Ultimately, Christian preaching theory was hoist with its own petard in regard to the issue of divine and human contexts. Unwilling to allow any inspired person the title of preacher, and the possibility of generating imitators, theorists of preaching explicitly displaced preaching from full participation in the realm of plenitudinous, divine communication. Their concepts of extraordinary and ordinary authority relegated prophecy to a different sphere and denied women and laymen access to preaching.81 Since women were regarded as equal in soul to men, the justification for preventing them from preaching could only be that this activity takes place in the human world and thus requires a certain “privilege over others,” as Humbert of Romans put it; hence women, being subject to men in human society, may not preach.82 This is also the substance of Thomas Aquinas’s argument against public instruction by women, which relies not on theological underpinnings, as his discussion of women and ordination does, but on social norms; he cites the ubiquitous Epistle to Timothy.83 Such justifications situate preaching firmly in the context of human hierarchies and limitations. They exclude women and also tend to diminish the male preacher’s ability to claim direct access to the divine in his preaching. The preacher, whether female or male, thus becomes subject to questions about social status, personal morality, and interactive performance; the exclusion of unauthorized speakers by appeal to the human context inescapably entangles the preacher in the demands of that context. Suspended between authorization and inspiration, between citation and ownership, the preacher had to assert a claim on his language and office that, in order to function, could only ever be provisional.
2
Holy Duplicity: The Preacher’s Two Faces
This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf,
That first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte.
Cristes loore and his apostles twelve
He taughte; but first he folwed it himselve.…
For though myself be a ful vicious man,
A moral tale yet I yow telle kan.
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
THE PREACHER’S ABSTRACT ABILITY TO FORM part of a clerical lineage was only one part of his task; once established in his role he still needed to demonstrate his ability to perform that role convincingly. The problem is neatly encapsulated in the contrasting preachers of the Canterbury Tales.1 Chaucer’s description of the Parson in the General Prologue is as much a depiction of the ideal priest as the Pardoner’s Prologue, later in the same text, is a compendium of a preacher’s faults.2 The two figures differ in almost every possible respect relevant to a preacher—intention, authorization, use of rhetoric, mode of delivery. The Pardoner’s very title declares him to be of a dubious caste of preachers who often used trumped-up bulls to justify their self-interested preaching, while the Parson, a parish priest whose concern is all for his flock, has pure intentions and a better and more ancient right to preach than anyone save a bishop.3 Then there are their styles of preaching: the Pardoner’s gesticulations, elaborate rhetoric, and spun-out exemplum are the antithesis of the Parson’s sober refusal to rhyme or “glose” in his “myrie tale in prose.”4 What does not differ is the worth of their messages; the Pardoner’s theme, “Radix malorum est cupiditas” (the love of money is the root of evils), is no less inherently respectable than the Parson’s implicit teaching, “Penitenciam agite” (do penance).5 But the very different responses they have drawn, both from their fellow pilgrims and from modern readers, amply demonstrate the importance of the messenger to his message. The Parson and the Pardoner encapsulate the central ethical and moral issues that concerned the writers of preaching manuals from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, a period when preaching was much in question both within and outside the orthodox church. High on the list of potential problems was the appropriate relationship between the preacher’s human body and his spiritual task. Fictional and extreme test cases, the Parson and the Pardoner are, in effect, exemplum in bono and exemplum in malo of that relationship. They can help to highlight and are themselves illuminated in turn by a discussion of how the preacher’s person could contribute to or diminish the “office of holy preaching.”6
While the problems surrounding the preacher’s body and office were becoming increasingly acute in the later Middle Ages, they were by no means new. Conrad Leyser has recently argued that Gregory the Great drew on the ascetic tradition to create the ideal of a ruler whose ability to control his own body and, in particular, the “flux” of his speech demonstrated his ability to manage affairs in the world; this control of speech, Leyser argues, in effect substituted for the sexual temperance or abstinence that was the focus for earlier thinkers.7 Gregory’s concern with “how [one could] safely distinguish speakers of true spiritual wisdom from purveyors of empty falsehoods” is reflected in his assertion, “If a man’s life is despised, his preaching will be condemned.”8 The concern with personal morality and Gregory’s distrust of the rhetorical display that might disguise “empty falsehoods” were crucial to his attempt to link external power to internal virtue, and they formed a key part of his substantial legacy of advice to later preachers on the practical and spiritual difficulties of their task.9
Gregory’s arguments on these topics remained central for later theorists of preaching, but they came to be used in a spiritual and institutional climate very different from that in which the sixth-century pope had developed them. The reforms instigated by the other famous Pope Gregory in the eleventh century gave rise to new pressures on the body of the preacher. The desire to return to a vision of the apostolic life as one of poverty and preaching, the focus on the clergy as a group set apart, and above all the need to recapture for the church as a whole a radical sense of sancta simplicitas all put increased demands on the clergy to possess, and to display in their words and actions, an impeccable personal morality.10 To fulfill their office and to reinforce the church’s power, preachers required both spiritual excellence and unquestioned authorization, qualities displayed above all in the preacher’s person.
That “person,” however, was a problematic and increasingly divided concept. As the authors of scholastic and disputation literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries moved away from the patristic tendency to focus on personal dignity, they began, as Jean Leclercq says, “to distinguish the person from the function, and they did so in order to emphasize the dignity of the function and the obligation of the person to conform himself to it.”11 The personal virtue that had been the primary repository of the preacher’s authority suddenly had to coexist with, and in many cases take second place to, the impersonal and hierarchical power of his official authorization.12 This shift is linked to the one that Stephen Jaeger sees in this same period, from charismatic body to charismatic text.13 Such a transition is never a smooth one, as Jaeger notes, and the growing focus on authorization worked against the continuing demand for holy simplicity and, more importantly, against the fact that preachers were, inevitably, charismatic bodies. Discussions aimed at preachers on the relationship of their persons to their task display with particular clarity what Ernst Kantorowicz, discussing another kind of dual body, calls the “eager[ness] to reconcile the duality of this world and the other, of things temporal and eternal, secular and spiritual.”14 Attempts to reconcile these dualities, however, often only reinforced the depth of the gap between them.
A comparison of the textual bodies of Parson and Pardoner begins to outline some possible relationships between the preacher’s person and his office. All we know of the Parson’s physical presence is that despite the breadth of his parish he visits his parishioners faithfully, in rain and snow and gloom of night, “upon his feet, and in his hand a staf.”15 The depiction suggests a body whose sole meaning derives from its service to a larger task; indeed, there is so little sense