“if it behooves a preacher of the word of God to present himself, at every place and time, so that ‘in gait, stance, bearing, and in all his movements he should do nothing that may offend anyone’s gaze,’ how much more should he preserve these things who shows himself like some star sent from on high and like an angel and messenger fallen from heaven into the presence of the people.”81 Whereas Alan of Lille tries to divorce preaching from acting while simultaneously showing how closely related the two are, Thomas Waleys’s description suggests that the preacher must use his physical body (gait, stance, bearing, movements) in a way that suggests his spiritual quality. In other words, just as for Alan performance should be used to deny the suggestion of acting, for Thomas the body should be used to elide the preacher’s physicality. In each case, it seems, the preacher’s self-presentation rests uneasily on his hybrid status as the human messenger of a divine message, as an “actor of truth itself.”
Thomas Waleys’s designation of excessive gesture as “inappropriate” to a preacher raises a final key question. In his manual Thomas of Chobham suggests that excessive or disorderly gestures may do more than simply bring the preacher’s gravity or modesty into doubt: they may question his very identity as a preacher. He notes that when David wished King Achis to think him stupid he “behaved affectedly, that is, made certain gestures”; by this, Thomas says, we may see clearly that “those who make such gestures in preaching will be considered foolish, and will seem rather to be actors [histriones] than preachers.”82 The emphasis falls on the supposedly inevitable reaction to such behavior, the sense that its “actorliness” will be entirely apparent to the audience and will diminish the preacher’s role to the point of nonexistence. His acting will take over so thoroughly that his role as preacher will seem “proper” in neither sense of the word, neither appropriate nor his own. To a certain extent the preacher’s claim to “own” his office is based on his internal fitness for that office. But since internal fitness, the preacher’s spirituality and disinterestedness, is visible only to God, he must make it visible to his audience through appropriate gestures and behavior in order to assert his identity as a preacher, and in this assertion there lies always the possibility of deception.83 If the immoral preacher “speaks another’s words,” the histrionic preacher seems, as it were, to take on another’s body, impairing his own claims to truth in a way that threatens the very substance of his office.
Maurice of Sully’s discussion of persone e ame with which we began shows preachers’ awareness of the divisions inherent in persona; the theorists’ discussions show why the problem was such a hard one to resolve. The duplicitas that Thomas of Chobham holds up as the true nature of preaching and the insistence on exemplarity that provides its context attempt to guarantee the authenticity of preaching—but they have a substantial sting in the tail. Wicked deeds cast doubt on the preacher’s words, but once the possibility of acting is introduced, virtuous deeds can do so as well. The overlapping categories of persona—body, self-presentation, gesture, deeds—are reminders that if a preacher’s body is, as the theorists implicitly recognize, always an actor’s body, then there is no way to know if he is an “actor of truth itself” or a mere histrio. The artes praedicandi suggest that, in preaching at least, holy simplicity was a created rather than a natural category, belonging to the sphere of persone rather than ame and thus subject to the doubleness that plagues human communication. Acting in the world, in both senses, requires the preacher, and the preaching theorists, to make use and take account of the body. The truth Augustine desires, the truth that is “not self-contradictory and two-faced,” is not an earthly truth; it is the preacher’s heavy task to attempt to convey that singular truth from a position that must always, and inevitably, be double.
The Pardoner, the Parson, and the Audience’s Dilemma
Where, then, does this leave us with Chaucer’s mirror-image preachers? I suggested above that the body’s dangers for preaching can only be rightly understood in the context of the body’s contributions to preaching. Similarly the context of holy duplicity suggests that neither Pardoner nor Parson can be completely understood without the other; perhaps no single portrait of a preacher can fully convey the complexities of the office. I began by stressing the Parson’s disembodied nature as it contrasts with the Pardoner’s excessive physicality, but as I hope the discussion above has suggested, such claims to disinterested abstraction are necessarily suspect. Looking at the Parson and Pardoner together, and in the context of debates on preaching, it is clear that Chaucer has not only embodied a crucial problem in preaching but by that very embodiment re-created for his readers the same dilemmas that preaching theory tried to address.
Those dilemmas appear most strikingly in criticism of the Pardoner. The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, as Lee Patterson has noted, “stage many of the issues central to the theological and ecclesiastical debates of late-medieval England,” including that of the preacher’s morality.84 A great deal of Pardoner criticism since the middle of the twentieth century—in effect, since the rise of exegetical criticism—has worked to understand his character as it interacts with, comments on, and manifests itself through his ecclesiastical position. Whereas earlier attention to the Pardoner’s religious standing often focused on what might be called his external qualities, such as how he exemplifies his profession or the nature of his sermon and its relationship to other sermons, recent work tends to combine this historical approach with an interest in how the Pardoner’s psyche is shaped or expressed through exegetical allusions or cultural and religious debates.85 Given the intensity of religious allusion and structure that shape the Pardoner and his speech, such readings seem entirely appropriate. I would like here to adopt their fruitful attention to religious context, but to look less at the Pardoner’s interiority than at how the presentation of his character reflects on “the nature of the cultural authority that produces him,” and in particular on the office of preacher.86 The context of preaching theory, combined with the continuing recognition in modern criticism of the Pardoner as an actor, can suggest some of the reasons why criticism of this character, and its fascination with his interiority, has been so voluminous and so varied.87
Chaucer has effectively tempted his readers into a continuing desire to know the truth of the Pardoner by presenting him as one who should, according to his office, be an actor of truth but who insists unrelentingly that his act is all a lie. The dilemmas presented by the embodiment of such a character have entranced critics for the past century, and they have done so, I suggest, because the question about the Pardoner’s interiority is one that we are both set up to ask and forever unable to answer. The battles over the relationship between the Pardoner’s “inside” and his “outside” arise not solely from differences in modern critical method, but from the very problems with preaching examined here. Chaucer by his depiction of the Pardoner—a depiction to which even the most stalwart opponents of roadside-drama excess concede an undeniable “personality”—has put us in the position of an audience observing the preacher’s public performance.88 Like that audience; we see only the face that looks in our direction. What, if anything, may lie behind it, what “face” the preacher may turn to his creator, and what his intentions may be can only be matters for speculation, but it is speculation that an audience will always engage in.89 Part of Harry Bailly’s fury at the end of the tale may stem from an obscure recognition that, as an audience member, he has been put in an untenable position of uncertainty by one of the very figures who was supposed to provide certainty. He responds by retreating to what he believes he knows about faith—that he will have “Cristes curs” if he listens to the Pardoner’s teaching—and by asserting aggressively his own desire literally to get hold of the Pardoner and establish the “truth” about one of that figure’s many uncertainties, the nature of his sexual body, in the crudest and most visible way possible.90
By “playing” the preacher, then, the Pardoner provides a reminder that all preaching is acting and that as a result our knowledge of the preacher is only ever partial.91 He may be “strange to himself,” as Patterson’s epigraph from Dom DeLillo puts it, but he is also, like every preacher, “strange” to his audience, unknowable and unfathomable. This inescapable
