strange effects. The humour impresses symptoms upon them according to their individual inclinations and dispositions. This leads Guaineri and Felix Plater to regard excessive devotion, blind zeal, fear of eternal punishment and the Last Judgement as a cause of the condition of those people who believe themselves inspired or are overwhelmed by despair.

But some plainly make a distinct species of it, dividing love melancholy into the kind whose object is women and the other whose object is God. Plato, in the Symposium, mentions two distinct frenzies; and among our more recent writers, Hercules de Saxonia, in his Practice of Medicine, book 1, chapter 16, the chapter on melancholy, expressly treats it as a distinct species.

“Love melancholy,” he says, “is of two kinds. The first is the condition of those who make God their object and devote themselves entirely to prayer, fasting and so on—though perhaps some will not grant it the name or classification of melancholy. The other concerns women.” Pieter van Foreest, in his Observations, says as much in the same words. Felix Plater, in On Mental Disturbance, chapter 3, says, “It is a very frequent species, and in treating it I have very often been greatly hindered.” It is a common disease; and Aretaeus and Plato provide grounds for what they say.

Aretaeus, an ancient author, in his third book, chapter 6, divides love melancholy in this way and derives this second kind from the first; it comes through inspiration or otherwise. Plato, in his Phaedrus, has these words: “Apollo’s priests at Delphi, and those at Dodona, perform many fine feats in their frenzy and benefit the Greeks, but never in their right minds.” He makes them all mad, as well he might.

Anyone who considers ancient superstition and its monstrous effects—as in the appropriate place I shall show the various frenzies of our prophetic gods, Pythonesses, Sibyls, enthusiasts, false prophets, heretics and schismatics in these later times of ours—will immediately admit that the whole world besides cannot furnish so much material for madness, so many astonishing symptoms, as superstition, heresy and schism have produced.

This species alone can be set against all the preceding ones: it has a wider range and more extraordinary effects. It stupefies and deludes people more than any other kind named above, does more harm, causes humanity more unrest and has tormented mortal souls more—such has been the devil’s cunning—than wars, plagues, sicknesses, scarcity, famine and all the rest.

Give me only a little liberty, and I shall briefly set before your eyes an astonishing, vast, infinite ocean of incredible madness and folly: a sea full of shoals and rocks, sandbanks, gulfs, turbulent straits and contrary tides; full of fearful monsters, strange shapes, roaring waves, tempests, Siren calms and halcyon seas; unspeakable misery, such comedies and tragedies, such absurd and ridiculous, deadly and lamentable fits, that I do not know whether they deserve more pity or ridicule, or can even be believed—except that every day we still see the same things happening in our own time: fresh examples, “new novelties,” fresh instances of misery and madness of this kind continually presented to us, abroad, at home, among us, in our own hearts.

But before I can discuss these various errors and deviations, their causes, symptoms, disturbances and so on, I must necessarily say something about the object of this love, God himself: what this love is, how it attracts us, where it comes from and—what causes all our miseries—how we misunderstand it, wander and turn away from it.

Among all the divine attributes that God claims for himself—eternity, omnipotence, immutability, wisdom, majesty, justice, mercy and so on—his beauty is not the least. “One thing,” says David, “have I desired of the Lord, and that I shall continue to desire: to behold the beauty of the Lord,” Psalm 27:4. “And out of Zion, which is the perfection of beauty, God has shone,” Psalm 50:2.

All other created things are beautiful, I admit, and many other objects greatly captivate us: a beautiful house, a beautiful horse, a handsome person. “I am amazed,” says Augustine, “when I look up to heaven and see the beauty of the stars. The beauty of angels, principalities and powers—who can express it? Who can adequately praise or describe the beauty that appears in us? So beautiful a body, so beautiful a face, eyes, nose, cheeks, chin and brows, all beautiful and lovely to behold, besides the beauty of the soul, which cannot be seen. If we exert ourselves so much and are so deeply moved by the beauty of created things, how should we be transported by the wonderful radiance of God himself?”