and 1347, but unfortunately also renewed the old penalties of lip-slitting and cutting out of tongues, which bore witness, it is true, to a holy horror of blasphemy, but which it was not possible to enforce. In the margin of the register containing the ordinance, someone has noted: “At present, 1411, all these oaths are in general use throughout the kingdom without being punished.”
Gerson, with his long experience as a confessor, knew the psychological nature of the sin of blasphemy very well. On the one hand, he says, there are the habitual swearers, who, though culpable, are not perjurers, as it is not their intention to take an oath. On the other, we find young men of a pure and simple nature who are irresistibly tempted to blaspheme and to deny God. Their case reminds us of John Bunyan’s, whose disease took the form of “a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption.” Gerson counsels these young men to give themselves up less to the contemplation of God and the saints, as they lack the mental strength required.
It is impossible to draw the line of demarcation between an ingenuous familiarity and conscious infidelity. As early as the fifteenth century people liked to show themselves esprits forts and to deride piety in others. The word “papelard,” meaning a hypocrite, was in frequent use with lay writers of the time. “De jeune angelot vieux diable” (a young saint makes an old devil), said the proverb, or, in solemn Latin metre, Angelicus juvenis senibus sathanizat in annis. “It is by such sayings,” Gerson exclaims, “that youth is perverted. A brazen face, scurrilous language and curses, immodest looks and gestures, are praised in children. Well, what is to be expected in old age of a sathanizing youth?”
The people, he says, do not know how to steer a middle course between overt unbelief and the foolish credulity, of which the clergy themselves set the example. They give credence to all revelations and prophecies, which are often but fancies of diseased people or lunatics, and yet when a serious divine, who has been honoured by genuine revelations, is occasionally mistaken, he is called impostor and “papelard,” and the people henceforth refuse to listen to any divine because all are considered hypocrites.
