The Anatomy of Melancholy

And so, while these men dispute about the sun and moon like the philosophers in Lucian, we may fear that the sun and moon will hide themselves, as offended as the moon was with those philosophers, and send another message to Jupiter through some newly contrived Icaromenippus, to put an end to all these prying controversies and scatter the disputants abroad.

But why should the sun and moon be angry or take offence at mathematicians and philosophers, when God himself receives the same treatment from a company of petty theologians? They are not content to observe the sun and moon, measure their positions and greatest distance through a telescope, calculate their movements, or visit the moon in a poetic fiction or a dream, as one writer says: “I shall now undertake a bold and memorable feat, not attempted before in this age: I shall tell what happened last night in the moon’s kingdom, where no one has ever arrived except in a dream”—apart from himself and Menippus.

Or, as Peter Cunaeus says, “I shall deal honestly: know that nothing I am about to write is true, and so forth. I shall tell of things that have neither happened nor will happen,” “merely to exercise my style and wit.” But these gigantic Cyclopes, quite seriously and without jesting, will pass beyond spheres, heaven, and stars into the Empyrean heaven, soar higher still, and see what God himself does.

The Jewish Talmudists take it upon themselves to determine how God spends all his time: sometimes playing with Leviathan, sometimes overseeing the world, and so forth. Like Lucian’s Jupiter, who spent much of the year painting butterflies’ wings and seeing who offered sacrifice; fixing the hours when it should rain, how much snow should fall in a particular place, which way the wind should blow in Greece, and which way in Africa.

In the Turks’ Koran, Muhammad is carried up to heaven on a Pegasus sent specially by God, as he lay in bed with his wife, and after some conversation with God is set down on earth again. The pagans depict God and distort him in a thousand ways; our heretics, schismatics, and some scholastics are not far behind.

Some portray him in the guise of an old man, draw maps of heaven, count the angels, and give their various names and offices. Some deny God and his providence; some take his office out of his hands, presuming to bind and loose in heaven, release, pardon, forgive, and share his command.