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Holy Duplicity: The Preacher’s Two Faces

This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf,

That first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte.

Cristes loore and his apostles twelve

He taughte; but first he folwed it himselve.…

For though myself be a ful vicious man,

A moral tale yet I yow telle kan.

Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

THE PREACHER’S ABSTRACT ABILITY TO FORM part of a clerical lineage was only one part of his task; once established in his role he still needed to demonstrate his ability to perform that role convincingly. The problem is neatly encapsulated in the contrasting preachers of the Canterbury Tales.¹ Chaucer’s description of the Parson in the General Prologue is as much a depiction of the ideal priest as the Pardoner’s Prologue, later in the same text, is a compendium of a preacher’s faults.² The two figures differ in almost every possible respect relevant to a preacher—intention, authorization, use of rhetoric, mode of delivery. The Pardoner’s very title declares him to be of a dubious caste of preachers who often used trumped-up bulls to justify their self-interested preaching, while the Parson, a parish priest whose concern is all for his flock, has pure intentions and a better and more ancient right to preach than anyone save a bishop.³ Then there are their styles of preaching: the Pardoner’s gesticulations, elaborate rhetoric, and spun-out exemplum are the antithesis of the Parson’s sober refusal to rhyme or “glose” in his “myrie tale in prose.”⁴ What does not differ is the worth of their messages; the Pardoner’s theme, “Radix malorum est cupiditas” (the love of money is the root of evils), is no less inherently respectable than the Parson’s implicit teaching, “Penitenciam agite” (do penance).⁵ But the very different responses they have drawn, both from their fellow pilgrims and from modern readers, amply demonstrate the importance of the messenger to his message. The Parson and the Pardoner encapsulate the central ethical and moral issues that concerned the writers of preaching manuals from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, a period when preaching was much in question both within and outside the orthodox church. High on the list of potential problems was the appropriate relationship between the preacher’s human body and his spiritual task. Fictional and extreme test cases, the Parson and the Pardoner are, in effect, exemplum in bono and exemplum in malo of that relationship. They can help to highlight and are themselves illuminated in turn by a discussion of how the preacher’s person could contribute to or diminish the “office of holy preaching.”⁶

While the problems surrounding the preacher’s body and office were becoming increasingly acute in the later Middle Ages, they were by no means new. Conrad Leyser has recently argued that Gregory the Great drew on the ascetic tradition to create the ideal of a ruler whose ability to control his own body and, in particular, the “flux” of his speech demonstrated his ability to manage affairs in the world; this control of speech, Leyser argues, in effect substituted for the sexual temperance or abstinence that was the focus for earlier thinkers.⁷ Gregory’s concern with “how [one could] safely distinguish speakers of true spiritual wisdom from purveyors of empty falsehoods” is reflected in his assertion, “If a man’s life is despised, his preaching will be condemned.”⁸ The concern with personal morality and Gregory’s distrust of the rhetorical display that might disguise “empty falsehoods” were crucial to his attempt to link external power to internal virtue, and they formed a key part of his substantial legacy of advice to later preachers on the practical and spiritual difficulties of their task.⁹

Gregory’s arguments on these topics remained central for later theorists of preaching, but they came to be used in a spiritual and institutional climate very different from that in which the sixth-century pope had developed them. The reforms instigated by the other famous Pope Gregory in the eleventh century gave rise to new pressures on the body of the preacher. The desire to return to a vision of the apostolic life as one of poverty and preaching, the focus on the clergy as a group set apart, and above all the need to recapture for the church as a whole a radical sense of sancta simplicitas all put increased demands on the clergy to possess, and to display in their words and actions, an impeccable personal morality.¹⁰ To fulfill their office and to reinforce the church’s power, preachers required both spiritual excellence and unquestioned authorization, qualities displayed above all in the preacher’s person.

That “person,” however, was a problematic and increasingly divided concept. As the authors of scholastic and disputation literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries moved away from the patristic tendency to focus on personal dignity, they began, as Jean Leclercq says, “to distinguish the person from the function, and they did so in order to emphasize the dignity of the function and the obligation of the person to conform himself to it.”¹¹ The personal virtue that had been the primary repository of the preacher’s authority suddenly had to coexist with, and in many cases take second place to, the impersonal and hierarchical power of his official authorization.¹² This shift is linked to the one that Stephen Jaeger sees in this same period, from charismatic body to charismatic text.¹³ Such a transition is never a smooth one, as Jaeger notes, and the growing focus on authorization worked against the continuing demand for holy simplicity and, more importantly, against the fact that preachers were, inevitably, charismatic bodies. Discussions aimed at preachers on the relationship of their persons to their task display with particular clarity what Ernst Kantorowicz, discussing another kind of dual body, calls the “eager[ness] to reconcile the duality of this world and the other, of things temporal and eternal, secular and spiritual.”¹⁴ Attempts to reconcile these dualities, however, often only reinforced the depth of the gap between them.

A comparison of the textual bodies of Parson and Pardoner begins to outline some possible relationships between the preacher’s person and his office. All we know of the Parson’s physical presence is that despite the breadth of his parish he visits his parishioners faithfully, in rain and snow and gloom of night, “upon his feet, and in his hand a staf.”¹⁵ The depiction suggests a body whose sole meaning derives from its service to a larger task; indeed, there is so little sense of particular embodiment here that, as R. N. Swanson puts it, “It is virtually impossible to bring him to mind as a person … any attempt to conjure up a physical presence falls completely flat.”¹⁶ The feet perhaps recall the image of preachers as the feet of the church, and the staff in his hand reminds us of his role as shepherd: the Parson’s body functions as an abstract reflection of his office.

What a contrast this makes to the Pardoner, whose physicality is so foregrounded, simultaneously excessive and elusive, that it may well dominate our sense of him and certainly interferes with his preaching in ways that preaching theorists would have strongly disapproved.¹⁷ First, there is the doubt about his sexuality: “I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare,” the narrator says, expressing an uncertainty that has implications not only for his acceptance among the other pilgrims but for his very ability to occupy the office of preacher.¹⁸ Second, there is the theatrical gesticulation about which he boasts in his prologue: “Thanne peyne I me to strecche forth the nekke, / And est and west upon the peple I bekke, / As dooth a dowve sittynge on a berne. / Myne handes and my tonge goon so yerne / That it is joye to se my bisynesse.”¹⁹ This kind of physical display is uniformly condemned in preaching handbooks and contrasts sharply with the Parson’s approach: here, it is clear, the preacher’s office serves his body rather than vice versa.²⁰ Finally, of course, the Pardoner’s greed, the cupidity that both fuels his preaching and provides its subject, marks the unworthy self-interest that motivates his supposedly spiritual work.²¹ If the Parson exemplifies personal authority attained through perfect submission to an institutional structure and ideal, and thus powerfully reinforcing that structure and ideal, the Pardoner emblematizes the capacity of the physical body to destroy both personal authority and institutional authorization.

Alastair Minnis has recently discussed the theoretical and theological aspects of the potential gap between the body as locus of authority and the body as locus of a fallible individual.²² The aim here is to raise similar questions about the practical performance of preaching. Attempts by the authors of artes praedicandi to manage the potentially competing meanings of the preacher’s body are all the more informative because they deal with a figure who was not, like a king, in a removed position of divine right nor, like an author, at a distance from his audience, but one who had constantly to perform both his virtue and his authority for a present, and possibly resistant, audience. In establishing the preacher’s claim implicitly to represent the church’s dignity and authority, preaching theorists often contrast the authorized representative with those excluded from or inappropriate to the office of preaching, such as heretics, laymen, women, and immoral preachers. References to such denigrated categories of persons can help us to understand the importance of the preacher’s persona and the vulnerability of an authorization that had to depend upon it.

In the practice of preaching, the bodily effacement implied in Chaucer’s textual portrait of the Parson was simply impossible: preaching is a physical performance, and thus the problems raised by the preacher’s body had to be addressed. Medieval discussions of the complex concept of persona demonstrate the doubleness inherent in the very activity of preaching, a doubleness that was both essential and potentially devastating to the preacher’s activity and role. In their yearning for holy simplicity, for an idealized congruence between the preacher’s words and his deeds, his message and his persona, the preaching theorists inadvertently highlighted the preacher’s hybridity and his inevitable participation in a world of partialness, appearances, and duplicity.²³

Persona and Authority

The primary meaning of persona according to J. F. Niermeyer’s Lexicon is “individual, human being,” and this seems to be the sense underlying the varied uses of the term in the artes praedicandi.²⁴ The importance both of particularity and of the power and frailty of humanness arises again and again in discussions of the preacher’s persona. However, the first definition given by Charles du Cange, “dignitas,” is more in line with meanings noted later in Niermeyer, such as “competence, qualification,” “someone of a certain standing,” “official,” and even “parson.”²⁵ The connotations of status and authority suggest that the term persona could encompass the possibly conflicting demands of the individual and of his office. Preaching manuals draw on this range of meanings, but their use of the term relates it especially to the human side of the preacher’s activity: his interaction with an audience, his status, his body, his actions in the world.

An address to priests by the late twelfth-century bishop and preacher Maurice of Sully begins to illustrate in a practical way the divisions inherent in the concept of persona. Maurice says that the priest’s three main responsibilities are a holy life, knowledge, and preaching.²⁶ He goes on to note that “holy life” means that the priest must cleanse himself “from all bodily and spiritual uncleanness” (de tote l’ordure de son cors e de s’ame) by which “his soul might appear ugly and ill-kempt before God, and his person before the world” (s’ame puet estre malmise e enlaidie devant Deu e sa persone devant le siecle).²⁷ The two pairings here are “body and soul” and “person and soul,” an imperfect repetition that reflects the multiple meanings of persona. “Person” is, first of all, set off against the “soul” that only God sees, and it is imagined as that which the priest, as a prerequisite for preaching, presents to the world. Maurice implies that the two kinds of uncleanness (of soul and body) and the two kinds of presentation (to God and the people) are equivalent, but this of course elides the imperfection of human perception as compared to that of God. God will know how true the preacher’s presentation is, but a human audience may not. A key characteristic of persona, then, is that it refers to the preacher’s activities and appearance in the world, to external, human communication rather than the preacher’s internal connection with God. The pairing of person and soul also suggests, without insisting on it, that the preacher’s external presentation to his human audience will reflect his relationship to God, that internal and external purity are linked. However, persona is not only divided from soul and thus put squarely into the arena of human interaction, but is also shown to include both the priest’s physical body and his self-presentation. The parallel pairings “soul and body” and “soul and person” suggest that body and persona are intimately linked and that, in Maurice’s view, the body [cors] can impair the effectiveness of the preacher’s self-presentation, make his person [persone] “ugly” before the people and thus, presumably, detract from his message. The preacher’s persona is intimately connected to but not entirely synonymous with his body.

For Maurice, it seems, the emphasis falls on the preacher’s appearance before his two audiences, God and people, and persona is imagined as prior to preaching, as part of the basis for the activity. It is also, however, subject to contamination by the preacher’s sinful body. Writing for a group whose mission to preach was not in question, parish priests, Maurice focuses his attention on the preacher’s moral qualities as the basis for his authority, reflecting to some extent the older ideal of personal dignity rather than the new attention to office.

A different emphasis appears in the work of Humbert of Romans. While Humbert, like Maurice, saw persona as related to both body and status, and as a basis for the practical exercise of the preacher’s office before a human audience, his De eruditione praedicatorum is more attentive to questions of authorization and legitimacy. It is not surprising that Humbert, as an ecclesiastical official and a member of an order of wandering preachers, shows a strong concern both with maintaining the boundaries of official authorization (boundaries that had at times been drawn against the mendicants) and with a preacher’s ability to establish authority before an audience.²⁸ Taken together, the categories he discusses under the heading “De persona praedicatoris” demonstrate the potential capaciousness of this concept and its suspension between ideas of the physical and the social. Humbert says that, “regarding the person [of the preacher], it should be noted” that he should be of the male sex, not evidently deformed, physically strong, of appropriate age (i.e., not too young); that he should have “some prerogative over others”; and finally that he should not be a “contemptible person,” by which, Humbert clarifies, he means someone of vicious life.²⁹ The preacher’s person, for Humbert, must both represent and uphold his preeminence over those he addresses.

The “his” in that sentence is no accident, since Humbert’s first category entirely excludes women from the practice of preaching. This exclusion is foundational: above all the preacher must be a man. Humbert justifies his ruling on a fourfold basis that recapitulates the standard arguments against women preachers.³⁰ The first reason for women’s exclusion is deficiency of understanding, which Humbert says is more to be expected in women than in men; the second is women’s subordinate status; the third is that if a woman were to preach, her appearance might provoke men to lust; and finally, women are barred “in memory of the foolishness of the first woman, of whom Bernard said, ‘She taught once, and overthrew the whole world.’ ”³¹ Like the categories as a whole, this list offers a combination of body-related and status-related prohibitions, and we may note that two of Humbert’s qualifications for male preachers, strength and “some preeminence over others,” are often used to exclude women and thus would tend to reinforce his initial ban on female preachers on both physical and social grounds.

While the focus of this initial category might seem to be squarely on women, all of Humbert’s reasons for excluding women have some bearing on men, a fact that is usually made explicit in the text. The first category, lack of intelligence, is one that Humbert claims is more applicable to women than men. The way he expresses this, however, makes it clear that women’s weakness is relative (“intelligence … is not to be expected in women so much as in men”) and thus to some extent undermines it as a basis for exclusion.³² The second issue, subordinate status, implicitly recalls women’s subjection to men, but as Humbert’s more general category of “preeminence” suggests, this too can be grounds for excluding men as well as women. These categories emphasize women’s inadequacy and weakness, but since both are qualities that men can share, they act as a reminder that women are only one group of many that were barred from preaching and undermine women’s exceptionally rigid exclusion.

Humbert’s third and fourth reasons emphasize not qualities that men and women might share, but rather women’s effect on men. The anxiety about male lust and the recollection of Eve demonstrate not women’s weakness, but rather their dangerous power. And while these criteria certainly denigrate the female body as a source of sin and confusion, they implicitly concede that it is male weakness—the ability to be provoked to lust and Adam’s willingness to listen to Eve—that makes women dangerous. The depiction of women as simultaneously inadequate and threatening to the office of preacher and the ways in which that inadequacy and threat implicate men are reminiscent of clerical anxieties about the flesh.³³ Such a connection is hardly surprising, given the strong medieval association of flesh and femininity. But the rather elaborate introductory insistence on women’s exclusion raises the suspicion that this approach allows Humbert to draw attention away from the frailty of the male flesh, and to establish a solid persona for the preacher, by reiterating the notion that women are particularly subject to and representative of the weakness that is in fact a characteristic of all human beings.

Despite this preemptive strike, the categories that follow, with their imbrication of status and embodiment, cannot but suggest that men, like women, are immured in physicality. Even their attempts to escape it, via the establishment of a formal, disembodied authority, depend on the physicality that men share with women and on the response to their bodies in the physical world. This is what lies behind the prohibition on evident deformity. The attributes of wholeness and masculinity are ones the preacher needs to be seen to possess in order to establish that he has a body appropriate to his office. We might think here of the Pardoner, who seems to feel a need to perform masculinity—perhaps as a way to assert both his maleness and his lack of physical deformity—as well as to proclaim his status and authorization.³⁴ His physical qualities and his official qualifications are mutually dependent and equally suspect; they bring each other and, by extension, the office of preacher into disrepute.³⁵

Humbert’s last three categories attend less to physical qualifications than to those of status. The preacher must be of appropriate age, since Christ did not presume to preach before the age of thirty: here again what might at first appear to be a physical requirement turns out to be linked to a question of status and, indeed, to what might be called the ultimate question of status, the preacher’s similarity to Christ. Also, the preacher must have some prerogative over others “whether in office, or in learning, or in religion, and so forth,” for which reason a layman (like a woman) is not to preach. Finally, a preacher must not be a contemptible person, lest his preaching be rejected. Here Humbert cites the standard text from Gregory the Great: “If a man’s life is despised, it is clear that his preaching will be scorned.”³⁶ These last two requirements are presented as though divorced from embodiment, and remind us that maleness is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for preaching: the preacher must also demonstrate eminence and virtue.

Like those that went before, Humbert’s final group of categories emphasizes the preacher’s relationship to his audience and the things that may cause them to scorn him or disregard his message, rather than the purely internal qualities that might be necessary for effective preaching.³⁷ The various subheadings of persona bring together, not to say jumble, the issues of status, authority, authorization, and embodiment, showing the preacher’s right and ability to speak as a matter for complex negotiation among him, his congregation, God, and the institutional hierarchy of the church. In these negotiations persona is assumed to precede preaching in some sense and is tacitly regarded as a true reflection of the preacher’s internal state. In Humbert’s last category, however, we face the troubling prospect of the despicable preacher, a figure who leads us deeper into the complexities of the preacher’s persona.

The Body Double

If a man’s life is condemned, his preaching will be scorned, Humbert asserts; similarly, as most of the artes praedicandi insist, one whose life is admirable will strengthen his preaching.³⁸ In this context the import of the term persona is perhaps best conveyed by Leclercq’s assertion that the medieval conception of the preacher’s office “excludes … all preoccupation with self-interest [recherche personelle].”³⁹ The preaching manuals (and the Pardoner) make it clear that the preacher’s “personal” interest in preaching could include anything from desire for adulation, to vainglory, to pure greed: sinful desires that the body could either manifest or hide, promote or suppress. At the same time a good example was a crucial part of preaching. The problem of the preacher’s personal relationship to his office had been explored extensively by Thomas of Chobham in the early thirteenth century. In a section of his Summa de arte praedicandi titled “On the doubleness of preaching”—that is, on preaching in word and in deed—Thomas moves from the ideal of the preacher as exemplar to the problem of the preacher as sinner. His discussion shows quite clearly how the preacher’s physicality is both a benefit and a detriment, an essential element of and a potential danger to his message.⁴⁰

The importance of example, a crucial aspect of a sermon’s material as well as its delivery, lies in its inevitable relationship to the physical and the particular, to all the qualities that work against the idealized submergence of the person in the office seen in Chaucer’s Parson.⁴¹ It is no accident that that supremely disembodied churchman refuses to use the denigrated, embodied mode of “fables” in his sermon, refuses to speak in the exemplum form that the Pardoner elaborates on so vividly.⁴² Not all medieval preachers—indeed, it seems, very few—were as fastidious as the Parson in this regard; exemplary stories were regarded by most as a valuable tool, for the same reasons that made the preacher’s personal exemplarity necessary. In one of the many prologues that address the usefulness of similitudes and exempla, Étienne de Bourbon writes that it is necessary that doctrine, like Christ, be “embodied and clothed in flesh” to make it accessible to a lay audience.⁴³ The image of embodiment and fleshliness carries us right to the idea of the preacher as exemplar; the need to make doctrine visible and palpable that Etienne cites also animates Thomas of Chobham’s insistence on the mutual necessity of the preacher’s words and deeds. “Every preacher should give a good example [bonum exemplum] in his works, and good doctrine in his words,” he says, since a good life without preaching is inefficacious.⁴⁴ The insistence on preaching both in word and in deed does more, that is, than assert that word and deed must be congruent; it expresses the limitations of words alone in convincingly portraying salvific doctrine. Indeed, Robert of Basevorn seems almost to imply that embodiment is essential to preaching. Regarding God, the first preacher, he says, “He preached frequently through angels who assumed bodies or, as some would have it, some other corporeal likeness which He Himself assumed not in union of substance, but only as its mover, as perhaps he spoke to Adam and many others.… And at last He Himself, taking on a human soul and body in the unity of substance came preaching.”⁴⁵ Even God, it seems, needs a body if he is to preach.

The “unity of substance” of which Robert speaks, of course, was the ultimate instance of doctrine “embodied and clothed in flesh,” Jesus Christ. The Incarnation presented doctrine in an accessible form and provided the perfect example for Christians to follow: an embodied human person who fully expressed all the ideals of the faith. As Augustine wrote, “We need a mediator linked with us in our lowliness by reason of the mortal nature of his body, and yet able to render us truly divine assistance for our purification and liberation,” and later he says that Christ offered his virtuous humanity as “an example for our imitation.”⁴⁶ Christ, of course, was an example for all the faithful, but the clergy were supposed to provide an idealized example of appropriate imitation. “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ,” Paul says to the Corinthians, a passage quoted by Thomas of Chobham in his section on doubleness.⁴⁷ If Christ’s humanity mediates between the heavenly and the earthly, then the preacher, who should be a true reflection of that example, is the mediator at one remove. He too conveys the heavenly by earthly means.

The concept of mediated imitation clearly informs Thomas’s treatment of exemplarity and makes visible the demands that this role placed on the preacher, who, Thomas says, “should be like a book and a mirror for his flock, that they may read in the deeds of their leader as in a book, and may see in a mirror what they should do.”⁴⁸ The numerous exempla collections called Speculum … (and the many other kinds of books that went under the same title) were intended, as Ritamary Bradley has pointed out, to “show the world what it is and … to point out what it should be.”⁴⁹ Although Thomas is clearly focusing on the latter of these two meanings, the preacher, like his exempla, could illustrate both. The uneasily dual nature of the mirror, a glass in which we see perfection, but see it darkly, is like that of the preacher, an earthly and physical exemplar of an abstract ideal.⁵⁰ Just as the exempla used in his sermon clothed doctrine in the flesh of narrative, so the preacher was to clothe a moral ideal in human flesh. The danger, as always, was that the flesh might interfere with the expression of doctrine, rather than facilitating it. For God, whom no “clothing” of flesh can defile, this necessary method carries no dangers, but for the human preacher who followed him it was otherwise.

The preacher’s dual allegiance—responsible to God and people, imitating one and imitated by the other—should be internally coherent. But the division introduced by that duality, like the one between words and deeds, could also make the preacher’s persona dangerous. One sign of this is the fact that Thomas’s concept of the “doubleness” of preaching, which begins by emphasizing the capacity of bodily action to reinforce the preacher’s words, quickly turns to the body’s potential to undermine those words and to the role of sin in preaching: the bulk of the section on doubleness considers how a preacher should publicize or hide his sins and describes sinful modes of preaching. A certain slippage in Thomas’s use of the term duplex, twofold or double, helps us to see how immorality and its relationship to the preacher’s persona call into question not just the authority of a particular preacher but the nature of preaching itself.

Thomas first uses the term duplex to refer to the mutually reinforcing areas of words and deeds: “preaching can only be double” because these two must both be present.⁵¹ As he dissects this concept, however, we begin to see the preacher’s “duplicity” as a matter not of beneficial replication but of potentially destructive division. If life and word are not in agreement, “the example killeth what the word giveth life,” and rather than reinforcement there is a fatal conflict between the two.⁵² This is also the case with the two ways in which a sinner can hide his sin and the two ways in which he can make it public; in each case there is a good and a bad possibility. A positive display of deeds receives no discussion, presumably because it is the situation already discussed in the remarks on exemplarity: if a preacher’s life is virtuous, this should be made visible to his audience so that it will reinforce his preaching. The other three possibilities all address the less attractive but apparently, in Thomas’s view, more probable situation where the preacher is a sinful man—not extraordinarily sinful, perhaps, but not a straightforward exemplar of virtue.

The sinful preacher, Thomas suggests, has three options. The only positive one is hiding one’s sins for the good of others, out of shame before God.⁵³ Then there are the negative possibilities of displaying one’s sins in a bad way or hiding them in a bad way. The first of these is very much what the Pardoner does: he appears not to regret but to glory in his sins; he publicizes them with gusto and élan. Such behavior should be avoided, Thomas suggests, lest the preacher scandalize his flock, making himself a stumbling block to their salvation—as happens with the Pardoner, at least in the context of the Canterbury Tales.⁵⁴ The other possibility, that of hiding sins in a bad way, brings us to a discussion that links the preacher’s doubleness of word and deed with his potential duplicity or hypocrisy as a performer.⁵⁵ Thomas speaks harshly of those who “hide their sins in an evil way, that is, under the adornment of virtues [sub ornamento uirtutum], and as it were put on their sins like silken garments that they may deceive others and seem beautiful to them.”⁵⁶ He goes on to compare such preachers to Thamar, in Gen. 38:13–15, who sat at the crossroads in rich clothing like a harlot, and says that “thus do hypocrites act meretriciously, to deceive the sight of those who observe them by an ornate exterior of virtues.”⁵⁷ Both the emphasis on ornate decoration and the comparison to Thamar create an atmosphere of carnality around what could otherwise be seen as primarily intellectual or spiritual deception. Whereas Humbert of Romans projected onto women the kinds of physical shortcomings that might threaten any preacher, Thomas, by assimilating the hypocritical preacher to a decked-out harlot, suggests that lust and self-display can equally be characteristics of the male preacher. Here we see the dangers of the preacher’s physicality: his body is no longer the beneficent double of his doctrine but rather its evil twin, undoing all the good work done by the word.

When Thomas turns to the second half of his initial pairing—the preacher’s word or teaching—it becomes clear that physicality and doubleness pose a threat in this realm as well. As we arrive at the section on “the word of preaching” the transformation in the concept of doubleness is complete: like preaching as a whole, the modes of preaching in words are called “duplex.” Here, however, doubleness refers not to two halves, capable of working either for or against each other; it speaks rather of division into two mutually exclusive categories, recalling the preacher’s possible ways to display his life. The preacher can preach either “for the benefit and use of his neighbors” or “out of desire for earthly gain or the pleasure of human approval”; here again, the Parson and Pardoner line up on opposite sides of a divide.⁵⁸ The former category, preaching for the good of others, receives no discussion. The latter is immediately defined as adultery of the Word of God, and those who pursue it are accused of one of four modes of sin: theft, fornication, idolatry, or lying. As with the doubleness of preaching and of the preacher’s life, the negative possibilities receive far more attention than the positive ones; it seems that the preacher’s personal desires and bodily weaknesses pose a threat that overshadows the beneficial potential of his body.

All four “bad modes” serve the regrettably worldly desires for money, vainglory, and human approval, the self-interest that the artes praedieandi universally condemn. The discussions of “fornication” and “idolatry” particularly demonstrate how the preacher’s words can be tainted by the demands of his person. Those who “fornicate” in preaching, Thomas says, “luxuriate in the empty words of their own rhetoric” (luxuriantur in uerbis ponposis eloquentie sue).⁵⁹ The verb luxuriantur, which recalls the deadly sin of luxuria, or lust, connects with other words in this passage, such as lasciuia, delectare, and dulcedo, to reinforce the sense of sexual sin evoked by the gratification of personal desires in preaching.⁶⁰ The mode linked to “idolatry,” on the other hand, returns us to the body and the sense of its own doubleness. “The third way of sinning against the word of God is when [the preacher] commits the same errors that he condemns,” says Thomas, and he adds, “This is to build with one hand and destroy with the other.”⁶¹ This recapitulation of the words/deeds problem shows the preacher’s body, suddenly, as divided not only from the beneficial capabilities of the word but indeed also against itself, as one hand creates what the other destroys.

The preacher, as a creator in both word and deed, must make his two halves work together for his message to be effective. But as the development of Thomas’s concept of duplicitas in preaching demonstrates, it was not difficult to slip from doubleness as beneficial reinforcement to doubleness as deceptive and destructive division. Divided against himself and from the salvific doctrine he presents, the wicked preacher “ ‘speaks another’s words’ (‘dicit aliena’),” since his behavior makes it clear that the words he speaks cannot truly be his.⁶² He breaks the congruence of word and deed that would allow him to be a beneficent exemplar and thus impairs his own authenticity, which is both his claim to be the persona he presents and the source of his authority. In so doing he amply demonstrates the power of the preacher’s presence, whose ability to diminish his message only reemphasizes its equally important role in validating that message.

Two-Faced Preachers

Thomas of Chobham recapitulates much of his discussion of the doubleness of preaching later in his text when he considers the issue of persona, a reiteration that demonstrates the link between the problems of self-presentation and morality.⁶³ An appendix to Humbert of Romans’s treatise on Dominican offices makes this connection more explicit, echoing the image of building and destroying used by Thomas: “It is essential that life and teaching should coincide in [the preacher], lest what he builds up with one hand, he destroy with the other. Thus the preacher should present [praetendere] humility in his bearing, virtue in his morals, discretion in his words, charity in his zeal for souls, temperance in eating and drinking, and maturity in his actions.”⁶⁴ The preacher’s actions in the world create a persona that must reflect his truly virtuous morals and thus reinforce his capacity to be a preacher, or else fatally undermine it. The unreliability of the preacher’s body as an index of his virtue raises a specter of hypocrisy that challenges the very office of preaching—a challenge often conceived in terms of acting.

The dislike of acting was, of course, not invented by Christian preaching theorists; Cicero lamented that orators, “the actors [actores] of truth itself,” were reluctant to use the persuasive tools afforded by delivery preferring to leave these to the histriones.⁶⁵ But the idea of “representing truth” is a complex one, as Christian writers were particularly aware. In his Soliloquies, Augustine rejects the provisional truths afforded by acting, saying that “we should, instead, seek that truth which is not self-contradictory and two-faced.”⁶⁶ Whereas Cicero seemed to envision the ability to use acting techniques without compromising oneself, Augustine, and later preaching theorists, were more alive to the contradictions implicit in the notion of the performer of truth.

What makes these contradictions so problematic, as we have seen, is that it is in such doubleness, such two-facedness, that the very nature and effectiveness of the preacher’s role lie. Maurice of Sully suggests that in some sense the preacher is, and must be, two-faced, one face toward God and one toward the people, and later theorists reinforce this notion. Ideally these two faces would be the same; control of speech and moderation of movement would represent cleanliness and orderliness of soul.⁶⁷ Such a correspondence would guarantee the visibility of a preacher’s wicked life to his audience. Discussions of another aspect of the preacher’s self-presentation—not his behavior in the world but the performance of preaching—show why that assumption was so troubling and, not incidentally, why there is such a long-standing antipathy toward acting in preaching theory. Performance in preaching calls forth many of the issues already seen in connection with the preacher’s role as exemplar, but it does so in a way that seriously undermines the value of exemplarity as a mode of teaching. Accounts of delivery rework Thomas’s notion of beneficial duplicity in a way that makes its dark side more evident, repeatedly showing the divisions in the preacher’s self-presentation as places where a gap between appearance and reality might arise.

Alan of Lille, whose Summa on the art of preaching is the earliest of the late medieval preaching manuals, discusses the preacher’s persona in the following terms: “The preacher should capture the goodwill of his audience by his own person [a propria persona] through humility, and by the usefulness of the material he presents, by saying that he proposes to them the word of God that it may bear fruit in their minds, not for any earthly reward, but for their progress and success; not that he may be stimulated by the empty clamor of the crowd, not that he may be soothed by popular favor, not that he may be flattered by theatrical applause; but so that their souls may be formed, and that they should consider not who speaks, but what he says.”⁶⁸ Alan’s language here suggests that the preacher has a complicated relationship to the theatricality of his task: he must create a persona by rejecting the suggestion that he is an actor. The preacher can inspire confidence in his “own” persona specifically by telling his audience that he does not want to seek an actor’s rewards (applause, popular favor, earthly gain). This suggests that it is not enough merely to be humble; to make his message effective, the preacher must actually 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 side to side, and waving the arms, saying firmly that “such movements are not appropriate to a preacher.”⁸⁰ He goes on to say that attention to gesture is important because “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 strangeness suggests the limitations of the idealized portrait of the Parson, which seems to ask members of the audience to accept a kind of transparency that they know to be false—even as they may wish that it were true. But this is not to say that the Pardoner is in some twisted way more “truthful” than the Parson. Instead it suggests that we must look again at the ideal, wholly simple Parson. In the General Prologue it is true that there is little to interrupt readers’ view of his transparent truthfulness.⁹² The Parson is an exemplar of holy duplicity, as the Prologue insists over and over: his words and deeds are in perfect harmony. And insofar as that appearance of perfection has been accepted, it has been notably unproductive of criticism about the Parson as a character precisely because there seems to be no one there who inflects the message. But this view can only be sustained if we limit ourselves to the third-person General Prologue portrait. Just as theoretical texts on preaching suggest, the image of a perfectly disembodied exemplar can only be sustained outside the context of performance. At the points where the Parson ceases to be a third-person figure characterized by the narrator and speaks in a voice of his own, he inevitably complicates—without necessarily invalidating—his own status as an ideal.

As Lee Patterson has noted, “the inclusion of the teller with the tale personalizes the meanings that emerge,” and the Parson’s Tale is not exempt from this phenomenon; the Parson’s embodiment, his status as a character, is sometimes regarded as undermining his message.⁹³ Patterson sees the “personalization” of the tales as encouraging “a dramatic reading that discounts any authoritative significance” and suggests that the Parson’s Tale only escapes this limitation by transcending the frame narrative that produces it; it “takes its origin in the very dramatic and realistic context which it will dismiss.”⁹⁴ As Peggy Knapp points out, however, such a view involves a paradox: “If [the Parson’s] doctrine is true, there need be no fictions, and yet he formulates this doctrine within a fiction—he is a fiction. Either the unchanging realm (from God’s vantage point) of the revealed Word swallows the flawed, historical, uncertain world of experience, or vice versa.”⁹⁵ Knapp’s point about this paradox is well taken, but I would argue that there is more room for negotiation than she, or Patterson, allows. The figure of the Parson, in effect, shows that neither the unchanging realm of authority nor the fluctuating world of experience does swallow the other; instead, these realms coexist and interact, as they must do for every preacher.⁹⁶ At the end of the Parson’s Tale the figure of the individual speaker fades into textuality—but only to give way to the voice of another speaker, of Chaucer in the Retractions, a reminder that while the origins of the voice are never guaranteed, it is always a voice that comes from someone. Preaching is precisely the attempt to bring the unchanging, revealed Word into the uncertain, human world, and the duplicity required of the preacher reflects that disparity. We need not regard Chaucer’s depiction of an idealized preacher as a mere setup for yet another anticlerical critique to argue that it does in the end acknowledge the impossibility of that single-minded ideal. If the Parson’s individuality to some extent diminishes his capacity to convey authority, that same individuality whatever its costs, is simultaneously essential to his existence and effectiveness as a preacher. We can see how physicality both gives and takes away authority in the Parson’s speech, the best available proxy for his embodied performance.⁹⁷ It is as an audience of his textual speech that we imitate a sermon audience; it is only through language that these characters are present, and only through their speech, as distinguished from the narrator’s descriptions of them, that they take on a life of their own. We catch a first glimpse of the Parson as a person, not just an ecclesiastical model, in the General Prologue portrait’s question, “if gold ruste, what shal iren do?” and its reference to the shame of “a shiten shepherde and a clene sheep,” both of which allude to the priest’s duty to act as an example.⁹⁸ As Jill Mann observes, in the passage as a whole “we realise that once again, it is the character himself who is speaking. It is not the moralist commentator who quotes from the gospel and adds the ‘figure’ about rusting gold; it is the Parson himself.”⁹⁹ Such language begins to constitute the Parson as a personality distinct from the abstract ideal of the good priest.

Later instances of the Parson’s speech reinforce the hints of his individual character in the General Prologue. The epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale depicts the Parson’s objection to Harry Bailly’s swearing, which draws Harry’s jocular claim to “smelle a Lollere in the wynd.”¹⁰⁰ The Parson’s rebuke—itself slightly jocular, reproving without being harsh, as the General Prologue had promised—increases our sense of him as an individual, and Harry’s mock-accusation points to the specificity of the Parson’s response, the way it makes him a potential participant in a recognizable political and religious debate.¹⁰¹ The Parson may or may not have heretical secrets, but Harry’s ability to imagine such a thing, based on the Parson’s conversation, is enough to remove the latter from his abstract portrait frame and put him into a world of human interactions. Both Harry and the modern critics who try to break down the Parson’s appearance of perfection could be accused of misreading, but in fact their suspicions are an entirely foreseeable response to the presentation of an idealized performer. By making that performer’s humanness clear through his individual voice, Chaucer makes it inevitable that such questions will be asked about the Parson, whatever their answers may be.

The Parson’s involvement in, and awareness of, a human context can also be seen in his self-presentation in the prologue to his tale. Usually it is his strictures against exempla and alliteration, his rejection of embodied forms, that draw attention here. Less noticed is his initial address to the pilgrims, which demonstrates a sensitivity to his audience:

Why sholde I sowen draf out of my fest,

Whan I may sowen whete, if that me lest?

For which I seye, if that yow list to heere

Moralitee and vertuous mateere,

And thanne that ye wol yeve me audience,

I wol ful fayn, at Cristes reverence,

Do yow plesaunce leefful, as I kan.¹⁰²

He begins with an image that personalizes a biblical injunction, the rhetorical question and first-person form making it almost conversational.¹⁰³ The last five lines of this passage alternate between concern for the audience and concern for the text. The first and third lines address the audience’s willingness to hear; the second and fourth offer what the speaker can provide (virtuous doctrine, a good will, and reverence for Christ). The final line combines these areas into “plesaunce leefful,” the linking of what will please the audience with what will benefit them. The address as a whole is nothing other than a captatio benevolentiae, an astute rhetorical move that shows that the Parson is well aware of his need, as Alan of Lille put it, to “capture the good will of his audience by his own person through humility, and by the usefulness of the material he presents.”¹⁰⁴ Without questioning the “truth” of his performance of virtue, we may acknowledge that it is inevitably a performance. By creating the Parson as an embodied character, however sketchily, and by giving him a voice of his own, Chaucer shows that though he makes very different choices, he is involved in and aware of the same network of audience and performance that the Pardoner manipulates so skillfully.

What Chaucer’s preachers seem at first to present, then, is a study in holy simplicity versus unholy duplicity, a black-and-white dichotomy, and on a certain abstract level it remains true that the Pardoner represents an immoral preacher, the Parson a virtuous one. The context of preaching theory suggests further possibilities: not just the holy duplicity that Chaucer’s General Prologue portrait of the Parson so insistently foregrounds, but unholy simplicity—the Pardoner’s single-minded pursuit of gain, so single that he seems at times to consist only of that quality.¹⁰⁵ Ultimately, however, this opposition also proves too simple; the juxtaposition and the embodiment of polarized abstractions, and the frame in which they are set, help to show why such dichotomies are unsustainable. In giving his characters voices of their own, Chaucer disallows our reliance on the voice of the all-knowing creator, on any immediate or transparent access to the truth about any other person, however fictional. Like a preacher’s audience, Chaucer’s readers may speculate about the speaker’s soul, but all we really see is his person, the individual whose specificity and solidity make any claim to transparency—to perfect holiness or perfect unholiness—suspect. No preacher, however virtuous, is an empty vessel through which God speaks, but to understand the beneficial as well as the destructive implications of that fact we need the Pardoner as much as we need the Parson. It is not just that the ideal that the Parson represents can only be perceived, but indeed that it can only exist alongside and interdependent with the counterideal of his troubling, but not simply unholy, colleague.¹⁰⁶ And together they have drawn critical responses that show how we, as readers, still struggle with the problems that face any audience attempting to assess the two-faced truth of public performance.

The traditions of preaching theory that Chaucer drew on in creating his Parson and Pardoner acknowledged and attempted to come to terms with the divisive physicality of preaching, an activity in which the human body that marks the gap between heaven and earth must also become the means of bridging that gap. Persona, imagined as the guarantor of the preacher’s authorized status and his connection to God, turns out to be a performance—a performance always capable, as in the Pardoner’s case, of spectacular falsity or, more worryingly, of a deception unperceived by the audience. As a result the doubleness of persona and the necessary duplicity of the preacher have the capacity to undermine not only a particular act of preaching or a particular preacher, but the very office. In the face of tensions between visionary and institutional authority, between charismatic body and charismatic text, preaching theorists tried to hold the competing forces together in ways that required them to explore, explicate, and attempt to control the power of the preacher’s persona. Their discussions, the best available record of the pressures felt by medieval preachers, give us a certain, admittedly oblique access to the experience of constructing oneself as a person worthy to inhabit “an office more angelic than human.”¹⁰⁷