文艺复兴时期对忧郁的人文主义安慰

Consolations for melancholy in Renaissance humanism

本文探索了忧郁在文艺复兴时期人文主义慰藉文学中的作用。开篇概括了人文主义慰藉文学的主题、手法及经典模式,特别关注人文主义慰藉文学的道德心理学,探讨了人文主义慰藉文学与圣经及基督教宗教文学的关系。中间部分转向忧郁在人文主义慰藉文学中的地位,表明尽管在很多情况下道德主义者和宗教作家不愿通过分析或治疗一种基本身体状况涉足医师的研究领域,但盖伦医学中关于情感"灵魂偶然因素"的讨论为制定和应用道德慰藉疗法治疗忧郁症提供了概念框架。在此,想象的作用至关重要:作为忧郁症中受主要影响的部分,这种心理官能既是造成忧郁症激情的主要原因,又为医师和道德主义者缓解或消除这些激情提供了机会。因此,想象处于关于忧郁的道德心理学的核心。本文在最后部分指出,罗伯特·伯顿在《忧郁的解剖》一书的"安慰性题外话"中,介绍了用道德慰藉治疗忧郁的最完整实施办法,它既融合了传统人文主义慰藉文学中丰富的道德、宗教和心理要素,又包含了许多别具一格和自相矛盾的特征。

This essay explores the role of melancholy within the consolatory literature of Renaissance humanism.It begins with a summary of the themes and methods of humanist consolationes and their classical models,with particular attention to their moral psychology,and addresses their relationship with scripture and Christian spiritual literature.It then turns to the position of melancholy within humanist consolations.It is shown that whilst in many cases moralists and spiritual writers were reluctant invade the territory of the physicians by analysing or treating a fundamentally somatic condition,discussions of the accidentia animi in Galenic medicine provided the conceptual environment within which a moral-consolatory therapy for melancholy could be formulated and applied.Here the role of the imagination was crucial:as the primarily affected part in the disease,it was the faculty of the soul that was primarily responsible for melancholic passions,but also the faculty that presented the physician and moralist with the opportunity to dispel or alleviate those passions.Hence,the imagination was at the centre of a moral psychology of melancholy.The final sections of the essay show that the fullest implementation of this approach to the treatment of melancholy was in Robert Burton’s’Consolatory Digression’in The Anatomy of Melancholy,which both synthesises the various moral,spiritual and psychological elements of the humanist consolatory tradition,and contains a number of idiosyncratic and paradoxical features.