The Anatomy of Melancholy

Whom next? The Stoics? The Stoic sage, and he alone, is subject to no disturbance of mind. As Plutarch mockingly describes him, torture does not trouble him, fire does not burn him, his adversary cannot defeat him, his enemy cannot sell him. Though wrinkled, half-blind, toothless, and deformed, he is supremely beautiful and godlike, a king in his own imagination, though not worth a groat.

He never loses his judgement, never goes mad, never becomes sad or drunk, because virtue cannot be taken away: so Zeno maintains, on account of the firmness of his understanding. But he was mad to say so. This fellow needs Anticyra’s chisel or a pickaxe; he needs a hole bored in his head, and so do all his companions, however wise they would like to seem.

Chrysippus himself freely concedes that at certain times and on certain occasions they are fools like everyone else: he says that virtue can be lost through drunkenness or melancholy. It may be lost through drunkenness or melancholy; the wise man may sometimes be mentally unsettled like the rest: supremely wise, except when troublesome phlegm gets in the way.

I ought here to except some Cynics: Menippus, Diogenes, and Crates of Thebes. Or, coming down to our own times, that all-knowing brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, the only people who are wise: those great theologians, statesmen, philosophers, physicians, scholars of language, practitioners of the arts, and so on, whom Saint Bridget, Abbot Joachim, Leicenbergius, and such inspired spirits have prophesied and promised to the world;

if, that is, any such people exist—Heinrich Neuhusius doubts it, as do Valentinus Andreae and others—or if there is an Elijah the Artificer, their Paracelsian master. Though Libavius and many others ridicule and criticize him, some insist that he is the renewer of all the arts and sciences, the reformer of the world, and alive at this very moment;

for so Johannes Montanus Strigoniensis, that great champion of Paracelsus, argues and confidently asserts: a supremely godlike man, the very essence of wisdom, wherever he may be. For he, his brotherhood, his friends, and the rest are all betrothed to wisdom, if we may believe their disciples and followers.

I must of course except Lipsius and the Pope, and strike their names from the catalogue of fools. For besides Dousa’s flattering testimony— From the rising sun to the Maeotian marshes, No one can claim to equal Justus—

Lipsius says of himself that he was indeed the teacher of the human race, through speech and writing: a grand lord, a master, a tutor to us all. He boasts of how, for thirteen years, he sowed wisdom in the Low Countries, as the philosopher Ammonius once did in Alexandria: literature together with humane learning, and wisdom with practical judgement. High priest of wisdom, he shall be the eighth sage.