) who was fully aware of every enigma of earthly life, and through that knowledge he was able to observe everything as if from outside. “For scant means of acquiring knowledge are scattered among the members of the body; and many are the evils that break in to blunt the edge of studious thought. And gazing on a little portion of life that is not life, swift to meet their fate, they rise and are borne away like smoke, persuaded only of that on which each one chances as he is driven this way and that, but the whole he vainly boasts he has found” (2). Human existence is eternal suffering (“O eternal mystery, what we are / And what we seek, we cannot find; and what / We find, that we are not”—this is Hölderlin in the opening scene of his play The Death of Empedocles), and like the melancholic heroes, Empedocles wanders in the region that lies beyond human existence but falls short of the divine. His knowledge gave him the right to form an opinion about everything, but that same knowledge also cast him out of all contexts of earthly existence: for he who sees through everything will find his home — or more precisely, his homelessness — in the infinite. Whether the historical person named Empedocles really did know everything is an open question (his contemporaries certainly thought so, and Lucretius was later to write: Ut vix humana videatur stirpe creatus—“He scarcely seems to be from the mortal race” [De rerum natura, bk. 1, 733]). More importantly, he himself was convinced of that. But that conviction was sufficient for his fate to be the same as that of the heroes: his superhuman, extraordinary achievement (he was the greatest physician of his day) and his inner state, that of an outcast (he was a philosopher and therefore mad, which is to say, ecstatic), were inseparable. “For me as well this life became a poem,” Hölderlin puts in his mouth (act 1, scene 4), with a touch of Romantic bias toward apparent roundedness (for what appears from the outside as a poem is from the inside an aggregate of torn prose). There is no roundedness; in a portrait of Empedocles in Orvieto Cathedral, Luca Signorelli depicts the philosopher leaning out a window while examining the stars, and in so doing his figure virtually demolishes the fixed rules of Renaissance perspective. That is Empedocles, the person felt to be a kindred spirit by Hölderlin and Novalis, and the person about whom Nietzsche wanted to write a tragedy (in measureless prose!). His melancholia was multiply compound: his belief in his own divinity made him obsessed in the Platonic sense; his search for the secrets of death carried him beyond the boundaries of life: Empedocles instructed Pausanias, his pupil, on how a person in a state of suspended animation should be restored to life, and according to a story reported by Heraclides of Pontus, he had saved many people from Persephone’s underworld empire. On reaching the border between being and nonbeing as an oracle, he had a glimpse into the secrets of life. Thus, his death was not an ordinary affair: for anyone able to make life and perishing relative, death is not death but a consummation. Not in a Christian sense, of course, but in accordance with the beliefs of antiquity: life and death become of secondary importance when compared with the exclusivity of being. Being lays a claim on us even beyond death: recognizing this is at once uplifting and depressing. Inevitably, two kinds of reports of Empedocles’ death have remained extant. According to one of them, early one morning after a sacrificial feast, the philosopher could not be found by his companions. A servant recounted to them that he had been awakened at midnight by the sound of Empedocles’ voice, and on rising from his bed, he had seen a light flickering like a flaming torch in the sky. Empedocles’ pupil Pausanias unraveled the mystery of the celestial light: the gods had summoned to their presence the philosopher, who left the earth behind him, not as a human but as a god. According to the second version, he had not been summoned by the gods: he brought his life to an end voluntarily by jumping into the crater of Etna in order thereby to prove his divinity. This salto mortale, however, has a deeper meaning: it was looked on by ancient Greeks as one of the forms of ecstasy, hence (bear in mind the connection between ecstasy, melancholia, and divine furor) a fine death (
); and at the same time, death by fire brought about purification. A person committed to die in flames was purified (
) of earthly dross. For that reason, fire was a source of a higher order of life.15 According to Greek religious beliefs, Heracles’ death by fire, which was an inevitable consequence of his melancholia, guaranteed him immortality, just as it was to do for Empedocles.16 That is how fire becomes a source of higher life: it is itself logos (Heraclitus).17 Empedocles’ self-immolation went ahead under the spell of “resurrection,” and it led him out of the world of earthly existence, which in Plato’s view was a prison, and in Empedocles’ view a cave. (As Schiller wrote about Heracles, who was translated to the other world after death by fire: “casting off his earthly frame” [“The Ideal and Life”]). Resurrection, however, does not necessarily follow the moment of death; just as a soothsayer, standing outside time, can obtain an overview of human time itself, resurrection is not simply an event that occurs in time: it proceeds outside time. It eclipses life just as it does death. Just as death does not imply resurrection for everybody, few partake of resurrection in their life as well. As the word itself suggests, resurrection is a physical as well as a spiritual phenomenon; its Greek equivalent (
) also means “awakening,” that is, stepping out of the previous state. Since that stepping out (
) is connected with the moment, it is therefore absolutely present tense (not just in the sense of the verbal tense). From all this it follows that resurrection is granted to those who recognize not only the laws of our existence in time but also those of our existence prevailing over time itself, and who see its possibilities and its limits. These are the soothsayers, the mad, the extraordinary people, and the philosophers — those whom we can describe in one word as melancholics.
At every moment, the life of a melancholic partakes of resurrection — that is why he does not die, at least not in the physical sense. A life that encloses resurrection within itself is a complete life and is therefore threatened not by death but by ordinary life, which rejects the ever-present possibility of resurrection, that is, of ecstasy. That is why melancholic heroes were misanthropes (as heroes, they differed from everybody else anyway), while melancholic philosophers, if not expressly misanthropic, looked down on those who were stuck in darkness and ignorance, for once the soul reaches the state of knowledge (in Plato’s vocabulary, the invisible realm, which is akin to it), then it becomes perfect, and as the initiated say, their remaining time is spent in truth and among the gods (see Phaedrus, 249c — d). A person who partakes of resurrection rises out of the world of earthly beings toward real beings (