However, get past the icky profiles that have attended Andrew Solomon - over-medicated, over-mediated and over here: Prozac's doe-eyed poster boy - and you find an exemplary text. This paper unmoors melancholy from its classical sources and, beginning from the ambivalence of the noonday motif, argues that the traditional literature of mystics and ascetics prepared for this remarkable shift.That said, depression has become something of an oversubscribed pitch in the black economy of confessional writing and the prospect of another young, gifted and rich "depressive" come to tell us about hell on trust-funded earth did not excite my own meagre sero tonin to butcher-than-usual levels.
But after the introduction of the Aristotelian problem to Latin writers, a contrasting view appeared in the early thirteenth century, which held melancholy for a benediction of mystical or theophanic frenzy. As examined in Saturn and Melancholy pathological melancholy would traditionally refer to the complex of symptoms associated with sloth and sadness that beleaguered the uprooted and antisocial ascetic. This paper studies the propinquity of these two notions in the symbolism and vocabulary of medieval spiritual writers, and in so doing documents the biblical and monastic contribution to unfolding ideas about melancholy. Both notions hark back to biblical statements made in the Psalms and Song of Songs and were elaborated by medieval thinkers through exegetical rumination.
1173) also described noontime as the high point of mystical experience. But medieval spiritual writers like Bernard of Clairvaux (d. At the noon hour, the demonic assault was vigorous and ranging. The midday demon, who attacked the solitary monk with vicious temptations – above all, that of acedia – is a conventional motif in late antique and medieval ascetic literature.
0 kommentar(er)
