Hillman's provocation here cuts against something deeply inherited. The manic defense against depression is not a personal failure; it is structural — the soul's version of a very old promise that if you move fast enough, ascend high enough, produce enough, the weight will lift. Productivity, optimism, self-improvement, even spiritual practice can each become what he is naming: a resurrection strategy, a refusal to let the descent complete itself. The Christian psychology he identifies is not about belief; it is about the grammar of repair — the assumption that being down is a problem to be solved rather than a movement to be followed.

What he asks is harder than it sounds. To be true to depression means not treating it as a malfunction of the spirit awaiting correction, but as the soul doing something — limiting, focusing, pulling downward toward what weight and gravity have always indicated: the real. The dry soul he is reaching toward with that phrase goes back past his own sources; wetness here is not sadness but dissolution, the kind of easy fluidity that moves along the surface and never encounters the specific. Depression introduces the specific. It insists on particularity, on this life, this body, this constraint — which is exactly what the resurrective impulse is designed to dissolve into hope.