Proving Woman (56 page)

¹²²
Ibid., col. 523.

¹²³
Ibid., col. 528.

¹²⁴
Ibid., tract 1, fol. 502; tract 2, cols. 537–38.

¹²⁵
Ibid., tract 2, cols. 511, 577–78.

¹²⁶
Ibid., tract 1, cols. 497, 500; tract 2, cols. 511, 523.

¹²⁷
Denis the Carthusian is an exception in this context, recognizing certain raptures, inflammations, elevations, etc., as important
signs of divine favor (
De discretione et examinatione spirituum
, arts. 2 and 5, in
Opera
, vol. 4,
Opera minora
, 8:268, 270–72). Cf. this flowery (but vague) description of mystical experience to his more explicit examples of somatic
experiences in rapture in a treatise clearly written with a different end in mind. In the latter he cites Aquinas’s and Francis’s
levitations, the latter’s reception of the stigmata, the miraculous lights around the enraptured Francis and Clare of Assisi
(d. 1253), Elisabeth of Spalbeek’s rapture during communion, Catherine of Siena’s physical immovability in rapture, and the
miraculous lightning resulting from John Ruusbroec’s contemplation (
De contemplatione tres libri
30.19, in
Opera
, vol. 41,
Opera
minora
, 8:281).

Chapter Seven

John Gerson and Joan of Arc

[Birgitta] saw then, in spirit, a ladder which was

fixed in the earth and whose top touched the sky. And at its top, in the sky, she saw the Lord Jesus Christ seated on a wonderful
throne like a judge judging. . . .And in the middle of that same ladder, the aforesaid Lady Birgitta saw a certain religious,
known to her and at that time still alive in the body—a man of great erudition in the science of theology but full of guile
and diabolic malice. Because of his extremely impatient and restless gestures, this man looked

more like a devil than a humble religious. And then the said lady saw the thoughts and all the internal affections of the
heart of that religious and he manifested them with inordinate and restless gestures, by means of questions.
¹

(Bridget of Sweden)

BRIDGET OF SWEDEN'S fifth book of revelations,
The Book of Questions
, from which the above passage is taken, is cast as a kind of disputation between a diabolical religious and Christ.
²
Clearly John Gerson was not alone in envisaging the scholar as a potential abettor of evil. But the chancellor and the mystic
would probably have differed concerning who exactly had gone over to the devil. Gerson doubtless saw his own efforts to constrain
mysticism as according him a place on the side of the angels. His famous challenge of Bridget’s revelations and canonization
alike, a platform from which he would launch a major campaign against female mysticism, would be additional proof of how richly
deserving he was. But Bridget’s supporters doubtless would have regarded Gerson’s intervention differently, perhaps construing
the vision of the diabolical theologian as striking proof of her prophetic perspicacity. Indeed, had the timing been a little
different, Gerson himself might have fit the bill as the demonic cleric. And yet to a later generation of female mystics,
the drama being enacted, the set, and even some of the roles were changing. As the lecture hall collapsed into the courtroom,
so Christ the judge was supplanted by the diabolical theologian, while the mystic replaced the cleric. But the person standing
before the theologian was no longer introduced as a potential disputant but arraigned as a defendant.

Gerson is the last in our series of Parisian masters who addressed spiritual discernment; his writings on the subject are
not only the most prolix but also the most influential.
³
This corpus also helps to illuminate, even as it abets, the plummeting estimation of female spirituality in the scholarly
world. Moreover, Gerson’s intervention is marked by his efforts to develop a procedural/juridical response to the challenge
of contemporary mysticism. He thus unites various strains that particularly contributed to the holy woman’s downward spiral:
the inquisitorial method, scholasticism, the manipulation of medical discourse. But Gerson’s efforts to wield the impressive
mechanism that he developed were marked by failure. This becomes especially clear late in his career with his unsuccessful
attempt to defend Joan of Arc. From a certain perspective, Gerson was under-mined by the very success of his campaign against
female mysticism: Joan’s pivotal intervention in the Hundred Years War epitomizes the potential of female mysticism for political
mobilization and thus represents everything to which Gerson had opposed himself. Gerson’s inability to apply adequately his
system of discernment in defense of Joan provides striking demonstrations of both the negative, incriminating vector of his
scholastic-inquisitorial approach to discernment and, on a larger scale, the impossibility for discourse to control or contain
its own effects. Spiritual discernment as envisaged by Gerson and his cohort seems to promise an enhancement of clerical control.
But both Gerson’s treatment of Joan and the incalculable response it provokes point to the contrary effect: far from providing
a mechanism for distinguishing counterfeit from genuine spirituality, spiritual discernment emerges as an inadvertent abettor
of confusion in categories.

Gerson’s various treatises sustain many of the concerns already treated by Henry of Langenstein, particularly the tendency
to naturalize the supernatural; the suspicion of spiritual excesses; the apprehension of various alleged spiritual consolations;
and a hierarchy of credibility, which, for Gerson, was extended from the visionary to the assessor.
⁴
Both men also contested the idea of a loquacious deity: genuine divine communications would not simply be serendipitous and
diverting episodes, but would be impelled by a high degree of necessity. Henry of Langenstein expressed this conviction through
the biblical citation “God spoke once, and was silent” (Job 33.14). Gerson would, in turn, adopt this succinct biblical formula,
although (unlike God) he was not ashamed to repeat it.
⁵

Although Gerson seems to have drawn directly only upon the work of Henry of Langenstein, his writings nevertheless unite and
extend key aspects of the discourse as developed by all three of his predecessors. As with Henry of Friemar, Gerson’s discussion
of discernment will include an indictment of scholarly vanity. While Gerson emphasizes the assessment of individual spirituality
in the manner of the two Henrys, he nevertheless shares in Peter d’Ailly’s preoccupation with the larger impact on Christendom
effected by the many individuals who claimed revelations from God.
⁶
We also see a progression in the degree of engagement with contemporary issues. The works of both Henry of Friemar and Henry
of Langenstein are theoretical and abstract. D’Ailly, in contrast, speaks in vague terms about the proximity of Antichrist
and his minions, yet presents them as contemporary threats. Gerson’s treatises are very much grounded in the moment, reveling
in the specific and anecdotal. In addition, Gerson further develops and sharpens the physiological understanding of visions
that was already apparent in the works of Henry of Langenstein and Peter d’Ailly, two of his professors at the university.
As with his intervention in the nascent discourse on the dangers of scrupulosity, Gerson will associate many mystical phenomena
with pathological disorders of various sorts, rendering the body even more suspect. But undoubtedly one of his most influential
initiatives was the gendering of this discourse. Gerson was largely responsible for the “top-down” initia tive to control
female spirituality frequently associated with the flourishing of treatises on spiritual discernment in the later Middle Ages.
⁷
Thus while Peter d’Ailly expressed concern over the nebulous category of false prophets, it was Gerson who identified these
suspect individuals primarily as women. Indeed, poaching upon the clergy’s predilection for medical imagery, we might venture
that earlier writers could be perceived as surgeons inventing a new instrument. Gerson will not only sharpen the instrument
but also diagnose which patients require the operation.
⁸

Gerson was responding to the emergence of a cadre of prominent female mystics of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries
who had begun to play an unprecedented role in public life.
⁹
The triune disasters of the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the papal schism created a vacuum in institutional authority
into which female mystics and prophets had moved. Gerson’s challenge of the recent canonization of Bridget of Sweden at the
Council of Constance (1415), articulated in his treatise
On the Proving of Spirits
, was a direct response to the impact of the female visionaries of the period.
¹⁰
Still, his apprehension about female spirituality far antedated his challenge to Bridget, springing fully armed from his head
in his very first treatise on discernment.
On Distinguishing
True from False Revelations
, written in 1401, already associates women with a dangerous immoderacy in asceticism. In particular, he evokes a nameless
woman in Arras who, having rejected proper pastoral counsel, was starving herself to death.
¹¹
His is a tonally ugly rendition of the female spirituality associated with eucharistic feasting and ascetical fasting described
in the work of Caroline Walker Bynum. Further, when arguing against the efficacy of miracles or revelations lacking in necessity,
Gerson gives the example of a woman who frequently saw Christ flying through the air: “this sign of truth has shown, unless
I am mistaken, that she was out of her mind.”
¹²
This early work on discernment depicts women as dangerously inclined to confuse carnal and spiritual love. To this end, he
tells of a certain Marie of Valenciennes, better known to history as Marguerite Porete, who wrongfully exploited Augustine’s
dictum “Have charity, and do what you want.”
¹³
On the Proving of Spirits
will further identify women as particularly likely to be led astray by the degree of their fervor. Such women develop inappropriate
relations with their confessors under the pretext of frequent confession. Finally, these women are possessed by an unsavory
degree of curiosity, “which leads to gazing about and talking (not to mention touching).” It is no coincidence that this characterization
corresponds to a medical understanding of women’s greater humidity, which would lead to a desire for novelty.
¹⁴

It is in his third treatise,
On the Examination of Doctrine
of 1423, however, that Gerson goes beyond merely discrediting female mystical experiences, working with particular zeal to
disqualify women altogether as appropriate arbiters of spiritual matters. Opening with a discussion of the various ecclesiastical
bodies equipped to act as judges in matters of faith, he eventually turns to the gift of spiritual discernment. Although acknowledging
that Augustine’s mother, Monica, was possessed of the gift of discernment (as Augustine himself had ventured in the ), Gerson
cautions against any woman who claims this gift for her self. 15 He further applies the apostolic interdict against female
teaching to all forms of publication, oral or written.

Jerome blames men who, for shame, learn from women what they teach men. What if someone of the female sex were reckoned to
walk in the great and marvelous things above herself; to add daily vision upon vision; to report lesions of the brain through
epilepsy or petrification, or some kind of melancholy as a miracle, (etc.); to say nothing unless in the place of God without
any mediation; to call priests her sons; to teach them the profession in which they were assiduously brought up. . . .One
woman says that she was annihilated for a little while: another says that she was united in a union with God, more marvelous
than the union Christ assumed with his own humanity.
¹⁶

Gerson trips lightly from Virgil’s denunciation of woman’s mutability, to apostolic warnings against young and curious women,
to a denunciation of Eve who, according to his reckoning, lied twice in her first utterance. All female verbiage should be
scrutinized much more carefully than male, since human and divine law unite in attempting to restrain women. The fact that
no writing remains from the female greats of patristic lore, such as Paula or Eustochium, is but a testimony to these women’s
discretion.
¹⁷

From the perspective of earlier writings on spiritual discernment, it is worth repeating that Gerson was the first to diagnose
a certain kind of spiritual duplicity or deception as a woman’s problem, and that this diagnosis was in no way implicit in
the discourse that he had inherited.
¹⁸
The treatises of his immediate predecessors remained quite abstract, resisting the association of spiritual frailty with any
particular individual, group, or gender. This remains true even when there may have been a legitimate reason to mistrust female
religious fervor. Henry of Friemar, for example, was a member of the theological tribunal responsible for condemning the
work of the mystic and purported heresiarch of the Free Spirit movement Marguerite Porete (Gerson’s Marie of Valenciennes).
Yet Henry’s treatise on spiritual discernment did not target women.
¹⁹
Moreover, both Henry of Langenstein and Peter d’Ailly were deeply invested in the prophecies of Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179)
and believed that she had correctly pre-dicted the papal schism.
²⁰
Henry actually wrote a detailed letter to the bishop of Worms, bringing him up to date on what Hildegard (“that perspicuous
scrutinizer and veracious preeminence [
summator
]”) had to say on the subject.
²¹
More remarkably, Peter d’Ailly, despite his skeptical attitude toward prophecy, nevertheless punctuates his treatise with
quotations from Hildegard—the only nonbiblical prophet whom he consistently (and approvingly) cites.
²²
His active promotion of a woman in this context is but an extension of his egalitarian view that it was everyone’s responsibility
to profess the faith publicly in cases of emergency.
²³

Many of Peter’s contemporaries would have agreed that the late fourteenth century satisfied even the most cautious criteria
for what constituted a state of emergency. Gerson himself was almost morbidly preoccupied with the confusion of the times
and quick to excoriate the responsible parties. He initially blamed the University of Paris for the prolongation of the schism,
which he considered to be second in degree of culpability only to the papacy and the prelates.
²⁴
(Meanwhile, painfully aware of the crisis in conscience provoked by the schism, he attempted to address the fears of a perplexed
population with reassurances that, should a person align him-or herself with the wrong pope, God would credit the individual’s
good intentions.)
²⁵
Gerson likewise averred that the devastation wrought by the Hundred Years War was exacerbated by the sinful irresponsibility
of the ruling class.
²⁶
But, however attuned he might be to the turbulent political climate or aggrieved at the failure of masculine leadership, Gerson
resisted Peter’s equation of such dire straits with a more generalized mandate for proclaiming the faith. On the contrary,
Gerson’s reaction was to circle the wagons of clerical prerogative.