The Anatomy of Melancholy

SUBSECTION 2 A digression on the nature of spirits Evil angels or devils and how they cause melancholy

How far the power of spirits and devils extends, and whether they can cause this or any other disease, is a serious question worth considering. To make it better understood, I shall briefly digress on the nature of spirits.

The question is extremely obscure—full of controversy and uncertainty, according to Postel—and beyond human understanding. “I confess that it exceeds the powers of my inquiry,” says Augustine; I admit that I cannot understand it. The finite cannot pass judgement on the infinite. With Cicero, in On the Nature of the Gods, we can more readily determine what spirits are not than what they are.

Our subtle scholastics, our Cardanos and Scaligers, our profound Thomists, the penetrating intellects of Fracastoro and Fernel, are weak, barren, obscure and inadequate when faced with these mysteries. All our sharpest minds grow dim, like an owl’s eyes in sunlight, and cannot grasp them. Yet, as with the other subjects, I shall venture to say something about this one.

In former times, as we read in Acts 23, the Sadducees denied the existence of such spirits, devils or angels. So did the physician Galen, the Peripatetics and even Aristotle himself, as Pomponazzi firmly maintains and Scaliger to some extent concedes—although the Jesuit Dandini strongly denies this in his commentary on book 2 of On the Soul.

Separate substances and intelligences are the same beings that Christians call angels and Platonists call demons: they give all spirits the name daimones, whether good or evil angels, as Julius Pollux observes in book 1, chapter 1 of his Onomasticon. Epicureans and atheists generally share the view that they do not exist, because they have never seen them.

Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus, following in the footsteps of Trismegistus, Pythagoras and Socrates, have no doubt that such spirits exist. Neither do the Stoics, although they stray far from the truth.

As for their first origin, the Talmudists say that Adam had a wife called Lilith before he married Eve, and that by her he fathered nothing but devils. The Turks’ Koran is just as absurd and ridiculous on this point. But Scripture informs us Christians how Lucifer, their chief, fell from heaven with his companions because of his pride and ambition;

created by God, placed in heaven and once an angel of light, he is now cast down into the lower regions of air beneath the moon, or into hell, and “handed over to chains of darkness,” 2 Peter 2:4, to be held until condemnation.

Some hold the foolish opinion that these spirits are the souls of the dead: the good and nobler souls were made gods, while the baser ones grovelled on the ground or in the lower regions and became devils. Tertullian, the philosopher Porphyry and Maximus of Tyre, in Discourse 27, maintain this. These spirits that we call angels and devils, he says, are nothing but the souls of the dead, who either help and support their surviving friends through love and pity, or persecute the enemies they hated, as Dido threatened to persecute Aeneas:

Everywhere my ghost will haunt you; you villain, you will pay.