Grace presupposes faith — seen from the position of solitude, however, faith takes on the form of a command. For that reason, the flight of a recluse from grace is a flight from external commands, which can be regarded as insisting on one’s freedom. That freedom consists of a denial of faith; but since for the Middle Ages, living under the spell of a horror vacui as it was, what was denied was just as much an emanation of God’s existence as what was accepted (even sin exists only because God exists); therefore, denial on the part of an abandoned medieval melancholic was essentially directed at an affirmation of nothing. God cannot be denied, because God is present even in that denial; existence cannot be denied, because existence itself is a precondition for denying existence; one cannot deny oneself, because even the ultimate gesture of suicide is carried out by a “superego” in the Christian sense. There is no ultimate denial extending to everything — merely a desire to deny. Yet the nothing that this desire confronts is not nothing, since simply by asserting it one is asserting its existence. Thus, denial, seeking an object in its desire for freedom, is compelled to affirm — to affirm nothingness. Which means that deniers strive to assert the absolute validity of all the things that cause their sense of loneliness. The outcome is the deification not just of the individuality of the body but also of the soul, and consequently of the uniqueness of life.
In stepping outside the order created by reason, passions tend toward sin; within that order, they tend toward virtue, teaches St. Thomas. Sin implies a rejection of the Christian interpretation of existence conceivable by reason, and thus, in the final analysis, it goes hand in hand with a loss of grace. Since the time of St. Augustine, intentionally shutting oneself up and turning away from God (aversio a Deo) has been regarded by Christian theology as a major sin. A sinner rejects grace, slumps into loneliness, and, as has been seen, becomes a prisoner of melancholia. Anyone who is melancholic steps out of the rational order created by reason and therefore, as measured by medieval standards, can in no way be considered wise. (In writing about melancholia, scholars fall into a deep hush about the Aristotelian notion.) Since melancholics can only long for metaphysical solitude, they are prisoners of that longing. It has no object, and therefore it falls back on itself: the self begins to fantasize, to imagine things, and it takes an inward turn that can be seen only as pathological. True wisdom is not touched by sickness, the Middle Ages vow (first, St. Augustine in his work
De beata vita), but the antique meaning of apatheia is altered, with less emphasis given to the stoical overcoming of the passions and more to the mind’s self-control. Anyone who fails to observe that is sick in the eyes of the Middle Ages. “So pleasant their vain conceits are,” the Robert Burton writes about melancholics, “that they hinder their ordinary tasks and necessary business, they cannot address themselves to them, or almost to any study or employment” (Burton, Anatomy, partition 1, sec. 2, member 2, subsec. 6, 246). The black bile rises to the opening of the liver, thence to the heart, and its final destination is the brain, Constantine the African writes; the black bile that makes its way to the brain dulls the powers of judgment. Melancholics are overcome by undue fright and imagine that “the sort of thing is occurring which will never occur in reality.” The mind becomes deranged and incapable of getting its bearings in a familiar world. “As with the sun, which loses its light if clouds or vapors reach it, so too the mind of a sick person becomes deranged if the noxious vapors of black bile reach him; he is unable to shine any more, and he does not recognize things according to their inner reality” (quoted in Heinrich Schipperges, “Melancholie als ein mittelaltlicher Sammelbegriff für Wahnvorstellungen,” 728). A melancholic is alienated from everything, said Constantine, who considered melancholy to be both a corporeal and a mental illness, since in his view, fantasizing too was an illness. The medieval world ejected from itself all imaginings, yet it is questionable whether everything that a system seeks to eject can be adequately characterized by the word “sickness.” Naturally, the exaggerated fantasizing of a medieval melancholic was sick, since, after all, it was corroding the body of a healthy society, but — and this is where the melancholia of the Middle Ages was one step ahead — those who called melancholia an illness did not inquire into the question of health itself. Ulysses crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, the boundary laid down for mankind, and that was why, in Dante’s opinion, not only was his flight wild (folle volo — Inferno, canto 26, l. 125), but so, too, was he himself (Paradise, canto 27, l. 83). The limits imposed are those of God, and we should know our limits. The boundlessness of a melancholic, his longing to be negative, was, according to the contemporary conception, sick, irrational, and contradictory to all the rules of reason. “In melancholy persons,” writes Avicenna, “the vividness of the imagination (imaginatio) of depressing things itself causes them to appear, because the thing whose image is represented to the mind is already there in actuality. . We find that the understanding is drawn away from rational actions by the senses and by the phantasy” (quoted in E. R. Harvey, The Inward Wits, 26). Melancholics, he writes elsewhere, are “usually sad and solitary, and [they are] continually, and in excess, more than ordinarily suspicious, more fearful, and have long, sore, and most corrupt imaginations” (quoted in Burton, Anatomy, partition 1, sec. 3, member 1, subsec. 3, 402). Melancholia is a product of a sick fantasy — sick, because it does not recognize generally agreed boundaries. According to Avicenna’s doctrine, imaginatio is the store-house of sense perceptions, whereas the vis imaginativa is the faculty that mobilizes the collected sensory data. A healthy imagination is not free, but subordinate to the senses; perception itself, however, is of a lower order than thinking—cogitatio—which alone leads to God; and if imagination, in its attempt to break loose from this hierarchy, tries to acquire autonomy, it becomes sick (morbus imaginationis is the frequent accusation laid against melancholics).