The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.