. The Frankish church inherited from late antiquity a range of pastoral acts identified with preaching and an ecclesiological framework by means of which these acts were authorized. Patristic preaching was centered on the address of the faithful, which occurred within worship on Sundays and feast days, an address centered on exegesis of biblical readings by which the preacher articulated Christian belief and cult on the one hand, Christian life and practice on the other.
Little is known of the preaching practice of the Frankish church during the Merovingian period (ca. 450–751). Its episcopate was filled largely by scions of the old Roman provincial aristocracy, who tended to maintain the rhetorical and theological traditions of the patristic world. Few monuments to their early homiletic effort survive. The sermons of Caesarius of Arles represent an exception that allows one to see both the continuity of context and pastoral intent between his preaching and that of his patristic predecessors, even while noting the considerable changes in circumstance and a heightened awareness of the countryside and of the enormous dislocations of the day.
The pastoral situation of the Merovingian church was poorly fitted to the rhetorical and institutional framework evolved in the ancient church, which had concentrated pastoral (preaching) efforts in the hands of a bishop and the clergy who made up his immediate household. Merovingian dioceses were sprawling affairs whose sheer physical size necessitated the development of subdiocesan centers of pastoral care, that is, parishes endowed with clerical communities. Who were these parish priests to be? How were they to be trained to pastoral office? And how was their pastoral activity to relate to that carried on by the bishop and his household clergy?
Clear attempts to answer such questions survive only in Carolingian sources (751–989), such as capitularies. The Admonitio generalis (789) established doctrinal ends of preaching—faith in the Trinity, Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection. It recommended that preachers make use of the Articles of Faith, the list of sins contained in Galatians 5, and the spiritual counsels found in the Sermon on the Mount. At Tours in 813, bishops were admonished to preach to their subjects concerning the Last Things and to do so in the vernacular. At Attigny in 822, they were exhorted to establish assistants within their dioceses who would be competent to help them fulfill their preaching office. The capitulary of Haito, bishop of Basel, demanded that parish priests have in their possession all books requisite to the administration of their responsibilities, among which was to be a collection of sermons covering all Sundays and feast days.
This legislation suggests that by the 8th and 9th centuries the Frankish church had begun to adjust to the logistics of its situation. While the identification of the church’s “order of preachers” with the episcopacy remained current, the bishop’s office, including his preaching ministry, was assumed to be carried on with a fair degree of autonomy by clerical delegates at the parish level. Preaching was for the most part conceived in terms of the public worship of the faithful. The bishop’s preaching, to be carried on in the vernacular, was intended to instruct the faithful in the obligations of membership in the community, obligations of both word and deed.
Haito of Basel’s capitulary alludes to another Carolingian initiative. Bishops and clerics became increasingly busy with the compilation and dissemination of homiliaries, collections of sermons covering the readings of the liturgical year. Many were produced in a monastic context with the contemplative lectio divina in mind; others were produced primarily for the edification of the clergy. Some, however, were compiled in response to the desire recorded in Haito’s capitulary that every parish priest have access to a collection of sermons covering the readings of the entire liturgical year.
This survey of early-medieval preaching must be modified somewhat by pointing to a revival of kerygmatic preaching in the Frankish church. The Gallo-Roman domination of the episcopacy gave way in the latter half of the 7th century. The new willingness of the Frankish nobility to pursue ecclesiastical careers went hand in hand with the wanderings of St. Columbanus and the establishment of Irish monasticism throughout the Frankish lands. A new missionary spirit emerged among Frankish ecclesiastics that culminated in a move to evangelize the Germanic peoples of the Rhineland and Frisia, a mission that culminated in the mid-8th-century missions led by St. Boniface.
The history of preaching takes a significant turn in the 11th century. The advent of the eremetical movement ca. 1000, the birth and spread of the movement of regular canons in the middle decades of the century, and the policies of the reform popes at the century’s close all gave voice to a new spirit that sought to dissociate preaching from certain of its old moorings and associate it with new spiritual aims. The episcopal care of the Frankish centuries had addressed communities rather than persons. Its form and focus were adapted accordingly, expressing them-selves in large-scale events constituted by highly stylized acts in public liturgical settings. Bishops could be counted on to maintain the required pomp in their preaching in the vernacular, but not so their proxies in the country parishes. Consequently, it would seem that the preaching of the latter remained in the Latin of the homiliaries themselves. Such a preaching, because it was literally unintelligible, addressed the community with a verbal mystery, a fitting adumbration of the subsequent mystery of Word-made-Flesh on the altar at the climax of the Mass.
Many of the French hermits, taking John the Baptist as their patron and model, returned to the edges of the settled land to preach a message of repentance to individuals. In the Frankish church, repentance had been the special concern of the monastic order, which shouldered the burden of a constant repentance on behalf of the faithful as a whole. In the preaching of the 11th-century itinerant preachers, however, the penitent life was democratized and addressed to each of the faithful. As a result, the 11th and 12th centuries can be seen as a great age of religious and lay preaching, and as an age of immense institutional and pastoral ferment, as the church struggled to adapt to this outburst of new needs and feelings. The earliest of these wandering preachers remain largely nameless, but we know the names of many who came to be allied with the movement of reform emanating from and under the auspices of the popes of Rome: Peter the Hermit (1050–1115), Robert d’Arbrissel (1060–1115), St. Norbert of Xanten (1082–1134), to name only a few.
From the 11th century, Benedictine houses began staffing their dependent parishes with monks of the community. Orders of regular canons proliferated, several of which, such as the Premonstratensians, took on pastoral care in rural churches or, like the Victorines in northern France, the care of women religious, including the office of preaching. Nor should one forget the extensive use made of preachers and preaching missions by the popes of the 11th and 12th centuries. One thinks of the Cistercians Bernard of Clairvaux and Alain de Lille commissioned to preach the Second and Third Crusades, of religious sent to preach against heretics in southern France, of the dispirited troop of Cistercians whom St. Dominic met and encouraged in 1206. Examples of lay preaching and preachers are equally plentiful. In particular, one thinks of the career of Peter Waldo.
Just as the hermits of the early 11th century had taken on a biblical exemplar in John the Baptist, so too did lay preachers take on exemplars: the Apostles and the apostolic life described in Matthew 10. In emulation of the Apostles, they moved about two by two, barefoot and penniless, preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God. This flowering of lay preaching, this apostolic movement, by its embrace of mendicancy also drew strength from a development within the rapidly urbanizing regions of Europe: the embrace of a life of voluntary poverty in response to the blatant excesses of monied wealth among townsfolk.
All this ferment provoked anxiety in many quarters. A controversy broke out in the 12th century as to the very possibility of a religious office of preaching: was not the “order of preachers” the episcopacy and those whom bishops delegated to carry out their pastoral functions in parish churches? How was the increasingly widespread claim among religious to an intrinsic preaching office, much less the swarming groups of lay “apostles,” to be accommodated to the pastoral institutions of the western church?
The pontificate of Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) would create a framework transforming the church’s pastoral care that won the adherence of the majority of religious and lay preachers. In a first phase, Innocent created space for lay and religious preachers by his efforts to reconcile groups of heretical preachers, the Humiliati (1201) and Walden-sians (1208 and 1210). His work with St. Francis in Italy and with Bishop Foulques of Toulouse and St. Dominic in southern France went far to establishing the two greatest mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans. He narrowed the definition of properly clerical preaching (praedicatio) by splitting off from it two activities formerly bound to it: the telling of one’s faith to another (professio fidei) and the defense of orthodoxy in debate with heretics (defensio fidei). In a second phase, Innocent crystallized a new pastoral order in the constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). He gave universal force to the old Carolingian admonition that bishops recruit preachers competent to preach throughout their diocese. In so doing, however, he associated preaching with the sacrament of penance, for he added that bishops should also recruit competent confessors. In addition, he underscored the importance of confession by establishing a universal obligation to make annual confession to one’s “proper priest,” further associating this confession with the obligation to receive communion at Easter. The net effect of this legislation was to bind preaching to the sacrament of penance and to institutionalize the spiritual impulses of the previous two centuries by making the sacrament of penance with its prolegomenon, repentance, into an obligatory and annual feature of adult Christian living. This new pastoral axis of preaching-for-confession demanded far-ranging modifications to the church’s pastoral institutions.
Preaching could no longer be seen as the preserve of an “order of preachers” identified narrowly with the episcopacy and the homily at Mass celebrated in the cathedral church. Preaching-for-confession assumed a more intimate interaction between preacher and hearer, one more obviously possible at the parish level in the countryside. In the towns, where parish structure was underdeveloped, parish churches needed the supplement of religious oratories open to the faithful. The 13th century saw the formation of many new parishes and the establishment of mendicant priories throughout the towns of Europe.
Preaching-for-confession demanded not only familiarity but also knowledge, a theoretical understanding of what motivated human action. The 13th century saw a considerable expansion of clerical opportunities to study and the proliferation of a vast pastoral literature, much of which was designed to help parish and mendicant priests prepare for their roles as preachers and confessors to the faithful. From the University of Paris especially, there poured forth a torrent of treatises: manuals of confession, guides to confessors, biblical distinctions, collections of model sermons, summae of preaching, arts of preaching, biblical postillae, and the like.
By ca. 1300, a new framework of pastoral institutions had been worked out. The locus of pastoral care had been lowered from the cathedral church to the parish church, supplemented in urban areas by the oratories of the religious. The “order of preachers” had been expanded to include parish and religious clergy. Indeed, that old Gregorian term had come to rest upon one order of religious in particular, the Dominican Order of Friars Preachers.
These transformations led to the exclusion of certain possibilities. From the mid-13th century, lay preaching came to be proscribed. Even those lay functions given papal sanction by Innocent III, profession and defense of the faith, came to be viewed with suspicion. The orders founded by Innocent’s policy of reconciliation had ceased to be by the end of the century. Nevertheless, a long and uninterrupted tradition of monastic preaching continued with little change. Within the monastery, religious superiors, male and female, preached to their subordinates so as to form them to their religious callings. In France, sermons of the Mistress of Paris’s Grand Béguinage are preserved in manuscripts B.N. lat. 16481 and 16482.
Literary witnesses to medieval preaching abound. Although they bear a problematic relationship to actual preaching, they do provide some sense of the rhetorical modes that held sway at different periods of medieval history. In general, a patristic mode of preaching predominated in both monastery and public preaching until the close of the 12th century. This mode, the homily (tractatus, omelia), represented a more or less continuous commentary on the biblical readings chosen for exposition, whereby the preacher exposited his text by associating it with other biblical passages that shared a significant word or concept. This mode of preaching continued in monastic circles even after it began to give way to other modes outside of monastery walls.
Word-associative approaches to the biblical text crystallized in the course of the 12th century into a set form, the biblical distinction, under the influence of the cathedral schools. The use of biblical distinctions to provide an architectonic for sermons is clearly visible in the sermon collections of late 12th-century bishops like Maurice de Sully. This represents a first step away from the homily tradition and toward a new mode of preaching, the “thematic sermon.”
The thematic sermon proper emerges at the dawn of the 13th century and continues to be developed well into the 14th. Here, attention has come to focus upon a single, small passage of the Mass readings. This “theme” is then divided into a number of “parts,” usually between two and four. These divisions serve subsequently as occasions for doctrinal, mystical, or moral instruction. Instruction or correction occurs via the process of expansion or dilation by which the meaning of each part is articulated, with or without subdivision, and confirmed by means of “authorities,” “arguments,” or “examples.” The latter category often meant a narrative vignette drawn from a common stock of colorful stories. It could also mean a parallel moment from the nonhuman world, a similitude that drew its power from the assumption of the human microcosm. The more educated the context, the more preachers would be expected to confirm their divisions and subdivisions by recourse to arguments and authorities. When preaching to the ordinary faithful, however, one was expected to use examples and similitudes. The Sermones vulgares of Jacques de Vitry show how effectively the thematic sermon could be adapted to the needs of popular preaching.
The 13th-century transformation of preaching in response to the spiritual ferment of the 11th and 12th centuries was largely completed by the mid-14th century. The last two centuries of the medieval era saw a refining and elaboration of the system. Everywhere, there came to be more preachers, more sermon aids of every sort, more opportunities for study. France continued to be blessed with gifted preachers of every stripe, whether a pope like Clement VI, an academic like Jean Gerson, or a mendicant like Vincent Ferrer. None of these gifted men, however, came from an unexpected quarter; the system was firmly in place. There would be no substantial change to the office of preaching until the 16th century, the advent of Calvinist preaching, and the Catholic response inaugurated at the Council of Trent (1563).
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