[In the following excerpt, Soufas concentrates on de Molina's El condenado por desconfiado and its character Paulo who, in Soufas' essay, clearly defines the seventeenth-century understanding of religious melancholy.]

In truth it was melancholy that the devil breathed into Adam at the time of his fall: melancholy which robs a man of his ardour and faith.

St. Hildegard of Bingen

The epigraph above calls attention to the importance of melancholy in the religious and the moral teachings against sin. St. Hildegard of Bingen concentrates on the origin of melancholy, which she describes as simultaneous with the commission of Original Sin. In her account, the twelfth-century saint focuses on the moment when Adam ate the forbidden apple and the melancholy humor in his blood curdled, “as when a lamp is quenched, the smouldering and smoking wick remains reeking behind … the sparkle of innocence was dulled in him, and his eyes, which had formerly beheld heaven, were blinded, and his gall was changed to bitterness, and his melancholy to blackness.”¹ Hers is a description of melancholia that represents an important medieval articulation of the link between the humoral condition and the spiritual, ethical, and moral issues which continue to be raised 450 to 500 years later by the Renaissance doctors and scientists in their multifaceted treatises on melancholy. The beliefs that began to emerge in the later sixteenth century and blossomed full-blown in the seventeenth echo her insistence upon the moral responsibility incumbent upon the melancholic and those administering to him or her to seek relief and/or cures through medical and theological means.

The Renaissance expository writers reiterate as well St. Hildegard's insistence upon the all-pervasive quality of melancholy as a nearly universal affliction. In her view, melancholia is Adam's punishment and thus the “incurable hereditary evil” to which all human beings are vulnerable, while in the early seventeenth century, Burton likewise writes: “thou shalt soon perceive that all the world is mad, that it is melancholy.”² Such notions reinforce the tradition of melancholy as a concern in moral teachings and associate it with the pride and thirst for forbidden knowledge as the basis of humanity's Fall. This is a dimension that finds an almost full reverberation in the intellectual scope of the literary representation of melancholy in the seventeenth century, when emphasis was placed on the melancholic's illicit use of the mind in both secular and spiritual matters.

The religious melancholic is an individual whose depiction in Renaissance literature evinces his or her ties to ethical and medical notions that date back to the early centuries of Christianity. That depiction reaches a height of scientific focus in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when the medico-scientific writers like Alfonso de Santa Cruz and Pedro Mercado include references to it or provide related case histories.³ Burton's examination of the syndrome in his Anatomy of Melancholy is the first extensive secular coverage of the subject, and it serves as a compendium of an age-old topic frequently written about by officials of the Christian Church. Burton's chapter on religious melancholy appears in the Anatomy from its earliest edition (1621) and, though certainly not widely circulated in Spain, it is coextensive with certain Spanish dramatic representations of the same spiritual/humoral condition. I choose to concentrate on one such work, Tirso de Molina's El condenado por desconfiado, for two reasons. First, its range of possible dates of composition has been postulated between 1615 and 1625.⁴ These dates situate the drama in that period of heightened literary interest in melancholy when Tirso and other writers had more frequent opportunities for exposure to notions about aspects of religious melancholy and its evolution from the earlier sinful condition known as acedia that Burton also summarizes during approximately the same period. Second, El condenado por desconfiado is a play in which its author scrutinizes the majority of the questions surrounding the topic of religious melancholy, including the complex and varying elements of despair, neglect, idleness, delusions, and vulnerability to the Devil's persuasion that melancholics were believed to suffer and that continued to characterize the notion of acedia from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance.⁵

As a character clearly defined within the framework of the seventeenth-century understanding of religious melancholy, Tirso's ascetic hermit Paulo in El condenado por desconfiado has much in common with such diverse figures of history and fiction as the gods of Olympus, the fourth-century monks living with Evagrius in the Egyptian desert, and countless other historical and literary personalities believed to suffer from a pathological melancholy system. Part of the background of Tirso's characterization of Paulo involves the terminological evolution of acedia, a word used very early to describe the tedium afflicting the monks of Alexandria as a consequence of the monotony of their routine, which causes, among other things, restlessness, dejection, and a wish to leave the monastic life altogether. Lyman looks back even further to the Homeric stories about the Olympian life, in which the literal definition of acedia, “uncaring,” had been “inadvertently institutionalized in the leisure world of the Greek deities” whose hedonistic life gave way to gloomy disillusionment and immoral pursuits that contaminated as well the mortals with whom they interacted.⁶ Through the writings of John Cassian, the monastic vice of acedia was introduced into the Latin West and passed through transformations during the Middle Ages, becoming associated and even interchangeable with the deadly sin of sloth. Thus it was eventually a danger for persons of any profession.

A new emphasis was placed on the internal mental state and emotions as causes of acedia; now seen as a weakness of the spirit, religious melancholy was likewise connected to tristitia, thereby gaining a psychological basis as well, as Siegfried Wenzel explains. He further contends: “In this process acedia came to be understood as man's culpable aversion against the divine good—a conception with which the emphasis on the vice's mental aspects and the more ‘spiritualized’ view reached its culmination.”⁷ Paralleling this cycle was another, for the Scholastics characterize acedia as a sin occupying a position between sins of the spirit and those of the body. Other moralists group acedia with the carnal vices of lust and gluttony because of its pathological connection to one's need for rest and sleep, exaggerated in the physical listlessness often evident in the melancholic. The demonasticization of acedia, its internalization, and its categorization as a “vice of the spirit” as well as a “vice of the flesh” occurs, nevertheless, over the whole of the Middle Ages, and Wenzel ultimately concedes a tripartite categorization—“monastic, Scholastic, and popular”—which, he tells us, “can be localized with some accuracy in time, and even more, in literary genre.” He adds, however, that “never did a later form completely replace an earlier one. The laicization … of the vice in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries did not entail the total loss of monastic elements … and the concept of acedia one meets in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is a comprehensive one, embracing elements from all stages of acedia's past life.”⁸

As is the case with scholarly melancholics, their religious counterparts are also solitary thinkers, and Tirso depicts his accidic monk as prideful in his contemplation. The emphasis on the “mental aspects” involved in one's “culpable aversion against the divine good” to which Wenzel refers is at the heart of what Tirso portrays in El condenado por desconfiado.⁹ The play dramatizes the dialectical response on the part of its author to the epistemological struggle over the perceived strength or danger inherent in the active melancholy mind. The play also addresses a related point made by Sullivan concerning the composite nature of Golden Age dramatic presentations that encompass “the basic antagonisms of the Counter Reformation itself, i.e., Renaissance liberation in conflict with a medievalizing reaction; the comedia was a theater that restated medieval values, but explored the scope of human freedom without being able to help itself.”¹⁰ Tirso's transvalued treatment of the melancholy mentality portrays Enrico the bandit as a counterpart to the religious melancholic Paulo, for Enrico exhibits numerous traits of melancholy criminality that were also thought to plague the religious melancholic once he or she had despaired of salvation. Like two complementary character studies of distinct but related melancholic disorders, Paulo and Enrico dramatize what the more scientific writers record in their treatises, but these two diverge in their eventual responses to their afflictions. Understanding the context of melancholy within which Tirso develops the action, theme, imagery, and characterization in this play provides a means of reading the work that accounts for its canonicity in seventeenth-century terms.

In the nonliterary studies of acedia, the authors comment upon the concept in its more secular context through its connection to humoral melancholy. Those pseudo-scientific writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who do address the topic of religious melancholy as a discrete type describe it as marked by despair over one's salvation and failure to pursue or to finish good works. Certain characteristics became associated with the religious individuals whose melancholy symptoms were either the result or, conversely, the cause of their devout lifestyle; insufficient or unfit diet, fasting, and other such hardships of a strict religious life were thought either to produce or to exacerbate the physiological symptoms of the disorder. So, too, the solitude which melancholics are said to seek as well as the darkness of a cave or a monastic cell are part of the hermit's ambience. Cristóbal Acosta asserts in his late sixteenth-century Tratado en contra y pro de la vida solitaria (Treatise against and for the solitary life) that “melancholía no os faltará, que allende la vuestra natural, la divina scriptura llama triste al que vive solo y sin compañía” (you will not lack melancholy, for besides your natural melancholy, divine scripture labels sad the one who lives alone and without company).¹¹ The study and meditation associated with melancholy is often described as a cause of heightened anxiety and a weakening of faith and convictions in the religious. In their melancholic states, they convince themselves of their own eternal damnation and the impossibility of ever receiving God's grace and redemption.

Murillo, in particular, regards the religious as especially susceptible to melancholia. With references to Pliny, he includes those “dados a los estudios, y a la Religion” (those given to study and to Religion) in the category that also encompasses the “Insanos, Melancholicos, y Maniacos” (Insane, Melancholics, and Maniacs), adding that these individuals are known popularly as “alumbrados” (illuminati) and are “callados, tristes, y excordes” (quiet, sad, and mentally unbalanced). The blending of medical and moral notions evident in the majority of the expository works is clearly articulated in Murillo's study, as certain sections dealing with the cure of melancholy diseases attest. He posits, for example, “que los Medicos no curen el cuerpo, antes que este curada el alma con el Santissimo Sacramento de la Penitencia, y Sagrada comunion, y confession Sacramental … y es gran desdicha lo que en esto passa, que muchos Medicos … por dezir a los enfermos que se confiessen en tiempo, se hallan con ellos muertos, no sin grande cargo de sus conciencias” (that the Physicians do not cure the body, before the soul is cured with the Holy Sacrament of Penitence, and Holy communion, and Sacramental confession … and it is very unfortunate what happens in this matter, for many Doctors … by telling the sick people to confess, find that they die, not without great charge to their consciences). He further counsels physicians that they recognize the link between disease and sin (an echo of St. Hildegard's account of the origin of melancholy) and so the doctor must consider “si acaso la enfermedad que se padece es causada, y le vino al enfermo por sus pecados: porque es de Fe Catolica, que por nuestros pecados enfermamos muchas vezes” (if by chance the illness suffered is caused and comes to the patient through his sins: because it is part of the Catholic Faith that due to our sins we become sick many times). He adds, however: “Mas aunque el Demonio pueda causar enfermedades innumerables, puede el Medico, como instrumento de la Divina Iusticia, o qualquiera otro varon de vida inculpable, (pie & devote), ahuyentar a los Demonios” (But although the Devil may cause innumerable diseases, the Doctor, as an instrument of Divine Justice, or any other man of guiltless life, “devoutly,” can drive away Devils).¹² The physician's task is thus diverse and combines both ethical and scientific fields.¹³ Murillo cites the exhortation nosce teipsum as an important moral underpinning to his arguments about the religious melancholics, explaining: “el que fuere perfectamente sabio, se conocera perfectamente a si mismo … y assi, como se puede afirmar que se cognosca perfectamente el Melancholico, o Maniaco, que con sus propias manos se quita la vida” (he who may be perfectly wise, will know himself perfectly … and so, as one can affirm that the Melancholic or the Maniac knows himself perfectly, for with his own hands he ends his life).¹⁴ The despair and self-destructive tendencies (in both a physical and spiritual sense) are therefore an inherent danger in the melancholy self-contemplation that needs to be tempered and redirected by means of theological and medical ministering.

Tirso's characterization of Paulo in the play undeniably entails the traditional conception of acedia. The isolated life based on a routine of meditation and sparse diet, the latter highlighted through the complaints of Paulo's servant Pedrisco, is indeed what has occupied the hermit for ten years. His initial attack of despair, moreover, follows a period of sleep, and his subsequent rancor and neglect of his duty to God are, as Daniel Rogers asserts, in keeping with the vices that St. Thomas associates with acedia.¹⁵ The blending of the accepted notion of acedia with that of the humoral disorder of melancholy must, however, be considered. What Paulo does and says and the visual and poetic imagery attendant upon his behavior reflect this blend of psychological, physiological, and ethical factors.

As the play begins, Paulo expresses his preference for solitude and darkness:

¡Dichoso albergue mío! Soledad apacible y deleitosa, que en el calor y el frío me dais posada en esta selva umbrosa.

(My happy refuge! Peaceful and delightful solitude, that in the heat and the cold gives me shelter in this dark forest.)¹⁶

In the medical books, as in their artistic literary counterparts, an affinity for solitary darkness is often mentioned in descriptions of melancholy characteristics. The associated metaphorical suggestions link melancholy with that darkness of mind which the dark humor brings about as well as that physical darkness in which melancholics prefer to stay or which might worsen their already fearful nature. Murillo writes, for example:

espantanse, y assombranse estos melancholicos, como lo hazen los muchachos en las tinieblas, y obscuridades, y entre los crecidos, y mancebos, los indoctos, y rudos; porque de la manera que las tinieblas exteriores, casi a todos los hombres les dan pavor, y miedo, si no es que son muy ossados, o enseñados: assi de la misma manera, el color del humor melancholico viene a hazer tener temor con tinieblas, y obscuridad, cubriendo con sombra, o assombrando el celebro, demanera, que lo que parece que se colige de Galeno, es, que la causa destos sympthomas, miedo, y tristeza, mas es el color del humor, que no la destemplança de las qualidades.

(These melancholics become frightened and startled, as do children in the shadows and in darkness, and among older people and youths, the uneducated and the uncultured; because in the way that external darkness shocks and frightens almost all people; if they are not very brave or educated: thus the color of the melancholic humor causes fear by shadows, darkness, covering with shade, or by startling the brain, so it seems that what we can summarize from Galen is that the cause of these symptoms, fear, and sadness, is the color of the humor rather than the irregularity of the qualities.)¹⁷

The tradition of acedia and the vulnerability of religious persons, in particular hermits, to melancholia makes the references to solitude and darkness significant in the case of a figure purportedly living such a reclusive life. St. Hildegard's references to the darkness of the descent of sin and melancholy on humanity are also recalled by such passages.

Thus, although Paulo's monologue seems to express the beatus ille topos, it more appropriately indicates to the audience the melancholic condition that afflicts him. The intensity of Paulo's statements builds through the first four stanzas of his speech to the point where he shouts:

¿Quién ¡Oh celeste velo! aquestos tafetanes luminosos rasgar pudiera un poco para ver … ?(1.21-24)

(Who, Oh celestial veil! could tear a little bit these luminous curtains in order to see … ?)

Again, there is an echo of Hildegard's metaphorical explanation of melancholy, which posits Adam's loss of innocence as an inability to look into heaven, a privilege that had formerly been his. Paulo suggests his parallel experience of wishing to duplicate the prelapsarian privilege that nevertheless cannot be reclaimed by humanity, whom he figuratively represents in this moment of blasphemous pride. He hastens to add, however, “¡Ay de mí! Vuélvome loco” (Woe is me! I am going crazy [1.24]), thereby identifying his own underlying instability and linking himself from the beginning of the play with the state of locura which, like manía, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientists use as a synonym for melancolía,

His outburst displays as well the ecstatic state that melancholia was thought capable of triggering in the religiously devout, for as Lawrence Babb asserts: “Melancholy symptoms of a religious character include many rapturous fancies.”¹⁸ As is typical of religious melancholics, Paulo's thoughts turn to the question of his own meriting of salvation and to the threatening “puertas del profundo” (doors to hell [1.36]). Furthermore, his last sentence before leaving the stage (“Ved que el hombre se hizo / de barro vil, de barro quebradizo” [Understand that man was made of common clay, of fragile clay]; 1.75-76) carries with it the traditional biblical teaching but also hints at the connection between the humor melancholy and the earth, its mate among the natural elements.

The hermit's words end with his entrance into one of the mountain grottoes and are followed by the vociferous complaints of his only servant and companion Pedrisco. The gracioso bemoans specifically the bad diet that robs him, and presumably his master, of sound health. Outlining the regimen the two men follow and the emotional consequence it has for both at times, he says:

Aquí penitencia hacemos, y sólo yerbas comemos, y a veces nos acordamos, de lo mucho que dejamos por lo poco que tenemos. (1.112-16)

(Here we do penance, and we only eat herbs, and at times we remember, how much we left behind for the little that we have.)

Pedrisco's complaints, though comical in presentation because of their stress on his interest in creature comforts, nevertheless emphasize repeatedly his sadness, “triste fin me pronostico” (I predict a sad end for myself [1.81]), and lamenting further (“memorias me hacen llorar” [memories make me cry]; 1.124): “ya está todo perdido” (now everything is lost [1.132]). Pedrisco thus sets the mood for Paulo's next monologue, which itself begins “¡qué desventura! / Y ¡qué desgracia, cierta, lastimosa!” (What misfortune! / And what certain and regrettable bad luck! [1.139-40]). It is this frame of mind which dominates Paulo throughout the rest of the play, and this scene, moreover, subtly suggests that the entryways through which the hermit and his servant pass into their respective caves are analogous to the doors to hell (“puertas del profundo”) which Paulo dreads in his first speech. The dark abyss, however, is a mental and emotional one, linked nevertheless to the physical world through his melancholy physiology but leading to eternal spiritual damnation because of the obsessive despair upon which he seizes.

The immediate cause of Paulo's fear and sadness, the two emotions most characteristic of melancholia, is his nightmarish dream vision of “la muerte cruel” (cruel death) and the final judgment upon his condemned soul. Having described the unsettling images, Paulo relates his concerns in terms that reinforce his identity as a religious melancholic: “Con aquella fatiga y aquel miedo / desperté” (I awoke with that fatigue and that fear [1.177-78]). He emphasizes at once the physical weariness associated with acedia and the fright of melancholia. He then goes on to describe the classical traits of one so afflicted:

… aunque temblando, y no vi nada si no es mi culpa, y tan confuso quedo, que si no es a mi suerte desdichada, o traza del contrario, ardid o enredo, que vibra contra mí su ardiente espada, no sé a qué atribuya. (1.178-83)

(… although trembling, and I saw nothing if not my guilt, and so confused do I remain, that if it is not to my wretched luck, or trick, ruse, or intrigue of Satan, who moves his burning sword against me, I do not know to what to attribute it.)

His doubts and self-recrimination are accompanied by repetitive despairing questions: “¿Heme de condenar, mi Dios divino, / como ese sueño dice, o he de verme / en el sagrado alcázar cristalino?” (Am I to condemn myself, my divine God, / as that dream says, or will I find myself / in the sacred crystal palace? [1.185-87]); “¿qué fin he de tener?” (what end must I have? [1.189]); “¿He de ir a vuestro Cielo, o al infierno?” (Will I go to your Heaven, or to hell? [1. 192]).

Of particular interest to Renaissance expository writers are the powers ascribed to melancholics who are said to be able to see into the future and experience rapturous visions. In Spain, most treatises on melancholy reflect their authors' refusal to accept such purported powers, and express instead another popular Renaissance notion that the devil preys more frequently upon melancholic individuals and is responsible for their visions of damnation. In his appended section about these supposed prophetic powers, Freylas directly addresses the connection between the devil and melancholy, saying, “es cierto que se junta el demonio con el humor melancolico, porque halla en el muy grande disposicion para hazer grandes danos, como es persuadir a que se ahorquen, o desesperen de la misericordia de Dios” (it is certain that the devil joins himself to the melancholy humor, because he finds in it a very great disposition to do great harm, like persuading melancholics to hang themselves, or to despair of God's mercy).¹⁹ Murillo likewise writes “el Demonio se alegra con el humor Melancholico” (the Devil rejoices in the Melancholic humor). He goes into great detail in his arguments meant to discourage belief in the purported abilities of melancholics to prophesy and to speak languages never studied (particularly Latin), citing many ancient and contemporary sources about the devil's intervention in such cases.²⁰ These sorts of expressions by Spanish expository writers are commonplaces in the tradition of melancholy as the balneum diaboli that many of their European contemporaries also record.

In his discussion of this phenomenon, Babb includes references to similar statements by Philip Barrough, Johann Weyer, Robert Burton, André Du Laurens, and others.²¹ Jackson, who devotes an entire chapter in his study to beliefs about the purported supernatural powers enjoyed by melancholics and their presumed sources, explains that the issuing of prophesy by melancholy persons had varyingly been through a transformation of the Platonic theory of divinely inspired madness in combination with the Aristotelian theories about the superior capabilities of the melancholic mind. Numerous medical writers acknowledge the strength of such a tradition, but they often relegate the prophetic visions to the realm of pathological delusion.²² Certainly, the Spanish physicians who are more generally Galenic in their approach to melancholy support this kind of assessment.

Dramatizing a similar view of such melancholic abilities of prophecy, Tirso represents the devil's sway upon Paulo's diseased melancholy mind. Like several of the physicians, however, Tirso makes plain that God allows the devil's trickery. The devil in El condenado por desconfiado is able to influence Paulo, but only after the experience of his frightening dream, which intensifies the connection between the hermit and melancholia. Freylas, for instance, writes: “el que [tiene abundancia de] melancolia visita con los suenos los muertos, y sepulcros, y … cosas negras y tristes” (he who [has an abundance of] melancholy visits the dead in dreams, as well as graves, and … dark and sad things).²³ In addition, Murillo discusses at length the melancholy fixations and obsessions that befall an overly melancholy mind because of both fear and the devil's intervention. The effects he describes seem particularly applicable to Paulo:

Ay algunas personas tan escrupulosas por razon de la complexion melancholica, y fria, que estan dispuestas para el temor, y assi las mugeres melancholicas, y los hombres que padecen esta enfermedad estan mas sugetos a esta passion, porque el temor, y la frialdad aprietan el corazon, y de alli se dispone la imaginacion a concebir el mal que esta por venir, y por flaqueza de la cabeça quando esta con lesion, como sucede en los melancholicos, o el Demonio los despierta, y atiza, el que puede mover los humores melancholicos, con permision de Dios, y la imaginacion puede ser enganada, y tener demasiadamente alguna cosa, o por abstinencias, vigilias, y asperezas, o compania de personas escrupulosas.

(There are some persons who are so scrupulous because of their cold and melancholic makeup that they are disposed to fear. Thus many melancholic women, and the men who suffer from this disease, are quite subject to that passion, because fear and coldness press upon the heart. In this way, one's imagination is prepared to conceive some future evil. And, as happens with melancholics, either some weakness in the head as when it has been wounded, or the Devil, with God's permission, wakes and stirs in them that which can move the melancholic humors and the imagination can be deceived, putting excessive emphasis on some thing: abstinence, vigils, mortification, or the company of pious people.)²⁴

So it is that, in his monk's routine, Paulo is overly susceptible to cold fear and even more so once his body is affected by what was thought to be the cooling influence of sleep. The devil, who has received permission from “el Juez más supremo y recto” (the most supreme and just Judge [1.230]) to deceive, and thus test, Paulo, has been able to exacerbate his fearful thoughts about the future. The consequences are dire, for, not availing himself of the suggested remedies for his pathological condition—described, for example, by Murillo as confession, medical advice, and, in particular, recourse to God's grace—Paulo does not reverse the process.²⁵ The devil appeals to him through his senses in a physical visitation as well. The hermit's imagination receives this sensory information, but his overly active melancholy intellect is not able to interpret correctly the information offered. The natural tendencies he has toward pride and rumination become symptoms of his disease, and he progressively takes on more and more of the most negative qualities of pathological melancholia whose sufferers are “soberbios, altivos, renegadores, astutos, doblados, injuriosos, y amigos de hazer mal, y vengativos, y los que tienen el ingenio mas agudo, suelen ser acedos, colericos, y malcontentos” (prideful, haughty, ill-tempered, crafty, deceitful, insulting, vengeful, and fond of doing evil, and those who have the most astute wit, are usually disagreeable, angry, and malcontent).²⁶ On the authority of numerous Renaissance discussions of religious melancholy, Babb asserts: “Such [persons] often develop a dreadful melancholy which provokes them to commit monstrous crimes.”²⁷

Upon learning from the devil in angel's guise that his fate is to be that of the stranger Enrico, Paulo makes clear that he is experiencing the “impious delusions of divine favor” that many expository writers label as the devil's inspiration.²⁸ The hermit declares: “Algún divino varón, / debe de ser: ¿quién lo duda?” (He must be some saintly man, / who can doubt it? [1.289-91]), and “¡Gran santo debe de ser! / Lleno de contento estoy” (He must be a great saint! / I am full of happiness [1.321-22]). His statement about contentment should, of course, be taken ironically, since his words and behavior provide evidence instead of his religious melancholia. La Puerta de la Mar, the site to which Paulo is directed in order to observe Enrico, is, moreover, symbolically linked to melancholy through connection with Saturn and one of his realms of influence, the sea. It also recalls the “puertas del profundo” that Paulo earlier dreaded.

The result of the devil's message is in the short run a more hopeful, though deluded, discourse on Paulo's part, rhetoric that lasts only until he observes Enrico and learns that this man is a hardened criminal with a record of multiple crimes. Other melancholy symptoms then begin to become evident in Paulo's demeanor. Abandoning all hope of salvation, he yields to the more violent side of his melancholy nature and suffers alternations between the so-called hot and cold characteristics that the pathological melancholic can experience as a consequence of a strong show of emotion. The result is a series of alternating cycles of violence, overwhelming fear, and incapacitating sadness that plague him during the rest of the play. The fires of hell which Paulo anticipates thus correspond to the more manic and violent activities upon which he embarks, though he heads for the mountains, made of earth and therefore symbolic of melancholy. He declares to Pedrisco: “En el monte hay bandoleros: / bandolero quiero ser” (In the mountains there are bandits: / I want to be a bandit [1.979-80]), adding further that in comparison to Enrico “[t]an malo tengo de ser / como él, y peor si puedo” (I want to be as bad / as he, and worse if I am able [1.984-85]). The inner heat of his agitated pathological adust state is apparent and he exclaims at one point: “Rayo del mundo he de ser” (I will become a thunderbolt of the world [1.998]), while at another, “Fuego por la vista exhalo” (I exhale fire through my eyes [2.1427]). He likewise continues to express his pride, describing the course his villainy will take: “Más que la Naturaleza / he de hacer por cobrar fama” (In order to gain fame / I must outdo Nature [2.1438-39]).

Following his intentions to lead the evil life that corresponds to the eternal damnation he expects, Paulo dramatizes the perversion of his will's action by means of his unhealthy intellect. He never completely relents in his certainty of condemnation and proves that his melancholy susceptibility to the devil's suggestion is more profound than is his faith in God's grace. He listens to but does not believe the angelic messenger sent to advise him to repent and accept God's forgiveness. Paulo's adherence to a conviction that his fate is predetermined is, of course, an unacceptable stance from the point of view of the Zumelian theology that Tirso follows.²⁹ The potential for physiological determinism inherent in humoralism is likewise rejected by the ethical notions of the physicians writing on melancholy, for measures to relieve the various melancholy disorders are nearly always aimed at restoring the patient to a state of balance (Huarte, of course, is a notable exception), physically and mentally, and overcoming the effects of the offending humor. Indeed, the humoral tendencies that render Paulo prone to melancholic despair, criminality, emotional imbalance, and excessive pride are aspects of his personality which Renaissance medicine teaches can be controlled. As Tirso presents him, then, there is no reason to assume that Paulo is inherently unable to break out of his cycle of religious melancholy. It is, however, a mistake to assume that the hermit needs merely to exercise reason's control over his passions, for like other melancholy characters in Spain's Golden Age, Paulo is a figure whose thought process is depicted as dangerous because he thinks too much.

The ruminations of a melancholy mind that the expository writers warn against are thus very much a part of Paulo's traits. The deeper and more pathological his melancholy, the more powerful becomes his tendency to think, and the more profound becomes his despair. His arguments for turning to the life of crime that Enrico leads, for example, are evidence of his consciously made decision to do so:

si su fin he de tener, tenga su vida y sus hechos; que no es bien que yo en el mundo esté penitencia haciendo, y que él viva en la ciudad con gustos y con contentos, y que a la muerte tengamos un fin. (1.970-77)

(If I must have his end, let me have his life and deeds; for it is not right that I do penance in the world, while he lives in the city with pleasures and happiness, and that in death we have the same end.)

He pursues his goal of evil with full conviction, affirming at one point: “Pues hoy verá el cielo en mí / si en las maldades no igualo / a Enrico” (Well then today heaven will see in my actions / if I do not equal Enrico / in evil [2.1424-26]). Paulo is thus cognizant of what he does and even reasons through his rejection of salvation. His melancholy temperament, of course, predisposes him to his initial despairing reaction to the dream in his cave, but Tirso, with Renaissance sensibility, develops him as an individual whose physical and psychological natures are interdependent and whose moral shortcomings cannot be categorized as merely the results of uncontrolled emotion or weak rationality.

The other important character in El condenado por desconfiado who is portrayed within the broad context of melancholy is Enrico. He initially exhibits the extreme violence, cruelty, and treachery associated with the melancholy villains who populate so many of the Elizabethan works examined by Babb and Lyons. Enrico's characterization is manipulated by Tirso to trace this bandit's evolution from destructive behavior in the first two acts to the fearful and sad melancholy contemplation of a captured prisoner in act 3. Enrico thus provides a significant figure against which to measure Paulo. The young villain begins the play in the same sphere of violence into which the hermit moves, but at the end, he is in a frame of mind which approximates that of Paulo in his earlier ascetic existence. Paulo dramatizes the consequences of despair and religious melancholy that culminate in violence and damnation. Enrico enacts the positive outcome that remains a possibility for Paulo and for any sinner who undertakes a contemplative self-examination for the correct reasons and accepts the limitations of the human intellect in comparison with God's grace. Tirso's transvaluation of melancholy thus provides two characters whose respective melancholy imbalances lead eventually to two completely different kinds of contemplation, one that brings about the damnation of a figure of devotion and the other the salvation of a murderous criminal.

Lyons describes melancholy villains as “plotting revengers” who derive “great enjoyment from [their] villainies.” This is the case with Enrico in Tirso's play, for in act 1 he makes a festive occasion of the recounting of crimes among his band of accomplices (scene 11). Lyons further explains that “[d]isenchantment with the world and disillusionment over their failure in it are understood to make such characters amenable to any kind of villainy.”³⁰ Babb adds that in Elizabethan England writers regarded the melancholic's criminal bias as very dangerous “because melancholy sometimes endows men with great acumen, which presumably may be turned to evil uses.”³¹ Though Tirso does not refer to the birth of his bandit as having occurred under Saturn's astrological influence, as do some of the English playwrights with regard to their villainous characters,³² Enrico claims “Yo nací mal inclinado, / como se ve en los efetos / del discurso de mi vida” (I was born with bad tendencies, / as is seen in the effects / of the passage of my life [1.724-26]). Tirso nevertheless suggests the connection between Enrico's criminality and the disposition with which he is born, elements that reinforce the characteristics of Saturnine melancholy as then understood as well as the melancholic's ability to overcome such inclinations.

Enrico proceeds to deliver a long monologue on his evil deeds, which encompass his entire life: “… haciendo / travesuras cuando niño, / locuras cuando mancebo” (… committing mischief as a child, / folly as a youth [1.737-39]). During the play his sustained criminality is depicted through descriptions of his robberies, swindles, and even murders. In accord with the definitions of melancholy villains, Enrico likewise expresses his misanthropy in terms of a reaction against his failures: “Quedé pobre y sin hacienda, / y como enseñado a hacerlo, / di en robar de casa en casa” (I was left poor and without property, / and having learned how to do so, / I turned to robbing house after house [1.748-50]). His evil, like Paulo's, is also consciously undertaken, a fact that he emphasizes with such boasts as: “Por hacer mal solamente / he jurado juramentos / falsos, fingiendo quimeras” (Only in order to do evil / have I committed perjury / inventing fantastic ideas [1.828-30]). He adds further:

No digo jamás palabra si no es con un juramento, con un “pese” o un “por vida”, porque sé que ofendo al cielo. (1.844-47)

(I never say a word if it is not with a curse, with a “may the Devil take me” or “God damn me” because I know that I offend heaven.)

Enrico continues with the claim that he has never been to Mass nor, finding himself in danger, has he ever confessed “ni invocado a Dios eterno” (nor invoked the eternal God [1.851]). His rejection of good and his embrace of wrongdoing and violence are similar to the course of action the despairing Paulo will soon undertake at the end of act 1 with the determination: “Los pasos pienso seguir / de Enrico” (I plan to follow the footsteps / of Enrico [1.1010-11]).

Neither man, however, denies a belief in God. Paulo even prays “Señor, perdona / si injustamente me vengo” (Lord, forgive me / if I avenge myself unjustly [1.1002-3]), just before he heads into the mountains to become a bandolero. Enrico declares his underlying hope of eventual salvation when he addresses Paulo and chides him for his lack of faith: “Desesperación ha sido / lo que has hecho, y aun venganza / de la palabra de Dios” (What you have done / is desperate, and even vengeance, / against the word of God [2.1971-73]). He adds, furthermore:

mas siempre tengo esperanza en que tengo de salvarme; puesto que no va fundada mi esperanza en obras mías, sino en saber que se humana Dios con el más pecador, y con su piedad se salva. (2.1996-2002)

(But I always have hope that I will be saved; although my hope is not based on my works, but rather on knowing that God is humane with the greatest sinner, and through His pity he is saved.)

Tirso therefore uses his reprobate Enrico as the mouthpiece of the most positive message in the play. Through the melancholy villain, the dramatist underscores the hope for all sinners who must understand that salvation is a gift bestowed on unworthy recipients by a loving and forgiving Deity.

An important point also to be made in comparing Enrico and Paulo involves an issue addressed by the scientists and moralists who consider religious melancholy and its characteristic despair—as opposed to a genuine sense of sin—akin to the distinctions made by ascetic writers between “a positive and a negative kind of tristitia, the former leading to penance and salvation, the latter to death.”³³ This is the very issue upon which the Englishman Timothy Bright focuses in his Treatise of Melancholie and is the difference eventually enacted by Enrico and Paulo and the ends to which they progress. The lifelong criminal finally acknowledges his sins and asks for forgiveness while the one-time holy man is seen burning in the flames of hell because of his despair. Unlike Enrico, Paulo recognizes too late his error in relying solely upon his own interpretation of deceptive evidence and not enough upon God's promises.

Tirso clearly depicts a physiological and mental shift in Enrico once the young man is apprehended by the authorities and put into prison for the murder of the governor. Though in the beginning of his stay in jail he exhibits more violent tendencies, even killing one of the guards and threatening his former lover with renewed abuse because she has married another rogue, his surroundings come to reflect and enhance the internal changes in him brought about by the physical conditions as well as the thoughts and emotions he is experiencing. This depiction also recalls another notion about acedia and anger. As Lyons points out, “[i]n schemes of the sins, anger was a cause of acedia.”³⁴ Her references to Chaucer and Dante call attention to two passages that seem to announce the association Tirso subtly insinuates through the feelings and behavior of Enrico. In the “Parson's Tale,” Chaucer writes: “Envye and Ire maken bitternesse in herte, which bitternesse is mooder of Accidie.”³⁵ Dante likewise pairs “l’anime de color cui vinse l’ira” (the souls of those whom anger overcame) in the Fifth Circle of Hell with those “che sospira, / e fanno pullular quest’acqua al summo” (who sigh and make the water bubble on the surface). This group explains to their observer: “Tristi fummo / nell’aere dolce che dal sol s’allegra, / portando dentro accidioso fummo” (We were sullen in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing in our hearts a sluggish smoke) and they are sunk in black sludge—an appropriate reminder of the connection between acedia and melancholy.³⁶

After his angry outbursts, Enrico finds himself removed from his cell to a deeper dungeon chamber, a place that physically intensifies a growing inner coldness that is presumably caused by the adustion of the humors from his outburst of anger, jealousy, and violence. The stage directions indicate that he is now in “Un calabozo” (a dungeon [p. 180]), and whereas he had earlier shared a cell with Pedrisco (now a member of Paulo's band of marauders) Enrico is, at present, in solitude. He begins scene vi with a speech that evinces his increasingly fearful melancholy state:

En lóbrega confusión ya, valiente Enrico, os veis, pero nunca desmayéis; tened fuerte corazón. (3.2232-35)

(In gloomy confusion now, brave Enrico, you find yourself, but do not lose heart; keep a strong heart.)

Almost immediately he hears the voice of the devil, who chooses this moment, when Enrico is his most melancholically contemplative and suggestive, to try to win another victory by delusion and persuasion. Enrico's initial reaction is one of heightened fear: “Esta voz me hace temblar. / Los cabellos erizados / pronostican mi temor” (This voice makes me tremble. / My hairs stand on end / and foretell my fear [3.2241-43]). Fear begins to dominate him, as he repeatedly makes clear: “tanto temor me da” (I am so afraid [3.2253]); “¡qué confuso abismo! / No me conozco a mí mismo, / y el corazón no reposa” (What a confusing abyss! / I do not recognize myself, / and my heart does not rest [3.2258-60]); and “Un sudor frío / por mis venas se derrama” (A cold sweat flows / through my veins [3.2271-72]). His ultimate response at this point is an intellectual one as he calls upon his own mental powers for answers: “¿Qué me dices, pensamiento?” (What do you have to say to me, thought? [3.2285]).

Unlike Paulo, who privileges the devil's messages above even those from an angelic shepherd, Enrico listens and heeds the counsel of a heavenly second voice that opposes the devil's urging to escape through an apparent breach in the prison wall. Though the bandit wavers in his decision when he learns that he will soon be hanged for his crimes, he eventually does confess his sins. His aged father Anareto rebukes him for, among other things, his “loco pensamiento” (insane thinking [3.2465]), but in the old man's presence Enrico dies a Christian death. Paulo, on the other hand, dies unconfessed and unsaved, and Pedrisco comments upon the outcome:

Las suertes fueron trocadas. Enrico, con ser tan malo, se salvó, y éste al infierno se fué por desconfiado. (3.2899-2902)

(Their fates were switched around. Enrico, although so bad, saved himself, and this one went to hell because of his lack of faith.)

Notes

1. In Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 326. See also Jean Starobinsky's discussion of St. Hildegard's writings on melancholy and original sin, in History of the Treatment of Melancholy, 35.

2. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 28.

3. Santa Cruz, “Diagnostio et cura affecctuum melancholicorum,” 35-36 and Mercado, Dialogos de Philosophia, fol. Xiiii.

4. Henryk Ziomek, A History of Spanish Golden Age Drama, 93.

5. Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 47-54; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 72. A particularly accessible sixteenth-century Spanish account of the dangers of melancholia for members of monasteries and convents written by one from their ranks is found in St. Teresa of Avila's Las fundaciones, ed. Guido Mancini (Madrid: Iter Ediciones, 1970), 86-90.

6. Standford M. Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins, 14-15.

7. Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: “Acedia” in Medieval Thought and Literature, 174-76.

8. Ibid., 170-71, 179; see also Starobinski, 31-35, 325-41 and Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 65-77, 325-41.

9. Henry W. Sullivan discusses what he considers Tirso's consistent depiction of the privileged status accorded the individual will and its freedom in the pursuit of personal goals. He asserts: “This subordination of intellect, energy and ethical nicety to the attainment of an end determined by the individual will may be termed an ethical voluntarism. … Tirsian voluntad desires ends and employs manipulative, intelligent cunning to obtain that end” (Tirso de Molina and the Drama of the Counter Reformation, 171). I would, nevertheless, argue that the intellect is not subordinated to the will in melancholy characters such as Paulo, for in Tirso's straightforward representation of the faculties of the rational soul—the reason, the memory, and the will—it is the reason or the intellect that contemplates and interprets what is good and what is evil and then informs the will of its determination. The will, which desires the good and rejects the evil, causes physical action toward the good through the sensitive passions and thus functions as the primary controlling agent in the human soul. It is, however, important to understand the essential role of the intellect in the determination of good toward which the will moves. As in all cases of melancholy, the reasoning process of the mind is disrupted in various ways, and the manipulative energies of the religious melancholic, like those of the scholar, are better understood as originating in the overly contemplative intellect. Certainly, the ends sought by Paulo are very much products of his melancholic intellect.

10. Ibid., 63.

11. Tratado, not paginated.

12. Murillo y Velarde, Aprobacion de ingenios, fols. 21v, 29r, 28r, 33v.

13. Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 19, views medicine and psychology as interconnected in the Renaissance.

14. Aprobacion de ingenios, fol. 21r.

15. Daniel Rogers, “Introduction” to El condenado por desconfiado, by Tirso de Molina, 24.

16. Tirso de Molina, El condenado por desconfiado, ed. Ciriaco Morón and Rolena Adorno, act 1, verses 1-4. Subsequent references (act and verse) will be cited in the text.

17. Aprobacion de ingenios, fol. 98v.

18. Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 48.

19. Freylas, Conocimiento, curacion y preservacion, section not paginated.

20. Aprobacion de ingenios, fols. 31r, 30r-33r.

21. Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 48-49.

22. On the supernatural powers of melancholics, see Melancholia and Depression, 325-41; on pathological delusion, see 327-28.

23. Conocimiento, curacion y preservacion, section not paginated.

24. Aprobacion de ingenios, fols. 73v-74r.

25. Ibid., fol. 29r.

26. Ibid., fol. 38r.

27. Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 48.

28. Ibid., 49.

29. For a cogent discussion, see Sullivan, Drama of the Counter Reformation, 13-69.

30. Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, 23, 35.

31. Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 84.

32. Some of the examples of this practice are noted in Babb, Elizabethan Malady, and include Robert Greene's Duke Valdracko in Planetomachia and Conrade in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. See Babb's discussion of melancholy villains (85-91).

33. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 68; see also Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 52.

34. Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, 63.

35. In The Canterbury Tales, ed. A. C. Cawley, 575.