The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 7. Envy, malice and hatred as causes.

Envy and malice are two links in this chain, and both, as Guianerius proves in treatise 15, chapter 2, from Galen’s commentary 22 on the third book of Aphorisms, cause this illness by themselves, especially in people whose bodies are otherwise predisposed to melancholy. Valescus of Taranta and Felix Platter observe that envy so gnaws at many people’s hearts that they become thoroughly melancholy. That is presumably why Solomon, Proverbs 14:13, calls it “the rotting of the bones,” and Cyprian “a hidden wound.”

The Sicilian tyrants never devised A greater torment—

The Sicilian tyrants never invented a torment like it. It crucifies people’s souls, withers their bodies, makes them hollow-eyed, pale, thin and ghastly to behold: Cyprian, sermon 2, On Jealousy and Envy. As a moth eats a garment, says Chrysostom, so envy consumes a person, making him a living anatomical specimen, a skeleton, “a lean and pale carcass, brought to life by a fiend”—Hall, Characters. Whenever an envious wretch sees another person prosper, grow rich, thrive and succeed in the world, gain honours, offices or the like, he resents it and grieves.

He wastes away at the sight Of others’ success—and is his own punishment.

He tortures himself if his equal, friend or neighbour is promoted, praised or successful. Once he hears of it, it wounds him afresh; no greater pain can come to him than news of another person’s good fortune. Every such sight is a dagger at his heart. He looks on with an envious eye, like those who fell from Lucian’s rock of honour, and will harm himself to injure someone else: “He will fall headlong, provided he falls upon his enemy.” Like the man in Aesop, he would willingly lose one eye so that his companion might lose both; or like the rich man in Quintilian who poisoned the flowers in his garden so that his neighbour’s bees could gather no more honey from them.

His whole life is sorrow, and every word he speaks a satire; nothing fattens him but other people’s ruin. In a word, envy is simply “sorrow at another’s good fortune”—sorrow for other people’s blessings, past, present or future—and “joy at adversity,” joy in their suffering. It is the opposite of compassion, which grieves at other people’s misfortunes and affects the body adversely in a different way. So John of Damascus defines it in On the Orthodox Faith, book 2; Thomas Aquinas, II–II, question 36, article 1; Aristotle, Rhetoric, book 2, chapters 4 and 10; Plato, Philebus; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, book 3; Gregory of Nyssa, On the Virtue of the Soul, chapter 12; Basil, On Envy; Pindar, ode 1, series 5. And we find it true.