Body Double
If a man’s life is condemned, his preaching will be scorned, Humbert asserts; similarly, as most of the artes praedicandi insist, one whose life is admirable will strengthen his preaching.38 In this context the import of the term persona is perhaps best conveyed by Leclercq’s assertion that the medieval conception of the preacher’s office “excludes … all preoccupation with self-interest [recherche personelle].”39 The preaching manuals (and the Pardoner) make it clear that the preacher’s “personal” interest in preaching could include anything from desire for adulation, to vainglory, to pure greed: sinful desires that the body could either manifest or hide, promote or suppress. At the same time a good example was a crucial part of preaching. The problem of the preacher’s personal relationship to his office had been explored extensively by Thomas of Chobham in the early thirteenth century. In a section of his Summa de arte praedicandi titled “On the doubleness of preaching”—that is, on preaching in word and in deed—Thomas moves from the ideal of the preacher as exemplar to the problem of the preacher as sinner. His discussion shows quite clearly how the preacher’s physicality is both a benefit and a detriment, an essential element of and a potential danger to his message.40
The importance of example, a crucial aspect of a sermon’s material as well as its delivery, lies in its inevitable relationship to the physical and the particular, to all the qualities that work against the idealized submergence of the person in the office seen in Chaucer’s Parson.41 It is no accident that that supremely disembodied churchman refuses to use the denigrated, embodied mode of “fables” in his sermon, refuses to speak in the exemplum form that the Pardoner elaborates on so vividly.42 Not all medieval preachers—indeed, it seems, very few—were as fastidious as the Parson in this regard; exemplary stories were regarded by most as a valuable tool, for the same reasons that made the preacher’s personal exemplarity necessary. In one of the many prologues that address the usefulness of similitudes and exempla, Étienne de Bourbon writes that it is necessary that doctrine, like Christ, be “embodied and clothed in flesh” to make it accessible to a lay audience.43 The image of embodiment and fleshliness carries us right to the idea of the preacher as exemplar; the need to make doctrine visible and palpable that Etienne cites also animates Thomas of Chobham’s insistence on the mutual necessity of the preacher’s words and deeds. “Every preacher should give a good example [bonum exemplum] in his works, and good doctrine in his words,” he says, since a good life without preaching is inefficacious.44 The insistence on preaching both in word and in deed does more, that is, than assert that word and deed must be congruent; it expresses the limitations of words alone in convincingly portraying salvific doctrine. Indeed, Robert of Basevorn seems almost to imply that embodiment is essential to preaching. Regarding God, the first preacher, he says, “He preached frequently through angels who assumed bodies or, as some would have it, some other corporeal likeness which He Himself assumed not in union of substance, but only as its mover, as perhaps he spoke to Adam and many others.… And at last He Himself, taking on a human soul and body in the unity of substance came preaching.”45 Even God, it seems, needs a body if he is to preach.
The “unity of substance” of which Robert speaks, of course, was the ultimate instance of doctrine “embodied and clothed in flesh,” Jesus Christ. The Incarnation presented doctrine in an accessible form and provided the perfect example for Christians to follow: an embodied human person who fully expressed all the ideals of the faith. As Augustine wrote, “We need a mediator linked with us in our lowliness by reason of the mortal nature of his body, and yet able to render us truly divine assistance for our purification and liberation,” and later he says that Christ offered his virtuous humanity as “an example for our imitation.”46 Christ, of course, was an example for all the faithful, but the clergy were supposed to provide an idealized example of appropriate imitation. “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ,” Paul says to the Corinthians, a passage quoted by Thomas of Chobham in his section on doubleness.47 If Christ’s humanity mediates between the heavenly and the earthly, then the preacher, who should be a true reflection of that example, is the mediator at one remove. He too conveys the heavenly by earthly means.
The concept of mediated imitation clearly informs Thomas’s treatment of exemplarity and makes visible the demands that this role placed on the preacher, who, Thomas says, “should be like a book and a mirror for his flock, that they may read in the deeds of their leader as in a book, and may see in a mirror what they should do.”48 The numerous exempla collections called Speculum … (and the many other kinds of books that went under the same title) were intended, as Ritamary Bradley has pointed out, to “show the world what it is and … to point out what it should be.”49 Although Thomas is clearly focusing on the latter of these two meanings, the preacher, like his exempla, could illustrate both. The uneasily dual nature of the mirror, a glass in which we see perfection, but see it darkly, is like that of the preacher, an earthly and physical exemplar of an abstract ideal.50 Just as the exempla used in his sermon clothed doctrine in the flesh of narrative, so the preacher was to clothe a moral ideal in human flesh. The danger, as always, was that the flesh might interfere with the expression of doctrine, rather than facilitating it. For God, whom no “clothing” of flesh can defile, this necessary method carries no dangers, but for the human preacher who followed him it was otherwise.
The preacher’s dual allegiance—responsible to God and people, imitating one and imitated by the other—should be internally coherent. But the division introduced by that duality, like the one between words and deeds, could also make the preacher’s persona dangerous. One sign of this is the fact that Thomas’s concept of the “doubleness” of preaching, which begins by emphasizing the capacity of bodily action to reinforce the preacher’s words, quickly turns to the body’s potential to undermine those words and to the role of sin in preaching: the bulk of the section on doubleness considers how a preacher should publicize or hide his sins and describes sinful modes of preaching. A certain slippage in Thomas’s use of the term duplex, twofold or double, helps us to see how immorality and its relationship to the preacher’s persona call into question not just the authority of a particular preacher but the nature of preaching itself.
Thomas first uses the term duplex to refer to the mutually reinforcing areas of words and deeds: “preaching can only be double” because these two must both be present.51 As he dissects this concept, however, we begin to see the preacher’s “duplicity” as a matter not of beneficial replication but of potentially destructive division. If life and word are not in agreement, “the example killeth what the word giveth life,” and rather than reinforcement there is a fatal conflict between the two.52 This is also the case with the two ways in which a sinner can hide his sin and the two ways in which he can make it public; in each case there is a good and a bad possibility. A positive display of deeds receives no discussion, presumably because it is the situation already discussed in the remarks on exemplarity: if a preacher’s life is virtuous, this should be made visible to his audience so that it will reinforce his preaching. The other three possibilities all address the less attractive but apparently, in Thomas’s view, more probable situation where the preacher is a sinful man—not extraordinarily sinful, perhaps, but not a straightforward exemplar of virtue.
The sinful preacher, Thomas suggests, has three options. The only positive one is hiding one’s sins for the good of others, out of shame before God.53 Then there are the negative possibilities of displaying one’s sins in a bad way or hiding them in a bad way. The first of these is very much what the Pardoner does: he appears not to regret but to glory in his sins; he publicizes them with gusto and élan. Such behavior should be avoided, Thomas suggests, lest the preacher scandalize his flock, making himself a stumbling block to their salvation—as happens with the Pardoner, at least in the context of the Canterbury Tales.54 The other possibility, that of hiding sins in a bad way, brings us to a discussion that links the preacher’s doubleness of word and deed with his potential duplicity or hypocrisy as a performer.55 Thomas speaks harshly of those who “hide their sins in
