The Anatomy of Melancholy

The different meanings and definitions of despair and the people and parts affected

There are many kinds of despair, some holy and some unholy, as one writer distinguishes them. Drawing on Cicero, he defines unholy despair as distress of mind without any expectation of better things: a sickness of the soul without any hope or expectation of improvement. It commonly follows fear: while evil is anticipated, we fear; when it is certain, we despair.

According to Thomas Aquinas, second part of the second part, distinction 40, article 4, it is a withdrawal from the desired thing because it is thought impossible: holding back from what is desired because of some supposed impossibility.

Because they cannot obtain what they want, people become desperate and often either succumb to this passion through death itself or attempt impossible feats beyond human power. In some circumstances this desperate disposition is not much to be condemned: in war it often produces extraordinary courage, as Josephus, The Jewish War, book 1, chapter 14, Lambert Daneau, Political Aphorisms, page 226, and many political writers maintain. It makes people surpass their own courage and turn in a moment from an abandoned, powerless company into conquerors.

The defeated have one hope of safety—to hope for none.

In such circumstances, when they see no escape and must either kill or be killed, they take courage and often beyond hope, beyond all expectation, deliver themselves. Fifteen thousand Locrians fought a hundred thousand Crotoniates. Seeing only one outcome—that they must all die—they resolved not to leave the world unavenged. They launched a desperate assault and defeated their enemies. There was no other cause of their victory, says my authority Justin, than that they had despaired.

When William the Conqueror first landed in England, he sent his ships back so that his soldiers would have no hope of retreat. Bodin excuses his countrymen’s defeat at the famous battle of Agincourt in Henry V’s time by this resort to despair: a few desperate men, surrounded by their enemies and beyond all hope of surviving, fought like so many devils. Of this battle Froissart says, all history could produce nothing like it: history can scarcely parallel how a handful of Englishmen defeated a royal French army.

He therefore warns soldiers never to attack desperate people. Following Frontinus and Vegetius, Guicciardini gives the same advice in his Memoranda, part 2, page 25: do not block an enemy who is withdrawing.

There are many such kinds of despair, when people have lost hope of succeeding in a petition or despaired of better fortune. Despair makes the monk, as the saying goes. Despair also causes death itself: how many thousands in such distress have killed themselves and many others? For someone who cares nothing for his own life has another person’s life at his command.