Angels and Earthly Creatures. Claire M. Waters
of preaching’ appropriate to the people’s capacities” in its simplicity and use of parables.54 And William of St.-Amour, arguing a point of preaching jurisdiction that has nothing to do with women, says in the beginning of his antifraternal tirade, “Prophets in holy scripture are called seers.… Thus in making the scriptures available by expounding them they can justly be called seers, since in those same writings they are called prophets. Eph. 4: ‘And he gave to some of them apostles, to others prophets;’ the Gloss [adds], ‘Prophets, that is, interpreters of scripture.’ ”55 Here the distinction between apostles and prophets, which could certainly have been used in other contexts as a justification for excluding prophetic speech from the realm of preaching, is set aside in favor of an interpretation that defines prophecy explicitly as textual interpretation, “making the scriptures available by expounding them.”
To go back to a foundational example, it may be noted that Moses, God’s prophet, conveyed the messages he received to his brother Aaron, who had the gift of eloquence; it would thus seem that Aaron is the preacher to Moses’ prophet, acting as the mediator Aquinas envisioned between prophet and people.56 At another point, however, God says to Moses, “I have made you a God to Pharaoh; your brother Aaron will be your prophet,” which suggests that the distinction between prophet and preacher was not a particularly solid one and moreover that a “prophet” could directly address an audience.57 In his early thirteenth-century preaching manual Alexander of Ashby further demonstrates the fluidity of roles when he refers to Moses as interchangeably preacher and prophet, and to Aaron simply as priest.58 When unlicensed preachers were not directly in question, in other words, the boundaries of prophecy and preaching could be somewhat fluid. When the object was to control access to ecclesiastical power, however, prophecy consistently took on its limited meaning of direct revelation or future-telling, a meaning that had the effect of excluding female and lay male prophets from a clerical lineage of preachers.59
The definition of the woman prophet’s role as extralineal, then, was designed to cope with one of the difficulties raised by women who addressed the church: that of what precedent they might set. There remained, however, the question of the origin of the prophet’s speech, a concern akin to the question of “expounding” in preaching. When God instructed the fourteenth-century prophet Birgitta of Sweden to go and rebuke the king of Sweden, Birgitta pleaded ignorance of what to say and was told, “When you arrive, open your mouth; and I will fill it”; when she arrived, “divine words were at once poured into her.”60 This formulation accords with Birgitta’s image of herself as a “channel” for God’s Word, a pure conduit for the message she carried. Two centuries earlier Bernard of Clairvaux had rejected this image of a male preacher, saying that he should be a vessel, not a channel, taking in the message and incorporating it before pouring it out by teaching. To attempt to teach others without being filled oneself constituted a spiritual danger.61 For a woman preacher, however, any activity or image that emphasized the role of her own mind or body in the transmission of her message could be risky and distracting.
A male preacher’s ownership of his words seems at first glance to be more clear-cut than is that of the woman prophet. Preaching, unlike scripted, sacramental speech, always has an individual, personal component; as one thirteenth-century author notes, “no one speaks of ‘my baptizing’ as he does of ‘my evangelizing’ or ‘my preaching.’ ”62 This is one of the things that differentiate preaching from a sacrament, which, if performed with technical correctness, always has the same effect, regardless of the quality of the individual priest who performs it.63 The preacher is thus involved in the work of preaching and cannot expect “his” preaching to be handed to him on a silver platter; as the preaching manuals make clear, the Lord helps those who help themselves, and eloquence in preaching is an acquired habit as well as a gift of grace.64 Yet Birgitta’s delicate balance between God’s words and her own, though more fraught, is in some ways not so different from that of a male preacher. A thirteenth-century treatise on preaching says that “the preacher should not say his own words, but the words of the Lord and those things the Lord supplies to him.”65 And the reassurance given to Birgitta that her speech comes from God echoes numerous biblical verses that apply to male prophets and preachers, most notably, perhaps, Matt. 10:18–20, from the chapter on the sending of the Apostles, when Christ tells them, “You will be led before governors and kings for my sake.… But when they deliver you up, do not think of how or what you will speak: for it will be given to you in that same hour what you will speak. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you.”66 The prophet is an instrument, God’s mouthpiece—but so is the preacher. Indeed the preacher should “efface himself,” as Jean Leclercq says, thinking only of the glory of God and the edification of his neighbor.67 In this regard, the difference between a woman prophet and a male preacher was perhaps as much one of emphasis as of substance.
A discussion by Thomas Aquinas both reinforces this impression and suggests how strong—and complex—was the association between ownership of speech and lineal ordination that excluded unauthorized speakers. He takes the concern with ownership back to its foundations as he analyzes Jesus’ words in John 7:16: “My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.” Aquinas explains that there would be no difficulty if Jesus had said, “The doctrine that I speak is not mine,” but his words suggest that his doctrine both is and is not his. Aquinas solves this by saying that “the spiritual origin of doctrine is from God,” and thus Jesus’ doctrine is his insofar as the Son is one with the Father but is not his insofar as he is a “created soul.” In other words, Jesus’ doctrine is not his insofar as he is human. Moreover, Aquinas adds, it is because Jesus’ doctrine is not his own that it is true doctrine. This is the explanation of John 7:18: “He who speaks from himself, seeks his own glory, but he who seeks the glory of him that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him.” God is the sole locus of truth; the validity of the preacher’s doctrine derives from its origin in God rather than in himself.68
As Alexander of Ashby puts it, “If someone speaks, let him speak as it were not his own words, but the words of Christ, attributing nothing of what is well said to himself but all to him from whom comes all good.”69 Aquinas adds that “it is unrighteousness when a man usurps what is foreign [alienum] to him” and insists that anyone who seeks his own glory, rather than God’s, is unrighteous—a stricture that the preaching manuals repeat many times.70
Although Aquinas’s argument particularly considers Jesus, his extension of the point to unworthy preachers makes it clear that his observations have wider application. The insistence that a teacher’s words are valid only insofar as they mark his connection to God requires the speaker’s displacement of himself. A similar move, of course, helped to make prophecy a valid option for women: it downplayed the speaker’s body and offered a guarantee that a woman’s doctrine was not her own. But the insistence on “the doctrine of him that sent me” recalls the need for institutional sanction, for the preacher’s participation in a masculine lineage founded by Christ. Thus the alienation of speech Aquinas insists on (loqui non a se) justifies the preacher’s position in a lineage even as it puts demands on him. Provided he is not speaking “of himself” he does not “usurp” that which is another’s; his disowned speech marks the preacher’s personal authority and righteousness and also his claim to be “him whom God has sent,” his official and lineal authorization by the church. Women’s exclusion from priestly lineage, however, meant that even if their doctrine was God’s, their speech, if made public, was always in some sense a usurpation of another’s privilege; unlike male preachers, they could not comfortably make reference to “him that sent me.”
The male preacher’s nonownership of his speech, then, both linked him to and distinguished him from a woman prophet because his depersonalized speech, unlike hers, paradoxically gave him ownership of his status as preacher. From this position, though his doctrine might be God’s, he could still refer to “my preaching” and claim both his own speech and its scriptural origins in a way that a woman—limited, at best, to reading, reciting, or exhorting—never could. Moreover, institutional sanction and descent from Christ made it possible for the male preacher’s body to disappear, in a sense, into that