conceived of as having some function as a teacher, even though he was certainly not a living exemplum of good conduct. Such a man’s knowledge, in other words, is worth something; it does have value in itself and it may lead certain auditors to the ideal combination of good thinking and good deeds. For the failure of the mercenarius is not one of knowledge; that is the sin characteristic of the heretic. Therefore, these types of teacher should not be put on a par. In spirit, here Henry was following Philippians 1:18 by affirming the supreme importance of proclaiming Christ.
Whatever the truth of that specific matter may be, it should by now be abundantly clear that segregation of the officium praedicatoris from the character of the man who assumes that office is a crucial and consistent feature of the discussions reviewed above. The emphasis was thereby placed, as Jean Leclercq says, on the dignity of the function and on the obligation of the person to act in accordance with it. Concomitant with this was the clear recognition that some actual preachers lamentably fail to live up to their high calling. And here the intellectual machinery ground to a halt. The cogs and springs of Aristotelian psychology (particularly the theory of habitus) and of Aristotelian causality (particularly the theory of instrumental causality) served to bring out the full proportions of the problem but did not produce a solution. Indeed, given the very nature of the problem and the methods of analysis then available, no abstract solution was possible. A rationale could easily be provided for the sinful lecturer instructing his audience in a specific science, but the spectacle of a sinful preacher attempting to preach to his flock was far more problematic. Here the special circumstances had to be investigated: scandal was to be avoided at all costs, the spiritual welfare of the flock being the primary consideration. At which point the problem became a practical one. If the preacher was doing more harm than good in his preaching, then it was up to his bishop or other superior to intervene and silence him. According to the Lollards of late-medieval England, however, the level of ecclesiastical control and policing of preaching was utterly inadequate, and in tacit opposition to attempts to allow some (albeit limited) value to certain kinds of deviant preacher, they produced an ideology whereby the lack of personal righteousness disqualified a sinner from preaching and destroyed his pedagogic authority. Those issues will be addressed later; for the moment our concern is with the transmission of orthodox doctrine concerning good and bad preachers.
Theory into Practice: Codes of Conduct in Preachers’ Handbooks
The preacher’s appropriate codes of conduct and conditiones, as defined in (largely Parisian) scholastic debate, constituted discourses which exercised considerable influence and enjoyed wide dissemination, appearing in various forms in many preachers’ aids and reference books, including the artes praedicandi and exempla collections.54 The genre of ars praedicandi flourished particularly in England, and such works as Thomas of Chobham’s ambitiously pioneering Summa de arte praedicandi, Robert of Basevorn’s Forma praedicandi (1322), Thomas Waleys’s De modo componendi sermones (c. 1338) and Ralph Higden’s Ars componendi sermones (c. 1340) include treatments of the three types of issue which have been defined above, concerning authority, knowledge, and personal character.55 “Three things are necessary for the one exercising an act of preaching,” said Robert of Basevorn—and here we return to the quotation with which the present chapter began. The tria necessaria are defined as purity of life, competent knowledge, and authority. With regard to the last of these, Robert emphasizes the importance of having the preacher properly licensed, by either a bishop or the pope. The preacher must be “sent out” with the proper authority, by the Church. As St. Paul asks, “How will they preach, unless they be sent?” (Romans 10:15). Wherefore we learn that “No lay person or Religious, unless permitted (licentiatus) by a Bishop or the Pope, and no woman, no matter how learned or saintly (docta et sancta), ought to preach. Nor is it enough for one to say that he was commissioned by God (a Deo missus), unless he clearly proves this, for the heretics are wont to make this claim.”56 In Chapter 3 below we will consider the extent to which one group of “heretics,” the Lollards, made just such a claim, and also the manner in which some of them questioned the received wisdom that “no woman, no matter how learned or saintly, ought to preach.”
The second thing which Robert of Basevorn deems necessary for one engaged in the act of preaching is—predictably enough—competent knowledge (scientia). The preacher “must at least have explicit knowledge of the articles of Faith, the Ten Commandments, and the distinction between sin and non-sin; otherwise, ‘the blind leads the blind, and both fall into the ditch’” (cf. Matthew 15:14; Luke 6:39). However, Robert spends more time on the first of his requirements, purity of life, where he defers to the opinion of the doctores, which I take to be a specific reference to debates of the kind discussed above as opposed to a vague general remark.57 What we are offered is an elaboration of the distinction (as found in Thomas of Chobham’s Summa de arte praedicandi) between the teacher who can discharge his duty while in a state of mortal sin and the preacher who cannot. It is necessary to have “purity of life, without remorse of conscience with respect to anything grievous; otherwise, according to the doctors, the preacher sins grievously.” For God demands of the sinner, “Why dost thou announce my justice?” adding that He “will accuse you and stand against your face” (Psalm 49:16, 21).
The necessity for puritas vitae in the preacher, Robert explains, is because he has taken upon himself an officium whose end (finis) in itself is to make others good. “In this there is a great, indeed a very great, presumption that he is initiated into hierarchical acts, yes divine acts”; he publicly show himself to be, as it were, divine and godlike, although—in the case in which he is a sinner—he is actually deformed. Now, a person may say that he is good when he is not, and this may not be a mortal sin, because he is not engaged in a hierarchical act. Robert proceeds to contrast the very different objectives of the lector and the predicator:
Thus a lecturer in a school (lector in scholia) may be in mortal sin and teach in it, and because his act of itself is not immediately directed to making others good as such I do not believe that he sins mortally [i.e., in his act of teaching.]58
Robert concludes that we must say concerning the immoral preacher exactly what we would say concerning the immoral priest who is obliged to administer a sacrament:
But as it seems to me, we must say on this subject [i.e., of the immoral preacher] what we would say about one administering some sacrament in mortal sin, that if he can refuse ministering it without confusion, scandal, or ultimate danger to him to whom the sacrament ought to be administered, by all means he ought to do so; otherwise he commits a new mortal sin. If he cannot refuse, he ought to be sincerely contrite, and in that case the saying applies: “I said: I will confess, and you forgave” (Psalm 31:5). Thus refraining for the most part from that sin, he can administer the sacrament. This is what I believe should be said here.
Sic credo hic esse dicendum. So did most others. Here is one area in which there was little debate, Robert’s predecessors and contemporaries being confident about drawing parallels between the situation of the immoral preacher and that of the immoral minister of one or more of the sacraments (while, of course, recognizing that preaching was not itself a sacrament, but rather one of the duties consequent on the sacrament of ordination). On certain occasions certain aspects of the conditiones praedicatoris may look like a subsection within the larger discussion; on others, they seem to be fuelling debate on different but related issues. Often it is intellectually difficult if not impossible—and indeed fatuous—to try to determine which argument inspired which other. For one and the same argument could function as both producer and product, instigator and instigated.
What is abundantly clear is that many of the arguments concerning the relationship between institutionally conferred authority and personal righteousness that have become familiar during the preceding discussion also feature crucially in accounts of the valid administration of the sacraments. In order to pursue this line of inquiry our analysis must go beyond the specific dilemmas concerning the immoral preacher to trace the larger
