Angels and Earthly Creatures. Claire M. Waters
problem shows the preacher’s body, suddenly, as divided not only from the beneficial capabilities of the word but indeed also against itself, as one hand creates what the other destroys.
The preacher, as a creator in both word and deed, must make his two halves work together for his message to be effective. But as the development of Thomas’s concept of duplicitas in preaching demonstrates, it was not difficult to slip from doubleness as beneficial reinforcement to doubleness as deceptive and destructive division. Divided against himself and from the salvific doctrine he presents, the wicked preacher “ ‘speaks another’s words’ (‘dicit aliena’),” since his behavior makes it clear that the words he speaks cannot truly be his.62 He breaks the congruence of word and deed that would allow him to be a beneficent exemplar and thus impairs his own authenticity, which is both his claim to be the persona he presents and the source of his authority. In so doing he amply demonstrates the power of the preacher’s presence, whose ability to diminish his message only reemphasizes its equally important role in validating that message.
Two-Faced Preachers
Thomas of Chobham recapitulates much of his discussion of the doubleness of preaching later in his text when he considers the issue of persona, a reiteration that demonstrates the link between the problems of self-presentation and morality.63 An appendix to Humbert of Romans’s treatise on Dominican offices makes this connection more explicit, echoing the image of building and destroying used by Thomas: “It is essential that life and teaching should coincide in [the preacher], lest what he builds up with one hand, he destroy with the other. Thus the preacher should present [praetendere] humility in his bearing, virtue in his morals, discretion in his words, charity in his zeal for souls, temperance in eating and drinking, and maturity in his actions.”64 The preacher’s actions in the world create a persona that must reflect his truly virtuous morals and thus reinforce his capacity to be a preacher, or else fatally undermine it. The unreliability of the preacher’s body as an index of his virtue raises a specter of hypocrisy that challenges the very office of preaching—a challenge often conceived in terms of acting.
The dislike of acting was, of course, not invented by Christian preaching theorists; Cicero lamented that orators, “the actors [actores] of truth itself,” were reluctant to use the persuasive tools afforded by delivery preferring to leave these to the histriones.65 But the idea of “representing truth” is a complex one, as Christian writers were particularly aware. In his Soliloquies, Augustine rejects the provisional truths afforded by acting, saying that “we should, instead, seek that truth which is not self-contradictory and two-faced.”66 Whereas Cicero seemed to envision the ability to use acting techniques without compromising oneself, Augustine, and later preaching theorists, were more alive to the contradictions implicit in the notion of the performer of truth.
What makes these contradictions so problematic, as we have seen, is that it is in such doubleness, such two-facedness, that the very nature and effectiveness of the preacher’s role lie. Maurice of Sully suggests that in some sense the preacher is, and must be, two-faced, one face toward God and one toward the people, and later theorists reinforce this notion. Ideally these two faces would be the same; control of speech and moderation of movement would represent cleanliness and orderliness of soul.67 Such a correspondence would guarantee the visibility of a preacher’s wicked life to his audience. Discussions of another aspect of the preacher’s self-presentation—not his behavior in the world but the performance of preaching—show why that assumption was so troubling and, not incidentally, why there is such a long-standing antipathy toward acting in preaching theory. Performance in preaching calls forth many of the issues already seen in connection with the preacher’s role as exemplar, but it does so in a way that seriously undermines the value of exemplarity as a mode of teaching. Accounts of delivery rework Thomas’s notion of beneficial duplicity in a way that makes its dark side more evident, repeatedly showing the divisions in the preacher’s self-presentation as places where a gap between appearance and reality might arise.
Alan of Lille, whose Summa on the art of preaching is the earliest of the late medieval preaching manuals, discusses the preacher’s persona in the following terms: “The preacher should capture the goodwill of his audience by his own person [a propria persona] through humility, and by the usefulness of the material he presents, by saying that he proposes to them the word of God that it may bear fruit in their minds, not for any earthly reward, but for their progress and success; not that he may be stimulated by the empty clamor of the crowd, not that he may be soothed by popular favor, not that he may be flattered by theatrical applause; but so that their souls may be formed, and that they should consider not who speaks, but what he says.”68 Alan’s language here suggests that the preacher has a complicated relationship to the theatricality of his task: he must create a persona by rejecting the suggestion that he is an actor. The preacher can inspire confidence in his “own” persona specifically by telling his audience that he does not want to seek an actor’s rewards (applause, popular favor, earthly gain). This suggests that it is not enough merely to be humble; to make his message effective, the preacher must actually project his own humility. The ostentatious construction of personal unimportance is essential to his office.69 Even as he rejects the preacher’s association with the actor, then, Alan makes it clear how similar the two roles are. The preacher may—and certainly should—have different goals than the actor, but their methods are strikingly similar.
We may also note here that Alan attempts to evade the problem of persona altogether, but does so in a way that demonstrates the impossibility of such a maneuver. His final note, that the audience should consider “not who speaks, but what he says,” does indeed describe the ideal: the message should be important, not the messenger. But like the Parson’s body, whose importance consists in its visible submergence in his ecclesiastical role, the expression of this ideal betrays its reliance on that which it claims to discard. For Alan does not just assert that the audience should consider message rather than messenger; instead he says that the preacher should capture the goodwill of his audience (a rhetorical concept) by telling them that they should consider not who speaks but what he says. The preacher should use his persona, his presentation of himself, to encourage a disregard for himself as an individual. While on one level the idea of regarding the message rather than the messenger makes sense, on another level the way that message must be conveyed demonstrates the impossibility of such disregard for the personality, individuality, and embodiment of its speaker.
The other reason, of course, that Alan’s attempt to minimize the role of the preacher’s person is doomed from the start is that in some ways it is extraordinarily important who speaks. If it were not, then anyone speaking the Word of God and promoting a beneficial message could be a preacher: a woman, a layman, a depraved sinner. It is only within the already enclosed world of authorized preachers—those with official sanction, male, undeformed, strong enough, old enough, with a certain prerogative, and living a virtuous life, to use Humbert’s requirements—that the messenger is unimportant. The many exclusions necessary before it is possible to emphasize logos over ethos demonstrate sufficiently that the body of the preacher is indeed a crucial aspect of his message.
Alan of Lille’s presentation of persona considers it primarily as a verbal performance, albeit one that reflects on the preacher’s life. Other texts address persona in terms that insistently return to the preacher’s physicality and make clear his disturbing links to the despised figure of the actor. These formulations were sensitive to the ways in which gesture and physical appearance worked to establish the preacher’s persona, for better or worse. In a chapter on delivery, for instance, Thomas of Chobham touches on the issues of presentation before an audience raised by Humbert of Romans and Maurice of Sully. Rather tautologically he observes that “it is extremely shameful when a preacher behaves [se habet] shamefully in voice, face, or gesture.”70 He goes on to clarify the implications of such behavior, noting that Caiaphas, who stands and furiously addresses Jesus in Matt. 26:62, is rebuked by the Gloss on that passage: “He was angry because he found no place of calumny; by a disgraceful motion of the body he showed the wickedness of his mind.”71 A similar belief in physical gesture as an accurate reflection of inner state must lie behind the many strictures in preaching manuals against