The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 3. Classification of the passions.

The disturbances and passions that trouble the imagination, though they inhabit the borderland between sense and reason, follow sense rather than reason, because they are immersed in the bodily organs of sense. They are commonly divided between two inclinations, the irascible and the concupiscible. The followers of Thomas Aquinas subdivide them into eleven: six belonging to the desiring faculty and five to the faculty of struggle. Aristotle reduces them all to pleasure and pain; Plato to love and hatred; Vives to good and evil.

If the object is good, it is either present, and then we simply rejoice in it and love it; or still to come, and then we desire and hope for it. If it is evil, we simply hate it: if present, it brings sorrow; if still to come, fear. Bernard compares these four passions to the wheels of a chariot that carries us through this world. All other passions fall under these four—or six, as some would have it: love, joy, desire, hatred, sorrow and fear. The rest, such as anger, envy, rivalry, pride, jealousy, anxiety, pity, shame, discontent, despair, ambition, greed and so on, can be reduced to these primary passions. When excessive, they consume the spirits and are especially productive of melancholy.

A few judicious people can govern themselves and curb these unruly emotions through religion, philosophy and divine precepts of meekness, patience and the like. But most, lacking self-control through poor judgement and ignorance, let themselves be led entirely by sense. Far from repressing their rebellious inclinations, they give them every encouragement, dropping the reins and using every stimulus to spur them on. Bad by nature and made worse by artifice, training, habit, education and their own perverse will, they follow wherever their unbridled emotions carry them, acting more from habit and wilfulness than from reason.

“A stubborn will,” as Melanchthon calls it, “does evil”: this obstinate will of ours perverts judgement, which sees and knows what should and ought to be done, yet refuses to do it. “Slaves to the belly,” slaves to their various lusts and appetites, they fling and plunge themselves into a labyrinth of cares, blinded by lust, blinded by ambition. They ask God for what they could give themselves, if only they could restrain the cares and disturbances with which they continually wear away their minds. But by yielding to these violent passions of fear, grief, shame, revenge, hatred, malice and so on, they are torn to pieces, as Actaeon was by his dogs, and crucify their own souls.