The Anatomy of Melancholy

MEMBER 2 Bodily deformity, sickness, low birth, and particular discontents

Particular discontents and grievances concern the body, the mind, or one’s circumstances. By wounding the human soul, they produce melancholy and many serious troubles; the antidote of good counsel and persuasion may ease or remove them.

Bodily deformities and impairments—lameness, curvature, deafness, blindness, whether present from birth or acquired—torment many people. Yet this may comfort them: these bodily impairments do not blemish the soul in the least or hinder its workings, but rather help and greatly strengthen it. Your body may be lame and look deformed, yet this does not prevent you from being good, wise, upright, and honourable.

“Honour and beauty seldom dwell together,” says Plutarch, and an excellent understanding often lies beneath a threadbare coat: “Wisdom often hides beneath worn clothing.”

When Cornelio Musso, the famous Italian preacher, first entered the pulpit in Venice, his appearance—a small, thin, poor, downcast figure—so lowered him in his listeners’ esteem that they were all ready to leave the church. But when they heard him speak, they marvelled at him; the senator who could enjoy his company or be first to invite him home counted himself fortunate.

A man who looks insignificant may have more intelligence, learning, and integrity than someone who struts about “flaunting bombast,” and “taking grand strides,” and wins the world’s admiration. “A humble jar often holds noble nectar”: the best wine comes from an old vessel.

How many princes, kings, emperors, philosophers, and orators with bodily deformities could I name? Hannibal had one eye; Appius Claudus and Timoleon were blind, as were Muleasses, king of Tunis, John, king of Bohemia, and the prophet Tiresias. “Night has its pleasures.” For the loss of that one sense, such people are commonly compensated in the others: they have excellent memories and other abilities, music and many recreations, much happiness and great wisdom, as Cicero explains so well in his Tusculan Disputations. Homer was blind, yet who, he asks, ever produced more accurate, vivid, or better descriptions with both eyes?

Democritus was blind, yet, as Laertius writes of him, he saw more than all the rest of Greece. As Plato concludes, “The mind’s eye begins to see keenly as soon as the bodily eye loses its bloom”: when our bodily eyes are at their worst, the eyes of our soul generally see best. Some philosophers and theologians have castrated themselves or deliberately put out their eyes to contemplate better.