) originally had connotations of throwing, vexing, strife; or in other words, the devil is present in the sick body or soul even if the illness seems to be derived from the most “natural” causes. In the Christian theological sense, the devil has existing substantiality, but he cannot be seen as God’s opposite number: he is a finite creature, and divine authority sets limits to the evil he can do. Pursuant to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, nothing is evil by nature, but all evil is finite, temporal and stems from a creature’s free decision (see Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, Concise Theological Dictionary, s.v. “evil”). Evil is inconceivable in the absence of good, since it stems from the rejection of God, of the good. True evil, therefore, is not manifested in destruction and ruination but in the rejection of divine goodness and grace. In the case of the melancholic, this means that his illness is a scaled-down replica of the strife between God and the deviclass="underline" a melancholic wants to be enough for himself, to acquire completeness in himself. According to St. Bonaventure, “every sin is a result of the inner chaos of the soul or will” (quoted in Jehl, Melancholie und Acedia, 175); and by making order (God’s order) the ultimate basis, he invalidates from the outset the sense of existence of the melancholic, who discerns in everything disorder and instability, guaranteed by death. Melancholics are surrounded by such a high degree of incomprehension that in the Christian view, they are truly ill, and behind their sickness lurks the devil. According to Avicenna, the bile is painted black by the devil, which is why black bile was proverbially said to be the devil’s bath (balneum diaboli). (Galgerandus of Mantua, a famous physician, allegedly tried to cure a demoniac woman “by purging black choler,” that is, bile; see Burton, Anatomy, partition 1, sec. 2, member 1, subsec. 2, 200.) Melancholia is the result of the devil’s machinations; this is the opinion of the Arabian Rhasis, of Michael Psellos, Gordonius, Paracelsus, Luther (“where melancholia raises its head, the Devil bathes”—quoted in Werner Leibbrand, Heilkunde, 201), and St. Teresa of Avila (“There are varieties of this temper [melancholia]. . I verily believe that Satan lays hold of it in some people as a means whereby to draw them to himself if he can”—quoted by Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn, 106). The devil makes his entrance and does everything possible to divert the melancholic from God. Burton cites Gentilis Fulgosus, who writes that he had a melancholy friend who had a black man “in the likeness of a soldier” following him wherever he was — this man was obviously the devil himself. Explanations connecting melancholia with a diabolical origin proliferated particularly from the twelfth through the thirteenth centuries — at the time when heresies also began to spread. Melancholics are inclined to heresy to begin with, and when this heresy appeared as an organized phenomenon, nothing could be more natural than to brand its followers as sick. “Anchorites, monks, and the rest of that superstitious rank,” Guianerius writes, “through immoderate fasting, have been frequently mad” (quoted in Burton, Anatomy, partition 1, sec. 2, member 2, subsec. 2). Regarding the so-called religious melancholic (note the collocation!): “Some seem to be inspired of the Holy Ghost, some take upon them to be Prophets, some are addicted to new opinions, some foretell strange things,” writes Gordonius. “Some will prophesy of the end of the World to a day almost, and the fall of the Antichrist” (partition 3, sec. 4, member 1, subsec. 1, 312). This is an unmistakable example of ideology at work (although the word “ideology” was coined only at the end of the eighteenth century), which became so far-reaching that in the early seventeenth century, in his massive work on melancholy the Anglican Robert Burton introduced two groups of religious melancholics: Enthusiasts (that is, Puritans and Catholics) and Atheists. Everyone who failed to find a place in the prevailing Anglican denomination was melancholic. Similar assertions are made by Melanchthon, who calls atheism now monstrous, now poisoned melancholy (monstruosa melancholia and venenata melancholia).
Melancholics are uneliminable figures in the world-historical drama of Christianity, obliged to play out the role of an all-rejecting desire for freedom. For the medieval melancholic, as for his Greek counterpart, the accustomed order of existence was overturned, leaving him with no foothold to grasp in order to create a habitable world. In the case of medieval melancholics, the complete turning away and denial are even more conspicuous: the surroundings from which they try to break out are much denser, more impenetrable than the heterogeneous culture of antiquity. There is just one mystery, one story, one basic principle, one God. The melancholic of antiquity could hunker down here and there among varied spheres of existence (as a soothsayer, madman, or philosopher; ever-newer worlds opened up for him, and even though these differed radically from the day-to-day, the customary, he could still consider them to be his own); this small degree of latitude, however, was not granted to medieval melancholics. In the Middle Ages, melancholia was an endangered state: a melancholic would smash up against a brick wall and get badly bruised. Or one could say that rather than hitting the wall, he was walled in from the outset. A melancholic wishes, first and foremost, to escape from himself, but he can find no crack in the homogeneous, overarching culture, and resignation grows in him, together with a sense of helplessness. In the end, he petrifies inwardly as well, feeling he has been robbed of his capacity for both wanting and not wanting. He has lost himself: he feels as if his body and soul had been replaced by a void, a yawning gap. (In the Middle Ages lead weights were placed on the head of some melancholics so they could feel that they had a head and body.) At the same time, he perceives his entire being as a dead weight, an immovable stone block. Aegidius Albertinus writes about melancholia in the following terms: “The grief, which otherwise moves the heart to meekness, only makes him more and more obstinate in his perverse thoughts, for his tears do not fall into his heart and soften its hardness, but he resembles a stone which, when the weather is damp, only sweats outwardly” (quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 154).
“It is, therefore, no strange anomaly partly to will and partly to be unwilling. This is actually an infirmity of mind,” writes Augustine (Confessions, bk. 8, 9), thinking of inertia, of melancholy, and of the unwillingness of the body to do what the mind commands. Medieval melancholics, unlike the ancient Greeks, did not walk but idled in one spot. They turned away from the world, withdrew into themselves, did nothing that might win them grace: they are inert. Inertness, or acedia4—the original Greek 
means “without care, negligence”—is discouragement, absolute indifference to the good, spiteful indolence. Dante considered acidia (sullenness) one of the seven deadly sins, and those who were guilty of it were located in the Fifth Circle of Hell, in the foul water of the Styx. Sloth, in the Middle Ages, was called the devil’s cushion or pillow, and those inclined to idleness were held to be melancholic. “I have often seen,” said Rhasis, as cited by Burton (Anatomy, partition 1, sec. 2, member 2, subsec. 6, 242), “that idleness begets this humour [melancholia] more than any thing else.” On account of its very slow speed of revolution around the sun, Saturn, the planet of melancholia, was called Shani (from the Sanskrit Sanischana, “the slow mover”) or Manda (“slow”) by the Indians. In a thirteenth-century manuscript, one may read the following about acedia: “On Sloth. The fourth principal sin is sloth in the service of God. That is if I should turn from a laborious and demanding good work to idle rest. If I turn from the good work when it becomes heavy, this gives rise to bitterness of the heart” (quoted in Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 155). Indolence or sloth (this we must certainly not judge from the viewpoint of today’s work ethic) averts one’s eyes from the good, and the consequence of doing so is eternal death, which fills the heart of the melancholic with infinite sorrow.5 Acedia was the mother of “gloom,” tristitia (in medieval Latin, acedior meant “languid, slothful,” hence, “to be wearied of a thing”), the sadness that melancholics feel on account of their being destined for death, the extinction of their unrepeatable earthly existence, even though they feel that earthly existence to be unbearable. St. Paul distinguishes two kinds of sorrow: “For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). Sorrow of the world (