The Noonday Demon

by Solomon, Andrew

  The English Renaissance held more closely to medieval views about melancholy than did the Italian, but the southern influence began to creep up in the late fifteenth century. So, for example, the English continued to believe that melancholy came from “the intercourse or meddling of euill angels,” but accepted that those afflicted with such intervention were not responsible for it. For the English Renaissance thinker, the sense of sin experienced by the melancholic is a dangerous misfortune rather than a sign of the absence of God’s love and is not to be confused with the true sense of sin experienced by the true sinner. Of course it was not always easy to distinguish between the delusional and the real. One student of “melancholick Constitution, distracted with grief,” claimed that he had actually felt an “evil Spirit enter by his fundament with wind, and so did creep up his body until it possessed the head.” Though he was ultimately cured of the devil’s presence, others were not so lucky. George Gifford wondered, “What manner of persons are fittest for the devill to make his instruments in witchcraft and sorceries” and found for his answer that the devil seeks “ungodly persons which are blind, full of infidelity, and overwhelmed and drowned in dark ignorance. If there be above all these a melancholike constitution of body, his impressions print the deeper in the minde.”

  The northern idea of a relationship between witches and melancholy gives the southern idea of a relationship between genius and melancholy a good run for its money. The Dutch court doctor Jan Wier (whose De praestigiis daemonum was listed by Freud as one of the ten greatest books of all time) was a great defender of witches as the victims of their own melancholia; his assertion that these unfortunate ladies were sick in the head saved a number of them from execution. He argued his position by showing that the victims of witches were usually delusional, focusing on the large number of men in northern Europe who accused witches of stealing their penises. Wier insisted other men could usually spot the stolen organs physically present right where they had always resided and proposed that men were seldom abandoned by their “needles.” If the men who were the “victims” of witches suffered from delusions, then surely the ones who supposed that they were witches were only the more delusional. This model was taken up by the Englishman Reginald Scot, who in his 1584 book on witchcraft proposed that witches were all merely depressed and foolish old women, prodded by evil as though it were a mosquito, who ineptly took on themselves blame for the problems they saw around them. In their “drousie minds the divell hath goten a fine seat; so as, what mischeefe, mischance, calamitie, or slaughter is brought to passe, they are easilie persuaded the same is doone by themselves.” This view, that what had been held to be religious truth was all merely delusion and connected to melancholic mental illness, had strong opponents who continued to champion the medieval position; though Scot’s book was broadly read in Elizabethan England, King James commanded that all copies of it be burned—as though the books themselves were witches.

  Illness gradually overtook possession. In a French case of this period, physicians perceived in a witch “some rumbling under her short ribs on the left side, proper to those that are subject to the Spleene,” and this led to the 1583 synod command that priests “inquire diligently into the life of the possessed” before an exorcism, “for oftentimes those that are Melancholike, Lunatike, and Bewitched by Magicall Artes . . . have more neede of Phisitians Remedie, than of the Exorcists Ministrie.” Renaissance rationalism triumphed over medieval superstition.

  The French were the first to treat effectively symptoms that could reflect either primary disease or affliction of imagination. Montaigne, something of a melancholic himself, was a great believer in philosophy as physic, and he created an antimelancholic theater of illusion. He tells, for example, of a woman who was in terror because she believed she had swallowed a needle; so he made her throw up and put a needle in her vomit, and she was cured.

  Andreas Du Laurens’s Discourse of Melancholike Diseases was published in English in 1599. Du Laurens stated that melancholy was “a cold and drie distemperature of the brain” that could proceed “not of the disposition of the bodie,” but of patients’ “manner of living, and of such studies as they bee most addicted unto.” Du Laurens divided up the mind into three parts: reason, imagination, and memory. Concluding that melancholia was an illness of imagination, he left to the melancholic an intact reason, which meant that in the eyes of the Church the melancholic was not deprived of his humanity (his “immortal rational soul”) and was therefore not cursed by God. He took on board the idea that melancholy can come in degrees, separating “melancholike constitutions which keep within the bounds and limits of health” from the ones that did not keep within those bounds. Like most other writers on the subject, his book is full of anecdotal descriptions of individuals, including “one Sienois a Gentleman, who had resolved with himselfe not to pisse, but to dye rather, and that because he imagined that when he first pissed, all his towne would be drowned.” The man was apparently paralyzed with a depressive anxiety and a sense of his own destructiveness and was causing trauma to his bladder; eventually, his physicians built a fire next door, persuaded the man that the town was burning down and that only by his relieving himself could he save it, and so brought him through this particular anxiety.

  Du Laurens is perhaps best known for his complicated idea that people see backward: that their eyes roll inward and look at their brain. He fails to make clear what rainbow spectacular the cheery individual might find when he looks backward into his brain, but he does stipulate that, since the brain of the melancholic is suffused with black bile, the eyes of the melancholic, when they roll backward, see darkness everywhere. “The spirits and blacke vapours continually passe by the sinews, veines and arteries, from the braine unto the eye, which causeth it to see many shadows and untrue apparitions in the aire, whereupon from the eye the formes thereof are conveyed unto the imagination.” Then the unpleasantness really gets going, these black visions continuing to flash on the eye even when it is directed at the outside world, and the melancholic sees “many bodies flying, like to Ants, flyes, and long haires, the same also does such as are readie to vomit.”

  It began to be a commonplace, at this time, that one might divide normative grief from melancholy by assessing the appropriate proportions of loss to sorrow, and measuring how some people exceeded those proportions—a principle Freud would develop three centuries later, and which continues to be used in the diagnosis of depression today. One doctor of the early seventeenth century wrote that a patient had gone so far as to “take no joy of anything” following a death; another was “troubled by melancholy, how to live for the death of her mother that died a quarter of a year since. Will weep and cry and wander and can follow no business.” Another doctor wrote that ordinary discontent or sorrow “makes more way for the greatest enemy of nature, viz., melancholy.” Melancholy, then, becomes an ordinary thing carried too far as well as an abnormal thing; this dual definition rapidly became a standard one.

  By the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth, the “ordinary” melancholy had become a common affliction that could be as pleasurable as it was unpleasant. The arguments of Ficino and of his counterparts in England were increasingly echoed all across the Continent. Levinus Lemnius in Holland, Huarte and Luis Mercado in Spain, Joannes Baptista Silvaticus in Milan, and Andreas Du Laurens in France each wrote of the melancholy that makes a man better and more inspired than his nonmelancholic counterparts. Romantic Aristotelian conceptions of melancholy seemed to sweep Europe, and melancholy came into fashion. In Italy, where Ficino had definitively identified melancholy with genius, all those who believed themselves to be geniuses expected themselves to be melancholy. While men of real brilliance might suffer, those who hoped to be mistaken for brilliant men acted out suffering. Around Ficino, there assembled in Florence a group of cosmopolitan Saturnist intellectuals. Englishmen who traveled to Italy and saw this milieu would go home boasting a sophistication that was manifest i
n their melancholic attributes upon their return, and since only the wealthy could afford to travel, melancholy soon became, in the eyes of the English, an illness of the aristocracy. The upper-class malcontent—dark-eyed, sorrowful, taciturn, disheveled, irritable, surly, austere—becomes by the late sixteenth century a social prototype, described and caricatured in literature of the time, most brilliantly in the figure of “the melancholy Jacques” in As You Like It.

  Shakespeare’s mastery of melancholia—which is most transparently his subject in the character of Hamlet—was to change forever the understanding of the subject. By no other author was the matter described so sympathetically or with such complexity, woven so intimately into cheer and sadness, shown to be so essential to wisdom and so much the basis of folly, given the attributes of both cunning and self-destruction. Previous to Shakespeare, the melancholy of a man had been a discrete entity; after Shakespeare, it was no more easily separable from the rest of self than are the indigo rays from the rest of the white-light spectrum. What a prism might reveal for an instant cannot alter the everyday reality of the sun.

  By the time Hamlet was performed, melancholy was almost as much of a privilege as a disease. A morose hairdresser in a play of the mid–seventeenth century complains that he feels melancholy and meets with a stern reprimand. “Melancholy? Marry, gup, is melancholy a word for a barber’s mouth? Thou shouldst say heavy, dull, and doltish: melancholy is the crest of the courtier’s arms!” According to the notes of a physician of the period, 40 percent of his melancholy patients had titles—despite the fact that much of his practice was devoted to caring for farmers and their wives. Two-thirds of the aristocrats who came to him complained of melancholy humors; and these men and women were well informed, speaking not simply of waves of sadness but complaining quite specifically on the basis of the scientific knowledge and fashion of the time. One such patient was “desirous to have something to avoid the fumes arising from the spleen.” Concoctions based on hellebores were still the favorites; the doctor who treated this man prescribed hiera logadii, lapis lazuli, hellebore, cloves, licorice powder, diambra, and pulvis sancti, all of them to be dissolved in white wine, and borage. Astrological charts were consulted (for independent information and to determine the timing of treatment); the possibility of bloodletting was also considered. And of course religious counseling was also usually held to be a good idea.

  Just as in the early Prozac days, everyone and his uncle Bob seemed to be getting depressed and battling depression and talking about battling depression, so in the early seventeenth century the nonmelancholic man began to focus on the idea of melancholy. In both the 1630s and the 1990s the meaning of the disease-associated word—melancholy or depression—grew confused. When acedia was a sin, only those who were so ill that they could not function, or who suffered delusional anxiety, would admit to their complaint. Now that the word melancholia was used also to signify great depth, soulfulness, complexity, and even genius, people took on the behaviors of a depressive without medical cause; they soon discovered that, though real depression might be painful, depressive behavior could be pleasurable. They took to lounging for hours on long sofas, staring at the moon, asking existential questions, professing fear of whatever was difficult, failing to respond to questions put to them, and altogether carrying on in just the way that the prohibition against acedia had been meant to prevent. Yet it was the same basic structure of complaint, the same as what we now call depression. This melancholia was a praiseworthy ailment that one was constantly analyzing. Those who were truly ill with severe melancholia had sympathy and respect heaped on them, and these, with various medical advances, gave them a better time of it than they would have enjoyed in any period since Galen’s Rome. The state of mind so elegized was what might be called white melancholy, something more shimmering than shadowy. Milton’s “Il Penseroso” describes the seventeenth-century idea exquisitely:

  . . . hail thou Goddess, sage and holy,

  Hail, divinest Melancholy,

  whose saintly visage is too bright

  To hit the sense of human sight

  until in a celebration of monastic isolation and gloom and old age, Milton waxes grand:

  Find out the peaceful hermitage,

  The hairy gown and mossy cell,

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Till old experience do attain

  To something like prophetic strain.

  These pleasures, Melancholy, give,

  And I with thee will choose to live.

  The seventeenth century found history’s greatest champion of the melancholy cause. Robert Burton mixed a millennium of thought and a steady supply of scattered personal intuitions in The Anatomy of Melancholy, the volume to which he devoted his entire life. The most often-quoted book on the subject prior to Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia is a subtle, self-contradictory, badly organized, hugely wise volume that synthesizes and attempts to reconcile the philosophies of Aristotle and Ficino, the sense of character of Shakespeare, the medical insights of Hippocrates and Galen, the religious impulses of the medieval and Renaissance Church, and personal experiences of illness and introspection. Burton’s ability to locate real ties between philosophy and medicine, and between science and metaphysics, started us on the path to a unifying theory of mind and matter. And yet one cannot credit Burton so much with reconciling conflicting views as with tolerating their contradictions; he is quite capable of giving six discrepant explanations for a single phenomenon without ever suggesting that the phenomenon might be overdetermined. To the modern reader, this sometimes seems bizarre; but the same reader, examining texts recently issued by the National Institute of Mental Health, will find that the complexity of depressive complaints lies precisely in that they are usually overdetermined—that depression is the common destination to which many pathways lead, and that in any individual, a certain set of symptoms may be the result of one or any several of these pathways.

  Burton comes up with a physical explanation for melancholy: “our body is like a Clocke, if one wheele be amisse, all the rest are disordered, the whole Fabricke suffers.” He acknowledges that “as the Philosophers make eight degrees of heat and cold: we may make 88 of Melancholy, as the parties affected are diversely seized with it, or have been plunged more or lesse into this infernall gulfe.” Later he says, “Proteus himself is not so diverse; you may as well make the Moon a new coat, as a true character of a melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a brin in the air as the heart of a melancholy man.” Burton makes a general distinction among brain-based “head melancholy,” “whole body melancholy,” and that which comes from the “Bowels, Liver, Spleene, or Membrane,” which he calls “windie melancholy.” These he then divides and subdivides, creating a map of distress.

  Burton distinguishes melancholy from simply being “dull, sad, sowre, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased.” Such qualities, he says, are within the scope of any man alive and should not by themselves be taken as evidence of the complaint. “Man that is borne of a woman,” he says, quoting the Book of Common Prayer, “is of short continuance and full of trouble.” This does not mean that we are all melancholiacs. Indeed Burton says, “These miseries encompasse our life. And ’tis most absurd and ridiculous for any mortall man to looke for a perpetuall tenor of happinesse in this life. Nothing so preposterous, and he that knowes not this, and is not armed to indure it, is not fit to live in this world. Get thee hence, if thou canst not brook it, there is no way to avoid it, but to arme thy self with magnamitie, to oppose thyself unto it, to suffer affliction, constantly to bear it.”

  You cannot live in the world unless you can tolerate misfortune, and misfortune comes to us all; but misfortune easily runs out of control. While a simple cough is tolerable, “continual and inveterate causeth a consumption of the lungs; so doe these our Melancholy provocations.” And Burton identifies the very modern principle that everyone has a different level of tolerance for trauma, and that it is the interaction
of the quantity of trauma and the level of tolerance that determines illness. “For that which is but a flea-biting to one, causeth insufferable torment to another, & which one by his singular moderation, & well composed carriage can happily overcome, a second is no whit able to sustaine, but upon every small occasion of misconceived abuse, injurie, griefe, disgrace, losse, crosse, rumor, &c. yeelds so farre to passion, that his complexion is altered, his digestion hindered, his sleepe gone, his spirits obscured, and his heart heavy . . . and he himselfe overcome with Melancholy. And as it is with a man imprisoned for debt, if once in the gaole, every Creditor will bring his action against him, and there likely to hold him: If any discontent sease upon a patient, in an instant all other perturbations will set upon him, and then like a lame dogge or broken winged goose hee droopes and pines away, and is brought at last to that malady of melancholy it selfe.” Burton recapitulates the experience of anxiety as well, correctly including it in his description of depression: “In the daytime they are affrighted still by some terrible object, and torne in pieces with suspicion, feare, sorrow, discountents, cares, shames, anguish, &c., as so many wild horses, that they cannot be quiet an houre, a minute of the time.”

  Burton describes melancholiacs variously as “distrustful, envious, malicious,” “covetous,” “repining, discontent,” and “prone to revenge.” The selfsame Burton writes that “melancholy men of all others are most witty, and [their melancholic disposition] causeth many times divine ravishment, and a kind of enthusiasmus . . . which causeth them to be excellent Philosophers, Poets, Prophets, &c.” He defers to the censors of his time by addressing the religious issues around the illness in a tactful fashion—but he also asserts that excessive religious enthusiasm can be a sign of melancholy or can engender mad despair; and he affirms that sad people who receive from God scary commands to which they feel inadequate are probably experiencing melancholy delusions. And he says, finally, that melancholy is really an illness of both body and soul, but then, like Du Laurens, avoids suggesting any loss of reason (which render his subjects inhuman and therefore animal) by saying that illness is a “default of the Imagination” rather than of reason itself.