Content area
Abstract
In the past few years, scholars of the Middle Ages have noticed a group of thirteenth and fourteenth-century mystical authors who used vernacular language to convey distinctive teachings on the relationship between the soul and God. In the fifteenth century, three professional theologians, Jean Gerson, Nicholas of Cusa and Denys the Carthusian, drew on the mystical theology of these vernacular authors to rebuild the fragmented Church of their day. As these later writers worked to reform their Church, they borrowed the vernacular theologians' teachings on the mystical life while either rejecting or excusing their more controversial doctrine of radical mystical union.
In this study, I examine the use of the ideas and practices of vernacular theology by these three professional theologians. As I will show, Gerson, Nicholas and Denys encountered both an opportunity and an obstacle in their use of vernacular theology. On the one hand, they could use the mystical theology of the fourteenth century to counter the overly intellectual concerns of educated European men. On the other hand, they would need to reclaim the vernacular theologians from the dust heap of heresy in order to make their ideas acceptable to other fifteenth-century scholastics. As I examine their respective attitudes, I point out the various strategies they employed to appropriate, censure, or endorse the insights of vernacular theology.
These three scholastics used the ideas of the vernacular theologians to bring their own theology back to its ground in the desire for the vision of God. While Gerson and Cusa applied this mystical desire to the errors they saw in the practices of the laity and the beliefs of the academics, Denys addressed a division which existed in the soul between love and knowledge. All three of them drew on the unifying themes of vernacular authors to attempt to re-unite their increasingly fragmented world through the unity inherent in mystical union.
