may deceive others and seem beautiful to them.”56 He goes on to compare such preachers to Thamar, in Gen. 38:13–15, who sat at the crossroads in rich clothing like a harlot, and says that “thus do hypocrites act meretriciously, to deceive the sight of those who observe them by an ornate exterior of virtues.”57 Both the emphasis on ornate decoration and the comparison to Thamar create an atmosphere of carnality around what could otherwise be seen as primarily intellectual or spiritual deception. Whereas Humbert of Romans projected onto women the kinds of physical shortcomings that might threaten any preacher, Thomas, by assimilating the hypocritical preacher to a decked-out harlot, suggests that lust and self-display can equally be characteristics of the male preacher. Here we see the dangers of the preacher’s physicality: his body is no longer the beneficent double of his doctrine but rather its evil twin, undoing all the good work done by the word.
When Thomas turns to the second half of his initial pairing—the preacher’s word or teaching—it becomes clear that physicality and doubleness pose a threat in this realm as well. As we arrive at the section on “the word of preaching” the transformation in the concept of doubleness is complete: like preaching as a whole, the modes of preaching in words are called “duplex.” Here, however, doubleness refers not to two halves, capable of working either for or against each other; it speaks rather of division into two mutually exclusive categories, recalling the preacher’s possible ways to display his life. The preacher can preach either “for the benefit and use of his neighbors” or “out of desire for earthly gain or the pleasure of human approval”; here again, the Parson and Pardoner line up on opposite sides of a divide.58 The former category, preaching for the good of others, receives no discussion. The latter is immediately defined as adultery of the Word of God, and those who pursue it are accused of one of four modes of sin: theft, fornication, idolatry, or lying. As with the doubleness of preaching and of the preacher’s life, the negative possibilities receive far more attention than the positive ones; it seems that the preacher’s personal desires and bodily weaknesses pose a threat that overshadows the beneficial potential of his body.
All four “bad modes” serve the regrettably worldly desires for money, vainglory, and human approval, the self-interest that the artes praedieandi universally condemn. The discussions of “fornication” and “idolatry” particularly demonstrate how the preacher’s words can be tainted by the demands of his person. Those who “fornicate” in preaching, Thomas says, “luxuriate in the empty words of their own rhetoric” (luxuriantur in uerbis ponposis eloquentie sue).59 The verb luxuriantur, which recalls the deadly sin of luxuria, or lust, connects with other words in this passage, such as lasciuia, delectare, and dulcedo, to reinforce the sense of sexual sin evoked by the gratification of personal desires in preaching.60 The mode linked to “idolatry,” on the other hand, returns us to the body and the sense of its own doubleness. “The third way of sinning against the word of God is when [the preacher] commits the same errors that he condemns,” says Thomas, and he adds, “This is to build with one hand and destroy with the other.”61 This recapitulation of the words/deeds 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
