GERSON, JEAN. - Theologian and chancellor of the University of Paris, b. 14 Dec. 1363 in the hamlet of Gerson (whence he took his name) in the village of Barby (county of Réthe, diocese of Reims), d. at Lyon on 12 July 1429.
The firstborn son of a peasant of Champagne, he entered the College of Navarre in Paris in 1377 as a scholarship holder. Magister artium in 1382, G. began his theological studies under the direction of masters such as Laurent de Chavanges, Gilles des Champs, Henri d'Oyta, Henry of Langenstein and Peter of Ailly, who took him under his protection. His activity began with Septuagesima Sunday of 1388, when he displayed his talent as an orator with a remarkable Latin sermon at the College of Navarre. From May to July 1388 he was part of the university embassy, led by Peter of Ailly, which at Avignon, before Clement VII, dealt with the condemnation of John of Montson, who had declared the Immaculate Conception contrary to the faith. Later, on 8 Dec. 1401, G. delivered an important French sermon, Tota pulchra es, in favor of the Immaculate Conception, and took an interest in the reinstatement of the Dominicans at the University in 1403.
Beginning in 1388 G. held two courses on the Bible, then commented on the Sentences. On 18 Dec. 1392 he obtained the licentiate in theology and, probably in 1394, the doctorate. Until the question of the authenticity of the schematic commentary on the Sentences, which the manuscript of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris (lat. 15156) attributes to G., is resolved, too much will remain unknown to be able to define G.'s initial theses and doctrinal affiliations. There is not much information about the exact nature of the theological doctrines then proposed at Paris, about the real influence and the personality of Ockham himself, a passionate dialectician rather than a builder of systems. If Peter of Ailly seems to have willingly yielded to this influence, G. cannot be considered as a link between Ockham and Luther. His epistemology and his psychology bear the imprint of Neoplatonism and of the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius. The voluntarism of G.'s moral theology is difficult to interpret and may find its place in the Bonaventuran current. His observations on justification and predestination are made according to the distinction classical, for the theologians of the time, between potentia Dei absoluta and ordinata. Another neuralgic point is Gerson's attitude regarding the value of the elements of the sacrament of Penance. If G. regarded with admiration the Ockhamist acuteness on the divine ideas, he nevertheless returned to the Augustinian tradition. Beyond the speculative intemperance of the formalizantes such as John of Ripa or Louis of Padua, he sought to recover the solid doctrine of St. Bonaventure and of St. Thomas Aquinas.
At the beginning of his career and even before he was licensed in theology and elected chancellor, between 1390 and 1394, G. delivered many sermons in French at court, in which he strove to interest the ruling classes in a peaceful solution of the schism, to turn them away from an exclusively Clementine policy, to avoid unfortunate initiatives or to set aside certain practical obstacles. In 1393 he became first almoner of the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, who had acquired a preponderant role in French politics after the first crisis of madness of the young King Charles VI, which occurred on 5 Aug. 1392.
The pope of Avignon, Benedict XIII, appointed G., on 13 Apr. 1395, chancellor of Notre-Dame and of the University of Paris. The moment was extremely important. It could be hoped that Benedict XIII would accept the solution of which G. was a partisan (De schismate). Faced with the Pontiff's reticence, the chancellor showed considerable impatience, but remained hostile to the aggressive attitude of certain university circles and, although he intervened with pamphlets and consultations, refused to take part in the withdrawal of obedience toward Benedict XIII, which was voted by the Council of Paris (14 May-18 July 1398).
Having become dean of St. Donatian at Bruges, G. resided in that city for three months, at the end of 1396, and a second time for two months at the beginning of 1398. But in Paris, while continuing to preach moral and social reform at court, he manifested his powerful renewing mentality by professing, alongside his normal courses, a series of lectures on the spiritual life. Peter of Ailly, having become bishop of Cambrai, sat at the feet of the chair of his former pupil. G. conceived his work in the form of a trilogy often interrupted and whose integral parts have been arbitrarily dissociated by editors: first, the birth and development of the spiritual life (De vita spirituali animae), then the various movements of this divinized life (De impulsibus), finally its perfection under the name of contemplation (De mystica theologia). The historical interpretation that saw in G. the prototype of those spirits of the end of the 14th century who would belatedly seek intellectual equilibrium in an infra-rational mysticism is entirely outdated. Mysticism was rather for G. the normal crowning of an edifice with secure foundations. If by its very nature the intellectual way helps one to enter into intimate contact with God, it is nonetheless the affective way that introduces one into this contact. The difficulties that G. encountered at the beginning of his office perhaps contributed, thanks to his stays at Bruges, to hastening an evolution that other causes had determined. Nevertheless, in the present state of research, it appears that G. was above all a theologian concerned with synthesizing and placing at the service of all souls the doctrine of the great contemplatives.
During the first quarter of 1399, G. undoubtedly sent to a Carthusian of Hérinnes, Bartholomew Clantier, a letter of direction on John van Ruysbroeck's De ornatu spiritualium nuptiarum, whose unforeseen publication in the Opera omnia offered, much later, a fundamental document in the age-old polemic between theologians and mystics. But, for its author, this hasty text did not have such importance. On March 27, very probably, G. delivered in Paris, within the cycle of his university sermons for Holy Thursday, an important discourse for his cosmic mysticism. From June 4, 1399 to Sept. 21, 1400 he stayed at Bruges, where he composed, for his sisters, several French opuscules, among them La mendicité spirituelle and La montagne de contemplation. He began to comment on the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius, drew up plans for reform concerning the teaching of theology, and while he was resolving to abandon his office he fell ill. Once recovered, he returned to Paris, where in 1401 he composed the De distinctione verarum visionum a falsis, and, in 1402, his De parvulis ad Christum trahendis, capital for the history of pedagogy. His French preaching then turned to the people, although he did not become curate of St-Jean-en-Grève until 1408. He invites these simple hearers of his to the contemplative life also with the sermon Videmus of May 21, 1402. Three days earlier he had, in his famous Vision against the Roman de la rose, put this naturalistic doctrine on trial, abstaining from any direct allusion to works and persons. This episode is very well known to the general public, but in part distorted. In fact it is now certain that in the polemic that opposed Christine de Pizan to Gontier Col and Jean de Montreuil, G. was not the notable clerc of the first conversations, of whom Christine indeed speaks. The intervention of Pierre Col, canon of Paris, in favor of the Roman, decided G., in Oct. 1402, to a private warning. Faced with the obstinacy of this ecclesiastic he insisted, on Dec. 24, in his fourth discourse Poenitemini, on a formal condemnation, which had been more laconic on the 17th. But this condemnation struck only the final part of the Roman since, being a poet, G. had not been insensitive to the beauty of the whole. This intervention seems to have borne its fruits in Jean de Montreuil himself, who was by no means a rebel who despised a possible narrowness of spirit in G. Nourished on classical works, the chancellor was in reality regarded as a master by this humanist and by many others. The fact is rich in historical significance. Placing himself clearly in the tradition of the Ciceronian theme already modified by St. Augustine: Vir Christianus dicendi peritus, G. adapts it, in a wholly original and significant way, to the spirituality of his age: Vir Christianus in sacris litteris eruditus. This new formula directs the evolution of French humanism during the 15th and 16th centuries to such a point that, through a clear line of dependencies, it will find its surest demonstration in the work of Guillaume Budé.
The period 1402-1403 is characterized by intense activity. On Nov. 8, the two Lectiones contra vanam curiositatem in negotio fidei define G.'s position regarding the technical problems of the school. Faithful to the spirit of St. Bernard, the chancellor set out to bring back to the sobriety of the Christian faith the speculative intemperance that was raging at the University of Paris. Between Oct. 1402 and the end of March 1403 the Trilogus in materia schismatis developed the thesis of the restoration of obedience. Simultaneously he developed the third part of his trilogy on the spiritual life: the De mystica theologia speculativa whose 41st consideration grants the nihil obstat to the mysticism of Ruysbroeck. With the first Sunday of Advent 1402 there also began the continuous series of French sermons Poenitemini et credite evangelio, of a great moral density (thirteen of them survive), plus the great French Passion sermon for Good Friday Ad Deum vadit, which is its crowning piece.
A new important moment in G.'s life began with the restoration of obedience to Benedict XIII, which was celebrated by the chancellor in Paris on 4 June 1403. On 9 Nov., at Marseille, he offered the repentant University's homage to the Pope. On 1 Jan. 1404, at Tarascon, he set out a program of reforms that is not lacking in boldness. Having become a member of the Chapter of Notre-Dame of Paris on 28 Jan. 1404, he defended the honor of the University against Charles of Savoisy on 19 July. On 7 Nov. 1405, before the court, but in the absence of the ailing King, he delivered the most famous of his speeches, the Vivat rex, directed in part against the tyranny of the Duke of Orléans. Nevertheless it is inaccurate to think that G. expressed ideas that authorized revolt and prepared the way for tyrannicide, and that he then renounced them. The Decem considerationes principibus utilissimae*, on which people relied for a long time, are an apocryphal and tendentious work! G. was too moderate to embrace the revolutionary theories of an Occam or a Marsilius of Padua.
During 1407 he devoted himself above all to the affairs of the schism. Having been designated, together with Pierre d'Ailly, as a member of the embassy that was to negotiate the meeting of the two Popes at Savona, he delivered in French at Notre-Dame, on 18 March, a farewell speech, Vade in pace, in which he gives useful advice to the embassy. This achieved no result either at Marseille or in Italy. Having withdrawn to Genoa, the chancellor there composed, from Sept. to Nov., the practical part of his treatise De mystica theologia, which was published, complete, around Easter 1408. Responding to the appeal of the Archbishop of Reims, he opened, on 4 May, the Council of that province and delivered there two sermons on the duties of prelates and of priests in general.
Meanwhile, on 23 Nov. 1407, in Paris, John the Fearless had had the Duke of Orléans assassinated. On 8 March the criminal found his apologist in the person of the theologian Jean Petit. Since G. clearly condemned the theory of tyrannicide upheld by Petit only in 1413, this delay has been judged very severely, but there are reasons to excuse it.
The sermon Veniat pax closed the fourth assembly of the clergy of France. G. had shown himself very moderate, although, disappointed by the most recent policy of the popes, he had clearly noted the lively reaction of French circles against Benedict XIII, who had excommunicated Charles VI. In this period of French neutrality, he avoided every excessive measure and argument. He did not attend the Council of Pisa, but in 1409 he began the composition of the treatise on the unity of the Church. Between 5 June and 8 July he completed it with the inquiry entitled De auferibilitate papae ab Ecclesia, in which, seized by the fear of the impossibility of overcoming the schism, he set out his conciliarist theories. From 31 July to 5 Aug. G. made his last visit to Bruges; he was relieved of his office on 30 June 1411. Shortly before 25 Dec. 1409 he preached in Paris before the King the sermon Pax hominibus in favor of the return of the Greeks, a speech that bears witness to his concerns for the unity of the Church. During the same year, after studying the Passions de l'âme, he composed a short work Sur la méditation.
The following three years seem empty: G. was very ill during that period. The revolt of 1415 spread and applied, with summary executive justice, the theory of tyrannicide. G. himself was threatened in person and in his property. The victorious return of the Armagnacs to Paris finally allowed him, on 4 Sept., to insert into his French speech Rex in sempiternum the famous seven propositions drawn from Jean Petit's speech of 1408. He asked for their condemnation. One cannot believe that G. wavered in order to defend his personal interests between the Burgundian party and that of the Armagnacs. There is no contradiction between the doctrine of the Vivat rex of 1405 and that of the Rex in sempiternum of 1413. G. showed himself above all a Frenchman, devoted to the person of his King and a defender of Christian doctrine; yet even in these political circumstances favorable to his intervention, the opposition remained strong, as is shown by the reactions of the Council of the Faith, held in Paris from 30 Nov. 1413 to 19 Feb. 1414, which arrived, on the 23rd of that same month, at an episcopal sentence of condemnation. As in the polemic over the Roman de la rose, G. would have wished to reduce the whole discussion to a doctrinal trial. Instead, in the reality of events, there was a trial of individuals that, for four years, embittered the chancellor's life and in the end forced him into exile. The Bishop of Arras, Martin Porée, an implacable adversary of G., attributed to the latter excessive expressions, which historians have wrongly accepted as true.
On 21 Feb. 1415 G. arrived at the Council of Constance, of which he was not, as has been said, the soul, but the victim. The persistence of the schism and his profound zeal, which aimed to prevent the disorders provoked by crimes and heresies, inspired in him ineffective expedients and truly erroneous theses (v. CONCILIARISMO), which the Gallicans of the 17th century made use of, though treating them abusively as abstract and not occasional theories. Moreover, apocryphal treatises have been attributed to him: above all the De modis uniendi of Thierry de Niem. In his sermon of 21 July, Prosperum ita faciet, G. subordinates the exercise of the pope's sovereign power to certain restrictions, while he establishes, without reservations, that the Council can neither impair the absoluteness of the papal power conferred by Christ, nor, a fortiori, diminish it.
But at Constance, Martin Porée and Pierre Cauchon also defended John the Fearless against the accusation of heresy, and if on 6 July 1415 only the first thesis denounced by Gerson, Quilibet tyrannus, was condemned (which satisfied no one), on 15 Jan. 1405 the judgment of the Council of Paris was annulled. G. then gave his conciliar activity an increasingly spiritual orientation. Already on 26 Apr. 1415 he had delivered an admirable sermon on prayer, and on 3 Aug., examining the canonization of St. Bridget, he had been led to publish his De probatione spirituum. During the days of 7 and 8 Sept. 1416 he wrote or spoke on the cult of St. Joseph, one of G.'s deepest and most original devotions, in favor of which, as early as 17 Aug. 1413, he had sent a letter to all the Churches. There date from 17 Jan. 1417 a sermon and a treatise on the union of Christ and the Church; from 3 Apr. 1418 the treatise Sur la véritable religion et perfection, in which he defended, against the Dominican Matthieu Grabon, the religious movement that arose in the Low Countries and was designated by the expression devotio moderna.
The bloody reconquest of Paris by the Burgundians, on 28 Dec. 1418, condemned G. to exile. A first stage led him to Rattenberg (Inn), where from June to Aug. 1419 he composed his great work De consolatione theologiae. The last ten years of his life were ones of intense spiritual and literary activity. At the abbey of Mölk (Austria) he composed his great heroic poem Josephina. After refusing the offer of a chair at the University of Vienna, he accepted, in 1419, the hospitality offered him by his brother John, prior of the Celestines at Lyon. In 1425 he took up residence, again at Lyon, at the Collegiate Church of St. Paul, where the archbishop assigned him a dwelling and an income. During this period G. revised his works and composed new ones of a chiefly moral and contemplative character, but of considerable bulk, and whose mere enumeration would in itself be long. It suffices to recall his De concordia metaphysicae cum logica, finished on 24 Dec. 1426; the Collectorium super Magnificat of the years 1426-27, of great importance for spiritual doctrine, for Mariology and Eucharistic theology; his Consultation en faveur de Jeanne d'Arc of 14 May 1429 was his swan song.
BIBLI: Per tutto l'argomento cf. la copiosa monografia di I. B. Schwab, Johannes G., Würzburg 1858, che non è ancora stata sostituita. Si citeranno qui soltanto i lavori che sono stati pubblicati dopo la bibliografia data alla fine del lavoro di sintesi parziale di I. L. Connolly, John G. reformer and mystic, Lovanio 1928. I volumi di A. Combes indicati infra contengono molti sviluppi e studi bibliografici e cronologici che superano il campo delimitato dai loro titoli rispettivi.
Sulla biografia: M. J. Pinet, La vie ardente de G., Parigi 1929; H. Dacremont, G., ivi 1929; E. Vansteenberghe, G. à Bruges, in Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique, 31 (1935), pp. 5-52; P. Glorieux, L'année universitaire 1392-93 à la Sorbonne à travers les notes d'un étudiant, in Revue des sciences religieuses, 19 (1939), pp. 429-82.
Sulle opere: Opera omnia, 5 voll., a cura di E. Dupin, Anversa 1706. Edizioni o riedizioni a cura di E. Vansteenberghe in Revue des sciences religieuses, 13 (1933), pp. 165-85, 393-424; 14 (1934), pp. 191-218, 370-95; 15 (1935), pp. 232-66; 16 (1936), pp. 33-46, 441-73; 19 (1939), pp. 24-47; a cura di A. Pons, Les sept Heures de la Passion, Parigi s. d.; a cura di A. Thomas, Jean G. et l'éducation des dauphins de France, ivi 1930; a cura di I. B. Monnoyeur, Le traité de Jean G. Initiation à la vie mystique, ivi 1943 (La montagne de contemplation. La mendicité spirituelle). Frammenti di opere sono stati pubblicati criticamente da A. Combes, Essai sur la critique de Ruysbroeck par G., I: Introduction critique et dossier documentaire, ivi 1945, pp. 615-869. Per il Commentaire inédit des Sentences attribuito a G., cf. E. Longpré in Archivium Franciscanum historicum, 23 (1930), pp. 251-252 (senza riserva) e A. Combes in Archives d'hist. doctr. et litt.
du moyen âge, 12 (1939), pp. 365-85 (pone il problema senza concludere). Circa i manoscritti originali francesi di una sessantina di sermoni francesi di G. e circa le edizioni parziali realizzate dopo Dupin, cf. L. Sorrento, Discorsi francesi del G. Il problema dei manoscritti, in Medievalia, Brescia 1943, pp. 287-316; L. Mourin, L'oeuvre oratoire française de J. G. et les mus. qui la contiennent, in Archives d'hist. doctr. et litt. du moyen âge, 15 (1946) pp. 225-61. La passione Ad Deum vadit è stata oggetto di una edizione non critica da dom G. Frénard, Parigi 1947, che, contrariamente all'edizione anteriore di Carnahan (detta critica), tiene conto dell'insieme dei manoscritti. Dieci sermoni francesi sono stati pubblicati criticamente e studiati dal punto di vista dottrinale, letterario e linguistico da L. Mourin. Six sermons français inédits de Jean G., Parigi 1946; Le sermon « Puer natus est nobis », in Les lettres romanes (Lovano), 2 (1948), pp. 315-24; 3 (1949), pp. 31-43, 105-45; Le sermon « Factum est proelium », in Recherches de théol. enc. et médiévale, 16 (1949), pp. 99-154; i sermoni « Ave Maria » e « Suscepinus », in Scriptorium (Bruxelles), 2 (1948), pp. 321-40; 3 (1949), pp. 99-68.
On philosophy, dogmatic and moral theology: in addition to the comprehensive works, one may consult with prudence W. Dress, Die Theologie Gersons, Gütersloh 1931, to which I. B. Monnoyeur, La doctrine de G. augustinienne et bonaventurienne, in Etudes franciscaines, 46 (1934), pp. 600-97, has brought major corrections.
Sulla teologia mistica: M. I. Pinet, La montagne de contemplation. La mendicité spirituelle. Etude..., Lione 1927; I. Steltenberger, Die Mystik des Johannes G., Breslavia 1928; P. Pourrat, J. G. et l'appel à la contemplation mystique, in Revue apologétique, 49 (1929), pp. 427-38; J. B. Monnoyeur, G. et l'appel à la contemplation, in La vie spirituelle, 23 (1930), pp. 49-68; A. Combes, L'authenticité geronienne de l'« Annotatio doctorum qui de contemplation », in Archives d'hist. doctr. et litt. du moyen âge, 12 (1939), pp. 291-364; id., Jean G. commentateur dionysien, Parigi 1940; id., G. et Pomeris, in Archives..., 14 (1945), pp. 394-500; id., Essai, cit., I, completato da Sur la date des sermons universitaires de G. Pour la fête du Jeudi-Saint, in Archives..., 15 (1946), pp. 331-482; id., Essai, cit., II, La première critique geronienne de « De ornata spiritualium nuptiarum », Parigi 1948.
Sulle teorie politiche: A. Coville, Jean Petit. La question du tyrannicide au commencement du XVe siècle, Parigi 1932; C. Schaffer, Die Staatslehre des J. G., Colonia 1935.
Sul grande scisma e teorie ecclesiologiche: cf. N. Valois, La France et le grand schisme d'Occident, 4 voll., Parigi 1896-1902 ed i complementi e le correzioni in A. Combes, Jean de Montreuil et le chancelier G. Contribution à l'histoire des rapports de l'humanisme et de la théologie en France au début du XVe siècle, ivi 1942; H. Iedin, Storia del Concilio di Trento, I, Brescia 1949, p. 15 e passim.
Su G. e la storia letteraria francese: per la polemica sul « Roman de la rose » cf. A. Combes, Jean de Montreuil, cit.; id., G. et la naissance de l'Humanisme, in Revue du moyen âge latin, 1 (1945), pp. 259-84; L. Mourin, Sermons français de G., op. cit.; F. Simone, Rassegna di studi sul Quattrocento francese, in Rivista di letterature moderne, 2 (1947), pp. 152-69.
Andrea Combes-Luigi Mourin-Franco Simone