Jean Gerson: Early Works

Jean Gerson: Early Works. Translated and introduced by Brain Patrick Maguire, with a preface by Bernard McGinn. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1998. xvi + 482 pp. $34.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

These days, if you know anything of Jean Gerson (1363-1429), you probably know that he was a reformer who led the University of Paris and a prime mover in the delicate struggle to get rid of the one, then two extra popes. You also might know that he was a defender of orthodoxy in a turbulent time and a stern moralist. He was also a great scholar of mysticism. These aspects of Gerson's life are intimately revealed in Brian Maguire's very readable and well-selected translation-the first substantial collection of Gerson's writings in English, and a favor to anyone interested in fifteenth-century theology and/or mysticism. I say "intimately" because Maguire's carefully broad sample of letters, sermons and treatises also reveals a private, turbulent and surprisingly emotional aspect to Gerson's theological concerns-surprising to me, anyway. I had previously read only his two major treatises on mystical theology and "Distinguishing True from False Revelations" (both included here), both well-known to scholars of late medieval Christianity. Among other things, they are interesting witnesses to significant changes in the conception of "mysticism" around 1400. The two on mystical theology are simultaneously examples of and responses to a genre that had become quite popular by the start of the 1400s: compilations and syntheses of mystical doctrine, which had come to be conceived as distinct from quotidian Christian life. These ideas and practices were taken by some as the true guide to and goal of a holy life, and were understood to frame the individual's private path to union with God.

Some churchmen, Gerson among them, disliked this freelance movement and were dubious about the emphasis on private experiences of ecstasy. Gerson's treatises on mysticism try to balance such experience against proper humility and virtue and to subordinate mystical doctrine and practice to regular Christian life, which he insists must be submitted to Church authority. He presents an ecstatic Dionysianism that culminates in a union of wills in love, rejecting any hint of identity or divinization. Along the way he is perfectly willing to criticize misleading statements by even widely respected writers like Jan Ruusbroec and Bernard of Clairvaux.

But Gerson was not at ease with the issue. Although he insists that experiential, affective knowledge of God must be inspected by intellect and bridled by orthodox doctrine, he praises experience of God over mere intellectual knowledge. He brings it up again and again, almost in a tone of longing; and each time he worries that experience cannot be trusted, that it fathers pride and fools even the virtuous. When I read the treatises on mystical theology after Gerson's letters and advice to his siblings and students, I heard the call-and-response of a man who leaps to give advice to those he thinks in danger of going astray-everyone, including himself-but is chased by doubt and unmet desire. When, at the end of the collection, I read Gerson's famously prurient advice to confessors about how to manipulate people into appalling admissions about sexual sins, I was surprisingly moved. This book is a fine introduction to a fascinating, turbulent man and his times.

GORDON RUDY

University of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Fall 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved