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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You Can't Keep A Good Man Down, August 24, 2008
What exactly has Brian McGuire accomplished here? [1] He has produced a first rate biography of one of Catholicism's most controversial medieval minds. [2] He has shed light upon Jean Gerson's major contributions to Catholic philosophy and moral theology. [3] He has provided a colorful and insightful vision of Church, university, and civic life at the turn of the fifteenth century. [4] He has done the above in a prose style that seamlessly integrates multiple languages, primary sources, and flowing narrative. Other readers will no doubt fault me for neglecting the author's treatment of contemporary spirituality and church councils, for example, as equally impressive.
Jean Gerson [1363-1429] will never become a saint, for much the same reason that Thomas Merton and Fulton Sheen never will--the paper trail is too extensive. Gerson also carries the added baggage of bad timing--his professional life coincides with an era that Catholicism would like to forget, the Great Schism--a subject about which our subject had much to say and write. Gerson was highly visible in his own lifetime as Chancellor of the University of Paris and later through his extensive body of writing, on subjects as diverse as "The Mountain of Contemplation" and as mundane as his "On Nocturnal Emission and Preparation for the Mass." [His youngest brother, the monk Jean the Celestine, collected and edited his papers, an act of love with immense long-term historical importance.] He was a senior player in the reform Council of Constance, though in a way that perhaps stunned his contemporaries and derailed his career. That Gerson's body was twice buried and twice lost reflects the Church's ambivalence about his work.
Gerson himself grew up in a town that now no longer exists, in the shadow of a nearby monastery. The oldest of a large family, student Jean was sent to Paris to improve the next generation's fortunes. As priest and scholar, he would find himself at a young age Chancellor of the mother of higher studies, the University of Paris. McGuire is careful to delineate the delicacy of this position. As chancellor he was responsible for academic excellence, suppression of error, and the spiritual well being of his students. He was beholden to both the cathedral and the crown, and in fact found it necessary to curry favor for decent living arrangements. This alone was no easy task: with Charles VI mentally ill, civil power tipped periodically from the Duke of Orleans to the Duke of Burgundy. On the other hand, his proximity to such men gave Gerson frequent access to the royal pulpit and a widespread circulation of his thinking.
Gerson's private and public thinking was conflicted. He harbored a deep wish to flee to the peace and security of obscurity, and twice in his career he did actually resign his university position. But he always returned, the weary warrior who wanted nothing better than lasting Church reform. He did not have to look far for an agenda: the Western Church was inexorably breaking in two under the weight of dueling papacies. From a theological vantage point, this was the epic lose-lose situation: every conceivable solution involved, to some degree, a denigration of papal power. Gerson operated in a spectrum between those calling for the expulsion of popes and those counseling no action. Gerson could not embrace the latter; he feared, and with very good reason, that the split between Avignon and Rome would become as permanent as that between Rome and Constantinople. The idea of forceful expulsion was a step he was not willing to take.
Gerson looked to a restoration of a monolithic papacy but not without several preconditions. The first was the efficacy of a reform council; the second was the cooperation and participation of Christian princes; and the third was the reform of dioceses through the efficacy of local bishops and diocesan clergy. Gerson distrusted religious orders--the Dominicans had been a handful at the university--and he was equally suspicious of mystics, though intrigued by manifestations of the Via Moderna throughout France.
Key to his planning, of course, was civil stability. When his own patron, the Duke of Orleans, was murdered by the Duke of Burgundy, resulting in a violent local civil war, Gerson made public order his cause. The matter of tyrannicide so enveloped his passions that when his long hoped for reform council finally took place at Constance in 1415, Gerson derailed the council and his own career in a virtual filibuster on the matter of royal conduct. McGuire recounts Gerson's puzzling metamorphosis through the council from the West's leading theologian to a marginalized, discredited figure whose profound insights were lost to the fathers of Constance.
For reasons of reputation and safety, Gerson could never return to Paris, but instead lived in exile in Lyon. Here he produced a remarkable body of literature, much of it centered upon moral theology and devotion. He tackled questions of human rights, commerce and nationalism. His writings give evidence of considerable moral debate in his day about the psychology of penance. Gerson anticipates the great debates of the Manualist era and even the twentieth century controversies of double effect and situation ethics. In discussing the propriety of celebrating sacraments with troubled conscience, for example, he drew from the wisdom of Ovid, of all people: "He who is not present today will be less fit tomorrow." [224] Gerson, curiously, was instrumental in establishing greater intensity to the cult of a more youthful St. Joseph, with emphasis upon the saint's sexual restraint.
McGuire's biography of Gerson is the first since 1929, but his exhaustive bibliography gives evidence that the University Chancellor's writings and influence may be entering a new springtime. I would not expect the Church to proclaim a "Year of Gerson" any time soon, but he might get invited to dinner.
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