Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/163

Rh new task, and this day was called Innocents’ Day, like the festival itself. Louis XI observed this usage scrupulously. The coronation of Edward IV of England was repeated, as it had taken place on a Sunday, because the 28th of December of the previous year had been a Sunday too. René de Lorraine had to give up his plan of fighting a battle on the 17th of October, 1476, as his lansquenets refused to encounter the enemy “on Innocents’ Day.”

This belief, of which we find some traces appearing in England as late as the eighteenth century, called forth a treatise from Gerson against superstition in general. His penetrating mind had realized some of the danger with which these excrescences of the creed menaced the purity of religious thought. He was aware of their psychological basis; according to him, these beliefs proceed ex sola hominum phantasiatione et melancholica imaginatione; it is a disorder of the imagination caused by some lesion of the brain, which in its turn is due to diabolic illusions.

The Church was constantly on her guard lest dogmatic truth should be confounded with this mass of facile beliefs, and lest the exuberance of popular fancy should degrade God. But was she able to stand against this strong need of giving a concrete form to all the emotions accompanying religious thought? It was an irresistible tendency to reduce the infinite to the finite, to disintegrate all mystery. The highest mysteries of the creed became covered with a crust of superficial piety. Even the profound faith in the eucharist expands into childish beliefs—for instance, that one cannot go blind or have a stroke of apoplexy on a day on which one has heard mass, or that one does not grow older during the time spent in attending mass. While herself offering so much food to the popular imagination, the Church could not claim to keep that imagination within the limits of a healthy and vigorous piety.

In this respect the case of Gerson is characteristic. He composed a treatise, Contra vanam curiositatem, by which he means the spirit of research which desires to scrutinize the secrets of nature. But whilst protesting against it, he himself becomes guilty of a curiosity which to us seems out of place and deplorable. Gerson was the great promoter of the adoration of Saint Joseph. His veneration for this saint makes