The cause of fantasizing, of the roving imagination, was not merely noxious vapors of black bile rising to the brain; it also stemmed from an elemental human need. 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, which no crafty philosophy is capable of resolving. Seen from the outside, an individual who longs for freedom is daring and self-confident; naturally, in the eyes of the age his fantasizing is sickly, but there is determination and resoluteness behind this sickness. He of course sees the situation differently. Rebelling against divine omnipotence, he wishes to grant individual things, retrieved from under the authority of the general, their own ultimate justification, subject to no one’s backing. This entails that he absolutize himself as ultimate certitude. The rejection of grace and the choice of freedom is madness in the eyes of the outside world, and the individual who chooses to act like that is truly mad: his desire to understand himself, the individuality and irreplaceability of the self, forces him to return to the question of being, which, in turn, lands him back with God. He is forced to realize that he does not have even himself at his own free disposal — and experiencing that can truly drive one mad. He cannot change the fact that he was created, and the fantasizing, which is essentially aimed at turning himself into a creator, comes to nothing: he becomes unintelligible, muddled, crazy. An inner derangement is inevitable for anyone wishing to cut himself free from God: the desire for freedom plunges the desirer into madness. He will be branded by others as a madman, and they have every reason for doing so: the culture around the melancholic — Christianity — produces the possibility of endless freedom (that is, sin) only to suppress it in madness and transform it into the greatest possible servitude, into self-slavery. “One cannot sufficiently condemn Christianity for having devaluated the value of such a great purifying nihilistic movement, which was perhaps already being formed. . through continual deterrence from the deed of nihilism, which is suicide” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 143). This inseparable intertwining of the possibility of freedom and servitude brings about an inner breakdown (most people writing about melancholia in the Middle Ages list symptoms that are used to characterize schizophrenia nowadays), and in the case of melancholia, that condition is degraded into a mental illness. From the early Middle Ages, indeed from the early days of Christianity, physicians (Soranus of Ephesus and Caelius Aurelinus) and thinkers considered it to be a mental illness, which embraced everything from schizophrenia to manic depression or, to narrow the range, from rabies to lycanthropy. The interpretation of existence inherent in antiquity’s notion of melancholia thereby lost its validity, but its medieval career had not yet come to an end. Melancholia was born originally out of a profound longing for freedom, a longing that was condemned to die from the start. The medieval interpretation of existence, however, in consequence of its totalitarian nature, not only bound the desire for freedom hand and foot but also, by declaring it to be a mental illness (or making effectively mentally ill those who had started to doubt), managed to exploit melancholia for its own glorification. Anyone who wanted to oppose the scheme of existence, to transgress the boundaries that had been laid down, would truly become sick — and what could serve as a better proof of the viability and vigor of a system? The Christian mystery was a unique event, the beginning and end of which are known, and for that reason, there is no scene in this world that does not have a prescribed place in that drama. The medieval view, like the teachings of Greek mythology, associates every type of mental illness, thus melancholia as well, with the night (the symbolic creatures of which include the owl and the bat). Night in the Christian sense — unlike the notion in antiquity — does not allow a glimpse of a new world that has never been seen before; instead, it is darkness taken in the strictest sense of the word. (Naturally, that does not apply to mystics, who were on intimate terms with melancholia.) To express this in the language of mystery: night was the era without Jesus Christ (Romans 13:12), which would pass soon so that the faithful might triumph; and in a figurative sense, the night is death (John 9:4). By becoming a mental illness, and by being connected with the night, melancholia achieved “world-historical” ranking: it was integrated, won its place on the stage, and melancholics became flailing actors whose fate was known by audiences in advance.3
The fact that melancholia was declared an illness indirectly contributed to the strengthening of faith. In illness, people no longer have command of themselves, and Christian theology discovered the ambiguous nature of a person’s creaturely nature in illness: a person was simultaneously a passive and an active being. It is in a sick person that the double freedom — creaturely and individual — which characterizes healthy people as well, manifests most obviously. The conflict between these two kinds of freedom culminates in the melancholic patient, and thus melancholia is not just a specific disease but also an epitome: an embodiment of the duel that, in the Christian view of the world, characterizes world history and is fought between sin and redemption. The word “devil” (