|
Darrera modificació: 2024-12-26
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Ford, Jack, "Healthy Body, Healthy Mind: Eucrasia and Sanitas in the Medical Approaches to Affectivity of William of Saint-Thierry and Richard of Saint-Victor", Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, 73 (2023), 47-100.
- Resum
- This essay examines how Greco-Arabic medicine is used in the writings of William of Saint-Thierry (1080?-1148) and Richard of Saint-Victor (d. 1173) to complement Cistercian and Victorine understandings of affectivity, that is, how the emotional faculty of the soul (affectus) ordered human affections and actions toward God. In William's De natura corporis et animae (On the Nature of the Body and the Soul), composed around 1140, and Richard's De statu interioris hominis (On the State of the Inner Man), written in the early 1160s, the medical terms eucrasia (‘good complexion') and sanitas (‘health'), I argue, have been underexplored. These terms are used not only in their natural philosophical context to denote the proportionate mixtures of the elements, humours and spirits, but are also employed in these psychological treatises to complement Cistercian and Victorine explanations of healthy affective and rational dispositions of the soul. This was no empty symbolism. For both writers, a healthy body makes a healthy mind. Closer inspection reveals that these terms are present not just in treatises De anima but that speculation on the soul complemented William and Richard's pedagogy and mysticism, as is clear in the Speculum fidei (The Mirror of Faith) and De duodecim patriarchis (On the Twelve Patriarchs). Medicine, I contend, thus had a practical use in Cistercian and Victorine life to train monks and canons as spiritual doctors, capable of diagnosing imbalances of the body and mind that stymied deeper affective and contemplative relationships with God. This ‘medical affectivity' also had an extensive afterlife: being systematised by the canon Hugh of Fouilloy, and then communicated to the Franciscan theologians of the early thirteenth century by the Cistercian monk Alcher of Clairvaux.
- Matèries
- Religió - Espiritualitat
Medicina
Història de la medicina
- URL
- https://www.academia.edu/108509093/Healthy_Body_Hea ...
|