, at a cosmic way of looking at things. On the other hand, the school of a cosmic outlook (Empedocles) arrived at man’s physical reality from a background of examining the cosmos and the universe. The two schools differed in methodology, but they agreed in regarding human beings as part of the cosmos in both body and soul, and they considered treatment to be inconceivable without bringing the patient into harmony with the universe. That was how the empirically demonstrable four humors were given cosmic significance, and the immaterial number four, privileging the cosmos, became physical reality. The manifest connection of the two viewpoints was accomplished by the treatise On the Nature of Man, the author of which was presumed to be either Hippocrates or his son-in-law and disciple Polybus.
The cosmically based doctrine of the elements and the unity of the empirical humors comprised everything that could be said about humankind in classical antiquity. But in parallel with the cracking of the unity of the universe, mankind gradually slipped out of the tethers of this universe: the cosmos and the individual (body and spirit, mind and praxis) appeared as two poles. Instead of being concentric enclosures, they ended up at the opposite ends of a straight line. The connection was maintained; only its nature changed: in place of an organic interdependence, the universe became a system of correspondences: everything corresponded with something, but nothing contained everything within itself. Typical of the later classical, Hellenistic theory of melancholy was a growing overcomplication and the ever-more prolix, diffuse, meandering, and inconclusive literature devoted to the subject (numerous treatises were written, including a famous, partially extant two-volume work by Rufus of Ephesus in the time of Trajan). The Hippocratic concept of melancholia lost its cosmic background and continued to live as an empirical theory of humors. The Aristotelian concept, on the other hand, seemed to be forgotten: the idea that physical extraordinariness and intellectual excellence might be associated with despair was alarming, and the spirit of the age did all it could to hold melancholy at bay. Galen revived the Empedoclean theory of the four elements, supplementing it with Hippocratic humorism and adding ethical correspondences to the humors, and thus the outlines of a doctrine of the temperaments began to emerge. In the second half of the fourth century CE, Helvius Vindicianus, a physician friend of St. Augustine, devised a typology, a scheme of categorization totally alien to classical antiquity. The likes of it were again encountered in a sixth-century treatise entitled On the Humors: by that stage, the four temperaments indicated four normal states. The taming of melancholia was complete: on the one hand, if it was reminiscent of melancholia in the Aristotelian sense, then it was purely a matter of an illness, but on the other hand, everyone could be categorized as belonging to one type or another. The excrescences had to be lopped off to make the world snug for everyone. Having accomplished this, theorists could expand the domain of the individual temperaments with impunity and without affecting the typology: the basic principle, that is to say, the averageness or typicality, was left undisturbed. Thus, each humor corresponds with one element of the cosmos, one season, one age of life, a time of day, a metal, a mineral, a color — indeed, from the ninth century on, a planet as well. A fully crystallized doctrine of the temperaments saw the light of day in the first half of the twelfth century: the first time the four words “phlegmatic,” “melancholic,” “sanguine,” and “choleric” make an appearance is in an encyclopedic work on natural philosophy with the title of De philosophia mundi, by William of Conches, and although the natural-historical foundations of humorism had been demolished by the discovery of the circulation of blood in 1628, the theory lives on in the mind of the public to the present day. The four kinds of temperament lock people into four castes, from which it is impossible to step out. In the classic notion of melancholia, one’s freedom of temperament, interpretation of existence, and choice of fate did not exclude one another: in contradistinction, Hellenism saw persons as being subject to their own temperaments, incapable of surpassing themselves. (We characterize persons as melancholic or choleric, and often feel that with this adjective their whole existence can safely be placed in the parentheses: we are no longer curious about who they are or what kind of worldview or existential condition induced them to become melancholic. We are interested only in how melancholia as their defining feature can be shown in every facet of their behavior.) A person is no longer master of himself but a prisoner of his own being from birth, whether healthy or not (since antiquity, melancholia could mean both average health and sickness that departs from the average, but never health that departs from the average). A person locked into his own created nature is no master of either himself or his existence, but in every respect is of a lower order than his creator (or “merely” his destiny), and by becoming resigned to this necessity, he gives up, from the outset, trying to force open the limits of existence. William of Conches unwittingly and very astutely touched on the essence of humorism when he called the four temperaments defects (“quia corrumpitur natura”—“which are of corrupted nature,” as quoted in Hellmut Flashar, Melancholie und Melancholiker in den medizinischen Theorien der Antike, 115). The humors of prelapsarian humankind became mixed after the Fall, or in other words, the four temperaments were four kinds of manifestation of original sin. No person is without a temperament; there is no temperament without sin. We are in the Middle Ages.