SOURCE: Colie, Rosalie L. “Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the Structure of Paradox.” In Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, pp. 430-60. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.

[In the essay below, Colie argues that The Anatomy of Melancholy is deliberately paradoxical in many ways, including its contradictory subject matter, its conflicting genres, and its juxtaposition of opposites. Burton's “fragmenting of the categories of phenomena” in this manner, and his “identification of cause, symptom, and cure,” she maintains, universalizes melancholy “into the whole condition of humanity.”]

Who can but pity the mercifull intention of those hands that doe destroy themselves?

Browne, Religio Medici, I. 53

Jonathan Swift is the culprit responsible for the vulgar error that Burton's Anatomy is an amorphous literary creation, an infinite digression upon an infinity of subjects. Actually, the paradox can be defended, not only that the book is composed of very carefully constructed parts, but also that the parts are disposed in the decorum suitable to Burton's material. To begin with the most obvious element of all, Burton's material was by medical and philosophical tradition contradictory—“The Author's Abstract of Melancholy” asserts in its stilted measure that

All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so sad as melancholy;

and that

All other joys to this are folly,
None so sweet as melancholy—(1)

to remind us of the conflicting traditions, symptoms, causes, and results of the disease called Melancholy.² Again and again, as Burton points out, cases of melancholy display contradiction: the same thing may, in different cases, be cause and symptom, cause and cure; or, the cure of one case may be the cause of another.³ For a subject such as melancholy, in which cause, symptom, and cure are so confused and so confusing, decorum demands the mixture of mode and of genre. When one looks at the separate parts of the book, one sees remarkable examples of different literary genres.

Most obviously, Burton's book is an “anatomy,” an analysis of a state of mind which, when examined closely, turns into many states of mind. His title of course derives from Vesalius' contribution to the new medicine in De corporis humani fabrica, a technical book whose subject provided a metaphor for all sorts of examinations, of “discoveries,” uncovering of areas of the globe or of knowledge analogous to the anatomical uncovering of the systems of the human body. Anatomies of Renaissance subjects abounded—of wit, of abuses, of popery, of antimony, of immortality, of the world, to name only a few. Vesalius' method proceeds inward, to strip the perfect human creature of layer upon layer, until all that remains of him is an inarticulate heap of bones. It is not the bones, though, that are the object of the investigation: the investigation is its own object; the investigation itself is the voyage of discovery, the total process of acquiring knowledge. Though there is much in Burton's book that is encyclopedic, he does not attempt the classical circumscription of all knowledge; instead of beating the bounds of the parish of human understanding, he begins like Vesalius from the outside and proceeds on an inward voyage of discovery which, as I hope to show, is in both the literal and the spiritual sense a revelation.

On the face of it, the Anatomy of Melancholy is a medical book, like Timothy Bright's Treatise of Melancholy, like the many books of the medical writers Burton cites, Du Laurens, Fernel, and Vesalius himself. Compared with modern medical books, however, Renaissance books of medicine were themselves much more than mere compendia of symptoms and remedies or directions for treatment. Of English books, for instance, Timothy Bright, Helkiah Crooke, and Thomas Cogan all dealt with questions of both body and soul, recognizing the psychosomatic elements of disease, elements which necessitated moral and spiritual attention as well as physical care. Because medical books dealt with physical regimen and control, they habitually commented upon public and private morality, lectured on ethics, politics, economics, and society in general,⁴ as Burton's Anatomy so conspicuously does.

In obvious ways, Burton's casebook simply exploits the material of other books in general medicine, though, as he was careful to indicate early in the Anatomy, melancholy was by its nature not the professional consideration of medical men alone (I. 34-35). Since it was a disease of the soul, melancholy belonged quite literally in Burton's professional purlieu, since by his ordination he was charged precisely with the cure of souls. Furthermore, as he pointed out solemnly, contribution to medicine by divines was common enough to form a legitimate tradition of its own: he cited as authorities for this aspect of his enterprise Ficino, Linacre, Braunus, Hemingius, Lessius the Jesuit, Beroaldus, St. Luke, and, finally, Hercules and Aesculapius as types of Christ Himself (I. 34-37; III. 375).

As a practical and theoretical textbook in both physic and divinity, Burton's Anatomy joined the casuist traditions stemming from both professions. His Anatomy is a tremendous display of casuistry, with cases drawn not from the practice and experience of its author only, but from the whole range of western—for Burton, human—history. He was engaged in the taxonomy of melancholy, and his cases can be classified—the man who thought he was glass, the man who thought he was butter; the predicaments of maids, nuns, and widows are all assigned to classes of causes, symptoms, and cure; but each case is, as Burton continually stressed, unique, requiring particular variations in treatment, a fact which the skilled practitioner must realize. Burton's book, literally, is about cases of conscience, in both senses of that word, both understanding, and moral sensibility: it provides the intellectual historian, moreover, with a useful demonstration of the close connection between the casuistic method and the empiricisms of the Renaissance. In law canon, civil, and merchant; in medicine and (gradually) in the mathematical branches of natural philosophy; in religion, each casus, each case, could claim the right to particular scrutiny.⁵ For the divine, charged with the cure of souls, casus has a double significance, since it is the word for “fall,” and the divine's business is to deal with the particular, unique tumble by which each man recapitulates the general Fall in Eden.

Burton's scene was set in Eden:

[Man's] disobedience, pride, ambition, intemperance, incredulity, curiosity; from whence proceeded original sin and that general corruption of mankind, as from a fountain flowed all bad inclinations and actual transgressions, which cause our several calamities inflicted upon us for our sins.

(I. 131)

Since, in Burton's world, the most general of all diseases was melancholy, with its manifold forms physical and spiritual, he was able to trace without ado all cases of melancholy back to the first Fall:

… from these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free, no Stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.

(I. 143-44)

Melancholy is the mark of living: all mortal men, by the Judaeo-Christian dispensation, are marked for life by original sin, which in Burton's language is translated into melancholy.

But Christian book that it is, the Anatomy is also the book of a humanist, whose roots go deep into antiquity. With his striking independence in the use of sources, Burton demonstrates the typical humanist disregard of the contextual demands of those sources, pillaging for his own purposes, to suit himself, to buttress his argument or to illustrate his point, however he chose to do so. As a gallimaufry of humanist wisdom and opinion, the Anatomy is matched only by the self-help learning of Erasmus' Adagia and the idiosyncratic constructions of the Essays of Montaigne. Like Montaigne himself, whom Burton cites as authority for his own style of writing,

This roving humor … I have ever had, and like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain, and truly, qui ubique est, nusquam est … that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, and with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment.

(I. 17-18)

Montaigne's view—or his fiction—of himself was that he too had no memory, no learning, and little judgment; that his essays, in their sequence and their philosophy, were simply the records of his undisciplined considerations; that they were, insofar as possible, the informal and direct recapitulation of a man, of himself. the master of irony and of tone, naturally Montaigne did not present “himself,” though in a formal time and out of formal literary traditions, he came remarkably close, in illusion at least, to presenting himself as he “really was.” Burton's book belongs in the genre to which Montaigne gave the name, the essay; like Montaigne, Burton was busy weighing, assaying, in his case the scruples of melancholy men as well as the physic by which they could be cured.

But he assayed grosser weights, too—the values of his culture, the worth of ancient and popular wisdom, of ancient and popular learning, of ancient and vulgar errors. He weighed, again and again, himself, not just in the successive editions of his book, but also as a total man, a man in sum. Montaigne's book took the weights of the various, mutable man its author was; its tones followed the needs of his moods and his subjects. Like Montaigne's book, the Anatomy is various by design, since it too must match the vagaries of both its author and its subject, according to Burton's whimsical application of the principle of decorum:

… 'tis not my study or intent to compose neatly, which an orator requires, but to express myself and readily and plainly as it happens. So that as a river runs sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then per ambages; now deep, then shallow; now muddy, then clear; now broad, then narrow; doth my style flow: now serious, then light; now comical, then satirical; now more elaborate, then remiss, as the present subject required, or as at that time I was affected. And if thou vouchsafe to read this treatise, it shall seem no otherwise to thee than the way to an ordinary traveller, sometimes fair, sometimes foul; here champaign, there enclosed; barren in one place, better soil in another: by woods, groves, hills, dales, plains, etc. I shall lead thee per ardua montium, et lubrica vallium, et roscida cespitum, et glebosa camporum, through variety of objects, that which thou shalt like and surely dislike.

(I. 32)

That passage was written, as the book was, by a self-conscious disciple of Montaigne, but though the Anatomy is a long and constant weighing, it is not quite a collection of essays. Burton was bound by his material and his method to a more complicated effort, to articulate, as anatomy does, the disparate parts into a fitting whole.⁶

The passage just cited tells us a great deal—not to expect consistency, for example; to adjust to many different tones, different styles, and different genres. Following Burton's own leads, his appeals to various sorts of authority and tradition, I want to explore some of the range of his use of genre and of traditional tone.

To begin with an obvious example, the synopses with which each Partition begins demonstrate Burton's training in the schools: even if we are not particularly reminded of scholastic division in Burton's additive accounts, the construction of the book as a whole follows the conventional patterns of scholastic demonstration and argument, particularly as applied to books of instruction.⁷ To pass from this to a more concealed genre, the book as a whole bears the message, if not the shape, of something quite different. The entire book is a consolatio philosophiae,⁸ the promise of the limited comfort learning can give to men under the pressure of their painful daily lives. Under singular stress, Socrates remembered to award the consolation of philosophy to his friends anticipating their bereavement; Cicero's recapitulation of philosophical strength after the death of his daughter Tullia and Boethius' remarkable testament in prison have become the classics of a reflective and didactic genre. As Burton said of himself, “I writ of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy” (I. 20): he shakes himself out of his disease by attacking it foursquare, and he consoles his miseries by that activity. “Cardan professeth he wrote his book de Consolatione after his son's death, to comfort himself; so did Tully write of the same subject with like intent after his daughter's departure. …” (I. 21)

The whole book is located within the genre, and there are two quite different integral consolations of philosophy within it. One, in the Second Partition, warns against undue mourning at the death of friends and relations, and provides a discourse against the fear of one's own death. In this essay, almost all the references are classical: the comfort given is moral rather than spiritual, and of the whole Bible, only the Stoical Ecclesiastes is cited. Though in general, the tone is elevated and Stoical, at the end, the permissive, understanding doctor has his say. If the patient cannot meet the austere demands of Stoic self-control, then he should indulge in remedial diversions such as men in other countries do—

The Italians most part sleep away care and grief, if it unseasonably seize upon them; Danes, Dutchmen, Polanders, and Bohemians drink it down; our countrymen go to plays. Do something, something or other, let it not transpose thee. …

(II. 185)

In addition to this classical consolatio, Burton provided a Christian consolation, in the form of a sermon, his “Consolatory Digression,” where he once more enjoins his patients to “merriment” and to holy joy:

Go then merrily to heaven. If the way be troublesome, and you in misery, in many grievances, on the other side you have many pleasant sports, objects, sweet smells, delightsome tastes, music, meats, herbs, flowers, etc. to recreate your senses. Or put case that thou art now forsaken of the world, dejected, contemned, yet comfort thyself; as it was said to Hagar in the wilderness, “God sees thee, he takes notice of thee”: there is a God above that can vindicate thy cause, that can relieve thee. … For thy part then rest satisfied, “cast all thy care on him, thy burden on him, rely on him, trust on him, and he shall nourish thee, care for thee, give thee thine heart's desire”; say with David, “God is our hope and strength, in troubles ready to be found” (Ps. xlvi, i). “For they that trust in the Lord shall be as Mount Zion, which cannot be removed. As the mountains are about Jerusalem, so is the Lord about his people, from henceforth and forever” (Ps. cxxv, I, 2).

(II. 132-133)

One might expect at this point a pendant to the consolatio, the contemptus mundi, such as that provided in Donne's Anniversary Poems;⁹ but Burton gives us no such thing. He was certainly under no illusions about the pains of this world—the book, after all, delineates them in often tedious detail: but the solitary scholar, the spectator of other men's activities, whose Egeria was melancholy herself, nonetheless never gladly renounced the world into which he was born, never for one moment underestimated the values conferred by the painful, beautiful, various world. “Solitariness,” the great cause and symptom of melancholy, is always suspect: hermits are to be reintegrated into human society, and private men brought forth into community again. The world itself Burton could regard as a great box of simples from which to select the remedy proper to one's own kind of melancholy.

Burton followed Aristotle and Ficino in believing that melancholy is an heroic disease; that its principal sufferers were endowed with perceptions far more intense, more poignant, often more obsessive and more painful than those of ordinary men, but perceptions at the same time more authoritative and significant than those granted to the healthy or to sufferers from melancholy to a lesser degree. Melancholy was the malady of creative people: a bad case heightened the melancholiac's perceptions overwhelmingly, so that he might be reduced to folding his arms and pulling his hatbrim over his face, or she to sitting with her head on her hand, her elbow on her knee, staring into space, paralyzed by the grandeur of her inward vision of the outward world.¹⁰ The melancholiac is in very interesting symbiosis with the world. His perceptions of its multiplicity may overwhelm him with fear of his own meaninglessness; but his perceptions of the world are precisely what make him heroic, and he appreciates his perceptive power even when in the grip of his pains. The world is the melancholiac's dear enemy, and as such cannot be disposed of by contemptu mundi. Burton never attempted rejection of the world: his whole book is informed by respect for its vigor and variety, not by a sense of its decay.

This is not to say that Burton wrote a paean to the world's wonders like that of Pico della Mirandola, for the world was not, in Burton's vision, a friendly place or a haven for the sufferer. Burton's own attitudes toward the world varied, as he himself said. Though he attempted, like Democritus, to see it as comedy, all too often he was forced, like Heraclitus, to see it as tragedy:

Fleat Heraclitus, an rideat Democritus? in attempting to speak of these symptoms, shall I laugh with Democritus, or weep with Heraclitus? they are so ridiculous and absurd on the one side, so lamentable and tragic on the other: a mixed scene offers itself, so full of errors and a promiscuous variety of objects, that I know not in what strain to represent it.

(III. 346)

In his Heraclitan mood, Burton was capable of jeremiad. His humanist discourse on the horrors of war is an example of this, the horrors particularly of the recent wars fought, he felt, on religious pretexts rather than religious grounds (I. 56; III. 346-53). More specifically, Burton wept for the victims of melancholy; his sensitivity to cases of suffering is, at this long distance, very touching:

… [S]o by little and little, by that shoeing-horn of idleness, and voluntary solitariness, melancholy, this feral fiend, is drawn on … it was not so delicious at first, as now it is bitter and harsh; a cankered soul macerated with cares and discontents, tedium vitae, impatience, agony, inconstancy, irresolution, precipitate them into unspeakable miseries.

(I. 406-07)

Of men driven by sleeplessness upon despair, he wrote,

They can take no rest in the night, nor sleep, or if they do slumber, fearful dreams astonish them. In the day-time they are affrighted still by some terrible object, and torn in pieces with suspicion, fear, sorrow, discontents, cares, shame, anguish, etc., as so many wild horses, that they cannot be quiet an hour, a minute of time, but even against their wills they are intent, and still thinking of it, they cannot forget it, it grinds their souls day and night, they are perpetually tormented, a burden to themselves, as Job was, they can neither eat, drink, nor sleep.

(I. 431-32)

Naturally enough, in someone who chose to call himself “Democritus junior,” Burton attempted to maintain a tone of ironic criticism for the better part of his work, to laugh at foolish foibles rather than to denounce human depravity. The figure of Democritus played a part in the mixed play of the Renaissance satirist;¹¹ Burton's choice of the laughing philosopher of antiquity as his persona gained him entrance into another legitimately mixed genre, that of satire. He certainly wrote more satirical passages than jeremiads: it is difficult, however, to maintain a tone of humorous detachment for the melancholy man, predisposed to weep like Heraclitus; and difficult for Burton, too, with his extraordinary sympathy for the almost infinitely varied excruciations inevitable to the condition he described. All the same, for Burton as for Juvenal, difficile est satiram non scribere:¹²

If Democritus were alive now, he should see strange alterations, a new company of counterfeit vizards, whifflers, Cuman asses, maskers, mummers, painted puppets, outsides, fantastic shadows, gulls, monsters, giddy-heads, butterflies.

(I. 52)

If Democritus were alive now, and should but see the superstition of our age, our religious madness …, so many professed Christians, yet so few imitators of Christ; so much talk of religion, so much science, so little conscience; so much knowledge, so many preachers, so little practice; such variety of sects, such absurd and ridiculous traditions and ceremonies; if he should meet a Capuchin, a Franciscan, a pharisaical Jesuit, a man-serpent, a shave-crowned monk in his robes, a begging friar, or see their three-crowned Sovereign Lord the Pope, poor Peter's successor, servus servorum Dei, to depose kings with his foot, to tread on emperors' necks, make them stand bare-foot and bare-legged at his gates, hold his bridle and stirrup, etc. (O that Peter and Paul were alive to see this!); if he should observe a prince creep so devoutly to kiss his toe, and those red-cap cardinals, poor parish priests of old, now princes' companions, what would he say?

(I. 54)

Had he seen, on the adverse side, some of our nice and curious schismatics in another extreme abhor all ceremonies, and rather lose their lives and livings than do or admit anything papists have formerly used, though in things indifferent (they alone are the true Church …); formalists, out of fear and base flattery, like so many weather-cocks turn round, a rout of temporizers, ready to embrace and maintain all that is or shall be proposed in the hope of preferment; another Epicurean company, lying at lurch as so many vultures, watching for a prey of Church goods, and ready to rise by the downfall of any: as Lucian said in like case, what dost thou think Democritus would have done, had he been spectator to all these things?

(I. 55)

Certainly Burton's material lent itself to satire, and satire had its uses, both in the general essay and in specific moral essays. In the long introduction to his work, Burton's description of his society—the falseness of rulers, of laws and lawyers, the fragility of family ties and all other bonds of trust, the dubious relations between the sexes—recalls its major source, Raphael Hythlodaye's picture of England in the first book of More's Utopia.¹³ As in that book, in which satire and utopian prescription were mutual requirements, Burton provides us with a utopian remedy for Stuart abuses:

I will yet, to satisfy and please myself, make an Utopia of mine own, a New Atlantis, a political commonwealth of mine own, in which I will freely domineer, build cities, make laws, statutes, as I list myself. And why may I not? Pictoribus atque poetis, etc.—you know what liberty poets ever had, and besides, my predecessor Democritus was a politician, a recorder of Abdera, a law maker, as some say; and why may I not presume so much as he did?

(I. 97-98)

Like More's, Burton's utopia both was and was not a “witty fiction” merely; like Plato's, Andreae's, Campanella's, and Bacon's, it dealt with the realities of social and political organization, and provided generously for health, education, and welfare in England; like More's, his commonwealth was a humanist prescription rather than a scientific or political fantasy.¹⁴ Burton's vision is in itself interesting: his observations can be matched again and again in the grievances laid before king and parliament; his eye was in for the good of England. Like More and unlike parliament, though, Burton was far from radical in his plans for reform. More's pastoralism and communism have their roots in an early Christian spiritual arcadia, and Burton shared the spiritual if not the communal ideals of his predecessor. Both men were conservative, therefore: neither realized the beneficent implications in the spectacular industrial revolution going on about them. In certain respects, however, Burton was more modern in his social outlook than More; for example, his utopians were not protectionists, as More's had been, but mercantilists organized for trade free of the monopolies of which all England, except the monopolists, complained. Economically Burton was modern, but socially he was not: “I will have several orders, degrees of nobility, and those hereditary,” said Burton. “My form of government shall be monarchical” (I. 101).

One might think that Burton wrote his utopia merely to gratify a whim or to demonstrate his stylistic facility and imaginative ingenuity. There is, though, a contextual justification for this odd section, embedded so deeply in the preface to the book that many readers have not recognized what they were reading. As Democritus had license to write of public matters as a law-maker in Abdera, so had Burton as a physician license to write of the ills of the commonwealth as well as the ills of the people in it. In the ancient metaphor, the body politic is likened to the human body: society is seen as diseased or disordered, its diseases and disorders are diagnosed, remedies are prescribed.¹⁵ By extension of this metaphor, political analysis is part of the physician's correspondent task.

Burton's political commentary is closely linked to his commentary on religious institutions. The Church is, as the state is, a body, with habits and traditions. As a divine, Burton wrote much of The Anatomy of Melancholy within the generic traditions appropriate to his Church and about the ecclesiastical problems, public and private, of his time. Sometimes his satire turns to jeremiad, as in his strictures on Roman Catholic “superstition”:

When I see a priest say mass, with all those apish gestures, murmurings, etc., read the customs of the Jews' synagogue, or Mahometan meskites, I must needs laugh at their folly: Risum teneatis amici?; but when I see them make matters of conscience of such toys and trifles, to adore the devil, to endanger their souls, to offer their children to their idols, etc., I must needs condole their misery … when I see grave learned men rail and scold like butterwomen, methinks 'tis pretty sport, and fit for Calphurnius and Democritus to laugh at. But when I see so much blood spilt, so many murders and massacres, so many cruel battles fought, etc., 'tis a fitter subject for Heraclitus to lament.

(III. 346)

Like most Anglican priests, Burton was aware of the debt of his Church to the Roman one. He saw the Anglican Reformation as the restorer of the true religion, the English Church as the true balance between the superstitions of an overinstitutionalized Rome and the individual eccentricities of sectarians (III. 324, 423). Withal, Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept over the state of divinity in early Stuart England, in language matched by many a Presbyterian and Independent divine:

This is that base and starveling class, needy, vagabond, slaves of their bellies, worthy to be sent back to the plough-tail, fitter for the pigsty than the altar, which has basely prostituted the study of divinity. These it is who fill the pulpits and creep into noblemen's houses. Having no other means of livelihood, and being incapable both mentally and physically of filling any other post, they find here an anchorage, and clutch at the priesthood, not from religious motives, but, as Paul says, “huckstering the word of God.”

(I. 328)

A divine himself, Burton had chosen not to take the conventional track to preferment:

… had I been as forward and ambitious as some others, I might have haply printed a sermon at Paul's Cross, a sermon in St. Mary's Oxon, a sermon in Christ Church, or a sermon before the right honourable, right reverend, a sermon before the right worshipful, a sermon in Latin, in English, a sermon with a name, a sermon without, a sermon, a sermon, etc. But I have ever been as desirous to suppress my labours in this kind, as others have been to press and publish theirs.

(I. 35)

Like all Oxford divines, Burton was obliged to deliver sermons, both for his college chapel (the cathedral of the diocese), and in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin that served the university community. He was able to make up a fine sermon, too, as the consolatory digression demonstrates, as well as the first section in the book, “On Man's Excellency, fall, Miseries, and Infirmities.”

Burton certainly excelled in hortatory rhetoric. Viewed another way, the parts of the Anatomy of Melancholy dissolve into a treatise on education, de regimine hominis, a mirror of man. Once more, the genre itself, of which Erasmus' Enchiridion and Machiavelli's Prince are the most notable Renaissance examples, was closely related both to the medical treatise and to the dissertation in political theory. The most trivial Renaissance behavior book derives from the highest ancient tradition of moral discourse, in which it is assumed that the commonweal depends upon the health, physical and spiritual, of each participant.

The descriptive, prescriptive, and remedial sections of the Anatomy naturally refer to the moral tradition of which they are a part; Burton's book was a “macaronicon,” as he said, but a macaronic not of genres territorially divided, but of genres mutually serviceable. So his remarkable chapters on the origin and etiology of melancholy, “Parents, a Cause” (I. 211), and nurses as a cause (I. 330ff.), “Education a Cause of Melancholy” (I. 333), favorite chapters of twentieth-century readers, may be seen as genre recapitulations of the de regimine principis (itself, incidentally, a paradoxical title, the ruler ruled), drawing upon ethical, educational, political, and medical traditions all at once, but laying stress on the negative rather than the positive formation of human beings. Burton's long, careful chapters on the “rectifications” of melancholy, by diet, air, exercise, and moderation of the passions make up a behavior book for every fallen man and woman. What distinguishes his book from most of those in the tradition is his assumption that all educations, all growings-up, must take place against a background and often in the foreground, of spiritual or nervous malady.

Burton's Third Partition, the section on love and religious melancholy, falls into a particular subtype of Renaissance behavior book, the love dialogue, or love treatise, of which Landino, Ficino, Bembo, Castiglione, and Leone Ebreo are only the most famous composers. Because the better part of Burton's discourse on love deals with the afflictions of the condition it is easy to overlook the fact that Burton the solitary scholar, celibate by reason of his post, also wrote a praise of love the more moving because he was so manifestly acquainted with love's complicated pains. He knew the power and the extent of the passion of love, so strong that the mightiest have dutifully gone down before it; he knew the self-hatred that unworthy love induces in the lover; he knew the equivocations of jealousy—all that his anatomy lays bare. Like Rabelais in his Tiers Livre, Burton presents the humanist defense of women and marriage, but not without the counterevidence for Chaunticler's position. Like Pantagruel, Burton (or Democritus junior) is detached during the marriage debate; the case is far from a clear ruling, however: though marriage can bring the greatest of earthly joys, for the most part it seems not to do so. Panurge seems to have hesitated indefinitely between the joys and the frustrations anticipated in marriage, but the fact that love went attended by pain was not, for Burton, a sufficient argument to reject either love or marriage. Venus, as he thoroughly explained, was a cause of much melancholy; but she is also its cure, as maids, nuns, and widows conspicuously know.

Like Plato, Ficino, Leone Ebreo, and the rest, Burton passes up the scale from Aphrodite Pandemos, Venus Vulgaris, to Aphrodite Ouranos, Venus Coelestis, or from physical to spiritual, human to divine love. His dissertation is, however, radically different from the conventional love treatise, in which increased contentment is promised to the lover progressing from stage to stage on the ladder of love. Burton's treatise is a Renaissance love dialogue turned inside out: the Anatomy describes the dark side of the Platonic scale, with all the sufferings involved in every step up it.¹⁶ The most heroic form of melancholy, and therefore the most serious case of the malady, is the melancholy suffered in loving God Himself.¹⁷ Not only does passage up Burton's ladder of love give no assurance of general happiness, but it also carries with it the greatest threat of all, the despair lurking in every case of religious melancholy.

One form of religious melancholy proceeded directly from the cure of love melancholy. Appreciation of God's extraordinary beauty was the most reliable cure for sufferers from love of an earthly object; but contemplation of God's perfection characteristically reinforced awareness of human imperfection. Since God Himself was not always accurately presented to His worshippers, His distorted figure might induce or increase the fear or the madness of religious despair: the crime of misleading Christians in the worship of God Burton attributed particularly to the priests of the Roman Church (III. 331-36).

Albeit in some ways a moderate one, Burton was a product of the Protestant Reformation: the Augustine he selected as authority for his views is the Augustine of Contra Pelagianos, quite a different Augustine, for example, from the one Milton selected as his authority. For Burton men were less powerful than passions. Though medical and humanist tradition both required that every possible remedy be devised to help men in their unequal fight against themselves, only God's grace could really bring men through, and even God's grace was no warranty for earthly happiness:

So that affliction is a school or academy, wherein the best scholars are prepared to the commencements of the Deity. And though it be most troublesome and grievous for the time, yet know this, it comes by God's permission and providence; He is a spectator of thy groans and tears, still present with thee; the very hairs of thy head are numbered, not one of them can fall to the ground without the express will of God.

(III. 425-26)

Religious fear could also come and go in the mind of man without effectively contaminating it: not even the most timorous need be damned by their terrors. When Christ Himself knew something very like religious despair in the garden, common men might take some comfort in their affliction:

'Tis no new thing this, God's best servants and dearest children have been so visited and tried. Christ in the garden cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” His son by nature, as thou art by adoption and grace.

(III. 426)

By theological definition, grace is beyond understanding, though not beyond recognition. All divinity is above reason; faced with the paradoxes of divinity, one is supposed to lose one's self in “O altitudo!” Divinity is, practically speaking, unknowable and therefore unknown. For the medical man, accustomed to the vagaries of disease, for a divine trained on cases of conscience, for a literary man brought up on Montaigne, unknowing is a familiar condition. Recognition rather than knowledge is the most such men can hope for. For the Christian, recognition is just that: the most one can hope for. Discovery brings revelation; the revelation it brings is of irresistible grace.

No amount of human knowledge has the slightest effect upon God's grace, of course: but human knowledge can help to identify and to recognize conditions. Burton's book is a paradoxical exercise in many ways, but chiefly because it is about paradoxical subjects, about divinity, about epistemology, about medical problems at the frontiers of research, and therefore at the limits of discourse. Further, as one is increasingly aware in reading the medico-spiritual matter of The Anatomy of Melancholy, the material is itself full of contradiction. God is the first cause of melancholy and its only sure cure; love is cause and cure; idleness, solitude, sorrow, and fear are cause and symptom; melancholy itself is both the disease and its own cure. Elsewhere I hope to discuss some of the significance of these duplicities and multiplicities: here I want merely to stress the composed, contradictory, paradoxical nature of the disease itself.¹⁸

The practitioner treating melancholy, finding himself faced by, say, a patient exhibiting sorrow, must somehow determine the relation of this sorrow to the total disease, must sort out the contradictions of this case from others, must discover each paradox of the disease. To find out, for example, whether sorrow is the cause or the symptom in any particular case, the physician must undo the disease, determining the disorders of each layer, just as Vesalius uncovered the layered subsystems of the human body. Each case becomes a separate investigation, a separate discovery; the whole enterprise, made up of all the cases, is a voyage of intellectual discovery.

Any voyage of discovery involves the interdependent enterprises of map-making and taxonomy, as Burton recognized in his attempts both to organize melanoholy as a whole and to classify its subdivisions. The metaphor of the voyage attracted him, as the preface early notes—

I never travelled but in map or card, in which my unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated, as having ever been especially delighted with the study of cosmography.

(I. 18)

The book is chock-a-block with the rich comparative material brought home to Europe by the voyagers into the geographical new world.¹⁹

Not only the real but the imaginary voyage also has its tradition,²⁰ from Lucian's Icaromenippus to space fiction, often related to or overlapping with the utopian tradition and the satiric one. In the “Digression of the Air,” Burton sets out on his imaginary journey:

As a long-winged hawk, when he is first whistled off the fist, mounts aloft, and for his pleasure fetcheth many a circuit in the air, still soaring higher and higher till he be come to his full pitch, and in the end when the game is sprung, comes down amain, and stoops upon a sudden: so will I, having now come at last into these ample fields of air, wherein I may freely expatiate and exercise myself for my recreation, awhile rove, wander round about the world, mount aloft to those ethereal orbs and celestial spheres, and so descend to my former elements again.

(II. 34-35)

This time, the trip is around the world and through the conjectural cosmos. Burton's voyage is particularly interesting, because it is not the usual fantasy of the planetary voyage, like Lucian's or Cyrano's; it is an imaginary voyage about the real world. In other words, it is not what it seems: it is a paradox. More than this, it is a double paradox, since it is also and equally a real voyage about the imaginary world, or the world of the imagination. To put it another way, the book belongs to still another genre of discovery, of venturing into the unknown, namely, the picaresque. Instead of a fictional hero, Democritus and his reader go hand in hand through the hills and valleys, the deserts, the seas, and the airy spaces of this book. He takes us in picaresque disorder from one consideration, one intellectual incident to the next, evidently at random, though with a randomness corresponding to real experience and consequently, in the Bildungsroman tradition, a randomness at once significant and constructive.

The picaresque is the generic privilege of every man. Every man is, before God, a rogue: every man makes his way at hazard through the journey of his life—and only some men are, like Odysseus, lucky enough to find their way home. Burton's technique, like that of Cervantes in Don Quixote, is to assimilate landscape—in Burton's case, the landscape of the entire universe—to mood, to inward need. The actual voyage of discovery is only apparently through the sensible world. Actually the voyage is inward, through the fantastic worlds the imagination creates, a world like that of Bruegel's “Mad Meg,” where an entire landscape is made up by the action of one picaresque, errant, wandering mind.

The climate of Burton's book is of opposites and oppositions, contradictions and paradoxes: we become so acclimated to these anomalies that we tend to overlook their meanings in the large. Burton never presents his readers with a choice between one explanation for melancholy and another different or contradictory explanation. He does not present us with either the Galenical or the homeopathic remedy for any symptom. He does not present us with the choice between being and not being melancholy. His is a pluralist world, accommodating all the alternatives, even some which in conventional logic close one another out. Since Bacon, kicking stones can refute Berkeley: experience can make logical and metaphysical systems seem irrelevant. Burton is not dialectic, for all the rigidly imposed organization of his matter; he is like the philosopher whose name he took, ready to assume the existence of mutual contradictions, and to assume that they are the material of which the world is made up. As one perceives this, one perceives as well the fundamental way in which Burton's whole book is a medical paradox, introducing a new psychology. Ostensibly within the frame of the old faculty and humoral psychology, Burton argues against the old narrow concepts of melancholy and of human nature, providing a new way of regarding both those things.

Necessarily, in so various a world as Burton's, paradox becomes domesticated, becomes a homely mode of perception. Because we come to regard Burton's paradoxes as normal, the Anatomy has been overlooked, I think, as a major document in the genre of paradox. In the very simplest sense, it is a rhetorical paradox, since it is designed to cheat the reader's expectation. We are led to expect a straightforward medical treatise, like Bright's, and we get a great many utterly different things thrown in—a spiritual treatise, an atlas, a book of meteorology, a behavior book, and so forth, and so forth. As the paradoxist is supposed to, furthermore, Burton misleads his readers exactly: speaking of Democritus, he warns us not to expect

a pasquil, a satire, some ridiculous treatise …, some prodigious tenent, or paradox of the earth's motion, of infinite worlds, in infinito vacuo, ex fortuita atomorum collisione, in an infinite waste, so caused by an accidental collision of motes in the sun, all which Democritus held, Epicurus and their master Leucippus of old maintained, and are lately revived by Copernicus, Brunus, and some others.

(I. 15)

Each of these things, from pasquil to the notions of Bruno, is of course displayed in the treatise, and each of them more than once. Burton sets out to contradict himself; he has produced by calculation a series of rhetorical paradoxes within the limits of his book as a whole. The rhetorical paradox furthermore is the form most suited to Burton's material, which is, quite literally, anything and everything: the paradox, even more than the permissive satirical form, allows for anything, encourages genera mixta and the breaching of all limits established by any convention. Under paradox's protection, pasquil, satire, jeremiad, eulogy, sermon, utopia, behavior book, and so on and so on, may be—even should be—juxtaposed.

There is more to Burton's paradoxology than this. It has seemed possible, for example, to collect Burton's comments on himself and to subject them to psychiatric scrutiny.²¹ Burton's self-references, then, provide genuine autobiographical data. This might seem to be direct, empirical self-reference on the model of Montaigne, had not Burton specifically said that he “would not be known” (I. 15). Not to have recognized him, however, would have been impossible in the limited world of the seventeenth-century English gentry, since he registered his father's and mother's names, the place of his birth, the name of his brother's only book and the only such book then in print, as well as his own present occupation and habitation.²² Rather more like Erasmus' figure of Folly than like Montaigne, Burton refers to himself sometimes sharply and frankly, sometimes implicitly or by denial, within the fiction he sets up. “I have laid myself open (I know it),” he says, “in this treatise, turn'd mine inside outward. …” (I. 27) Reflection in mirrors is the infinite regression in the language of things, the “real” correlative of the intellectual construct of self-reference. Burton's self-references are in a dark glass, but they reflect him right enough, his face shadowed by the disease which he served.

On closer scrutiny, Burton's service to the disease turns out to be more unconventional than at first sight it appears. The title of the book, the vocabulary in which the descriptions were cast, are those of the humoral psychology. But Burton's extraordinary fragmenting of the categories of phenomena, together with the extensive generalization he makes of the melancholy phenomena he describes, his identification of cause, symptom, and cure, the very universalization of the disease into the whole condition of humanity: all this pulverizes the structural schemes of the psychology of humors, removes the medical and spiritual problems of melancholy into a far wider area of consideration and reference. In other words, the book turns out to be paradoxical about its very material: ostensibly a treatise well within the traditional psychology and medicine, it breaks through the boundaries of that tradition to universalize for common understanding and insight what had been a technical and restricted medical problem. In the simplest sense, the achievement of the book is paradoxical, the presentation of a proposition contrary to popular opinion. In a deeper sense, the fact of that commonplace paradox is in turn paradoxical in practice: the melancholiac's anatomy of melancholy determines melancholy to be other than it appeared. In Burton's dark mirror, melancholy saw herself as she really was, as quite different from what she had been thought, perhaps even quite different from what she had thought herself before her long scrutiny.

Erasmus' Folly refers not only to Erasmus, her creator, but always to herself: The Praise of Folly is a huge self-reference, Folly's shameless praise of herself, as she tells us, an exercise in philautia, or self-love. In moral theology, philautia is usually translated as pride, the root sin of all the rest. True to his custom, Burton supplied several words to translate the shades of meaning involved in the concept of philautia: “Philautia, or Self-love, Vainglory, Praise, Honour, Immoderate Applause, Pride, overmuch Joy, etc.” (I. 292). Immediately following this section is Burton's longest digression, in many ways his most touching and personal essay, the “Digression of the Miseries of Scholars” (I. 300ff.). By the end of the digression, Burton has slid into using the first-person plural, identifying himself with all miserable, all naturally and properly melancholy scholars. Even then, though, he contradicts the implications in that use of “we,” ultimately agreeing with his invoked impartial observer that the clergy, of whom he is a member, make up “a rotten crowd, beggarly, uncouth, filthy, melancholy, miserable, despicable, and contemptible” (I. 330).

To degrade one's class is of course to degrade one's self, to deny one's importance and significance. The paradox, a linguistic self-denial or self-contradiction, may well ask for this kind of fictional attitude toward one's self—as, for example, Folly herself so classically demonstrates. The extreme acting-out of such self-denial in life is the act of suicide, the all-too-common close to cases of melancholy.²³ Burton provides us with his brief biathanatos, or debate upon the lawfulness of suicide (I. 435-39). As a divine and a physician, we might expect him to condemn suicide outright and without equivocation; but once more, he cheats our expectation by the sympathy, and even the hope of divine pardon, which he extends to men led by desperation to risk their salvation as well as their bodily health.

Actually, Burton's toleration of suicides is but another mark of his general comprehension of melancholy and of all spiritual ills. He never underestimated melancholy's miseries and tortures: but also, he never underestimated the benefits melancholy may grant to her victims. Creation is deeply involved in melancholy—the muses are melancholy, as he wrote in his digression on scholarly miseries (I. 300). The proposition is reversible: melancholy is the muses, too. Intensity of human perception, creativity in all fields are in the gift of melancholy: or, melancholy favors the gifted. Melancholy distinguishes men, one from another, and most of all those particularly qualified as men. Melancholy, as “Albertus Durer” had depicted her, was an angel fixed upon the point of her own contemplation, arrested by the intensity and depth of her understanding.

Burton's book is, first and last, a paradox of the fundamental kind, a praise of folly.²⁴ The melancholy man knows how to praise melancholy because of the perceptions his melancholy gives him, because it is melancholy that drives a man to seek solitude and to contemplate truth. Burton's vision was as arresting and complete as that of Dürer's intellectual giantess: for him, melancholy itself became the organizing principle of the world. Primarily his book belongs in the tradition of Nicholas of Cusa, who praised docta ignorantia; of Montaigne, who provided a learned proof of universal ignorance and uncertainty; of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, who learnedly proved the inadequacies of all branches of learning; of Erasmus, who praised at once folly and, by indirection and darkly, a wisdom beyond that of men; of Sebastian Brandt, for whom the world was a ship full of fools. All these works were, in varying degrees, didactic essays aimed at human error and pride, at human philautia; all were paradoxical encomia, praising what most men were accustomed to think vile. Taking their texts from Ecclesiastes and Paul, all, even Brandt, reinterpreted ignorance, uncertainty, folly, and melancholy as the true wisdom and means to grace. The paradoxist denies dialectic, forbids a choice between one absolute and another; he insists upon et, upon the simultaneity of double and plural truth.

Like Montaigne, who calls doubt upon the method of his “Apologie” just as he is about to lunge home, like Folly who questions her whole oration, Burton is critical of his own discourse. Again and again he refers to Erasmus and his Encomion;²⁵ like Folly, Democritus junior warns the reader of his own unreliability:

I have overshot myself, I have spoken foolishly, rashly, unadvisedly, absurdly, I have anatomized mine own folly. And now methinks upon a sudden I am awaked as it were out of a dream; I have had a raving fit, a phantastical fit, ranged up and down, in and out, I have insulted over most kind of men, abused some, offended others, wronged myself; and now being recovered, and perceiving mine error, cry with Orlando, Solvite me, pardon, O boni, that which is past, and I will make you amends in that which is to come; I promise you a more sober discourse in my following treatise.

(I. 122)

The following treatise may be more sober, but Democritus promises no more than sobriety. That treatise too may give offense, and if it does, it does:

I hope there will no such cause of offense be given; if there be, Nemo aliquid recognoscat, nos mentimur omnia. I'll deny all (my last refuge), recant all, renounce all I have said, if any man except, and with as much facility excuse as he can accuse; but I presume of thy good favour, and gracious acceptance (gentle reader). Out of an assured hope and confidence thereof, I will begin.

(I. 123)

So begins the book proper, calling doubt on its own matter; but the book ends quoting Augustine, who turns doubt itself into opportunity for salvation:

Do you wish to be freed from doubt? do you desire to escape uncertainty? Be penitent while of sound mind: by so doing I assert that you are safe, because you have devoted that time to penitence in which you might have been guilty of sin.

(III. 432)

Those are the book's last words, in the tradition of paradox, an anticlimax: one is not sure that the end has been reached, one is tempted to turn the page for the climax proper to such a book. But this end is a proper ending, all the same, for the paradox does not conclude, does not close off for good. The book does not quite end, and yet it does end, realistically speaking, as any intimate discourse ends, in the expectation of continued life and continued discourse. Spiritually speaking, too, the book has come to its end, which is the assertion of belief in the life to come, in both the rest of mortal life and in a life in heaven; it ends in an assertion of trust, amidst a dangerous and mutable world, in the flexible, tolerant, comprehensive grace of God. Melancholy is simply the condition of mortality, or of living; like life itself, it is the only medium in which anyone can become a man or hope for a life after death. As in Cusanus', Montaigne's, and Erasmus' books, out of acknowledged folly grace has grown; melancholy proves to be a heavenly as well as an earthly muse.

Notes

1. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (3 vols., London, Everyman's Library, 1948), I. 11. All quotations from the Anatomy are from this edition, henceforth referred to as AM, with volume and page numbers.

2. Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Dürers Melencolia I, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg (Leipzig, 1923), the great study of the etiology and iconology of the disease, must be consulted; the work has recently been published in an enlarged English translation: Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London and New York, 1964). Lawrence Babb's two books, The Elizabethan Malady (Michigan State University Press, 1951), and Sanity in Bedlam (Michigan State University Press, 1959), deal with literary melancholy in English, and with Burton specifically.

3. As for example: idleness and solitariness are both causes and symptoms of melancholy (I. 245); sorrow is a cause (I. 259) and a symptom (I. 389); love a cause and a cure (III. 256); melancholy a cure for melancholy (II. 206). In a further study of the AM, I hope to develop this notion of interchangeability of cause, symptom, and cure.

4. The best discussion of Burton's book against its medical background is that of Naomi Loeb Lipman, “Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and its Relation to the Medical Book Tradition of the English Renaissance,” Columbia University, unpublished master's essay, 1952, which is full of valuable material on the range of subject matter in conventional medical writing.

5. A sensible, ranging study of the many Renaissance “empiricisms” in the professions, trades, and religions is badly needed. Burton's association with one such tradition, that of religious casuistry, has been commented on before: see William R. Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton's England (University of California Press, 1952), p. 20.

6. See F. P. Wilson, Elizabethan and Jacobean (Clarendon Press, 1945), pp. 46-48; John L. Lievsay, “Robert Burton's De Consolatione,” South Atlantic Quarterly, LV (1956), p. 329; Northrup Frye, Fables of Identity (Harbinger, 1963), pp. 155-63.

7. Lipman, “Robert Burton's Anatomy,” pp. 40-41, especially n. 7.

8. Lievsay, “Robert Burton's De Consolatione,” notes the principal classical consolation, but fails to show its connection either with its Christian counterpart in the book, or with the book as a whole.

9. For Donne's Anniversary Poems, see above, Chapter 13.

10. Panofsky and Saxl, Dürers Melencolia I, passim.

11. See Lila Hermann Freedman, “Satiric Personae. A Study of the Point of View in Formal Verse Satire in the English Renaissance from Wyatt to Marston,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1955, pp. 326-30; Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 311-12.

12. See William R. Mueller, “Robert Burton's ‘Satyricall Preface,’” MLQ, XV (1954), 28-35.

13. For Burton's utopianism, see J. Max Patrick, “Robert Burton's Utopianism,” PQ, XXVI (1948), 345-58. As hardly needs pointing out by now, More's title, “Utopia,” or nowhere, designates his book as a paradox, an assertion in its own terms self-contradictory or self-denying.

14. J. H. Hexter, More's Utopia: The Biography of an Idea; see Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton's England, passim.

15. See Lipman, “Robert Burton's Anatomy,” passim; Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton's England, p. 9.

16. Burton did not by any means invent the anti-love treatise, a form Italian in origin, with (so far as I know) Battista Fregoso's Anteros (Milan, 1486), translated into French and published in 1581 by Thomas Sébillet, Contramours. L'Antéros, oux contramour de Messire Baptiste Fulgose, iadis Duc de Gennes (Paris, Martin le Jeune, 1581); the translation is dedicated to Pontus de Tyard.

17. AM, III. 311-24; though a discussion of Bruno's Gli heroici furori has not been included in this chapter, it properly should have been. Bruno's work is important for heroic suffering and heroic madness, and therefore belongs in a consideration of melancholy; furthermore, the metaphysical love of God prescribed in that treatise may have provided Burton with some of his ideas in the last section of the Anatomy.

18. See Panofsky and Saxl, passim.

19. See especially, AM, I. 80-81; II. 35, 48, 171, 173-75.

20. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, “Cosmic Voyages,” ELH, VII (1940), 83-107; and Voyages to the Moon (New York, 1948), especially p. 225. For Burton's cosmology, see Robert L. Brown, “Robert Burton and the New Cosmology,” MLQ, XIII (1952), 131-48.

21. Bergen Evans and George Mohr, M.D., The Psychiatry of Robert Burton (New York, 1944).

22. AM, I. 36; his birthplace: II. 68, 250; his school: II. 63; Oxford, Christ Church, and the Bodleian: I. 17, 417; II. 66, 91, 97, 214; his brothers: I. 36; II. 68; his mother: II. 251; his living at Segrave: II. 63-64; his patroness, II. 68.

23. See below, Chapter 16.

24. Irene Samuel, “The Brood of Folly,” N& Q, CCIII (1958), 430-31; Walter J. Kaiser, Praisers of Folly.

25. AM, I. 27, 28, 29, 39, 52, 59, 247, 310, 325, 343; II. 92, 126; III. 3.

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