Proving Woman (58 page)

From first to last, Gerson’s cautious endorsement of Ermine exemplifies scholarly prudence. Consistent with his own concern
for authenticity, it concludes by drawing attention to his signature as proof of his authorship. 59 As a whole, the letter
is safely couched in the context of Morel’s request (which was described as repeated and even importunate), while much of
the “work” of the letter is to establish Gerson as an evenhanded assessor, as opposed to an enthusiastic supporter. If subsequent
events caused him to regret his decision, his earlier opinions had been sufficiently sotto voce to make a reversal possible.

And such a reversal did eventually occur. In the final treatise that addresses the question of discernment directly,
On the Examination of Doctrine
(1423), Gerson cautions particularly against easily crediting those who use their purported revelations in usurping the right
to teach and promote their own claims to sanctity. Women, especially laywomen, are singled out. It is in this context that
Ermine’s name is invoked.

There are many others who . . . wish to deceive others by fashioning marvels . . . and insofar as I am an expert who speaks
often, if I wished to report or to write, a great effect that book would have and it would be a marvel among the curious.
Blessed God preserved me many times from seduction [
a seductione
] from the mockery and contempt of such ones. I confess that earlier I was near seduction [
proximus
seductioni
] over a certain Ermine of Reims through the relations of some men possessed of great reputations—if I had not, with God willing,
tempered the manner of my response. Around that time, I compiled a little work or reading concerning the distinction of true
revelations from false.
⁶⁰

This passage is extremely revealing: God is seen as the custodian ensuring Gerson’s credibility as the “expert who speaks
often.” Gerson is thus divinely spared various “seductions”—be they the derision of the curious, or the more potent lure of
Ermine and her puissant supporters. God’s intervention is particularly manifest in the fact that Gerson “tempered the manner
of [his] response.” Thus his measured method of discernment receives a kind of divine ratification.

We are not told what specifically led to Gerson’s disillusionment with Ermine. Nor is it at all certain whether his shifting
perspective directly prompted the treatise on discernment to which he refers, or whether he was still riding the crest of
his modest wave of support for Ermine.
⁶¹
But his initial caution and his ultimate reversal both appear to be motivated by the fear of being duped by a fake or “bad
copy.” This fear informs his attraction to the rhetoric of authentic coins versus counterfeits in
On
Distinguishing True from False Revelations
. Indeed, Gerson builds his entire treatise around this metaphor. “We are to be like spiritual money-changers or merchants.
With skill and care we examine the precious and unfamiliar coin of divine revelation, in order to find out whether demons,
who strive to corrupt and counterfeit any divine and good coin, smuggle in a false and base coin instead of the true and legitimate
one.”
⁶²
Moreover, his leading example is, arguably, the most compelling instance of impostorship perpetrated amid the desert fathers
and one extremely germane to a late medieval milieu: a series of incidents in which the devil disguises himself as Christ.
The fathers are not deceived, and they answer: “ ‘I do not wish to see Christ on earth. I will be happy to see him in heaven,’
” or variations thereof.
⁶³
The implication is not only that any credible mystic would exercise parallel skepticism with respect to super-natural visitors,
but that Gerson’s readers should manifest similar caution with the mystic.

The image of the money changer perfectly adumbrates Gerson’s approach to discernment, while securely anchoring it within tradition.
From patristic times, the art of discernment had been likened to the task of the
numeralius
or money changer, whose profession required him to authenticate or “prove” coins by testing them in a fire—an image that had
the advantage of corresponding to the way in which God “proves” his elect.
⁶⁴
In addition to enlisting the weighty validation imparted by the unassailable biblical and patristic legacy, the imagery surrounding
this form of authentication also had affinities with the scholastic methodology itself and the potential parallels between
the analogous functions of money changer and scholar. Both sets of professionals were fully apprised of the alarming fact
that once the counterfeit coin was introduced into a particular economy—be it fiscal, intellectual, or spiritual—it would
circulate like any other coin, inexorably contaminating all that it touched.
⁶⁵
In order to avert this, the money changer had “to prove” (
probare
) gold in a fire, just as the scholar “proved” a proposition by assailing it with various objections. Gerson proceeds to establish
a set of metallurgically informed metaphors for proof of authenticity.
⁶⁶

Gerson’s caution with regard to Ermine is at one with the strategy pursued in his most celebrated treatise on discernment,
On the Proving of
Spirits
—a title both invoking Paul’s biblical injunction and subtly sustaining the image of the money changer. In this work, his
challenge of Bridget of Sweden’s recent canonization is subtly couched in a triple set of dangers: the risk that the council
may approve visions that are imagined and false; the potential scandal of suppressing a cult to which many already adhere;
and the danger in silence. Gerson’s response is to propose his “middle ground,” consisting of the ensuing guidelines for discernment.
67 While acknowledging in passing that some can discern spirits on the basis of inspiration by the Holy Spirit alone, the
treatise is nevertheless focused on what he lists as the first method of discernment: “the norms from holy scripture and those
proposed by good men [
viros
] well versed in it.”
⁶⁸
He reduces his method to six terse principles of inquiry to be applied to the probation of mystic and revelations alike. These
he summarizes in a little ditty (which rhymed in the Latin original): “Ask who, what, why / To whom, what kind, whence?” The
following gloss is then given:“
Who
is it to whom the revelation is made?
What
does the revelation itself mean and to what does it refer?
Why
is it said to have taken place?
To whom
was it manifested for advice?
What kind of life
does the visionary lead?
Whence
does the revelation originate?”
⁶⁹
In this line of questioning, we can decipher the familiar contours of interrogation associated with the inquisitional procedure
and, ultimately, its diverse uses.
⁷⁰
Thus later in the same treatise, when Gerson comments on the indispensability of theologians to processes of canonization,
he automatically brings to mind its inquisitionally constituted ethos.
⁷¹

Beyond the various dangers to which Gerson alludes at the outset of
On the Proving of Spirits
is the tacit or suppressed danger that Gerson’s view might ultimately be rejected by the assembly—which is, in a sense, what
occurred. And since the Council of Constance did, eventually, approve Bridget and her revelations, it is just as well that
Gerson simply posed Bridget and her ilk as a
quaestio
, for which he provided the appropriate apparatus but not the solution.

The inquisitional allusions are taken up with still greater vehemence in the final treatise,
On the Examination of Doctrine
. It is here that Gerson calls for a more “particular inquisition” of a confessor’s overly partial testimony at a deceased
penitent’s process of canonization.
⁷²
He also notes that if “a great inquisition” occurs over the purveyors of heretical opinion, how much more apt this would be
for the screening of new teachings, be they lay or clerical, theological or canonical, during the person’s lifetime rather
than after death “so that the living person may be corrected if any error were discovered.” This was an odd position for the
chancellor of the University of Paris to assume. Gerson himself recognized that such inquisitorially sponsored censorship
struck at the heart of the medieval university’s own notion of academic freedom. He accordingly anticipates that “the usual
protests [will] ring out that this exactitude should be performed on public acts of sacred theology. This is what the person
means when he says: I may write heretical material, but I would [still] not be a heretic [
haereticare potero, sedhaereticus non ero
]. Why this concern? After all, nobody is a heretic unless pertinacious.”
⁷³
While Gerson may have correctly predicted the outcry that his suggestion would elicit, his attempts to allay his outraged
colleagues’ fears seem sadly insufficient.

This latter treatise is the one that denounces Ermine by name, further underlining the uniform action he recommended for wayward
scholars and mystics alike, while leaving little doubt about the very high price Gerson assigned to credulity in female visions.
His critique of confessors who sponsor their female penitents’ cults is followed by an admonition to clerics against ceding
authority to women and half-wits. This point is punctuated with the example of Gregory XI who, in extremis with his hand on
the consecrated host, bemoaned his own adherence to certain mystics whom Gerson refrains from naming, though clearly alluding
to Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, whose deluded advice precipitated the papal schism.
⁷⁴

THE CHANCELLOR, THE MAID, AND THE MOMENTUM OF DISCOURSE

Over the years Gerson had the opportunity to refine considerably his scholarly technique of spiritual discernment. But when
he attempted to use this mechanism in a different way, he learned that he was less its master than he might have supposed.
I am referring to his attempt to use it for purposes of vindication, perhaps even sanctification, in the case of Joan of Arc.
⁷⁵
Try as he might to adapt his discourse of discernment to an alternative and more exculpatory purpose, he was to discover himself,
like the captain of the
Titanic
, unable to change its course or to overcome its inevitable inertia before he hit the iceberg.

For this discursive trajectory had been carefully plotted. Uniting the exacting requirements for academic proof with the uniformity
of an inquisition, Gerson’s approach procedurally demanded the seeming disinterest of the inquisitor, rather than the overt
ardor of a potential apologist. This would be in keeping with his disparagement of a confessor’s bias in favor of his holy
charge. From Gerson’s perspective, this disinterest not only added the sheen of credibility to the endeavor; it also provided
the essential room to maneuver in the event that the judge had to revoke an earlier decision. But, ultimately, Gerson’s machine
was built to generate negatively valenced judgments. Fueled as it was by objections, careful considerations, and doubt, it
was better adapted to producing condemnations than vindications, even as it was more successful at identifying heretics than
identifying saints.

Twenty-eight years after his regretted endorsement of Ermine of Reims, fourteen years after his scuttled attempt to undermine
Bridget of Sweden’s canonization, Gerson, writing in exile in Lyons as an enemy of the now ascendant Anglo-Burgundian party,
set about vindicating the divine source of Joan of Arc’s inspiration.
⁷⁶
But Gerson’s investment is reflected inversely in the degree of reasoned detachment he affects in his treatise. (And I should
say at the outset that it is these devices of detachment I am concerned with, rather than the arguments Gerson mobilizes for
her defense.) The opening of the treatise sets the tone:

Over the deed of the maid and the credulity fit to be extended to her, it ought to be supposed in the first place that many
false things are probable—indeed according to the Philosopher it is proposed that false things are more probable than certain
true ones to the extent that contradictory things are the same in degree of probability though not in truth. [Second] It ought
to be further heeded that probability, if rightly founded and understood, ought not to be called an error or erroneous unless
its assertion is pertinaciously extended beyond the limits of probability. . . .Athird consideration arises concerning faith
and good morals, which creates a twofold difference. . . . Some things are said for the necessity of faith, and these admit
of no doubt or conjecture of probability, according to popular judgment: doubt in faith is infidelity. . . . Different again
are those things in the faith or of the faith that are called for by piety or devotion, but in no way from necessity: concerning
which things it can be said in the common tongue: he who doesn’t believe it, isn’t damned.
⁷⁷

In this rather involuted opening, the mechanisms of skepticism are finely tuned in the extreme—establishing Gerson’s disinterested
right to judge, while simultaneously building into his defense of Joan a generous escape clause for himself. He secures this
latter condition by enlisting the Aristotelian supposition that the realm of the probable invariably overshadows the actual,
at the same time maintaining that (despite its extreme fallibility) a position based on probability is not an error. Gerson
proceeds to underline the compulsory nature of the articles of the faith with an explicit, albeit unavowed, citation from
the
Decretals
of Gregory IX.
⁷⁸
The noncompulsory nature of popular devotion is, by contrast, signified by a popular adage in the vernacular. In other words,
if Gerson is wrong in his subsequent support of Joan (and the laws of probability are against him, as he himself points out),
he is not in error. By the same token, neither does anyone who refuses to believe in Joan err.
⁷⁹