speech-act and thus cannot be bracketed out. Similarly, as has been suggested above, attempts to depict prophecy as an entirely distinct and extraordinary category with no bearing on the preacher’s authority are in the end unsustainable, and the theorists’ repeated attempts at definition suggest that they were uncomfortably aware of this instability.
Citation may seem to be a red herring, since for Austin citation is what excludes a speech-act from ordinary consideration while for the medieval theorists citation is precisely what makes the preacher’s speech-act ordinary. The conflict is only apparent, however; indeed, the ultimate instance of Austin’s “true” performative speech might be said to be the priestly, sacramental speech that both authorizes and contrasts with the preacher’s speech: “I absolve you"; “I baptize you”; “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” In the end both Austin’s “infelicitous” utterances and the kinds of speech excluded from the category of preaching are rejected because they are “inappropriate” in that the speaker is in some essential sense not the “owner” of that speech, or perhaps we might more correctly say because it does not “belong” to him or her.
Both Austin and the preaching theorists wish to establish a claim that we can determine who has a right to certain kinds of speech.78 Here again, however, we encounter the problem of absence, the absence of any absolute and fully expressed meaning, figured by Derrida as the impossibility of “saturating” the context of any communication. For Derrida the kind of plenitude imagined and desired by preaching theorists (and to a lesser extent by Austin) is unavailable: “Given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content.… In order for a context to be exhaustively determinable, in the sense required by Austin, conscious intention would at the very least have to be totally present and immediately transparent to itself and to others, since it is a determining center [foyer] of context.”79 In view of the bodily absence of God, whose “conscious intention” they would presumably have regarded as “totally present and immediately transparent to itself,” if not invariably to others, preaching theorists recognized the need for a representative. However, because of human limitations—whether these are regarded as the result of original sin or of an unruly unconscious—the human representative, unlike the one he represents, is not capable of a “conscious intention” that is “totally present.” Given the preacher’s human shortcomings, the context of preaching, like any other human context, could never be “saturable” in Derrida’s terms or, it might be said, controllable.80
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
