Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419)

Birth at Valencia (1350)

Vincent Ferrer was born on 23 January 1350 at Valencia, in the kingdom of the same name attached to the Crown of Aragon.^[7][8] He was the fourth child of the notary Guillem Ferrer and Constança Miquel, a respectable family of the city reconquered from Islam a century earlier.^[9] The family was turned toward God: his elder brother Boniface Ferrer would become a Carthusian and general of the order, prior of the Grande Chartreuse in 1402.^[10]

The child proved precocious. According to his first biographers, he completed the philosophy course at about fourteen and showed very early an intense devotion, marked by fasting, almsgiving to the poor and a great tenderness for the Passion of Christ.^[11][12]

Entry among the Preachers and the years of study

In 1367, at seventeen, Vincent entered the Order of Preachers, founded a century and a half earlier by Saint Dominic to unite the study of truth with preaching.^[13] His formation was demanding and itinerant, in the image of the order: the house of studies at Barcelona (1368), teaching philosophy at Lérida (1370), return to the studium of Arabic and Hebrew at Barcelona (1373), then studies at Toulouse (1377).^[14]

This twofold competence — scholastic dialectic on the one hand, knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic on the other — prepared the future missionary to dialogue with the Jews and Muslims of Spain. Ordained priest in 1379 at Barcelona, a doctor of theology trained at the university of Lérida, he taught theology at Valencia cathedral from 1385 to 1390.^[15][16] He left behind logical treatises still preserved — De suppositionibus dialecticis, De natura universalis — which testify to a rigorously trained mind before he became a preacher to crowds.^[17]

In the service of Peter de Luna and the court of Avignon

As early as 1379, the young Dominican was noticed by Cardinal Pedro Martínez de Luna, the future antipope Benedict XIII.^[18] Confessor to Queen Yolande of Aragon at Salamanca (c. 1391–1395), Vincent then became, when Peter de Luna was elected pope by the Avignon obedience in 1394, his confessor and apostolic penitentiary.^[19][20] He refused the bishoprics and the cardinalate offered to him, faithful to the poverty of his order.^[21]

From this closeness was born his public engagement in the greatest crisis of the medieval Church.

A Christendom with two, then three popes

Nothing about Vincent Ferrer can be understood without the Western Schism (1378–1417). At the death of Gregory XI, the contested election of Urban VI at Rome, then that of Clement VII at Avignon, fractured Christendom into two rival obediences.^[22][23] Each camp had its pope, its cardinals, its saints — Saint Catherine of Siena supported Rome, Vincent Ferrer supported Avignon — and each kingdom chose its allegiance according to its political alliances.

In 1409, the Council of Pisa, meaning to settle the matter, only made it worse by electing a third pope: the Church now had three simultaneous claimants.^[24] Only the Council of Constance (1414–1418) would overcome the crisis.

Vincent, defender of Avignon

Vincent took the side of Avignon out of reasoned conviction. He wrote a treatise, the De moderno Ecclesiae schismate ("On the present schism of the Church"), to defend the legitimacy of the Avignon pontiffs.^[25][26] His loyalty to Peter de Luna was total: the Catholic Encyclopedia describes him as "one of the most resolute and faithful supporters of Benedict XIII".^[27]

This loyalty would make all the more resounding the act by which, twenty years later, he resolved to abandon his friend to save the unity of the Church.

The illness and the apparition of Christ

In 1398, while Avignon was under siege and Vincent lay gravely ill with a fever that brought him to death's door, the event occurred that changed his life.^[28][29] He received, as he himself recounted, an apparition of Christ accompanied by Saint Dominic and Saint Francis of Assisi: he was miraculously healed and sent to preach penance to prepare men for the coming judgment.^[30][31]

According to the account Vincent himself gave of this vision, taken up in the canonization dossier, Christ sent him to preach the conversion and correction of men before the coming of the Antichrist.^[32]

"The Angel of the Apocalypse"

From this mission received, Vincent drew a reading of his own vocation that would mark his iconography for centuries. He understood himself to be the angel of the Apocalypse, whom Saint John sees "flying in midheaven, with an eternal gospel" to proclaim to every nation:

"Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come." — Revelation 14:7^[33]

It is in these terms — Timete Deum et date illi honorem, quia venit hora iudicii eius — that posterity would portray him, forefinger raised to heaven, book open at this verse.^[34] Benedict XIII granted him in November 1399 full powers as legate a latere Christi ("envoy from the side of Christ"), an exceptional title freeing him for a universal preaching mission.^[35]

A continent-wide preaching itinerary

From 1399 until his death, Vincent Ferrer led the life of a wandering preacher of almost unbelievable endurance, crossing on foot — then, as age came, mounted on a donkey — most of Western Europe.^[36][37]

The company of penitents

Vincent never travelled alone. A veritable army of penitents, recruited from every rank of society, followed him from town to town: the Catholic Encyclopedia speaks of a retinue sometimes reaching ten thousand people, without any scandal ever touching that wandering assembly.^[38] Many practised public flagellation as a sign of penance, a custom Vincent supervised to avoid the excesses of the spontaneous flagellant movements of the fourteenth century.^[39]

This penitential staging — processions, hymns, fasts, public reconciliations of enemies — made each visit of the saint a veritable spiritual awakening of cities.^[40]

The gift of tongues

Vincent preached in his mother tongue, Valencian (a dialect of Catalan), and yet the chronicles affirm he was understood by Bretons, Italians, Germans and Englishmen.^[41] This gift of tongues — or at least a prodigious intelligibility — is reported by serious witnesses, including Nicolas de Clamanges, doctor of the University of Paris.^[42] His contemporaries saw in it a sign of the preacher's apostolic mission, an echo of Pentecost.

Miracles

Vincent's reputation as a wonderworker is inseparable from his preaching. Healings of the sick, of paralytics, of the possessed punctuate his sermons.^[43][44] The most famous of his wonders, abundantly depicted in art, is the resurrection of a child: the legend, studied by the historian Laura Ackerman Smoller in The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby, tells of a mother who, driven mad, had killed and dismembered her infant, and that Vincent restored him to life.^[45] Beyond the legendary detail, this story expresses the saint's function in the medieval imagination: a man through whom life itself seemed to return.

Another tradition reports that he prophesied his own canonization: to those astonished at his miracles, he is said to have answered that one day the Church would declare him a saint — which came to pass less than forty years after his death.^[46]

"Timete Deum": the fear of God

The heart of Vincent Ferrer's message was not menace for its own sake, but conversion in urgency. He preached a just God whose judgment is near, but merciful to whoever repents.^[47][48] In a Christendom traumatized by the Black Death, wars and the scandal of the schism, this reminder of the last things — death, judgment, heaven and hell — answered a profound expectation.

His conviction of the imminence of the Antichrist, which he preached notably at Toledo (1411) and Toulouse (1416), was not a calculation of dates but a call to watchfulness.^[49] This eschatological preaching connects him to an ancient medieval current, without ever fixing a precise deadline of the kind condemned by the Church.

A word for the living and for the dead

Vincent closely linked the preaching of the Judgment to the practice of the sacraments: confession, communion, reconciliation of enemies, restitution of ill-gotten goods. His sermons, preserved in Latin and published as early as the sixteenth century (Antwerp, 1570; complete edition at Valencia, 1591), reveal a rigorous theologian behind the popular preacher.^[50]

A massive preaching effort

Trained in Hebrew and Arabic, Vincent devoted a major part of his Iberian mission to the conversion of the Jews and Muslims of Spain. His first biographer, Pietro Ranzano, puts forward the figure — no doubt amplified by hagiography — of twenty-five thousand Jews converted, and of several thousand Muslims in the Granada region.^[51][52] Modern historians retain an order of magnitude of 25,000 to 30,000 Jewish conversions linked, directly or indirectly, to his preaching.^[53][54]

The disputation of Tortosa (1413-1414)

The summit of this enterprise was the great disputation of Tortosa (1413–1414), a public controversy between rabbis and Christian theologians convened under the aegis of Benedict XIII.^[55] In its wake, many notable Jews of Aragon received baptism. The most famous conversion was that of Rabbi Yehoshua ha-Lorki, who became Jerónimo de Santa Fe (Jerome of the Holy Faith), crossed over to the Christian camp and played a leading role in the disputation.^[56]

A controversial memory

It would be dishonest to pass over the fact that this page provokes lively historiographical debate today. Vincent has sometimes been made the instigator of the pogroms of 1391 or a partisan of forced conversion.^[57] Recent research, notably that of Philip Daileader, strongly qualifies this portrait: the violence of 1391 precedes his great mission and cannot be imputed to him; above all, Vincent defended in principle the free character of baptism, condemning physical coercion, even though the social and legal pressure of his time weighed heavily on Jewish communities.^[58]

The Church canonized in him the preacher of the faith, not a state policy. Distinguishing the holiness of the man from the limits and violence of his age is a matter of historical honesty, without rewriting or excusing what must be faced squarely.

The death without heir of Martin I of Aragon (1410) opened a grave dynastic crisis. To decide between the claimants, the kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia appointed a commission of nine judges, three per kingdom, assembled at Caspe.^[59][60] Vincent Ferrer was one of them, and his moral authority there was decisive.

On 28 June 1412, it was he who publicly proclaimed the result: the Crown of Aragon went to Ferdinand of Antequera, infante of Castile.^[61][62] This Compromise of Caspe is one of the rare medieval examples of a monarchical succession settled by a quasi-judicial procedure — and it bears the mark of the preacher, anxious to avert civil war.

The most consequential act of his whole public life was doubtless the most painful. Long faithful to Benedict XIII, Vincent ended by concluding that the Avignon antipope, the sole surviving claimant stubbornly refusing all renunciation, had become the principal obstacle to unity.^[63][64]

On 6 January 1416, preaching at Perpignan in the presence of King Ferdinand, he officially announced the withdrawal of obedience of the Crown of Aragon toward Benedict XIII.^[65][66] By detaching Spain from the last Avignon obedience, he deprived Peter de Luna of his principal support and opened the way to the unanimous election of Martin V at the Council of Constance (1417), which ended the schism.^[67]

"Vincent was one of the most resolute and faithful supporters of Benedict XIII" — and it was precisely this proven fidelity that gave his withdrawal, when the moment came, a weight no one else could have lent it.^[68]

Behind the preacher to crowds hides a master of the interior life. His short Treatise on the Spiritual Life (De vita spirituali) has remained a classic of Dominican spirituality, to the point of being regarded as a worthy "prelude to the Imitation of Christ".^[69] In it he offers simple counsels drawn from the Scriptures and the Fathers to lead humble souls to please God.

Humility, foundation of all

For Vincent, it is humility that opens the soul to the light of God. Far from being a decorative virtue, it is the very condition of true spiritual knowledge:

"Humility; a virtue which purifying the heart from all vain and useless thoughts, opens the eyes of the soul." — Saint Vincent Ferrer, Treatise on the Spiritual Life, ch. III^[70]

He warns, with an altogether scholastic finesse, against the temptation to practise humility or the fear of God in order to obtain visions and revelations: that would be to fall back into the pride one claims to flee.^[71]

Silence, poverty, detachment

The interior life passes through the guarding of the tongue and detachment. The saint asks that speech be used only for good:

"This organ ought only to be employed in useful speech, and never to become the instrument of vain and idle words." — Saint Vincent Ferrer, Treatise on the Spiritual Life, ch. II^[72]

His personal poverty was radical: the ground for a bed, perpetual fasting, rising at two in the morning for the office, daily Mass followed by several hours of preaching, then care of sick children in the afternoon.^[73] He taught asking nothing of anyone except in absolute necessity.^[74]

Abandonment to the will of God

The ultimate mainspring of his spirituality is conformity to the will of God: every spiritual gift comes from God alone, not from one's own effort.

"It is Jesus Christ Who, in His mercy, gives it to you; that this in no way comes from yourself." — Saint Vincent Ferrer, Treatise on the Spiritual Life, ch. III^[75]

This doctrine of total dependence on grace, joined with humility and the filial fear of God, makes the Treatise a guide still read today in novitiates.^[76]

In the evening of his life, exhausted, Vincent answered the call of John V, Duke of Brittany, and preached throughout the province from 1418.^[77] Tradition reports that he met King Henry V of England, whom he exhorted to end the Hundred Years' War, and that Saint Colette of Corbie prophesied to him that he would die in France.^[78][79]

It was at Vannes that he died on 5 April 1419, at sixty-nine, worn out by twenty years of roads and sermons.^[80][81] The Breton city, whose patron saint he became, keeps his relics in Saint-Pierre Cathedral.^[82]

The trial and the miracles

Vincent's cause was carried by an immediate popular fervour. The canonical inquiries, conducted at Vannes, Toulouse, Naples and Avignon, gathered a considerable quantity of testimonies: the tradition recorded in the Acta Sanctorum retains the figure of eight hundred and seventy-three reported miracles at the trial.^{[83][84][85][86]}

Calixtus III and the bull of Pius II

The Spanish pope Calixtus III (Alfonso de Borgia), who had known Vincent in his lifetime and had, it is said, received from him the prophecy of his accession to the pontifical throne, decreed his canonization on 3 June 1455.^[87][88] Calixtus dying before publishing the bull, it was his successor Pius II who promulgated the official document, the bull Rationi congruit, in October 1458.^[89] According to the summaries historians give of it, Pius II celebrated Vincent in it as the angel of the Apocalypse, flying across heaven to announce to the inhabitants of the earth the day of Judgment.^[90]

Patronages and iconography

Saint Vincent Ferrer is celebrated on 5 April in the Roman Martyrology (5 May among the Dominicans).^[91] Patron of Valencia and Vannes, he is also patron of roofers, plumbers and builders — through a play on his name and on the image of spiritual edification.^[92] Art almost always depicts him in the Dominican habit, forefinger pointed to heaven, holding the book open at the verse Timete Deum, sometimes endowed with angel's wings and a trumpet: the Angel of the Judgment, become for centuries the icon of the preacher of the last things.^[93]

• The Western Schism (1378-1417) — the crisis of the two then three popes, backdrop of Vincent's whole life.
• Saint Dominic (1170-1221) — the founder of the Order of Preachers, of which Vincent was one of the greatest preachers.
• Calixtus III (1378-1458) — the Borgia pope who canonized Vincent and had known him in life.
• Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) — the Dominican who, in the same schism, supported Rome when Vincent supported Avignon.
• Saint Bernardine of Siena (1380-1444) — the Franciscan whom Vincent, it is said, noticed in the crowd at Alexandria.