We have now reached the late Middle Ages. Jupiter either abolishes melancholia or ennobles it. The influence the planets exert may be fateful, but is not necessarily so: a person, as natural magic declares, is not merely at the mercy of destiny, but can also meet it halfway, and even fight against it. One may choose one’s fate. Melancholia is a result not just of rejecting divine grace but also of a singular interplay of natural forces. In the late Middle Ages, the astrological explanation refined the earlier monolithic way of looking at things, according to which melancholia was a mental illness. However paradoxical it may seem, the astrological conception smoothed the ground for the assessment of melancholia in modern times. Like the derivation of it from original sin, astrological explanations generalized melancholia: it could befall anyone. Something that could befall anyone and settle on a person like destiny or fate was in no way just an illness, at least not in the sense that illness was understood at the time; for in that sense, illness indicated a lack of divine grace. If anyone could lose grace, a sinless person just as much as a sinner, then the meaning of melancholia needed to be modified. Defiance of God was not a sin by definition, but an experiment, the goal of which was self-deification. Astrology and the associated concept of melancholia prepared the way for the dethronement of God.
Chapter 4. THE CHALLENGE OF FATE
Destiny challenged — nothing could be further from the scholastic picture of the universe. Haughtiness, closing in on oneself, rejecting grace, indeed tacitly disavowing God — those were still demonstrable characteristics of medieval melancholics, who were rightly and justifiably considered mentally ill by those around them: melancholics truly did go mad in a solitary way of life and did so literally, not merely symbolically. They were prisoners of destiny, helpless sufferers of their fate, however alive to it they may have been. The moment, however, that the ideological seal was broken by astrological explanations, those ties started to loosen. The condition of Saturn’s children became ambiguous, as did Saturn himself. “Saturn cannot easily signify the common quality and lot of the human race, but he signifies an individual set apart from others, divine or brutish, blessed or bowed down with the extreme of misery,” Marsilio Ficino writes in
De vita triplici (Three Books on Life, bk. 3, ch. 2), composed between 1480 and 1489, which, alongside Burton’s massive tome, is the other most important work on melancholia. Saturn’s dual power did not only result in two human types but could also turn someone into a two-faced person. On one occasion, Ficino complained to Giovanni Cavalcanti about the bad influence of Saturn on him, whereupon Cavalcanti reproached his friend for having no cause for complaint, since it was exclusively through Saturn’s assistance that he had become such an excellent and clever person; Ficino agreed with him—“I shall, in agreement with Aristotle, say that this nature itself is a unique and divine gift” (Epistolae, vol. 2, no. 24) — and moreover added that maybe he could also thank Saturn for his talent, since Saturn’s detrimental effect could be mitigated by the other planets. In his response, he writes: “Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning; set, as he is, almost in the midst of my ascendant Aquarius, he is influenced by Mars, also in Aquarius, and the Moon in Capricorn. He is in square aspect to the Sun and Mercury in Scorpio, which occupy the ninth house. But Venus in Libra and Jupiter in Cancer have, perhaps, offered some resistance to this melancholy nature” (ibid.). Saturn was just as responsible for depression as for intellectual excellence, for ill humor as for enlightenment. This duality is the starting point of the chapter on melancholia in his Three Books on Life. The ambivalence typical of the melancholic was at one and the same time the basis of a dynamic personality. In book 1, chapter 2, of De vita triplici he writes: “Therefore black bile continually incites the soul both to collect itself together into one and to dwell on itself and to contemplate itself.” Because of the dynamic character of the mind, however, black bile influences the mind, and conversely, mental exertion is responsible for the ill effects of black bile. Melancholics can blame themselves just as much as Saturn; indeed, with sufficient exertion, the mind alone is capable of inducing melancholia, without any help from Saturn.1 Ficino’s innovation was the idea that not only were Saturn’s children capable of intellectual achievements, but through appropriate intellectual activity, anyone might fall under the influence of Saturn. With intellectual effort, a person could transcend his or her customary circles and expand the dimensions of the existing world. “Hence by withdrawal from human affairs, by leisure, solitude, constancy, by theology, the more esoteric philosophy, superstition, magic, agriculture, and by sorrow, we come under the influence of Saturn” (ibid., bk. 3, ch. 3). Saturn is the most human and equally the most mysterious planet;2 the way leading to the unknown, as in the case of the mysteries of antiquity, was open to all.