THE IMAGE OF MELANCHOLY

AND THE EVOLUTION OF BAROQUE IDIOM

by

Ken Perlow

© 1995

Introduction

This paper traces the linkage between Hermetic philosophy, with the gifts of melancholy at its core, and the development of the forms of the secunda prattica at the turn of the Seventeenth Century. The connection is subtle but clear, not just in direct attributions by pioneering Baroque composers of their ideas to Platonic notions of melancholy, but in the epistemological models which generated the new musical practices; Baroque idiom was a natural outgrowth of the scientific cosmology that was discovered by neo-Platonists. It is no accident that its earliest Italian forms were developed using the newest and most powerful tool of the inchoate scientific age--experimentation--during just that brief period when the new science co-existed with the old, magic alongside the mathematics, and that it became clichéd and predictable just as cosmological paradigms forsook alchemical magic for celestial mechanics.

The Evolution of Melancholy

Though well known, the Classical taxonomy of the four humorsblood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bileand their effects on the human psyche cannot be traced to any unambiguous source. Galen, the Greek physician who popularized this linking of physical state to bodily fluids, himself attributed the philosophy to Hippocrates, and both Empedocles and Pythagoras followed Galen's lead. With a quadripartite schema for classifying all matter, and a conception of science that stressed deductive logic over empiricism, it was perhaps inevitable that some such taxonomy would be invented. Galen's system was as follows:

Humor	Temperament	Season	Quality	Element
Blood	Sanguine	Spring	Warm + moist	Air
Yellow bile	Choleric	Summer	Warm + dry	Fire
Black bile	Melancholic	Autumn	Cold + dry	Earth
Phlegm	Phlegmatic	Winter	Cold + moist	Water

The most important concept to the Greeks was that these humors be kept in balance, that health entailed possessing these bodily fluids in equal measure. But even from the start there was a sense of "good" and "bad" fluids: Blood was not a surplus humor, indeed, there isn't even a word for "sanguine" in Classical Greek. Excessive amounts of the others, however, produced illness. But among the three remaining was yet another distinction: Melancholy was characterized predominantly by mental symptomsfrom fear to depression to madness.

Plato, in the fourth century BCE, was the first to find a silver lining in the nimbus cloud of melancholy, in so doing becoming the first writer to associate it with the now well-known flip-side of depression, namely mania. In Plato's taxonomy of mental health, a surplus of black bile made one prone to such frenzy that divine inspiration could be achieved in music and poetry. In the dialogue Phaedrus Socrates states, "...in fact frenzy, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings" [Plat, p.46]. This notion became immediately popular, and this popularity was to be sustained for more than a millennium. What Plato had hit on was the timeless conceit that those sensitive enough to be affected by the fundamentally oppressive nature of life are those who can and do express it in their art. Gellius, a contemporary, commented that melancholy had become "a disease of heroes." The idea was coopted and refined by the systematic Aristotelian view of natural philosophy, which synthesized the Galenic medical conception of melancholy with the Platonic conception of frenzy.

"This union found expression in what for the Greeks was the paradoxical thesis that not only the tragic heroes, like Ajax, Hercules, and Bellerophon, but all really outstanding men, whether in the realm of the arts or in those of poetry, philosophy, or statesmanshipeven Socrates and Platowere melancholics." [KPS, p.17]

This dilemma of how a person could be both great and sick was posed directly as Aristotle's Problem XXX (from the Problemata Physica, ultimately attributed to "pseudo-Aristotle", most probably the work of Theophrastos, but believed well into the Seventeenth Century to be genuine): "Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics...?" And the question was answered in characteristic Aristotelian idiom:

"To sum up, the action of black bile being variable, melancholics are variable, for the black bile becomes very hot and very cold. ... Since it is possible for this variable mixture to be well tempered and well adjusted in a certain respect...therefore all melancholy persons are out of the ordinary, not owing to illness, but to their natural disposition." [KPS, p.29]

Problem XXX thus represents a balance point between the Platonic and Aristotelian world views:

"The concept of frenzy as the sole basis for the highest creative gifts was Platonic. The attempt to bring this recognized mysterious relationship between genius and madness, which Plato had expressed only in a myth, into the bright light of rational science was Aristotelian... This union led to a shift of values through which the 'many' were equated with 'average', and which stressed the emotional 'Be different!' rather than the ethical 'Be virtuous!'... Divine frenzy came to be regarded as a sensibility of soul, and a man's spiritual greatness was measured by his capacity for experience and, above all, for suffering." [KPS, p.41]

In contrast, Medieval theologians conceived of Melancholy as an illness, with only a few exceptions: To William of Auvergne, an Aristotelian, it represented a state of grace, and for Chrysostom it was a spiritual trial which only deep introspection and prayer could make bearable and even understandable. Most, like Hildegard of Bingen, reinforced the Augustinian sentiment that melancholy reflected not a state of grace but the Fall from Grace--the ultimate object of despair [KPS, p.79]. And this was not merely in describing melancholy as mental illness, but as a judgment, like God's of Adam, of the entire temperament. Thus, melancholy became associated not simply with day-to-day suffering, but with original sin. A competent physician could produce some relief from the pain, but the disease was incurable, hereditary, and universal. Thus, the nature of melancholy had become somewhat schizophrenic. To the Classical philosophers it was desirable; to the Medieval theologians it was anathema. This dilemma was particularly acute for followers of Plato, for whom melancholy had taken on a spiritual dimension; it was not merely good, it was divine, and yet from the Church's perspective it was Satanic. The dilemma was resolved by Ficino, ushering in almost a century of neo-Platonist revival in art and science.