Care of the soul requires acceptance of all this dying. The temptation is to champion our familiar ideas about life right up to the last second, but it may be necessary in the end to give them up, to enter into the movement of death. If the symptom is felt as the sense that life is over, and that there's no use in going on, then an affirmative approach to this feeling might be a conscious, artful giving-in to the emotions and thoughts of ending that depression has stirred up. Nicholas of Cusa, certainly one of the most profound theologians of the Renaissance, tells how he was on a journey, on a ship in fact, when the realization dawned on him in a visionary way that we should acknowledge our ignorance of the most profound things. Discovering that we do not know who God is and what life is all about, he says, is the learning of ignorance, ignorance about the very meaning and value of our lives. This is a starting point for a more grounded, open-ended kind of knowledge that never closes up in fixed opinions. Using his favorite metaphors from geometry, he says that if full knowledge about the very base of our existence could be described as a circle, the best we can do is to arrive at a polygon-something short of sure knowledge. The emptiness and dissolution of meaning that are often present in depression show how attached we can become to our ways of understanding and explaining our lives. Often our personal philosophies and our values seem to be all too neatly wrapped, leaving little room for mystery. Depression comes along then and opens up a hole. Ancient astrologers imagined Saturn as the most remote planet, far out in cold and empty space. Depression makes holes in our theories and assumptions, but even this painful process can be honored as a necessary and valuable source of healing.
— Thomas Moore
Moore is tracking something precise here, and it resists the consolation he almost offers. Depression, on this reading, is not an illness to be cured but a geometric correction — the polygon arriving to replace the circle we pretended to have. Nicholas of Cusa's ship-vision is well chosen: he did not receive the revelation in a library or a chapel, but mid-crossing, between shores, which is where ignorance tends to become undeniable.
The harder edge of this passage is the word "affirmative." Moore is not asking for acceptance in the therapeutic sense, the sense that eventually permits you to feel better. He is asking for something closer to cooperation — a conscious, artful giving-in to the thoughts of ending that depression surfaces. What ends, specifically, is the personal philosophy that was too neatly wrapped. The soul, it turns out, had been living inside an explanation of itself, and the explanation was the problem. Saturn does not arrive as punishment; he arrives as the outermost planet, the one farthest from the warm organizing center, and what he discloses is how much of what felt like knowledge was really just the refusal to remain uncertain.
The hole depression opens is not a wound to be closed. It is the polygon insisting on its own shape.
Thomas Moore·Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide·1992