5. The melancholy temperament
5
The melancholy temperament
John Foster1 was a man of an extraordinary depth of thought, and this is how he writes to one of his most thoughtful correspondents:
Everything that interests my heart leads me into this mingled emotion of melancholy and sublime. I have lost all taste for the light and the gay; rather, I never had any such taste. I turn disgusted and contemptuous from insipid and shallow folly, to lave in the tide, the stream,—of deeper sentiments. I have criminally neglected regular, studious thinking for many years. My greatest defects are in regard to religion, on which subject, as it respects myself, I want to have a profound and solemn investigation, which I foresee must be mingled with a great deal of painful and repentant feeling. What a serious task it is to confront one’s self with faithful truth, and to see one’s self by a light that will not flatter! At the last tribunal no one will regret having been a habitual and rigorous judge of self.
Does any one ask what a true and a wise “melancholy” is? Does any one wish to know what that mourning is which our Lord pronounces to be blessed?2 I know no better English example of it than John Foster; I know no better German example of it than Jacob Behmen;3 and no better example of it ever lived than the French Blaise Pascal.4 Dante, Cromwell, Johnson, and Cowper5 will occur to all in this connection. And the melancholy of all these men is a melancholy worthy of the solemn name. Their melancholy is that into which all truly great minds, and all truly deep, awakened, and enlightened hearts more and more sink down, till they and their melancholy are all swallowed up in the ocean of light and liberty that is at God’s right hand.
*From The Four Temperaments (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1895), 87-91.
1. John Foster (1770-1843), raised in a Calvinist environment, failed as a Baptist minister, but became well known as a Reformed essayist.
2. See Matthew 5:4.
3. Jakob Boehme (1575-1624) was a German mystic, whose writings deeply fascinated Whyte. For Whyte’s essay on his life and thought, see Thirteen Appreciations (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., [1913]), 35-71. See also Whyte’s Jacob Behmen: an Appreciation (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, [1894]).
4. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a brilliant French Roman Catholic author, scientist and apologist. His Pensées (1670) have been widely appreciated for their apologetic power and spirituality.
5. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was an Italian poet and philosopher whose Divina Commedia is a classic work in the history of western literature. Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) was the Puritan ruler of England and Wales during the 1650s. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is best remembered as an essayist and lexicographer. He was also an ardent Anglican who had a deep dislike of the children of Puritanism, namely, the eighteenth-century Dissenters. William Cowper (1731-1800) was an important Evangelical hymnwriter of the eighteenth century.