the Walk: The Preacher as Common Man
The ambiguous relationship of the preacher’s two allegiances can be seen also in Humbert’s De eruditione, in a section not on formal preaching but on how to make “private conversation” edifying. In the previous chapter “Against preachers who, in familiar conversation, say useless things [vana], as worldly people do,” Humbert has been holding forth on the wickedness of “worldly speech” (linguam mundi).38 It is clear that “worldly” here does not equate with the vernacular. While one of Humbert’s arguments against worldly speech is that if schoolboys who lapse out of Latin into the vernacular are punished, preachers who lapse into useless speech should be still more severely chastised, another notes that just as preachers “should not abandon heavenly language for earthly [linguam caelestem propter linguam mundi], so a Frenchman, wherever he may go, does not easily abandon his own language for another, on account of the nobility of his language and his fatherland.”39 Vernacular speech, then, can be either earthly or heavenly, just as Latin can.40 The schoolboy example, moreover, implies that worldly speech is the “vernacular” of the clergy, who must be trained into the practice of heavenly speech—a perhaps unintentional equation that acknowledges both the preacher’s human fallibility and the constructed, learned quality of his role as preacher.41
Although Humbert criticizes “worldly speech,” he recognizes that it can be useful at times. His chapter on private conversation emphasizes again the need to consider what, when, to whom, and how one speaks, and it admits that “sometimes one should speak holy words, sometimes tell good exempla, and sometimes even use some secular words.”42 Later he clarifies this need, saying that secular words may sometimes be used “for the purpose of a certain conformity” (propter quamdam … conformitatem) with the people addressed.43 If even secular speech is occasionally permitted for good ends, surely the “conformity” with an audience marked by the vernacular—like the “furtive complicity” created by exempla—is one of the preacher’s strengths and ultimately one of the things that in turn promotes the audience’s imitation of him, their adoption of the preacher’s “forma.”44
This is not to deny that a strong distinction remained, and was promoted, between clergy and laity, Latin and vernacular, learned and unlearned in many cases, or that there was a cultural investment in regarding the laity as simple and unlearned by comparison with the clergy. But even when those seemingly opposed categories were used, they could be deployed in ways that demonstrate the complexity of their relationship. We see this in a sermon delivered by Stephen Langton near the beginning of the preaching revival. The sermon takes as its theme “Attendite uobis et uniuerso gregi” (drawing on Acts 20:28) and instructs its clerical audience on the responsibilities of their office.45 Partway through the sermon, after an extended discussion of Cain and Abel that gives a biblical rationale for the preacher’s responsibility to his flock, Langton changes his approach:
Let me also speak in an everyday manner [uulgariter] for those who are more simple [simpliciores]: notice with what great veneration simple and unlearned laypeople [simplices laici et ydiote] prepare for Easter, with what punishments they afflict their bodies, what fasts, prayers, and vigils; they are ornamented as it were with heavenly pearls, so that they might participate in the Lord’s Supper. What Easter is to them, almost any day is to you, and therefore consider carefully by their example what you ought to do, lest what befalls a lying people should befall you.46
While this passage clearly makes a distinction between clergy and laity, Langton’s use of “simpliciores” and “simplices” in the same sentence seems to imagine clerics who are not so far from their flocks and indeed teaches those clerics with the kind of method—appeal to everyday experience—that was often advocated for laypeople. Moreover he encourages the audience to attend to the admirable example of pious preparation offered by the laity, reversing the more usual injunctions to laypeople that they should imitate the clergy. Langton is sensitive to the diversity of his clerical audience throughout, ending his discourse with the announcement, “I wish to conclude with an everyday example for the simple [simplices]” and a brief similitude about a merchant. Here there is a distinct sense of the clergy and laity existing along a spectrum of simplicitas, as it were, across which the preacher needs to range in his attempts to reach all of his audience.
The use of vernacular, then, can bring out similarities between clergy and laity as well as marking their differences. And if some writers seem to concede the use of exempla, the vernacular, or other means of connection as a regrettable necessity, there are other descriptions that actively valorize such connection. One of these is the repeated story of the unlearned preacher whose similitudes or exempla are persuasive where the words of a learned preacher were not. Christoph Maier relates one version of this exemplum, about the preaching of the crusade in a village: A papal legate, unsuccessful in persuading the populace, eventually called on the unlearned village priest (sacerdos simplicissimus scripture et litterature), who reluctantly agreed to take his place and proceeded to convince almost everyone without use of scriptural authority, “with simplicity by showing a good example” (simplicitate boni exempli ostencio). The preacher used the familiar image of threshing and winnowing chaff from grain to tell, as it were, an exemplum involving himself and the other clerics present: the papal legate, he said, had threshed the crowd like grain and prepared them, and it was now his own job to winnow them and find who was chaff and who would go on crusade.47 As the story shows, the anonymous preacher did a masterful job of including himself and his parishioners in a framework of recognizable experience that was also a manifestation of doctrinal truth (a tactic identical to that used by Stephen Langton with his audience of priests). The papal legate in Maier’s exemplum may have been using the vernacular, but clearly he was not speaking the audience’s language.48 The tale also reflects the desire for holy simplicity that is a persistent thread in medieval Christianity and that mitigates the negative aspects of referring to an audience as “simplices.”49
Conceptions of a preacher’s contact with “the people,” then, involve style and genre as much as language—the preacher’s need not just to speak in the vernacular but to talk the talk with his audience. Other advice offered to preachers extends this need to understand, use, and respect vernacular or “common” modes of communication to the preacher’s behavior in the world, his ability to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. In these contexts, as in those that address language and genre, nonclerical culture and nonclerical people are understood to be shrewd and deserving of respect: they may be simplices, but they’re not stupid.50 A preacher’s good behavior reflects well on the church and maintains his institutional position, but it also gains him the personal respect of his audience, without which all the institutional backing in the world is useless.
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