The Anatomy of Melancholy

Cardano calls a library medicine for the soul. Religious authors strengthen the mind, making people courageous and steadfast; and, as Hyperius adds, godly conversation will not allow the mind to be tormented by absurd thoughts. Rhazes prescribes continual conversation for such melancholy people: ongoing talk about some history, tale, poem, news, and the like. “To eat and drink one another’s talk is as pleasant as food or drink”: it nourishes the mind as food and drink nourish the body, and pleases it as much.

For this reason Rhazes, with good cause, would have someone always talk seriously or debate with them, and sometimes even quibble and argue—provided it does not erupt into violent agitation. Such disputation is like stirring a dying fire to make it burn afresh: it sharpens a sluggish mind and will not let it drown in those deep thoughts that commonly trouble melancholy people.

Ferdinand and Alfonso, kings of Aragon and Sicily, were both cured by reading history—one Curtius, the other Livy—when no prescribed medicine would work. Camerarius reports the same of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Pagan philosophers are so full of divine precepts of this kind that some believe they alone can calm a distressed mind.

“There are words and sayings by which to soothe this pain,” and so forth: Epictetus, Plutarch, and Seneca. “What a man he is! What weapons,” says Lipsius, “he supplies against every misfortune of the mind and against death itself! How he tears out vices and implants virtues!” When I read Seneca, I feel beyond all human fortunes, on a mountain summit above mortality.

Plutarch says as much of Homer. This is probably why, in Xenophon, Niceratus’s parents made him learn Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey by heart: “so that he might become a good man,” both to make him good and upright and to keep him from idleness. If philosophy can provide such comfort, what may we gain from theology? What will the religious meditations of Augustine, Cyprian, Gregory, and Bernard give us?

They tell us what is noble, what shameful, what useful, what not, More fully and better than Chrysippus and Crantor.

Indeed, what will Scripture itself give us? It is like an apothecary’s shop containing remedies for every illness of the mind: purgatives, restoratives, medicines that alter its condition, strengthening remedies, soothing remedies, and so forth. “Every disease of the soul,” says Augustine, “has its particular medicine in Scripture. All that is required is for the sick person to take the draught God has already prepared.”

Gregory calls it a mirror in which we may see all our infirmities; “speech tried by fire,” Psalm 119:140; Origen calls it a charm. And so Jerome directs Rusticus the monk continually to read Scripture and reflect on what he has read: for meditation is to what we read as chewing is to food.