The Anatomy of Melancholy

Treatment of despair through medicine, good counsel, consolation, and so on.

Experience teaches us that although many die obstinate and wilful in this illness, multitudes in turn can resist and overcome it, seek help and find comfort. They are taken from the jaws of the underworld, from the jaws of hell and out of the devil’s claws, even though they have bound themselves over to him. Some recover through their own strength and God’s assistance—Though he kill me, says Job, yet will I trust in him—others through good counsel, advice and medicine.

Bellovacus cured a monk by changing his habit and way of life; Platter cured many through medicine alone. But generally the two must work together. Those who think they can overcome this deadly affliction through medicine alone take the wrong course, and those who expect to achieve it through good advice alone are equally mistaken. Although each is powerful in itself, united strength is greater: they must go hand in hand in treating this disease:

——so each seeks the other’s help.

As for medicine, the same course should be followed here as in other forms of melancholy: diet, air, exercise and all those passions and disturbances of the mind, and so on, must be put right by the same means. They must not be left alone or to themselves, never idle, never without company.

Counsel and good consolation must be suited to the person’s disposition and to the causes: loss, fear, grief, discontent or some such disastrous event; a guilty conscience; or frequent meditation and an excessively painful apprehension and consideration of one’s past life. It must be corrected and counterbalanced through hearing and reading Scripture, good theologians, sound advice and conversation, applying God’s word to their distressed souls:

Many excellent exhortations and discourses of moral counsel are available for this purpose, for anyone troubled in mind. Perkins, Greenham, Hayward, Bright, Abernethy, Bolton, Culmannus, Hemmingius, Caelius Secundus and Nicholas Laurentius write extensively on the subject; so do Azorius, Navarrus, Sayrus and others who have written cases of conscience among our Catholic writers.

But because these works are not at everyone’s hand or always so easily obtained, I will, for the benefit and relief of the afflicted and at some friends’ request, gather from their extensive treatises a few consoling sayings, exhortations, arguments and pieces of advice concerning this subject, and from God’s word. For I know, as Culmannus says on a similar occasion, how ineffective and futile human counsels are for comforting an afflicted conscience unless God’s word joins and accompanies them, from which come life, relief, repentance, and so on.

First I presuppose what Beza, Greenham, Perkins and Bolton require: before any remedies are applied, those receiving counsel must be sufficiently prepared, humbled for their sins and ready for consolation; they must have confessed and been examined as to how deeply they are affected, their present disposition and their capacity to receive good advice. It is therefore to those so thoroughly explored and examined that I address the following discourse.