The Anatomy of Melancholy

except that at this time fate drove me onto this rock of melancholy and swept me away down this side stream—a little rivulet diverted from the main channel of my studies. In my spare hours I have occupied and amused myself with it as a most necessary and useful subject. I do not prefer it to theology, which I acknowledge as the queen of professions, with all the others as her handmaids. Rather, I saw no equally pressing need in theology. If I had written a straightforward exposition of doctrine, there are already so many books of that kind—so many commentators, treatises, pamphlets, expositions, and sermons—that whole teams of oxen could not haul them.

And if I had been as eager and ambitious as some others, I might perhaps have printed a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, a sermon at St Mary’s, Oxford, a sermon at Christ Church, or a sermon before the Right Honourable, the Right Reverend, a sermon before the Right Worshipful; a sermon in Latin, in English, a sermon with a name, a sermon without; a sermon, a sermon, and so on. But I have always been as eager to keep my work of this kind unpublished as others have been to put theirs through the press and publish it.

To write religious controversy would have been like cutting off one of the Hydra’s heads: “one dispute breeds another.” One produces the next, with so many replies, further replies, and swarms of questions, “in this sacred war fought with the point of the pen,” that once I had begun I could never finish. As Pope Alexander VI observed long ago, one would be much better off provoking a great prince than a begging friar—or, I would add, a Jesuit or a seminary priest. “This breed of men is unconquerable.” They are a body that cannot be refuted; they must and will have the last word;

and they conduct their disputes with such vehemence, insolence, abominable lying, falsification, and bitterness that, as the poet said, “Is it blind fury, or does some fiercer force drive you, or guilt? Answer me.” Whether blind fury, error, rashness, or something else spurs them on, I do not know. What I do know is that, as Augustine observed long ago, “the storm of contention clouds the clear sky of charity.” This tempest of dispute overcasts charity’s serenity. In every branch of learning, too many spirits of this kind have already been conjured up—more than we know how to lay to rest—and they rage so furiously and make such a racket,

that, as Quintilian said, it would have been far better for some of them to have been born unable to speak and wholly uneducated than to fall into such folly and destroy themselves. Better to have left unwritten: for silence will always be safe. It is a general fault. So Severinus the Dane complains of medicine: unhappy creatures that we are, we spend our days on useless questions and disputes, intricate subtleties, “about goat’s wool”—about moonlight reflected in water—while leaving nature’s greatest treasures untouched, where the best remedies for every kind of disease may be found. We not only neglect them ourselves, but obstruct, condemn, forbid, and ridicule others willing to investigate them. These considerations have now induced me to choose this medical subject.