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Gerson was a man proof against classification or generalization. A mystic in faith, he was rational in practice. As a lover of the golden mean, he distrusted the devotional excesses of other mystics and visionaries. As a churchman, he was both conformist and non-conformist. Humane in ideas, he harshly opposed the early French humanists in the great debate over the Roman de la Rose. Despite his dislike of visionaries, especially female, he was to be, in the last year of his life, one of only two theologians willing to guarantee the authenticity of the voices of Joan of Arc. This was not because he was what moderns would call a liberal, but because he understood the intensity of her religious faith. He was a compendium and a reflector of the ideas and intellectual influences of his age.

In earlier times he would have been a monk, but in the last hundred years the university had taken over from the monastery the main work of transmitting the knowledge of the past and pursuing it in the present. Entering the University of Paris at fourteen, Gerson had found theology and philosophy petrified in the arid syllogisms of the scholastics. In the great age of Aquinas, scholasticism had undertaken to answer all questions of faith by reason and logic, but reason had proved incapable of explaining God and the universe, and the effort faded, leaving only a hard shell of argument by logic, practiced, as Petrarch said in disgust, by “hoary-headed children.” When theybegin to “spew forth syllogisms,” he advised taking flight. Gerson, like others of his troubled time, craved something more meaningful for the soul and found the alternative in mystic faith and direct communion with God.

He believed that society could be regenerated only through a renewal and deepening of faith in which “vain curiosity” had no place. Knowledge of God, he wrote, “is better acquired by penitent feeling than by intellectual investigation.” He took the same view of the supernatural, affirming the existence of demons and reproving those who scoffed for lack of faith and the “infection of reason.” Yet Gerson could not keep reason from breaking in. He scorned magic and astrologers’ superstitions, and recommended careful examination of visions before giving them credence.

He disapproved of the Bible in the vernacular, yet, as a poet, teacher, and orator, he wrote many of his sermons and treatises in French so as to convey his meaning to simple minds and youthful understanding. Medieval educators in general spent much time composing sermons for children. Gerson in particular was concerned with their development, and uncommon in seeing them as persons distinct from adults. In a curriculum for Church schools, he urged the necessity of keeping a vigil lamp lit in the youngest children’s dormitory to serve as a symbol of faith and to give light when “natural necessity” required their rising during the night. Reformation of the Church, he warned, must begin with the right teaching of children, and reform of the colleges begin with reform of elementary schools.

He advised confessors to arouse a sense of guilt in children with regard to their sexual habits so that they might recognize the need for penitence. Masturbation, even without ejaculation, was a sin that “takes away a child’s virginity even more than if at the same age he had gone with a woman.” The absence of a sense of guilt about it in children was a situation that must be changed. They must not hear coarse conversation or be allowed to kiss and fondle each other nor sleep in the same bed with the opposite sex, nor with adults even of the same sex. Gerson had six sisters, all of whom chose to remain unmarried in holy virginity. Some powerful family influence was surely at work here from which this strong personality emerged.

Sex was one factor in Gerson’s violent rejection of Jean de Meung’s Roman de la Rose. Meung’s celebration of carnal love, his satire of Chastity, his enthronement of Reason, his free-thinking skepticism, his anti-clerical bias were all anathema to Gerson. When Christine de Pisan