The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 8. Rivalry, hatred, faction and the desire for revenge as causes.

From this root of envy spring those deadly branches—faction, hatred, spite and rivalry—which cause similar distress and are “saws of the soul,” the soul’s saws; “passions full of consternation,” emotions filled with desperate bewilderment. Or, as Cyprian describes rivalry, it is a moth in the soul, a wasting disease: to make another person’s happiness one’s own misery, to torture, crucify and execute oneself, to eat one’s own heart. Food and drink do such people no good. They grieve, sigh and groan continually, day and night without respite; their breast is torn apart.

And a little later: Whoever it is you rival and envy, he may escape you, but you can escape neither him nor yourself. Wherever you are, he is with you; your enemy is always in your breast, your destruction within you. You are a captive, bound hand and foot as long as you remain malicious and envious, and you cannot be comforted. This was the devil’s downfall; whenever this passion fully possesses you, it will be yours. Yet no disturbance is more frequent, no passion more common.

Potter resents potter, and carpenter carpenter; Beggar envies beggar, and singer singer. A potter rivals a potter, One smith envies another; A beggar rivals a beggar, A singer his fellow singer.

Every society, corporate body and private family is full of it. It takes hold of almost every kind of person, from prince to ploughman; even among familiar companions it can be seen. Scarcely three people meet without two of them taking sides, forming factions or competing, with some “enmity,” quarrel, private grudge or resentment among them.

Scarcely two gentlemen live near one another in the country, unless they are close relatives or connected by marriage, without rivalry between them and their servants; some quarrel or grudge between their wives or children, friends and followers; some dispute over wealth, ancestry, precedence and so on. As a result, like Aesop’s frog, which tried to swell to the size of an ox and finally burst, they exceed their means and station, competing until they consume their property in lawsuits—or in hospitality, feasting and fine clothes to acquire a few inflated titles. For “we all suffer from ambitious poverty.” To outshine one another, they exhaust their bodies, wear away their souls, and beggar themselves through disputes or competitive entertaining.

Scarcely two great scholars live in the same age without bitterly attacking one another and one another’s followers: Scotists and Thomists, Realists and Nominalists, Plato and Aristotle, Galenists and Paracelsians, and so on. It holds true in every profession.