Un discreto controllo. Come il discernimento degli spiriti passò dall'essere carisma a essere funzione istituzionale

A Discreet Control. How the Discernment of Spirits Shifted from Being a Charism to Being an Institutional Function This contribution addresses the conceptual definition and the practice of the discernment of spirits as they emerge from a selection of works composed between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In particular, it analyzes the texts of two eminent theologians, Henry of Langenstein and Jean Gerson, as authoritative and widely circulated works, alongside the writings of an Augustinian friar from Siena, Girolamo da Siena, which show how the practice of discernment developed. The analysis shows that the discernment of spirits became a genuine instrument of social control. Attested as a charism by the evangelical canon, it was transformed into a priestly exercise through the construction of a theological interpretive framework that absorbed the charism into the ecclesiastical institution. In this way, the right to mark the boundary between what proceeds from the Spirit of God and what is caused by the devil was recognized as belonging to the priestly order alone. This occurred between the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, at a crucial cultural turning point, because it vested in the ecclesiastical institution alone the faculty of judging true and false in matters of the interior life, making the Church the sole arbiter in the forum of conscience