stands for an unsuitability lacking any kind of comparison. The more one is the victim of this, the less one is capable of seeing the context and measure of one’s blunder. “(Inside, we are) a complex store-house and treasury of ills, with many possibilities of suffering,” says Democritus (Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, 105, frag. 149). The treasury that he comes upon is the irremediable and increasingly certain condemnation of his life to failure. The sea into which Heracles plunged is, in the final analysis, a sea of deprivation of something, a deficiency; and the suffering caused by madness, horrifyingly, is increased by the fact that this deficiency, the sense of an all-enveloping negativity, is the reward for perfect, unsurpassable labors. Madness is the reward for all-surpassing extraordinariness, for supereminence7—this at least is the conclusion to which the fate of these three melancholic heroes points.
Identifying madness with melancholia, especially with the current preoccupation with psychology and clinical psychiatry, seems to give the problem short shrift. But madness in this case is also an ingredient of mythological tales, and just as the myth as a whole has a meaning, so too its separate parts have broader significance than it would appear at first sight from a rational point of view. A myth cannot be puzzled out — only, at best, endlessly unraveled — without flinching from relating it to our own situation, which itself is not much different from a maze and is in no way more solid than the soil of mythology. The same can be said about frenzy. Lyssa was the goddess, or daimona, responsible for raging madness — it was she who planted its seed in the mind of Heracles in Euripides’ drama. Her mother was Nyx, the dark personification of Night, her father, Uranus, and that family tree places madness in a wider context. Uranus is the god of the sky, and so on the paternal side, madness can be traced back to the very beginnings of existence. On the maternal side, born of the night as she is, she stems from the realm of invisible entities; for the Greeks, however, night did not just conceal things but — like the dream world — could also make the invisible visible.8 At night, a new world unfolds itself, and this new world is not merely some dreamland of the imagination: it is also related to the daytime world. In his short treatise On Prophesying by Dreams, Aristotle articulates a widespread Greek belief that in nocturnal dreams profound truths are revealed to the dreamer. The night allows us to catch a glimpse of invisible things and thus makes divination possible. Prophecy is therefore a sibling of madness, which is further confirmed by the spirit of the Greek language: the verbs to prophesy (
) and to rage (
) go back to a common root. (At this point, it is enough to note in parentheses that Aristotle also saw a connection between melancholia and the night,
) a disgrace or dishonor, would never have called prophecy (
), which is. . the noblest of arts, by the very same name“ (Phaedrus, 244b — c). Madness is a divine gift, at least if it fits into the aforesaid context. Plato writes also about the kind of madness that is not a gift of the gods but afflicts the human mind as a darkening here on earth. Just as two kinds of love are distinguished, the heavenly, temperate, and the unrestrained, unbridled Eros, so too there is a distinction made between two kinds of madness. At the same time — and this is worth noting — Plato regards one of the variants of earthly madness clouding the eye as melancholia. In the Timaeus (86b), he discusses sufferings of the soul, even to the point of defining melancholia, without actually naming it; while both in the Phaedrus (268e) and in the Republic (573c), he uses the words “melancholia” and “melancholic” in the mundane sense of “crazy.” The notion of mania, of madness, however, leads off into the otherworldly realm; raving visited upon us by the gods allows a glimpse into higher spheres of being: “The fourth and last kind of madness. . is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is transported with the recollection of the true beauty; he would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad” (Phaedrus, 249d). The Platonic duality of a divine madness that tempts a person into the sky (mania) and more mundane madness, which shackles a person to earth (melancholia), was resolved by Aristotle: to mania with a metaphysical tint, he attached a scientific sense by making it medically explicable on the basis of bodily symptoms while broadening the notion of melancholia. He mixed the specific metaphysical characteristics of mania with the physical attributes of melancholia and thereby instigated a radically new conception of the latter. For Aristotle, melancholia of physical origin had its metaphysical associations to thank for being able to provide grounds for eminence and extraordinariness. (In the Middle Ages, one could witness a downgrading of those metaphysical characteristics, and only in the fifteenth century, in Ficino’s notion of melancholia, did it regain the rights won with the Aristotelian theory.) What was characteristic of melancholia, as of madness, was the ecstasy, the stepping outside oneself, and re-creation of the laws of existence in a wider sense. Indeed, in Aristotle’s time, to rave (
) was also used in connection with melancholia. The madness of the three heroes thus becomes the source of melancholia, but this madness — and their whole lives are proof of this — is not, in and of itself, its basis: also pertinent are the realization of great feats, the accomplishment of superhuman actions, and the vanquishing of the powers of darkness. The heroes are not melancholic because they are mad, nor even because of their extraordinary strength and talent, but because the two are inseparable in them: madness is a consequence of their extraordinariness, while they owe their extraordinariness to their inherent possibility of going mad. Since there is no earthly standard for measuring their extraordinariness, their madness is likewise not definitively curable by earthly medicines; indeed, medication would destroy them.10 Their madness opened the gates of a new world, and passing through those gates would cause the earthly arrangements of this world to lose their significance, and the horizons that arose before them would put all existing things in a radically new light. “[Where] madness has entered with holy prayers and rites, and by inspired utterances found a way of deliverance for those who are in need; and he who has part in this gift, and is truly possessed and duly out of his mind,” writes Plato, “is by the use of purifications and mysteries made whole and exempt from evil, future as well as present, and has a release from the calamity which was afflicting him” (Phaedrus, 244e). Melancholia, which in Aristotle (and also in Hippocrates) is inseparably intertwined with mania, enables those who come down with it to step beyond the usual boundaries of human existence and withdraw themselves from the demands of everyday life. In the words of Heraclitus: “Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the others’ death, dead in the others’ life” (frag. XCII, in Kahn, Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 71). For them, a gradual breakup of the mundane world is under way (melancholic heroes are doubtful even of the divinities who vouch for existence), and they will be the beholders of, and passive parties to, “coming into being” (