) freezes one in one’s own createdness — on the other hand, however, sorrow is not just a cause, but also an effect: the consequence of a state that was hopeless and doomed to damnation from the outset.
The condition of Egyptian monks in the region of Alexandria drew attention to acedia in the fourth century, with Evagrius Ponticus naming it as the most serious of the (then still) eight evil thoughts (capita cognoscitiva) from which all sinful behavior springs. A monk in a state of acedia did not wish to remain in his cell, found work repugnant to him, and felt forsaken and inconsolable. Since acedia is not just a devilish suggestion but an evil spirit, a demon as well, the soul is compelled to experience hell. Thus, acedia is more than simple idleness: it is a sign of turning away from God, and it can be manifested just as much in sleepiness and laziness as in restlessness and instability. It is not of work that Homo accidiosus is tired, but of God’s oppressive almightiness; in vain he turns his gaze from God to the world, for instead of replenishment, from here too everything leads back to God. E. M. Cioran, a great melancholic of the twentieth century, writes about acedia as follows: “The dull sadness of monasteries wore an emptiness into the soul of the monks, known in the Middle Ages as acedia. . It is a loathing not of God but in him. Acedia gathers into itself the meaning of all those Sunday afternoons spent in the weighty silence of the monasteries” (Cioran, Tears and Saints, 86). According to Bonaventure, acedia has two roots: curiosity (curiositas) and disgust (fastidium). Disgust follows curiosity, and the initial question, “Is it worth living for God?” is quickly modified to “Is it worth living at all?” Aegidius Albertinus in the sixteenth century writes as follows in Lucifers Königreich und Seelengejaidt: Oder Narrenhatz (Lucifer’s Kingdom and His Hunt for Souls; or, The Hounding of Fools):
We legitimately compare acedia or sloth to a rabid dog’s bite; because a person who is bitten by such a dog is soon overtaken by frightful dreams, they shiver in their sleep, and they become rabid, refusing all drinks, fearing water, barking like a dog, and trembling so hard that they swoon. People like that soon die unless given help. It is those haunted by the devil of sloth that are bitten by rabid dogs: people like that have dreadful dreams, they tremble without reason; things which for others are easy they find difficult to do; they just gaze at the sight of others working and are themselves lazy; although they protest if they are called indolent.
(324–25)
St. Thomas Aquinas recommends numerous medications for the cure of acedia and
tristitia de bono spirituali divino
— searching for joy, crying to relieve spiritual tension, a sympathetic friend, sleep, baths, prayer — but these remedies by no means get at the roots of melancholy, the irresolvable conflicts attendant on being plunged into created existence. St. Thomas’s suggestions are designed to
conceal
melancholia, to hide sadness, while aiming indirectly at preserving the existing world order. (In the Middle Ages the royal court was also intolerant of gloom: that was the privilege of the court jester. He was allowed to be melancholic, to unveil the transience beyond every joy, the sadness inherent in all things. He did not have to be taken seriously, but he was needed as a sort of “safety valve.”)
It is sin that lurks at the very bottom of sloth and worldly sorrow: “This strife was against my will,” writes St. Augustine of the above-mentioned sickness of the soul, “but the punishment of my own. Thus it was no more I who did it, but the sin that dwelt in me” (Confessions, bk. 8, 10). It was Adam who made humankind sinful, as a result of which, sin is a collective legacy of us all. St. Hildegard of Bingen (twelfth century), the “Sibyl of the Rhine,” who acquired fame through her prophetic visions and unusual spiritual experiences, saw the origin of melancholia in this shared sin: “What is now gall in him sparkled like crystal, and bore the taste of good work, and what is now melancholy in man shone in him like the dawn and contained in itself the wisdom and perfection of good works; but when Adam broke the law, the sparkle of innocence was dulled in him, and his eyes, which had formerly beheld heaven, were blinded, and his gall was changed to bitterness, and his melancholy to blackness” (quoted in Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 80). (Of course, “black bile” meant “melancholy.”) In this view, then, melancholia was not an attribute of the individual, but of the genus humankind, and was born when the Tree of Knowledge was robbed. The consequences of melancholia are sorrow and despair, since humankind is incapable of forgetting paradise: in St. Hildegard’s understanding, it automatically extends to everybody. (Her contemporary William of Conches called the four temperaments “deficient forms”—referring to the mixture of man’s humors after the Fall, as opposed to the balanced mixture before.) But original sin as “deficiency” is not the same as the sin of a specific individual. In the case of melancholics, the sin is double, since in addition to the collective original sin, they are weighed down by individual sin; after all, they have rejected the good of their own free will as well, not only as a result of their being created. According to Roman Catholic theology, sin is a mysterium iniquitatis, a mystery of evil, as a result of which creaturely freedom may even set itself against God and choose evil. Choosing evil of one’s free will, the rejection of God, produces melancholia, but that melancholia only nominally resembles the melancholia springing from original sin. Even before making a choice of good or evil, a person, as a descendent of Adam, is guilty of original sin, but thanks to Jesus Christ, can find redemption. Thus, the possibility for individual decision is restricted to the space between these two points, and by choosing individual sin, one cuts oneself off from Jesus. From a medieval medical point of view, a mentally ill person — including a melancholic — can be cured of his illness by looking at a portrait of Jesus or Mary for a long time. That was why for lunatics there was an almost proverbial chant: Eamus ad videndum filium Mariae—“Let us see the son of Mary.” The tracing of the origin of melancholia to original sin and to the Christian anthropological interpretation of humankind provides nothing less than an existential explanation of human existence; melancholia stemming from individual choice, on the other hand, admits of a practical-ethical image of humankind — one that the Church persecuted vehemently, judging it an indication of sinners venturing a universal interpretation of existence. (At the beginning of the seventeenth century, yet still completely in the medieval spirit, Robert Burton too made a distinction between two kinds of melancholia: the universal sort, which is an inseparable aspect of being human, and a special melancholia, typical only of certain people.)