Whether the Passions of the Soul or Diseases of the Body Are Worse (1-4)

HOMER, having contemplated the various kinds of mortal animals, and compared them one with another in respect to their lives and habits, cried out:

What wretched creature of what wretched kind,

Than man more weak, calamitous, and blind!

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attributing to man that unhappy primacy of having the superiority in miseries. But we, considering man as having already gained the victory for infelicity, and being publicly declared the most miserable of all animals, will compare him with himself in a contention about his own calamities, not unprofitably but even altogether necessarily dividing his soul from his body; that we may thence learn, whether we live more miserably on account of Fortune or of ourselves. For sickness is indeed, engendered in the body by Nature; but vice and malice in the soul are first its own work, afterward its passion. Now it is of no small advantage towards content of mind, if that which is the worse is curable, and lighter and less violent in its attacks than we feared.

Wherefore the physicians do in the first place indeed desire that a man should not be sick, and next, that being sick he should not be ignorant that he is so; which nevertheless befalls all the diseases of the soul. For neither those who are mad, those that are lascivious, nor those who act unjustly, think that they sin; nay, some of them are on the contrary persuaded even that they do well. Never yet did any man call a fever health, a consumption a good constitution of body, the gout swift-footedness, or the wanness of the face a fresh color; but many there are who term anger courage, unchaste love amity, envy emulation, and cowardice cautiousness. Moreover, those who are troubled with corporeal sickness send for physicians, for they are sensible what they stand in need of for the cure of their diseases; but these who are sick in mind shun philosophers, because they think themselves to act excellently in those very things in which they most offend. For making use of this reasoning, we affirm that the blearness or soreness of the eyes is a less malady than madness, and the gout in the feet than a frenzy in the brain; for in the one a man is sensible of his distemper, and crying out calls for the physician, to whom, when he is come, he shows his eye to be anointed, stretches out his vein to be opened, and gives up his head to be cured; but on the contrary, you hear Agave, when seized with madness, through the violence of her passion not knowing the dearest pledges of her womb, to cry out:

From the hill’s top into the plain,

Bring me this young fawn, newly slain,

Which happily’s become our prey.

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For he who is sick in body, presently yielding and betaking himself to his bed, lies there quiet, till he is cured; and if the accession of some violent hot fit makes him a little

Lie still at ease, poor wretch, keep in thy bed,[*]

easily stays and retains him; but those, on the other side, who are surprised with the passions of the soul are then most active, then least at quiet; for the impulses of the mind are the principal causes of actions, and passions are the violent fits of such impulses. Wherefore, they suffer not the soul to be at rest; but when a man has most need of patience, silence, and retirement, then is he drawn forth into the light, then is he chiefly discovered by his choleric humors, his eagerness in contending, his dishonest loves, and his heart-breaking sorrows, which force him to commit many irregular actions, and speak many words unfitting for the times.