Eleanor Vicari's The View from Minerva's Tower: Learning and Imagination in The Anatomy of Melancholy, U. of Toronto Press, Toronto, n.d.

This book advances a novel theory; Ms. Vicari believes that Robert Burton was a Christian, not superficially or incidentally, but profoundly and essentially; that he rejected the medical profession's view that melancholy had a physical cause, namely a black fluid secreted in the spleen, and held that it was caused by sin, or rather, that melancholy was a metaphor for sin; hence that he wrote to produce in the reader a Christian conversion, and The Anatomy of Melancholy is in fact one vast sermon.

As to Burton's Christianity, Vicari writes, "There is no reason to assume that Burton was insincere in his religious profession,or that he regarded his priestly vocation as anything less than it was supposed to be--the most important thing about him"(pp. 123-4). As to the passages of the Anatomy that challenge or undermine Christianity, Vicari writes:"We cannot make too much of Burton's skepticism"(p.87).

As to the cause of melancholy, Burton's "profound belief is that melancholy is a result of sin and a symptom of sin; indeed, as we proceed through the Anatomy we become more and more aware that melancholy is nothing other than a metaphor, a myth, or a figuring forth of the fallen state of man(p.187).

As to Burton's desire to convert the reader, Vicari speaks confidently of "the religious conversion that it is Burton's aim, as a Christian priest, to effect in us"(p. 187).She writes: "Although his book never drops its guises of a manual of hygiene and a personal record of cure by recreation, it becomes more and more concerned with cure by conversion"(pp. 5-6).

As to the Anatomy's being a sermon:"The Anatomy of Melancholy... is dominated by... a rhetoric of persuasion which, at the deepest level, is homiletic"(p. 186)."...what is produced in the end is nothing other than a kind of sermon "(p.6). "The Anatomy...is surely preaching" (p.125). " The Anatomy of Melancholy may deliberately disguise its genre [but]it is in essence a sermon"(p.144).

If true, this book overthrows everything that had been previously thought about Burton. Sir William Osler, for example, had said that The Anatomy of Melancholywas the greatest medical treatise ever written by a layman, and it is difficult to see how such a treatise could be mistaken for a sermon designed to effect Christian conversion in the reader, if Osler is right, or how the converse could happen if Vicari is right. In "Robert Burton's Palinodes," published in Studies in Philology in 1979, I argued that, under a facade of conservatism and orthodoxy, Burton advances an eclectic series of radical propositions, among them euthanasia, pacificism, and agnosticism, using the device of the palinode or retraction; he keeps making inflammatory statements and then reversing them or denying them. This essay continued the argument of an earlier one, "Robert Burton and Ramist Method,"that said The Anatomy had a content radically opposed to its form and was written with some deceptive intent (I am now ready to say the intent was to deceive the censors). Clearly, no sermon was ever an attempt to deceive the censors. But in a cavalier passage lasting two sentences, Vicari throws both essays, Osler's and mine, into the dumpster (p.3), a sample of the academic custom of dismissing-ignoring which I deplore on the home page of this website. In this strange manner I find my obscure name linked with that of a great man and a knight, the highest honor that ever befel me. I thank you, Eleanor Vicari, and doff my cap to you.

But,The View from Minerva's Tower is not true; it is preposterous. It ignores known facts and the text of the Anatomy itself more than it relies on either to make its case.

Let us begin with the assertion that Burton's priestly vocation was the most important thing about him. The priesthood certainly supplied Burton with an income, but that seems to be all it ever meant to him. He constantly saw it in those terms, and in fact, responded not with Christian resignation but with rancor when he failed to earn as much as he wanted. The whole "Digression of the Misery of Scholars" is little more than a lamentation over the disproportion between the vast amount of time and effort it takes to join the clergy and the paltry income that is earned. There is not a word to suggest that the hard work and poverty ought to be embraced in imitation of Christ. Burton sees the poverty of the clergy exactly as one would see low income in any group employed for a wage or a fee;the aristocrats who employ priests in benefices should pay more and the priests are at fault for accepting so little."That there is a fault among us, I confess, and were there not a buyer, there would not be a seller...the fountain of these miseries proceeds from these griping patrons. In accusing them, I do not altogether excuse us. Both are faulty, they and we (Anatomy, Everyman's Library Ed., I, 313). What the clergy are guilty of, he explains, is failing to demand a cash reward when they are entitled to one. He himself, Robert Burton, has been guilty of this unprofessional conduct."I have had some such noble friends' acquaintance, and scholars', but most part (common courtesies and ordinary respects excepted), they and I parted as we met, they gave me as much as I requested, and that was nothing," he fumes, employing a rebus, a blank space on the page, to denote the word "nothing" by means of the entity nothing, thus expressing it more forcefully than italics ever could(I,313).

Researches by Joseph Holtgen and Michael O'Connell have uncovered the complex maneuvers by which Burton obtained the living of Seagrave in Leicestershire. His patron, Lord George Berkeley, gave him the advowson, or right of disposing of the living; he waited five years till the incumbent died; in the meantime he had given the advowson to his brothers and cousin; on the death of the incumbent they used this power to give him the living. The whole finesse was necessitated by the rule that a man could not present himself to a living.By means of a legal fiction Berkeley gave away the right to a thing rather than the thing itself and Burton in turn gave it to persons who could be trusted to exercise it in his favor. And when, after five years of scheming, he had his ecclesiastical post, what did he do with it? He handed its duties over to a curate so that he could pocket its revenues without giving up the job he loved, that of librarian of Christ Church College.

Burton also referred to the clerical profession as one in which he could "get nothing but by simony"(I.36), that is, only by engaging in the corruption which he said was rampant in the church.Again we catch the note of a vocation seen solely in terms of its earnings, as when he speaks of country parsons becoming maltsters, graziers and chapmen (see quote below).O'Connell's conclusion is inevitable; Burton is like a character in Trollope (Robert Burton, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1986, p. 24).The entity at Seagrave was called a living and that's all it ever was to him.If George Herbert is right, and "A Pastor is the Deputy of Christ for the reducing of Man to the Obedience of God," Burton never even wanted to be a pastor (A Priest to the Temple, in Herbert, Works, ed. F.E. Hutchinson, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1941:p. 225).

Further evidence of this mercenary attitude towards the priesthood occurs at the end of "The Misery of Scholars" when Burton lists the troubles that can overwhelm a clergyman when he finally obtains a benefice: the parsonage turns out to be dilapidated and must be repaired at the new incumbent's expense; if he does not repair it with money obtained by suing his predecessor, he will be sued by his successor; five different kinds of ecclesiastical fees must be paid at once to the diocese; the legal title of the incumbent to hold the post may be found to be faulty, forcing him to sue for his rights; officials of the chancery may engage in undefined activities resulting in the incumbent being "fleeced by those greedy harpies to get more fees"; or the congregation may be inspired to reject their minister by their Calvinism, Catholicism, or atheism. This is a Calvary, all right, enough to try the virtue of the best Christian, but how little of it is, in Donne's phrase, involved in mankind. It is almost all money, debt, fees, lawsuits for money. In his book as in his life, Burton sees the priesthood as an investment of time and midnight oil resulting in a series of cash payments, but a thoroughly bad deal.

However, the fact that a benefice is a cure of souls must finally occur to any priest, even Burton. And here is how the young minister, if he escapes being fleeced by harpies, learns to join his flock in work and prayer:

...from a polite and terse academic he must turn rustic, rude, melancholize alone, learn to forget, or else, as many do, become maltsters, graziers, chapmen, etc.(now banished from the academy, all commerce of the Muses, and confined to a country village, as Ovid was from Rome to Pontus)and daily converse with a company of idiots and clowns(I.323).

Burton was of gentle birth, and his family bore a coat of arms (three dogs' heads in left profile)in which he took great pride; he emblazoned it on the title page of his book,on the south porch of St. Thomas, Oxford (O'Connell, p. 21), and on his tomb.But he was a younger son, and under the law of primogeniture could inherit none of his parents' wealth. Entering the ministry was a traditional response to this predicament, and Burton seems to have followed the tradition.Had he been the man Vicari takes him to be, he would at least have done his best to overcome his own aristocratic disdain for the idiots and clowns of Seagrave whom he was commissioned to admonish and console.But he obviouusly never did.

At the end of this narrative of a worldly life comes evidence of Burton's non-Christianity that escaped Vicari's notice, though she made it the frontispiece of her book; Burton's tomb. It displays the man himself, in a ruff and his academic robes; his heraldic device; his natal horoscope, showing that the stars at his birth had predetermined him to melancholy; and an armillary sphere. This man wished to be remembered as a gentleman and a scholar, and as owing his life-long ill health to fate rather than to any sensual indulgence; he wished to be remembered as anything except a Christian. There is no cross, there are no hovering angels, there is no winged skull symbolizing resurrection, nor are the hands of the deceased joined in prayer as is customary in Renaissance funerary effigies. Most telling of all, the inscription reads "here lies Democritus Junior."As Hawthorne's melancholy minister wanted to go to his grave with a black veil covering his face, Burton wanted to go to his grave wearing the mask of Democritus, a philosopher who said "In reality there is nothing but atoms and space,"and whose books, according to Plato, for their atheism and denial of the soul's immortality should be burnt (which they were).By inscribing the name of Democritus on his tomb Burton implies that he lived and died an atheist. It is an impudent performance, given the fact that it is in a cathedral. But that is nothing new;Burton calls his pseudonym "insolent" on page one of "Democritus Junior to the Reader."

This brings us to the idea that melancholy, in Burton's book, is really a metaphor for man's fallen state. I am reminded of a story about Freud. One day he held out a cigar towards his seminar and said "Gentlemen, it may be that this is a phallic symbol. But let us not forget that it is also a cigar."

In reaction against the theologians who imputed sickness to sin, and recommended repentance as a cure, the medical profession always sought the physical cause. Hence doctors, as such, were suspected of atheism. Chaucer's Doctor of Physic traced any and all diseases to the four qualities of hot, cold, moist, and dry, and believed that each had a specific place of origin in the human body and a single fluid (blood, choler, melancholy, phlegm) in its etiology. His knowledge of these physical causes was encyclopedic, but "His study was but little on the Bible." Sir Thomas Browne is aware that the title of his book, "A Doctor's Religion," will seem an oxymoron to many, but bravely claims the right to call himself a Christian notwithstanding "the scandal of my profession."

On the face of it, Burton is in this strong and solid tradition of seeking the physical causes of disease. "If natural melancholy be adust, it maketh one kind; if blood, another; if choler, a third, differing from the first"(I, 175)."...[melancholy] may be reduced to three kinds by reason of their seat; head, body and hypochondries"(I, 175). Blasphemous thoughts result from "distempered humours, black fumes which offend his brain."(I,418). Idleness "is the true cause that so many great men, ladies and gentlewomen labour of this disease in country and city; for idleness is an appendix to nobility; they count it a disgrace to work...and thence their bodies become full of gross humours, wind, crudities, their minds disquieted, dull, heavy, etc."(I, 244)Burton mentions that idleness is one of the Seven Deadly Sins (acedia) and a preacher would doubtless say that it causes mental heaviness by itself,one spiritual state bringing on another; but Burton must needs insert the physical components, the humors, wind, and undigested food.

In "Robert Burton's Palinodes" ( Studies in Philology, 1979)I showed that one form of melancholy--religious despair, or an obsessive belief that one was going to hell--had always been thought to be pathological and treatable by medicine till the rise of Calvinism, in the Sixteenth Century, led to the belief that it was often a symptom of reprobation, i.e., caused by God, and hence not to be countered by any human activity whatever. Burton ignored this idea and recommended that both spiritual and physical means be used in every case of despair. "Some [are cured] out of their own strength, and God's assistance...[Felix]Plater[cured] many by physic alone. But for the most part they must concur; and they take a wrong course that think to overcome this feral passion by sole physic; and they are as much out, that think to work this effect by good advice alone... they must go hand in hand to this disease"(III, 409)."The Cure of Despair" is the last subsection of Burton's book, so after about a thousand pages of densely-packed prose,he is still saying what he said at first, that melancholy is to be treated with both medicine and spiritual consolation.These assertions of Eleanor Vicari's, that in theAnatomy melancholy is always caused by sin, or rather, is merely a metaphor for sin; and that this becomes clearer as one reads on, are thus unsupported by the text. I made this point, as I say, in an essay published in Studies in Philology in 1979, and though she might be able, for anything I know, to marshal arguments to defeat me, I think it cavalier of her to proceed with the composition of her book without having read my essay.

This brings us to Vicari's contention that in the Anatomy, Burton is trying to convert the reader to a Christian life. Now, it is well known that if you describe a huge variety of sexual acts in a brief space,the reader is likely to find himself or herself titillated in a manner not conducive to the life of the spirit. Such a procedure can be justified when composing a handbook of psychopathology, but not when trying to lead others in the way of the cross. But in III.ii.1.2, "How Love Tyrannizeth over Men,"Burton erects his own placard "No one under 18 admitted"--by which I mean he puts the whole passage in Latin--and sets forth the following catena:

Semiramis had sex with a stallion, Pasiphae with a bull, Aristo of Ephesus with a she-ass, Fulvius with a mare, others with dogs, goats, etc....And they do it, not only with beasts, but with other men... this vice was once common among the eastern peoples, especially the Greeks, and also the Italians, Africans, Asians; Hercules had Hylas, Polycletus, Dion, Perithous, Abderus, and a Phrygian; others say Euristius was Hercules's lover.Socrates used to go down to the gymnasium for the comely boys, feasting his eyes on that flagitious sight...indeed Alcibiades said this of that same Socrates, "Not only would I rather keep silent, but I loathe speaking of him, he offers so much incentive to lust."...Plato had his Agathon, Xenophon Clinias, Virgil Alexis, Anacreon Bathyllus...Among the Asians, Turks and Italians, this vice was never more common than it is right now....There are frequent complaints of it between married couples, when the husband makes use of a part that is opposite to the permitted one. No sin is more common among the Italians, who defend it in lengthy books based on Lucian and Achilles Tatius. Giovanni de la Casa, Bishop of Benevento, calls it a divine work, the smug rascal, and says that he himself never has sex any other way.(III,50-52)

This quotation is already too long,but the original continues to cascade: sodomy in the Vatican, sodomy in monasteries, flagellation, daisy chains (spintrias), lesbianism, a sex-change, necrophilia, fetichism; then, what pornographers call double penetration; voyeurism, more bestiality, more sodomy.In conclusion, Burton will say no more, for fear of teaching wickedness to "frivolous wits and depraved minds"(levissimis ingeniis et depravatis mentibus, II,52).

For a concentrated raking-together of all the juicy parts of Graeco-Roman literature, this is, I daresay, without a peer until the Nineteenth Century when Emmanuel Forberg compiles his Handbook of Classical Erotology(which also, under the title De Figuris Veneris has that "No one under 18 admitted" sign).One of the pleasures of a classical education is, and always has been, reading poetry and prose that handle these topics in a candid and unabashed way. Federico Fellini said that he made his film version of the Satyricon of Petronius because he was fascinated by a culture without guilt. This is what Burton offers the reader in "How Love Tyrannizeth,"and it is an experience so startling and so obviously willed by our author that we doubt he is trying to make Christians of us.

Also to this point is Burton's confession that, in spite of college rules requiring him to be celibate, he had first-hand experience of intercourse with women.

...I am of Haedus' mind,"no man can discourse of love matters, or judge of them aright, that hath not made trial in his own person"...I confess I am but a novice, a contemplator only, "I know not what love is, nor am I a lover," I have a tincture, for why should I lie, dissemble or excuse it? yet I am a man, etc., not altogether inexpert in this subject, I am not an instructor in love...(III.184)

The passage makes no sense,for it mingles sentences,implying Burton has a small amount of experience of sex, with others implying he has none at all.This is a clear case of the Burtonian palinode, in which the denials are meant to bewilder the censor (see my study of "Robert Burton's Palinodes,"Studies in Philology,1975). But the end result is an impression that Burton has committed a few sins and does not repent them in the least. The entirety of III.ii.2.2, "Beauty from the Face, Eyes, other parts, and how it pierceth"is a renaissance prose poem in praise of Eros:"whensoever fair Charmides came abroad, they seemed all to be in love with him...as those lovers of beauty did Acontius...the Athenian lasses stared on Alcibiades; Sappho and the Milesian women on Phaon the fair." To convert to Christianity, I must repent my sins and leave them behind me; will this book help me do so?

Lastly, we come to Vicari's claim that The Anatomy of Melancholy is a sermon. Because of the suspicion of atheism suffered by the medical profession,Burton was defensive about failing to publish a book of theology or homiletics, and overstated his disdain for such books:

...in divinity I saw no such great need. For had I written positively, there be so many books in that kind, so many commentators, treatises, pamphlets, expositions, sermons,that whole teams of oxen cannot draw them; and had I been as forward and ambitious as some others, I might have haply printed a sermon at Paul's Cross, a sermon at 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 been ever as desirous to suppress my labours in this kind, as others have been to press and publish theirs (I,35).

Supposing this to be insincere, one must admit that the Anatomy's being really a sermon was a secret that Burton went to great lengths to conceal; as indeed, he did conceal it for 368 years before the piercing gaze of Eleanor Vicari found it beneath its veils.

Notice the qualification, "had I written positively"--that is, had Burton affirmed the doctrines of the Church of England, then he would have added to a vast excess. This implies that if he had written negatively, denying those doctrines, he should have fulfilled a real communicative need;there is a shortage of books exposing the falsity of those doctrines.

The Anatomy contains long passages of moral exhortation not unlike a sermon, of which the longest is II.iii.7,"Remedies Against Discontents."This makes use of the figure of anticlimax to negate itself. It consists mostly of lofty, but tautological sentiments, such as "if princes would do justice, judges be upright, clergymen truly devout...these mischiefs would not so frequently happen amongst us"(II,202).In the last paragraph, however, the sentiments become less lofty, because they are too trite and terse to attain what in the Seventeenth Century was called a high style. They constitute, in fact, an anthology of brief bromides. "Know thyself. Be contented with thy lot. Trust not wealth..."The gist of most of the bromides, "Be contented with thy lot," clashes blatantly with the "Digression of the Misery of Scholars." What they lack in originality, these sayings make up in numbers: there are ninety of them. One begins to suspect that Burton's tongue, as so often, is in his cheek, the number and banality of these sayings forming a parody of the uselessness of such traditional wisdom in coping with ordinary sorrow, let alone mental illness. Then comes the clincher, the last sentence of "Remedies Against Discontents": "Look for more in Isocrates, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus, etc., and for defect, consult with cheese-trenchers and painted cloths"(II,205).

Isocrates and cheese-trenchers! Seneca and painted cloths!This is obvious and deliberate sarcasm. The 21st-Century equivalent is: "You can find more of this in Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Francois Mauriac, or if they don't satisfy, read bumper-sticker slogans and t-shirt mottoes."As a cleric, Burton is expected to produce moral exhortation, but as a melancholic, that is, a mental patient with chronic depression, he knows how useless it is-- as indeed, does Milton's Samson(lines 652-64). Yet again, the claim that the Anatomy is a sermon rests on compromised evidence.

That the concealed message of the Anatomy is really agnosticism is the meaning of Burton's "Digression of Air,"concerning which I must preface some remarks.

It was so common in the Renaissance to write under censorship, that Peter Ramus included a chapter, "De Crypticis Methodi," translated by Roland McIlwain as "Of the Craftie and Secrete Methode," in his Dialecticae Libri Duo.In this Ramus explains that his familiar system of dichotomies is to be used "how often soever the matter is to be clearly understanded: But when with delectation or some other motion thy chief purpose is to deceave the auditor, then thou shall...[insert]thinges appartaining nothing to the matter: as digressiones from the purpose, & long tarying upon the matter..."(The Logike of the Moste Excellent Philosopher P. Ramus, tr. Roland McIlwain, London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1574, p. 100. The italics are added). This, then, explains Burton's digressions (of spirits, of the air, of the misery of Scholars; Democritus Junior to the Reader); the reader who seeks their meaning will find it; less intelligent readers, whom Ramus calls "the people, a many-headed beast,"will miss the whole point, misled by the author's bewildering arrangement of his materials (Logike, loc. cit.).

The "Digression of Air" is a guided tour of the medieval universe, beginning on the earth's surface, diving to the bottom of hell, returning to the earth's surface, soaring to the moon's orbit, climbing through the planetary spheres and the fixed stars, and lastly reaching the empyrean heaven where God briefly reveals himself. This precis makes the source obvious; Burton is parodying Dante, to whose poem in fact he alludes during the descent into hell (II.41). As Dante's poem is western civilization's supreme affirmation of Christian faith, Burton's parody is a descant on the theme of doubt. As a whole house might be made of toothpicks, Burton's universe is made of hundreds of facts, each of which a prudent mind must reject. This one is unsubstantiated, that one contradicts equally well-attested facts, another is absurd--not one can be accepted. On the plains of Russia grows a plant that blossoms forth an animal, a lamb called the boranetz, attached to the plant by a kind of umbilical cord. Sigismund Herberstein, who journeyed to Russia, saw hats made of the pelt of the boranetz. In the center of the earth is space for one hundred billion tortured bodies, that being the total number of reprobates, according to Lessius. A new map captured from the Spaniards shows that California is an island. Where the elemental world meets the moon's orbit, comets pass through what should be a wall of solid crystal.This brings us to the Dantesque climax of Burton's journey, his vision of God:

[Many ask] why good and bad are punished together, war, fires, plague infest all alike, why wicked men flourish, good are poor, in prison, sick...Why doth He suffer so much mischief and evil to be done, if he be able to help? why doth He not assist good, or resist bad, reform our wills, if he be not the author of sin, and let such enormities be committed, unworthy of His knowledge, wisdom, government, mercy, and providence?(I, 59)

The first two sentences are atheist attacks such as Roman stoics used against the Olympian gods. The rest are Arminian attacks against Calvin's God as "the author of sin," since he both damns the reprobates in the very act of creating them, and foreordains the wicked acts by which they shall deserve damnation. Further, the Arminians wanted to know, if God can save human beings by a mere decision of his own, not waiting on their free will to cooperate, why doesn't he save them all? Arminianism was a serious charge against an Anglican minister in 1621, but atheism was worse.Aware of the danger, Burton produces one of his eighteen palinodes and scuttles away under its cover:

But hoo!I am now gone quite out of sight, I am almost giddy with roving about: I could have ranged farther yet, but I am an infant, and not able to dive into these profundities or sound these depths, not able to understand, much less to discuss (I.60).

As geography, meteorology, and astronomy are but hearsay and speculation, and filled with error, so is theology; that is the message of this very important section of Burton's masterpiece.

Vicari and I are in agreement that the Anatomy is two books in one, a show book and a real book. She thinks the show book is humanism and Erasmian satire while the real book is Christianity. I think the show book is Christianity while the real book is skepticism. The obvious weakness of her case is that, first,the show book must exist to hide the real book from all but a few penetrating readers; and secondly, there was no reason for Burton to hide his Christianity. But he had many reasons to hide his skepticism, the least of which was fear of losing his livelihood.

The cause of the deficiency of Vicari's book is evident: her parti pris. She set out to Christianize The Anatomy of Melancholy and refused to be discouraged by the text. She has many companions in her folly: a whole school of writers seems to be trying to see the Seventeenth Century as an age of faith whereas we ought to be celebrating it as the age in which the stranglehold of Christianity over the universities was finally broken for good. As my home page shows, I have my work cut out for me.