The Anatomy of Melancholy

A third argument follows from the preceding one. Everyone is carried away by passion, discontent, lust, pleasures, and so forth; people generally hate the virtues they ought to love and love the vices they ought to hate. They are therefore more than melancholy: quite mad, brute beasts, without reason—so Chrysostom argues. Or rather, they are dead and buried alive, as Philo the Jew concludes with certainty of all who are carried away by passions or suffer from any disease of the mind.

Where there is fear and sorrow, Lactantius firmly maintains, wisdom cannot dwell. Whoever desires will also fear; Whoever lives in fear will never, to my mind, be free. Seneca and the other Stoics hold that wisdom cannot be found wherever there is even the slightest disturbance of the emotions.

What could be more ridiculous, as Lactantius asks, than to hear how Xerxes whipped the Hellespont, threatened Mount Athos, and so on? To come to the point, who is free from passion? “There is no mortal whom pain or sickness does not touch,” as Cicero declares, quoting an old poem. No mortal can avoid sorrow and sickness, and sorrow is melancholy’s inseparable companion.

Chrysostom goes further still: they are more than mad, actual beasts, stupefied and without common sense. “How,” he asks, “am I to recognise you as a man when you kick like an ass, neigh after women like a horse, rage with lust like a bull, gorge like a bear, sting like a scorpion, prey like a wolf, and are as cunning as a fox and as shameless as a dog? Shall I call you a man when you show every sign of a beast? How shall I recognise you as a man? By your shape? That frightens me still more, to see a beast in the likeness of a man.”

Seneca calls that saying of Epicurus a magnificent utterance, a heroic speech: “A fool is always beginning to live.” He considers it shameful fickleness to lay new foundations for one’s life every day. But who does otherwise? One travels, another builds; one pursues this business, another that, and old people are as far astray as the rest. “O foolish old age!” Cicero exclaims. Thus young, old, and middle-aged are all senseless and foolish.