Seneca replied that what is produced by music and the arts, or in animals, is only preliminary shocks or ‘first movements’. One Stoic, Posidonius, protested that such judgements are neither necessary nor sufficient for emotion, not necessary, for example, for emotion produced by melody, or in animals. Bodily and mental shocks (e.g., crying) are not part of the emotion. In their view, an emotion is a pair of value judgements that harm or benefit if at hand, and that it is appropriate to react. The Stoics (Chrysippus, Seneca, Epictetus) tell us how to get rid of unwanted emotions by re-evaluating situations (cognitive therapy). 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. 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.
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