The Anatomy of Melancholy

In one sense, “Christians are Crassians”—Christians are dullards—and, compared with that wisdom, no better than fools. “Who is wise? God alone,” Pythagoras replies. “God alone is wise,” Paul declares in Romans 16; alone good, as Augustine rightly argues; “and no living person can be justified in his sight.” “God looked down from heaven upon humankind to see whether anyone understood,” Psalm 53:2–3; but all are corrupt and go astray. Romans 3:12: “No one does good, not even one.” Job intensifies this, 4:18: “Look: he found no constancy in his servants, and charged his angels with folly,” and verse 19: “How much more those who dwell in houses of clay?” In this sense we are all fools, and Scripture alone is “Minerva’s citadel”; we and our writings are shallow and imperfect.

But that is not all I mean: even in our everyday dealings, we are no better than fools. All our actions, as Pliny told Trajan, reproach us for our folly; the whole course of our lives is material for laughter. We lack sober judgement. The world itself, which should at least have grown wise with age, as Hugo de Prato Florido maintains, “keeps acting foolishly”: it grows more foolish every day; the more it is whipped, the worse it becomes, and like a child it still wants a crown of roses and flowers. We play the ape in it, “two-legged asses,” and everywhere is full “of Apuleiuses turned upside down”—transformed, two-legged asses—“of reversed Silenuses,” childish, “like a two-year-old child sleeping in his father’s rocking arm.”

In his dialogue Antonius, Giovanni Pontano presents some people laughing at an old man whose age had made him a little foolish. But, as he warns there, “Do not wonder, my guest, at this old man”—do not marvel at him alone, for “this whole city is delirium”: our whole town is equally deluded. We are a company of fools. Do not ask, with the character in the poet, “Do ghosts, frenzy, and madness torment this old man?” What madness haunts this old man? Ask what madness haunts us all. For we are “every last one of us” mad; “we have all been mad once”—not once, but always, “once, and together, and always”, continually and collectively as bad as he is. Do not say “an old man is twice a child” or “a doting old woman,” but say of us all, “always children”: young and old are all deluded, as Lactantius demonstrates from Seneca;

there is no difference between us and children except that “we play bigger games, and with bigger dolls.” They play with rag dolls and such toys; we amuse ourselves with larger dolls. We cannot accuse or condemn one another when we are at fault ourselves: “You talk nonsense”—you talk foolishly—or, as Micio reproached Demea, “You are mad; go away.” We are just as mad ourselves, and it is hard to say who is worst. Indeed, this holds everywhere: “Fortune governs life, not wisdom.”