Angels and Earthly Creatures. Claire M. Waters
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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“God himself works so closely with preachers that when he was on earth and visible to us the words of preachers were withdrawn … but now that he is not present in the flesh they must speak for him.”72 Both the preacher’s need and his ability to “cite” Christ derive from this relative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 to function depends on its participation in a chain of citation, such “non-ordinary” speech actually shares its defining characteristic as citation with any other speech-act and thus cannot be bracketed out. Similarly, as has been suggested above, attempts to depict prophecy as an entirely distinct and extraordinary category with no bearing on the preacher’s authority are in the end unsustainable, and the theorists’ repeated attempts at definition suggest that they were uncomfortably aware of this instability.
Citation may seem to be a red herring, since for Austin citation is what excludes a speech-act from ordinary consideration while for the medieval theorists citation is precisely what makes the preacher’s speech-act ordinary. The conflict is only apparent, however; indeed, the ultimate instance of Austin’s “true” performative speech might be said to be the priestly, sacramental speech that both authorizes and contrasts with the preacher’s speech: “I absolve you"; “I baptize you”; “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” In the end both Austin’s “infelicitous” utterances and the kinds of speech excluded from the category of preaching are rejected because they are “inappropriate” in that the speaker is in some essential sense not the “owner” of that speech, or perhaps we might more correctly say because it does not “belong” to him or her.
Both Austin and the preaching theorists wish to establish a claim that we can determine who has a right to certain kinds of speech.78 Here again, however, we encounter the problem of absence, the absence of any absolute and fully expressed meaning, figured by Derrida as the impossibility of “saturating” the context of any communication. For Derrida the kind of plenitude imagined and desired by preaching theorists (and to a lesser extent by Austin) is unavailable: “Given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content.… In order for a context to be exhaustively determinable, in the sense required by Austin, conscious intention would at the very least have to be totally present and immediately transparent to itself and to others, since it is a determining center [foyer] of context.”79 In view of the bodily absence of God, whose “conscious intention” they would presumably have regarded as “totally present and immediately transparent to itself,” if not invariably to others, preaching theorists recognized the need for a representative. However, because of human limitations—whether these are regarded as the result of original sin