The Anatomy of Melancholy

And this, it seems, is what our poets of fable have represented figuratively in the story of Pandora’s box, which she opened out of curiosity, filling the world with every kind of disease. It is not curiosity alone, but our other sins that cry out for punishment, that draw these various plagues and miseries down upon our heads. For “where there is sin, there is a storm,” as Chrysostom aptly observes.

“Fools are afflicted for their transgressions and their wickedness.” “Fear comes like sudden devastation, and destruction like a whirlwind, with affliction and anguish,” because they did not fear God. “Are you shaken by wars?” as Cyprian forcefully asks Demetrius. “Are you troubled by scarcity and famine? Is your health shattered by raging diseases? Is humankind everywhere tormented by epidemics? It is all for your sins.” Haggai 1:9–10; Amos 1; Jeremiah 7.

God is angry, punishes and threatens because of their obstinacy and stubbornness: they will not turn to him. “If the earth is barren for lack of rain, if it lies dry and parched and produces no fruit, if your springs dry up, your wine, grain and oil are blighted, if the air is corrupted and people are afflicted with disease, it is because of their sins.” Like Abel’s blood, those sins cry aloud to heaven for vengeance. Lamentations 5:15: “We have sinned, and therefore our hearts are heavy.” Isaiah 59:11–12: “We roar like bears and mourn like doves, and lack deliverance,” and so on, “because of our sins and trespasses.”

But we cannot bear to hear or acknowledge this. Jeremiah 2:30: “We are struck in vain and accept no correction”; and chapter 5:3: “You have struck them, but they have not grieved; they have refused correction and have not returned.” He has sent pestilence, but they have not turned to him: Amos 4. Herod could not endure John the Baptist, nor could Domitian bear Apollonius telling him the causes of the plague at Ephesus: his injustice, incest, adultery and the like.

Thus, alongside our blindness and obstinacy, comes God’s just judgement, as a concurrent cause and chief agent, bringing these calamities upon us to punish us, I say, for our sins and to satisfy God’s wrath. For the law requires obedience or punishment, as you may read at length in Deuteronomy 28:15: “If they will not obey the Lord and keep his commandments and ordinances, then all these curses shall come upon them.”

“Cursed in the town and in the field,” and so on; “cursed in the fruit of the body,” and so on. “The Lord shall send you trouble and shame because of your wickedness.” A little later: “The Lord shall strike you with the boils of Egypt, with haemorrhoids, scabs and itching, and you shall not be healed”; “with madness, blindness and bewilderment of heart.” Paul confirms this in Romans 2:9: “Tribulation and anguish upon the soul of everyone who does evil.”

Or these chastisements are inflicted to humble us, to exercise and test our patience here in this life, to bring us home, to make us know God and ourselves, and to instruct us in wisdom. “Therefore my people have gone into captivity, because they had no knowledge; therefore the Lord’s wrath is kindled against his people, and he has stretched out his hand against them.”