来而不往非礼也:论英国中世纪道德剧《每个人》的生死学

Voluntary Exchange:The Concept of Salvation in Everyman

本文以英国中世纪道德剧《每个人》的生死议题为引子,以新历史主义的研究方法探讨当时英国城市生活的社会经济面及15世纪末、16世纪初西欧基督教教会的腐败与宗教改革运动。《每个人》的剧作家借由戏剧批判每个人、有钱人、基督徒、少壮青年错误的金钱观以及教会神职人员的贪婪,进而凸显每个人不可不知的救赎经济学。剧作家以经济学礼尚往来的道理提醒每个人正视死亡的真相,以寻索在现世存活的意义。这样投机却务实的生死学在什么样的物质条件下产生?由谁发声?由谁主导?由谁建构?透过找寻可能答案的探索,或许我们将更加能理解这个剧本的历史意义及剧作家以戏剧文学方式批判15世纪末英国中产阶级(社会上层)商人贪婪及教会拜金的动机与时代意义。在21世纪中国台湾地区这个异教的语境里,生命救赎与个人政经地位、财富多寡、宗教信仰、年龄、性别、职业及教育有关吗?如果答案是肯定的,何以使然?本文所论述的《每个人》剧中的财富与善终的议题希望可以给读者提供一些省思。

This paper argues that for the dramatist of Everyman and his Tudor audiences Everyman's fear of death and love for wealth awakened a sense of the cultural and historically contingent construction of the economy of salvation in a world of merchant capitalism.Taking the morality play as a resonant display of social discontent,this paper poses a series of questions concerning wealth:What should Everyman do with his money to save his soul?What is at stake for him to balance his account?How were medieval merchants'daily acts of bookkeeping formed and transformed?What cultural and material conditions made possible Everyman's reckoning?What were the feelings of those who originally held the account books,cherished them,collected them,and possessed them in the late medieval and early Tudor England?What is the meaning of"our"relationship to Everyman's anxiety of death as displayed in the morality play,and on this day?In light of Stephen Greenblatt's new historicism,I aim to recover as far as possible the historical circumstances of medieval merchants'bookkeeping and to analyze their concept of donation between these circumstances and our own.To be precise,we will situate the morality play in relation to other representative practices of commerce operative in the culture of Tudor England in both its history and our own.