CHAPTER IX

PREACHING

REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS

Bourgain Bourgain (l’Abbé L.), _La chaire française au xiie siècle_ d’après les manuscrits, Paris, 1879.

Clerval (see the list for Chapter VI).

Cruel Cruel (R.), _Geschichte der deutschen Predigt im Mittelalter_, Detmold, 1879.

Douais Douais (C.), _Essai sur l’organisation des études dans l’Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs au xiiie et au xive siècle_ (1216-1342). Prèmiere province de Provence. Province de Toulouse, avec de nombreux textes inédits. Toulouse & Paris, 1884.

LM Lecoy de la Marche (A.), _La chaire française au moyen âge_, spécialement au xiiie siècle, d’après les manuscrits contemporains, Paris, 1886 (2nd edition).

Owst Owst (G. R.), _Preaching in medieval England_, an introduction to sermon manuscripts of the period c. 1350-1450, Cambridge, 1926.

PL _Patrologia latina_ (Migne), cited by volume and column.

Perdrizet Perdrizet (Paul), _Étude sur le Speculum humanæ salvationis_, Paris (thèse), 1908.

Polheim Polheim (Karl), _Die lateinische Reimprosa_, Berlin, 1925.

The historian of twelfth-century preaching finds the “prodigious success”[1] of St. Anselm’s sermon on the Assumption not even faintly echoed in the flat record. The same disappointment awaits any one who shall turn from the fame of John Bunyan’s preaching to his printed sermons. In both cases the reputation is more convincing than the record. The testimony leaves no doubt that the preacher was eloquent; but his eloquence has not been preserved. The seventeenth-century record and the medieval, though in different directions, are alike insufficient.[2] Even when we have on the page before us the very sentences—and often we have something less, or even something different, we lack something of the eloquence. For the difficulty of transmission is so fundamental that it thwarts even the records of our own day. Oratory is typically the energizing of a message by a speaker for a specific audience. Its style depends on all three. In varying degrees all three enter into its composition. The occasion becomes part of the message. Between speaker and audience there is mutual response. Therefore of all the arts oratory is the most perishable.

But the history of oratory, though often baffling, is not hopeless. So perishable that it can never be quite recaptured, oratory may be so charged that even through imperfect record much often transpires. For any given period its records not only reveal much of the habit of the time, but conversely can often be so interpreted by that habit as to become really significant. Medieval sermons can thus be related not only to the medieval pedagogy of rhetoric, but to actual habits of composition and of style. In a form of oratory continuous for nearly two thousand years they will show at least what in preparation, composition, utterance, record is typically medieval.

For the middle age preaching is the characteristic form of oratory. Political oratory being in abeyance, legal oratory having little scope, preaching practically monopolizes the third field distinguished by Aristotle, occasional oratory, the oratory of here and now. Teaching, clearly of course a sermon function, sometimes becomes the main object; but even so it is not incompatible with other oratorical use of the occasion. Indeed, a sermon hardly succeeds as teaching except through the typical means of occasional oratory. For a sermon is different from a lesson, and even more different from an essay. As a form of oral composition it has opportunities and methods distinct from those of the bar or the senate. Occasional oratory, always beset by temptations toward sophistic,[3] has always opened on the other hand the highest ranges. In preaching, the safeguard against sophistic is in the distinctive use of the occasion to move men to action. Always emotional, occasional oratory becomes in preaching a distinct form of persuasion. Relying less than political oratory on argument, reasoning less and pleading more, it is even more urgent toward a goal. This character, achievement alike and misuse, is vivid in the medieval preaching of the friars.

Medieval preaching is occasional oratory not only in the ancient application to special solemnity, but more significantly in using the familiar recurrences of the Church year. The whole western world kept not only Christmas, but Candlemas, Michaelmas, and the rest. Nothing is more characteristic than the focus of popular emotion upon Corpus Christi. The calendar of feasts and fasts was the actual calendar. A medieval auditory had a great common fund of conscious and subconscious associations. The surrounding symbolism of stone and glass was familiar from land to land. The pulpit was beside the altar. The regular sermon on a Sunday or a feast was at Mass after the gospel, which furnished its text.[4] The atmosphere of prayer was intensified by specific petition preceding and following. “Let us therefore ask our Lord to give me good words for you” ended the exordium, or “Pray that we may be illuminated,” or “Pray the Lord, therefore, that by the power of spiritual teaching to-day your hearts may be uplifted”;[5] and the congregation united in _Pater_ and _Ave_. So the sermon ended with prayer, and was immediately followed by common intercessions. Though some of these conditions are constant throughout the history of Christendom, never before or since have they combined at once so amply and so widely to constitute the conditions of preaching. In this special sense medieval preaching was the oratory of occasion. At no other time has oratory had at command so large and constant a fund of common emotional associations.

A. VERNACULAR TO THE PEOPLE, LATIN TO THE CLERGY

The appeal of medieval preaching to this common emotional fund, though it cannot often be measured, can be analyzed often as to style and composition, oftener as to habit of thought, in abundant documents. Even in print hardly any medieval material is more abundant—and there are further stores in manuscript—than collections of sermons. In order to interpret these, we must constantly remember how they were made and why. First, medieval sermons are habitually gauged to one of the two typical audiences. Either they are for the lay folk in parish church or cathedral (_sermones ad populum_), and were preached in the vernacular; or they are for the clergy (_sermones ad clerum_), i.e., before synods, councils, schools, oftenest of all in monastery chapels, and were preached in Latin.[6] In either case, until the late middle age, the record was always in Latin; in either case the preparation also, the notes and outline and more or less of the further composition, was usually in Latin. In the former case of a sermon preached to a lay congregation the record gives at most only a translation.[7] In the latter case of a sermon preached to a monastic community the record is at least nearer to the spoken word. We can press further, therefore, the analysis of sermons preserved by such communities as the Cistercians and the Victorines.[8]

Though popular preaching is no less worthy of study, less of it has been transferred to the written page.[9] But translation, though it could convey little of the spoken vernacular style, must not be thought of as involving the difficulties of to-day. In the middle age every cleric was bilingual; and every preacher of distinction enough to be recorded not only read and wrote Latin habitually, but spoke it fluently.[10] His schooling having been in Latin, both written and oral, his daily offices, his reading, and whatever writing he did being still in Latin, he used Latin easily and naturally in thinking out and ordering a sermon or in giving another’s sermon, or his own afterward, the permanence of writing. Since he would not be embarrassed, as young preachers sometimes are to-day, by trying to recall phrases and sentences, preaching in the vernacular from Latin notes might even leave oral composition the more free.

B. COLLECTIONS

The other process, the final rendering in Latin, was by no means always of the sermon as preached. It might be merely a digest, or more expansive, or the whole sermon. All three degrees seem to be exemplified among the printed sermons of Fulbert.[11] The compilers of Odo of Morimond say: “he was very eloquent; but in writing his sermons we have ignored the form for the substance.”[12] Collections often show distinctly less concern for record, for commemoration of achievement, than for guidance. Some even of the more important collections have evidently this practical aim. They propose not only inspiration, but practical suggestion and direction for future sermons on recurrent themes. They are less anthologies than repertories. Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris, thus designed his widespread collection primarily for the pastors of his diocese.[13] The study of preaching, not merely the preservation of notable sermons preached in his time (_sermones reportati de auditu_), seems to have been the object of the collections of Pierre de Limoges. Clearly the best known of these, his _Distinctiones_,[14] arranging not only whole sermons, but outlines and suggestive passages alphabetically by subjects, is meant for reference. That the collections commonly had in view the practical use of successful sermons as models is suggested again and again, and sometimes indicated.[15]

The great thesaurus of Jacques de Vitry[16] is systematically practical, a collection not primarily _of_ sermons, but _for_ sermons. Models, outlines, suggestions, intended for adaptation in the vernacular[17] are arranged according to the Church calendar: four books for the seasons, a fifth for the saints, with three expositions for each day, the first of the introit, the second of the epistle, the third of the gospel. The sixth book is classified for adaptations to typical social groups. What has naturally most attracted modern historians in this storehouse is the abundance of illustrative descriptions and stories, the _exempla_. A resource prized in all times for popular address, the _exemplum_ was so cultivated in medieval preaching as to call forth many collections.[18] It looms unduly large to modern readers because the _exempla_ have now an extraneous interest in reflecting medieval life, and because they were taken not only, as now, from contemporary life, from history, from legend, but also from the bestiaries.

The basilisk, they tell us, bears in his eye his poison, vilest of animals, beyond others to be execrated. Wilt thou know the eye that is empoisoned, eye of evil, eye that has fascination? Then think thou upon envy. St. Bernard on the Psalm _Qui habitat_, xiii. 4; PL 183: 237.

The mythical zoölogy is now often too diverting to keep its effectiveness as illustration. But to recover this, and to realize that the bestiaries do not convict the middle age of credulity, we need not go back of St. Francis de Sales. _Exempla_, after all, are a commonplace of preaching because they are a necessity.

The general thesaurus and the special[19] alike confirm the impression of wide use of a common fund of topics and illustrations. But sermon helps are not peculiar to the middle age. Every age has offered to its preachers something equivalent to the medieval handy manuals.[20] Not only preaching, but all occasional oratory, has always been beset by the temptation to rely on pattern and stock.[21] That the middle age had many conventional sermons is less significant than that it had St. Bernard and the early Dominicans.

C. MANUALS

Medieval manuals of preaching are no more specific than modern manuals as to their rhetoric. That is typically generalized, or even taken for granted. For instance, Guibert de Nogent’s _Liber quo ordine sermo fieri debeat_,[22] concerned entirely with interpretation, has no rhetoric at all. The anonymous Chartres work on popular preaching quoted in part by Clerval[23] gives, besides the usual procedure and advice, a practical counsel for preparation and one for delivery. The first is to fix meditation on the specific object of that sermon and on the specific means most likely to bring it home, not on the words. The words will come if the matter is surely ordered. The second is to increase urgency from quotations of texts through _exempla_ uttered with loud appeal until the congregation shows emotional response, then to moderate the tone so as to lead quietly to the final benediction.

Another anonymous manual[24] sets forth eight methods of expansion (_De dilatatione sermonum_): (1) definition and exposition of terms, especially of their “moral” significance; (2) division, not to be so minute in a sermon as in a treatise; (3) proof, by contraries, enthymemes, examples, again to be guarded from subtlety; (4) citation of confirmatory texts; (5) degrees, i.e., positive-comparative-superlative, as in exhibiting one of the virtues; (6) metaphors, not to be multiplied nor mixed; (7) symbolism, i.e., allegory, tropology, anagogy; (8) cause and effect. Most of these are commonplaces of rhetoric. Some of them, and their use for dilation, suggest the same preoccupations as the _poetriæ_.[25]

The Dominicans, devoted to preaching, maintaining a long and severe discipline of studies, provided systematically for oral composition. “_Legendo, studendo, disputando_”[26]—the last tallies not only with Dominican fame, but with the focus, and the increasing emphasis, of oral training on logic.[27] Otherwise the manual of the fifth Dominican General, the _De eruditione prædicatorum_ of Humbert de Romans, says little of rhetoric. Rather it is practical psychology, as are the second book of Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ and the sixth book of Jacques de Vitry.

Practical by another method is the manual of Alain de Lille, _Summa magistri Alani doctoris universalis de arte prædicatoria_.[28] “First we must see,” he says at the end of his preface, “_what_ preaching is, its distinguishing qualities of expression and of thought, and its typical species; secondly, _who_ should preach; thirdly, _to whom_; fourthly, _why_; fifthly, _where_.” His first chapter, after brief consideration of preaching as public speaking, sets forth the special sanction for sermons of the gospels, the Psalms, the Pauline epistles, and the “books of Solomon” as offering instruction in morals. Winning his audience by his own humility and by the practical import of his message,[29] not by appeals to applause, the preacher proceeds to the twofold exposition of the text. “Let his words be sometimes emotional (_commotiva_), to soften the minds of his hearers and bring tears. But let the sermon be concise, lest prolixity bring instead boredom.... Finally he should use _exempla_.”