to him from whom comes all good.”69 Aquinas adds that “it is unrighteousness when a man usurps what is foreign [alienum] to him” and insists that anyone who seeks his own glory, rather than God’s, is unrighteous—a stricture that the preaching manuals repeat many times.70
Although Aquinas’s argument particularly considers Jesus, his extension of the point to unworthy preachers makes it clear that his observations have wider application. The insistence that a teacher’s words are valid only insofar as they mark his connection to God requires the speaker’s displacement of himself. A similar move, of course, helped to make prophecy a valid option for women: it downplayed the speaker’s body and offered a guarantee that a woman’s doctrine was not her own. But the insistence on “the doctrine of him that sent me” recalls the need for institutional sanction, for the preacher’s participation in a masculine lineage founded by Christ. Thus the alienation of speech Aquinas insists on (loqui non a se) justifies the preacher’s position in a lineage even as it puts demands on him. Provided he is not speaking “of himself” he does not “usurp” that which is another’s; his disowned speech marks the preacher’s personal authority and righteousness and also his claim to be “him whom God has sent,” his official and lineal authorization by the church. Women’s exclusion from priestly lineage, however, meant that even if their doctrine was God’s, their speech, if made public, was always in some sense a usurpation of another’s privilege; unlike male preachers, they could not comfortably make reference to “him that sent me.”
The male preacher’s nonownership of his speech, then, both linked him to and distinguished him from a woman prophet because his depersonalized speech, unlike hers, paradoxically gave him ownership of his status as preacher. From this position, though his doctrine might be God’s, he could still refer to “my preaching” and claim both his own speech and its scriptural origins in a way that a woman—limited, at best, to reading, reciting, or exhorting—never could. Moreover, institutional sanction and descent from Christ made it possible for the male preacher’s body to disappear, in a sense, into that which it represented. The female body, much more marked as bodily in medieval culture, could not stage such a disappearance, and this cultural visibility made it extremely difficult for women to preach in the Middle Ages.71 It also helps to make medieval attitudes visible now, to access the problems with the human male bodies that late medieval theorists often obscured by assimilating those bodies into an idealized image of the preacher that emphasized office over person.
This, then, is what Aquinas’s discussion does not address: the great equalizer between male and female preachers, their humanness. He prefers simply to ignore or condemn the possibility of a human preacher’s mixed motives or his inadequacy to his role, and this precludes any serious consideration of the preacher’s self (se). Such complex questions, however, are precisely the strength of the preaching manuals. As these texts demonstrate, concerns such as ownership of speech, the place of the physical body in the act of preaching, and the preacher’s relationship to both an ultimate source of authority in God and the earthly authorization provided by the institutional church arose not just in relation to women but as fundamentally important matters for all preachers. The attempts at definition, like Aquinas’s exegesis, show the fragility of the preacher’s claim on the doctrine he conveyed and the fragility of the boundaries of preaching. Lying between the purely charismatic speech of prophecy (the ultimate expression of personal authority) and the purely sacramental speech of priesthood (the ultimate form of official authorization), preaching was a hybrid form. The preacher’s speech, and ownership of it, are at issue in ways that the prophet’s and the priest’s are not, and those questions of ownership make the speaking body peculiarly important.
The Absence of Absolutes
The increasing appearance of solidity in the office of preacher that characterizes the thirteenth century, then, was a response to a crucial weakness, as are many displays of strength. The multiple citations required in preaching, with their concomitant questions about ownership of speech and clerical lineage, emphasized the preacher’s body because they foregrounded the physical absence of his (or her) ultimate model. The preacher re-presents God or Christ precisely because neither is bodily present. As Gillian Evans puts it, paraphrasing the words of Gregory the Great, “God himself works so closely with preachers that when he was on earth and visible to us the words of preachers were withdrawn … but now that he is not present in the flesh they must speak for him.”72 Both the preacher’s need and his ability to “cite” Christ derive from this relative absence, an absence that makes it difficult or impossible to guarantee the authenticity of the citation.73 If preaching were simply a matter of citing the words and actions of Christ—in effect, of acting the “script” of preaching—there would clearly be nothing to prevent any virtuous and learned speaker from preaching. Such proliferation, however, was unacceptable. As a late preaching manual puts it, “All preaching is sent from God, without mediation or by the mediation of angels or men, and it always bears the power of God and represents his person.”74 Preaching by unauthorized speakers, especially women, disrupts a chain of citations—textual, personal, and institutional—whose ultimate and immediate referent is the person of God, and this lineage of authority is intended to constitute the very basis of preaching. That the final guarantor of that lineage is both present, in the form of his representative, and also absent, and thus unable immediately to guarantee that representative’s appropriateness, is the kernel of the problem, and it is this nexus of absence and presence that returns us to modern speech-act and performance theory.75
The usefulness of the categories developed by Austin, Derrida, and Butler for looking at medieval preaching theory, so far from them in time and worldview, is no accident, I would argue, as we can see by following the modern chain of citations. Butler builds on Derrida’s work to develop her theory of performance as unauthored citation; Derrida’s concepts of iterability and citation grow in turn out of his disagreements with Austin’s speech-act theory, particularly the latter’s rejection of the idea of actors’ language as “hollow and void.” Austin’s notion of performative speech is a reflection on the workings of “ordinary language” that draws on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein; and Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations, which generates that theory, with a quotation from Saint Augustine’s Confessions, bringing us full circle to the father of Christian preaching theory. The idea of “ordinary language,” of course, which lies at the center of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, returns us to one of the key terms of the preaching debate. In effect, it was Augustine’s concern with the nature of language, its workings in a human context, and its role in the connection between human and divine that produced both De doctrina Christiana (the first sustained theoretical approach to Christian preaching) and the passage of the Confessions that drew Wittgenstein’s attention. Derrida and Butler examine human communication and the establishment of authority in the context of an absolute absence—that is, from an atheistic perspective—while the medieval theorists begin from an assumption that there exists an absolute presence, but both groups come up against many of the same problems and questions.76 In each case the theorists must struggle with how spoken human communication replicates or refuses to replicate the notion of an absolute presence or absence lying behind it.
We can see this most clearly by turning to the point at which Derrida takes up Austin’s arguments. Somewhat like medieval theorists’ definitions of preaching, with their constitutive exclusions of prophecy, Austin’s theory of speech-acts requires the exclusion of the imitated, delegated, citational speech of actors. He characterizes this as “non-ordinary” and thus denies it a place in his consideration of performative speech, claiming that “a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage.… Language in such circumstances is in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously, but in many ways parasitic upon its normal use.… Our performative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances.”77 Derrida, whose discussion of citationality begins precisely from this collapse (as he sees it) in Austin’s argument, contends that since any speech-act’s ability
