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,