The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Even in the midst of laughter there is sorrow,” as Solomon says. Even amid all our feasting and merriment, as Augustine concludes in his commentary on Psalm 41, there is grief and discontent. “Among our delights, something cruel is always choking us.” Here, for a pint of honey you will probably find a gallon of gall; for a dram of pleasure, a pound of pain; for an inch of mirth, an ell of mourning. These miseries wind around our life as ivy winds around an oak.

It is utterly absurd and ridiculous for any mortal to expect an uninterrupted course of happiness in life. Nothing is so prosperous and pleasant that it contains no bitterness, no cause for complaint or discontent. Everything is bittersweet, a mixture of feelings, like the black and white squares of a chessboard. People, families and cities have their falls and declines: now trines and sextiles, then squares and oppositions.

We are not here like the angels, the celestial powers and heavenly bodies, the sun and moon, completing our course without mishap and continuing steadily for so many ages. We are subject to infirmities and miseries, interrupted, tossed and tumbled up and down, blown about by every little gust, often troubled and unsettled by the slightest occasion: uncertain and fragile, as is everything we trust in.

Anyone who does not know this, and is not prepared to endure it, is unfit to live in this world—as one writer laments of our times. He does not understand its nature: pleasure and pain are always linked, following one another in a circle. Leave the world, then; be gone from here if you cannot bear it.

There is no escaping it: you must arm yourself with patience and courage, stand firm against it, and endure hardship as a good soldier of Christ, as Paul advises, bearing it steadfastly.

But so few can accept this good counsel or put it into practice. Instead, like so many brute beasts, they give way to their passions, willingly subjecting themselves to them and plunging into a labyrinth of cares, woes and miseries. They allow these to overwhelm their souls and cannot arm themselves with the patience they should. It therefore often happens that these passing states become established conditions.

As Seneca observes, repeated emotional disturbances, when neglected, become a disease. Just as a single catarrhal discharge, not yet habitual, produces a cough, while a persistent and long-standing one causes a wasting disease of the lungs, so do these provocations to melancholy. People are affected more or less according to the strength or weakness of the humour itself, and the ability of their bodily constitution or rational soul to resist it.