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← ExitThe Anatomy of Melancholy

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Its Object, God; What His Beauty Is; How It Attracts. the Parts and People…

We too would now have done this, had our will not been corrupted, as indeed we are commanded to love God with all our heart and all our soul. For we were born to this end: to love this object and enjoy it, as Melanchthon explains. Our will would have loved and sought him alone as our supreme good, or principal good, and all other good things for God’s sake. And nature, having proceeded from this source, would have sought this fountain. But in the infirmity of human nature this order is disturbed, and our love is corrupted.

And a human being is like that monster in Plato, composed of a Scylla, a lion and a man. We are swept headlong away by the torrent of our passions. The world, with its infinite variety of pleasing objects, so entices and captivates us that we cannot so much as look towards God, seek him or think of him as we should. We cannot, says Augustine, set our minds on the heavenly commonwealth. We cannot restrain ourselves from these things, so pleasing is their sweetness to us.

Marriage, says Gwalther, holds many back: a thing praiseworthy, good and necessary in itself; yet many, deceived and swept away by their blind love of it, have quite abandoned the love of God and the desire for his glory. Food and drink have overcome as many, while they strive to please and satisfy their guts and bellies rather than to serve God and nature. Some are so occupied with trade and making money that they lose their own souls: carried away by greed and an insatiable desire for gain, they forget God. We may say as much of honour, alliances, friendships, health, wealth and every other profit or pleasure in this life.

In this world there are so many beautiful objects—the splendour and brightness of gold, the majesty of glory, the help of friends, fair promises, smooth words, victories, triumphs, and such an infinite multitude of pleasing beauties—to entice us and draw us away from God that we cannot attend to him. This is what Christ himself, the prophets and the apostles thundered against and warned us to avoid. In 1 John 2:15–17: Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the Father’s love is not in him. For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world. And the world passes away, and its lust with it; but whoever fulfils God’s will remains for ever.

No one, says our Saviour, can serve two masters: he must love the one and hate the other, and so on. Good or bad loves produce good or bad conduct, Augustine rightly concludes; and this is what all the Church Fathers repeatedly teach. No one, Augustine warns, can be God’s friend while delighting in the pleasures of the world. Cleanse your heart, purify your heart; if you wish to see this beauty, prepare yourself for it.

We must behold it with the eye of contemplation. The wing of meditation lifts us up and raises our souls through the movement of our hearts and the sweetness of contemplation: so says Gregory, quoted by Bonaventure. Philo of Alexandria supports him: Whoever loves God will soar aloft and take wings; leaving the earth, he will fly up to heaven and wander with the sun, moon, stars and that heavenly host, with God himself as his guide.

If we desire to see him, we must put aside all the vain objects that hold us back and dazzle our eyes; and, as Ficino advises, acquire sunlike eyes, spectacles such as those who look at the sun use. To see this divine beauty, set aside all material objects and all sense perception; then you will see him as he is.

You greedy wretch, Augustine protests, why do you stand gaping at this dross, these dungheaps, these filthy excrements? Look at a far more beautiful object: God himself courts you. Behold him, enjoy him; he is sick with love. Song of Solomon 5. He invites you to see him, to come into his beautiful garden, to eat and drink with him, to rejoice with him and enjoy his presence for ever. Wisdom cries out in the streets, beside the gates, on the heights, before the city and at the entrance, bidding people listen to her instruction, which is better than gold or precious stones. No pleasures can compare with it. Leave everything, then, and follow her: I exhort and entreat you, my friends.

In Ficino’s words, I exhort and entreat you to embrace and follow this divine love with all your hearts and all your powers. By every service and effort, seek the favour of this God who loves you so much. For his sake alone, says Plotinus, we must forsake the kingdoms and empires of the whole earth—sea, land and air—if we wish to be grafted into him: leave everything and follow him.

Now, since this love of God is a settled disposition infused by God—as Thomas Aquinas holds, 1.2, question 23—by which a person is inclined to love God above all and his neighbour as himself, we must pray that God will open our eyes and cleanse our hearts. Then we may be able to receive his glorious rays and perform the duties he requires of us: Deuteronomy 6 and Joshua 23, to love God above all and our neighbour as ourselves, and to keep his commandments.

By this we know, says John, 5:2, that we love the children of God: when we love God and keep his commandments. This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love, 4:8; and whoever dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him. For love presupposes knowledge, faith and hope, and unites us to God himself, as Leone Ebreo teaches us. It is accompanied by fear of God, humility, meekness, patience, all those virtues, and charity itself.

12021.The object is God, the supreme good discussed at the end of Block 151. Burton’s argument assumes the corruption of the human will after the Fall. Melancthon is Philipp Melanchthon; the margin cites his work On the Soul. “Enjoy” here means possess or participate in the good, not merely take pleasure in it.

12023.Plato, Republic 9, 588b–589b, imagines a many-headed beast, a lion and a man enclosed within a human exterior. Scylla is one of the mythical composite creatures mentioned just before the construction; Burton substitutes her name for the many-headed beast. The separate Augustinian phrase about the heavenly commonwealth is not located by the margin’s reference to Plato.

12025.Gualter is Rudolf Gwalther, cited through his homilies on the First Epistle of John. Detains means holds back from devotion. The passage criticizes disordered attachment to otherwise legitimate goods; it expressly describes marriage as good and necessary.

12027.The print reads “1 John 17.15.” The quotation belongs to 1 John 2:15–17; the modern column supplies that reference. Burton’s wording is a composite rendering rather than an exact quotation of the King James text. The unassigned Latin margin expands the catalogue of worldly attractions.

12029.The two masters recalls Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13; good and bad loves occurs in Augustine, Letter 155.4.13. On Psalm 32, second exposition, sermon 1.7 (PL 36, col. 282), relates divine wisdom’s beauty to cleansing the heart so as to see and embrace it. This is a thematic parallel: Burton’s fuller Latin wording was not found there. His intermediary and the heavenly-commonwealth phrase remain untraced.

12032.Burton attributes the first image to Gregory through a work circulating under Bonaventure’s name, cited as On the Seven Journeys, distinction 6; the precise intermediary remains to be collated. Philo’s flight with the heavenly host has a parallel in The Special Laws 1.207, in the discussion of sacrifices. Burton cites it under the older sectional title On Sacrificial Victims.

12034.Solar eyes expresses a philosophical likeness between the faculty of seeing and its object; compare Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.9, where the eye must become sunlike. Burton’s addition of spectacles makes the metaphor concrete. The sentence continues across the printed page break; “all sense” means sensory perception.

12037.Burton joins an Augustinian appeal to the avaricious with the Song of Solomon’s garden and lovesickness imagery (5:1, 8) and personified Wisdom in Proverbs 8. “He is sick for love” is his devotional application: in Song 5:8 the female lover speaks of her own lovesickness. The closing Latin begins the exhortation attributed to Ficino in the next unit.

12040.The Plotinus parallel is Enneads 1.6.7, On Beauty, on renouncing dominion for the vision of the Good. Burton presents this in Christian devotional language. The Ficino margin prints “Cap.18. Rom.”; its abbreviated title and exact passage remain unresolved. Burton’s English expansion is retained after the independently translated Latin exhortation.

12042.Habit is a settled disposition or capacity, not a repeated routine. The printed Aquinas reference is “1.2. question 23”; relevant discussions of charity are in Summa theologiae II–II, questions 23–24, especially 24.2 on infusion. The reference is preserved rather than silently emended. Deuteronomy 6:5 and Joshua 23:11 command love of God; the combined command concerning one’s neighbour also recalls Matthew 22:37–39.

12044.These sentences combine 1 John 5:2–3, 4:8 and 4:16. Leon Hebrew is Leone Ebreo (Judah Abravanel), author of the Dialogues of Love. Charity here has the broad theological sense of love of God and neighbour, not simply giving money to the poor.