In Ficino’s eyes, the melancholic personality was ambivalent and dynamic, simultaneously crazy and sane, enthusiastic and depressed. The most striking characteristic of melancholics was that they were responsible for their own fate — they could challenge and influence it. The notion of people being responsible for their own fate, however, had far-reaching consequences: it not only removed the individual from God’s authority, but also invested him with an arbitrary power that made his solitude much more palpable and tormenting than in earlier centuries. Medieval melancholics were also solitary, but since their solitude was coupled with mental illness, because of their situation, they were incapable of assessing their own state: the culture around them was so closed that they were obliged to believe whatever others said about them. They were captives of their culture; if they were regarded as crazy, then they believed it — and that was enough to drive them truly crazy. Ficino’s melancholics were responsible for their own fate; they withdrew themselves from the control of any authority. The cause of their solitude was not necessarily inertia but very often intellectual exertion; that was why they were fully aware of their position — in contrast with medieval melancholics, who were never able to emancipate themselves to this extent from their cultural surroundings. Melancholics realized their solitude, and their position became unbearable as a result, but this intolerableness, at the same time, became the basis of their sense of being chosen. They clashed with everything (since they made choices), and that was why they were regarded as abnormal, because others generally satisfied common expectations. They regarded themselves, however, as the most normal of all (they behaved according to their own will, after all, and they set their own rules for themselves). They knew and saw that the world was a system of expectations, but that ambiguous situation made them incapable of satisfying expectations of any kind. Either they had to accept that they were abnormal, sick personalities, for, after all, a normal personality accepted that the world was the way it was, but their sense of being chosen did not permit any such acceptance; or else they had to accept that they were chosen, extraordinarily talented, healthy people, but that, too, was beyond them because they sincerely experienced the abnormal nature of their situation. These mutually conflicting demands paralyzed them and, to use a modern expression, made them neurotic. Ignoring the ego’s orders — as Freud would put it — was not neurotic (in this sense, neither a total masochist nor a mentally ill patient should be considered neurotic), yet living in the midst of conflicts and being caught between conflicting commands, without finding a way out (compensation, sublimation, foregoing certain desires, conscious avoidance of conflicts, etc.) would eventually turn one into a neurotic. Neurotics are not insane, but they are not healthy either; caught between conflicting commands, they drift this way and that, so in their situation they are as familiar with despair as with irony. (Melancholics in the Middle Ages could “decide” between a closed world and nothing — hence their madness; melancholics in the Renaissance, however, could not “choose”: the world was open, riven from the outset.)
In Ficino’s view, melancholia was not an illness, nor was it health, but some intermediate state that should not be called neurotic, because that would be forcing the melancholic state into a schema of modern notions. Naturally, melancholia preserved marks of the medieval outlook: even into the sixteenth century, physicians (see, for example, Tomaso Garzoni and Girolamo Fracastoro) considered it a mental disease, and Petrarch, that characteristically melancholic writer of the modern age, speaks with alarm about his own condition: “What prevents us from believing that I am suffering from a fever of mind?” he wrote to Andrea Dandolo, referring to his own shaky condition, which he considered unfortunate (Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, bk. 15, letter 4, 261). Lurking behind that ambivalent pronouncement is fear: Petrarch feared the medieval conception, according to which a melancholic was mentally ill; he feared madness. That fear, however, was a signal that he was caught between two mutually opposing expectations; he was melancholic, but he was not mad. Of course, he did not yet possess the self-awareness of the great melancholics of the Renaissance era; he looked on his own melancholia as unequivocally reprehensible and damaging. Admittedly, in a section of his work Secretum subtitled “De contemptu mundi” (“On Scorn of Worldly Things”), melancholia is mentioned not as a form of insanity but as a normal state of mind, but his imagined interlocutor, St. Augustine, attempts to dispel his modern-style inner uncertainty with arguments that still evoke the Middle Ages. Petrarch was unable to decide which viewpoint to represent: he dared not admit to the new way of looking on melancholia, but he also feared medieval condemnation. The genre of dialogue was a product of this hesitation. (It was only with Ficino that it became possible to admit uncertainty with confidence.) And what could be more revealing than the fact that in the course of the third dialogue, Petrarch as St. Augustine mentions the name of Aristotle, whose notion of melancholia was radically different from that of the Middle Ages, but (on the basis of Latin-language sources, primarily Seneca) he misquotes the philosopher: instead of saying that in Aristotle’s opinion every eminent person is melancholic, he declares that great talent is inconceivable without an admixture of madness (Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae). Thus, he changed “melancholia” to “madness,” even though the way melancholia is handled in the dialogue shows that it is clearly no longer seen as madness.
Petrarch was ashamed of his melancholia, and he suffered not only from that melancholia but also from the shame itself.3 He was solitary, and tormented not only by being solitary, but also by the recognition that to be solitary was not proper. Petrarch was the first conscious melancholic — that was why his melancholia was not madness, but at the same time it made it impossible to put an end to his own melancholia. The more he was aware of his own situation, the deeper he became submerged in it. The wish to escape evolved into desperation, but since he found no remedy for it, this desperation spread to everything: it became weltschmerz. Melancholia presenting itself as world-weariness was not a defect, however; not a distorted version of a theological explanation of being, but a sovereign, self-standing attitude to existence, a positive state, however fraught with pain it might have been. Weltschmerz does not judge any particular aspect of the existing world; it is not critical but, however contradictory it may seem, affirmative, furnishing evidence of a new world that does not supplement the existing one but supplants it. Weltschmerz has no tangible cause — or to be precise, anything might be the cause, but one cannot abolish one’s pain by eliminating it. Medieval melancholics went mad over the world’s closed nature; in Petrarch, by contrast, the world called forth a sense of infinite dissatisfaction, and it was not the world but a universal deficiency that became the source of his melancholia. That deficiency was intangible and interminable. There is no explanation for weltschmerz — there is only one single point that it can hold onto: death, which is the same as nothingness. For modern melancholics, unlike their fellow sufferers in antiquity, did not regard death as rebirth but as ultimate annihilation. Modern melancholics were among the first to discern themselves in the figure of Christ in Jacopo Bellini’s Crucifixion, displayed in the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona. This Christ no longer believes in anything. Protruding from an endless dark-blue background is the cross alone, which no longer serves for the acceptance of death in faith but is simply a gallows tree. Nothing at all counterbalances torment, pain, and death: in this picture of metaphysical homelessness, the world is represented solely by this tool of execution. In the aforesaid dialogue, Petrarch confesses to Augustine that he is incapable of diverting his thoughts away from death. For him, death is not an abstract idea but a physical process that may occur at any moment. Speaking about death, he warns his interlocutor, “Nonetheless, we should not allow either the syllables of the word or the memory of the thing itself to pass quickly from our minds,” and lashes out with almost Heideggerian pathos at those who turn a deaf ear to the reality of death: “This, then, is what I call ‘penetrated deeply enough,’ not when you say the word death out of habit or when you repeat, ‘Nothing is more certain than the fact of death, nothing less certain than its hours,’ and other truisms of this kind that we hear every day. Such words just fly away; they don’t sink down deeply and stay with you.” Death should not be merely a matter of the imagination, but the whole truth, Petrarch admonishes: “And so I think about these dreadful events not as if they were far in the future, but as if they were to happen soon, indeed as if they were to happen now” (Petrarch, Secret, 1st dialogue, 63–67). According to earlier views, melancholics were sinful for, among other reasons, cutting themselves off from God in opening up to death (one should bear in mind the condemnation of suicide); melancholics of the modern age, on the other hand, did not fortify themselves against death with any kind of hope, and rather than being defensive, they were on the attack: they considered public opinion guilty. The real sin, in their opinion, was to cut oneself off from death rather than from God. An openness to death distinguished them from others, the nonmelancholics; that was what made them chosen, solitary, and, at the same time, the unhappiest of souls. If one is helpless in the face of a world-eroding void, then one has to turn against the Creator himself, and there is no way of getting over one’s contempt for the world. “Do you think yourself bad?” Augustine asks Francesco, his interlocutor. “The worst,” the latter responds. “Why?” “Lots of reasons,” Francesco answers. “You are like those who at the slightest offense relive every grudge they have ever felt.” “No wound on me now is so old that forgetting has erased it,” retorts Francesco. “The injuries that torture me now are all recent. And if any of them were able to be alleviated by time, Fortune struck the same place again so quickly that no wound has ever completely scarred over. And when this is added to my hatred and contempt for the human condition generally, I am not strong enough to overcome my intense anguish. It doesn’t matter to me whether you call this aegritudo or accidia or some other name. We agree about what it is” (Petrarch, Secret, 2nd dialogue).