As Stephen Jaeger has observed, this ideal of a perfect soul in a perfect body, the two reinforcing each other without any gap, appears in a life of Saint Bernard; Bernard’s biographer Geoffrey describes the saint as “the first and greatest miracle” that God performed through him, saying that Bernard was “serene of face, modest in his bearing, cautious in speech, pious in action.… In his body there was a certain visible grace and charm, which was spiritual and not physical. His face beamed with light, in his eyes there shone an angelic purity and the simplicity of a dove.”73 This depiction reflects, Jaeger argues, an eleventh- and twelfth-century concept of education that was “oriented to the body” and “identifie [d] control of the body with control of the self.… The cultivation of external presence is identical with the cultivation of virtue.”74 He suggests that this attitude gradually gave way to a focus on charismatic texts. It is, however, precisely such a conception of the charismatic body that we see in the preaching manuals’ insistence on teaching verbo et exemplo and on appropriate gesture as evidence of good intentions.
Considering this ideal in light of preaching theorists’ ideas of persona helps to clarify why “holy simplicity” was so attractive and yet so unattainable in late medieval preaching. Such simplicity was an ideal of reformist preaching; Peter Damian, for instance, regarded “sancta simplicitas” as characteristic of apostolic preaching, saying that God “[does not] need our grammar to draw men … since he sent not philosophers and orators, but simple men and fishermen.”75 Here we see the discomfort with human rhetoric visible from Paul’s Epistles onward that still haunted late medieval preaching texts. Humbert of Romans, discussing the preacher’s speech, demands “simplicity, without the elaboration of ornate rhetoric.”76 The duplicity inherent in language and the moral neutrality of rhetoric were persistent concerns for practitioners and theorists of sacred oratory. As discussions of delivery show, however, it was not only language but also life that could be double: the preacher’s performance demonstrated that both body and words had the capacity to hide the truth as well as display it and thus threatened the ideal correspondence of persone e ame, exterior and interior, that holy simplicity demanded.
Preachers’ difficulty in fully inhabiting the space of sancta simplicitas may in part reflect the fact that, despite the “monachization of priesthood” in the reform period, the preacher’s body was inevitably in a situation that made simplicity difficult to achieve.77 The ideal of monism, the “singleness of heart” that ideally characterizes every true Christian, is one that not accidentally gives its name to monasticism.78 Precisely because they were performers in the world, preachers were almost by definition unable to access the purity and simplicity that were the monastic ideal; unlike the monk’s, the preacher’s connection to God had not only to exist but to be publicly displayed. The doubleness inherent in the preacher’s persona was inevitably in conflict with simplicitas.
Despite these incongruities and challenges preachers were stuck with their charismatic bodies. For them, embodied authority was not subject to supersession by textual authority, precisely because the preacher—a living “book” for his congregation, as Thomas of Chobham put it—conveyed his message via his body. Instead the two modes of authorization existed in uneasy juxtaposition as the demands that the preacher’s persona conform to his office intensified. As Jaeger points out, Geoffrey of Clairvaux’s life of Bernard “implies a contest between charisma of person and representation.”79 The problem for preachers was that they were charismatic bodies whose very raison d’être was to be representatives, with the divisions that representation inevitably implies.
In the centuries following Bernard’s lifetime, preaching theorists still looked to the ideal that he personified and, indeed, to its roots in Gregory the Great’s practical admonitions to help them negotiate their dual status as physical presences and spiritual representatives. The Dominican Thomas Waleys, for instance, writing in the first half of the fourteenth century, makes clear the continuing pressure for the preacher’s body to convey his spiritual qualities. He cautions, as do many other theorists, against excessive gestures in preaching: a preacher must preserve “due moderation” (debitam … modestiam) when preaching, and use “appropriate” (decentes) gestures. He warns against bobbing around, nodding the head unduly, whipping from side to side, and waving the arms, saying firmly that “such movements are not appropriate to a preacher.”80 He goes on to say that attention to gesture is important because “if it behooves a preacher of the word of God to present himself, at every place and time, so that ‘in gait, stance, bearing, and in all his movements he should do nothing that may offend anyone’s gaze,’ how much more should he preserve these things who shows himself like some star sent from on high and like an angel and messenger fallen from heaven into the presence of the people.”81 Whereas Alan of Lille tries to divorce preaching from acting while simultaneously showing how closely related the two are, Thomas Waleys’s description suggests that the preacher must use his physical body (gait, stance, bearing, movements) in a way that suggests his spiritual quality. In other words, just as for Alan performance should be used to deny the suggestion of acting, for Thomas the body should be used to elide the preacher’s physicality. In each case, it seems, the preacher’s self-presentation rests uneasily on his hybrid status as the human messenger of a divine message, as an “actor of truth itself.”
Thomas Waleys’s designation of excessive gesture as “inappropriate” to a preacher raises a final key question. In his manual Thomas of Chobham suggests that excessive or disorderly gestures may do more than simply bring the preacher’s gravity or modesty into doubt: they may question his very identity as a preacher. He notes that when David wished King Achis to think him stupid he “behaved affectedly, that is, made certain gestures”; by this, Thomas says, we may see clearly that “those who make such gestures in preaching will be considered foolish, and will seem rather to be actors [histriones] than preachers.”82 The emphasis falls on the supposedly inevitable reaction to such behavior, the sense that its “actorliness” will be entirely apparent to the audience and will diminish the preacher’s role to the point of nonexistence. His acting will take over so thoroughly that his role as preacher will seem “proper” in neither sense of the word, neither appropriate nor his own. To a certain extent the preacher’s claim to “own” his office is based on his internal fitness for that office. But since internal fitness, the preacher’s spirituality and disinterestedness, is visible only to God, he must make it visible to his audience through appropriate gestures and behavior in order to assert his identity as a preacher, and in this assertion there lies always the possibility of deception.83 If the immoral preacher “speaks another’s words,” the histrionic preacher seems, as it were, to take on another’s body, impairing his own claims to truth in a way that threatens the very substance of his office.
Maurice of Sully’s discussion of persone e ame with which we began shows preachers’ awareness of the divisions inherent in persona; the theorists’ discussions show why the problem was such a hard one to resolve. The duplicitas that Thomas of Chobham holds up as the true nature of preaching and the insistence on exemplarity that provides its context attempt to guarantee the authenticity of preaching—but they have a substantial sting in the tail. Wicked deeds cast doubt on the preacher’s words, but once the possibility of acting is introduced, virtuous deeds can do so as well. The overlapping categories of persona—body, self-presentation, gesture, deeds—are reminders that if a preacher’s body is, as the theorists implicitly recognize, always an actor’s body, then there is no way to know if he is an “actor of truth itself” or a mere histrio. The artes praedicandi suggest that, in preaching at least, holy simplicity was a created rather than a natural category, belonging to the sphere of persone rather than ame and thus subject