) — to use a Platonic expression — that is, to the continuous interchange of being and nonbeing (
).
That explains melancholics’ talent for surprisingly accurate prophesying, noted and commented on by the ancient Greeks. In the aforesaid short treatise, Aristotle draws attention to the ability of melancholics to foretell the future with great accuracy, and in his younger days, when he had still believed in the divine origin of dreams, he went so far as to connect this ability with sleep. Melancholics, he says, have transient dreams and are plagued by the same sorts of notions that visit febrile patients — and these notions reveal to them the deeper relationships of existence. Thus, a prophet should not be imagined in the present-day sense as someone lodged in the present who prophesies an event that will occur at some later date, but as a person who stands outside time. Thus, Homer writes of one such prophet: “Calchas son of Thestor, wisest of augurs, / who knew things past, present and to come, rose to speak” (Iliad, bk. 1, 68–70). For Calchas there was no decisive difference between the past, the present, and the future: for him who understands everything, sees and hears everything simultaneously,11 time becomes of secondary importance. Time is part of the world of opinion (
), proclaims Xenophanes; reason in search of truth, on the other hand, is not at the mercy of time: in comparison with something having existed, existing now, or coming into existence, it is incomparably more important that it is part of existence, which generates time. Because it is Being, namely, that which exists (
), which in the view of Parmenides “has no coming-into-being and no destruction, for it is whole of limb, without motion, and without end. And it never Was, nor Will Be, because it Is now, a Whole all together, One, continuous” (Fragments, 8). Soothsayers find themselves at home in a world of Being beyond time, in a place where they are not captive to any particular tense and where, with impunity, they can transgress the boundaries of things laid down by time. An oracle navigates freely in time and space; not detained by beliefs and opinions, his attention is always directed instead at the truth, which is not revealed in response to his glance but could not exist without that glance. That is why a soothsayer’s words seem as though they emanate straight from the heart of things. Not for nothing did the ancient Greeks hold Delphi, seat of the oracle of Apollo, to be a central point of the world, its omphalos, or “navel,” where any mortal could learn what is and what will be. But only a select few found their home in this navel, which could be known only to those whom the gods regarded as worthy. Epimenides denied that the Delphic omphalos was the central point of land or sea. “If any there be,” he writes, “it is visible to the gods, not visible to mortals” (Freeman, Ancilla, 10, frag. 11). One would thus have to become divine in order to glimpse the omphalos; one has to be one of the elect of the gods to be capable of prophesying while seated on that navel. That is why soothsayers were so mysterious and frightening, like the sibyl, who, according to Heraclitus, “with raving mouth utters things mirthless and unadorned and unperfumed” (frag. XXXIV, in Kahn, Art, 45). The madness is the mania that raises the oracle up high, and in the course of that elevation the earthly truth that has been left behind is unraveled. The prophecies inspired by god take the form of “dark sayings and visions” (Timaeus, 72b), but the suspicion arises that this is because the truth that has been recognized is itself an insolvable mystery. Soothsayers transgress boundaries, and they become embodiments of a strange detachment. And because they are not gods, merely partaking of the divine, this strangeness within them will be a source of pain. For that reason, genuine prophets are equipped with double vision: they impart nonhuman truth with human words; they are possessed by gods12 yet speak for themselves; they are less than gods, owing to their human fate, but because of their familiarity with the gods, they are more than human beings — just like melancholic Heracles. A soothsayer’s destiny is to experience the destructive forces of intermediacy, homelessness, and elusiveness.
“Your life is one long night,” Oedipus says to the prophet Teiresias (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 374), and by this he alludes not merely to his real blindness. The seer has partaken of enlightenment, but that radiance is the light of night. Plato held divine possession to be one of the sources of the power of augury: in that context, Philo was subsequently to write: “For when the divine light sets, this other rises and shines, and this very frequently happens to the race of prophets; for the mind (
) that is in us is removed from its place at the arrival of the divine Spirit (
), but is again restored to its previous habitation when that Spirit departs, for it is contrary to holy law for what is mortal to dwell with what is immortal. On this account the setting of our reason (
), and the darkness which surrounds it, causes a trance and a heaven-inflicted madness (
)” (Who Is the Heir of Divine Things, 264–65). Philo brands melancholia an illness, even though he connects ecstasy not just with divine possession but also with melancholia (249), thereby bringing home the connection between divinatory powers and melancholia. On falling into an ecstasy, one steps out of oneself without having the faintest idea of the direction of the excursion or the place of “arrival.” Nor could one, since it is a condensate of moment, of the now, in which space and time, which imply directions and positions, are shrunk to nothing. Melancholics experience their life as consisting of a series of such moments, and scanning the world from that point of view, they give proof positive of a gift for prophecy. By virtue of their singular position, they become immersed in the process of “becoming,” and from there they speak to us who are purely observers of this process and, furthermore, are able to interpret it only after the event by freezing its individual moments. Prophets are immersed in the process of coming into being; for them, existence is constant change. The name of dark, mysterious Heraclitus appears before us, the Heraclitus who, according to Diogenes Laertius, left some of his works unfinished because of his melancholia and who held wise men (that is, prophets) in great esteem. Despondent at seeing the contingency of unambiguous things, taking note of the struggle of being and nonbeing, and suffering on that account, Heraclitus could himself be called a prophet in a profound sense of the word, because when he asserts, “It is not better for men to obtain all they wish” (Freeman, Ancilla, 32, frag. 110), he then testifies to a most profound talent for inverse prophecy. Anyone who participates in the process of coming into being will inevitably glimpse the doom of death — not the death that will befall us at some appointed hour, but that which is constantly threatening us and shapes our every moment. Heraclitus writes of mortal immortals, and immortal mortals — in other words, about the relativity of life and death. A true prophet is not a person with the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, but one who can tell what is happening today; a person who opens up our own inner self to our gaze, not someone who confronts us with an outer self that will be realized some day. “Know thyself,” the ancient Greeks could read on the façade of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. The future within us, not without: we make the future into the future, or in other words, we are not at the mercy of time but solely of ourselves. True prophets, St. Francis of Assisi would later teach Brother Leo, “if they. . had the gift of prophecy. . could reveal, not only all future things, but likewise the secrets of all consciences and all souls” (The Little Flowers, 8). That is why Empedocles names the prophets of all men dwelling on the earth as the first of the four most important vocations, followed by hymn writers, physicians, and chieftains — those who, in their own manner, likewise see it as their business in life to spy out the formation and principles of our lives. That is why Plato uses the passive voice of the verb “to foretell” (