 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Most Christian Doctor, Jean Gerson. Our tour through medieval intellectual culture is reaching its final stops as we approach the year 1400, and thus the date I've somewhat artificially chosen to mark the boundary between medieval and renaissance philosophy. To make sure you realise how artificial that boundary is, in these last few episodes of the current series, I'll be looking at figures and movements that span the divide between the 14th and 15th centuries. We'll be seeing anticipations of renaissance humanism, and of the religious controversies that ultimately gave rise to the Protestant Reformation. But around 1400, people were also looking back. They continued to take inspiration from earlier scholastics like Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, and texts that were more than a century old were the late medieval equivalent of bestsellers. One of them was the Romance of the Rose. Normally, when I allude to topics covered in long previous episodes, I worry that listeners will struggle to remember what I'm talking about, but I suspect you'll have no trouble recalling this ironic, artful, and occasionally obscene production of the late 13th century poet Jean de Meun. The occasional obscenity was one reason for the so-called Carelles de la Rose, a famous debate over the Romance of the Rose that was sparked at the close of the 14th century. It involved about half a dozen members of the French aristocracy with various connections to the French court, and in the person of Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris. He was scandalized by the poem's enthusiastic embrace of erotic conquest, its use of naughty language and even naughtier metaphors to describe the sexual organs. Another of its detractors was Christine de Pizan, who complained especially of the misogyny running throughout the Romance. I'm actually going to cover Christine properly in the future series of episodes on Renaissance thought. When I do, we'll see that she contributed significantly to political philosophy and established herself as a sort of figure unprecedented in the medieval period. She was an independent woman, neither ascetic nor nun, who participated in intellectual and literary discussions on an equal footing with scholars of her time. In the case of the debate over the Romance of the Rose, she even initiated the discussion. She first expressed her disquiet about Jean de Meun's work in 1399, following this up with a series of letters in which she sharpened and extended her critique of the Romance and its pernicious effect on readers. What strikes the modern reader most is her spirited rebuke of those passages in the Romance which speak badly of all women, as when Jean de Meun has one character complain, you are all now will be and have been whores, indeed or in tension. Christine was outraged by such statements. Certainly some women are wicked, but just as we don't say that all angels are evil because of the fall of Lucifer, neither should we condemn the whole sex for the sins of the few. Her defense of women was of course a matter of self-defense, something not lost on her opponents. Defenders of the Romance added insult to insult by implying that she had no business criticizing it as a mere woman. One defender of the Romance, named Jean de Montreuil, wrote, Although she is not lacking in intelligence within the limits of her female capacity, it seemed to me nevertheless that I was hearing the Greek whore Leontium, who, as Cicero reports, dared to write against so great a philosopher as Theophrastus. In response, Christine modestly admitted to being a woman of untrained intellect and uncomplicated sensibility, while insisting that her voice should be heard too. Heroines of classical history and Christian religion show, she argued, that there is no cause to discount someone just because she is female. Besides, as Christine pointed out, if the debate in part concerned women's virtue, then this was something to which she could speak with a certain authority, being a woman herself. Not that you need to be a woman to see the implausibility of saying that women are more wicked than men. As she put it in one characteristically witty remark, where are the countries or kingdoms that have been ravaged by women's great iniquities? Yet, misogyny is only one of the accusations she lobbed in the direction of Jean de Montreuil. Like the foolish lover character in the Romance itself, she complained about the use of the dirty word testicles, and more generally worried that the Romance's libel indeed purposefully designed to urge its reader on to sin. Jean de Montreuil's admirers rose to his defense with more than just sexist abuse of Christine. The most interesting voice on the other side was Pierre Colles, who wrote a letter to Christine putting a case in favor of the Romance. Here we get into more obviously philosophical territory as the debate begins to turn on questions of aesthetics, and in particular, the relation between fiction and the moral integrity of an author. Colles urges us not to confuse the characters who speak in the Romance with Jean de Montreuil himself. Admittedly, figures like the old woman and the jealous man do have nasty advice for the character of the foolish lover. But these evil words are intended simply to prepare the reader, who is likely to encounter such arguments and attitudes in real life. According to Pierre Colles, the attitude of the author, Jean de Montreuil, was quite different. He used to be a foolish lover himself, but eventually came to his senses. It is thus a work of repentance, and also of helpful warning for the reader not to give in to the irrationality of passionate love. Colles even claims to know a man who was brought to his senses upon reading the Romance, and recovered from a bout of foolish love. In truth, this is a patently unconvincing reading of the Romance, and one wonders how seriously Colles means what he is saying. A true follower of Jean de Montreuil, Colles himself would seem to be adept at literary playfulness. As one interpreter has put it, even in the midst of defending, Colles appears all too often self-mocking and ironic, while preserving all the while a delightful, blithe air of naïve innocence. Christine takes the whole business more seriously, responding that the detail and persuasiveness of the wicked speeches in the Romance go far beyond what would be needed to give warning. It would be like actually teaching someone to counterfeit money in the process of warning them about false currency. And for her, this is no game. Colles may claim to know a friend who was cured of love by the Romance, but Christine knows of another man who beats his wife, having been turned misogynistic by this dangerous reading material. As for Jean Gerson, he was somewhat more willing to play with literary artifice. In a work of 1402, he had lampooned the Romance by describing a courtroom scene in which the character of the foolish lover, in other words Jean de Montreuil, is accused in the presence of a personification of justice. His ironically disapproving approach is already indicated by the detail that his own vision is related as something that happened when he was very much awake and not dreaming like Jean de Montreuil, or for that matter, Langland in Piers Plowman. Despite this literary sensibility, he is no more impressed than Christine was by the idea that we should carefully distinguish an author's own views from those of his characters. This does not give an author license to say just whatever he wants. Imagine a Christian who preaches on behalf of the Muslim faith but just for the sake of argument. Clearly, this would be unacceptable, says Gerson. Besides, the Romance makes its speakers say things that are discordant with the concepts they personify. Jean de Montreuil's character of reason is not very reasonable, for example. This betrays that the author is in fact putting his own words into the mouths of those characters, so that effectively everything is said in his own person. Yet both Gerson and Christine were still able to admire the aesthetic qualities of the poem. They admitted that it is very well written and registered no objections to courtly love literature as such, even if Christine teasingly mocked some of its conventions. I have never heard tell, she says, where the cemeteries are in which are buried those whom pure love has put to death. One sign of their tolerance of the genre is that Gerson is perfectly happy with the beginning of the Romance by Guillaume Delaurice. It is only its scandalous continuation by Jean de Montreuil that needs to be brought to court. Though the work at the center of this debate is a quintessentially medieval one, the debate itself seems to belong more to the Renaissance. We have here reflection on the uses and abuses of literature in the vernacular, studded with frequent allusions to classical authors like Cicero and Seneca, who are far more salutary authors than Jean de Montreuil in the opinion of Christine and Gerson. The defense of female virtue, already a feature of 14th century literature with Boccaccio and Chaucer, would become a frequent topic of reflection in the 15th and 16th centuries. As we'll see when we come again to Christine, she returned to the subject in later works, notably her City of Ladies. A list of other Renaissance authors who take up the cause of women would include Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella. One may thus see both Gerson and Christine de Pizan as transitional figures straddling the divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Alternatively, one may question whether there is really any sharp divide here at all. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to choose a better transitional figure for these two periods than Jean Gerson. From a humble background, he rose to become a theologian at Paris in 1392, and as already mentioned, the Chancellor of the University there. This made him a prominent individual, with the opportunity to comment on a wide range of topics ranging from the political to the pastoral to the philosophical. It has been argued that he was among the first of Europe's public intellectuals and a leading exponent of the short topical treatise that was displacing older forms of writing at this period, like the commentary. Among the topics he tackled in such texts were the question of tyrannicide, the validity of visions received by women, including Brigitte of Sweden and Joan of Arc, the goodness of celibacy, and the evil of the heresies taught by John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. He often followed in the footsteps of his admired teacher at Paris, the theologian Peter de Ayy, who was in fact also involved in the debate over the romance of the rose. But for both de Ayy and Gerson, a far more crucial debate was the one that raged in the late 14th and early 15th centuries as a result of the schism in the papacy. The rift began in 1378, when cardinals decamped from Italy to Avignon in France, claiming that the election of Pope Urban VI had been forced upon them by the people of Rome. They nominated a new pope, Clement VII, beginning a decades-long period where there were two or even three rival popes. When popes died, the schism continued, with new popes simply replacing them on both sides. Theologians like Gerson were forced to grapple with a political conundrum that also posed grave spiritual difficulties. What were Christians to do in the face of conflicting decrees handed down by two different popes? Gerson offered a voice of calm guidance, reminding us of Peter Abelard's ethics when he suggests that the main thing was to form an intention to be pious. In the same optimistic spirit, he worked for years to encourage the so-called Via Cassionis, a solution by which all rival claimants to the papacy would voluntarily renounce their titles, paving the way for the election of a new and universally recognized candidate. Ultimately, though, and to be more specific, at the time of a pivotal council held in Constance from 1414 to 1418, Gerson became a key supporter of the Via Conchilii. This alternative solution called for a church council that would impose a settlement of the issue. Peter de Ailly and others, notably the early conciliarists Conrad of Gelnhausen and Henry of Langenstein, had already pressed for this outcome and the addition of Gerson's voice helped to bring it about. If we cast our minds back to a writer like Giles of Rome, we can see why the conciliar approach was so controversial. Giles argued that the pope possessed a plenitude of power from which all valid authority flowed, in spiritual matters, of course, but also in secular affairs. For Giles, human society in general and the Church was a rigid hierarchy with a single power at its peak, just as the universe has its single divine ruler. Taking inspiration from the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius, Giles compared the Church hierarchy to that of the angels. It was not easy for Gerson to resist this logic, since he too ascribed a plenitude of power to the papacy and saw the ecclesiastical hierarchy as an image of that in heaven. To avoid the absolutist conclusion drawn by the likes of Giles, he drew on the tools of scholastic philosophy. The pope may be the head of the Church, but the head is only one part of the greater whole. A council, by contrast, represents the whole Church. So it is such a council and not the papacy that makes infallible judgments and that has a power of obligation that no one may licitly refuse, not even the pope. For Gerson, the Church is thus an example of the best political arrangements described in Aristotle's politics, namely a mixture of other constitutional forms. It has a monarchial element in the person of the pope, an oligarchic element with the council of bishops, and a democratic element insofar as the Church is universal among all the faithful. It would probably be fair to say that Gerson came around to this position in part for pragmatic reasons, but his pragmatism was principled. He argued that a dispute like this would often need to be resolved through the application of practical legal judgment, what Aristotle called epicia. The person in the best position to do this is not the canon lawyer, but the trained theologian who understands the divine law and can thus work towards the end God intended for us. With this point, we see another key element of Gerson's intellectual profile. As the leading representative of the University of Paris, he was unstinting in defending the prerogatives of the trained theologian. His public interventions were often in this spirit. He called on his theological expertise to give advice to others, even to the French king, who was encouraged to listen to his daughter, the university, and he frequently remonstrated with other theologians who strayed into error. This could occur because of an overly literal approach to Scripture, as with the heresies of Wycliffe and Huss, or at the other extreme, because of excessively figurative readings. The latter was the case in Gerson's view when the Parisian theologian Jean Petit argued that the murder of a wicked tyrant does not violate the commandment against killing. Gerson had no patience with this, insisting that one should adhere to the plain letter of Scripture even if further symbolic interpretations may also be given. Actually, Gerson had little patience with quite a few of his colleagues, despite being the voice of the university. He lamented the scholastic tendency towards curiosity and singularity, by which he meant over-specializing in narrow technical issues. What we now see as highlights of later medieval thought, such as the debate over universals, were for him little more than pointless distinction-mongering. His warning was that unbounded philosophy would dash itself upon the stone of error, while his positive advice was, Let us learn not so much to dispute as to live. This attitude finds its most eloquent expression in his sermons, many of which survive today. Here, too, he is at pains to avoid questions that are abstruse and curious. As the Gerson scholar Catherine Brown has put it, Although he admits that there is nothing wrong with scholastic theology per se, the impression is that one is really better off without it, especially if one wishes to attain the height of Christian wisdom. His sermons thus concentrated on communicating important issues to a wide audience. Convinced that ignorance of sin is no excuse, he strove to offer moral advice and also consolation to the laity, and in particular to women. This brings us back full circle to Gerson's attitude towards women. In several passages he seems to express the sort of misogyny he himself attacked in the debate over the Romance of the Rose. He agreed with the standard scholastic view, which we saw Aquinas expressing a couple of episodes ago, that women should not speak publicly, and went so far as to say that any teaching put forth by a woman is automatically suspect. He was troubled by the heroic asceticism of certain women, and here one might think of Catherine of Siena, which often came together with a degree of arrogance. On the other hand, he was critical of male mystics too, such as Jan van Roesbruck, who claimed that it is possible to achieve complete identity with God in mystical union. Frequently, he spoke much more positively of women, admiring their capacity for spiritual devotion, and towards the end of his life expressing support for Joan of Arc. There is no inconsistency here. For Gerson, the unlettered simplicity and emotional nature of women helped them avoid the sort of overcomplicated approach to religion that Gerson detected in his fellow schoolmen, and made them apt for true mystical experience. Somewhat like Eckhart before him, albeit with far less daring, Gerson attempted to integrate mysticism into a worldview shaped by scholasticism. He wrestled with the question whether union with God is primarily accomplished through intellectual understanding or through affective or emotional experience. Though he generally seems to have thought that both approaches have merit, he moved towards affective mysticism as his career progressed. The appropriate stance for the one who journeys towards God is passionate yearning, waiting for an ultimately unknowable God to bestow the reward of mystical insight. Such union with God never amounts to a complete dissolving of the mystic in God's essence, as claimed by any number of medieval mystics who compared the process to dissolution or annihilation like a complete mixing of two liquids. Rather, the mystical theologian is like the polished glass that can receive a perfect reflection, or like a statue that sculpts itself. The aspiring mystic works at removing everything that prevents him, or indeed her, from being a perfect image of God. Gerson's political stance, his emphasis on simple piety, and his distrust of technical scholasticism all anticipate currents of thought that will flow through the 15th century. To borrow a line that the parodic literary history from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf applied to Dante, Gerson stood with one foot in the Middle Ages while with the other he hailed the dawn of a new day. But, as I suggested at the start of this episode, he wasn't alone. Next time, we'll be looking at another key transitional figure, the man that from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf calls John Wycliffe of Dover, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.