Medieval Christian preaching sought to convey a divine message by means of a human medium: the preacher's eloquence. Although Christian theorists of preaching, at least those following Augustine, recognized rhetoric as an inherent and necessary element of their activity, they were also heirs to a patristic suspicion of its pagan roots, its moral neutrality, and especially its potential to emphasize the letter over the spirit, medium over message. This essay explores the way such anxieties were worked out in preaching manuals, scholastic disputations, and hagiography of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Drawing on the principles and the concerns expressed by such authorities as Tertullian and Augustine, later medieval preaching theorists like Alan of Lille and the Dominican Thomas Waleys struggled with and, to some extent, found ways for preaching to accommodate rhetoric's dangerous but effective power. Strikingly, many of their concerns and strategies are echoed in the disputation literature and hagiography that discuss women's preaching. In the work of Jacobus of Voragine and other hagiographers, we see that outstanding women could offer one possible solution to the problem of rhetoric in preaching.
Theoretical Backgrounds to Women's Preaching
As scholars including Jody Enders and Rita Copeland have noted, preaching theorists'
anxiety tended to focus on what might be called the surface elements of rhetoric,
such as style and delivery, expressing itself repeatedly as a concern with external
beauty, ornateness, and superficiality.1 The ascetic distaste for
such external artifice was part of a larger suspicion of the literal and the
physical, an attitude that, through the association of woman with the body (as
of man with the spirit), came to link femininity with the superficial and with
rhetoric itself. (The perceived affinity between verbal beauty and physical
beauty, between rhetoric and the feminine, meant that concerns about rhetoric
could be expressed in part as a gender problem.) The theory of preaching
as it was worked out in the late-twelfth to fifteenth centuries displays a mistrust
of ornate language, theatricality, and other potentially inappropriate sources
of attraction, often discussing them in terms that echo the patristic mistrust
of feminine allure. The association between feminine and rhetorical attractions
leads us to examine the important role of physical beauty and eloquence in the
legendary preaching of saints like Katherine of Alexandria and Mary Magdalene,
the only women late-medieval orthodoxy could accept as preachers.2 Their stories helped to
neutralize the dangerous allure of the superficial by showing how physical and
verbal beauty could be united to serve, rather than threaten, the greater good
of preaching.
Howard Bloch, among others, has explored the associations patristic Christian
thinkers made between femininity and the superficial, and between rhetoric and
the feminine.3 The complex
of associations that links femininity and artifice is most clearly expressed
in the works of Tertullian. His writings on the theater, pagan spectacles,
feminine cosmetics and adornment, and pagan literature associate and denigrate
all forms of human artifice and artistry, which he regarded as the invention
of the devil, introduced into the world by the fallen angels.4 The fundamental issue, for
Tertullian, was that of idolatry: to focus on the surface was to miss
or deny the underlying truth of Christianity, a truth which could manifest itself
without the aid of the surface allurements he so despised. Speaking of
women's appearance, he says, "The fullness of your modesty should be such that
it shines forth from your soul in your dress, and cries out from your conscience
in your appearance."5 Virtue and truth should
speak for themselves. It is easy to see how such an attitude could lead
to a distaste for the human artifice of rhetoric, though Tertullian, himself
a master rhetorician, avoided directly addressing the issue of eloquence.6
Augustine, writing two centuries later, takes up the challenge of finding
rhetoric's proper place in Christianity, making a sustained attempt to address
the problem of eloquence in preaching, and his thoughts on the subject were
enormously influential for later preaching theorists. Despite his less
virulent tone, it is clear that he, like Tertullian, saw similarities between
various kinds of worldliness, and that he included rhetoric--at least in its
purely pagan form--among them. One brief chapter of his Confessions
mentions, in quick succession and with no apparent sense of incongruity,
his days as a teacher of secular rhetoric, the mistress he lived with before
his conversion, and his refusal to use a pagan soothsayer to help him win a
poetic competition. Rhetoric, sexuality, and pagan religion all seem to
be connected in his mind.7 Similarly, when he discusses
his reprehensible attraction to pagan literature above Christian truth, the
example that comes to his mind is how he wept over Dido's lament and death in
the Aeneid, rather than the state of his own soul. Pagan literature
is exemplified by the oratory of an adulterous female suicide (1.13).
In De doctrina Christiana, Augustine addresses, on a theoretical
level, the problem with which he has struggled on a personal level: that
the undeniable appeal and effectiveness of pagan oratory are precisely what
make it both necessary and dangerous for a Christian, and particularly for a
preacher. His concern, especially in Book 4, is to show how the beauties
and the power of this oratory can be harnessed to serve Christian ends, without
overwhelming the message they convey. In doing so he demonstrates his
own ambivalence. The term he uses repeatedly to express the desirably
attractive qualities of eloquence is suavitas, a word with both sensual
and intellectual connotations of pleasure and attractiveness.8 Augustine stresses the importance
of suavitas to effective speech, but he is careful to indicate that it
is pleasurable, rather than wholesome. He warns that one must always avoid
the "pernicious sweetness" of suavitas that carries no salubrious message
(4.5.8), and deplores the use of eloquence to make wickedness attractive (4.14.30).
At times he seems for a moment to imagine a world where unadorned truth could
speak for itself—but he quickly turns from this utopian vision to admit that
fastidious tastes make eloquence a necessity even for the preacher of divine
truth (4.13-4.14.30). His willingness to accommodate eloquence is conveyed
to later theorists of preaching—as are his continuing reservations about it.
De doctrina Christiana was finished around the year. After
that, it was almost eight hundred years before further substantial work was
done on the theory of Christian preaching.9 In the interval, of course, Christianity had
thoroughly established itself and preaching had developed a substantial, if
uncodified, tradition. Perhaps as a result, the preaching theorists of
the later Middle Ages demonstrate much less anxiety about rhetoric than their
forebears, for whom pagan rhetoric seemed to threaten the very substance of
Christian doctrine.10 Alan of Lille, one of
the earliest medieval theorists, still has Tertullianesque things to say about
the undesirability of theatricality and ornateness in preaching:
The Preaching of Katherine of Alexandria
In another context, however, the interaction of physical beauty and eloquence
that preaching theorists tended to see as threatening takes on an entirely different
valence. In the legends of Katherine of Alexandria and Mary Magdalene,
the saint's beauty stands in complex relationship to her speech, acting both
to attract and to distract her listeners. The hagiographers' treatment
of these powerful women preachers offers a new approach to allure in preaching
that turns the feminized associations of rhetoric into an advantage rather than
a danger.
The legend of Katherine of Alexandria, like those of many other virgin
martyrs, makes the heroine's beauty central to the story, linking that beauty
to her defining attributes as virgin and martyr. Katherine's legend also,
more unusually, directly addresses the dangers of eloquence, depicting the saint
as a learned rhetor who must debate other skilled rhetors to promote and defend
her faith. In the eleventh-century Latin Life of St Katherine known as
the Vulgate, Katherine's physical beauty attracts her audience's attention and
goodwill in much the way the captatio benevolentiae does in classical
rhetoric—and is then turned upon them, as it were, to show why such an attraction
is to be shunned. Like the preacher's rhetoric, the virgin's beauty is
the sweetness that lures a hearer to swallow the bitter medicine of her message,
a sweetness that is dangerous only if the hearer does not realize he must move
beyond it.22
When Katherine goes to confront the pagan emperor Maxentius at sacrifice,
she chides him for his idolatry. The emperor is as much struck by her
beauty as by her arguments, if not more so: "with his gaze fixed on the
virgin, he silently considered the beauty of her face and the constancy of her
words."23 Throughout the story, Maxentius proves himself
unable to recognize Katherine's physical beauty for what it is: a sign
of her virginal Christian perfection. This inability, a kind of misreading,
is exemplified by his offer to make a statue of Katherine and set it in the
city to be worshiped by all who pass. Katherine points out to Maxentius
(without convincing him) the worthlessness of an idol that cannot see, hear,
or speak, and the utter inferiority of human artistry to divine creation.
She goes on to say that if the statue has no animate characteristics, it might
as well have the ugly features of an ape as the appearance of a beautiful woman
(175). Maxentius is unable to take her point about the relative worth
of internal virtue and external beauty, and Katherine prepares to meet her martyrdom
at his hands.
As she proceeds to that martyrdom, the point about earthly beauty is reinforced
once more. The crowd, deploring the destruction of her beauty and youth,
calls to her to give in to the emperor, but Katherine sets them straight.
Her earthly beauty, she says, will return to dust and be eaten by worms; her
martyrdom is not an ending but a transitus ad uitam. Like Christ
on his way to the Crucifixion, she urges them to weep instead for themselves,
for whom death will be eternal if they do not follow her message. The
beauty that the pagans value and respond to takes on a new, inverted meaning
in Katherine's teaching: having used it to attract their attention, she
turns that very attraction into a lesson on their errors (190-91).24 Far from invalidating her preaching and leading
others astray, as the ascetic tradition and the opponents of women's preaching
would suggest, Katherine's physical beauty supports and even enables her salvific
message.
Even as Katherine rebukes the pagans for their interpretation of her beauty—as
a worldly good to be preserved—the narrative suggests another meaning for it.
Hers is no "mere" earthly beauty, no empty signifier, but instead serves as
an external marker of her inner, spiritual beauty and worth. In various
virgin martyr legends, the heroine's beauty is mentioned only to be immediately
linked to her faith and virginity; as St Ambrose, echoing Tertullian, says of
an ideal virgin, "the very appearance of her body [is] a reflection of her mind
and a figure for her virtue."25 For a Christian audience,
virginity and prospective martyrdom could neutralize the dangers implicit in
the figure of a young and beautiful woman by demonstrating that her interior
was consistent with her exterior. Katherine has the "singleness of heart"
that Christian asceticism associated with virginity, a state that, as Peter
Brown has said, required "total transparency to the will of God."26
Since duplicity or, more accurately, a gap between surface and substance was
one of the major anxieties raised by preaching, it makes sense that a woman
whose surface "transparently" expressed her substance could be valuable in exploring
the concept of ideal preaching.
Katherine's rhetorical skill functions in a way analogous to the use of
her beauty in her story: both exist to attract and convince her audience,
even as she herself ostentatiously despises these qualities. The Vulgate
describes her as decenter ornata, appropriately graced with and indeed
expert in pagan learning. As she tells the pagan philosophers whom Maxentius
summons to dispute with her, she mastered then abandoned pagan studies, since
they did not accord with Christianity; preparing to debate the philosophers,
she calls only on God, not on her own learning. And yet her language throughout
the Vulgate text demonstrates her mastery of rhetoric. The purity of her
approach is that she places no reliance on that rhetoric. Her prayer to
God, it seems, produces an effect identical to what her years of study could
provide—indeed, a greater effect. She converts all fifty philosophers,
thus disposing of, or rather subsuming, pagan eloquence into her Christian message.
The legend of Katherine thus presents her as an exemplar of the virgin
martyr whose weaknesses become strengths, her vulnerabilities fortifications
for herself and the faith. By embodying and then neutralizing the attributes
that could have threatened her message—alluring beauty, feminine frailty, rhetorical
skill—she offers an ideal of Christian preaching, "transparent" to the believing
audience and to God.27
The Case of Mary Magdalene
Katherine's unwavering virginity and martyrdom demonstrate the purity of her
message and make her beauty a contributor to, rather than an enemy of, her preaching.
But what do we make of Mary Magdalene, probably the most famous woman preacher
during the Middle Ages and one who clearly does not follow the virgin-martyr
model? The composite figure known to the Middle Ages—repentant harlot,
lover of God, apostle to the apostles, contemplative—has an extremely complex
identity. The place of her preaching in that complexity demonstrates another
way of negotiating the role of beauty in Christian preaching.
The Magdalene's status as apostola apostolorum, the first to see
and announce the risen Christ in the gospel account, led to later legends of
her missionary activity. One of the earliest of these is the twelfth-century
legend purporting to be by Rabanus Maurus.28 It tells how Mary, Martha and Lazarus accompanied
the bishop Maximian and others to Provence, where they all, including the sisters,
became missionaries. Describing the preaching of Mary and Martha, the
author says that the sisters had "admirable personal beauty, virtuous morals,
and a most ready and persuasive gift with words," so that nearly every listener
"was inflamed by their appearance with the love of God the Savior."29 Their beauty, eloquence, and good morals ensure
the effectiveness of their preaching.
In the account of Mary that precedes this, the hagiographer has given
a slightly different account of her preaching. At times, he says, she
would set aside the joys of contemplation and preach to unbelievers or comfort
believers with her "honeyed mind, dropping honeyed words."30 This sweetness of speech
is understood to derive directly from Mary's relationship to Jesus: she
speaks ex abundantia cordis and convinces her hearers by showing them
the eyes that wept for Christ and first saw him resurrected, the hair that dried
his feet, the mouth that kissed them, and so on.31 As Susan Haskins has noted,
commentators associated Mary's mouth, eyes, and especially hair with her dangerous
sexual allure before her conversion.32 In her later life, however,
her sinful female body becomes the visible sign of her love for Christ and,
by extension, of his love and forgiveness of her. Thus Mary's preaching,
which draws on her beauty and eloquence for its effect, is grounded in her personal
and even physical knowledge of Jesus, a knowledge that is witnessed by her own
body and that, according to the author of this life, Jesus himself linked to
her apostolate.33
Despite "Rabanus's" warmth in describing the preaching activity of Mary
and Martha, that activity is far from central to his lengthy account.
Jacobus of Voragine, writing a century or so later, makes her mission much more
of a focus, although his discussion of it is in the same tradition. The
description of her interaction with Jesus during his lifetime is remarkably
brief; Jacobus's interest lies in the later parts of her vita. After arriving
in Marseilles, Mary is distressed to see the people worshiping idols; she goes
forward and "with a calm face and a serene appearance, she recalled them from
the worship of idols with a discreet tongue and preached Christ to them with
great constancy."34 Jacobus may be noting her serenity and discretion
as a way to indicate that she preached appropriately—without, it is clear, any
unnecessary theatrics. The pagan mob is quite taken with her; Jacobus
says that "everyone was amazed at her beauty, her fluency in speaking, and the
sweetness of her eloquence."35
He adds that it is hardly surprising that the mouth that kissed the savior's
feet should breathe forth the fragrance of the word better than others.
The association of the preacher's eloquence with her physical beauty is by now
familiar, but it is still striking that Jacobus mentions nothing about the actual
substance of Mary's message or her hearers' response to that message.
His greatest emphasis falls on her eloquence, whose effectiveness is once more
linked to her physical contact with Jesus.
Transparent Rhetoric
We may note that these lives of Mary Magdalene do not focus as strongly on her
sheer physical beauty as does the life of Katherine. The danger of beauty
that Katherine overcomes and neutralizes, the danger of sexual allure, was seen
as the Magdalene's downfall, and her body could not directly signify spiritual
purity in the same way as Katherine's. Instead, Mary's physical beauty
is transformed into a spiritual sign: the attributes that had exemplified
worldly allurement become a focus for devotion. Her legends place more
emphasis on the beauty of her speech and the meaning of her body than on the
beauty of her body—or, indeed, the meaning of her speech.
In spite of this, however, the propriety and value of Mary's preaching
are never questioned. Her unmediated knowledge of Jesus is the inspiration
for and guarantee of her speech. Similarly, Katherine's pure and constant
virginity marks her as the true mystical spouse of Christ, and this intimate
relationship thoroughly informs her preaching. In both cases, a woman's
preaching is enabled by the immediacy of her relationship to God, a peculiarly
feminine relationship that yields an ideal neither masculine nor feminine:
preaching that conveys the Word as transparently as the preacher has received
it.
When the pagan philosophers confess to Maxentius that Katherine has converted
them, their spokesman describes the effect of her speech: "as we heard
her preach the name of Christ and the power of his divinity, as well as the
service of his cross, our entrails were stirred, our hearts trembled and all
the senses of our bodies fled in astonishment."36 This passage, which seems
to express the grace that works through the preacher, has a faint echo in the
much later preaching manual of Thomas Waleys, one of the few theorists who give
any sustained attention to delivery. He says,