The Anatomy of Melancholy

Our Turks, Chinese kings, great khans and Mughal rulers do little less, assuming divine and bombastic titles. The lower sort are too credulous, led by blind zeal and blind obedience to pursue and defend whatever their foolish leaders propose: whatever those leaders, through pride and a desire to stand apart, revenge, vainglory, ambition, malice or greed, rashly uphold and put forward,

their disciples make a matter of conscience, believing that failure to comply means hell and damnation. They would sooner abandon wives, children, house and home, lands, goods, fortunes and life itself than neglect or renounce the slightest part of it. To advance the common cause they endure any misery, become traitors, assassins and false martyrs, fully assured of and hoping for a reward in the other world: that they will certainly earn merit by it, gain heaven, and be canonized as saints.

Now, when they are thoroughly possessed by blind zeal and nurtured in superstition, he has many other baits to entice and delude them further, to make them utterly mortified and mad, all under the pretence of perfection: to earn merit through penance, wearing wool against the skin, whipping, alms, fasts and so on. In 1320 there was a sect of flagellants in Germany who, to the astonishment of onlookers, lashed and cruelly tortured themselves. I could give many other examples of each practice.

But works performed in this way are held to earn merit, “by the work performed,” “by strict desert,” for themselves and others. To make them wear down and consume their bodies, “under virtue’s appearance and shadow,” those evangelical counsels, as our false Catholics call them, are proposed: canonical obedience, voluntary poverty, vows of chastity, monkish practices and a solitary life. These extend to almost every religion and superstition—to Turks, Chinese, pagans, Ethiopians, Greeks, Latins and every country.

Among these, fasting, contemplation and solitude are like battering rams with which the Devil assaults and works upon even the strongest constitutions. “Some,” says Pieter van Foreest, “through prolonged fasting, study and heavenly meditations, continually occupy themselves with sacred matters and religion”: they are overcome by excessive fasting and meditation on divine things.

Not that fasting is blameworthy in itself: it is an excellent means of keeping the body in subjection, a preparation for devotion, medicine for the soul. It produces chaste thoughts, true zeal and a divine spirit; from it sound counsels proceed, desire is restrained, and vicious, overpowering lusts and humours are expelled. The Fathers praise it highly and, as Calvin observes, sometimes excessively.

The mother of health, the key to heaven, a spiritual wing to lift us up, the chariot of the Holy Spirit, the banner of faith, and so on. What they say is true, if fasting is practised moderately and at the proper time, as by Moses, Elijah, Daniel and CHRIST, and as his apostles used it. But when they use it to perform works beyond what duty requires, and, as Erasmus aptly rebukes them, “think heaven insufficient for their merits”—heaven is too small a reward for it—