It is not easy to distinguish between states of “black dog,” acedia, depression, and melancholia; depending on the context, all can appear in a positive or negative light. According to legend, in the fifth century BCE, the philosopher Democritus, to escape from the follies and distractions of the world, set himself up in a hovel on the outskirts of Abdera in what appeared to be a state of melancholy. The citizens of Abdera, appalled by his conduct, asked Hippocrates to use his medical skills to cure the stranger, whom they took to be a madman. Hippocrates, however, after examining Democritus, turned to the people and told them that it was they, not the philosopher, who were mad, and that they should all imitate his conduct and retire from the world to reflect in worthy solitude. Hippocrates took sides with the man who, bitten by acedia, retired to meditate in solitude on the world of which he wanted no part.
As Földényi notes, “A person longs for solitude and at the same time is fearful of it. He can be rid of God’s omnipotence only by elevating himself into an absolute. This, however, is just as depressing a state as God’s solitude.” Early Christians understood this conundrum. Human intellect was a faculty given to us in order to assist us in our faith — not to clarify the unclarifiable mysteries but to construct a logical scaffolding to support them. The evidence of things unseen would not, by reflection and reasoning, render those things visible but would allow the person of faith (the prerequisite of grace, as Földényi remarks) to ruminate and build upon such evidence. For that reason, the isolation of religious men and women in cells and caves and inhospitable deserts assisted the work willed by God. Sometimes the isolation was accomplished high upon a tower erected in a wasteland, such as the one in which, in the fifth century, Simeon Stylites, as Donald Atwater put it in A Dictionary of Saints, “despairing of escaping the world horizontally, tried to escape it vertically” by spending high above his brethren the last thirty-six years of his life.
But concomitant with this need for seclusion to nourish the inner life ran an undercurrent of guilt, a self-censuring of the very act of quiet thinking. Humankind, the Church Fathers taught, was meant to use its intellect to understand what could be understood, but there were questions that were not meant to be asked and limits of reasoning that were not meant to be transgressed. Dante charged Ulysses with a guilty curiosity and an arrogant desire to see the unknown world. Retreating into solitude with one’s own thoughts might allow this same sinful desire to arise and, without counsel and guidance of one’s spiritual leaders, remain dangerously unquenched. Therefore, the person seeking God in isolation was to concentrate solely on questions of Christian dogma and remain within the confines of dogmatic theology; pagan authors were dangerous because they distracted, like the Sirens, from the true course.
The thinkers of the Renaissance tried to turn what the early Christians had seen as the sin of acedia into a virtue. In “On Caring for the Health of the Man of Letters” in his Book of Life, the great humanist Marsilio Ficino, commenting on his own melancholia and his habit of withdrawing into solitude (“which only much playing of the lute can sweeten and soften a little”), attempted to withdraw himself from the influence of Saturn and ascribed his state to what Aristotle had called a singular and divine gift, and Plato before him a divine furor. Though warning scholars to avoid both phlegm (which blocks the intelligence) and black bile (which causes too much care) “as if they were sailing past Scylla and Charybdis,” Ficino concludes that thin black bile is beneficial for the man of letters. To encourage its flow, Ficino gives detailed instructions: emulate not the energetic demeanor of the pilgrim, alert on the road, but the idling disposition of the philosopher, meditative and slow. “When you have got out of bed,” advises Ficino, “do not rush right in on your reading or meditation, but for at least half an hour go off and get cleaned up. Then diligently enter your meditation, which you should prolong for about an hour, depending on your strength. Then, put off a little whatever you are thinking about, and in the meantime comb your hair diligently and moderately with an ivory comb, drawing it forty times from the front to the neck. Then rub the neck with a rough cloth, returning only then back to meditating, for two hours or so, or at least for an hour of study.” And Ficino concludes: “If you choose to live each day of your life in this way, the author of life himself will help you to stay longer with the human race and with him whose inspiration makes the whole world live” (Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer). In certain cases and under certain conditions, as a source for philosophical enterprise, melancholy came to be seen as a privileged state, part of the intellectual condition, as well as the source of inspired creation, and the reader, locked away in a solitary tower, as a maker.
Földényi discusses as well the descent of the term melancholia into the boredom and mere indifference to the things of the world, and the survival of this connotation into our age. Writers such as Hobbes, Baron d’Holbach, Locke, and Swift condemned melancholia for myriad reasons. The Anglican Robert Burton (says Földényi) accused atheism, Catholicism, and Puritanism of fostering melancholia; thinkers of the French Enlightenment said that melancholia was caused by Christianity; Georg Lukács, in the twentieth century, reproached Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett for indulging in “the melancholic disdain of reality”; Walter Benjamin mocked the poems of Erich Kästner for their “left-wing melancholia.” Kant saw melancholia as a sign of ethical self-consciousness. “Mention of melancholia,” writes Földényi, “creates palpable unease,” and adds with a certain defiance: “If psychiatry were to seek to return to the concept its due rights, . the closed system would be spectacularly thrown wide open.”
Földényi concludes his book bravely: “With every step he takes, man tries to smuggle some goal into nothingness. The melancholic is skeptical of those goals.” Rightly so, as Földényi shows. The melancholic Hamlet’s remark about being in the world, bound in a nutshell but thinking himself king of infinite space, is, in spite of all our arguments, our blessed common lot.
Melancholy
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The anguish of beginning signals the difficulty of the enterprise.
We have to make use of concepts to speak about something that corrodes concepts themselves in order, ultimately, to render them elusive, in the manner of a mirage. We shall turn for assistance to the grammar of words and the resonance of sentences, although what those try to articulate and render transparent is something that precedes those words and sentences themselves. Speech is sonorous, but sooner or later it falls silent: it is also an offspring of silence. Words say less than we would wish to convey — they mislead us, divert our thoughts away from their original goal to such an extent that possibly even as we speak we ourselves are amazed: we wanted to say something else, not what the words, tones, and linguistic structures imply. A word says less than we would like to communicate — however, the fact that misunderstandings cannot be eliminated from our lives is an indication that this is not a matter of faulty technique but one of the most singular paradoxes of speech, of communication. Words give little away because they contain too much. Whatever we say, whatever we speak about, our words are not just about what we wish to communicate. Deep within them lurks another, unspoken world that also sustains those words. Naturally, we may impart thoughts about this other world as well, but in so doing we do not dispose of it, merely push back its boundaries further, expanding the unreachable horizon. None of that detracts from the importance of words, concepts, and speech, but for words truly to acquire meaning and importance they must take into account their own defenselessness, advise of their own fragility. The protagonist of Cervantes’ story “The Glass Graduate” swallows a magic potion and feels that his body and soul are made of transparent glass — yet the more this delusion and fear take hold of him, the more his powers of discernment and clear-sightedness grow. In a way, it is much the same with words.