Robert Burton, "The Anatomy of Meloncholy", and the Height of Heaven

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 763  Blog Bookstore

The Elizabethan Robert Burton (1577-1640), in his supreme 1621 effort The Anatomy of Melancholy¹ (“The best book ever written. Period”)—ostensibly a quasi-medical book on depression/melancholy²  but really about everything, not to mention the entirety of the sciences—called on Galileo and Kepler in supporting his view that the “eighth sphere” (of Dante, containing the starry realm and the abode of the Heavenly Father) was 170 million 800 miles away³ from the earth. 

Burton thought that if you were to drop a stone from that distance and have it travel 100 mph it would take “65 years or more”, [page 152 or so]) to reach the ground here on earth.  Heaven aside, something going 100mph for 65 years wouldn’t get but a third of the way to 170mil., though it was interesting for

Burton to be thinking in terms of big distance like this at this time. There are by the way other “eighth spheres” around in the history of science and literature, from Sacrobosco to Copernicus, but Burton must absolutely be referring to Dante for this reference.

Well.  There is of course much of great interest in this book that wound up being correct, and then there was the other stuff, like this, that just didn’t work. Overall though it may be a book to be buried with; it is beautiful, complex, deliberate, fantastic, horribly erudite, compelling, and sometimes unreadable.  

Notes:

1.The full title of the book, by the way, is: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up.  The book again was first published in 1621, and followed by revisions in  1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, and 1651; the 1651 edition was reprinted in 1660 and 1676, and then all was quiet until it was picked up again in 1800.

2.  Burton  identifies Melancholia as follows: “Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or in habit. In disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoick, 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. . . . This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will hardly be removed.”

3.  The quote for the 170 million mile high Heaven bit: “So that according to these men the number of ethereal spirits must needs be infinite: for if that be true that some of our mathematicians say: if a stone could fall from the starry heaven, or eighth sphere, and should pass every hour an hundred miles, it would be 65 years, or more, before it would come to ground, by reason of the great distance of heaven from earth, which contains as some say 170 millions 800 miles, besides those other heavens, whether they be crystalline or watery which Maginus adds, which peradventure holds as much more, how many such spirits may it contain? And yet for all this Thomas Albertus, and most hold that there be far more angels than devils.”

Comments

[Jeff]

So, yeah, we've ordered a copy of Melancholy to add to our public library's extensive collection of unread books. However, my name is first on the list, and I shall spend some time with it, on and off. I've been wanting to for ages. (Actually, we don't have that many unread books, but I was just weeding books that went out, say, 3 times in their stay here and haven't been read in 3 or more years, and among them are many excellent works and it pains me of course but what can one do but why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ's sake, look out where yr going.)

[John Ptak]

Well. I'd not read this while driving, unless you were driving a car with a bench seat in front that would sit three easily, driving across the desert with cool refreshment. It really is I think as close as you can come to reading a fantastic hyper-smart wanting-to-be-read book that is unreadable. SO: what IS the percentage of unread books? SOunds like a beginning of stocking a different sort of Borgesian libby. Or my bookstore.