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 “excessive” or “disorderly” gestures: such bodily movements cast doubt on the preacher’s control and moderation. Conversely, injunctions to the preacher to preserve restraint and gravity are intended to reinforce the effectiveness of his persona. Thus, the importance of maturitas (meaning here, as Margaret Jennings points out, “modestia, gravitas”) in a preacher’s presentation is noted by Ranulph Higden: “ maturitas consists in two things, namely, in appropriate motion of the body and in restrained speech of the mouth.”72 Appropriate physical movement reflects an appropriate mental state, reinforcing the preacher’s message by reassuring the audience about the nature of his mind and, by extension, the state of his soul.
As Stephen Jaeger has observed, this ideal of a perfect soul in a perfect body, the two reinforcing each other without any gap, appears in a life of Saint Bernard; Bernard’s biographer Geoffrey describes the saint as “the first and greatest miracle” that God performed through him, saying that Bernard was “serene of face, modest in his bearing, cautious in speech, pious in action.… In his body there was a certain visible grace and charm, which was spiritual and not physical. His face beamed with light, in his eyes there shone an angelic purity and the simplicity of a dove.”73 This depiction reflects, Jaeger argues, an eleventh- and twelfth-century concept of education that was “oriented to the body” and “identifie [d] control of the body with control of the self.… The cultivation of external presence is identical with the cultivation of virtue.”74 He suggests that this attitude gradually gave way to a focus on charismatic texts. It is, however, precisely such a conception of the charismatic body that we see in the preaching manuals’ insistence on teaching verbo et exemplo and on appropriate gesture as evidence of good intentions.
Considering this ideal in light of preaching theorists’ ideas of persona helps to clarify why “holy simplicity” was so attractive and yet so unattainable in late medieval preaching. Such simplicity was an ideal of reformist preaching; Peter Damian, for instance, regarded “sancta simplicitas” as characteristic of apostolic preaching, saying that God “[does not] need our grammar to draw men … since he sent not philosophers and orators, but simple men and fishermen.”75 Here we see the discomfort with human rhetoric visible from Paul’s Epistles onward that still haunted late medieval preaching texts. Humbert of Romans, discussing the preacher’s speech, demands “simplicity, without the elaboration of ornate rhetoric.”76 The duplicity inherent in language and the moral neutrality of rhetoric were persistent concerns for practitioners and theorists of sacred oratory. As discussions of delivery show, however, it was not only language but also life that could be double: the preacher’s performance demonstrated that both body and words had the capacity to hide the truth as well as display it and thus threatened the ideal correspondence of persone e ame, exterior and interior, that holy simplicity demanded.
Preachers’ difficulty in fully inhabiting the space of sancta simplicitas may in part reflect the fact that, despite the “monachization of priesthood” in the reform period, the preacher’s body was inevitably in a situation that made simplicity difficult to achieve.77 The ideal of monism, the “singleness of heart” that ideally characterizes every true Christian, is one that not accidentally gives its name to monasticism.78 Precisely because they were performers in the world, preachers were almost by definition unable to access the purity and simplicity that were the monastic ideal; unlike the monk’s, the preacher’s connection to God had not only to exist but to be publicly displayed. The doubleness inherent in the preacher’s persona was inevitably in conflict with simplicitas.
Despite these incongruities and challenges preachers were stuck with their charismatic bodies. For them, embodied authority was not subject to supersession by textual authority, precisely because the preacher—a living “book” for his congregation, as Thomas of Chobham put it—conveyed his message via his body. Instead the two modes of authorization existed in uneasy juxtaposition as the demands that the preacher’s persona conform to his office intensified. As Jaeger points out, Geoffrey of Clairvaux’s life of Bernard “implies a contest between charisma of person and representation.”79 The problem for preachers was that they were charismatic bodies whose very raison d’être was to be representatives, with the divisions that representation inevitably implies.
In the centuries following Bernard’s lifetime, preaching theorists still looked to the ideal that he personified and, indeed, to its roots in Gregory the Great’s practical admonitions to help them negotiate their dual status as physical presences and spiritual representatives. The Dominican Thomas Waleys, for instance, writing in the first half of the fourteenth century, makes clear the continuing pressure for the preacher’s body to convey his spiritual qualities. He cautions, as do many other theorists, against excessive gestures in preaching: a preacher must preserve “due moderation” (debitam … modestiam) when preaching, and use “appropriate” (decentes) gestures. He warns against bobbing around, nodding the head unduly, whipping from
