DEFINITIONS

Gerson was a professor of theology who researched, taught and published on many religious themes, among them on what today would be called mysticism. Gerson called his subject ‘speculative mystical theology’. His extra-curricular lectures on this topic, given during the academic year 1402–3, were, in fact, part of his plan for the regeneration of the faculty of theology at Paris. He also published and probably taught on another aspect of the topic. We might call his treatise on this aspect ‘A guide to the mystical life’; he called it ‘practical mystical theology’. The term ‘mystica theologia’ by itself almost always for Gerson denotes the actual mystical experience which man can have of God, the state of mystical union with God, not the study of this experience, which is what the term suggests to us. The word ‘mysticism’ – and Latin and French equivalents for it – did not exist in the fifteenth century. The more usual term for what Gerson called ‘mystical theology’ was ‘contemplation’, a word Gerson uses himself, sometimes as a synonym for mystical theology, as in La Montaigne de contemplation, but sometimes as meaning the activity of the highest of man's intellectual powers, and thus different from mystical theology, which he chiefly connects with man's highest affective power, the synderesis.

Gerson's use of the term ‘mystica theologia’ is not, however, peculiar to him. It was used by Hugh of Balma, writing around 1300, and by Vincent of Aggsbach in the mid fifteenth century.