Jean Gerson was born in Gerson-lès-Barby, on the Seine River. At the age of fourteen, he went to the University of Palace, eventually earning a doctorate in theology in 1395; the same year, he became chancellor of the University and head of the theology faculty. Though he resigned from academia in 1398, criticizing the academic life and its focus on fulfilling the whims of patrons rather than true study, he later resumed his post in 1400, after an illness made him realize the importance of writing for an audience outside academia. Throughout his life, he met with the various Popes, working to end the papal schism. After attending the Council of Constance (1414-1418), he spent some time at the Abbey of Melk in Austria, as well as some time in Vienna, before returning to France in 1419. He ended his life in Lyon, where he spent his last decade teaching and writing copiously.
Gerson was an extremely prolific writer, in both Latin and French. Among his most famous works are Speculative Mystical Theology, Practical Mystical Theology, and Opus Tripartitum, a guide to the Christian life. His sermons, in either language, were incredibly popular; also somewhat known were his writings on the true purpose of universities, as well as his critique of the famous poem Romance of the Rose. The excerpts below are from his Sermon on St. Nicholas. The first section is part of a long speech against hope in temporal things, which Gerson puts in Nicholas' mouth; the last section is on Nicholas' holy death and his trust in the eternal God, as opposed to the things of earth.
Think that, not me, but the blessed Priest of Christ [Nicholas] is speaking of the multiple and vain hopes of mortals, he he who thus begins:
"O fragile, O fallible, O mendacious, untested, and fearful hopes of mortals! Into how many divisions do you lead those who embrace you, whom you spin around in such a miserable and reproachful whirling? Forsake them, blind men, and, where the danger of eternal death looms, see how extremely demented it is for the weak to lean upon the weaker, indeed, all these moralities, truly, mortalities, or more flowing nods, uncertain, with much promise, truly having no Faith, and (as Maro says of another proposition)
Someone leans upon such, or he falls; he wavers, and must needs fall. From these, forthwith snatch away your captive minds; believe me, unworthy are all those things which snatch you in their hope, twist the caught, delude them, and, therefore, rend them from immortal cares. But your vice came to be, so you be most worthy, you who suffer such things. For the Most High made you better, and for higher things, than that to a yoke, and to such an iniquitous yoke, you would subject your once free necks; He gave immortal souls, and ones capable of Him; to the blessed life of eternal happiness, not of ruin, He called you: He admonished you to not have a remaining city here, but to seek a future one (Heb 13:14), in which is what neither ear has heard, nor eye seen, nor arose in the heart of man, what God prepared for those loving Him (1 Cor 2:9). By his desire for seizing immortality, a certain Platonist by the name of Theobrotus, having read Of the Immortality of the Soul, Plato’s Book, threw himself from the top of a tall tower, for nothing else than that he would migrate to a life which he hoped would be better[2]. Seneca said this hope of immortality consoled him, and delighted him most in his solitary meditation..."
...But this so far. Now I will look at his most happy death (I would better say, “departure”), and consider how much more truly than its author, Epicurus, he could say that line: This is the most blessed day I have spent, and the last. [3] For, afterwards, with a free voice, not with a harassing or contradicting conscience, he first exclaimed that opening: In You, Lord, I have hoped; now secure, and fearing nothing, he subjoined: I will not be confounded in eternity (Ps 30:1), nor did he fall, since, to put it Martianus’ words:
And we sinners, hearing this, what do we do? How do we dissimulate? We avoid this, we do not snatch the hope of eternal things, nor aspire to that city for which we were made: but we have souls curved toward earthly things, and empty of heavenly things, as the Satirist narrates. [5] Length of mortal life delights, and we are in such a mind, and such a soul, that, at the bare name of death and all its din, we pale with fear; yet death to this just man was a true birth, and the end of all the troubles in which this unhappy life stands. Now he holds the door; we thrown ourselves into all the reproaches of this worldly sea, we do not direct ourselves to that door of beatitude. He reigns, and shows himself great in heaven’s kingdom; we pass a most unhappy exile, and, as much as to cruelest tyrants, we sink into vices, and yet we do not seek the true homeland and liberty. He thrives with a most jocund consort; we live among the most savage scoffs of warriors, and, hidden among beasts in human effigy (as Seneca has it),[6] we do not await this. He hears the songs of the supernal melodies; but we hear now of dead parents, now of grave and unexpected events befalling friends, now the disgraceful deeds of enemies, now the mocking of neighbors, now the fall of shifting Republics, now the voices of the people strangled by fear and sighs, bitter rumors, a toiling homeland, the good trampled by iniquitous feet, and (what is the greatest matter for impatience) iniquity repaid.
I do not speak of everything, for there are more than those known by words and hearing; since, if someone, with Heraclitus, esteems things more to be wept over than tolerated, I would never look with dry eyes, nor bear sufficient tears for such evils: and yet, placed among these things, we desire to ever live. He looks at heavenly things face to face; we scarcely catch uncertain thoughts of earthly things, and, with blind fragility, that which one ought to believe with a pious mind, we often either negate or strive to penetrate with our feeble mind, and we fatigue of counting the wisdom of God, which (according to the Prophet) has no number (Ps 146:5) by some subtle thoughts, like any other number; and yet in this, such scarcity of knowledge—by no means where the treasuries of knowledge are—we twist our souls. Moreover, his mind rests in leisure and tranquility; ours foams, flows, and wavers, and is disquieted by the bitter stings of sinners’ conscience; it wills, it wills not; now it hates, now it loves; again it hates; here it flatters, here it angers, and there is such variety at once; it hopes and despairs: lest now (as Persius says) its will be its own; [7] but its own are many and almost as much as there are moments in time; yet we do not sigh after that blessed tranquility and leisure. He, finally, (so that I tie separate things together in a brief word) has a perfect state through the aggregation of all goods; we have, not such a state, but a most defective fall [8] through the negation of all goods. And, among these things, we are thus far complacent, not fervently or frequently thinking of blessed eternity, as is meet, or doubting of it, and fearing. Good God! Where are we slipping to? Turn now this infidelity through your faithfulness and through your prayers, you, Most Blessed Father Nicholas: and if the grace of God be not empty in you; if it kept you from becoming similar to us through the weight of similar vices; if it gave you to be a singular Patron for us, in which we glory; if it benefits so many languid bodies through you, and even your dead body; if you are, as we sing of you, truly compassionate, and having pious innards [9] for the afflicted: when the salvation of the soul is more gracious to you than that of the body, and we are truly afflicted in mind, succor, hasten, bring help, and pluck from the bottom, from our minds, as much as is possible, those seducing hopes, which are better called desperations, which draw us headlong into newer desperations, with which, vehemently, you so bitterly quarreled, and forthwith insert that hope which alone saves us, and can lighten our labors, vivify what was inserted, strength what was vivified, and, until the very end, keep what was strengthened; so that we may bear whatever transitory thing occurs, constantly, if it is inconvenient, humbly, if it is conveniently; may God make us participants the perennial hope of a crown, by your assisting merits, Protector of those hoping in Him, without whom nothing is valid, nothing holy, through true hope and grace here in the present, and, in the future, through glory.
Footnotes: [1] Virgil, The Aeneid, II.794. Virgil’s full name was Publius Vergilius Maro.
[2] The usual spelling of the name is Cleombrotus, not Theombrotus; an old tradition, found in an epigram of Callimachus, for instance, says that Cleombrotus of Ambracia read Plato’s Phaedo and then leapt into the sea to join the better life beyond.
[3] This is a saying of Epicurus as quoted in Seneca, Epistle XCII.24.
[4] Martianus Capella, On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, II.140. The original has “and” instead of “soon.”
[5] Cf. Persius, Satires II.61.
[6] Describing a wild animal as “in human effigy” seems to come from Pliny, Natural History VII.17; I have not found any reference in Seneca.
[7] See Persius, Satires V.53: “Its will is to each, lest a sole will live.” Gerson quotes only the first half (velle suum cuique est).
[8] There is a type of pun here; the Latin for "state" (status) is related to the verb “to stand” (sto or statuo). Gerson thus plays on the contrast of “standing” and “falling.”
[9] Where we would talk about the heart being the center of emotions, some cultures speak of the “bowels” or “innards” (in Latin, viscera). These “pious viscera” are similar to the “good bowels” (εὐσπλαγχνία) of a Greek word for ”compassion.”
Source: Ioannis Gersonii Doctoris Theologi & Cancellarii Parisiensis Opera Omnia…, ed. Louis Ellies du Pin, Editio Secunda, Tomus Tertius (Hague: Peter de Hondt, 1728), 1575B-1575D, 1578B-1580C.