Melancholics would gladly be attached to anything, but they do not find their place anywhere. They are solitary in the widest sense of the word; like the figures in the portraits, they stand in the finite world and yet are outside all space. Their situation is undeterminable; their situation and their own conception of it differ so markedly that one cannot even venture a guess about which should be regarded as definitive. Writing about the mind, Marsilio Ficino says the following:
It is a wonderful power that restores infinites to something one and something one to infinites. No one degree in nature belongs to the mind exactly in that it penetrates every level from top to bottom. It has no place of its own in that nowhere does it come to rest. It has no power that is, one might say, specific and determined in that it acts on everything alike.
Demonstrating above all, it seems to me, that the mind’s power is as it were undetermined is also its discovery that infinity itself exists, and what it is and of what kind. But since knowledge is perfected through some sort of equating of the mind with the objects known, the mind is equated in a way with the infinity it knows. But what is equated to infinity has to be infinite.
(Ficino, Platonic Theology, vol. 2, bk. 8, 365)
Those words were dictated by Platonic faith, but melancholic Ficino must have been well aware that this faith did not conform to reality. Although it is true that seemingly nothing is able to check the human mind, those who possess the most boundless minds are, sad to say, Saturn’s children — in other words, it is precisely the melancholics who see most clearly that this apparent infinity is very limited or, if you prefer, bound to man. Human infinity — can there be a greater obstacle, a mightier self-contradiction? Infinity of the spirit or, to be more accurate, a desire for infinity can be sensed truly only by those who are clear about its ultimate impossibility — and those are the melancholics, who are unapproachable because they are standing at the “crossroads” of the finite and the infinite, attracted, on the one hand, by the earth and, on the other hand, by the sky, and discovering nothingness in the existing world, smuggling transience into every beginning, the intangible into everything tangible. According to rationalist scholastic thinking, there lay a logical path from the finite into the infinite, and the transition between the two was smooth and unbroken. That transition came to an end with the separation of theological-metaphysical speculation and the “natural” intellect: Aristotelian logic was now valid only for the finite world, and Nicholas of Cusa (Nicolaus Cusanus) was already disputing that from the finite one could reach the infinite rationally, on a logical path:
It is self-evident that there is no comparative relation between the infinite and the finite. Therefore, it is most clear that where we find comparative degrees of greatness, we do not arrive at the unqualifiedly Maximum; for things which are comparatively greater and lesser are finite; but, necessarily, such a Maximum is infinite. . For the intellect is to truth as [an inscribed] polygon is to [the inscribing]. . Hence, regarding truth, it is evident that we do not know anything other than the following: viz., that we know truth not to be precisely comprehensible as it is. For truth may be likened unto the most absolute necessity (which cannot be either something more or something less than it is), and our intellect may be likened unto possibility.
(Nicolaus Cusanus, On Learned Ignorance, bk. 1, 3)
Adequate knowledge is not the same as perfect knowledge, Cusanus claims, contrary to the scholastics. Many individuals of the Renaissance era became melancholic because of the human mind wavering between the finite and the infinite; nothing in the world was so exact that it could not be more exact, Cusanus propounded; nothing was so straight that it could not be straighter; nothing was so true that it could not be truer. God was infinite and hidden (
Deus absconditus
), and man had lost sight of him. He therefore had to be looked for, even though it was obvious that a finite intellect was never going to reach him. Cusanus did offer a solution: with the aid of intellectual vision, a created being was capable of reaching God — that solution, however, was not granted to the melancholic; at the point where Cusanus moves on, the melancholic gets stuck and sees his life as ultimately aimless.
The “crossroads” of the finite and the infinite is not accessible to all viewpoints; at best, it can be understood only metaphorically. Nevertheless, better light cannot be thrown on the situation of the melancholic than by that metaphor. Since every existing being is unique and unrepeatable, Cusanus asserts, and since the universe is infinite, the Earth can in no way be the center of the world — indeed, the world cannot have a center; any point could be considered that (this would become the favorite notion of Giordano Bruno), not just because any point can be selected arbitrarily, but also because the whole universe is reflected in every point. Every person regards himself or herself as elect (not on account of his or her knowledge so much as on account of his or her existence), and since only humans have knowledge of the world — this latter is stated by Pico della Mirandola in his discourse De hominis dignitate—man is the favored center of the universe. But since he is the center, he cannot relate his own being to anything; therefore, he is left alone. He is surrounded by the infinite, so he has to choose from among an infinite number of possibilities, has to build his life while facing an immeasurable set of possibilities. The never-ending, never-halting choices, however, are attended by infinitely many dangers: truly accepted individual freedom, choice, and danger are inconceivable without one another. (A melancholic Hercules at the crossroads is a favorite trope of Renaissance art.) Freedom for good thus becomes inseparable from freedom for evil, says Pico; one who is set at the absolute middle of the world — this is our conclusion — has just as much right to choose good as evil. Indeed, it is questionable whether the idea and the possibility of good and evil does not emerge subsequently, after the act of choosing, and even then not in the person who chooses but rather in those who despise him or, for that matter, adulate him. That is why the heroes of the so-called revenge tragedies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage choose evil uninhibitedly, and in so doing they are so consistent that, in the last analysis, they make the notions of evil and good themselves relative. How else can one explain why these scoundrels are such captivating fellows, for all their wickedness? Naturally, one feels sorry for the people whom they ruin; but that sorrow in all likelihood carries more than a dash of self-pity: we fear that the protagonists would probably treat us the same. Our sympathy is obscured, however, by our admiration: John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, and John Ford — who wrote a piece entitled The Lover’s Melancholy, and every one of whose plays is about melancholia — set the kind of villains on the stage who, after all, do what is granted to everyone as a possibility: whatever the price may be, they test how far a person’s abilities and power will go. These figures are not primarily villains, but people who have been left perfectly alone and are desperate, who are prepared to perpetrate anything to prove to themselves that life must have some solid basis after all. They strive for the infinite, like Marlowe’s heroes, but they know quite well that man is born weak to start with and is ruled by uncertainty.9 It is not bloodthirstiness, vengeance, or wickedness that lurks at the bottom of the souls of these villains, but sorrow mingled with fear — and the only reason we are not afraid to write that word is because that is how contemporaries characterized the heroes of these tragedies: ecstatic melancholics.10 Sorrow clouds the trinity of individual freedom, choice, and danger; if one strives for complete autonomy, total freedom from both the world and the heavens, then one’s hours are numbered.