The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.”