The Anatomy of Melancholy

What makes them go into the bowels of the earth, a hundred fathoms deep, risking their precious lives, enduring poisonous vapours and foul smells, when they already have enough if only they could be content, and have no such need to labour—what but the extraordinary delight they take in riches?

This may seem plausible at first sight, a persuasive and powerful argument. But let anyone who thinks so consider it more closely, and he will soon see that things are very different from what he supposes. It may perhaps be pleasant at first, as almost all melancholy is. Such men generally have some “lucid intervals,” with pleasant symptoms mixed in. But you must remember Chrysostom’s distinction: it is one thing to be rich, another to be covetous.

Generally they are all fools, simpletons, madmen, miserable wretches, living out of their senses, “without the art of enjoyment,” in perpetual slavery, fear, suspicion, sorrow and discontent: “they have more aloes than honey.” Indeed, they are possessed by their money rather than its possessors.

As Cyprian puts it, they are “enslaved to money,” bound apprentice to their goods, as Pliny says; or, as Chrysostom calls them, “slaves of riches,” slaves and drudges to their possessions. We may conclude of them all what Valerius says of Ptolemy, king of Cyprus: in title he was king of that island, but in his mind a miserable drudge to money.

Lacking freedom, More precious than metals.

Lacking his liberty, which is better than gold. Damasippus the Stoic in Horace proves that all mortals have their fits of folly, some in one way, some in another, but that covetous men are madder than the rest. Whoever looks closely into their condition and examines their symptoms will find nothing better to say of them than that they are all fools, as Nabal was, “in fact and in name” (1 Kings 15).

For what greater folly or madness can there be than to wear himself away when he need not? And when, as Cyprian observes, he could free himself from his burden and relieve his pains, he still goes on as his wealth increases: getting more when he has enough, living out of his senses, starving his own appetite for enjoyment, withholding from his wife and children, allowing neither them nor other friends to use or enjoy what is rightfully theirs and perhaps badly needed.

Like a hog, or a dog in the manger, he merely keeps it so that it can do nobody else any good, harming himself and others; and for a little fleeting gain he damns his own soul. Such men are generally sad and sour by nature, as Ahab was in spirit because he could not obtain Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 22). If he ever spends his money, even on necessities or for his own children’s benefit, he brawls and scolds. His heart is heavy; he is deeply troubled and reluctant to part with it.