Medieval rhetoric and poetic to 1400

References and Abbreviations

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 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.”

Chapter ii proposes for a theme the scorning of the world (De mundi contemptu), and for its text, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Distinguishing the vanity of this world as thus typically threefold, Alain quotes Romans and the Psalms and adds Persius. “Thus the preacher should confirm each division of his text. His next step is to show where is vanity, where vanity of vanities, where all is vanity.... The scorning of the world, thus established by the way of the world itself, should be established also by consideration of man’s end (a causa finali).” The peroration apostrophizes human blindness (O homo, si mundana, etc.).

In a word, Alain furnishes a specimen order and procedure. Succeeding chapters thus present other usual topics: scorning of oneself, gluttony, the other deadly sins, the heavenly hope, spiritual grief and joy, patience and each of the other virtues, love of God and of one’s neighbor, etc. The remaining headings of his prefatory division are taken up at chapter xxxviii; and his consideration of different types in congregations has the humor to include the sleepy. The title Summa, then, implies a preacher’s book of reference, with advice and direction subordinated to classified material. The distinction of this Summa is its systematic conciseness.

D. Symbolism

Much more distinctive than any provision of collection or manual for ordinary use of a common fund is the prevalence of symbolism. The “moral” exposition that followed the literal commonly had this direction. For medieval symbolism was not merely a habit of exposition; it was seen as well as heard because it was a habit of conception. The cathedrals still exhibit in sculpture and glass what came in words from their pulpits. The Psalms, especially those recurring in the daily offices, thus conveyed from generation to generation the eternal word of God. For every psalm was the lyric cry of David, or of some other ancient Hebrew, only in the first instance (litteralis expositio). It always meant more; and its further meaning (moralis expositio), as cumulating progressive experience of God, was more important. It always meant not only David, but every other soul thus answering God, the “poor man” of every time and of every clime, every individual then and there focusing and enlarging by those words his own experience.

So far the “moral” interpretation treats the psalm as an extreme case of literary inspiration, appropriates it as having the universal validity of every lyric that has survived the centuries. A religious classic, more widely and intensely spiritual than any other body of lyrics, the psalter is still only a classic. But medieval interpretation always took a third step. Every psalm meant not only David, and further not only every “poor man” making it his own, but also “the man,” the Lord incarnate to share all humanity and to give men “power to become the sons of God.” Thus the Psalms spanned the centuries, connected the New Testament with the Old indivisibly, and were the voice of man in every age answering God in the Church. The habitual use of the Old Testament, and even of secular history, as prefiguring is here focused in its simplest form.[30] Simplest and commonest instance of symbolism, the interpretation of the Psalms is characteristic. Though not, indeed, peculiar to the middle age, it opens a widespread medieval habit.

The habitual use of the Song of Songs as symbolic of the Christ and his Church reminds us that symbolism is essentially poetic. It was the usual poetic of medieval preaching in interpreting not only the Scriptures, but all human experience. As behind the word lay spiritual meaning, so behind the veil of the senses lay the realities of life. The so-called “otherworldliness” of medieval preaching is no ignoring of physical facts; it is a sustained and consistent call to see through them. What medieval philosophy defined as seeing “in the aspect of eternity” (sub specie æternitatis) medieval preaching inculcated as a habit of vision. The habit might, indeed, degenerate, as in that popular manual of the fourteenth century, the Speculum humanæ salvationis,[31] into extravagance or minute formalism; but even so it kept some view of history as a providential progress. It might rise, on the other hand, to express the immediate apprehension of the mystic, the vision of spiritual genius. But the distinction of the medieval mystic is rather in degree than in kind. The whole age is characteristically habituated to mysticism. No other poetic vision is equal to Dante’s; but no other form of poetry in his age, whether in verse or in sermon, is commoner than the vision.

Not only to the rapt was the visible world eloquent of the unseen eternal.

In the following sermon of this series St. Bernard refers seriatim to the accepted prefigurations of the Blessed Virgin. She is the perennial antagonist of the serpent (Genesis iii. 15), the mulier fortis of Solomon (Proverbs xxxi. 10), the burning bush (Exodus iii. 2), Aaron’s budding rod (Numbers xvii. 8), Isaiah’s rod from the root of Jesse (xi. 1), the rod that smote the rock (Exodus xvii. 6) and divided the sea (Exodus xiv. 16), Gideon’s fleece (Judges vi. 37-40), the woman who is the Lord’s new creation (Jeremiah xxxi. 22). The prefigurations of this list had an obvious appeal in sermons through being familiar in hymns, in sculpture, in glass. Evidently St. Bernard loved them for their poetry; but he is also convinced of their sanction. He even formulates the theory of symbolic prefiguration.

His second sermon for Advent carries out the prefiguration of the rod, or stem (virga).[32]

The symbolism of his sermon in the Epiphany octave on the marriage at Cana is specifically moralized.

Such preaching shows the same preoccupation as the symbolic windows of the cathedrals, their carved capitals, above all the thronged but harmonized groups of their great porches. It is not merely conventional illustration; it is a constant and consistent reminder of the history of mankind as a scheme of redemption.

E. Composition

1. Imaginative Method

The most conventional form of symbolism is allegory. This may be no more than what Lowell calls “personification by capital letters,” as in the Vice and Virtue, the Reason, Feeling, or Nature, of the eighteenth century. Even so it has more point when the convention is as instantly recognizable as the seven deadly sins of medieval capitals and poems, or the four cardinal and the three theological virtues, or even the seven liberal arts, each with appropriate costume, attitude, gesture, or action. How pleasant allegory may be in verse is evident in the wide popularity of the Roman de la Rose.

But no less evidently such pictorial aggregation offers little to preaching, since it has no vigor of composition. To be moving, allegory as well as higher symbolism must be narrative. The classic demonstration of this, the Pilgrim’s Progress, was written by a preacher. The art has never been more widely or more expertly pursued than in the middle age. The fourteenth-century English Piers Plowman suggests even more vividly, with its strongly oral manner, how allegory might move in preaching. A sermon might be not only enlivened by passages of easily recognizable description; it might further be vivified by making the figures individuals and by putting them into speech and action. A complete demonstration is furnished in the interlude, prologue, and tale of Chaucer’s Pardoner. That accomplished rascal is made to display the whole art of oral narrative, from its vulgar drama to its high ranges of symbolic suggestion. The case is extreme; but the method has been a resource of popular preaching from the days of Nathan’s rebuke to David down to the present. Oral narrative, often with dramatic dialogue, has been heard again and again, both in such base uses as the Pardoner’s and in such urgency of message as Bunyan’s, because it has been found surely persuasive.

Here is the high art of the exemplum. Often the medieval record puts us off with a summary; sometimes the manuals give a mere note, “Tell the story of so-and-so”; but sometimes there are clear clues to such narrative art as makes the Pardoner’s tale breathless. An exemplum of Walter Map’s lets us divine how dramatic the tale might be in the pulpit.

2. Logical Method

Composition as a progress of thought, logical sequence, ordering by paragraphs, shows on the other hand little that is distinctively medieval. As in other times, differences here are rather individual. Bourgain does not establish his assertion of a general weakness of order;[33] and his addition that even St. Bernard proceeds by leaps[34] is extravagant. Lecoy de la Marche has more warrant for asserting that medieval sermons generally lack such sustained progress[35] as Bossuet’s. For often the course of a medieval sermon is not only shorter;[36] it is less sustained by a progress of paragraphs than forwarded by stages of emotion. The latter method may be for its audience no less valid. Indeed, preaching must learn poetic as well as rhetoric. Its composition, ideally embracing both, will be bent toward the one or the other by the particular preacher and audience. The medieval abeyance of sustained logical progress, if in fact it was general, may have been due to preoccupation with those poetic methods which were effective with some of the greatest preachers.

The school lore of rhetoric, however, was weak in the inculcation of logical progress. Busy with style, confusing in this study rhetoric with poetic, it offered too little practical guidance for preaching as composition. Doubtless the lack was filled in some cases by the teacher;[37] but the shift of pedagogy to logic implies, among other things, dissatisfaction with rhetoric.[38] What medieval rhetoric lacked, medieval logic, for all its triumphs in other directions, could not quite supply for preaching. The disputations of the schools, excellent for general training in oral fluency, in precision, in detecting and meeting error, could not reach the specific skill of continuously instructing, winning, and moving a silent congregation. They might even lead a vain or unwary preacher astray. Medieval preaching has been accused of habitual over-division, of tedious minuteness in headings and subheadings. Unfortunately such sermon divisions are not peculiar to any period. They seem no less common, for instance, in printed English sermons of the seventeenth century. But the medieval record, at least, does not always reproduce the actual preaching method.[39] Sometimes it gives little beyond the outline, which thus seems the more barren. Sometimes it uses a sermon as the occasion for further development, rather providing for future than following actual exposition of the text. Where the record seems to follow, there is evidence enough to make probable that the dominance of logic did deviate many late medieval sermons into over-analysis.

Analysis, the very function of logic, can never suffice, as Aristotle makes clear, for presentation. In preaching, its value is not for organizing, but for preliminary study. It is rather for the preacher than for his audience. It belongs rather in his notes than in his sermon. But though doctors analyzing daily in the schools might rely unduly on their habitual method when they preached, they preached oftenest to the schools themselves, that is to special audiences habituated to logical method. The popular preaching of the Franciscans can hardly have had that bent. The Dominicans, severely trained in logic, were also trained specifically to preach. St. Bernard, preaching both to monastic communities and to the people, will not be accused of over-division. Neither St. Anthony of Padua nor St. Bernardine of Siena can have set Italy on fire with elaborate analysis. These considerations, though largely a priori, are at least as weighty as contrary inferences from the sermon record. They permit the belief that medieval preachers realized as generally as preachers of other times the apothegm of St. Ambrose: Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum.

F. Style

Medieval sermons, for all the defects of transmission, offer ample and various demonstration of the force and beauty of medieval Latin. In contrast to the archaistic composition of the Renaissance, medieval sermon Latin moves at its best with ready variety and even in ordinary use with easy fluency.

1. Rhythm

Pierre de Celles,[40] fairly typical of ordinary expertness, is clearly rhythmical. St. Bernard’s ardor and winsomeness, the oral immediacy of his expression, appear in no resource of his style more strikingly than in his very pace.[41]

2. Balance and Rime

Balance, beloved of occasional orators from Gorgias down,[42] is useful in sharpening the iterations and contrasts of preaching.

Such balance often leads, through mere inflectional correspondence, to rime. That rime of clause with clause was avoided as a vice even in classical Latin is an exaggeration of Renaissance scrupulosity.[44] The middle age, following rather Augustine and the tradition of the schools of Gaul,[45] found rime desirable, and often sought it to mark parallel or contrast. Simple, ordinary use of it is heard again and again in a sermon by Hilduin.[46]