Jean Gerson

Jean Charlier de Gerson (13 December 1363 – 12 July 1429) was a French scholar, educator, reformer, and poet, Chancellor of the University of Paris, a guiding light of the conciliar movement and one of the most prominent theologians at the Council of Constance. He was one of the first thinkers to develop what would later come to be called natural rights theory, and was also one of the first individuals to defend Joan of Arc and proclaim her supernatural vocation as authentic.

Aged fourteen, he left Gerson-lès-Barby to study at the college of Navarre in Paris under Gilles Deschamps, (Aegidius Campensis) and Pierre d'Ailly (Petrus de Alliaco), who became his life-long friend.

Gerson was born at Gerson-lès-Barby, Gerson (paroisse de Barby) a hamlet in the present municipality of Barby, Ardennes in the bishopric of Reims in Champagne.

His parents, Arnulphe Charlier and Élisabeth de la Chardenière, "a second Monica," were pious peasants, and seven of their twelve children, four daughters and three sons, devoted themselves to a religious life. The eldest, young Gerson was sent to Paris to the famous college of Navarre when fourteen years of age. After a five years' course he obtained the degree of licentiate of arts, and then began his theological studies under two very celebrated teachers, Gilles Deschamps (Aegidius Campensis) and Pierre d'Ailly (Petrus de Alliaco), rector of the college of Navarre, chancellor of the university, and afterwards bishop of Puy, archbishop of Cambrai and cardinal. Pierre d'Ailly remained his lifelong friend, and in later life the pupil seems to have become the teacher (see preface to Liber de vita Spir. Animae).

Gerson attracted the notice of the university. He was elected procurator for the French 'nation' (the French-born Francophone students at the University) in 1383, and again in 1384, in which year he graduated bachelor of theology. Three years later a still higher honour was bestowed upon him; he was sent along with the chancellor and others to represent the university in a case of appeal taken to the pope. John of Montson (Monzón, de Montesono), an Aragonese Dominican who had recently graduated as doctor of theology at Paris, had in 1387 been condemned by the faculty of theology because he had taught that the Virgin Mary, like other ordinary descendants of Adam, was born in original sin; and the Dominicans, who were fierce opponents of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, were expelled from the university.

John of Montson appealed to Pope Clement VII at Avignon, and Pierre d'Ailly, Gerson and the other university delegates, while they personally supported the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, were content to rest their case upon the legal rights of the university to test in its own way its theological teachers. It is certain that from this time onwards he was zealous in his endeavours to spiritualize the universities, to reform the morals of the clergy, and to put an end to the schism which then divided the church.

He first gained fame as a popular preacher in Paris in the early 1390s. In 1392 Gerson was awarded licentiate, receiving his doctorate of theology in 1394; and in 1395, when Pierre d'Ailly was made bishop of Puy, he was, at the early age of thirty-two, elected Chancellor of the University of Paris, and made a canon of Notre-Dame. The university was then at the height of its fame, and its chancellor was necessarily a man prominent not only in France but in Europe, sworn to maintain the rights of his university against both king and pope, and entrusted with the conduct and studies of a vast crowd of students attracted from almost every country in Europe. Gerson's writings bear witness to his deep sense of the responsibilities, anxieties and troubles of his position. He was all his days a man of letters, and an analysis of his writings is his best biography. His work has three periods, in which he was engaged in reforming the university studies, maturing plans for overcoming the schism (a task which after 1404 absorbed all his energies), and in the evening of his life writing books of devotion.

As Etienne Gilson refers, in his speech before King Charles VI of France on November 7, 1405, entitled Long Live the King, Gerson recalled the origins of the Wisdom of the University of Paris, in order: from the first man in the Earthly Paradise to the Hebrews and then to the Egyptians through Abraham (cf. the writings of Patriarch Joseph), then Athens, Rome and Paris.