The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 11. The concupiscible appetite: desires and ambition as causes.

These concupiscible and irascible appetites are like the two strands of a rope, intertwined with one another and both winding around the heart. Both are good, as Augustine holds in The City of God, book 14, chapter 9, if moderate; both are harmful if excessive. However much the concupiscible appetite may seem to offer pleasure and delight, and however often our desires please us by presenting an attractive object, when carried to extremes they torture and torment us in their turn.

It is truly said that desire has no rest: it is infinite in itself, endless; as one writer calls it, a perpetual rack, or, according to Augustine, a horse-mill, always going round in a circle. These desires are as varied as they are continual. “I could more easily count the atoms,” says Bernard, “than the movements of the heart: now I think of this, now of that.” You might as well count the motes in a sunbeam as count them.

It extends to anything sought excessively, according to Guaineri, or to any ardent desire, as Fernel interprets it. Whatever its kind, it tortures us if immoderate and, according to Platter and others, is a particular cause of melancholy. “My thoughts are torn apart by my many desires”: Augustine confessed that his manifold desires tore him to pieces.

Bernard likewise complains that they would not let him rest for a minute: I would have this, and that; then I wish to be this sort of person, then that. It is therefore hard to set limits to desires: they are so various and numerous that it is impossible to grasp them all. I shall dwell only on a few of the chief and most harmful kinds, such as that excessive appetite and desire for honour which we commonly call ambition;

love of money, which is covetousness, and that greedy desire for gain; self-love, pride and the excessive desire for vain glory or applause; excessive love of study; and love of women, which will require a whole volume to itself. I shall speak briefly of the others in their order.

Ambition: a proud covetousness, or a parching thirst for honour; a great torture of the mind, composed of envy, pride and greed. One defines it as a splendid madness, a pleasant poison; Ambrose, as a canker of the soul, a hidden plague; Bernard, as a secret poison, the father of spite and mother of hypocrisy, the moth that eats holiness, and a cause of madness, crucifying and disturbing everyone it seizes.

Seneca calls it “an anxious, fearful, empty, windy thing”: a windy thing, a vain, anxious and fearful thing. For those who, like Sisyphus, roll this restless stone of ambition are commonly in perpetual anguish, always perplexed—“always they withdraw silent and sad,” as Lucretius says—uncertain, timid, suspicious, afraid to give offence in word or deed.