Richard Baxter on Depression and Inordinate Loves

Depression is a complicated challenge. It requires multifaceted attention to a person’s situation. But it is not a new challenge. People were dealing with it centuries ago, and the Puritan pastor Richard Baxter sought to help his congregation and other Christians find hope and peace to move forward. In his works addressing depression (or melancholy, as they called it in his day), he discusses many facets of depression—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. It is still a valuable work for people seeking to walk through depression and to help others through it. 

The following excerpt from his work focuses on one particular factor often contributing to depression. He is offering suggestions for how to avoid “excessive sorrow”—a phrase he draws from 2 Corinthians 2:7: “. . . or he may be overwhelmed with excessive sorrow.” One can see 2 Corinthians 2 for more context, but it suffices here to note that Paul recognized that people could be hampered by “excessive sorrow,” which did not contribute to their spiritual well-being but rather detracted from it. 

So how to avoid “excessive sorrow”? One element was overcoming “inordinate love” of things in this world, which always fail to satisfy. Here’s what Baxter says:

Determine in yourselves more diligently than ever to overcome an inordinate love of the world. . . . The love of something precedes desire and grief over it. Whatever men love, they delight in possessing, mourn to be without, and desire to get. The will is driven by love, and no one is bothered about a lack of something he doesn’t want in the first place. 

However, the most common precipitant of intense depression is initially some temporal dissatisfaction and worry. Whether longings or trials, the fear of suffering them or a sense of the unfairness and aggravating nature of them, or perhaps falling into disgrace or contempt—any of these can induce a consuming discontent. . . .

When holy men die, their souls have a natural inclination upward. It is their love that inclines them: they love God and heaven, and holy company, and their godly friends, holy works, and mutual love, and the joyful praises of God. This spirit and love are like a fiery nature that carries them heavenward. Angels carry them not by force but as a bride to her marriage, who is borne the entire way by love. . . .

But to love something disproportionately is to turn from God. This is the dangerous malady of souls and the attitude that drags them down from heaven. . . .

Focus more on how to live by faith and hope and on the unseen promise of glory with Christ, and you will endure with patience any sufferings along the way. . . .

Consider carefully how much of a duty it is to trust God and our blessed Redeemer entirely, with both soul and body, and all we possess. . . . What is our Christianity if not a life of faith? And has your faith been reduced to this: to become obsessed with care and worry if God does not shape his providence to fit your expectations? Seek first his kingdom and righteousness, and he has promised that all other things will be given to you.

Richard Baxter^[1]

Seventeenth-century perspective can be helpful even today. And if this strikes us as an unusual approach to depression, perhaps that is all the more reason to give it consideration—for he may be pointing to something our current age is missing. 

For more on Richard Baxter’s treatment of depression, see Richard Baxter, Depression, Anxiety, and the Christian Life, ed. Michael S. Lundy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018). (Full disclosure: I am an editor at Crossway. But Baxter’s material, I would suggest, stands on the merits of his work that dates to the mid-seventeenth century.)

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^[1] Richard Baxter, “The Resolution of Depression and Overwhelming Grief through Faith,” in Depression, Anxiety, and the Christian Life, ed. Michael S. Lundy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 134–38.