The Anatomy of Melancholy

Member 3 Subsection 1 Passions and disturbances of the mind and how they cause melancholy

Just as the gymnosophist in Plutarch answered Alexander, when asked which had spoken best, that each of his companions had spoken better than the next, so I may say of these causes, to anyone who asks which is greatest: each is more grievous than the next, and this one, passion, is the greatest of all.

A most frequent and common cause of melancholy is this “thunderbolt of the passions,” as Piccolomini calls it: this thunder and lightning of emotional disturbance, which causes such violent and rapid changes in our little world, the human being, and often overthrows its healthy condition and balance. For just as the body acts upon the mind through its bad humours, troubling the spirits and sending thick vapours into the brain, and so, as a consequence, disturbing the soul and all its faculties—

A body burdened with yesterday’s excesses Weighs down the mind along with it—

with fear, sorrow and so on, the usual symptoms of this disease, so, on the other hand, the mind acts most powerfully upon the body. Through its passions and disturbances it produces extraordinary changes: melancholy, despair, cruel diseases and sometimes death itself.

So much so that what Plato says in his Charmides is entirely true: “All the body’s evils proceed from the soul”; all bodily misfortunes come from the soul. And Democritus argues in Plutarch that “the soul would be condemned at the body’s suit”: if the body brought a legal action against the soul on this account, the soul would surely lose its case and be convicted of causing such harm through its gross negligence.

For the soul has authority over the body and uses it as an instrument, as a smith uses his hammer, says Cyprian, laying all those faults and illnesses at the mind’s door. So does Philostratus: “The body is not defiled without the soul’s consent”; the body is corrupted only by the soul. Luis Vives holds that such turbulent upheavals proceed from ignorance and lack of judgement. All philosophers blame the body’s miseries on the soul, which should have governed it better under reason’s command and has failed to do so.

The Stoics are entirely of the opinion, as Lipsius and Piccolomini record, that a wise person should be “unaffected,” free of every kind of passion and emotional disturbance. So Seneca reports of Cato, the Greeks of Socrates, and Johannes Boemus of a people in Africa, so free from passion—or rather, so insensible—that if wounded by a sword they merely look round.

Lactantius, in book 2 of the Institutes, would exclude fear from a wise person; others exclude all passions, some only the greatest. But let them dispute as they please, lay down their theses and give instructions to the contrary: common experience proves Lemnius right—no mortal is free from these disturbances. If anyone is, surely he is either a god or a block of wood.

They are born and bred with us; we inherit them from our parents. “We receive this bad penny from our parents,” says Pelezius; “it is born and reared along with us.” It descends from Adam. Cain was melancholy, as Augustine says—and who is not?