The Anatomy of Melancholy

It cannot accord with God’s goodness, protection and providence, as Saint Chrysostom puts it in the language of such discontented people, to see and permit one person to be lame, another mad, a third poor and miserable throughout life, a fourth grievously tormented by sickness and pain until his last hour. Are these signs and works of God’s providence—to let one person be deaf and another mute?

An honest poor fellow lives in disgrace, sorrow and want; his life is wretched, while a wicked scoundrel overflows with wealth, keeps prostitutes and flatterers, and has whatever he desires. Do you hear this, Jupiter? Linking many such complaints together, they weave a lengthy indictment of God’s providence. Thus they mutter and object, with many similar, familiar, empty quibbles, unworthy of repetition or reply. See the rest of their arguments fully refuted in Mersenne’s commentary on Genesis and in Campanella. Whatever they profess, meanwhile they have little or no religion.

First cousins to these people are many of our great philosophers and deists. Although more temperate in this life, giving many sound moral precepts, and honest, upright and sober in their conduct, they are in effect the same. They count no one a good scholar unless he is an atheist. They aspire to knowledge too high for them: too much learning makes them mad.

They attribute everything to natural causes and the contingency of all things: as Melanchthon calls them, an obstinate breed of people—a perverse generation, misled by philosophy, the Devil’s prompting and their own innate blindness, who deny God as much as the rest. They hold all religion a fiction, contrary to reason and philosophy, although, Vanini says, fear of the magistrates prevents their professing this openly.

Ask one of them what religion he belongs to, and he answers mockingly: a philosopher, a Galenist, an Averroist, or, with Rabelais, a physician, a Peripatetic, an Epicurean. In spiritual matters God must demonstrate everything to the senses, leave a pledge with them, or seek another creditor.

They will acknowledge nature and fortune, but not God, although in effect they acknowledge both. For, as Scaliger defines it, nature signifies God’s ordinary power; or, as Calvin writes, nature is God’s order, so that extraordinary things may be called unnatural. Fortune is his unrevealed will: thus we call things subject to chance when they fall outside reason and expectation.

Minucius in Octavius and Seneca in On Benefits, book 4, chapters 5–7, argue well with them to this effect: They do not understand what they say. What is nature but God? Call him what you will—Nature, Jupiter—he has as many names as functions. It all amounts to the same thing: God is the source of all, the first giver and preserver, on whom all things depend; from whom and through whom are all things.

For whatever you see is God, wherever you move.

God is all in all; God is everywhere, in every place. Yet this Seneca, who could refute and blame them, deserves just as much blame and refutation himself, and is just as mad: for he holds to Stoic fate, that inescapable necessity at the opposite extreme.