Fallible Authors - Alastair Minnis The Middle Ages Series

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of theology—is not knowledge alone, “which those enslaved to passion can perhaps gain” (to quote a gloss from an earlier part of Aquinas’s Ethics commentary).46 This is a concomitant of the principle that the conditions and operations which produce a moral habitus are quite different from those which produce an intellectual habitus. As Aquinas says elsewhere (in his Summa theologiae), for a human to act well “it is requisite that not only his reason be well disposed through a habit of intellectual virtue, but also that his appetite be well disposed through a habit of moral virtue.”47 Socrates’ belief that as long as a man possesses knowledge he cannot sin is, therefore, “based on a false supposition.” (This notion was, of course, criticized in Aristotle’s Ethics.)48 Can, then, intellectual virtue exist without moral virtue? After all, “intellectual virtue, which is perfection of reason, does not depend on moral virtue, a perfection of the appetitive part.”49 Aquinas’s response is that intellectual virtues can indeed exist without moral virtue (with the exception of prudence). And this—to return to Aquinas’s commentary on the Ethics—is why Aristotle and his interpreters reject the opinion of those who, thinking “they can become virtuous by philosophizing,” talk about virtues rather than exercising them.50 Which is like saying that those who hear the advice of medical doctors but disregard it will enjoy good bodily health. Moral virtue is not a matter of theory alone, it requires appropriate behavior of the teacher and of the taught.

      Here, then, is the intellectual tradition behind (inter alia) Henry of Ghent’s two definitions of the doctor: someone who is capable of teaching because he has the requisite habitus of knowledge, and someone who has the office of teaching (officium docendi), being acceptable to auditors who, because of his own good life, trust him to do them some good. Henry’s discussion seems to be somewhat unusual, however, when placed in the perspective of the other quaestiones on the same and related issues (as illustrated above), because they tend to focus on the praedicator rather than work with the more inclusive term doctor, and some of them make the relevant Aristotelian distinction between moral and intellectual virtues altogether more cogent by identifying the respective duties of the praedicator and the lector, as in Thomas of Chobham’s treatment of the subject.51 The lector’s brief is simply to improve the minds, rather than save the souls, of his auditors. Knowledge (scientia) is not a moral virtue, Thomas continues, because, as Aristotle says, it does little or nothing to lead one to the virtues—a reference to the seminal passage from Book ii of the Ethics which we discussed above. Ad virtutes autem scire quidem parum aut nihil potest. 52 The fundamental difference between this type of approach and Henry’s is obvious. However, Henry had no hesitation in employing the basic distinction between preaching and lecturing in several other quaestiones. Perhaps in the case of art. XI, qu. 5 he wished to treat the problem of the sinful teacher in its most comprehensive and widest aspect and hence the term praedicator, being too specific for his purpose, was passed over in favor of doctor as the central term.53 However, I find more persuasive the hypothesis that Henry found the praedicator/doctor distinction, as applied in this context, far too reductive and misleading, perhaps even quite at variance with the truth of the matter as he saw it. For an essential part of the message of his quaestio on the sinful teacher is that even an immoral preacher (whether his immorality was concealed or public knowledge) could be conceived of as having some function as a teacher, even though he was certainly not a living exemplum of good conduct. Such a man’s knowledge, in other words, is worth something; it does have value in itself and it may lead certain auditors to the ideal combination of good thinking and good deeds. For the failure of the mercenarius is not one of knowledge; that is the sin characteristic of the heretic. Therefore, these types of teacher should not be put on a par. In spirit, here Henry was following Philippians 1:18 by affirming the supreme importance of proclaiming Christ.

      Whatever the truth of that specific matter may be, it should by now be abundantly clear that segregation of the officium praedicatoris from the character of the man who assumes that office is a crucial and consistent feature of the discussions reviewed above. The emphasis was thereby placed, as Jean Leclercq says, on the dignity of the function and on the obligation of the person to act in accordance with it. Concomitant with this was the clear recognition that some actual preachers lamentably fail to live up to their high calling. And here the intellectual machinery ground to a halt. The cogs and springs of Aristotelian psychology (particularly the theory of habitus) and of Aristotelian causality (particularly the theory of instrumental causality) served to bring out the full proportions of the problem but did not produce a solution. Indeed, given the very nature of the problem and the methods of analysis then available, no abstract solution was possible. A rationale could easily be provided for the sinful lecturer instructing his audience in a specific science, but the spectacle of a sinful preacher attempting to preach to his flock was far more problematic. Here the special circumstances had to be investigated: scandal was to be avoided at all costs, the spiritual welfare of the flock being the primary consideration. At which point the problem became a practical one. If the preacher was doing more harm than good in his preaching, then it was up to his bishop or other superior to intervene and silence him. According to the Lollards of late-medieval England, however, the level of ecclesiastical control and policing of preaching was utterly inadequate, and in tacit opposition to attempts to allow some (albeit limited) value to certain kinds of deviant preacher, they produced an ideology whereby the lack of personal righteousness disqualified a sinner from preaching and destroyed his pedagogic authority. Those issues will be addressed later; for the moment our concern is with the transmission of orthodox doctrine concerning good and bad preachers.

      The preacher’s appropriate codes of conduct and conditiones, as defined in (largely Parisian) scholastic debate, constituted discourses which exercised considerable influence and enjoyed wide dissemination, appearing in various forms in many preachers’ aids and reference books, including the artes praedicandi and exempla collections.54 The genre of ars praedicandi flourished particularly in England, and such works as Thomas of Chobham’s ambitiously pioneering Summa de arte praedicandi, Robert of Basevorn’s Forma praedicandi (1322), Thomas Waleys’s De modo componendi sermones (c. 1338) and Ralph Higden’s Ars componendi sermones (c. 1340) include treatments of the three types of issue which have been defined above, concerning authority, knowledge, and personal character.55 “Three things are necessary for the one exercising an act of preaching,” said Robert of Basevorn—and here we return to the quotation with which the present chapter began. The tria necessaria are defined as purity of life, competent knowledge, and authority. With regard to the last of these, Robert emphasizes the importance of having the preacher properly licensed, by either a bishop or the pope. The preacher must be “sent out” with the proper authority, by the Church. As St. Paul asks, “How will they preach, unless they be sent?” (Romans 10:15). Wherefore we learn that “No lay person or Religious, unless permitted (licentiatus) by a Bishop or the Pope, and no woman, no matter how learned or saintly (docta et sancta), ought to preach. Nor is it enough for one to say that he was commissioned by God (a Deo missus), unless he clearly proves this, for the heretics are wont to make this claim.”56 In Chapter 3 below we will consider the extent to which one group of “heretics,” the Lollards, made just such a claim, and also the manner in which some of them questioned the received wisdom that “no woman, no matter how learned or saintly, ought to preach.”

      The second thing which Robert of Basevorn deems necessary for one engaged in the act of preaching is—predictably enough—competent knowledge (scientia). The preacher “must at least have explicit knowledge of the articles of Faith, the Ten Commandments, and the distinction between sin and non-sin; otherwise, ‘the blind leads the blind, and both fall into the ditch’” (cf. Matthew 15:14; Luke 6:39). However, Robert spends more time on the first of his requirements, purity of life, where he defers to the opinion of the doctores, which I take to be a specific reference to debates of the kind discussed above as opposed to a vague general remark.57 What we are offered is an elaboration of the distinction (as found in Thomas of Chobham’s

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