The signs of melancholia started to appear well before Romanticism — in point of fact, at the time when Christianity was being consolidated, when love “broke away” from the net of human relations and inevitably became solitary. Not just in the sense that the lover and the object of love definitively broke away from each other, but also in that love itself became homeless — it could not find its place in this world because it did not wish to acknowledge finalities, definitive restrictions, and, being an earthly phenomenon, it had no business in the other world. It was Christian philosophy, born in the Roman Empire, that first posed questions about the individual, as well as those about individuality and uniqueness, and the role of love and affection became problematical around the same time: the lover was left to himself, yet because his love was nevertheless directed at something, this solitude was not just loneliness but also deprivation. If a melancholic’s most tormenting problem, from the Middle Ages on, has been that of self-determination, of sovereignty, then this difficulty has applied with double force to a lover.
There are two concepts of love in the history of European culture, and they radically, though not conspicuously, differ from each other. One was that of the Greeks, which thinkers like Spinoza and Hegel wanted to revive. According to this school of thought, love does not result in a radical break in the system of human relationships but fits in seamlessly among the other social relations of everyday life. The lover’s desire is associated with remembering, says Empedocles (see Fragments, § 64), and the act of remembering vouches for the recognition of the unity of being. Of the two forces that move the world, anger and strife (
) separates everything, whereas fondness (
) ties everything together. The basis of love (
) is liking: its essence is binding, unity, and perfection. Love and affection are not separated from the other spheres of life; indeed, they are, rather, the precondition for their unity. A lover does not just experience his own love: it is through love that the underlying harmony and enclosure of existence is realized for him. The object of love guides the lover toward deeper cognition — nothing is more natural than that Plato, in Phaedrus, should connect the initiate, the philosopher, the madman, the obsessed, and the seer, and designate them all with the single word “lover” (
). But as we have seen, precisely those people whom Plato collectively calls lovers were susceptible to melancholia; it was through them that melancholia appeared in its completeness. Thus, love in antiquity was not untouched by melancholia. After all, if love and affection facilitate a deeper understanding of being and existence, then ultimately they bring the lover to a recognition of the state of cosmic closure (enclosure). Therefore love, though it strikes one as a happy and comforting state, since it brings a lover closer to the beloved object, is actually endangered at every moment. Eros is an intermediary, creating a connection between heaven and earth, and if lovers do not watch out, they can easily come to grief; Eros will enslave them and carry them off into an unknown domain, toward fateful insights. One is at the mercy of Eros, and that is not only a joyful state but also a suffering. The Greeks regarded passionate love as burdensome, something one suffered almost like an illness; hence the name used for passionate love was 
, which also meant illness, misfortune, and suffering. (In Euripides’ Hippolytus, for example, the notions of 
and are presented together in every case.) Eros, unruly and uncurbed, can push one into perpetual homelessness: with due prudence and circumspection, however, lovers can avoid that fate and partake of (mutual) happiness:
Joy will come to those who share their marriage bed
with the calm of Aphrodite’s love and
not with the frenzy of Eros’ stinging arrows!
This god, this god with the golden hair,
lifts his bow and shoots two arrows of passion,
one to bring us life’s greatest joy,
the other to send us into a whirlwind of confusion,
(Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, 543–49)
Love fulfilled makes the lover outstanding and offers the possibility of a harmonious life. Plato writes as follows: “For the principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live — that principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honor, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant as surely as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honor and dishonor without which neither city nor private person ever does any good or great work” (Symposium, 178c — d). With Plato, love is mediation: a link between heaven and earth, body and spirit, and thereby it promotes the harmony of the individual and the state; indeed, according to Plato, only love promotes it. We are at our best when in love; according to this notion, love helps us realize our abilities and possibilities in relation to others, to society as a whole; it makes us able to find our place in the world. In antiquity, love was not automatically melancholic, though, as has been mentioned, it bordered on melancholia. If love is reciprocated, then arm in arm with Empedoclean love, it makes the cosmos closed and unitary from the inside. The intertwining of two bodies guarantees the unity of the world and makes it even more perfect, just like two souls recognizing each other.
This interpretation of love was revived in the philosophy of Spinoza and, especially, Hegel, but in such a manner as to deny it the possibility of definitively turning melancholic. The antique notion of love was taken over by modern thinkers who made it a war banner, since it was revived in an era when a harmonious relationship between the individual and the world seemed possible again. Hegel, who saw the fulfillment of history in civil society and who considered America suitable for the creation of a new epic, would have liked to see every human capability as uniform, commonly shared, and in harmony with the world. He perceived love as such an ability: “If love is the one point of union, and does not also draw into itself the remaining scope of what a man has to experience in accordance with his spiritual education and the circumstances of his class, it remains empty and abstract, and touches only the sensuous side of life. To be full and entire, it would have to be connected with the entirety of the rest of the mind, with the full nobility of disposition and interests” (Lectures on Fine Art, I. 3. B. II. 2. c). One may look at Hegel’s definition as echoing that of the Greeks, but one cannot help noticing a decisive difference: he adopted the Greek concept of love, but attempted to apply it to a radically different situation. The Greeks would never have spoken about empty and abstract sensuality: not only because such a thing did not exist (after all, either love was love, and to that extent definite, or it was not love — and “sheer” sensuality was not empty either, but very much a concrete reality), but also because they never set sensuality and intellectualism as antitheses. The decisive difference lay in the way that Hegel was unable, even at the level of terminology, to obliterate the existence of Christianity — the culture that completed the work of pitting the sensual against the spiritual, and the conceptual against the worldly. After the birth of Christianity, it was no longer possible to think about love in the same way as before, and if anyone, like Hegel, tried to do so, then he was obliged to ignore the special character of love and the fact that the relations between the individual and the community had also changed radically since antiquity. Hegel’s definition of love was empty: the sensual and the spiritual had a different character, a different relationship to each other, than they did in antiquity. Evoking the Greek way of looking at things in the modern era was not a way of articulating the concept of love (if that was possible at all); instead, it was a subjective pathos that concealed Hegel’s faith in the magnificence of the civil world. It was typical that elsewhere, to make sure that love did not slip out of his grasp and that he would not be obliged to cede it to the Romantics — that is, to the melancholics who alloyed death and genius — Hegel was forced to institutionalize love, sensing that if he were to make it the symbol of earthly harmony, then he would somehow have to make that harmony palpable. In the modern world, reserving love in this way could only happen on an institutional level, in the form of marriage: “On the relations between man and woman, it should be noted that a girl loses her honour in [the act of] physical surrender, which is not so much the case with a man, who has another field of ethical activity apart from the family. A girl’s vocation [Bestimmung] consists essentially only in the marital relationship; what is therefore required is that love should assume the shape of marriage, and that the different moments which are present in love should attain their truly rational relation to each other” (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 204–5). In Hegelian philosophy, what is lost is precisely the difference that separates the modern spirit from the Greek. Faith in earthly harmony deprives love of its reality, but the notion of love cannot be eliminated (out of prudery?); some reality has to be secured for it, but that reality is not the reality of love. Love melds into other human relationships. The reality of civil society, however, raises a doubt whether multifarious human capabilities and relationships fit so seamlessly into one another. The Hegelian notion of love identifies love with liking, blurring their fundamental difference. One can respond to Hegel by taking the words of Amfortas to speak for the reality of love in the modern age: “Oh! May no man, no man, undergo this torture / wakened in me by the sight which transports you!” (Wagner, Parsifal, act 1).