The Anatomy of Melancholy

they prescribe times and foods, buy and sell their merits, give them greater weight than the Ten Commandments, and count eating meat in Lent a greater sin than killing a man. As someone says, “They care more for a roast fish than for Christ crucified, more for salmon than for Solomon: Christ is in their mouths, Epicurus in their hearts.” When some pretend, and others credit these works of theirs with more than Christ’s death and passion, the Devil gets a foothold, strangely deceives them, and so makes them overturn the balance of their bodies and endanger their souls.

There have never been any strange demonic illusions among hermits or anchorites, any visions, phantoms, apparitions, states of inspiration, prophets or revelations, without excessive fasting, bad diet, sickness, melancholy, solitude or some such thing as their preceding causes, forerunners or companions. These give the Devil his best opportunity and very occasion to deceive them. Marcilius Cognatus, book 1, cont., chapter 7, has many stories to this effect, about people seduced by devils after long fasting;

and it is astonishing to relate, as Cardano writes, what strange effects arise from fasting: dreams, superstition, contempt for torments, a desire for death, prophecies, paradoxes, madness. Fasting naturally prepares people for these things. Monks, anchorites and the like, after prolonged emptiness, become melancholic and dizzy. They think they hear strange noises and speak with hobgoblins and devils; they shrivel their bodies; “and while we pursue the enemy,” says Gregory, “we slaughter the fellow citizen we love.” They become bare skeletons, skin and bones: “Abstaining from flesh, they devour their own flesh, until nothing remains but skin and bones.”

Hilarion, as Jerome reports in his life, and as Athanasius reports of Antony, was so wasted by fasting that his skin scarcely clung to his bones. For lack of vapours he could not sleep, and for lack of sleep his mind became disordered. Every night he heard infants crying, oxen lowing, wolves howling, lions roaring—or so he thought—chains clattering, strange voices and similar demonic illusions.

Such symptoms are common in those who fast for long periods, live alone, and give themselves to contemplation—to excessive solitude and meditation. Not that these things, as I said of fasting, deserve blame in themselves: in some cases they are beneficial and good. Temperance and contemplation unite our souls with God, as even the pagan Porphyry can tell us. Ecstasy is a taste of future happiness, through which we are united with God, a divine melancholy, a spiritual wing, as Bonaventure calls it, to lift us to heaven. But when abused it is sheer delusion and madness, a cause and symptom of religious melancholy.