The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Our love for our neighbour may proceed from him and travel with him, but not towards him as its final end. From him, when we rejoice in his safety and well-being; with him, when we wish to have him as a fellow traveller and companion on the Lord’s way; but not resting in him, because help, hope and trust are not to be placed in a human being.”

“Our love comes from the world when we begin to admire the Creator in his works and glorify God in his creatures. It would travel with the world if, following the changeability of all temporal things, it sank in adversity or rose too high in prosperity; towards the world, if it wished to settle in the world’s empty pleasures and pursuits.”

I could repeat many such divisions and subdivisions of love. But lest I “confuse filthy, burning lust with pure and divine love”—the objection Scaliger makes against Cardan in Exercise 501—I will follow Leone Ebreo’s precise division in Dialogue 2, between Sophia and Philo, where he discusses natural, sentient and rational love, treating each separately.

Natural love or hatred is the sympathy or antipathy seen in living and lifeless creatures, in the four elements, metals and stones: “heavy things tend downwards,” as a stone towards its centre, fire upwards, and rivers towards the sea. The sun, moon and stars continually circle, “loving to fulfil the duties of their nature,” for love of perfection. This love is evident, I say, in lifeless creatures. Why does a lodestone draw iron to itself, jet attract chaff, or the ground thirst for showers, except through love? No creature can be found, Saint Jerome concludes, “that does not love something”: no tree trunk, no stone, that has not some feeling of love.

It is more evident in plants and herbs, and particularly observed in growing things: a great sympathy between vine and elm; a great antipathy between vine and cabbage, vine and olive—“the maiden flees Bromius”—and vine and bay. The vine does not love the bay “or its smell, and will kill it if it grows nearby.” Burdock and lentil cannot endure one another; olive and myrtle embrace each other with roots and branches if they grow close together.

Read more in Piccolomini, grade 7, chapter 1; Crescentius, On Agriculture, book 5; Giambattista della Porta, On Magic, book 1, in the chapter on the antipathy of plants and sympathy of elements; and Fracastoro, On Sympathy and Antipathy. On the love and hatred of planets, consult any astrologer. Leone Ebreo gives many explanations drawn from fables and supplies moral interpretations of them as well.

Sentient love is the love of animals. The same Leone Ebreo, in Dialogue 2, assigns these causes to it. First, male and female love one another for the pleasure they take in mating. Second, for the preservation of their species and the desire for offspring. Third, because they agree in being of the same kind: “A pig seems most beautiful to a pig, a dog to a dog, an ox to an ox, and an ass to an ass,” as Epicharmus held; and according to that proverb of Diogenianus:

A jackdaw always sits beside a jackdaw.