A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [311]
Admirers of Meung sprang to his defense in open letters to Christine and Gerson. The defenders, Jean de Montreuil, Gontier and Pierre Col, were clerics and scholars in the secretarial service of the crown. Together with like-minded academics, they were among those who had chosen another path than Gerson in reaction to the dusty answers of the scholastics. With their faith in human reason and recognition of natural instincts they were acknowledging the lay spirit. In that sense they were humanists, although not concerned with the classical researches of the humanist movement in Florence. What they admired in Meung was his free-ranging thought and bold attack on standard formulas. Among certain learned and enlightened men, Jean de Montreuil asserted, appreciation of the Roman de la Rose was such that they would rather do without their shirts than this book. “The more I study the gravity of the mysteries and the mystery of the gravity of this profound and famous work, the more I am astonished at your disapproval.”
While fervent, this was not very specific. Pierre Col was more courageous, defending the sensuality that so offended Gerson. He asserted that the Song of Solomon celebrated love for the daughter of Pharaoh, not for the Church; that the female vulva represented by the Rose was held to be sacred, according to the Gospel of St. Luke; and that Gerson himself would one day fall in love, as had happened to other theologians.
The debate expanded. Christine replied with Le Dit de la Rose and Gerson with a magisterial essay, Tractatus Contra Romantium de Rosa in which allegorical figures carry their complaints against Jean de Meung before the “sacred court of Christianity” and he is appropriately condemned. Although Gerson had the last word in the controversy, he could not destroy the attraction of the book. It continued to be widely read into the 16th century, surviving even a pious attempt to “moralize” its images, in which the Rose was transformed into an allegory for Jesus.
While Gerson remained within the establishment, the search for faith was drawing others outside in movements away from institutional religion. People were seeking in lay communion a substitute for rituals grown routine and corrupt. Faith was all the more needed when the way seemed lost in a dark wood of alarms and confusions.
The damage done by the schism had deepened. Both the popes were absorbed in extravagant display for the sake of prestige and the search for more and more money to support it. Pope Boniface in Rome took cuts from usury and sold benefices to the point of scandal, sometimes re-selling the same office to a higher bidder and dating the second appointment previous to the first. He sold the right to hold as many as ten or twelve benefices at a time. Clement VII extracted “voluntary” loans and subsidies and piled up ecclesiastical taxes until his bishops in 1392 refused to pay, and pinned their protest to the doors of the papal palace in Avignon. As a dependent of France, he made over tithes on the French clergy to the crown, and in the many disputes arising from this, he took the crown’s part against the clergy. No measures filled his need; he had to borrow from usurers and pawn the sacred treasures. At his death, it was said, the papal tiara itself was on pawn.
Within the Empire the effect of the schism was not greatly divisive because conditions were already so chaotic that they could not have been made much worse. Charles IV had taken the precaution before he died of having his eldest son, Wenceslas, crowned King of Bohemia and nominated Emperor ahead of time, but concord and unity did not come with the