“Melancholy is too painful, reaches too deeply into the roots of human experience to permit us to leave it to the psychiatrists.” — Romano Guardini, The Human Experience (Cluny Media, 2018)
The word “melancholy”, in its literal Greek etymology, means “black bile” since emotional depression was thought to reside in an excess of this in the system. And despite the empirical falsehood of the specifics of this biological approach, it nevertheless shares the fundamental insight of modern medicine that depression has its roots in our bodily biochemistry. Seen in this light, melancholy in this psychiatric sense (i.e. as a form of mental distress with bodily roots), is a negative and damaging state of mind that can be extremely debilitating in both psychological and spiritual ways. Indeed it can be pathological and lethal when melancholy degenerates (or perhaps accelerates?) into suicidal forms of clinical depression. And even when it does not reach this extreme state it can quite often paralyze a person internally to such an extent that it is in fact a form of living death.
Christian melancholy
However, this is not the only form that melancholy can take. There is a very real sense in which some form of melancholy is a natural and positive product of a profoundly Christian spiritual disposition. As we see in the epigraphic quote from Guardini, there is a deeply spiritual component to melancholy which means, as he concludes, that “there is a question here of something closely related to the depths of human nature.” This then raises the question of whether in our culture we are too quick to dismiss melancholy as a disease to be treated rather than as a defining element of what it means to be a creature composed of both body and spirit. As composite beings in a fallen world, the melancholy we experience, says Guardini, “is the disturbance of man caused by the proximity of the eternal. It is simultaneously blessedness and menace.”
Along these lines, one of the definitions I have seen of a melancholic person is that such folks are “thoughtfully sad”. I like this definition since it distinguishes a melancholic soul from one who is suffering from the kinds of clinical depression described above. Nor is melancholia in this sense simply the sadness of one afflicted with a world weariness or spiritual acedia. In contrast to these things, melancholia is characterized by a deeply authentic existential spiritual response to the perpetually twilighted nature of our life as something that exists “in between” heaven and earth.
It is therefore a genuinely intellectual response to our condition rather than a reductively biological or affective one. We seek the eternal element in all of our questing after the good, but we apprehend it only as an “obscurity”. But here the obscurity we experience, as Guardini indicates, is a function of the excess of being in the good:
Melancholy means connection with the obscure foundations of being. ‘Obscure’ here does not mean any diminution, not the opposite of the good and beneficent light. Obscure does not signify “darkness,” but the living equivalent of light. Darkness is evil, something negative. Obscurity is related to light and both together form the mystery that is proper to man. Melancholy longs for this obscurity, convinced that, the clear forms of the present will emerge from it.
The melancholic person seeks the “ever more” beyond the horizon of our experience and senses that our desires imply there is something beyond the horizon we seek, but which remains elusive and ungraspable as an object of mere epistemic “acquisition.” We want what the teleology of our desires implies, but in the “not having” we grow restless and dissatisfied with the various substitutes and usual palliatives that are conjured up by the sophistical alchemists of our time—who promise us that they can turn stoic indifference into some kind of tolerable happiness.
But we are not fools, and the weak spiritual veganism of modernity’s merchants of Almond Milk fulfillment actually induce a bit of righteous rage at condescending presumption that if we’re not satisfied with such fakery we must be in a stage of psychological immaturity. After all, they say, only a child thinks our desires require satisfaction in some kind of terminal satiation. And so a truly “grown up” sophistication understands that our thirst for the eternal is a neurotic pathology.
An undergraduate student once asked me what it was that caused me to affirm, in faith, the existence of an “afterlife”. I said to him, “because I love my daughter.” He did not understand. But melancholics who live purposefully in the metaxis of eternity and time, heaven and earth, understand. This does not mean that we are thus “right” by some kind of logical necessity. Such analysis of the telos of love is not a moment of apologetical victory. Perhaps life really is tragic in the end. But a robust phenomenology of the deepest groaning of our loves does mean, at the very least, that faith is grounded in something profoundly teleological.
Thus, is it possible to flip the script on modernity and inquire into the anti-human assumptions at the very base of its cynical inquisitions. It also means that faith is therefore constitutively situated at once in both “natural religion” and the transposition of those natural dispositions into a christological fulfillment that is supereminent both in its fulfillment of natural desire and in the superfluous gratuity that its offer of divinization betokens.
In other words, the melancholic, in understanding the true telos of our desire for eternity, even as it suffers the sadness of its non-fulfillment, represents the more expansive explanatory framework. It represents the only true embracing of the profound paradox embedded in our agonistic existence as the coming together of tragedy and comedy in a theodramatic epic.
Supernatural sadness, eschatological hope
At worst the melancholic could be accused of an excessive focus on the frustrated condition of our tragically unrequited horizons of truth, beauty, love and hope, and a concomitant ignoring of the partial fulfillments of the same in this life. But I think this is a vapid criticism and that it has the odor of mediocrity about it. It has the stench of “settlement for penultimate things” about it. These kinds of criticisms bespeak a fundamentally non-eschatological form of thinking that is, in point of fact, precisely what is wrong with most of modern Christianity. Where there is no longer the palpable thirst for the eternal in the temporal, even the temporal is lost. And in its place are the pseudo-goods (gods?) of the now short-circuited desires we call our “identities” which are thinly constructed out of the gossamer of our diaphanous subjectivity. We lack substance and spiritual weight. And as C.S. Lewis pointed out, what this means is that we ultimately lack “the weight of glory”.
The melancholic person does not settle for such short-circuited preoccupations and has instead an unquenchable thirst for the fulfillment that the inner dynamic our desires implies. He or she therefore refuses to stop short in the vestibule of our simian past where the postmodern deconstructors live, ever-ready to pronounce that all love is “merely” veiled lust, all justice veiled revenge, all beauty merely the epiphenomenal dance of procreative peacockery, and all truth a veiled grasping for power.
The melancholic is not sad in a pedestrian sense, but is supernaturally sad in an eschatological mode. Melancholia, in other words, is a form of hope when lived properly in that eschatological zone, but, absent this eschatology, can turn in on itself as a modern expression of the ancient dramatist’s portrayals of life as tragedy. But in either account, the melancholic will have nothing of the deconstructor’s wrecking ball, for even in its tragic construal, the tragedy consists precisely in the frustration of things legitimately non-reductive in their goodness.
The Church needs her melancholics today more than ever. Because the true spiritual disease of modernity is the assertion that existence precedes and, therefore, supersedes, essence. And in living within the spiritual depths of our humanity, and seeking out the true nature of our liberation in those depths, what the melancholic discerns, and then lays bare, is that our nature is circumscribed by limits (essences and the fact of finitude) and by dependence upon eternity for the very temporality of the temporal, and the essentiality of the essential.
Furthermore, what this experience of dependence opens up is the fact that our limits are not limiting in the negative sense of something oppressive and constricting, but are merely the formal aspect of a finitude in a creaturely mode of receptivity for a fulfillment from beyond itself. The melancholic thus gives witness to the paradox of human existence as a finite creature destined for a fulfillment in God, therefore, that the closer we get to God the more human we become—not less. Our finitude becomes ever-more “finite” the more expanded into God it becomes. This implies that the closer we get to God our very “limits” are revealed, not as ligatures that bind, but as constraints that liberate. It is like a musical score that turns the “limitations” of “mere sounds” into a form that is open-ended and which is engaged in a transposition of sound from one level of being into a higher and more heuristic one.
A sign that the absolute exists
Modernity, in many ways, can be characterized as the portrayal of eternity as a limit setter in the negative sense of something that oppresses. Thus, not only do we not need or want the “salvation” that the Church brings, what we need instead is salvation from the Church and from the Christ it proclaims. This accounts for that peculiar dynamic in the modern era of the dialectical coexistence of a runaway reductive naturalism and a fantastical flight into spiritualities of pure speculative concoction. This is so because, in the absence of limits, what exists both above and below us is plastic and fungible, rootless and formless, meaningless and ersatz, stipulative and ultimately pointless. There is no transposition because there is no true experience of the melancholic’s longing for eternity in time.
For Guardini, the presence of melancholy in the deep spiritual sense is nothing less than “a sign that the absolute exists.” It exists as a counter-witness to this degradation of our limits into the merely limiting. As he puts it, “Melancholy is an expression of the fact that we are limited beings, that we live face to face … with God. We have been called by God, encouraged to assume him into our existence.” From this he concludes: “Melancholy may be described as the birth pangs of the eternal in man – or rather in specified men destined to experience the pains of this birth more profoundly.”
In all of this there is no premature resolution of the paradox, but a living within the tension that bears witness to the co-penetration of time and eternity as the proprietary watermark of our deepest nature. Guardini puts it beautifully:
But there are individuals who experience profoundly the mystery of limits. By nature they stand neither on this side or that. They live in the realm of limits. They experience the disturbance of the one sphere by the other–just as they contain the poles of what is human, its entirety, but at the same time the possibility of inner division.
What we need today therefore are saints of this sort of melancholy. And, in my view, it is precisely the deficit of such saints in the Church that has led to the eclipse of the eschatological senses and the ascendency of a suffocating theological horizontalism that is the deepest sin within the post-conciliar Church. And this is done, more often than not, in the name of a kind of “pastoral realism” that seeks to “meet people where they are.”
The irony is that it is in fact the melancholic who, despite his alleged credulity toward “unproven things”, is actually the most adept at detecting fakery and spiritual quackery, and is, therefore, the true realist. Not all melancholics are prophets, but all true prophets are melancholics.
And is this not really what the season of Lent is meant to recover? That sense of our pilgrim status and that as we are walking along the way that our eyes remain firmly fixed on the rising Son in the East even as we watch the road in front of us lest we stumble. This is the spirituality of the melancholic and this means, as Guardini reminds us, that he or she “is free of the fascination of a false, direct oneness with God as well as a direct identification with nature. A chasm, a two-sided cleft, surrounds him.”
But it also means that we can now place our entire relationship with nature, and thus with ourselves, under the Holy Spirit and of our sense of responsibility to God. What is Lent then if not the cultivation of this true sorrow. “True sorrow exists only in relation to the absolute,” Guardini notes, “not in relation to … a bare imperative or moral law, but in relation to a living being, to God.”
Therefore, Lenten sorrow means “that I place myself on God’s side, against myself. I do not claim any self-justification, but confess my guilt–before God and with him. That is the vitalizing element.”
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Very noetically profound. Thank you, and Guardini.
Fascination for the eternal inspires.
So the joy of one St. Ignatius of Antioch is explained by his proximity to the spiritually eternal, unbound by temptations, ties, and troubles of the material world. Ignatius sets before us his faith and love, leading him to unbounded trust and joy.
Why do we not accept as joyful and good that God may/surely will imminently call us to Himself? Do we soldier on the Via Crucis, made sad by its length and the time we are forced to sojourn there? Why are we impatient at a late train or the slow-moving vehicle in our traffic lane? How, then, does such impatient sadness differ from melancholic vanity?
The snideness of “the weak spiritual veganism of modernity’s merchants of Almond Milk” is unbecoming, and I am puzzled by what it is supposed to mean. Being vegan takes a lot of discipline and work, and sacrifice. And are the lactose intolerant somehow inferior or simply weak?
My late beloved husband, who died of COVID in 2020 at the age of 62 before the vaccines came out, would have struggled with your article, as he suffered from clinical depression that required treatment with powerful meds, along with regular monitoring by a psychiatrist and a psychologist. He was often “melancholic” in his outlook on various issues and daily life events, although his meds definitely relieved much of the unrealistic sadness regarding things he could do nothing about (e.g., wars, politics, etc.). R.I.P., my love! I have always considered myself a joyful person who tries to see the good in everything–the first thing I said when my husband passed as I stood by his hospital bedside was, “You beat me to heaven, dear!” I rejoice that he is finally “well,” and it is my theory that his depression was part of the cause for his inability to respond to the 30 days of hospitalization and skilled care that he received–he was simply unable to muster the “oomph” to recover from COVID as depression causes not only a “severe sadness” of the heart and mind, but also “depresses” certain bodily functions. I think there are many Scriptures that validate my optimistic and joyful outlook–“The joy of the Lord is my strength” (Nehemiah 8:10), “Rejoice in the Lord always!” (Phil. 4:4), and “the fruit of the Spirit is…joy…” (Gal. 5:22). The Apostle Paul knew that he would be martyred, but he was joyful. I inherited a joyful outlook from my dear mother, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis that twisted every joint in her body, even her jaw joints–but to the very end of her life (in a nursing home), she remained joyful–the nurses and aides would often come to her for advice about their lives. Yes, there is much to be disturbed about in the Church and in the world, but our Lord Jesus told us to “Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world!” I believe that we should be wary of anything that takes away our joy (although I have given up my many sweet treats for Lent, which makes me sad, but it’s a healthy sad and will ultimately lead to joy as I lose a little weight, have more energy, and see my blood pressure go down!). I fear that your article could cause people susceptible to various depression symptoms and those with actual clinical depression requiring medical intervention and treatment, to feel that they are “well” and that their depression is good and holy, when in reality, they are at great risk for some very negative outcomes (e.g., suicide) as a result of an untreated depression. Perhaps an article like this should include a warning that it’s meant for philosophers, not regular folks and definitely not for those suffering from clinical depression/melancholia. JMO as a “regular folk” who chooses to deal with disturbing issues by asking the Lord Jesus to deal with it and to let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.
Two times in this essay Dr. Chapp ascribes melancholy to the metaxis of earth and heaven. Of hell there is no mention.
Man’s inability to accept the truths of Christian revelation and the words of Christ Our Savior may play a role in the angst of existential dismay.
I do not mention the metaxis of heaven and hell in this essay because its main point — melancholy — has more to do with the metaxis between heaven and earth than it does heaven and hell. Furthermore, I did deal precisely with the metaxsis of heaven and hell in my article of January 28 (https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/01/28/holiness-and-the-desperate-need-for-saints-in-between/). I fully accept the truths of revelation on heaven and hell. Hell is real and it is possible for people to go there. Nor is my current essay about the “angst of existential dismay”. A fact easily discerned by anyone reading the essay without a jaundiced eye. “Angst” was not the main theme of Guardini’s treatment of melancholy nor was it of mine. Nor is there any mention of existential dismay. Guardini said nothing about this nor do I. The essay was about how our perception of eternity in time creates an “obscuring” of truth that is not the obscuring of darkness, but of an overabundance of light. Guardini made this clear and I quoted him on that point.
Apparently I ouched a melancholic nerve. No, angst was not the main theme of the essay. Neither was it depression nor was it Almond Milk. Yet the ire is to me.
Thank you for elucidating what has lain mouldering beneath the surface for decades in this aging melancholic. An affirmation far more meaningful than, “Cheer up—God loves you!”
Possibly an example of “pastoral realism,” we read: “…faith is therefore constitutively situated at once in both ‘natural religion’ and the transposition of those natural dispositions into a christological fulfillment….”
To what extent does an ambiguous “pluralism” of religions pastorally dissolve the gratuitous “transposition [of natural dispositions] into christological fulfillment”?
During the midterm between World wars German psychiatry identified chemical imbalance and initiated the biochemical approach to clinical depression. Since then most psychiatric disorders are treated chemically, psychotropically. Our question is whether the disorder, clinical depression, is initiated by the will and the chemical changes are the result – rather than the generally presumed converse?
Approached in that context what may appear the garden variety melancholia, melancholy a word used to distinguish what everyone experiences in degrees [premise held by psychologist Fr Benedict Groeschel CFR], depression may also lead to the above clinical illness. Romano Guardini spoke well when he advised we shouldn’t leave depression, or melancholia if it pleases us, to the psychiatrist. Melancholy is defined as a pensive sadness with no obvious cause. Pensive is key presuming it’s a willed state of internal affairs [pun intended].
Larry Chapp following Guardini’s advice turns to the supreme truth who is also the supreme truth for solace. True sorrow relates to our displeasure in our failures to love God and brother. All the rest is moaning about oneself. The latter is as Freud terms interminable in his text Terminal and Interminable. How to terminate depressive guilt? Chapp’s insight on real Lenten sorrow is in bringing our guilt before God and expressing it with God. It’s personal. Implied in that is the realization of our nothingness before him who alone is good.
A dynamic literally raided [I initially intended raised, but raided now seems relevant] by commenters is cause for dismay, that is, not possessing certitude of salvation, angst we all suffer, impatience during the trial God is permitting. We may be consoled with knowledge that confidence in a beloved is itself an act of love, that with God the trust we render is most pleasing, that we truly believe in his perfect, infinite good.
We read: “Our question is whether the disorder, clinical depression, is initiated by the will and the chemical changes are the result – rather than the generally presumed converse?”
Relative to this question, we do have these possibly relevant clues:
One modern addiction, overindulgence in digital and virtual reality games, is found to produce corresponding neuro-chemical and possibly cellular changes in the brain itself (e.g., dopamine which is responsible for reward-driven behavior). And, a fairly recent study completed at University College London and using MRI technology (magnetic resonance imagery) strongly implies that a habit of lying tends to suppress the part of the brain (the amygdala) that responds emotionally to a “slippery slope” pattern of small and then larger lies (Neil Garrett, Dan Ariely and Stephanie Laxxaro, Nature Neuroscience Journal, October 24, 2016; reported by Erica Goode, New York Times, October 25, 2016).
Is clinical depression sometimes self-induced, one slippery-slope step at a time?
Absolutely wonderful, Larry. I was not aware of Guardini’s take on this, so thank you. I might also recommend “The Catholic Guide to Depression” by Aaron Kheriaty, a book that also carefully both distinguishes and unites the biological and spiritual aspects of melancholy at the intersection of nature and grace. The preface references Balthasar and to me it is a true Communio viewpoint: “No dramatic aspect of life, and certainly not depression, can be adequately accounted for without the Christian revelation of the human person as created in the image of God, redeemed in Christ, and called to Trinitarian communion. These are the plot points that alone render meaningful the trajectory of life.” I don’t care for the word “depression” in the title though. The more ancient “melancholy” is the deeper and wider word.
My very deep condolences on your loss; your letter and attitude are spiritually beautiful. However, to be fair, the very first paragraph of the article did in fact speak of the pathological, medical form of depression that can lead to suicide (specifically mentioned), and then makes it clear in the very next paragraph that Dr. Chapp is dealing with some thing ELSE in the article: “However, this is not the only form that melancholy can take.”
Thank you. I thought by opening the essay with a paragraph on the awful and horrible aspects of clinical depression that I could dispel any misunderstanding about the fact that I was not writing about that. And Guardini, in his essay on melancholy, makes the exact same distinction.
Nor, am I setting melancholy against joy. I am discussing a much neglected inner aspect of Christian joy. And that is the aspect of a melancholic awareness that our grasping of the eternal in the temporal is so very, very partial and fragmented in this life. Christian joy arises precisely out of this lived experience of fragmented longing as so many of the great saints attest to. In other words, Christian joy traverses or pilgrims through melancholy and not around it.
About the “very partial and fragmented”…Benedict XVI explained that with our finite minds we see the eternal only through the particular, and not with any presumptive and wraparound synoptic vision. This was one of his insights against the theology of self-transcendence as expounded by Karl Rahner. Instead, the Other…
Probably also a good insight into the excesses of certain synodalities, contrasted with faithful guardianship (“backwardist”?) of the Deposit of Faith centered on all of the singular and very particular Incarnation in backwater Bethlehem.
Just looking at your essay from a rhetorical standpoint, it seems to me that introducing it with a run-on sentence that takes a swipe at almond milk is counterproductive. I had my phone in one hand and a glass of chocolate almond milk in the other as I read it. Back in the day when I was a tofu aficionado Bill Buckley and disciples used to take swipes at people who ate tofu. I never understood that sort of thinking or writing.As my pathologist uncle used to say, “Cow’s milk is for baby cows.” Now that I’ve become a carnivore( beef butter bacon and eggs) it’s too late for the approval of the National Review crowd, but surely there must be an intellectual niche for me someplace, possibly among the meat eating theologians or the almond milk fakirs.
Insightful essay. I do believe it was the inarticulate melancholy I felt from childhood that prevented me from buying into materialism, or then from committing to a flaky new age spirituality, until I could recognize in Christ my way home. We do know this in the Church. Stations of the Cross at my parish are well attended every Lenten Friday, and the readings and prayers speak right into our human finitude, to the weight of glory that is there along with the weight of the Cross on the shoulders of the Son of Man.
I remember crying and wailing as a child in the single digits of my age, and all that I knew was that I wanted to renounce the bright childish jewel tones of my toys for somber comforting earth tones. I told my parents that I wanted the walls of my bedroom painted brown. Unserious colors could not sustain me. But melancholy did not find completion in psychiatric depression, or in the precious pretentious yearning of my adolescence either.
Now I think I am on my way, as the rays of the sun seem to shine upon me more through sacraments and daily encounters, and I know that I am here, and myself, and human.
Wonderful enlightening article and a great insight into consumers of almond milk. They are a very sensitive bunch.
It would seem so!
What is needed in the Church today is true dynamic teaching by those who know God our Father, just as Jesus Christ gave concerning God our Father’s absolute Love for each of us, and of His whole-hearted desire to father each and every one of us. We can know Him in and through His Son. Jesus Christ, and we can be taught by the Holy Spirit to live the fullness of our life in Christ as Jesus promised in the Gospel of John. No melancholy needed at all, but what is needed is genuine, vibrant disciples of Christ to fearlessly teach by the Holy Spirit as they have been taught. We, believers, are the sons and daughters of God. Receive His fathering, His love, His gifts, His Son. He loves you!!
God bless, C-Marie
“What we need today therefore are saints of this sort of melancholy. And, in my view, it is precisely the deficit of such saints in the Church that has led to the eclipse of the eschatological senses and the ascendency of a suffocating theological horizontalism that is the deepest sin within the post-conciliar Church” – Amen to that. A very rewarding read, thank you Larry Chapp
Here’s how I understand the humour, “melancholic”; as well as “humours” in general.
Melancholic describes one of the four “humours” of affected character and personality -phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine and melancholic. It was said to be produced by or emanate from bodily transpirations but the humours themselves were the cause for attention. Within that, humours are considered powerful enough to define you; however they do not determine what you are as you remain free to master them. The four humours cover the range of affect but it is possible to find oneself more prey to one more than any of the others.
These ideas can and do give good intentions and resolutions to put into practice. They help identify moods that have a deeper root but in just noticing the effects one can engage the opposite virtue to develop a course of habits, moderateness, stablility, being alert. The humours relate with vice and “negative mood”. The virtue is the countervailing will to be and do good.
Loosely “humours” could be considered a form of metaphysics and interior action to deal with them a discipline in philosophy with a metaphysical fine-tuning. It wasn’t necessarily religious and it doesn’t have to be. But it does relate with overcoming the pull of the body and poor mental demeanour and restablishing a force of reason.
I am not read up on Guardini and I don’t know how he treats with the humours or if his melancholia has anything to do with that. I feel uncertain of his treatment of melancholia. Chapp’s essay adds to the difficulty. Christ declared he came to set a fire and how He wished it were already ablaze; I wouldn’t render this as some kind of “heavenly melancholia”. Christ was declaring not only against “negativity”of others but about His own pure desires on fulfillment “you of little faith!”
“Humours” were not considered “healthful” and there is no reason to have them as mixed-good-and-bad. For example, sanguine relates with calculating not romantic, melancholy relates with gloom not nostalgia. TOO MUCH nostalgia would be an invasion from the humours.
The word “humours” is a nice play, not to make too much of so little! It expresses the wisdom of the ages so that it would have been remarkable synthesis for the times in which it came to the popular imagination. Maybe understanding this today is even more enthralling! Hopefully Guardini eventually found the “melancholy” distasteful!
I am always on the look-out for reflections on the humours for better comprehension and facility; and would you believe, they can be found in variety even as you see here at CWR itself!
‘ So, knowing your temperament will provide clues to identify your predominant fault. For example, a person who is sanguine is prone to lust, gluttony or pusillanimity (lack of courage). Cholerics are prone to anger and envy. Melancholics are prone to fear, aversion, despondency and despair, while Phlegmatics are prone to sloth or acedia and a reluctance to suffer due to an attachment to pleasure. ‘
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/01/22/a-catholic-business-leaders-basic-field-guide/
At the risk of further upending little applecarts in our path, I nevertheless make bold to offer Elias direct excerpt from Guardini’s essay on melancholy. It clarifies much of the melancholic jungle twixt heaven, earth, and hell which— sadly — not all have will to know, eyes to see, or words to say.
With thanks to the Thomist traditionalist. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-demon-of-melancholy/
Wow meiron, you have a rich theme and rich sources. God bless you. And thank you.
I have some reading to do here I see.
Beautiful essay. “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Creamy almond milk -stress, creamy- makes a great nightcap. Ice-cold or with crushed ice or both. You’ll sleep “on clouds” and on waking you won’t have a sour tummy. Just as St. Paul recommended taking a dash of wine and not brooding.
The Beatitudes are Jesus’ mastery for us. Mourning deals with true penitential spirit which is a gift from Him and which we work through with Him in His sufferings. He surely never meant for anyone to be morose for the sake of heaven and most especially never meant we have our sorrows and sufferings as our selfish possessions.
Equating melancholy with being selfish or morose (of a sour temper; sullen and austere; ill-humored; severe; lascivious; brooding over evil thoughts) is quite a misunderstanding. Certainly, we are to avoid such depraved attitudes, but melancholia is actually much affected by the worldliness of others. That saint (not sure who it was) comes to mind who rapped on doors and called through windows, “Love is not loved! Love is not loved!” Wanting joy for others who cannot see their way to it, and sorrow over the world’s grievous mistakes puts us in the Garden with Our Lord, weeping over the folly of man. I am content there (though I do my share of dozing).
So now I’ve read meiron’s link twice and from what I can surmise up to this time, Guardini does not deal with a melancholy that is both virtue-and-vice but as something spiritually debilitating or incipiently crippling and needing a divine intervention.
It could look as if Guardini condensed all the humours into one as a way to capture a -or, the- problem character. Perhaps it is Augustine as if he never changed. Perhaps it is Nietzsche or Camus or Richlieu. Maybe Benedetto Croce.
I think this relates with the “spiritual worldliness” Pope Francis has been warning about, which particular terminology, as I seem to recollect, was said to originate from Guardini’s thought. Then, however, Pope Francis develops the “spiritual worldliness” as being something quite widespread even as he proceeds to focus a negative view on “traditionalists” as “rigid”, “too observant”, “manichean”, etc. while promoting some others who make a splash about their idleness.
Just some considerations. But for now I feel Chapp’s essay doesn’t do justice to what Guardini intended with the “melancholia”. He makes it out to be what it isn’t. Guardini would proceed to admit with Nietzsche that melancholy is a “demon” but then adapt it because it IS really a demon and thresh it out to expose the insidious.
Maybe Thomas Merton.
Elias,
I think you graciously hit a couple points. In defense of Chapp’s questionable treatment of Guardini’s ideas on melancholy, Guardini’s essay structure is inexplicably topsy-turkey. Guardini himself, at the end of his essay, articulates the recognition: “…the imperfections and the piecemeal character of my presentation strike me forcibly.” He says he is, due to lack of time and some other unidentified constraint, not able to improve it.
Some twenty pages into the essay (p. 52, Cluny), Guardini notes Nietzsche’s characterizing “the spirit of melancholy as a demon” but inexplicably he does not develop the point until much later. Only near the essay’s end at p. 74 and continuing for 4-5 pages does he write: “There is a good melancholy and an evil melancholy.” The evil form of melancholy …”consists in the consciousness of failure, of loss. In it the danger of being damned is felt because the imposed duty was not fulfilled–that which spells eternal weal or woe but which must be executed in time, which passes and never returns….” This (evil) melancholy “…can mount to the proportions of hopelessness and despair….”
Guardini extensively quotes Kierkegaard (evangelical/Lutheran?) who notoriously suffered and delved perhaps obsessively into his personal experience of melancholy. Other historico-religious context clues for us in relation to Guardini: Of Italian Catholic origin, the family moved to Germany when he was an infant, and so he was educated and came to teach in Germany (predominantly Protestant) during the interwar years.
I know that Francis liked him, but I don’t know why nor am I the least bit curious about Francis’ theological interest….I am sure he has already revealed to us the fullness of his thought in that regard.
Best of Lent,
M
And one further thing. The original essay by Guardini is not titled “The Demon of Melancholy.” That is a title given by CLJ. The original title is simply “Melancholy”. I think that is also important. It is not my essay that misrepresents Guardini, but the CLJ does, in both its title and in its editing of the text.
Belaboring some fine points, for knowledge’s sake:
CLJ and I both used the term “excerpt” to describe its excerpt which it labeled “The Demon of Melancholy.” The excerpt consists of full and complete and unchanged paragraphs taken from the entire essay. Within those paragraphs no editing has been done.
I have not accused you of cherry-picking. I presume that you wrote what you read.
Abe books has a published version of the essay in Italian, bearing the title “Il ritratto della malinconia” or “Portrait of…” Cluny entitles it, “The Meaning of …” and CLJ calls it “The Demon of…” You say Guardini called it simply “Melancholy.” So? I too have been called by many different names.
The first half of Guardini’s essay deals with the negative aspects of melancholia. And they are real. And in my first paragraph I note that there is a form of it that is very destructive. Perhaps I could have drawn out that point more but space is limited in these essays on CWR. But I focused on the second half of the essay because that is where Guardini digs deeper and goes well beyond the demonic aspects to show how it can be transformed (“adapted in your terminology which I think is flawed) it to a positive spiritual force when it is viewed as the soul’s response to its encounter with eternity in time. I used several quotes from that section to make my point and they are not cherry picked. The accurately portray his thought on the positive aspects of melancholy in the second half of the essay. I did not misrepresent anything or make it seem what it is not. If you do not think Guardini ends the essay with the positive Christian transformation of melancholy then I humbly submit that you do not understand its final points.
I think too it is important to note that he begins the essay with a lengthy quotation from Kierkegaard. And Kierkegaard approaches the topic in a very similar way. He sees the demonic aspects but also sees it as an almost necessary component of any truly profound spiritual growth. And it is important therefore that Guardini begins with Kierkegaard which signals that he is taking his hermeneutical principles on the topic from him. Balthasar does the same on his book on Christian anxiety as he follows Kierkegaard. He first notes how anxiety can be a very non Christian thing, indeed even demonic, but then goes on to show its Christian transformation into something truly essential. And tha two concepts — anxiety and melancholy — are deeply related.
Guardini does warn us against spiritual worldliness and in many places. And a melancholy that is purely worldly would fall under that critique. But Guardini notes that there are forms of it that are not the product of a mere spiritual worldliness but are in fact the product of the opposite: the eschagological frustration in a sense of those who are drawing close to God and who find the world insufficient.
But thanks for the comment. It was a charitable attempt at dialogue. And it is in that spirit that I penned this response. Peace.
I forgot to mention something else. The essay in Church Life Journal is an edited version of the full essay by Guardini on the topic. The full essay is much, much longer. It can be found in the book mentioned in the epigraphic quote. It is a long chapter in his book “The Human Experience”. And it is in the full version that he begins with Kierkegaard and then goes on at great length in the second section on the positive aspects of melancholia. I can see why you would think that I did not do full justice to Guardini if you are basing your opinion merely on the edited CLJ essay which focused on the first half of Guardini’s essay which was on the negative aspects. I would encourage you, if you are interested in the topic, to get the book and read the full essay.
Thank you meiron and Larry Chapp for filling out the other parts to this essay. Other than Pope Francis speaking about “spiritual worldliness”, this would be my first encounter with these ideas and insights from Guardini. I have a solid introduction here I think. Therefore I would have to retract the assessment I meted out on Chapp’s review, where I wrote ‘….. for now I feel Chapp’s essay doesn’t do justice to what Guardini intended with the “melancholia”. He makes it out to be what it isn’t.’
Retracted!
Getting deeper into reading Guardini? I’m considering it. One of the reasons why the expose on humours I shared is interesting to me is that it can be fitted into a study about the service of philosophy to Revelation and Christology. JPII had taken up with this idea later in life and seemed to have set his heart on it.
Proviso: If I do more of the reading on Guardini, I might still have to come back on Chapp!
On Pope Francis; notwithstanding all the proliferating vagaries and provisional-isms, what is taking place must necessarily impact vocation in some way no matter how slight. It’s not anything I can ignore, whether personally or in the impact it is having on others. It has to be shouldered seriously and responsibly. Plus, his own soul can be at risk. Our Lord guaranteed a rock upon which the Church is built. Wherefore, we pray and sacrifice in obedience to our Lord trusting His Providence. It surely means that Christ will have His way and no-one and nothing will thwart Him.
We also want to love the poor Pope because he is the Pope and maybe even because he is poor; and Jesus knows our hearts. Lord have mercy.
Some further remarks on humours.
Humours and their moods don’t necessarily define a “predominant trait” or “predominant character flaw”. It could be like that -“predominant”; such is the typical treatment when considering them. There are however, other possibilities that exist with and without a predominant trait. You could have mood swings, particular triggers, mixed moods (mood combinations), mood rush, subtle murmuring moods. You could be a generally moody character who dwells only in moods, whether as subject or as master. As a subject, like an addict, you are only really happy on or with a trip; likely you are driven by mixes and the external world and what you receive are coloured like this. Alternatively, you can make them your object; and as the master of your humours you are trying to shape badness to enhance some purposes.
Some moods you might “enjoy” while others you “despise”. You might like something for yourself but find it despicable in another person -in either case engaging the wrong consequences. The upshot is that leaving them unchecked or having them as not dangerous, will be morally ruinous.
You can abstract from the humours and “heighten” the metaphysics. The 4 humours can be seen as general declension categories where you delve further and fit in other things you notice, about yourself, captivating of the soul, memory, understanding, will; whether to do with disarray or malignity in body, thinking, emotion, heart.
You can distinguish humours that dwell with you constantly or return intermittently; humours that seem to come at you powerfully or drive themselves and you with them; humours that have external dependence and source and those that have uniquely internal ones; and how they might connect or relate or be contingent.
You can define those humours that seem to be conatural a part of your very fibre and those that got acquired or came through various failings. You can get a sense of the measure or size of each and its habit with the level of attraction, the level of indulging,/pleasure-taking, the level of prostration and the level of the overall decrepitude.
“Unwanted” humours you can resist by exercise of more active will that moves against involuntariness. “Wanted” humours you can resist by more passive will that neutralizes the voluntariness. Vice versa. This insight matches with the human virtues. From all this we can see how serious the matter is and the need for prayer.
If you suppose I am revealing some things about my own miry humours (humours bog, thromboses, etc.), you are correct. I can’t claim I worked this out on my own account. It came with divine assistance as I believe it to be; taking criticism; and the real penance.