Flight from Byzantium --- Joseph Brodsky Chapter 26
飞离拜占庭
Flight from Byzantium --- Joseph Brodsky 中文译文
飞离拜占庭 第二十六章
罗马教会被孤立的最大好处就是不服从于任何一个独立自治的国家。除了罗马教会自己，已经没有人或事可以阻碍它发展成一个明确清晰的、稳定的制度。这正是之后发生的事情。罗马法律的结合，比起在拜占庭，在罗马更严肃得被对待。罗马教会内部发展的精准逻辑逐渐演变成伦理－政治体系，而这正式所谓的西方国家和个人概念的核心。就像几乎所有的离婚案那样，拜占庭和罗马也绝对没有离得很彻底，它们仍旧有一部分财产是共有的。但总体来说，我们可以说这个西方概念绕了一大圈后又回到了原点，因为东罗马从纯概念角度而言，从来没有和西罗马有任何交集，在那个无限的困境中我们所说的，或者我们所理解的是西方基督教及其折射的世界观。
任何体系，即使是一个完全无缺的体系，它的缺点就是它到底是不是一个体系。比如，一个体系必须在定义上排斥某些东西，把它们看作异己，并尽可能把它们降低到不存在。西方基督教的系统缺陷经由罗马试炼出。这个缺陷就是在不知情的情况下减少对于邪恶的概念。对于任何事物的任何概念都是基于经验。对于西方的基督教而言，关于邪恶的经历是由罗马法律所描述 ，再加上君士坦丁之前历代君王对于基督教迫害的第一手资料的辅助。 当然，这就等于有了很多关于邪恶的资料，但这距离了解邪恶的本质还有很长一段路。西方基督教通过与拜占庭分离，将东罗马描述为不存在的地方，也因此将其自身对于人类负能量潜力的概念降低到一个危险的程度。
如今，如果一个年轻人带着一把自动来福枪爬上大学塔楼，对着行人扫射，假设他被制服了，最后带去了法院，法官会宣判此人精神不正常，把他送去精神病院里关着。但是从根本上说，这名年轻人的做法和普塞洛斯描述的对于皇家庶子的阉割并没有太大区别。这和伊朗教长屠杀一万个臣民，仅仅为了实现他理解的先知的旨意。或是大清洗过程中从朱加什维利说出的格言“和我们在一起，没有人是不可替代的。” 这些英勇事迹背后庞大的人群分母，折射的就是人命如草菅的反对个人主义概念。也就是说，如果我们只是认为每一条生命是独一无二的，那么生命是神圣的这个概念将不复存在。
我不是在断言这个概念的缺失是一个纯粹的东罗马现象。因为它并不是。所以这才尤其得可怕。但是随着西罗马基督教对于世界，法律，秩序，人类行为规范，等等诸如此类的思想的发展，考虑到它自己的发展和最终的胜利，它犯下了一个不能原谅的错误，那就是忽视了拜占庭的教训。毕竟，学习别人的错误是一条捷径。因此至今为止所有的这些日常事物可以不断给我们惊喜，因此国家和个人无法对此充分得反应。我们在他们把之前提到的现象称为精神疾病、宗教狂热，诸如此类的名称中可见一斑。
The advantage of the Roman Church’s isolation lay above all in the natural benefits to be derived from any form of autonomy. There was almost nothing and nobody, with the exception of the Roman Church itself, to prevent its developing into a defined, fixed system. Which is what indeed took place. The combination of Roman law, reckoned with more seriously in Rome than in Byzantium, and the specific logic of the Roman Church’s inner development evolved into the ethico-political system that lies at the heart of the so-called Western conception of the state and of individual being. Like almost all divorces, the one between Byzantium and Rome was by no means total; a great deal of property stayed shared. But in general one can insist that this Western conception drew around itself a kind of circle, which the East, in a purely conceptual sense, never crossed, and within whose ample bounds was elaborated what we term, or understand as, Western Christianity and the world view it implies.
The drawback of any system, even a perfect one, is that is it a system-- i.e., that it must by definition exclude certain things, regard them as alien to it, and as far as possible relegate them to the nonexistent. The drawback of the system that was worked out in Rome-- the drawback of Western Christianity-- was the unwitting reduction of its notions of evil. Any notions about anything are based on experience. For Western Christianity, the experience of evil was the experience reflected in the Roman law, with the additon of firsthand knowledge of the persecution of Christians by the emperors before Constantine. That’s a lot, of course, but it is a long way from exhausting the reality of evil. By divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity consigned the East to nonexistence, and thus reduced its own notion of human negative potential to a considerable, perhaps even a perilous, degree.
Today, if a young man climbs up a university tower with an automatic rifle and starts spraying passersby, a judge-- this is assuming, of course, that the young man has been disarmed and brought to court-- will class him as mentally disturbed and lock him up in a mental institution. Yet in essence the behavior of that young man cannot be distinguished from the castration of the royal by-blow as related by Psellus. Nor can it be told apart from the Iranian Imam’s butchering tens of thousands of his subjects in order to confirm his version of the will of the Prophet. Or from Dzhugashvili’s maxim, uttered in the course of the Great Terror, that “with us, no one is irreplaceable.” The common denominator of all these deeds is the anti-individualistic notion that human life is essentially nothing-- i.e., the absence of the idea that human life is sacred, if only because each life is unique.
I am far from asserting that the absence of this concept is a purely Eastern phenomenon; it is not, and that is what’s inded scary. But Western Christianity, along with developing all its ensuing ideas about the world, law, order, the norms of human behavior, and so forth, made the unforgivable error of neglecting, for the sake of its own growth and eventual triumph , the experience supplied by Byzantium. After all, that was a shortcut. Hence all these daily-- by now-- occurrences that surprise us so much; hence that inability on the part of states and individuals to react to them adequately, which shows itself in their dubbing the aforementioned phenomena mantal illness, religious fanaticism, and whatnot.
Hence all these daily-- by now-- occurrences that surprise us so much; hence that inability on the part of states and individuals to react to them adequately, which shows itself in their dubbing the aforementioned phenomena mantal illness, religious fanaticism, and whatnot.
这句有点看不懂。。。和上文关系更是没有弄清楚。于是自己猜了一下。。。
恳请指正。
Flight from Byzantium --- Joseph Brodsky 中文译文
飞离拜占庭 第二十六章
罗马教会被孤立的最大好处就是不服从于任何一个独立自治的国家。除了罗马教会自己，已经没有人或事可以阻碍它发展成一个明确清晰的、稳定的制度。这正是之后发生的事情。罗马法律的结合，比起在拜占庭，在罗马更严肃得被对待。罗马教会内部发展的精准逻辑逐渐演变成伦理－政治体系，而这正式所谓的西方国家和个人概念的核心。就像几乎所有的离婚案那样，拜占庭和罗马也绝对没有离得很彻底，它们仍旧有一部分财产是共有的。但总体来说，我们可以说这个西方概念绕了一大圈后又回到了原点，因为东罗马从纯概念角度而言，从来没有和西罗马有任何交集，在那个无限的困境中我们所说的，或者我们所理解的是西方基督教及其折射的世界观。
任何体系，即使是一个完全无缺的体系，它的缺点就是它到底是不是一个体系。比如，一个体系必须在定义上排斥某些东西，把它们看作异己，并尽可能把它们降低到不存在。西方基督教的系统缺陷经由罗马试炼出。这个缺陷就是在不知情的情况下减少对于邪恶的概念。对于任何事物的任何概念都是基于经验。对于西方的基督教而言，关于邪恶的经历是由罗马法律所描述 ，再加上君士坦丁之前历代君王对于基督教迫害的第一手资料的辅助。 当然，这就等于有了很多关于邪恶的资料，但这距离了解邪恶的本质还有很长一段路。西方基督教通过与拜占庭分离，将东罗马描述为不存在的地方，也因此将其自身对于人类负能量潜力的概念降低到一个危险的程度。
如今，如果一个年轻人带着一把自动来福枪爬上大学塔楼，对着行人扫射，假设他被制服了，最后带去了法院，法官会宣判此人精神不正常，把他送去精神病院里关着。但是从根本上说，这名年轻人的做法和普塞洛斯描述的对于皇家庶子的阉割并没有太大区别。这和伊朗教长屠杀一万个臣民，仅仅为了实现他理解的先知的旨意。或是大清洗过程中从朱加什维利说出的格言“和我们在一起，没有人是不可替代的。” 这些英勇事迹背后庞大的人群分母，折射的就是人命如草菅的反对个人主义概念。也就是说，如果我们只是认为每一条生命是独一无二的，那么生命是神圣的这个概念将不复存在。
我不是在断言这个概念的缺失是一个纯粹的东罗马现象。因为它并不是。所以这才尤其得可怕。但是随着西罗马基督教对于世界，法律，秩序，人类行为规范，等等诸如此类的思想的发展，考虑到它自己的发展和最终的胜利，它犯下了一个不能原谅的错误，那就是忽视了拜占庭的教训。毕竟，学习别人的错误是一条捷径。因此至今为止所有的这些日常事物可以不断给我们惊喜，因此国家和个人无法对此充分得反应。我们在他们把之前提到的现象称为精神疾病、宗教狂热，诸如此类的名称中可见一斑。
The advantage of the Roman Church’s isolation lay above all in the natural benefits to be derived from any form of autonomy. There was almost nothing and nobody, with the exception of the Roman Church itself, to prevent its developing into a defined, fixed system. Which is what indeed took place. The combination of Roman law, reckoned with more seriously in Rome than in Byzantium, and the specific logic of the Roman Church’s inner development evolved into the ethico-political system that lies at the heart of the so-called Western conception of the state and of individual being. Like almost all divorces, the one between Byzantium and Rome was by no means total; a great deal of property stayed shared. But in general one can insist that this Western conception drew around itself a kind of circle, which the East, in a purely conceptual sense, never crossed, and within whose ample bounds was elaborated what we term, or understand as, Western Christianity and the world view it implies.
The drawback of any system, even a perfect one, is that is it a system-- i.e., that it must by definition exclude certain things, regard them as alien to it, and as far as possible relegate them to the nonexistent. The drawback of the system that was worked out in Rome-- the drawback of Western Christianity-- was the unwitting reduction of its notions of evil. Any notions about anything are based on experience. For Western Christianity, the experience of evil was the experience reflected in the Roman law, with the additon of firsthand knowledge of the persecution of Christians by the emperors before Constantine. That’s a lot, of course, but it is a long way from exhausting the reality of evil. By divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity consigned the East to nonexistence, and thus reduced its own notion of human negative potential to a considerable, perhaps even a perilous, degree.
Today, if a young man climbs up a university tower with an automatic rifle and starts spraying passersby, a judge-- this is assuming, of course, that the young man has been disarmed and brought to court-- will class him as mentally disturbed and lock him up in a mental institution. Yet in essence the behavior of that young man cannot be distinguished from the castration of the royal by-blow as related by Psellus. Nor can it be told apart from the Iranian Imam’s butchering tens of thousands of his subjects in order to confirm his version of the will of the Prophet. Or from Dzhugashvili’s maxim, uttered in the course of the Great Terror, that “with us, no one is irreplaceable.” The common denominator of all these deeds is the anti-individualistic notion that human life is essentially nothing-- i.e., the absence of the idea that human life is sacred, if only because each life is unique.
I am far from asserting that the absence of this concept is a purely Eastern phenomenon; it is not, and that is what’s inded scary. But Western Christianity, along with developing all its ensuing ideas about the world, law, order, the norms of human behavior, and so forth, made the unforgivable error of neglecting, for the sake of its own growth and eventual triumph , the experience supplied by Byzantium. After all, that was a shortcut. Hence all these daily-- by now-- occurrences that surprise us so much; hence that inability on the part of states and individuals to react to them adequately, which shows itself in their dubbing the aforementioned phenomena mantal illness, religious fanaticism, and whatnot.
Hence all these daily-- by now-- occurrences that surprise us so much; hence that inability on the part of states and individuals to react to them adequately, which shows itself in their dubbing the aforementioned phenomena mantal illness, religious fanaticism, and whatnot.
这句有点看不懂。。。和上文关系更是没有弄清楚。于是自己猜了一下。。。
恳请指正。
