—does not imply passivity, as becomes clear from Aristotle’s previously noted remark). The story from the Fall to the Resurrection is well known and, according to the eschatological view of things, is unidirectional and cannot be changed. Concerning God’s mystery, men are ignorant to the same extent that they are small in proportion to God, St. Irenaeus declared in the second century. Man is completely at the mercy of God. Only faith will get us to salvation (“Christian truth is incomparably fairer than Helen of Troy,” St. Augustine said much later); faith has a definite object, however. The Greek mysteries recur again and again; they are cyclical like the eternal cycles of nature — that is why initiation can never be brought to an end, just as there is no end to the understanding of existence. The path leading to the Christian God is finite, and it can be completed; since faith has an object, and that object can be named, the possibility of faith is given to everyone. An opening up on the part of the human being is absolutely decisive, but opening up, in a Christian sense, means entering the holy house of God, the church. The mystery that lasts from baptism to resurrection, that starts again with the birth of each person and is nevertheless identical with the sole true mystery, the story of Jesus Christ, is granted to everyone. Partaking of universal grace preserves believers for God, and for themselves it is a guarantee of the ultimate sense and purposefulness of existence.
As a consequence of the trust placed in divine omnipotence, the mysteries lost their earlier role: initiation was no longer accompanied by a solitude shrouded in mute silence but by an opening-up toward God. Christian initiation is collective in nature; the individual is lifted out of his or her individuality into the intellectual and political domain of faith. Although Christianity does acknowledge the concept of individuality (indeed, in all probability it is the only religion that genuinely does), the solitude that became the lot of Greek melancholics is unimaginable for Christians: persons are individuals, but through their intellect they are also parts of the universal. Divine judgment as well as grace create the arch that stretches between the personal and impersonal, but the tension between those two poles, which is natural in the context of a faith-based tradition, appears to many as most unnatural; many representatives of Islamic mysticism turned melancholic precisely because of this tension. To what extent was a man a unique, unrepeatable individual and to what extent was he a part, a mere “instance” of redeeming grace — that was one of the fundamental problems for a person in the Middle Ages. But the question was not posed in just this way, since that would have implied a ready answer. It was those already suffering from being abandoned to their fate who posed the question in that way — those for whom their own being and the possibility of God’s grace had become questionable, who had to make certain things the object not just of questioning but also of outright doubt. Belief in grace could marginalize the force of the feeling of abandonment, but it could not extinguish it — and despair was still present within those margins. Melancholy and a sense of growing isolation were just as inseparable in the Middle Ages as they had been in antiquity. But whereas solitude, for the Greeks, was a product of turning away from things that seemed fixed and unequivocal (to make use of Christian terminology: loneliness was a result of “searching for God”; the search, however — as was shown by the story of Bellerophon — found nothing and thus coiled back on itself), in the Middle Ages solitude was considered to be a phenomenon attendant on estrangement from grace. A melancholic was usually a heretic, the devil’s accomplice; but as Constantine the African noted, someone who brooded too long over God could also be a melancholic. Brooding, daydreaming, does not make the world of inscrutable things comprehensible, and loneliness, which springs from an insoluble contradiction between divine judgment and grace (and which, because of this insolubility, engenders dread), does not differ from the solitude of heretics and fanatics. St. Jerome writes about those who turn their backs on their previous lives, escape into solitude, and become monks, but since they are looking for solitude rather than for God, they usually relapse into their previous lifestyles. “Some too there are,” St. Jerome writes in letter 125, “who, from the dampness of their cells and from the severity of their fasts, from their weariness of solitude and from excessive study, have a singing in their ears day and night, and turn melancholy mad so as to need the poultices of Hippocrates more than exhortations from me.” An illustrious exemplar of such a melancholic is the monk Stagirius. This pious soul found the nightly vigils intolerable and began to be afflicted by nightmares and disturbed speech, with frequent spells of fainting getting the better of him, which his companions interpreted as tests of his character: he had to vanquish the temptations of the devil within himself. Constantine the African regarded the depression that often overcame monastics, the morbus melancholicus, as a deadly sin, and with every right from his point of view: a melancholic monk was left to himself not just physically but spiritually as well — he broke away from the house of God and became prey for the devil.
The expression “left to oneself” is metaphoricaclass="underline" the metaphysical solitude of the Romantics, which will be dealt with later, was as yet unknown. No one could be left to himself in the Middle Ages; at most, he might abandon God and thereby go over to another transcendental power: the devil. A person’s sense of loneliness was broached by the Church paradoxically: not only did it have to wrestle with the issue of “projecting” an individual smoothly into the abstract infinity of the divine substance, but, in parallel, it also needed to define the individual’s sensory individuality. Christianity was an intellectual and political empire in which the individual was bound by contingent, abstract threads to the totality of the “empire”—and the Church tried to take that contingency into account by working out the individuality of the soul and the personality. The question was asked in the following form: to what extent is a person an independent, finite, unique being and to what extent a part of God’s infinite universe? St. Augustine, founder of the substantiality of the individual soul, expounded the idea that the self is not the sum total of its activities (that is, it is not an accessory of the everlastingly existing parts of the universe that can be assembled at any time) but a finite, independent reality. With that idea, he set the European concept of freedom and individuality on its future course; he thought through the conflict of the soul’s individuality, its independence, and at the same time its repeatability, its “episodicity,” in a way that is valid to the present day. “For what would I say, O Lord my God, but that I know not whence I came into this dying life (shall I call it?) or living death,” he asks (Confessions, bk. 1, 6, trans. Pusey), and elsewhere declares, “I want to know God and the soul. Nothing else? Nothing whatever!” (Soliloquies, bk. 1, pt. 2). And who could ask for more? An individual in the mirror of God is nothing; in his own mirror, everything. And the reverse is also true: in God’s presence, an individual is substantiality; in the mirror of his own soul, a void. There is no need to determine how big a distance or gap separates the single from the general, the individual from the universal. Though faith readily bridges that divide, the totally subjective character of an act of faith intensifies even further the dizzying maelstrom between the subject and object of faith, which can easily make melancholics of those who gaze into the deep. St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century was the first in the history of Christian thinking to assert that God is infinite, thus breaking from the notion in Greek metaphysics that infinity is a negative, not a positive, predication. From then on, the idea of emptiness and infinity, creatureliness and noncreatureliness, would give European consciousness no rest. Surpassing even St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas no longer saw the individuality of a person as a problem just of the “soul” but also of the “body”—and if the soul could become infinite despite its individuality, the body was exclusively a boundary, a restraint. Aquinas tied the question of singularity to materiality, and posed the problem of the individuality of the soul in relation to the body: “The body is not of the essence of the soul; but the soul by the nature of its essence can be united to the body” (Summa Theologica, I, q. 75, a. 7). People differ from one another by virtue of the individuality of their bodies; therefore, it is impossible for one intellect to belong to all men, he notes; otherwise, it would follow that Socrates and Plato were one man. Such a dispersal of souls, however, makes it impossible to have knowledge of one God. The mind by its very nature wants to know about everything, which is why it longs for God — thus, the existence of one God somehow defines the existence of all other souls. “If my intellect is distinct from your intellect, my intellect is an individual [quiddam individuum], and so is yours; for individuals are things which differ in number but agree in one species. Now whatever is received into anything must be received according to the condition of the receiver. Therefore the species of things would be received individually [individualiter] into my intellect, and also into yours: which is contrary to the nature of the intellect which knows universals” (I, q. 76, a. 3). Because of the generalizing capacity of the intellect, then, an absolute individuality cannot possibly be imagined, and this is guaranteed not only by the structure of the soul but also by the divine essence: “Everything participated [participatum] is compared to the participator [ad participans] as its act [actus]. But whatever created form be supposed to subsist ‘per se,’ must have existence by participation; for ‘even life,’ or anything of that sort, ‘is a participator of existence,’ as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. v). Now participated existence is limited by the capacity of the participator; so that God alone, who is His own existence, is pure act and infinite” (I, q. 75, a. 5). If, therefore, we assert of something that it exists, then it stands to reason that we are asserting the existence of God. God is the ultimate guarantor of the existence of individual things, yet he is not only the ultimate guarantor but a fundamental condition as well. The independence of things is therefore relative, and God, because of his omnipotence and his ceaseless presence, makes the world even more closed than the cosmos of antiquity. God is infinite, but since his existence automatically rules out emptiness and vacuum, his infinity is also depressing; there is no way of escaping him, no “secluded” nook where one might be left to oneself. This is why one’s abandonment is metaphoricaclass="underline" only the desire to be left alone exists, but that desire has no specific target, and therefore it cannot be assuaged. The idea of individuality and the inevitably attendant sense of loneliness are as ineradicable a part of Christianity as the idea of the omnipotence of God and the notion of grace, which, by their extending to everyone, are pacifying to all. God’s grace and omnipotence are the Church’s legitimate, the former two its illegitimate, children; and when individuality and its loneliness start to demand the rights owed to them, they are dispossessed of everything and in the end swindled out of themselves. In the eyes of the Church, an insatiable desire leading to muteness is not a sign of the mysterious aimlessness of a limited, unrepeatable human life (that is, a fulfillment of the senselessness of existence) but a sin, sheer negativity, about which one should feel guilty, and which, following the disappearance of the Greek Empire, has burdened Western culture to such an extent that it has not been able to shake it off to the present day.