Todd, 'Galien: L'ame et ses passions (Les passions et les erreurs de l'ame; Les facultes de l'ame suivent les temperaments du corps)', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9508
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9508-todd-galien
@@@@95.9.2, Barras et al., trans., Galien: L'ame et ses passions
Vincent Barras, Terpsichore Birchler, Anne-France Morand
(trans.), Galien: L'ame et ses passions (Les passions et les
erreurs de l'ame; Les facultes de l'ame suivent les temperaments
du corps). Paris: Societe d'edition Les Belles Lettres,
1995. Pp. lxviii + 155. FF 130. ISBN 2-251-33962-4.
Reviewed by Robert B. Todd -- University of British Columbia
bobtodd@unixg.ubc.ca
The works translated here are (in their official Latin titles)
the De propriorum animi cuiuslibet affectuum dignotione et
curatione (An. Aff.), the De animi cuiuslibet
peccatorum dignotione et medela (An. Pecc.) (both
translated from De Boer's edition at CMG V.4.1.1), and the
Quod animi mores corporis temperamenta sequantur
(QAM) (translated from Mueller's Teubner text in
Galenus: Scripta Minora, II [Leipzig, 1891; repr. 1967]).
They are put into clear and vigorous French in a series aimed at
a non-specialist readership. An. Aff. and An.
Pecc. have long been available in an English translation by
P. Harkins, Galen: On the Passions and Errors of the Soul
(Columbus, 1963), while QAM still regrettably awaits its
first English version.
The first two works deal with therapy for the "passions and
errors of the soul", and contain some lively and engaging
material, not only in descriptions of specific cases needing
therapy (notably the vivid anecdote at Ann. Aff. 4 which,
like others, shows that Galen would have made a fine novelist),
but also in the famous autobiographical digression (An.
Aff. ch. 8) in which he compares his irascible mother to
Xanthippe. An. Aff. also contains some less inviting
methodological material, and An. Pecc. is sometimes hard
going since it reflects Galen's epistemological position,
typically developed in a polemical and reactive way.
QAM is to a large extent an anthology of passages
culled from Plato, Aristotle, and Hippocrates to support his (far
from clear) position on psychophysical causation. Although
elementary, and protreptic, it is more scholastic than the other
two works. It is the subject of a penetrating analysis by G.E.R.
Lloyd (rightly noted in this volume) in the proceedings of the
third Colloquium Galenicum (Le opere psicologiche di
Galeno, edd. P. Manuli and M. Vegetti [Naples, 1988], 11-42).
This collection will be worth consulting even by specialists.
The introduction (xxvii-lii) and notes (117-127) are brief but
useful, and the select bibliography (129-132) is admirably
comprehensive and up to date, although restricted to the subject
matter of the treatises translated. (But now that ANRW
II.37.1 and 2 are out, Galenic bibliography is no longer a
problem.) The programmatic preface by Jean Starobinski
(vii-xxvi) magisterially reviews the way that Galen's
intellectually complex identity was simplified into a scholastic
medical system over the centuries. That complexity is emerging
in recent scholarship through efforts to locate Galen in the
broader culture of his time, the so-called Second Sophistic.
(P.A. Brunt at BICS 39 [1994] 25-52 may be able to dismiss
the identification of Galen as a sophistes, but his narrow
claims about professional identity need not preclude Galen's
having wider affinities with contemporary culture.) Starobinski
has insightful remarks on this theme at pp. xx-xxiii, and
particularly on Galen's use of discourse in therapy. (On
discourse and its conventions in the technical area of anatomical
researches see now H. von Staden, "Anatomy as Rhetoric: Galen on
Dissection and Persuasion," Journal of the History of Medicine
and Allied Sciences, 50 [1995], 47-66.)
In a work designed for a wide audience we cannot expect
discussions of the text. The notes indicate problematical loci
only in general terms, although the authoritative note at 118 n.
10 on issues in the manuscript tradition suggest that the authors
have deliberately held their fire in this area. Even so, I would
have liked some indication of supplements to the text; angle
brackets are used only to identify proposed lacunae. While many
of the unidentified supplements are admittedly of limited
significance, at one place (QAM p. 44.12-13) this practice
conceals from readers who might compare the Greek text an issue
of some historical importance. Here the Teubner text has a
reference to the important Peripatetic Andronicus of Rhodes in
angle brackets to indicate its presence only in the Aldine
edition. But as Paul Moraux (Der Aristotelismus bei den
Griechen, I [Berlin, 1976], 134 n. 9) showed, this supplement
can be confidently included in the text on the basis of the
Arabic tradition. (Since the authors mention at p. liv some of
the manuscripts of QAM, I might add that in the same note
Moraux also refers to a manuscript of this work not used by the
Teubner editors, Vindob. phil. gr. 330, s. xvi, fols. 250r-279v.
Another manuscript of QAM neglected by them is reported in
the fiches published by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies [Greek Index Project Series 3 (Toronto 1990), fiche 003,
p. L06]: Zeitz, Stiftsbibliothek, ms. gr. 66, s. xvi, fols.
100-116.)
The translation is, as I have said, clear and effective
(although it might have been divided into shorter paragraphs and
employed subheadings), and is usefully supported by a lengthy
indexed glossary (139-155) (although the latter's references to
pages makes the task of searching for terms a little difficult).
I have problems with the translation of some terms in
epistemology and methodology. "Obscur" for adelos
(usually "non-evident" in English discourse) is a bit misleading.
And endeixis at p. 54 (= V.75 K) as "exposition"
("exposition [de l'argument]" in the Glossary at 144) is perhaps
unhelpful; in the context it is contrasted with argument by
"demonstration" (apodeixis), or deductive reasoning, and a
Romance language could, like English, have used a form derived
from the traditional Latin term "indicatio". That would
certainly ring louder bells with readers already acquainted with
Galenic methodology where the term refers technically to the
inference from perception to unobservables. (On endeixis
see the proceedings of the 2nd. Galen Symposium, Galen's
Method of Healing [Leiden, 1991], where R. Durling at 112-113
notes the ancestry of the Latin equivalent "indicatio".)
In An. Pecc. and especially in QAM the phrase
ta enarges phainomena (usually "phenomenes
evidents" in this version, although "evidence manifeste" at p.
54) is widely used. This identifies (though elliptically in
these treatises) Galen's Stoicising version of the criterion of
truth. I would note that the phrase is also used frequently by
Posidonius, and it is surely his use of it in various contexts
that Galen is reflecting. The topic needs further discussion,
but for now see I.G. Kidd's remarks on Posidonius at
Posidonius: Vol. II, The Commentary (Cambridge, 1988), p.
74.
Finally, QAM, it should be stressed, was a work that
just through its title defined for later philosophers a crude
humorial determinism that could be easily dismissed. The Teubner
editors briefly noted the diffusion of the title in their
Praefatio (p. xxxiii), and I have discussed its presence in
Aristotelian commentaries on the discussion of psychophysical
causation at Aristotle, de anima 403a19-24; see
Symbolae Osloenses 52 (1977) 123-128, and cf. Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 38 (1984) 110. Perhaps the moral here is that
Galen may have suffered the penalty of writing too accessible a
treatise.
But all in all this is a valuable addition to the corpus of
introductory literature on Galen, and an excellent companion to
the late Paul Moraux's Galien de Pergame: Souvenirs d'un
medicin published in 1985 by the same house in another of its
innumerable series. Anglophone scholars should be inspired to
emulate their Francophone, not to mention Italian, colleagues in
making Galen similarly accessible to a wider audience in fresh
translations that draw on a growing and revisionary body of
secondary literature.