World-weariness, Petrarch says, or at least so the expression can be translated into modern languages. The original Latin word was accidia, and what in the Middle Ages meant spiritual or mental sloth, apathy, was redefined in the writings of Petrarch and took on the connotations of weltschmerz, melancholia. Petrarch was sad, but that was not sadness in the eyes of God, nor even of the world, although that is how Augustine still interprets Francesco’s ill humor in the dialogues. This ill humor was entirely noveclass="underline" it derived not from a rejection of God but from an (unspoken) vain search for him. The wish that determines the attitude of modern melancholics could not find its goal; and even though Petrarch might still have kept reiterating that God was the goal, his boundless moroseness was a good deal more revealing. Melancholics of the modern age were left to themselves, and as in Ficino’s case, that solitude was at once uplifting and crushing. The dejection that characterized him was previously unknown: nothing held him back, he knew no bounds. It was not a matter of madness, of mental illness; the melancholic was by then in despair, in the broadest sense of the word. A symptom of that is ill humor, the most characteristic feature of melancholia down to the present day.4 This ill humor, as has already been mentioned, was incurable; it had no cause, otherwise it could readily be checked. (The death of loved ones, one could object, is a “tangible” yet irrevocable cause, but it does not make everyone melancholic; anyone who becomes melancholic does not do so because of that, but because of a deeper despair that was latent even before that death.) The ill humor that sets the melancholic apart is not the same as fleeting, day-to-day ill humor: one not only stands it but goes to meet it; this ill humor is not only triggered by something, but “precedes” any conceivable cause. The ill humor, or despondency, that characterizes a melancholic is not merely an endurance, a lethargic toleration, of existence, but an active re-creation of it: melancholics live in the same world as other people, yet they do not see the same world. They build for themselves a new world into which they alone can enter. They are Saturn’s children, and for that reason stupid, stuck in the mud, and dull-witted — that, at least, is how the world in general thinks of them, since melancholics are incapable of seeing the simplest of facts “normally,” in conformity with public opinion. But being Saturn’s children, they are also clever, outstanding, magnificent, and wise — the same world asserts those things, too, for after all, a melancholic can discover shades and perspectives of existence that remain invisible to an ordinary person. They are, at one and the same time, abnormal and the most normal, and although either possibility in itself would be sufficient reason for the ill humor of a melancholic, it is nourished simultaneously by both.
Melancholics united in themselves extremes; they were at once divine maniacs — a feature that St. Bernard earlier had been inclined to recognize only in the lives of saints — and dragged down by the lead weight of despair. Ficino and other Renaissance humanists based their judgments of melancholia on that duality. The metaphysical point of view of Plato’s interpretation of mania and the “natural-historical” point of view of Aristotle’s interpretation of melancholia came together for the first time: in Ficino’s opinion, the melancholia of great people corresponded to Plato’s mania. (Half a century before Ficino, Antonio Guainerio, a professor at Padua, had accepted the superiority of melancholics and the divine nature of the melancholic state as a matter of fact.) In his Of Occult Philosophy (1510), Agrippa von Nettesheim writes about the superior inspiration with whose help the soul is able to ascend to the celestial truth, and he distinguishes three forms: dreams (somnia); rapture (raptus), brought about as a result of continuous contemplation of sublime things; and frenzy (furor). The last can be produced by — alongside such noble associates as the Muses, Dionysius, Apollo, or Venus — melancholia, the black choler: “For this, when it is stirred up, burns, and stirs up a madness conducing to knowledge and divination, especially if it be helped by any celestial influx, especially of Saturn, who. . seeing he is the author of secret contemplation, and estranged from all public affairs, and the highest of all the planets, he doth as he withcalls his mind from outward business, so also make it ascend higher, and bestows upon men the knowledge and presages of future things” (Three Books of Occult Philosophy or Magic, ch. 60, 186).