Grellard, Christophe <br/><br/>
The Sermon as Casuistic Exercise According to Jean Gerson 

 -  2015.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> According to Jean Gerson’s study of pastoral activity, the sermon holds a crucial position alongside confession, a privileged position confirmed by the very practice of predication at which he excelled. Gerson invests the sermon with a seminal role in the articulation of orthodoxy and orthopraxis, since the pastor’s word is at the junction between the generality of the law it must transmit and the singularity of the action it must regulate. This tension between generality and singularity is, for Gerson, resolved for the most part by casuistics, understood as a method of positing a problem and resolving the specific issue it raises. In this way, the sermon appears in many respects as a call to an examination of conscience and a preparation for confession that completes on an individual level the work of mediation between the law and the problem at hand in the sermon. It is the application of these proto-casuistics illustrated by the analysis of the cycle of French sermons entitled Poenitemini that allows us to consider the art of the sermon as a form of ethica utens.