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CHAPTER 2

The Christ Child in Two Treatises of Aelred of Rievaulx and in Early Franciscan Sources

In one of his numerous sermons on the Song of Songs, the renowned Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) invites his audience to imagine “how Mary’s husband Joseph would often take him [the Christ Child] on his knees and smile as he played with him.” This particular sermon, which momentarily turns to a scene of domestic intimacy, focuses on the verse “A bundle of Myrrh is my beloved to me, he shall abide between my breasts” (Sg. 1:12); it is specifically the word fasciculus (“little bundle”) that prompts Bernard to think of the infant Jesus. Myrrh, the bitter herb mentioned in the verse, recalls Jesus’ sufferings, which, according to Bernard, were manifest first in “the privations of his infancy,” and then in “the hardships he endured in preaching, the fatigues of his journeys, the long watches in prayer, the temptations when he fasted, his tears of compassion, the heckling when he addressed the people, and finally the dangers from traitors in the brotherhood, the insults, the spitting, the blows, the mockery, the scorn, the nails and similar torments that are multiplied in the Gospels.”¹ Bernard mentions Christ’s infancy only briefly within this increasingly dramatic sequence,² concentrating instead on the Passion, the climax of Christ’s life, which was recounted in the Gospels with considerable detail and elaborated even further in medieval devotional texts and images. Bernard advises his fellow monks to keep the recollection of Jesus’ life and death as a “delectable bunch” between their breasts; they are to have it before their mind’s eye, especially when they experience difficulties. It is near the end of this short sermon where Bernard introduces the aforementioned image of Joseph bouncing the infant Jesus on his knees.³ Yet he finally closes not with this charming vignette, but with a more abstract reference to Christ as the “Church’s bridegroom.” This implies that the members of the Church, especially the individual monk who hears or reads the sermon, are to seek mystical union with Christ—an intimate relationship with the Godman that is both fostered by and transcends meditation on the events of Jesus’ earthly existence.

Although it may seem strange that Bernard associates the infant Jesus with the bridegroom desired by the bride in the Song of Songs, other medieval Christians commonly thought of the Christ Child in this way. As Ann Astell remarks, in medieval texts in which the bride is interpreted as the Virgin Mary, the groom “assumes the striking form of an Infant Boy nursing at her breasts.”⁴ The Christ Child was not simply the beloved of the Virgin Mary, but also the spouse desired by Christians who sought a deeper spirituality. Such imagery is reflected in the vita for the Beguine Mary of Oignies (d. 1213) authored by Jacques de Vitry: “Sometimes it seemed to her that she held him [God] tightly between her breasts like a clinging baby for three or more days and she would hide him there lest he be seen by others and at other times she would play with him, kissing him (osculando ludebat) as if he were a child.” Mary’s biographer also notes that: “Once when she had lain continuously in bed for three days and had been sweetly resting with her Bridegroom, the days slipped by most stealthily because her joy was so great and so sweet.”⁵ In this chapter from Mary of Oignies’s vita, Jacques clearly has in mind the verse from the Song of Songs about the spouse having myrrh between her breasts, since he specifically says that the divine child who visited Mary and caused her such delight was nestled between her breasts (inter ubera commorantem; cf. Sg. 1:12).

Bernard’s disciple Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), who served for twenty years as abbot of an influential Cistercian monastery in Yorkshire, Rievaulx Abbey, also uses language and imagery from the Song of Songs when speaking of the Christ Child, as we shall see in considering two of his devotional treatises that deal with Jesus’ youth. An examination of these works shows that the figure of the Christ Child was employed by Aelred not simply in a sentimental way, that is, with the single goal of having his reader meditate upon and delight in the lovableness of the young Jesus, imaginatively re-presented in the here and now. The Cistercian abbot’s agenda is rather more complex, at least in the case of the treatise directed at a male reader, the De Jesu puero duodenni (On Jesus at the Age of Twelve). Yet in both cases, Aelred seeks to capture his reader’s attention by focusing on the divine child, whom one could imaginatively see and touch. In differing degrees, Aelred moves beyond the historical details of Jesus’ life, prompting his reader to engage in more abstract levels of thinking and to undergo an inner reformation—to undertake, more broadly speaking, a spiritual quest that would culminate in an ineffable experience of the divine.

This chapter will focus on two works of Aelred of Rievaulx and on thirteenth-century texts by and about St. Francis and his disciple St. Clare, because scholars have traditionally (and rightfully so in my view) given the Cistercians and Franciscans major credit for initiating a new type of devotion to the child Jesus that became widespread in the later Middle Ages, an affective piety that was focused on the Christ Child’s hardships as well as his attractiveness and sweetness as a tender child. Yet, as we shall see, the Cistercian abbot Aelred focuses only to a small degree on the human qualities of Christ’s boyhood, preferring in his now famous treatise on the twelve-year-old Jesus to draw the attention of his monastic male reader to the process of conversion and spiritual development that he himself must undergo, a transformation that should parallel the Christ Child’s birth and growth throughout the life cycle. While Aelred’s other work to be considered below, a letter addressed to his sister, who was an anchoress, appeals more to the senses in the relatively short section on the historical life of Christ that is relevant here, the recluse is encouraged not just to imagine what the human Jesus was like at different stages of his life, but also to reflect deeply on her own status as a bride of Christ, who has turned from this world so as to prepare herself better for the next, in which the union with her beloved will finally be realized. To become more familiar with Christ in the here and now and also to make herself more worthy of being his bride, the anchoress is to imagine herself interacting with Jesus as did his mother and his other female followers featured in the canonical gospels. The recluse is also to imitate Jesus in the way he lived his life, as a poor and humble man, detached from the power structures and, to some extent, social obligations of this world (like reproduction and child-rearing). Just as such Cistercian works do much, in a literary way, with the relatively few details from the canonical gospels dealing with Christ’s early life, so do the early Franciscan sources succeed in making the child Jesus who is hidden in the Bible come to the fore. Whereas the Cistercians’ approach was more inward, that of the Franciscans was more performative and tangible (in the sense of being focused on real objects like the manger), yet in both cases audiences were encouraged to imitate and have a greater love for the lowly and tender Child who was born in Bethlehem and grew up in obscurity in Nazareth, in a loving and humble family that focused on the basics of everyday life. Significantly, both Francis and Clare, the founders of the first and second orders of Franciscans (the Friars Minor and the Poor Clares) had consciously turned away from the comfortable lifestyles that they could easily have enjoyed as adults (because of their families’ wealth and social standing) and, instead, embraced a life of total poverty. This may help explain why Christ’s lifelong scantiness of clothing and nakedness had an extremely strong hold on the Franciscans’ imagination from the very beginning of the movement.

The Christ Child in Aelred’s De Jesu puero duodenni

Aelred of Rievaulx’s treatise De Jesu puero duodenni, written sometime between 1153 and 1157, is the first meditational text produced in the West that concentrates on the boy Jesus.⁶ A clarification is in order, however, considering that the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which was originally composed in the second century in Greek and later translated into medieval Latin, was the first text that ever focused on the boy Jesus, covering as it does select events from the fifth to twelfth year of his childhood. Although these two texts center upon the same biblical personage, they are quite different in terms of their content and aims. At the end of his treatise, Aelred tells his addressee, a monk named Ivo from Wardon (a daughterhouse of Rievaulx), that he has given him seeds of meditation (meditationum semina), as the monk had earlier requested.⁷ By leaving his treatise open-ended and inviting his reader to personalize it, Aelred encourages the individual meditator’s appropriation of his text. In contrast, the anonymous author of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas seems primarily concerned with filling in the gaps left in the canonical gospels’ account of Jesus’ early life by recounting exceptionally remarkable events. Though the anonymous author compensates for only some of these lacunae, the reader is not invited to extend the work imaginatively further. Another crucial difference is that, instead of providing mundane or intimate details about Jesus’ childhood that would arouse the reader’s piety by increasing his or her yearning for Christ, as do Aelred’s treatise and other medieval texts, the apocryphal narrative focuses on the Boy’s mighty deeds and his precocious wisdom, which are displayed repeatedly during Jesus’ partially reconstructed childhood.

While the anonymous author of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas may have primarily intended his narrative to be informational (that is, by recounting some of the most notable things that supposedly occurred during Jesus’ childhood), by the later Middle Ages the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in Latin and its offshoots clearly took on the character of a devotional narrative. By this I mean that it was considered conducive to increasing one’s reverence for the God-man, who, according to the text, had assumed the form of an extremely gifted and exceptional child. The devotional character of medieval redactions of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is suggested by their survival in a number of manuscripts from monastic libraries and other indications of its being read by Christians intensely focused on their spiritual life, such as the work’s inclusion among the treasured devotional books of the pious dowager Cecily Neville (d. 1495).⁸ Though both the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and Aelred’s treatise may have been read in a devotional and meditative manner in the later Middle Ages, the overall thrust of these texts is quite different, as I have already indicated. Aelred, who focuses on a specific episode from the Gospel of Luke (the twelve-year-old Jesus’ staying behind in the Temple), is mainly concerned with helping his reader make progress in the spiritual life, through becoming more virtuous and Christ-like and by deepening his relationship with his spiritual bridegroom. In contrast, the original author of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and also the medieval redactors of apocryphal tales of Jesus’ childhood appear uninterested in promoting the reader’s contemplative union with Christ; instead, their ostensible aim is to impress the reader with the Boy’s powerful deeds and uncanny wisdom, more than anything else.⁹

In what follows, I provide an overview of Aelred’s treatise De Jesu puero duodenni, focusing on specific passages in order to show that it concentrates only to a small extent on the historical aspects of Christ’s childhood (specifically the literal details having to do with Jesus’ staying behind in the Temple, mentioned by Luke), compared to its repeated emphasis on the monastic reader’s spiritual development. Aelred clearly believes that the latter process rests on an experiential encounter with Christ—an imaginative experience of the incarnate God with one’s inner senses, paired with appropriate emotional responses. Modern readers might at first approach Aelred’s text as a spiritual classic or even as a creative work, an early example of historical fiction, without realizing that it is grounded in the traditional routine of monastic life. The fact that Aelred is commenting on a certain lectio evangelica, as he says early on in his treatise, means that the biblical text in question is one which the entire community of monks would have heard, “sung or read,” within the liturgy.¹⁰ Individual monks may have also read and meditated on the text from Luke (2:41–52) in their lectio divina (that is, their personal spiritual reading).

Aelred’s treatise is based upon the assumption that the individual monk’s task is to achieve greater knowledge about Christ’s childhood through private prayer, in other words, through intimate communication with Christ that occurs within the monk’s soul. Aelred regards his book as an aid to such prayer, rather than as an authoritative source of hidden knowledge about Christ’s boyhood, as, for example, the apocryphal infancy gospels claimed to be. In other words, Aelred’s book is not meant to provide all the answers, as it were, but rather to serve as a springboard for further reflection and contemplation.

At the beginning of the text, Aelred reminds his addressee Ivo that he requested plausible hypotheses as to what the twelve-year-old Jesus was doing during the three days when he was intentionally apart from his parents, after they left Jerusalem. Yet Aelred does not pretend to provide easy solutions. As if privy to the monk’s inward thoughts, the Cistercian abbot says that he is aware “with what familiarity … you are wont to ask these very questions of Jesus himself in your holy prayers, when you have before the eyes of your heart the sweet likeness of that dear boy, when with a certain spiritual imagination you reproduce the features of that most beautiful face; when you rejoice in the gaze of those most charming and gentle eyes bent upon you.”¹¹ Aelred thus suggests that Ivo has already made some inroads regarding the questions that are of concern to him or has at least revealed his inquisitiveness. While the abbot encourages the monk’s imaginative recovery of Christ’s youth, he also recommends that the monk not press too hard at trying to attain knowledge of Jesus’ hidden years, but rather respect the secret details of Christ’s life—the choice that Jesus apparently made to hide the events of his childhood from future generations.¹² On one occasion Aelred explicitly warns Ivo: “when you [are] alone with [him],” be careful lest Christ “charge you with presumption in your questioning and … bridle your curiosity.”¹³ Aelred’s comment here is reflective of medieval clerics’ view of curiosity as a vice when it entailed an excessive desire for knowledge.¹⁴ Those who propagated apocryphal legends about Jesus’ childhood may, in fact, have been thought to cater to it, by prying into territory that was scripturally unknown and then speaking about it as if authoritatively.¹⁵ It is possible, though, that in the aforementioned passage, in which Aelred warns his friend against having an inordinate desire to know about the Savior’s youth, Aelred may simply be cautioning Ivo about plying Jesus with too many questions, particularly those that are of a factual nature and specifically concerned with details about his childhood.

Aelred himself, toward the beginning of the treatise, asks the boy Jesus a number of questions on behalf of Ivo. He later returns to some of these when he focuses on the historical aspects of the Temple episode, which constitutes the first main section of his treatise. Early on, Aelred questions Jesus with an anxious tone, which could perhaps express despair at getting concrete answers, as well as sincere solicitousness concerning the Christ Child’s physical well-being when he had detached himself from his parents: “O dear boy, where were you? Where were you hiding? Who gave you shelter? Whose company did you enjoy? Was it in heaven or on earth, or in some house that you spent the time? Or did you go off with some boys your own age into a hidden place (secreto loco) and regale them with mysteries (secretorum mysteria profundebas), in accordance with those words of yours in the Gospel: ‘Allow the children to come to me’ ” (Lk. 18:16, Matt. 19:14).¹⁶ Anselm Hoste remarks that, in this treatise, Aelred makes his reader sicut praesens in the life of Christ,¹⁷ yet when Aelred (on behalf of his reader) asks Jesus and later his mother questions like these concerning the Temple incident, such inquiries could be retrospective, as if the monk were conversing with Jesus and Mary in the reader’s present, rather than with them in the midst of the episode, as it unfolds, or immediately after it occurs. The past tense of the verbs in the queries cited above supports this alternative view, though Aelred’s addressing Jesus as a “dear boy” does seem to indicate that he is speaking to Jesus of the historical past (imaginatively re-presented).¹⁸ Be that as it may, it is clear that Aelred wants the reader of his text to replay the past in his memory and to insert himself in the course of events as if he were in the thick of their unfolding—to act as if such occurrences really matter in the here and now, to the reader who is imaginatively close to Jesus.

Aelred’s supposition in the above-cited passage that the Christ Child may have gone off with other children seems logical, considering that children are, and were, known to prefer the company of those their own age. Commenting on the biblical verse from Luke in which Christ essentially identifies himself with a young child (Lk. 9:47–48), the thirteenth-century Dominican exegete Hugh of Saint-Cher noted children’s natural affinity for each other: “they love each other.”¹⁹ As we shall see in the following chapter, the idea that the boy Jesus would have enjoyed being with his peers (and they with him) is highlighted in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and medieval texts derived from it, in which Jesus is repeatedly described as playing with other boys, usually outdoors.

The attention that Aelred’s treatise calls to children, here and elsewhere, arguably stems from his view that the boys who were privileged to interact with the twelve-year-old Jesus metaphorically represent monks, who, like Ivo, have chosen to enter a “hidden place” to gain access to Christ’s mysteries. Bernard of Clairvaux had earlier said that monastic life is characterized by three main features, one of which is hiddenness, a state that enables the monk to commune privately with his Lord.²⁰ Thus, when Aelred speaks of boys going off with Jesus to a “hidden place,” he may very well have in mind the monastery, an environment chosen as conducive to acquiring greater intimacy with Christ, through meditation on the various stages of his life as well as other monastic practices. The fact that Cistercian communities did not accept child oblates (as did the Benedictines and other related groups) may, paradoxically, have given the monks more of an opportunity to envision themselves as children (and also parents) in a metaphorical sense.²¹ Aelred’s famous lament for his beloved friend and fellow monk Simon, found in his De speculo caritatis (Mirror of Charity), illustrates the abbot’s view of the monastery as a place where boys, as it were, are spiritually gathered around the child Jesus. Speaking, at one point, of a monk dear to his heart, Aelred tells how the “tender and delicate boy” Simon (puerum tenerum et delicatum) entered monastic life at a young age, running after the boy Jesus, who exuded “the scent of his perfumes” (Sg. 1:3). Aelred admires Simon for turning aside from his noble family and entering the abbey at Rievaulx in order to pursue his spiritual quest for Jesus. It was there that Simon succeeded in imitating the Christ Child, who “show[ed] him the manger of his poverty, the resting place of his humility, [and] the chamber of his charity decked with blossoms of his grace.”²² Like the bride in the Song of Songs, Simon yearned for the bridegroom of his soul, Jesus, and succeeded in interacting with him in the privacy of the cloister.

It should come as no surprise that Aelred, a disciple of Bernard of Clairvaux, alludes to the Song of Songs throughout the De Jesu puero duodenni, to speak of the soul’s search for Christ and to convey its delight in his spiritual presence. To give another example of how this poetical book from Scripture (a love song) permeates Aelred’s text: Aelred tells his reader to visualize how the people traveling with the boy Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem reached out and seized him: “Old men kiss him, young men embrace him, boys wait upon him…. Each of them, I think, declares in his inmost heart: ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth’ (Sg. 1:1). And to the boys who long for his presence … it is easy to apply the words: ‘Who will grant me to have you as my brother, sucking my mother’s breasts, to find you outside and kiss you?’ (Sg. 8:1).”²³ Toward the end of the treatise, Aelred again quotes this verse from the Song of Songs when speaking of Ivo’s “longing for one kiss and one touch of [Jesus’] dear lips.” Aelred assures Ivo that when he sighs for Christ as for a brother, “Then certainly he will come to you with all the fragrance of ointments and perfumes.”²⁴ The abbot’s repeated emphasis on fragrance emanating from Christ, a detail which appeared in the above-cited passage from the Mirror of Charity, is clearly based upon the olfactory imagery in the Song of Songs. The sensuousness of this latter text, in my view, helps explain why Aelred, at one point, asks the boy Jesus who bathed and anointed him when he was separated from his parents for three days. Without explicitly claiming that this image has homosexual connotations, Brian Patrick McGuire suggests as much when, referring to this passage, he speaks of “Aelred’s fantasy about a massage for Jesus.”²⁵ If we keep in mind, though, that Aelred’s treatise is mainly concerned with the monk’s spiritual relationship with Christ and that Aelred constantly employs language and images from the Song of Songs, then the sensuousness of such passages will seem less startling and will less plausibly be read as a clear indication of Aelred’s putative homosexuality.²⁶ Aelred’s concern about the Christ Child’s hygiene may stem, in part, from the maternal care toward monks that he himself was accustomed to exercise as abbot.²⁷ It also suggests his identification with Mary in her search for Christ, insofar as she is envisioned in that episode as the bride par excellence yearning for the bridegroom, and also imagined as a solicitous mother. In this treatise, Ivo and the other monks are invited to identify with her. Toward the end of this work, when speaking of the rewards of the spiritual life, Aelred tells his monastic reader that he will eventually be able to utter the words that Mary herself said when she finally found her twelve-year-old son in the Temple: “Then there are embraces, then there are kisses, then: ‘I have found him whom my soul loves, I have held him fast and will not let him go’ ” (Sg. 3:4).²⁸

Having discussed the overall orientation of the De Jesu puero duodenni—the way it encourages the monastic reader to envision himself as seeking the most beloved of boys, as did the Christ Child’s family, friends, and neighbors—I will now flesh out the treatise’s contents more precisely in order to show that it places greater emphasis upon spiritual growth than upon the actual or hypothetical details of the Temple episode. Aelred gives his treatise a tripartite structure, dividing it into sequential considerations of the historical, allegorical, and moral senses of the biblical anecdote about the twelve-year-old Jesus. Numerically speaking, only the first ten of the text’s thirty-two sections (according to how its modern editors have divided it) are devoted to what the Christ Child did during his three-day sojourn in Jerusalem or to the issue of his subsequent advancement “in wisdom, and age, and grace” when he returned to Nazareth (Lk. 2:52). In other words, less than a third of the treatise is concerned with the historical (or broader, Christological) sense of the biblical account about the twelve-year-old Jesus’ staying behind in the Temple.²⁹ That Aelred is more interested in the episode’s moral sense is indicated by the fact that his treatise culminates in this mode of interpretation, and also by his reference to the theme of the soul’s infancy and development in sections that are ostensibly devoted to the historical and allegorical interpretations of the aforesaid biblical episode. For instance, early on, in the first (that is, historical) section of the treatise, after remarking that the boy Jesus did not come into the Temple “as a teacher, but as a boy who learns … [and] does not withdraw from the control of his parents” (a comment that, incidentally, undermines the potential view of Jesus as a disobedient and disrespectful child), Aelred suddenly reflects upon his own past sinful behavior, likening himself to the Prodigal Son (Lk. 15:11–32) who, through folly, soon found himself without food. In need of bread like the Prodigal Son, Aelred eventually came to his senses and returned to Bethlehem, a town whose name means “House of Bread.” There, on the altar in the Church, he found the Eucharist, which is none other than the Christ Child in the manger, and fed thereon.³⁰ Aelred then offers a moral reading of his own behavior and of the beasts widely thought to have been gathered around the manger at the first Christmas: “This is the beginning of conversion, a spiritual birth as it were, that we should model ourselves on the Child, take upon ourselves the marks of poverty, and becoming like animals before you, Lord, enjoy the delights of your presence.”³¹ Aelred clearly regards Bethlehem as a symbol of Christians’ spiritual birth. Proceeding along these tropological lines further, he explains that the Infant’s hiding of himself in Egypt (a dangerous place that nevertheless served as a safe haven for the child Jesus and his family) signifies the soul’s temptation, and that the Boy’s subsequent upbringing in Nazareth (a name meaning “flower”) represents the soul’s growth, or blossoming, in virtue. “For just as the Lord Jesus is born and conceived in us, so he grows and is nourished in us, until we come to perfect manhood, that maturity which is proportioned to the complete growth of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).³² Aelred here assumes his reader is aware of how “scripture speaks of two sorts of age,” as Origen put it: “One is the age of the body, which is not subject to our power but to the law of nature. The other is the age of the soul, which is properly under our control. If we will it, we grow daily in this age.”³³ In other words, the monk whom Aelred is addressing must consciously pursue spiritual development. By thus encouraging his reader to imitate the Christ Child by being spiritually reborn and developing after his pattern, Aelred, as abbot and spiritual guide, can be said to labor like a mother so that Christ might be formed in the monks entrusted to his care (cf. Gal. 4:19). After this digression about his own spirituality, which leads to his offering of moral advice, Aelred returns to a consideration of what transpired while the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem.

At the beginning of the second part of the work, in which he offers what he sees as the obvious allegorical meaning of the text (namely, that Christ’s parents in searching for him represent the Jews in search of the Messiah), Aelred reiterates the idea that the events of Christ’s early life (his birth, his persecution by Herod, and his upbringing at Nazareth) signify the monk’s spiritual progress.³⁴ Later on, in the third main section, when he centers his attention on the moral sense, Aelred uses a striking metaphor when he speaks of how the monk experiences “the infancy of the new way of life” (novae conversationis … infantia) at Bethlehem. Elaborating on a point he made earlier, Aelred explains that the monk imitates the poverty of Christ’s birth by renouncing the world and, in addition, acquires wealth at Nazareth by growing in virtues. He goes further, pointing out that Christ’s “going up” to Jerusalem with his parents signifies the soul’s eventual ascent to contemplation and that his “going down” to Nazareth with his parents means that a monk (especially an abbot charged with the responsibility of pastoral care) should turn aside from the heights of prayer when duty calls.³⁵

Whereas up until this point Aelred had spoken of the soul’s imitation of the child Jesus in an analogous sense, here he says, more literally, that the characteristics of infants are worthy of emulation: an infant, since it has “not yet arrived at the use of reason … harms no one, deceives no one; it is free from covetousness, knows nothing of its own will, judges no one, calumniates no one, covets nothing. It is not anxious for the present nor solicitous for the future and relies only on the judgment of others.”³⁶ While Aelred seems to imply that infants are naturally virtuous, he essentially says they lack the vices or failings commonly found in adults, especially those living in the world (though one could also say that Aelred values infants’ simplicity, a positive virtue).³⁷ When commenting on Christ’s remark about the necessity of becoming like a little child, if one wishes to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 18:3–5), St. Jerome (d. 420) had similarly spoken of little children as not being guilty of the negative behaviors commonly displayed in flawed adults: “Just as that little one, whose example I give you, does not persevere in anger, does not remember when it is injured, does not desire a beautiful woman it sees, does not think one thing while saying another, so also you, unless you shall have such innocence and purity of soul, shall not enter into the kingdoms of the heavens.”³⁸ Jerome’s list was repeated by a number of monastic authors.³⁹ Though Aelred does not reiterate its particulars, he can be said to convey the same basic idea. Yet even as both authors call attention to children’s lack of malice, their harmlessness, and overall passivity, they do so in slightly different ways. Aelred’s ideal seems to be that Cistercian monks (who, significantly, as already noted, did not begin their life in the monastery as oblates, which was a standard practice in the earlier Benedictine tradition) should be as malleable and submissive as young children.⁴⁰ Guerric of Igny, another twelfth-century Cistercian, likewise valorizes childhood in reflecting on Christ’s having taken on the form of a child: “Unto us … a little Child is born, and emptying out his majesty God had taken on himself not merely the earthly body of mortal men but the weakness and insignificance of children. O blessed childhood, whose weakness and foolishness is stronger and wiser than any man…. O sweet and sacred childhood, which brought back man’s true innocence, by which men of every age can return to blessed childhood and be conformed to you, not in physical weakness but in humility of heart and holiness of life.”⁴¹ In his treatise De Jesu puero duodenni, Aelred likewise engages in a type of idealization of childhood,⁴² though he is specifically concerned with how it was exemplified by Christ, the epitome of spiritual as well as physical perfection.

Thus far we have seen how Aelred spends a relatively small amount of time discussing the concrete aspects of Jesus’ childhood, specifically, how Aelred often seems eager to transition to the topic of a monk’s spiritual development, as ideally running parallel to the Christ Child’s human development. There is another way in which Aelred takes ample time to focus on the nonhistorical aspects of the Temple episode: in the middle section of his treatise, he offers an extended allegorical discussion of the Jews, who, like Jesus’ parents on this very stressful occasion, have great difficulty finding him. Though Aelred’s extensive criticism of the Jews (specifically, the Holy Family’s traveling companions) for failing to appreciate Christ in their midst seems digressive, not to mention bitterly harsh, it nevertheless shares the very broad theme of conversion and enrichment through Christ’s spiritual gifts that is central to Aelred’s overall moral interpretation of the Temple episode. To be more precise: in this middle section, Aelred speaks of the presumed, eventual conversion of the Jews at the end of the world and of God’s bestowal of graces upon the Gentiles, near to Christ, in the meantime. Rather surprisingly (considering that the figures of Mary and Ecclesia were often conflated and opposed to that of Synagoga),⁴³ Aelred recasts Jesus’ parents as the Jews who are separated from Christ and ineffectively searching for the Messiah among their own people. In his imaginative reworking of the biblical episode, Aelred goes further by transforming the Jewish teachers in the Temple, with whom Jesus is eventually found conversing, into the Gentiles, and the Temple into the Church, into which Jesus’ parents enter only after a period of time. Regarding Jesus as the Lord who will ultimately unite the Jews and Gentiles, Aelred speaks of the twelve-year-old Christ as an embodiment of both the Old and New Laws: the Ten Commandments and the dual mandate to love God and neighbor. As the verbum abbreuiatum sed consummans (“the Word that is abbreviated but sums up”; cf. Rom. 9:28; Isa. 10:23), Jesus brings the Law of Moses to perfection.⁴⁴ Like other medieval Christian scholars, Aelred is confident that the Jews will ultimately come over to Christ.

Since this treatise focuses heavily on the young Jesus’ separation from his parents and kindred, rather than his reunion with them, it is not surprising that the middle section of this work centers on discord among people. Aelred thus seems to seize upon (or perhaps be carried away by) the dramatic potential of the episode, going so far as to position himself as a sort of spokesperson for the Christ Child vis-à-vis the Jews, to whom he speaks reprovingly. He bluntly informs them that Christ has “cast away his heritage,” and proclaims that Christ’s “beautiful face … is hidden only from those of your own house.” Finding fault with the Jews for failing to recognize Christ, Aelred derogatorily contrasts them with the ox and the ass at the manger, who laudably recognized their master (Isa. 1:3).⁴⁵ Aelred depicts himself as not having success as a mediator with regard to either party; it is especially difficult for him to appease Jesus, whom he describes as crudelissimus (“utterly cruel”) toward his own people.⁴⁶ In this scenario, the Christ Child, whose immovability is made worse by the essentially unalterable biblical past, seems unwilling to make the initial gesture of reconciliation. Alluding to Matthew 12:46, Aelred says that even though the boy Jesus “certainly” (certe) was told that his mother and brethren were looking for him, he still did not go out of the Temple to meet them.⁴⁷ Instead, he waits inside until, after three days, his relatives finally come in, which for Aelred signifies the Jews’ eventual conversion to Christianity, in the third age of the world.

Although the abbot may zealously wish the Jews to be reconciled with Christ and for them to enjoy spiritual prosperity, he portrays the young Jesus as coldly stern toward his family members and associates who are looking for him. He also portrays the Jews as hostile, specifically by claiming that they cast an evil eye on those to whom (presumably the adult) Christ showed mercy. To be more precise, Aelred imagines Jesus criticizing the Jews more generally for their ill-will: “you raged at my gifts, you were envious at my compassion, and since your evil eye (nequam oculus; cf. Matt. 20:15) grudged the penitent, blinded by envy (livor), it was unable to see the author of its own salvation.”⁴⁸ As noted in subsequent chapters, Thomas Aquinas and Birgitta of Sweden similarly called attention to Jewish envy when they imagined how Jesus might have been received by the Jewish community around him.⁴⁹ Going further than Aelred, these later authors imagine ill feelings being directed at the boy Jesus himself. As I explain in the following chapter, the apocryphal infancy legends circulating in the later Middle Ages undoubtedly create a cultural rift between Jesus and the Jewish community into which he was born. Although Aelred, in the middle section of his treatise, may be alluding to the actual tension he imagines to have existed between Jesus and the Jews of his day, the abbot, taking a broad view of things, envisions the future healing of the current division between Christians and Jews.

I have already emphasized how Aelred treats the incident in the Temple as a historical event only to a certain extent, given that he also approaches the episode metaphorically as well as allegorically. Aelred’s novel yet rather spare speculations about the Boy’s activities in Jerusalem are worth considering more closely, especially since they have significant points in common with other medieval sources dealing with Christ’s childhood. After briefly wondering about the practical aspects of Jesus’ staying behind in Jerusalem, Aelred conjectures that, on the first day, the Boy went up to heaven to consult his Father about “the ordering of the redemptive work he had undertaken (suscepta dispensatio).”⁵⁰ Such a novel speculation (not apparently inspired by any legend in circulation) implies that the child Jesus already knew of the mission for which he was sent, an idea that finds expression, in different ways, in other medieval sources.⁵¹ Careful not to impute any ignorance to Christ as he engages in this divine and heavenly conference, Aelred adds that Jesus consulted his Father, “not in order to learn what he already knew from all eternity,” but “to defer” to him, to “offer him his obedience, [and to] show his humility.”⁵² Far from imagining the young Jesus wandering around Jerusalem, Aelred claims that on the second day of the Child’s brief retreat from his parents, Christ informed the angels of God’s plan to make good the loss of their numbers due to the rebellion of the bad angels. Only then, on the third day, did he “gradually” give the Jewish scholars some insight into “the promise contained in Scripture,” that is, the Father’s plan for the redemption.⁵³ Aelred interprets the Child’s answering of questions, as well as his listening to and questioning of the teachers, as a sign of his humility—of his choosing to act “as a boy who learns.”⁵⁴ Yet, at the same time, the boy Jesus instructs the doctors in a subtle way, seeking to shed some light on divine matters without causing alarm or offense.

Despite his tactfulness vis-à-vis the learned doctors, Aelred’s Christ Child could still be considered an exceptional boy and also a puer-senex (a boy endowed with the maturity of an adult). The abbot emphasizes how the fellow pilgrims to Jerusalem were drawn to the Boy, attracted as they were to the “signs of heavenly powers shining forth” from him, as well as the Christ Child’s revelation, in some way, of “the mystery of the wisdom that saves.”⁵⁵ Aelred also calls attention to the Boy’s serious demeanor and weighty speech, by which “the boys of his own age are kept from mischief.”⁵⁶ Despite such details, which clearly distinguish Jesus from ordinary boys, in this treatise he is in no way portrayed as preternaturally odd or obnoxious, as he is in the apocrypha (and as some children are in medieval saints’ vitae).⁵⁷ Toward the end of the first (that is, historical) section of the treatise, Aelred directly, though briefly, touches upon the issue of what Luke meant when he said that Jesus “advanced in wisdom” (2:52). Although he offers two views, without explicitly endorsing one and discounting the other, he seems to believe that Jesus did not actually advance in wisdom, since he states that “what can be said of God in his nature could be said of Christ, even when he was in his Mother’s womb.”⁵⁸ Yet Aelred acknowledges the alternative view, which relies upon the argument that if Christ lacked the fullness of beatitude during his life, then he probably also lacked wisdom in his youth.⁵⁹ In any case, Aelred does not spend much time on this vexed question, stating that he is concerned with devotion rather than theology.⁶⁰

Aelred’s devotional agenda explains why he emphasizes Mary’s intense feelings on the occasion of her loss, search for, and recovery of Jesus, and why he only briefly touches upon the question of what she thought of her son’s behavior and identity, which, again, has more to do with theological issues. When, toward the beginning of the treatise, he questions both the Christ Child and the Virgin, specifically wondering why Jesus did not have compassion on his mother, and expressing his bemusement as to why Mary looked for him if she knew that he was God, Aelred seems to be finding fault with both parties. In any case, he is clearly expressing his inability to comprehend their actions and motives, as well as his astonishment that such a mix-up could have happened in the first place. Around a century later, an English Franciscan poet, Walter of Wimborne, similarly pondered the crisis caused by Christ’s lingering in the Temple, going so far as to act as Mary’s lawyer in an imaginative court case, in which the twelve-year-old Jesus is accused of impiety because he caused his mother such emotional suffering.⁶¹ Although Aelred does not exaggerate the misunderstanding between Mother and Child to such proportions, he does depict Mary as a very solicitous and dutiful mother, saying that she was “on fire with such anxiety” over the loss of her son. He also adds tender human touches, for example, by suggesting that Mary suspected that Jesus had gone off with other boys and was worried that he suffered injury from one of them.⁶² As already noted, Aelred conveys Mary’s sense of relief when she finally found her son (which echoes the exclamation of the bride in the Song of Songs: “I have found him”). He is careful, though, to point out that her negative feelings were caused more by being deprived of the delights caused by her son’s presence, than by overwhelming anxiety over his safety (which is later emphasized in the Meditationes vitae Christi).⁶³ After all, he bluntly states, Mary knew that he was God.⁶⁴ Along similar lines, Aelred remarks, in response to Luke’s comment that his parents did not understand Jesus’ words when they found him (Lk. 2:50), that Mary “could not be ignorant of any purpose of her son.”⁶⁵ This implies that she somehow knew of her son’s redemptive mission, though the abbot here says too little to indicate what he actually thought about Mary’s understanding of the young Jesus.⁶⁶ As we shall see, late medieval writers sometimes portrayed Mary as being aware of her son’s future sacrifice through her knowledge of prophecies, or learning about it early on and sometimes being reluctant to accept it as God’s will.

While Aelred touches upon (what we might call) some Mariological and Christological issues and certainly adds some tender, human notes to the episode of the three-day separation, his main purpose in the De Jesu puero duodenni is ostensibly to foster the soul’s union with Christ, which is here symbolized by Mary’s finding of Jesus on the third day of her troubling search.⁶⁷ In the course of promoting such spiritual development, the Cistercian abbot has undeniably expanded the basic story about Christ’s staying behind in the Temple to great proportions. He achieves this not so much by adding mundane details that seem to derive from his own imagination (such as the idea the Jesus begged for food, which he mentions only briefly)⁶⁸ but by applying passages from different parts of the Bible (especially the Song of Songs) to an anecdote about Jesus’ childhood. His overall goal is to treat of the soul’s progress toward greater intimacy with and also resemblance to Christ. Indeed, in some way the treatise can be said to be not so much about the Christ Child after all, but rather about the soul of its intended monastic reader.

While the other medieval texts I will explore in this book similarly add color to their depiction of the Christ Child by drawing on passages from different parts of the Bible, none of them seem to interweave biblical verses quite so intricately as does Aelred in the De Jesu puero duodenni. Although Aelred inserts some realistic details, much of what he adds to the Temple episode does not apparently derive from his exercise of poetic license or from oral or apocryphal traditions but from the Bible in some way (including the novel idea about Jesus’ conference with his Father, which builds upon Christ’s assertion that he had to be “about [his] father’s business” [Lk. 2:49]).

In the De Jesu puero duodenni, Aelred has not relied on any apocryphal infancy texts, as he does, admittedly in only one instance, in the De institutione inclusarum (discussed below), yet in both cases he evinces a fairly open-minded attitude toward material that is not strictly rooted in Scripture, in which, as we have seen, he is wonderfully immersed. He briefly addresses this issue in the De Jesu puero duodenni, when, in the course of speculating about who might have cared for the Child in his parents’ absence, he remarks, “It is attractive (libet) to form opinions or conjectures or surmises on all these matters, but it is wrong to make any rash assertions.”⁶⁹ The apocryphal infancy legends explored in the following chapter have, as I have already noted, a quasi-dogmatic bent in their presentation of Christ’s childhood, in the sense that their narrators do not pause to offer alternatives or state that things might have happened differently. In an essay in which she concentrates on medieval French redactions of Christ’s apocryphal childhood, and contrasts them with the Franciscan Meditationes vitae Christi (which I discuss in the latter part of this chapter), Evelyn Birge Vitz draws an astute parallel between these two genres of texts (namely, apocryphal and meditative). It is helpful to consider her observation here since the Meditationes and the two aforementioned treatises by Aelred all encourage reflection on and visualization of the life of Christ, which, while guided, still leaves readers a good deal of freedom and, most importantly, invites them to see the biblical scenes and characters with their own inner eyes: “when one reads the Gospels, or any part of the Bible, as soon as one wishes to go beyond the schematic narrative and the theological formulations and tries to reconstruct in the mind’s eye a scene—tries to see Jesus in action—one automatically produces apocryphal, non-canonical details. Meditation is, thus, by its very nature, what I would term ‘apocryphogenic.’ ”⁷⁰ While it is true that meditational texts and apocryphal narratives, broadly speaking, engage the reader’s imagination by going beyond the bare narrative of the biblical text, it is important to reiterate that the authorial narrators of the apocrypha do not invite their readers to speculate about Jesus’ boyhood or in any way suggest that he himself may enlighten them about his life or about other issues or concerns. As I have already stated, such narrators pretend to offer historical accounts and do not foster much creative visualization of the child Jesus himself or of homely details about his childhood (such as what his sleeping conditions were like),⁷¹ beyond the reader’s envisioning of the scenes that form the backdrop of certain incidents—the remarkable episodes deemed worthy of recollection. Yet, as the observation by Vitz suggests, the authors of these genres all participate in and foster an imaginative freedom that allows them and their readers, to varying degrees, to explore the life of Christ in concrete though hypothetical ways.

The visual orientation of Aelred’s De Jesu puero duodenni and his De institutione inclusarum (discussed in the following section) is clearly central to the abbot’s experiential approach to monastic spirituality. Speaking of Jesus as the bridegroom desired by the soul, both texts emphasize the Boy’s extraordinary beauty and encourage the reader to imagine his physical appearance and, even more so, to yearn to see him. At the very beginning of the De Jesu puero duodenni, Ivo is reminded of how he is accustomed to gaze at the Boy’s “most beautiful face.”⁷² Later, Aelred surmises that on the trip up to Jerusalem “the grace of heaven shone (refulsisse) from that most beautiful face (speciossimus vultus) with such charm as to make everyone look at it.”⁷³ In describing Jesus as beautiful, Aelred and other medieval writers undoubtedly took their cue from Psalm 44:3, which speaks of one who is “beautiful above the sons of men.” William of St. Thierry, for example, cites this verse in Bernard of Clairvaux’s vita, when he recounts the pious boy’s vision of the Christ Child that occurred before Mass one Christmas Eve: “It was as if Bernard saw re-enacted the birth of the infant Word, more beautiful than all the sons of men…. And this made young Bernard’s heart overflow with a love and longing unheard of in a mere boy.”⁷⁴ Like Bernard, Aelred regards Jesus’ beauty as having a powerful influence on the beholder. His beauty is not simply skin-deep, but divinely radiant and deeply affecting. As we shall see, the Christ Child’s face is similarly described as powerfully radiant in the De institutione inclusarum.

By encouraging his reader to look at Christ’s face without, it should be noted, actually providing a detailed description of it, Aelred increases his reader’s desire for the beatific vision, which was thought to transcend human experience (cf. 1 Cor. 13:12). At the end of his treatise on Jesus’ childhood, Aelred claims that when the soul has reached its twelfth year, so to speak, it will be able to gaze on the bridegroom, who is more comely than the sons of men (Ps. 44:3); in return the Lord will look back through the lattices (Sg. 2:9). Such language reinforces the Christian reader’s conviction that, although Jesus is hidden, he desires to make contact with and even be united with the human soul.⁷⁵ Aelred concludes his treatise by encouraging Ivo to extend the gaze of his mind’s eye “into heaven’s secret places” (oculus mentis in ipsa caeli secreta radium porrexit).⁷⁶ Like an eagle,⁷⁷ the monk is to look up at the radiant sun, seeking to be more profoundly imbued with Christ’s mysteries as he continues to make spiritual progress. Rather than offer hidden knowledge about Christ’s childhood, along the lines of the purveyors of apocryphal lore, Aelred urges his reader to gain an experiential sort of knowledge of Christ through personal prayer and to proceed from there to a more contemplative level of spirituality. Although he modestly refrains from claiming that the book stems from the inner workings of his own interior life, his biographer Walter Daniel asserted that Aelred’s De Jesu puero duodenni came “out of the library of his heart.”⁷⁸ Thus, in this treatise Aelred presumably shared his own experience in approaching divine mysteries. In short, in addressing the desire of his addressee Ivo for deeper knowledge about the Christ Child, Aelred does not disseminate secrets he gleaned from reading esoteric books, such as those containing apocryphal childhood narratives, which had such an allure for medieval audiences. Instead, Aelred offers imaginative and rhetorical prompts that will propel his reader along the course toward a greater intimacy with Christ through prayer and meditation.

The Christ Child in Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum

In the 1160s, Aelred wrote the De institutione inclusarum, at the request of his sister, a recluse, in order to provide her, and other women drawn to the anchoritic way of life, with appropriate guidance and inspiration.⁷⁹ Significantly, only a relatively small proportion of this epistolary treatise deals with the Christ Child: a passage on Jesus’ infancy that occurs within the section of the text that focuses retrospectively on the life of Christ. The majority of Aelred’s letter is aimed at explaining why one should be a recluse and, more importantly, how to be a good one. Aelred’s underlying premise, with which he assumes his reader agrees, is that a female recluse, as a bride of Christ, exists in a state of expectation; having died to the world, she preserves her virginity in this life for her bridegroom, with whom she will finally be united in heaven. At the beginning of the treatise, Aelred tells his sister that one of the main reasons that people in the past have chosen the solitary life is so that they might “enjoy greater freedom in expressing … ardent longing for Christ’s embrace.”⁸⁰ Like other women, she has prudently enclosed herself in a cell, having little contact with other human beings. Yet she has not simply assumed a defensive posture; her goal of union with Christ is lofty. At different points in the treatise, Aelred invites the recluse to embrace Christ in her imagination and thus experience a foretaste of heavenly bliss.

Besides seeking to inspire and encourage his reader, Aelred recommends ways for her to avoid spiritual dangers. To fortify herself against the devil’s attack, the recluse should “never cease to ponder for whose bridal chamber she is being embellished, for whose embraces she is being prepared.” The sensuality of such imagery is presumably not at odds with the communal nature of heaven, for Aelred also tells the recluse to envision Mary leading the dance of the virginal brides of Christ.⁸¹ Approaching the issue of spiritual safeguarding more concretely, Aelred advises the recluse on how she should decorate her cell so as to avoid vanity; by sticking to the bare essentials, she will conform her lifestyle to that of her heavenly spouse, “who became poor although he was rich and chose for himself a poor mother, a poor family, a poor little house also and the squalor (vilitas) of the manger.”⁸² The recluse ought to recall Christ’s sacrifice as well as his childhood. By having a crucifix on the altar, specifically a representation of Jesus with outstretched arms, she will undoubtedly be reminded of his love for her.⁸³ On the whole, Aelred emphasizes the idea that Christ is the recluse’s spouse, even as he employs the image of Jesus as mother, specifically by prompting the recluse to imagine a maternal Christ nursing her with his naked breasts.⁸⁴

It is in Part Three of the epistolary treatise that Aelred focuses on the life of Christ in a brief and basically linear fashion. Aelred does not simply summarize the course of Jesus’ life but serves as a virtual tour guide, imaginatively leading the reader from one place to another in the Holy Land—locations once graced by Christ’s presence. Imaginatively entering into Jesus’ life, the recluse is to carry out the actions that Aelred recommends as a sort of stage director, at times telling her to pause, and at other times rushing her on to the next site, in order to commemorate another event. Marsha Dutton, seeking to distinguish between the two Aelredian works under discussion, says that the treatise addressed to Ivo urges imitation of Christ, whereas that addressed to his sister fosters a participatory experience of Christ, through the reader’s envisioning of herself as a companion of Jesus and also of Mary.⁸⁵ In my view, though these texts may be said to have different emphases, in reality they overlap a good deal. For example, the reader of the De Jesu puero duodenni is, like the reader of the De institutione inclusarum, encouraged to imagine what it would have been like to experience the presence of the Christ Child, as well as his absence. Admittedly, however, the treatise for Ivo centers on a metaphorical finding of the boy Jesus in the Temple as the ultimate goal of one’s spiritual journey, which in its various stages imitates Christ’s physical development. The focus of the De institutione inclusarum, in contrast, is on the literal details of Jesus’ childhood and the latter part of his life; Aelred’s sister is instructed to enter into the drama of Christ’s earthly life and have an imaginatively tactile experience of him, rather than ponder how her life metaphorically parallels that of Christ. The point of such meditations, Aelred states, is to increase the recluse’s love of God by providing a foretaste of Jesus’ sweetness through imagined intimacy with his historical person.⁸⁶

Although Aelred does not write extensively about the early life of Jesus in Part Three of the De institutione inclusarum, the relevant contents of this section are worth considering here, mainly because of their connection to details found in later medieval devotional works, some of which are discussed below. Assuming that the recluse habitually engages in the reading of Scripture, Aelred recommends that she ponder the writings of the prophets, along with Mary, who was similarly engaged in her room before the arrival of the archangel Gabriel. This view of the Virgin as reading at the moment of the Annunciation differs from what we find in the influential Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, where Mary is said to have been engaged in textile work.⁸⁷ Preferring a more contemplative Mary or at least one who uses books to enrich her prayer life, Aelred tells the recluse to imagine what “great sweetness” and fire of love Mary must have experienced upon becoming pregnant with the Lord; she is to focus on “the Virgin, whom she has resolved to imitate, and her son, to whom she is wed.”⁸⁸ Aelred tells his reader to follow Mary to her cousin Elizabeth’s home and focus her gaze on the wombs of the two pregnant women, “in which the salvation of the whole world takes its origin.” He reminds the recluse that even as a fetus, Jesus was her spouse, telling her to “embrace your Bridegroom” in Mary’s womb and Jesus’ “friend” in the womb of Elizabeth.⁸⁹ As we have already seen, medieval theologians commonly spoke of the Christ Child as a spouse. In addition, medieval Christians often envisioned Jesus as a homunculus while in the womb (that is, as a perfectly formed, yet diminutive human).⁹⁰ Building upon Luke 1:41, which notes that John the Baptist leapt in the womb of his mother when she was greeted by the pregnant Mary, Aelred further endows the fetal John with personality by making him seem on friendly terms with his cousin. Making no mention of Joseph, Aelred tells the recluse to be present with Mary at the Nativity—to observe her child with joy. Urged to become even further engaged in this domestic event, so to speak, the reader is to “embrace him in that sweet crib, let love overcome your reluctance, affection drive out fear. Put your lips on those most sacred feet, kiss them again and again”⁹¹—a piece of advice recycled in later devotional texts. Aelred clearly views imaginary contact with Christ’s feet as a way to gain access to him and to experience a foretaste of future intimacy with the divine bridegroom. Later on, along similar lines, he tells the reader to visualize Mary Magdalene kissing Jesus’ feet.⁹² The fear he automatically assumes his reader will feel when she is told to kiss the Infant’s feet may stem from her presumed sense of awe as well as her reserve, an inclination Aelred considers inappropriate in Christ’s bride. Even the otherwise bold housewife-turned-holy-woman Margery Kempe, who flourished in the early fifteenth century, felt some reserve toward Christ (though mostly because of her sense of inferiority stemming from her status as a wife). Hence when she swaddles him in a vision, she does so very gently.⁹³ Yet the Lord mystically assured Margery on another occasion, saying: “thu mayst boldly, whan thu art in thi bed, take me to the [i.e., embrace me] as for this weddyd husbond … and as thy swete sone.”⁹⁴ While not all medieval Christians intermingled erotic and maternal imagery so readily, the spousal connotation of the Christ Child, clearly present in Aelred’s anchoritic text, was in fact quite common, as already noted.

After Aelred tells his reader to meditate on the visit of the shepherds and that of the Magi, he instructs her to accompany the Christ Child to Egypt. He then recounts the story about how the Holy Family was held up by robbers as they fled there. It is important to note that Aelred is apparently the first writer in the West to relate this apocryphal legend, which is ultimately based on a tale included in the early medieval Arabic Infancy Gospel.⁹⁵ A chapter from this apocryphal text tells how the Holy Family encountered two adult thieves on the Flight into Egypt, one of whom prevented the other from harming the Holy Family. Out of gratitude, the infant Jesus promised his mother that he would reward the good thief’s kindness, prophesying that the two men would be crucified with him, but that the one on his right, the good thief, would enter with him into Paradise. Mary vocalizes her prayer that God protect her son from such a fate, but we are not told whether the infant Jesus responds.⁹⁶ This basic story was transmitted to the Greek-speaking world (and thence to Western Europe) through an interpolation made in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus.⁹⁷ Background information about the good thief is provided right after the Greek writer mentions the exchange of words between the two thieves crucified beside Christ, as recorded in Scripture (Lk. 23:39–43).⁹⁸ The apocryphal Greek text gives these thieves names: the bad one on the left is called “Gestas,” while the good one on the right is named “Dismas.”⁹⁹ The name Dismas and the tale of his early encounter with the Holy Family became well known in the West by the later Middle Ages.¹⁰⁰ This figure can be seen as one of many late medieval elaborations on the Passion story and, more specifically, as a part of the widespread devotional trend of the Proleptic Passion, which I explore in more detail below.

Whereas Mary plays a key role in both the Arabic and Greek redactions of this legend, in Aelred’s version the emphasis is on the interaction between the good thief and Jesus as they hung on the cross in close proximity. Struck by the beauty of the Lord hanging beside him, and far from being scandalized by Jesus’ execution as a criminal, the thief in Aelred’s account, who insists on Jesus’ innocence, reminds Christ of the good deed he himself had previously done for him, several years ago. It is worth quoting this passage from the De institutione inclusarum in full since, besides positing a close connection between Jesus’ infancy and Passion, it includes a number of important details, some of which resonate with sources discussed below. In addition, this is the only apocryphal infancy legend that Aelred relates here or elsewhere, so he must have had a good reason for its inclusion. Although the recluse is initially urged to accompany the Child on the Flight into Egypt, in this case, she is not at all told to intervene in the scene. Instead, she is meant to behold the miracle of a quasi death-bed conversion, which reveals Jesus’ lavish mercy:

Accept as true the legend that [Jesus] was captured by robbers on the way and owed his escape to a young man (adolescentulus) who is supposed to have been the son of the robber chief. After seizing his booty he looked at the Child in his Mother’s bosom and was so impressed by the majesty that radiated from his beautiful face as to be convinced that he was something more than man. Inflamed with love he embraced him and said: “O most blessed of children, if ever the occasion arises to take pity on me, then remember me and do not forget the present moment.” This is said to be the thief who was crucified at Christ’s right hand and rebuked the other thief when he blasphemed. “What,” he said, “have you no fear of God, when you are undergoing the same sentence? And we justly enough; we receive no more than the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing amiss.” Then, turning to the Lord and seeing in him that majesty which had distinguished him as a child, he remembered his agreement and said: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” So, in order to kindle love I consider it worthwhile to accept this legend as true, without making any rash assertions as to its authority.¹⁰¹

In this story, emphasis is given to the striking appearance of Jesus when he was both an infant and an adult—in both cases, the majesty of his divinity shines through the humble human circumstances of Jesus’ childhood and his death as a criminal. Recall that in the De Jesu puero duodenni, the Christ Child’s face, along similar lines, was said to be speciossimus (most beautiful), a description which echoes Psalm 44:3. Significantly, in both treatises, light is said to gleam from Jesus’ face.¹⁰²

Aware of its lack of certitude, Aelred still recounts this pious anecdote (in a sketchy fashion, as if he expects his reader to be already familiar with the tale), and then tells the recluse why he did so: it is useful in instilling love. He gives his reader freedom to believe it or not, though at the outset of his narration, he urges her to accept it as true: “Believe that what is said is true…. Therefore I judge it not at all useless for the enkindling of love to hold this opinion, with all boldness of affirming it far away.”¹⁰³ In the De Jesu puero duodenni, as I noted above, Aelred makes a comparable statement.¹⁰⁴ As we shall see in the following chapter, clerics similarly justified (or at least tolerated) the transmission of apocryphal material because of its perceived devotional utility, without worrying whether such legends were actually true. Along similar lines, medieval hagiographers customarily composed biographical narratives about holy people on the basis of what they considered appropriate behavior for those who came to be recognized as saints, rather than from what they knew to be the facts, or in the absence of biographical materials. In addition, they often knowingly used sources that were not completely reliable. For example, the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacobus de Voragine, who was essentially a compiler, repeatedly tells what we (and probably his learned readers) would consider farfetched tales and occasionally alerts his readers to the apocryphal nature of his accounts, saying that he himself regards them as doubtful. He explicitly leaves it up to his readers to judge for themselves whether such stories are worth retelling.¹⁰⁵

Aelred similarly tells his anchoritic reader that the tale about the robber’s son is a pious “opinion.”¹⁰⁶ He undoubtedly sees much value in the apocryphal legend about the Holy Family’s encounter with a good thief. For him, it is pious fiction worthy of attention, unlike, for example, the fictional romances about King Arthur that lay people and even monks were attracted to and took so seriously—worthless material as far as Aelred was concerned, especially when it became an inordinate drain on Christians’ emotions.¹⁰⁷

We might wonder how Aelred became acquainted with the story about the good thief, which originated in the East. As I mention in the following chapter, a few legends about the Holy Family deriving from Eastern sources were, in the later Middle Ages, incorporated into apocryphal infancy narratives that circulated in Latin and the vernacular languages. Such tales were also added to the repertoire of Christian iconography.¹⁰⁸ Yet given that the story about the good thief was generally not incorporated into the apocryphal infancy narratives circulating in Latin in the West, it is probably the case that the legend about the Holy Family’s encounter with thieves was originally transmitted orally. This was perhaps a result of Europeans’ greater contact with eastern Mediterranean cultures, due to their more frequent travel to and interest in that region. Oral transmission seems to account, at least in part, for the appearance in Europe of another tale about the Holy Family, namely their visit to the garden of Matariya near Cairo, which resulted, according to legend, in precious balm growing in that special location for centuries to come, on account of Mary’s washing of the baby Jesus and his clothes in that spot (fig. 18, upper register).¹⁰⁹

The Christ Child in the Piety of St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi

While it was by means of his writings that Aelred of Rievaulx, as far as we know, encouraged both monks and recluses to meditate on the early life of Jesus and to imitate his development by making spiritual progress, Francis of Assisi’s deep devotion to the child Jesus manifested itself very strongly through performance both on special occasions and day-to-day; without doubt, his dramatic words and deeds left a lasting impression upon his fellow Franciscans and also the laity. The most dramatic manifestation of Francis’s piety toward the child Jesus occurred on Christmas Eve in 1223 (three years before his death), when he arranged for a public manger to be set up in Greccio, a small town between Assisi and Rome. Those who have heard of the incident but are unfamiliar with the early accounts of Francis’s life may assume that, at Greccio, he simply participated in a Nativity play or paraliturgical activity of some sort. Yet he actually made arrangements for a Christmas Eve Mass, which he creatively embellished with audiovisual aides and enhanced by his preaching as a deacon. In this section, I will examine the Greccio episode in detail, after discussing the biographical sources for Francis and his disciple Clare that underscore their love for the Christ Child and their efforts to imitate him, especially his embrace of poverty. The corpus of Francis’s writings is quite small, and Clare’s even smaller, but they themselves speak of the Christ Child in a few passages, as do the hagiographical writings centered on these saints. Significantly, both Francis and Clare focused on Luke’s account of the Nativity, apparently disregarding the apocryphal legends about Jesus’ birth. As I explain below, at Greccio, Francis capitalized on the apocryphal detail about the ox and the ass, which seem part and parcel of his love of animals and of all creation more generally. The non-canonicity of these animals’ presence at Christ’s manger was probably not worrisome to Francis and his Christian contemporaries, considering that, at that time, these animals were widely assumed to have been present at the baby Jesus’ manger, which was literally a feeding box. On the whole, Francis, Clare, and their followers seem to have done very little, if anything, with the traditional apocryphal infancy legends. Instead, the two saints called attention to Jesus and Mary’s embrace of poverty at the Nativity despite their status as royalty—an embrace of poverty that is implied by the Gospel account but assumes central place in the Franciscan vision of Christ’s life and their attempts to imitate it exactly.

As we have seen, the Cistercians also meditated on the poverty of the infant Jesus and strove to imitate it by the simplicity of their monastic lifestyle, but they seem to have reflected more generally upon the poverty of the divine Word’s self-emptying (cf. Phil. 2:7), that is, his descent from his heavenly throne, assumption of human flesh, and living as a real human being, among other humans. In other words, the Cistercians did not apparently become fixated on specific circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth, such as the feeding bin in which he was placed and the meager strips of fabric with which he was swaddled—biblical details that captured the imagination of the Franciscans.¹¹⁰ In my view, the difference between early Franciscan and Cistercian approaches to the Nativity can be readily perceived by looking at two short and arguably representative passages that involve a visualization of the Mother and Child. In his De Jesu puero duodenni, Aelred encourages his reader to see “with the eyes of an enlightened mind” the Christ Child “lying in a manger, crying in his mother’s arms, hanging at her breasts”—an embodiment of God’s goodness, he says.¹¹¹ The image of a lactating Virgin and Child that Francis supposedly offered his followers is much more concrete and emotionally intense. According to Thomas of Celano, the Franciscan who authored two of the earliest vitae of the saint, Francis “used to observe the Nativity of the Child Jesus with an immense eagerness above all other solemnities, affirming it was the Feast of Feasts, when God was made a little child (parvulus) and hung on human breasts.” Here, God’s amazing condescension in becoming a child is highlighted by his literal dependency on human (that is, his mother’s nourishing) breasts. Thomas immediately goes on to note that Francis “would lick the images of the baby’s limbs with a hungry meditation, and the melting compassion of his heart toward the child [Jesus] also made him stammer sweet words as babies do. This name [Jesus] was to him like honey.”¹¹² Francis manifests his love for the Christ Child physically, by licking an effigy of Jesus and, further, by becoming like an infant, through his slippage into baby talk.¹¹³ So, while both Aelred and Francis imagine the infant Jesus nursing at Mary’s breast, Francis touches and even tastes the Christ Child with his inner senses, which are activated by external objects. Granted, the Franciscan text I have just quoted is a biographical one, whereas the Cistercian text that I have cited is not. Still, I think it is fair to say that Francis, in comparison to Aelred, was more concrete in the way he imagined the Christ Child and much more demonstrative in his piety toward the infant Jesus.

The aforesaid passage about Francis, which comes from Thomas of Celano’s Vita secunda (1245–47), contains the claim that Francis’s favorite feast was Christmas; it is this aspect of the saint’s piety that I will consider first. By affirming that the Nativity of the child Jesus “was the Feast of Feasts,” Francis (as he is presented by Thomas) gives the impression that he considers Christmas more important than Easter, the feast of Christ’s Resurrection, traditionally regarded as the climax of the liturgical year. In a sermon aimed at preparing Christians for the upcoming fast of Lent, Pope Leo the Great (d. 461) enunciates the common idea that Christmas is subordinate to Easter when he says: “we well know that the Paschal Mystery is the chief [of festivals], and the calendar of the whole year disposes us to enter into it properly and worthily.”¹¹⁴ Francis, I suspect, would have agreed with this idea; nonetheless, he sees the two feasts as inextricably linked and chooses to place rhetorical emphasis on the feast that commemorates the beginning of Christ’s life. In The Assisi Compilation (1244–60), an early Franciscan collection of stories about the saint, we are given Francis’s reason for holding Christmas in such high esteem: “although the Lord may have accomplished our salvation in his other solemnities, nevertheless, once he was born to us … it was certain that we would be saved.”¹¹⁵ In this passage, Francis cites part of Isaiah 9:6 (“For a child [parvulus] is born to us, and a son is given to us”). For Francis, this verse, which became the Introit for the Third Mass of Christmas, encapsulates the idea that the Son of God was born in order to be offered to God as a sacrifice that would redeem humankind. Francis seems to have been quite enthusiastic about this surprising and paradoxical mystery at the root of Christianity. Hence the verse occurs in the Office for the Passion that Francis himself composed, specifically, as the antiphon for the Vespers that were to be used from the Nativity to Epiphany: “This is the day the Lord has made / let us rejoice and be glad in it (Ps. 117:24). / For the Most Holy Child has been given to us (Isa. 9:6) / and has been born for us on the way [i.e., to Bethlehem] / and placed in a manger / because he did not have a place in the inn.”¹¹⁶ These verses express joy on account of the Father’s gift of the Son, who already begins to suffer at his Nativity, because of the lowly conditions in which Mary gave birth to her child. For Francis, then, the feast of Christmas commemorates the beginning of grace and points forward to Passiontide and, beyond it, to Easter; thus, the two main feasts of the liturgical year celebrate one and the same divine plan for the redemption. This explains why, at Christmas, Francis is not simply optimistic and merry, but confident of salvation and filled with profound joy. According to Thomas of Celano, the saint told his friars that they should eat meat if Christmas occurred on a Friday; he wanted “even the walls to eat meat on that day” or “at least be rubbed with grease!” He also desired that the poor be fed by the rich, and that oxen and asses be given extra hay. In addition, he wished to beseech the Emperor to issue a decree that wheat and grain be thrown on the roads for “our sisters the larks.”¹¹⁷

Yet joy was not the only emotion Francis experienced at Christmas. In the same chapter from the Vita secunda, Thomas goes on to recount how Francis was filled with compassion when he considered the circumstances of the Nativity: “He could not recall without tears the great want surrounding the little, poor Virgin (paupercula Virgo) on that day. One day when he was sitting down to dinner a brother mentioned the poverty of the Virgin, and reflected on the want of Christ her Son. No sooner had he heard this than he got up from the table, groaning with sobs of pain, and bathed in tears ate the rest of his bread on the naked ground. He used to say this must be a royal virtue, since it shone so remarkably in a King and Queen.”¹¹⁸ As is clear from such courtly language, Francis regards the paupercula Mary and her infant son as the ultimate royalty.¹¹⁹ The influential Franciscan theologian and Minister General Bonaventure (d. 1274) likewise emphasized the poverty that Christ embraced: “Christ was poor at his birth, poor during the course of his life, and poor at his death. In order to make poverty lovable to the world, he chose a most poor Mother.” For Francis, Christ’s wilful embrace of poverty required a radical response. Thus, in the anecdote mentioned above, he thinks it inappropriate for one who is Mary and Jesus’ subject (namely himself) to enjoy greater comfort than they, and so sits on the ground, a position associated with humility.¹²⁰ As we shall see, Francis similarly speaks of the Christ Child as “the poor King” when he preached as a deacon at Greccio. Francis’s fondness for courtly imagery, reflected in the passage above, is also seen in his comparison of the friars to minstrels and to the knights of the Round Table.¹²¹ As the greatest of knights, like Lancelot, Francis seems to live flamboyantly in a quasi-Arthurian world, ruled by Christ and Mary.¹²²

Another anecdote about Francis sitting on the floor at Christmas is worth considering since it likewise suggests that the saint associated the Nativity with poverty and (to a lesser extent) humility. One Christmas the friars in Greccio were expecting a visit from a Minister of the Franciscan Order, and so set the table elegantly, presumably to show him honor. Francis, who was staying with these friars at that time, knocked at the door and asked for alms, disguised as a beggar, but he was immediately recognized by his fellow friars. After coming in and taking a dish of food, Francis sat on the floor, rather than at the table on the dais with the other brothers. Sighing, Francis explained his disappointment: “When I saw the table finely and elaborately prepared, I considered that this was not a table of poor religious, who go door-to-door [i.e., begging] each day. For more than other religious, we should follow the example of poverty and humility in all things.”¹²³ This anecdote provides a glimpse into Francis’s response to Christ’s birth on the feast of Christmas itself, but his thoughts (to the extent that hagiography gives us access to them) seem to have been filled with the Nativity, and his actions shaped by his reflection on it, all the time.

As is well known, Francis’s biographers interpret his reception of the stigmata at La Verna in 1224, two years before his death, as the culmination of his perpetual efforts to imitate the crucified Savior during his life. Yet, if we read the sources carefully, it becomes clear that the saint strove to imitate Christ in the manger, as well as Jesus on the cross. Francis’s life as a friar began when he stripped himself publicly before the bishop of Assisi. Returning his fine clothing to his father, a wealthy cloth merchant, Francis informed him that his primary allegiance would henceforth be to his Father in heaven.¹²⁴ In a rendering of this famous episode by the modern Italian printer Rolando Dominici (fig. 5), Francis is portrayed covered from the waist down with the bishop’s mantle, the way he is depicted in the fresco dedicated to this event in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi. Dominici seems to suggest a source of inspiration for Francis at this crucial moment, by his placement of the half-swaddled baby Jesus lying practically on the ground in front of Francis.¹²⁵ The implication that the young convert Francis was, as it were, swaddled like the poor naked Christ Child may seem novel, but it is actually rooted in the written sources. Recall that in Aelred’s De Jesu puero duodenni infancy signified spiritual conversion. Bonaventure echoes this idea in his spiritual treatise De quinque festivitatibus pueri Jesu, a short devotional text that, like Aelred’s treatise on the twelve-year-old Jesus, makes an extended analogy between the earliest events of Christ’s life, on the one hand, and the soul’s conversion and spiritual growth, on the other.¹²⁶ A comparison between Francis at the beginning of his conversion and the infant Jesus is appropriate because, in his youth, the future saint experienced a spiritual rebirth, in which he embraced a sort of newness. Like a newborn, who has no clothing or other possessions, Francis divested himself of all material goods, even his underwear, when he severed his ties with his father and rejected his worldly ways.¹²⁷ Thomas of Celano comments on the advantage Francis gained by taking off his clothes: “Now he wrestles naked with the naked”—a reference to the traditional idea of spiritual combat, as well as an allusion to the ancient practice of pankration (which involved wrestling in the nude).¹²⁸ Thomas adds that now “only the wall of the flesh would separate [Francis] from the vision of God,” implying that clothing and other earthly goods are a hindrance to one who intensely seeks union with the divine.

Throughout his life as a friar, Francis—who, again, could have dressed in fine clothes in life, because of his social standing, but decisively opted not to, just as the Word himself chose poverty—insisted on having only one rough tunic, which he often shared or gave away when he saw a person in need.¹²⁹ At his death, he ordered that he be laid naked on the “naked ground.” A connection between the saint’s nakedness at the beginning and end of his religious life is explicitly made by Bonaventure, whose vita of Francis became the official version for the Franciscan Order in 1266: “In all things he wished without hesitation to be conformed to Christ crucified who hung on the cross poor, suffering, and naked. Naked he lingered before the bishop at the beginning of his conversion; and, for this reason, at the end of his life, he wanted to leave this world naked.”¹³⁰ In praising Francis’s nakedness, Bonaventure may have in mind the famous remark of Job (1:21; cf. Ecclesiastes 5:14) about his exiting from his mother’s womb naked and leaving the world in that state as well. Yet, by saying that Francis was naked “at the beginning” (of his life as a religious), Bonaventure may also have in mind the nearly naked Christ Child. The popular Franciscan-authored devotional text Meditationes vitae Christi (about which I will say more below) draws attention to Christ’s lack of clothing at his birth and at his death when it describes Mary wrapping the baby Jesus in her veil and later “girding him with her head covering,” when he was stripped completely naked at the Passion.¹³¹

Figure 5. The converted St. Francis stripped of clothes standing next to the baby Jesus lying on the ground. Print by Rolando Dominici (twenty-first century). By permission of the artist.

Bonaventure himself conflates Christ’s infancy with his Passion in a few places of his writings. For instance, in his De perfectione vitae ad sorores, he remarks that “from the first day of his life to his last, from the instant of birth to the instant of death, pain and sorrow were his companions. So he himself has said through the prophet: ‘I am afflicted and in agony from my youth’ (Ps. 87:16); and elsewhere: ‘I have been scourged all the day’ (Ps. 72:14), meaning all his life.”¹³² In his Vitis mystica, Bonaventure reiterates the idea that Jesus’ entire life was filled with suffering, when he explains that “the term ‘passion’ ” does not apply “to the one day only on which he died, but to the whole extent of his life.”¹³³ He again cites Psalm 87:16 in support of this interpretation.¹³⁴ In a later chapter, Bonaventure reflects on the idea that “the crucifixion of Jesus actually began at his birth,” explaining that it was not an accident that he was “born in a strange place, in mid-winter, in the depth of the night, outside the inn, of a Mother poor and humble. Although at this time there was no shedding of his blood, it did come about after only seven days had passed,” that is, at the Circumcision.¹³⁵ Along similar lines, St. Anthony of Padua, in a sermon for the feast of the Circumcision, observed, “Christ’s whole life was in blood … Christ was blood-red at the beginning and at the end of his life.”¹³⁶ In light of such passages, which presumably distill the spirituality of the order’s founder, I think it is fair to say that Francis of Assisi was thought to have imitated Christ in the sufferings he endured, not just at his Passion, but throughout his life—including its earliest moments. Indeed, all of Christ’s life entailed suffering that stemmed from poverty.

The centrality of Christ’s poverty to the Franciscan way of life is evident from the Regula non bullata, the Rule that Francis composed for his friars and that Pope Innocent III orally approved in 1209. When Francis says that the friars ought to “strive to follow the humility and poverty of our Lord Jesus Christ,” having nothing but food and clothing, he likely has in mind the Christ Child as well as the adult Jesus, who lived as an itinerant preacher content with bare necessities. Francis continues by telling the brothers not to be ashamed to beg, since Jesus himself was not ashamed to do so. “He was poor and a stranger and lived on alms—he, the Blessed Virgin, and his disciples.”¹³⁷ A more nuanced presentation of Jesus as a mendicant (literally, “one who begs”) is found in the Franciscan Meditationes vitae Christi, in the chapter on the Holy Family’s return from Egypt. Here, the boy Jesus seems to accept alms with unease: when his neighbors offered him money for traveling expenses for the family’s return from Egypt, “the boy was embarrassed … but out of his love of poverty, he opened his hand, shamefacedly accepted the money and expressed thanks.”¹³⁸ The implication is that by going against his natural disinclination to accept handouts, the Christ Child reveals his love of poverty as well as his nobility.¹³⁹ In the depiction of this incident in the well-known illustrated manuscript containing an Italian version of the Meditationes (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ital. 115, fol. 45r; fig. 6), a small-looking Christ Child (who, according to the text, would be about nine years old) appears a bit overwhelmed by the situation, as he opens his hand to receive money from an old man standing behind him.¹⁴⁰ Aelred of Rievaulx had earlier suggested that the young Jesus had begged for necessities, specifically during his three-day sojourn in Jerusalem, yet he did not elaborate on that detail.¹⁴¹ Just as Francis and his followers can be said to have acted like the child Jesus by begging, so, by wearing “poor clothes” patched “with sackcloth and other pieces” (namely, “a tunic with a hood”),¹⁴² they arguably patterned themselves after the newborn Christ Child, who was humbly wrapped with swaddling clothes (Lk. 2:7).

While Francis himself, in the surviving texts written by him, does not explicitly speak about the strips of fabric Mary used to swaddle her infant, his disciple Clare of Assisi did. In the monastic Rule she wrote for her sisters, Clare emphasizes that the infant Jesus was scantily covered, a detail she weaves into her instructions concerning the nuns’ clothing: “Out of love of the most holy and beloved Child wrapped in poor swaddling clothes (pauperculis panniculis involutus) and placed in a manger and of his most holy mother, I admonish, beg, and encourage my sisters to wear poor garments.”¹⁴³ Similarly, in her Fourth Letter to Agnes of Prague (a Bohemian princess who had become a Poor Clare nun around twenty years earlier), Clare urges her to contemplate Christ, her heavenly spouse: “Look, I say, at the border of this mirror, that is, the poverty of him who was placed in a manger and wrapped in swaddling clothes (in panniculis involutus). O marvelous humility! O astonishing poverty! The King of angels, the Lord of heaven and earth, is laid in a manger!”¹⁴⁴ Clare’s use of the diminutive form of the word panni (“strips of fabric”), which appears in Luke 2:7, is suggestive of rags, or at least of paltry pieces of cloth—pitiful strips of fabric that barely, and not at all worthily, cover the royal Babe.¹⁴⁵ Like Francis, Clare calls attention to the Infant’s royalty, which makes the humble conditions of the Nativity seem even more astonishing. Moreover, such a characterization emphasizes the nobility of Agnes’s heavenly spouse, a fitting match for a princess. Just as Francis was extremely ascetic as regards his use of clothing, occasionally appearing naked in public and instructing other friars to do so, as a form of penance,¹⁴⁶ so Clare, a woman of the nobility, “was content with only one tunic of lazzo (a rough fabric) and one mantle,” as a witness testified in Clare’s Process of Canonization.¹⁴⁷ Modestly wearing her rough-hewn garment, in deference to social norms, Clare nevertheless boldly envisioned herself fighting naked against the devil.¹⁴⁸ Although Francis himself does not employ the image of pankration, as Clare rather remarkably does, they both seem to have thought of Christ’s poverty as fundamentally consisting of a lack of clothing.

Figure 6. The Christ Child accepting alms, in an illustrated manuscript of the Meditationes vitae Christi. Paris, BnF, ital. 115, fol. 45r (fourteenth century). By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

That Francis’s fellow friars thought of him as a mirror image of the Christ Child is indicated by the comparisons they made between Francis and the baby Jesus. Franciscan sources recount how Lady Jacoba, an ardent admirer of Francis, was mystically summoned to the saint as he approached death. She brought fabric for his burial shroud, wax and incense for his funeral, as well as the ingredients needed for making the confection (marzipan) that Francis was extremely fond of. Although Lady Jacoba was a solo bringer of provisions for the one she so admired, the sources compare her to the Three Kings who offered gifts to the child Jesus. In his request for sweets (and his lack of fear of death), Francis seems childlike, yet he resembles the Christ Child most properly in his embrace of poverty. As the Assisi Compilation states: the Lord “inspired the Kings to travel with gifts to honor the child, his beloved Son, in the days of his birth and his poverty. So too he willed to inspire this noble lady in a faraway region to travel with gifts to honor and venerate” the body of Francis, “who loved the poverty of his beloved Son with so much fervor and love in life and in death.”¹⁴⁹

Francis’s admirers extended the comparison of the saint to the Christ Child even further in the following century, when they claimed that Francis was born in a stable, in proximity to an ox and an ass. According to legend, when his mother Lady Pica came to term but had not yet entered into labor, she was told by a mysterious stranger, who knocked at the door, that she should leave her chamber and go into the stable where she would be able to give birth. Today, in Assisi, one can still read the following inscription over the door of the chapel S. Francesco il Piccolo: “This oratory was the stable of the ox and the ass in which St. Francis, the mirror of the world, was born.”¹⁵⁰ Although the legend seems to have emerged only in the second half of the fourteenth century and the house of Pietro Bernardone, Francis’s father, was apparently located elsewhere in the town of Assisi, the tale about Francis’s birth remains valuable since it reveals how Francis’s life was believed to mirror Christ’s at its very beginning, not simply later on, most visibly when he received the stigmata. The Renaissance artist Benozzo Gozzoli (d. 1452) transmits this legend in his cycle on the life of St. Francis that adorns the sanctuary walls of the church of S. Francesco in Montefalco (fig. 7).¹⁵¹ Significantly, a handmaiden who has just given the newborn Francis his first bath holds him up naked so that the other women, and also animals in attendance, may see this remarkably Christ-like child. Francis’s birth, like that of other infants destined to become saints, was accompanied by a mysterious occurrence that presaged his future career: following his conversion in his youth, Francis earnestly imitated Christ’s lowliness (including his nakedness) and strove to spread love of the baby Jesus.¹⁵² Francis is similarly likened to the Christ Child in a pair of late thirteenth-century stained glass lancets in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi; in parallel fashion, the windows represent a standing figure holding a smaller, child(like) figure (fig. 8). On the left, Christ with a crossed nimbus embraces an adult yet miniature version of Francis of Assisi bearing the stigmata, who, as it were floating before Christ, holds a book and a cross. On the right, the Virgin holds the Christ Child frontally, almost as if he were seated on her lap, while his hands are basically in the same position as those of Francis. The suggestion is that Francis is the perfect image of Christ by virtue of sharing in his sufferings at the Passion and also by imitating the Christ Child. Furthermore, the image encourages the viewer to regard Francis as maternally cared for by Jesus and also as a brother to the Christ Child.¹⁵³ From such examples we can see how, from the perspective of Francis’s followers, he and Christ were mirror images of each other.

Figure 7. The legendary birth of Francis of Assisi in a stable. Fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, Church of S. Francesco, Montefalco (fifteenth century). By permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 8. St. Francis of Assisi held by Christ; the Christ Child held by Mary. Stained glass lancets, Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi (late thirteenth century). By permission of G. Ruf, www.assisi.de.

The merging of the figures of Francis and the Christ Child is also manifested in another way: in the attribution to the child Jesus of Franciscan features. We have already encountered an example of this in the portrayal of the Boy as a recipient of alms found in the Meditationes vitae Christi. The depiction of Jesus as a Franciscan can also be seen in an early fourteenth-century painting of the Madonna and Child, ascribed to the Primo Maestro di Santa Chiara, now in the Museo Diocesano in Spoleto. Here the Christ Child is dressed as a Franciscan, with brown wool habit, triple-knotted cord, and bare feet.¹⁵⁴ The anonymous author of the late thirteenth-century Meditatio pauperis in solitudine emphasizes Christ’s Franciscanism even more explicitly, stating that Christ “was the first and true Lesser Brother (frater minor) according to the perfection of the … virtues [viz., poverty, love and humility] which shone out in him in a most perfect way.”¹⁵⁵

The Christ Child—Alive Again—at Greccio

Having made the case that Francis and Clare sought to imitate the Christ Child, particularly the Infant’s embrace of poverty, I will now consider the famous episode at Greccio on Christmas Eve in 1223. On this occasion, Francis celebrated the feast of the Nativity with an outdoor Mass, using props and the setting of nature to help his audience visualize the first Christmas, when the Son of God came forth from Mary’s womb to live among humans—a descent of the divine to earth that was later repeated by Christ’s embodiment in the Eucharist. The saint’s motives for orchestrating a celebration of Christmas that was certainly more dramatic than usual were, in my view, primarily devotional: he wished to draw his audience’s attention to the virtues of the Christ Child, which he himself had cultivated for many years, to awaken the participants’ piety toward the baby Jesus, and to help them realize that the Child was perpetually in their midst and accessible to them, in the consecrated Eucharistic host.

Franciscan belief in the comforting and indeed unfailingly protective presence of the child Jesus hidden within the Eucharist is dramatically illustrated by a story told about how St. Clare once pleaded with the Lord, before the Eucharistic host, that he defend the nuns from the Saracens who were on the verge of invading her convent of San Damiano. In the most detailed account of this incident that survives, a chapter from the Legend of Saint Clare, it is the Christ Child who answers her prayers: a voice, “as if of a little child,” resounded in her ears: “I will always defend you.” So even when the child Jesus was not audible or visible to his devotees, he continually watched over them through his abiding presence in the Eucharist.¹⁵⁶ Fourteenth-century frescoes depicting this incident, in the oratory of the convent of San Damiano, depict Clare and her nuns kneeling before the Christ Child, who stands in the niche where a tabernacle or pyx used to be kept. The nuns’ reliance upon the power of the Christ Child, who blesses the sisters with his right hand, is vividly commemorated in this scene (fig. 9).¹⁵⁷

Belief in the Christ Child’s presence in the Eucharist and a commemoration of the deprivations attending his Nativity, rather than his mighty power, stressed in the aforesaid tale about Clare and her convent, is central to the early accounts of the Christmas celebration at Greccio. In what follows, I will focus on Francis’s devotional motives, seeking to deduce from details found in the legendary accounts of the episode what he most admired about the Christ Child. In this section, I will cite the description of the event at Greccio that Thomas of Celano provides at the end of Book One of his Vita prima, since this is the earliest source we have, yet I will also refer to Bonaventure’s later account, which includes a few details not found in the earlier version. At Greccio, Francis emphasizes the poverty and suffering of the Christ Child, seeing the Nativity and the Passion as part of a single continuum, which is accessible to Christians, in various times and places, in a special way through the Eucharist.

Thomas begins his chapter on the incident at Greccio by saying that Francis continuously strove to trace Christ’s footsteps and meditated on his words and deeds so assiduously “that he scarcely wanted to think of anything else.” He adds that Francis was totally focused on the humility of the Incarnation and the charity of the Passion, a remark that implies that the saint concentrated on both the beginning and endpoints of Jesus’ life. As we have seen, Francis rejoiced at Christmas because he saw the Nativity as the first step of a divinely planned course of events that would, of necessity, lead to redemption. In a short exhortatory text he authored, Francis says that it was the Father’s will that the Son, “whom he gave to us and who was born for us (Isa. 9:6), should offer himself through his own blood as a sacrifice and oblation on the altar of the cross (ara crucis).”¹⁵⁸ Francis’s association of the Nativity with the Passion and with the Eucharist is reflected in this passage and also (though more subtly) in Thomas’s account of Christmas at Greccio.

Figure 9. Above, St. Clare of Assisi and the nuns of San Damiano, in need of protection against the invading Saracens, praying before the Christ Child in a Eucharistic niche. Opposite, detail of the Christ Child blessing his devotees. Fresco, Oratory, San Damiano Convent, Assisi (fourteenth century). By permission of Stefan Diller.

Thomas’s statement that Francis’s greatest desire was “to retrace [Jesus’] footsteps completely” speaks to the saint’s eagerness to experience the life of Christ vicariously rather than as a disinterested observer, and to be perfectly conformed to it. Yet Thomas’s remark also raises the question of whether Francis sought to walk in Christ’s footsteps literally by making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Francis took great pains to visit the Sultan Malik al-Kamil in Egypt a few years prior to the incident at Greccio, probably wishing to achieve more than one end by his trip: his own martyrdom, the conversion of Muslims, and the securing of peace in the Holy Land, which was then under the sultan’s authority.¹⁵⁹ While none of the early sources say that Francis went to Jerusalem, some later historians suggested and even claimed that he did.¹⁶⁰ This position is no longer considered tenable, but it is worthwhile speculating here about Francis’s attitude toward pilgrimage, especially to the Holy Land, given that, in the episode under consideration, Greccio is made to resemble Bethlehem. Chiara Frugoni raises the possibility that the saint erected the manger scene at Greccio as a devotional alternative to pilgrimage to Bethlehem, which had been closely linked with the crusade movement. This is certainly one way of interpreting Thomas of Celano’s remark that “out of Greccio was made a new Bethlehem.”¹⁶¹

Perhaps Francis wished to convey the message that making a pilgrimage to the manger of Bethlehem was easier than it seemed, since Christmas was reenacted—or rather mystically recurred—on the altar at every Mass. Frugoni cites a passage from an anonymous treatise from the late twelfth century, in which a monk who wishes to go to Bethlehem is told that every altar, in every church, is the manger of the Christ Child: “You have no need to travel since you could find all these things at home. Christ, who was once born in Bethlehem according to the flesh, and was found in a manger, is now found everywhere, on all the altars of Holy Church … Therefore you do not need to go across the sea to seek in one place that which is found everywhere. Your altar a short way off is your Bethlehem.”¹⁶² The idea that the altar is the manger and also the cross is expressed in numerous homilies and commentaries on Scripture from the patristic and medieval periods.¹⁶³ But if a medieval Christian, grasping such mystical conflations, still insisted on making contact with a relic of the Nativity, he or she could travel less distantly by going to Rome, to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where purported relics of the manger from Bethlehem had been venerated for centuries. There, in a special chapel, midnight Mass of Christmas Eve was celebrated at an altar that stood over “five small boards of Levantine sycamore venerated as the crib of Christ.”¹⁶⁴ While Francis, at the Christmas celebration at Greccio, may have consciously imitated the nocturns and the Midnight Mass of the Roman liturgy as they were prayed in Santa Maria Maggiore (“supra praesepe”),¹⁶⁵ I very much doubt that it was his intention to draw pilgrims away from either Rome or Bethlehem.

In all likelihood, Francis simply wanted to reinvigorate people’s devotion to the Christ Child as the loving Redeemer who incredibly humbled himself at the Incarnation and to reiterate the traditional belief that Jesus is incarnated on the altar at Mass. The transformation of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood (an age-old doctrine officially promulgated as “transubstantiation” a few years earlier, at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215) paralleled Jesus’ assumption of flesh within Mary. In one of his “Admonitions,” Francis explains that when Christians view the host, they are unable to see Jesus in his humanity, just as the people around Christ were unable to see his divinity during his lifetime. Francis elaborates on this analogy: “Behold, each day he humbles himself as when he came from the royal throne (Wis. 18:15) into the Virgin’s womb; each day he himself comes to us, appearing humbly; each day he comes down from the bosom of the Father upon the altar in the hands of the priest. As he revealed himself to the holy apostles in true flesh, so he reveals himself to us now in sacred bread…. And in this way the Lord is always with his faithful, as he himself says: ‘Behold I am with you until the end of the age’ ” (Matt. 28:20).¹⁶⁶ In this passage, Francis calls attention to the divine humility fundamental to the Incarnation and also to the Eucharist; in both cases, God puts aside his royal magnificence and invites humans to exercise faith in his presence, which cannot be truly, that is, fully, seen. By conflating the baby Jesus with the Eucharistic host, Francis underscores the continual presence of the Lord, which is also a perpetual manifestation of his humility.

To return to what can only be speculations regarding Francis’s attitudes toward the role of specific geographic places within Christians’ spirituality: might his undeniable belief in Jesus’ Eucharistic omnipresence, in time and place, have led him to regard pilgrimage to Bethlehem and the other holy sites as unnecessary and otiose? While this is possible, I think that Francis would have encouraged European Christians to go to the Holy Land if they had the means to do so, given his intense focus on the historical life of Christ as transmitted by the canonical gospels.

Both Thomas and Bonaventure are fairly specific when it comes to enumerating the physical objects that Francis requested be prepared for the upcoming celebration at Greccio. It is important to note the objects that are named and those that are not, rather than assume that the mise-en-scène devised by Francis was identical to the large, if not life-size, manger scenes that in modern times have been displayed at Christmastime.¹⁶⁷ Thomas of Celano relates that Francis summoned a friend of his, a virtuous layman named John (the knight Giovanni Velita), and gave him instructions about what he should prepare. He also shared with him his reasoning for bringing about such a celebration: “For I wish to enact the memory of that babe who was born in Bethlehem: to see with my own bodily eyes the discomfort of his infant needs (infantilium necessitatum eius incommoda), how he lay in a manger (praesepe), and how with an ox and an ass standing by, he rested on hay.”¹⁶⁸ This instruction regarding props, so to speak, is fairly simple yet its language is precise and thus in need of careful examination.

First, though, we might consider an objection regarding the whole scenario: given that Francis (according to Thomas of Celano) continuously meditated on the Gospel, it seems superfluous for the saint to have insisted upon seeing the Nativity with his bodily eyes. However, given that religious art (and presumably also the liturgy and religious drama) had a powerful effect upon him, Francis’s desire to use props and appropriate scenery should not surprise us. When praying before the crucifix in the church of San Damiano, in the early stage of his conversion, Francis heard Christ tell him to rebuild his church: there, at the cross, a wonder occurred, for “with the lips of the painting (labiis picturae deductis), the image of Christ crucified spoke to him.”¹⁶⁹ Considering that he was profoundly influenced by religious art, I think it is fair to assume that Francis would have agreed with the thirteenth-century Dominican John Balbi of Genoa, who says that there are “three reasons for the institution of images in churches. First, for the instruction of the uneducated, who seem to be taught by them as if by books. Second, so that the mystery of the Incarnation and the examples of the saints may be the more in our memory while they are daily represented to our eyes. Third, to excite the feeling of devotion, which is more efficaciously aroused by things seen than by things heard.”¹⁷⁰ Balbi’s first point reiterates the ancient view of Gregory the Great, which was repeated, more recently, by Peter Comestor, who said that pictures in churches serve, as it were, as books for the laity.¹⁷¹ Drama, as a “quick” (that is, living) book, was thought to have an even stronger impact on the imagination than a picture or a series of pictures.¹⁷²

Scholars have often suggested that Francis’s Christmas celebration at Greccio was a popularization of the Christmas plays that had been performed in monasteries and cathedrals for at least two centuries. These plays imitated the dramatizations performed at Easter, which, as is well known, originally developed from an elaboration of the “Quem quaeretis” trope—the chanted question “Whom do you seek?” supposedly posed by an angel to the women who came to Jesus’ tomb on Easter Sunday morning.¹⁷³ In medieval Christmas plays, midwives ask a similar question of the shepherds or the Magi.¹⁷⁴ Such plays often involved a manger (praesepe) and an image of the Mother and Child, or just the Child, placed in or near it.¹⁷⁵ According to the fourteenth-century liturgical ordinary for the Officium Pastorum performed at the cathedral at Rouen, “a manger is to be prepared behind the altar and an image of St. Mary placed in it.” When the shepherds tell the midwives that they are in search of “the Savior Christ,” the women, “opening a curtain, show them the Child, saying: ‘The infant is here.’ ”¹⁷⁶ Although Francis may have been influenced by such plays performed in a number of monastic settings, he probably borrowed the idea of having Mass said over a manger more directly from the Christmas liturgy as it was executed at Santa Maria Maggiore. Francis certainly employed props at Greccio, but his manger scene—as far as we know—did not involve performers with scripted actions and speeches. As Erwin Rosenthal stated a number years ago: “The mise-en-scène at Greccio … cannot be called a liturgical play … but it does have in common with the ‘sacre rappresentazioni’ the intention of materializing the legend, of transposing it into living image. But,” he emphasizes, “there was no dialogue, there were no players in Greccio.”¹⁷⁷

Let us pursue the question of Francis’s liturgical props further. According to Thomas of Celano, the saint asked for a manger (praesepe); he did not explicitly request that an image of the Christ Child (or of the Madonna and Child) be brought to the Christmas celebration. I think there are two possibilities here. First: that Francis was concerned that the participants in the Mass at Greccio recognize the Christ Child on the altar, in the Eucharistic host, and so did not actually use an effigy—a hypothesis to which I will return shortly. The second, and more likely, possibility is that when Francis asked for a praesepe he meant that an effigy of the Christ Child should be brought with a manger. But this Latin word is admittedly problematic. As Rudolph Berliner pointed out, the Latin words praesepe or praesepium literally “mean ‘a stable’ or ‘a manger.’ In this special case [of the Nativity], the words can mean the whole cave as well as only that concavity which was the actual resting place of the Child.”¹⁷⁸ Although it is possible that Francis wanted a whole stablelike cave prepared when he requested a praesepe¹⁷⁹ (the mountain in Greccio on which the event occurred is indeed rocky and cavernous),¹⁸⁰ I suspect that by using the latter word he simply meant a “manger,” probably with an effigy in it. In his account of what actually happened that Christmas at Greccio (which, significantly, he describes in the present tense, as if the event were happening anew), Thomas noted that “over the manger (supra praesepe) the solemnities of the Mass are celebrated.”¹⁸¹ “Praesepe” here obviously means “feeding bin,” above (or perhaps near) which was placed a portable altar of some sort, since the Mass took place outdoors.¹⁸² Thomas describes the setting as a forest (silva), which would have been able to accommodate a large number of people, who might have gathered around an outdoor grotto. As we shall see, this rustic setting is important because it enabled people, animals, and even the natural surroundings to participate in the joyful re-presentation of the Savior’s birth.

The early artistic representations of the Mass of Greccio, which vary in detail, do not provide a definitive answer to the question of the actual furniture and accessory props used on this occasion (or the precise setting), nor do they help much in determining if some kind of Christ-Child statue was used. In the scene that depicts the Greccio episode in the Bardi Dossal (ca. 1245), in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, we see a priest at an altar and, in front of it, a swaddled infant Jesus lying upon a rocky mound.¹⁸³ In the fresco (s. XIV/XV) depicting the Greccio episode in the Chiesa di San Francesco in Pistoia, we see a box-like manger placed next to an altar, both of which are underneath a simple wooden structure surrounded by a leafy setting.¹⁸⁴ In a number of images, the Mass occurs within a church, as in the “Miracle of the Crib at Greccio” fresco in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi, which probably depicts the annual commemoration of the Greccio Mass in the Lower Church, rather than the historical event itself (fig. 10).¹⁸⁵ My concern, though, is not so much with the setting of the event, but rather with the question of whether Francis used an effigy of the Christ Child in that liturgical celebration. All of the surviving depictions of Greccio show a swaddled baby, either lying in the manger or being embraced by Francis hovering over it.

After calling attention to the saint’s preaching about the Christ Child’s poverty, both Thomas and Bonaventure speak of the sudden appearance of “a little child lying lifeless in the manger,” whom Francis “approach[ed] and waken[ed] … from a deep sleep.” Bonaventure adds that the child was “beautiful” and that Francis “embraced” it.¹⁸⁶ While both authors certainly imply that the child was Jesus, they speak about the boy in vague terms. This can be considered analogous to the way in which the Christ Child is spoken about in other hagiographical texts that recount how he unexpectedly appeared to someone, often to a holy person as a reward or to provide some consolation. For example, in the Life of St. Dorothy (appended to the Legenda aurea), right before the virgin is beheaded, a mysterious child appears to her, “dressed in purple, barefooted, with curly hair, with stars on his garment, bearing in his hand … a little basket, with three roses and as many apples.”¹⁸⁷ The beauty of the Child who mysteriously appears to a holy person usually reveals who he is (both to the saint and to the reader), and it is in this sense that we should understand Bonaventure’s remark that John of Greccio saw a “puerulus quidam valde formosus” (literally, “a certain very beautiful little boy”).¹⁸⁸ Both Thomas and Bonaventure indicate that only one of the bystanders saw the lovely child who suddenly appeared (Thomas omits the beholder’s name). The other participants’ lack of awareness of the miracle may symbolize their spiritual tepidity, but it may also be a way for the authors to indicate the special holiness of the beholder John—his being granted a special, mystical privilege to share in Francis’s intimacy with the baby Jesus. Thomas explicitly offers a symbolic interpretation of this apparition: the boy’s sleeping represents the lamentable fact that “in the hearts of many,” the Child had “been given over to oblivion.” Francis woke him as he lay dormant in the participants’ hearts, and impressed him upon their memory.¹⁸⁹ Bonaventure concurs, adding that “the truth [that the miracle] expresses proves its validity.”¹⁹⁰ Thus, both hagiographers credit Francis with reinvigorating people’s devotion to the Christ Child at Greccio. Whether he actually did this for European Christians in general is debatable, but given the tremendous influence wielded by the friars in the later Middle Ages, as well as Francis’s undeniable and very dramatic devotion to the Nativity, it seems fair to surmise that the increasing attention given to the Christ Child at that time was owing, to a large extent, to the charisma and impact of St. Francis of Assisi.

Figure 10. The Celebration of the Nativity at Greccio, with an appearance of the baby Jesus to St. Francis. Fresco, Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi (ca. 1288–1297). By permission of Scala/Art Resource, NY.

While John of Greccio supposedly beheld a living child in the manger, the other bystanders probably saw a mere effigy. Perhaps Francis approached it spontaneously and embraced it, hoping that Jesus would respond to him through it, as he did through the crucifix at San Damiano (which, at least with its lips, came to life).¹⁹¹ Effigies of the Christ Child from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy have survived to the present day, the most famous of which is the Santo Bambino of Ara Coeli in Rome, supposedly carved by a Franciscan friar using wood from the Holy Land.¹⁹² Even though extant statues of the Christ Child, as far as I am aware, do not date as far back as the early thirteenth century, Francis probably made use of one such effigy at Greccio, perhaps one that had already been employed in a Christmas play or in a private devotional context. A passage from the Vita secunda already cited demonstrates that Francis himself was fond of such devotional statuettes. After telling the reader about the saint’s love of Christmas, Thomas of Celano notes that “he would lick the images of the baby’s limbs.”¹⁹³ Along similar lines, in the Book of Margery Kempe, while the English holy woman was in Italy she came across a woman, traveling with two Franciscans, who carried an effigy of Jesus in a chest. When this woman with the prized possession arrived in different cities, she would give other women the opportunity to lavish their affection on the statuette, which they did by putting clothes on it as if it were a real baby, kissing it “as thei it had ben [as if it were] God hymselfe.”¹⁹⁴ Along similar lines, the Revelations of Margaret Ebner (d. 1351), a Dominican nun of the Monastery of Maria Medingen, recount how she received “a lovely statue from Vienna—Jesus in the crib.” One night, Margaret was called to come to the statue in the choir. “Then great delight in the childhood of our Lord came over me,” she recalls, “and I took the statue of the Child and pressed it against my naked heart as strongly as I could. At that I felt the movement of His mouth on my naked heart.” Another sister later tells her of the dream she had of giving Margaret her statue: “it was a living child … and [you] wanted to suckle it.”¹⁹⁵ The dynamics among Margaret, the statue, and the other nun can be seen as analogous to the triangular relationship that pertains among Francis, the mysterious boy in the manger, and the observer John. While Margaret clearly relates to the Child as a mother, Francis wakes him up and then simply hugs him. Francis’s follower Anthony of Padua similarly embraced the child Jesus, according to the man who, when he happened to peer into the friar’s chamber, saw him doing so.¹⁹⁶ Perhaps at the celebration at Greccio, Francis embraced the infant Jesus to comfort him in a maternal way, considering Francis’s well-known compassion for the discomforts attending Jesus’ birth.¹⁹⁷ Caroline Walker Bynum’s remark that Francis “is described as cradling all creation—from a rabbit to the baby Jesus—in his arms as a mother” strikes me as somewhat of an exaggeration,¹⁹⁸ but it is nonetheless true that Francis’s personality may be regarded, in some ways, as maternal.

In the Upper Church of San Francesco, the inscription underneath the fresco that depicts Francis’s encounter with the baby Jesus at Greccio provides evidence that an effigy was part of the manger scene that Francis had arranged. All the inscriptions accompanying the Life of St. Francis cycle in the Upper Church are based upon Bonaventure’s Legenda major, the text that became the official biography of Francis in 1266, around a generation prior to the execution of the cycle.¹⁹⁹ Although only some of the letters of the inscription for the Christmas fresco are still legible, the text has been reconstructed and reads, in translation, as follows: “How Blessed Francis, in memory of the birth of Christ, had a crib (praesepium) prepared, hay brought, an ox and ass led in, and preached concerning the birth of the poor king, and likewise, as the holy man was in prayer, a certain knight saw the child Jesus in the place of the one that the saint had brought.”²⁰⁰ These words are closely based on Bonaventure’s text, which repeats Thomas’s earlier description of the props almost verbatim. What is new here, though, is the statement that the Christ Child appeared in place of the boy whom the saint had brought; this implies that a statue was included in the manger scene and that it came to life or was, in some way, temporarily replaced by a living Christ Child. Regardless of whether Francis himself brought an effigy of the infant Jesus to the Christmas Eve Mass or told John to do so (when he instructed him to bring a praesepe), there seems to have been a statue of an infant placed in the manger at Greccio. Having a replica of the newborn Jesus before their “bodily eyes” would undoubtedly have helped the participants imagine the Nativity and, in addition, recognize the Child’s Eucharistic presence on the altar.

According to Thomas, Francis wanted to see “the discomfort[s] (incommoda) of [Jesus’] infant needs”—he admittedly does not actually say that Francis wanted to have an effigy of the Christ Child present at the celebration. By proceeding to list the manger, the beasts, and the hay (foenum), Thomas implies that all of these things made the Nativity an unpleasant, if not a painful, experience for the baby Jesus. Francis’s frequent practice of refusing “straw mattresses and blankets” and instead, sleeping naked on the “naked ground,” sometimes making use of “a stone or a piece of wood as his pillow,”²⁰¹ may very well have been an attempt, on his part, to imitate the infant Jesus, who had nowhere (suitable) to lay his head (Lk. 9:58). Emphasizing the Christ Child’s uncomfortable place of repose along similar lines, the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi encourages the reader to imagine Mary “plac[ing Jesus] in the manger” and positioning “his head on a small stone with perhaps just a little straw (feno) in between.”²⁰² In setting up the manger at Greccio, Francis might have thought that the hay provided a little, though not sufficient, padding for the baby Jesus; perhaps he also regarded the hay as scratchy and irritating to the Infant’s bare skin. Such a view is expressed in a fourteenth-century German Sister-Book, which recounts how a nun had a vision of “the Christ Child lying before the altar on stiff hay, which pricked his tender body so that it had red furrows.”²⁰³ The ox and ass were likewise regarded as indications of the Christ Child’s early suffering. The author of the Meditationes vitae Christi (likely taking a cue from Pseudo-Matthew)²⁰⁴ claims that the beasts “knelt, positioned their mouths over the manger and through their nostrils breathed down on him, almost as if they had reason to believe that a child so scantily covered would need warmth in a time of such intense cold.”²⁰⁵ By creating such wintry weather as the setting for the Nativity, the author of the Meditationes suggests that the Babe’s paltry swaddling clothes must not have done much to alleviate his discomfort. The harshness of the conditions in which Christ was born is stressed to an even greater extent by the fourteenth-century Franciscan Bartholomew of Pisa, who, like Francis, emphasizes that the baby Jesus, the Lord of the whole world, chose not to luxuriate in the lap of luxury or bask in magnificence but to suffer in the freezing cold.

Who, I ask, could keep from weeping … to see with the eyes of the mind the child Jesus, most noble, most beautiful and the very little king of all and the Lord crying out at his birth, wracked with cold, nakedness, and the unsuitableness of the place, and want of all things. For who is Jesus? Is he not the prince of peace, leader and lawgiver, king of kings … and emperor of heaven and earth? … Why therefore does the stony heart not have compassion on that little Jesus? … But since it was a time of great coldness, with what clothes was he covered up? Not, I say, those of great price but cheap and modest ones; he who clothes the whole world with variegated decoration is wrapped up with base clothes.²⁰⁶

To return to Francis’s representation of the infant Jesus’ discomforts: what do the earliest sources claim that Francis did and said at the celebration of Christmas held at Greccio, apart from hugging the baby Jesus? As Chiara Frugoni has remarked, we unfortunately lack a transcript of the sermon that Francis preached at this Mass, yet we can speculate about what he said, based on Thomas of Celano’s comments in this chapter. After noting that the props Francis had requested were duly brought in, Thomas remarks (probably echoing the saint’s expression of pleasure at a job well done): “There simplicity is given a place of honor, poverty is exalted, humility is commended, and out of Greccio is made a new Bethlehem.”²⁰⁷ While the first part of this statement speaks of God’s condescension at the Nativity and the virtues modeled by the infant Christ, the latter part references both the dramatic commemoration of the Nativity as a historical event, and its mystical recurrence in the Mass. Thomas uses another rhetorical paradox when he claims that Francis, in his role of deacon, preached about “the birth of the poor king in the poor city of Bethlehem.” Thomas here is likely summarizing at least part of the saint’s sermon; the phrase “poor king,” in particular, sounds like something Francis would say, judging from other statements attributed to him in early hagiographical writings. Recall how (according to the Vita secunda) Francis once sat on the bare floor and was “bathed in tears” when he heard about the “royal virtue” of the Christ Child and his mother—their embrace of poverty.²⁰⁸ At Greccio, Francis may very well have stressed this virtue out of the three that Thomas mentions (simplicity, poverty, and humility). Elsewhere, Thomas tells us why Francis liked Greccio so much: its inhabitants were “rich in poverty.”²⁰⁹ So poverty was clearly uppermost in Francis’s mind on Christmas Eve in Greccio.

Although Thomas does not explicitly say that Francis cried on that occasion, he calls attention to the saint’s intense emotionality when he says that he stood “before the manger, filled with heartfelt sighs.” He was no doubt thinking about the Babe’s poverty, and likely reflected on his pitiful swaddling clothes, as well as his makeshift crib.²¹⁰ In his account of this episode, Bonaventure, in comparison to Thomas of Celano, places greater emphasis upon Francis’s emotional response, specifically by saying that he was “bathed in tears,” a phrase which echoes the aforementioned passage from the Vita secunda.²¹¹ Along similar lines, in his Liber miraculorum, the Cluniac abbot Peter the Venerable (d. 1156), noted that “it is the custom of the same monastery [that is, Cluny] to celebrate the birthday of the Savior with a certain singular affection, more devotedly than other feast-days, and to solemnize it earnestly with the spirits of the angels, by means of the melodies of songs, lengthy readings, the burning of many sorts of candles, and—what is far more remarkable—with special devotion and much shedding of tears.”²¹² Although Francis was by no means the inventor of the Christmas Eve celebration, of the manger as a paraliturgical object,²¹³ or of compassion for the sufferings of the lowly Christ Child,²¹⁴ he breathed new life into the feast of the Nativity by emphasizing realistic details surrounding Christ’s birth, particularly the manger. He was also one of the first medieval Christians to manifest publicly and intentionally a tender sensibility for the Infant’s bodily sufferings and to encourage others to experience feelings of compassion as well as joyful gratitude for the Incarnation. Thus, in my view, it is fair to say that “compassion for the suffering Savior”—in both his infancy and at his Passion—“was given an archetypal expression in Francis and through him was channeled into Western devotion, art, and culture as a whole.”²¹⁵

During his sermon, Francis manifests his “sweet affection” for the Child by his inability to utter the word “Bethlehem” without bleating like a sheep. Thomas says that he tasted the words “Jesus” and “babe of Bethlehem,” savoring their sweetness.²¹⁶ Such gustatory imagery expresses the intensity of the saint’s loving meditation on Christ’s infancy, his experience of its immediacy, and his desire for union with the tender lamblike babe of Bethlehem, not to mention his devotion to the name of Jesus.²¹⁷ Anna Vorchtlin, a nun at Engelthal, expressed this sentiment, but with more gusto, when she told the baby Jesus, whom she saw in a vision, “If I had you, I would eat you up, I love you so much!”²¹⁸ Perhaps Francis’s indulgence in mystical sweetness compensated for the sorrow he experienced on this occasion when he recollected the sufferings that attended Christ’s birth.

Besides expressing his love for the infant Jesus and speaking of the incommodious conditions of his Nativity, Francis, by both his words and actions, likely reminded his audience of the presence of the Christ Child in the consecrated host. Indeed, by licking his lips, the saint may be manifesting his spiritual appetite for this heavenly food.²¹⁹ In one of his “Admonitions” (which I have already mentioned), Francis emphasizes the importance of Christians seeing God in the Eucharist with their spiritual eyes. Just as, at Greccio, the bystanders (with the exception of John and Francis) were unable to see Jesus in the manger, so they, like the other participants at Mass, were unable to see Christ, in his human form, on the altar. Might Francis, during his sermon, have pointed to the manger under (or next to) the altar, telling his listeners that they would soon see, in the hands of the priest, the same child who was wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in the manger in Bethlehem hundreds of years ago? Perhaps he expressed, in simple terms, the metaphor that the early Cistercian Guerric of Igny (and others) had enunciated: that the sacramental species of bread and wine covered the divinity, as the swaddling bands enveloped the Christ Child.²²⁰

While the image of the lamb that Francis dramatically introduces into his sermon by bleating reveals, in a charming manner, his love of animals (lambs were definitely his favorite),²²¹ he probably intended it as an imaginative cue that would prompt his audience to think of the Lamb of God who was sacrificed at the Passion (cf. Isa. 53:7), and still offered up by the priest at the altar at every Mass. The fresco depicting the Mass at Greccio in the Upper Church in Assisi may in fact represent the very moment in the liturgy when, at the beginning of the canon of the Mass, the choir chants the “Agnus Dei.” Like a snapshot, the scene captures a small number of friars singing, with opened mouths, as the priest bends over the host at the altar. Perhaps, though, the scene represents Francis seizing the baby Jesus at the very moment when the priest consecrates the host, which shortly thereafter would be elevated for adoration and viewing, with the priest saying: “Ecce Agnus Dei.” This could possibly explain why no one in the fresco (and all but one person in the written sources) seems to notice Francis’s encounter with the baby Jesus: while Francis holds the Lamb of God in his infant form, the other participants are about to behold Christ hidden under the Eucharistic species.²²² At the end of the chapter, Thomas reintroduces the image of the lamb when he notes that a permanent altar was built over the manger and a church around it, “so that where animals once ate the fodder of hay (foeni pabulum), there humans … would eat the flesh of the immaculate and spotless lamb, our Lord Jesus Christ, who ‘gave himself for us.’ ” Thomas here cites Paul’s letter to Titus (2:14), where he speaks of Christ’s giving of himself “for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity,” but he also echoes Isaiah 9:6 (“A child is born to us, and a son is given to us”), which, for Francis, as we have seen, powerfully encapsulates God’s loving plan for the redemption of the human race.

Now that we have considered how some of Francis’s earliest followers viewed his devotion to the Christ Child, it is worth reflecting on how this devotion of the saint tends to be viewed more generally and popularly. In an essay on the Old English poem Christ III, the Anglo-Saxonist scholar Thomas D. Hill contrasts the “dark” Anglo-Saxon view of the Nativity with the modern-day festive attitude toward Christmas, which he traces back to St. Francis of Assisi.²²³ Contextualizing the Old English poem within early medieval culture, as well as viewing it within the development of Christian piety over the centuries, Hill connects the Anglo-Saxon poet’s presentation of the infant Christ as “covered in a pauper’s clothes” and “laid … in the darkness … on a hard stone” with contemporary iconography of the newborn Christ placed on an altar-like manger, as seen, for example, in the tenth-century Benedictional of Æthelwold (London, British Library, MS Add. 49598, fol. 15v). Significantly, the image in question lies opposite a blessing for Christmas taken from a homily of Gregory the Great, an early and influential source for the conflation of the Christ Child and the Eucharist, and the manger and the altar.²²⁴ Although Hill in this article seems predominantly to have in mind the jovial side of Francis’s personality as well as his typical association with affective piety, Francis’s view of the Nativity was in fact rooted in the same patristic-based imagery that is reflected in the illuminated Anglo-Saxon liturgical book and in Christ III. Hill contrasts the “square, block-like” altar mentioned in the poem and similarly depicted in the Benedictional with Francis’s “crib filled with straw” (“comfortable enough”).²²⁵ Yet the Italian saint’s display of compassion for the “discomforts” of the Nativity and the connection he almost certainly made in his sermon between the Infant in the manger and the Child soon to be present on the altar demonstrates that Francis’s Christmas was not merely an occasion for sentimentality and merry-making. Francis was just as aware of the biblical theme of “the sacrifice of the well-beloved son” (a phrase used by Hill) as was his predecessors—a mystery culminating in Christ’s Passion and death and his perpetuation of his sacrifice in the Eucharist.²²⁶ Yet rather than glumly view the sacrificial offering of Jesus as “dark,” Francis expresses heartfelt compassion for Jesus’ suffering and, at the same time, delights in the lovableness of the “son given to us,” looking forward optimistically to the fullness of redemption, which was effected by both the birth and death of Christ and culminated in the Resurrection.

Francis’s overall approach to the Nativity, which is simultaneously rustic and mystical, should be kept in mind when trying to understand the attention he gives to the ox and the ass at Greccio and his wish, expressed on another occasion, that these beasts be given double fodder on Christmas.²²⁷ Scripture does not mention the presence of these animals at the manger, but the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew does, going so far as to describe how they bent their knees and adored the Infant who had been placed in their feeding bin,²²⁸ after the Holy Family had moved from the cave to the stable on the third day after Jesus’ birth. The anonymous author of that apocryphal text was by no means the first Christian to link Luke’s mention of the manger with Isaiah’s statement (Isa. 1:3) that “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib (praesepe domini sui).”²²⁹ Early exegetes had already interpreted this passage as a prophecy of Christ’s Nativity, typically seeing the ox as the Jews, chained to the law, and the ass as the Gentiles (pagans), who bore the burden of idolatry.²³⁰ Artistic representations of the Nativity rendered the passage from Isaiah literally,²³¹ which had the effect of lodging the presence of these two animals at Christ’s manger even further in the popular imagination. René Grousset claims that the ox and the ass gradually lost their symbolic meaning,²³² but it is not self-evident that literal and metaphorical views of the beasts could not coexist in the mind of the same person (or within the culture at large), at the same time. For Francis, the beasts around the baby Jesus were probably both reverent, rustic animals, as well as symbols of humans who were meant to feast on the bread that had come down from heaven at Christmas and is present at every Mass.

I wish to close this section by responding to two insightful scholarly treatments of the Greccio episode, which I have already mentioned in passing. Chiara Frugoni, who offers an ecumenical reading of the scene at Greccio, bases the crux of her argument on Francis’s inclusion of the ox and the ass, which, for her, represent the peaceful coming together of Christians and non-Christians (particularly Muslims).²³³ Frugoni notes that the Greccio incident took place shortly after the approval of the modified Rule of St. Francis (the Regula bullata), which eliminated Francis’s earlier instructions for dealing with the Saracens. In chapter 16 of the earlier Rule, Francis had suggested two approaches: one more ecumenical (the friars could live peacefully among the Saracens and other unbelievers, subject to their authority), and the other more directly missionary (they could preach the Gospel openly).²³⁴ Lamenting that these options (particularly the first) were removed from the later Rule, Frugoni claims that Francis erected the Christmas manger to encourage his fellow Christians to heed the message of peace delivered by the angels to the shepherds at Christ’s birth (Lk. 2:14, a biblical passage which Francis, judging from his own writings and from his devotional performativity described in the early legends, does not seem to have emphasized at Christmastime).²³⁵ The Christmas Mass at Greccio, from this perspective, was a protest against the Church-sponsored warfare of the Crusades, which were proving to be a failure by that time.²³⁶ Though Frugoni’s historical and ideological contextualization of the Greccio episode is illuminating, her insistence upon the connection between this event and Francis’s concern about inter-faith relations seems reductionistic. Moreover, while Francis’s bleating at Greccio would have made his audience think of a lamb, we actually do not know if he explicitly referred to the ox and the ass (let alone the message of the angels to the shepherds) in his sermon—and it is on the symbolism of these latter animals that Frugoni’s argument is based.

Lisa Kiser, for her part, considers Francis’s emphasis upon the ox and the ass in light of his well-known love of nature.²³⁷ She argues that the novelty of the Greccio incident was that Francis had real, live animals brought to the (para)liturgical performance centered around the manger. The wording of Francis’s instructions, which John of Greccio faithfully carried out, supports this view: “the manger is prepared, the hay is carried in, and the ox and the ass are led (adducuntur) to the spot.” Although Kiser emphasizes Francis’s inclusion of real animals at Greccio, she does not focus on the ox and the ass qua animals, but rather as representatives of the working classes who habitually employed them to help carry out their work. In my view, while there is certainly basis for associating Francis with ecumenism, environmentalism, and contemporary efforts to promote social justice, it would be misleading to ignore or seriously downplay the saint’s devotional aims in orchestrating the Mass under the stars at Greccio. His main goals were, in all probability, to inculcate a more tender devotion to the child Jesus and to remind his fellow friars and the laity of Jesus’ swaddled presence, so to speak, in the consecrated host.

Michael Robson captures a key element of the Greccio incident, which is easy for us to lose sight of, due to our familiarity with the story: Francis “wished to share with others his own sense of wonder. He was impelled to communicate to them the riches he had unearthed in the Gospel.”²³⁸ The newness of Greccio, in the most important sense, consisted in the participants’ experience of wonder, which Francis, like a child, seems to have possessed in great abundance and been able to share with others. As a cleric with an intuitive pastoral sensibility, Francis devised a plan for spreading his own enthusiasm for the Nativity, recognizing the impact that a multimedia presentation of a touching Gospel story would have upon ordinary people. Thomas of Celano conveys a sense of the excitement experienced by the participants when he says that they were delighted by the brightness of candles and torches that lit up the night, and “ecstatic at this new mystery of new joy.”²³⁹ The event at Greccio entailed not only an eye-catching spectacle, but also loud sounds: the singing of God’s praises, which, mixed with animals’ utterances, reverberated against the boulders, so that all of nature seemed to rejoice in the Nativity, just as it sorrowed at the Passion.²⁴⁰ In the previous century, Aelred of Rievaulx had expressed disapproval of elaborate singing at Mass.²⁴¹ He lamented that a practice that was “instituted to awaken the weak to the attachment of devotion” had the effect of causing people to lose a sense of the sacred—to fail “to honor that mystical crib … where Christ is mystically wrapped in swaddling clothes, where his most sacred blood is poured out in the chalice.”²⁴² Francis of Assisi, in contrast, seized the opportunity to embellish the liturgy with sights and sounds (and even smells), which would catch people’s attention and make an annual feast seem like a “new mystery”—without apparently worrying that the engagement of the senses would detract from the Real Presence. In the broadest sense, the “novelty” of the event at Greccio, which both Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure underscore, was the combination of the tangible and the everyday, with the mystical and the sacred. In my reading of the episode, Francis emphasized both the actual conditions of Christ’s Nativity, as it occurred hundreds of years ago, and the repeated sacramental embodiment of Christ upon the altar of every church.

The Meek and Ordinary, Though Peculiar Christ Child of the Meditationes vitae Christi

Francis of Assisi was so intensely focused on the Nativity and Passion of Christ—the central events of the Gospel—and the Lord’s enduring presence in the Eucharist that he might not have speculated much, if at all, on what Jesus did during the so-called “hidden years” of his childhood and adolescence. But, hypothetically speaking, if Francis had wondered about Christ’s “hidden years,” he would probably have reflected on the hardships that that phase of his life entailed and the virtues, such as humility, that Christ manifested at that time. Before moving on to consider, in the next chapter, the apocryphal portrayal of Jesus as a boy who displays his wisdom and power so dramatically that he calls much attention to himself, I will close this chapter by discussing the main features of the treatment of Jesus’ early life in the Meditationes vitae Christi, a Franciscan text I have already mentioned.²⁴³ The anonymous author of this popular devotional text owes much to Francis of Assisi and probably also to Aelred of Rievaulx, as regards the virtues of Christ he emphasizes, and the types of responses he hopes to elicit, when recounting the infancy and childhood of Christ. Although the Meditationes vitae Christi was not the only extensive treatment of Jesus’ youth in the later Middle Ages, it was very influential from the time of its appearance (probably in the early fourteenth century, possibly at its beginning) until the end of the medieval period and even into the Early Modern era.²⁴⁴

That this widespread devotional text has, in the past, been misattributed to Bonaventure, a prolific Franciscan writer canonized in 1482, is not surprising considering the latter’s fame and the features that Bonaventure’s Lignum vitae shares with the Meditationes vitae Christi. In his short treatise Lignum vitae, Bonaventure touches upon Christ’s early life only briefly, unlike the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi, who is almost novelistic in the imaginary scenarios and extra-biblical details about Christ’s infancy and childhood he conjures up. Still, both authors repeatedly invite their readers to insert themselves into the life of Christ as it unfolds within their imaginations, thereby giving them the opportunity to engage in what Ewert Cousins has called the “mysticism of the historical event,” which Francis clearly exemplified at Greccio.²⁴⁵ That Bonaventure employs this mode of commemoration in the Lignum vitae is evident from the way he closes his brief account of the Nativity, with an instruction to enter into the event: “Now, then, my soul, embrace that divine manger; press your lips upon and kiss the boy’s feet.” Echoing what he says elsewhere, Bonaventure goes on to assert that Jesus began to suffer for humanity at the beginning of his life, “not delaying to pour out for you the price of his blood,” which he did at the Circumcision.²⁴⁶ A little further on, the reader is urged to join the Magi in “venerat[ing] Christ the King,” and then to imitate the old man Simeon at the Purification: “Let love overcome your bashfulness; let affection dispel your fear. Receive the Infant in your arms and say with the bride: ‘I took hold of him and would not let him go’ (Sg. 3:4). Dance with the old man.”²⁴⁷ The reader is further told to accompany the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt, “when the evil Herod sought to kill the tiny King.” Immediately afterward, the reader is instructed to search with Mary for her twelve-year-old son, who supposedly had never left his parents before. Linking these crisis situations through his narrative, Bonaventure tells his reader to imagine himself accompanying the young mother fleeing with her little son and later seeking him when he was twelve and then, when he is found in the Temple, questioning him about his apparently callous actions.²⁴⁸

While some of these passages seem to be closely modeled on Part Three of Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum, which is concerned with the biblical past, Bonaventure—not surprisingly, considering his intense focus on biblical details—omits the apocryphal tale about the encounter between the Holy Family and the good thief, which appeared in the earlier, Cistercian text.²⁴⁹ In addition, although Bonaventure cites a verse from the Song of Songs (3:4) in his account of Jesus’ early life (when describing how Simeon held Mary’s babe and did not want “to let him go”),²⁵⁰ his meditative text is not suffused with the erotic language of yearning for union with the child Jesus that is so prominent in Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum as well as his De Jesu puero duodenni. Another important distinction worth noting is that, whereas Bonaventure elsewhere, namely in his De quinque festivitatibus pueri Jesu, tells his reader to express her affection for the Christ Child and tend to him in a spiritual way (by “wrapp[ing] him up in the chaste folds of desires,” for example), in the Lignum vitae, he simply recommends embracing Jesus physically, as if his reader were truly in the Child’s presence.²⁵¹ So the Lignum vitae is quite biblical and fairly straightforward in the imaginative and affective responses it seeks to elicit to the conventional events of Jesus’ infancy and childhood (that is, the incidents recounted in Scripture).

Like the De institutione inclusarum and the Lignum vitae, the Meditationes vitae Christi repeatedly urges its reader, originally a Poor Clare nun, to enter imaginatively into Jesus’ life. In addition, it frequently scripts the feeling of compassion as the appropriate response to the hardships and sufferings experienced by Jesus and Mary. A striking example of this occurs in the chapter on the Circumcision, which is the first time the reader is told to weep.²⁵² The author claims that Mary herself circumcised her son, using a stone knife, and says that the Infant cried because of the sharp pain he felt in his “real flesh subject to pain (ueram carnem et passibilem).”²⁵³ The reader ought to “suffer together with him” and even to cry with him. She is also to share in the psychological pain of his mother, who was “terribly upset at the pain and tears of her son.”²⁵⁴ The psychological suffering of both Mother and Child is increased by each of them witnessing the other suffer, which likewise happens at the crucifixion,²⁵⁵ but on this occasion they pacify and comfort each other as the pain presumably subsides. As did Bonaventure in the Lignum vitae, the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi emphasizes that Jesus “began to suffer for us” at that time (that is, at the Circumcision).²⁵⁶ Jesus’ suffering and self-abasement are in fact highlighted throughout the text, even before this incident. For example, the author earlier remarks that Jesus humbly cloistered himself in Mary’s womb, “just like everyone else.” The reader is urged to “feel compassion for him [in the womb] that he reached so great a depth of humility.” In addition, she is informed that Jesus “was in ongoing affliction” from the moment of his conception until his death, and that his continual mental anguish, especially at the thought of the loss of souls (to the devil), was even greater than his physical suffering.²⁵⁷ When describing the Holy Family’s return from Egypt, the author claims that it was even more difficult than the journey there (which, as other texts emphasize, was an unexpected, anxiety-ridden flight from murderous pursuers), since the seven-year-old Jesus was too big to be carried the whole way and too small to walk very far. The author then references Psalm 87:16 as a prophecy of Jesus’ childhood (as did Bonaventure earlier): “O noble and delicate child, king of heaven and earth, how hard you have labored for us, and how early you have taken on those labors!”²⁵⁸ By eliciting the emotion of compassion for both the adult and child Jesus, the Meditationes vitae Christi certainly did much to promote affective piety for its Poor Clare readers and other late medieval Christians.

The Poor Clare reader is encouraged to experience delight as well as sorrow when meditating on the childhood of Christ, and to relate to the Boy on a simple level, as if she were a gentle child in his presence. At Greccio, Francis of Assisi may very well have interacted in such an intimate way with the Christ Child who, as I have already recounted, seems to have miraculously appeared during the Christmas Eve Mass celebrated there. In his Vita secunda, Thomas of Celano says that Greccio was the place where the saint “recalled the birth of the Child of Bethlehem, becoming a child with the Child (factus cum Puero puer)”—an intriguing comment upon which the author unfortunately does not expand.²⁵⁹ Citing this latter passage, Leah Marcus remarks that Francis was “far from scorning puerility.” Speaking of medieval Franciscans more generally, she claims that they “sought to infuse Christianity with a childishly playful spirit”; their “mingled gaiety and reverence” was “quite consciously childlike in its spontaneity and lack of decorum.”²⁶⁰ While Francis may be considered childlike on account of his simplicity, playfulness, and sense of wonder, he may also be thought to have become “a child with the Child” in a deeper sense, perhaps experiencing, as if vicariously, some of the divine child’s lowliness and abasement. Although we cannot pin down his meaning, it is fair to say that Thomas of Celano’s phrase “factus cum Puero puer” is echoed by the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi in the chapter on the Flight into Egypt, which instructs the reader to “become a little girl with the little child.”²⁶¹

The chapter from the Meditationes vitae Christi dealing with the Flight to Egypt is worth examining more closely, since the author proposes much fruit for meditation regarding the seven years that the Holy Family spent in exile. To instill compassion in the reader, the author tells her what the family did to earn their living during that time. Implying that Joseph, an old man, brought home only a modest income as a carpenter, the author says that Mary plied the distaff and needle—a scene depicted in an illustrated Meditationes vitae Christi in Latin (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410, fol. 24v, bottom register; fig. 11) and also in an illustrated Italian version (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ital. 115, fols. 41r and 43r).²⁶² When he was old enough to do so, the child Jesus acted as his mother’s agent in her home-based sewing business, returning the items she finished and sometimes suffering rude treatment from her clients. Immediately after being told how the Holy Family supported themselves, the reader is prompted to consider what Mary did whenever she became aware that her growing boy was hungry (whether this was between meals or more continuously is unclear): as a solicitous and loving mother, Mary must have deprived herself of food in order to feed her son. Having given the reader a few glimpses into the Holy Family’s humble and close-knit domestic life, the author invites her to delve more deeply into Jesus’ boyhood, telling her to make use of the material he has given her, as she sees fit:

Enlarge on it … and be a little girl with the child Jesus, and disdain neither such humble activities nor meditating on what seems childish. For they are thought to produce devotion, enkindle love, induce compassion, bestow purity and simplicity, add to the strength of your humility and poverty; preserve intimacy, and produce unanimity (conformitatem facere), as well as raise your hope…. Do you see how many good results derive from [such meditation]? As I said, become like a little girl with the little child (sis … cum paruulo paruula) and grow with him as he grows.²⁶³

As Robert Worth Frank, Jr., points out, this enumeration of the good effects that will result from such a meditative exercise is a “large order, and an important statement.”²⁶⁴ While modern readers tend to respond to the Meditationes condescendingly, claiming that it fostered only a sentimental type of piety,²⁶⁵ the anonymous author here claims that the activity he proposes will have a profound spiritual effect. Not merely a game of make-believe aimed at triggering a fleeting emotional response, meditation on Jesus’ boyhood will enable the devout reader to become like the Child himself. She will not only grow in the virtues that the young Jesus manifests, she will also achieve a greater oneness, or familiarity, with Christ through the process of imaginatively concentrating on him and his experiences.²⁶⁶

Frank cites a passage from the following chapter of the Meditationes vitae Christi (which deals with the Holy Family’s return from Egypt) to illustrate the text’s effectiveness at “increasing love and preserving familiarity.”²⁶⁷ The reader, who, in her imagination, has already visited the Holy Family in Egypt, is told to go back there before they leave and then accompany them on their journey.

When perchance you have found him outside with the children, he will catch sight of you and run up to you immediately; for he is so friendly and easy to talk with and caring (curialis, lit., “courteous”). Kneel and kiss his feet, and sweeping him into your arms with a hug, find a bit of sweet respite with him. Then he will say to you, “We’ve been given permission to return to our own land, and tomorrow we must leave. You’ve come at a good time, because you will be going back with us.” Answer him at once that you are overjoyed at this; and that you hope to follow him wherever he goes (Rev. 14:4). In conversations like these you can take your delight with him.²⁶⁸

Figure 11. The fall of the idols in Egypt (upper register); Joseph and Mary at work (lower register), in an illustrated manuscript of the Meditationes vitae Christi. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410, fol. 24v (fourteenth century). By permission of the President and the Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

The charm of the child Jesus, who is here brimming with friendliness, is quite inviting. Students of medieval literature might usefully contrast the imaginary interaction between the Poor Clare reader and the Christ Child in this scene with the strained relationship between the jeweler-narrator and his deceased daughter in the Middle English poem Pearl. Though she had died at age two, the deceased girl around whom the poem centers appears to her father in a vision as a young maiden. Her demeanor is certainly more mature than what we would expect of one who, just a short while ago, was a little girl: she maintains her reserve and seems lacking in compassion, as she explains her new, exalted status as a bride of Christ. Toward the end of his dream vision, the narrator, after being coldly admonished by his daughter for his excessive grief and inability to understand basic Christian teachings, is nevertheless granted the privilege of seeing her in the heavenly Jerusalem, her new home, as she participates in a procession with the other spotless maidens who have become brides of Christ. Viewing her from an insurmountable distance, the bereft father is clearly cut off from the bliss and perfection of her world, even though he painfully yearns to be part of it.²⁶⁹ In contrast, the gap between the Poor Clare reader and the child Jesus, in the passage cited above, is quickly closed up, since the Child, as soon as he sees her, leaves his playmates, runs up to her, and then converses with her. He is happy that she is there and invites her to join his family. Though he is still a child, Jesus’ welcoming attitude here can be said to illustrate a statement he made to his disciples when he was an adult: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me” (Matt. 19:14). In this and in other chapters from the Meditationes vitae Christi dealing with the Christ Child, the reader is certainly welcomed into Jesus’ presence; she is encouraged to follow the Holy Family in her imagination, as they go from place to place, serving the boy Jesus and his parents in a concrete way.²⁷⁰

Like the two treatises by Aelred considered above, the Meditationes vitae Christi does not attempt to provide definitive answers about Christ’s life, but instead offers meditational materials that will help the reader engage in prayerful interaction with the Lord and other holy personages. In his prologue to the work, the author praises St. Cecilia for “ruminating on [Gospel] episodes with sweet and gentle relish (dulci ac suaui gustu ruminans).”²⁷¹ Cecilia, in other words, engaged in lectio divina, the monastic practice of spiritual reading that was commonly likened to “chewing the cud.”²⁷² The reader of the Meditationes vitae Christi is given devotional stories and images that she is likewise to assimilate and transform to her own liking within her soul. Since the author’s main goals are affective and moral, rather than historical (as regards the specific details of Jesus’ biography), he remains open-minded to his own and his reader’s reconstruction of Christ’s life. So, although the Meditationes vitae Christi can be said to resemble a gospel harmony, a text that synthesizes information from the canonical gospels to form a continuous narrative, the author of the Franciscan text is more concerned about the possibilities of meditative expansiveness than about producing a historically accurate, restrained yet detailed, linear account of Jesus’ life.²⁷³ He thus alludes in his prologue to Augustine’s well-known argument for an expansive mode of exegesis, which encourages multiple interpretations of a biblical passage, all of which are valid so long as they not contradict the law of charity.²⁷⁴ Admittedly, despite the Franciscan author’s statements about the open-ended nature of his project, he often prefers one way of filling in the gaps left by the scriptural account of Christ’s life to another, insofar as one particular approach seems more conducive to inculcating piety and good morality, especially as regards Franciscan values. A memorable example of this is his response to the gastronomical question that he himself raises: what kind of food did Jesus want the angels to bring him after his forty-day fast in the desert? As a son devoted to his mother, Jesus must have wanted some of her cooking more than anything else.²⁷⁵ While the apocryphal narratives considered in the next chapter do not speculate about such matters, they do, however, follow a similar sort of logic in their reconstruction of Jesus’ hidden years: assuming that Jesus had certain traits (because Scripture seems to indicate as much or it just seems proper for him to be such-and-such a way), one can fill in details about his truly human, yet also very exceptional, life.

The Franciscan text’s general open-endedness can be seen in the author’s use of multiple and different kinds of sources for the chapters dealing with Christ’s early years. To be more precise: in the early part of his work, he frequently quotes passages from Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons in order to reinforce the importance of particular virtues²⁷⁶; he occasionally borrows details from Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica;²⁷⁷ he once refers to the revelations of a St. Elizabeth, to convey the intensity of the young Mary’s desire to please God;²⁷⁸ and he cites what he claims is an unnamed friar’s vision of the Nativity.²⁷⁹ These sources add credibility and value to the meditations he proposes, but the author mainly uses them eclectically to create a framework for meditation and to provide some valuable details that will help fill out the space created by his narrative. He does not suggest that these sources are completely accurate, in a historical sense, nor does he limit himself or his reader to what they have to say.

The author also makes use of the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which he (wrongly) refers to as a writing of Jerome, in order to tell how Mary divided the hours of the day when living in the Temple during her girlhood.²⁸⁰ The author arguably also incorporated a few apocrypha-related details (without explicitly designating them as such) in order to reinforce his depiction of the Christ Child’s piety. He mentions, for example, that the boy Jesus must have drawn water from a well for his mother—a scenario that appears in the apocrypha.²⁸¹ Not only is the number of these details very small, but their traditional and legendary quality means that they were practically canonical; this is especially the case with the widespread belief that the idols fell down when the Christ Child entered into Egypt with his parents.²⁸² Significantly, with the exception of the incident just mentioned, that is, the fall of the idols, which is depicted in one of the few surviving illustrated copies of the Meditationes (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410, fol. 24v, top register; fig. 11), apocryphal legends concerning Jesus’ purportedly numerous childhood miracles are not incorporated into the narrative, not even the benign miracles, such as the Child’s commanding of a tree to bend down so that his mother might be refreshed by its fruits.²⁸³ In an aside, the anonymous Franciscan author actually reveals his disapproval of the apocrypha, probably as a body of legendary lore that others took so seriously, or at least found so appealing, when he says, when treating the Flight into Egypt: “because so little that is authentic can be found, I am not going to bother to relate the events that happened to them in the desert and along the way.”²⁸⁴ This remark clearly implies that he is aware of the apocryphal infancy stories (a number of which are set on the Flight to Egypt), yet has consciously chosen to disregard them in the composition of his narrative.

That the Franciscan author’s primary concern is to produce an affective response is evident from his treatment of the biblical episode in which the boy Jesus stays behind in the Temple. The majority of this chapter (which, significantly, is short, compared to Aelred’s handling of it in the De Jesu puero duo-denni describes the anguish that Jesus’ parents experienced upon realizing that he was lost and when they were searching for him with much difficulty. Echoing Aelred’s musings on the Child’s physical well-being during those few days, the Franciscan author briefly suggests that Jesus found food and lodgings at a hospice. In addition, he notes the Boy’s humility in listening to “the learned doctors, serene of countenance, wise and reverent … as if ignorant.” The author also points out Jesus’ humility in returning home with his parents, even though the Boy had stated his intention to focus on his Father’s business.²⁸⁵ Probably not incidentally, in this retelling of the Temple episode, the teachers’ response of amazement at the Boy’s speech (Lk. 2:47) is not at all mentioned. It was presumably this particular aspect of the story that seemed to justify the apocryphal authors’ presentation of Jesus as a wonder-child, a depiction out of sync with the Franciscans’ focus on their own self-abnegation and that of Jesus, their model of ideal human behavior.

Significantly, the idiosyncratic chapter from the Meditationes vitae Christi on what Jesus did from age twelve to thirty is much longer than the chapter on the episode about the Finding in the Temple.²⁸⁶ The Bible’s silence on what Christ did for so many years is here remedied by a Franciscan reconstruction of the young Jesus as a good-for-nothing, who purposely sought the scorn of those around him by doing nothing remarkable. The young Jesus is said to have withdrawn from the public, engaged in prayer, and carried out domestic chores. He is not portrayed as playing with other boys or even as going to school—the main activities ascribed to the Christ Child in the apocrypha, which are also things we would typically expect to hear about children. The author presents biblical support for this view of Jesus’ unimpressive youth: the comments of Jesus’ contemporaries, when he later began his public ministry, that he was merely the son of a carpenter (Matt. 13:55); John the Baptist’s role as his precursor, which would have been unnecessary if Jesus had already begun preaching and distinguishing himself in other ways; and the fact that the Evangelists wrote nothing about this period of Christ’s life. The adult Jesus’ description of himself as “meek and humble of heart” (Matt. 11:29) also makes this depiction seem plausible, as does the way in which Jesus spoke of himself as the brother of his fellow human beings (John 20:17, Matt. 25:40)—biblical passages that are explicitly cited in this chapter. In addition, the anonymous author clearly has in mind Luke’s comment, at the end of his account of the Holy Family’s visit to the Temple, that the twelve-year-old Jesus went home with his parents and “was subject to them” (Lk. 2:51), which he cites at the outset of the chapter dedicated to Jesus’ hidden years.²⁸⁷

The emphasis of the Meditationes vitae Christi upon the self-abnegation of the young Jesus is clearly an attempt to fashion his persona according to the model of Francis of Assisi. The saint’s desire to be perceived as a fool is strikingly illustrated by a detail Thomas of Celano includes in his Vita prima.²⁸⁸ Francis was clearly a talented preacher, for “even without preparation … [he] used to say the most amazing things to everyone.” Although he was apparently able to do so, Francis did not always preach impromptu. Even the absence of Francis’s anticipated preaching had a powerful effect, as Thomas attests: “Sometimes [Francis] prepared for his talk with some meditation, but once the people gathered he could not remember what he had meditated about and had to say. Without any embarrassment he would confess to the people that he had thought of many things before, but now could not remember a thing … [H]e would give a blessing and send the people away with this act alone as a very good sermon.”²⁸⁹ In a similar way, the young Jesus of the Meditationes vitae Christi paradoxically did amazing things by doing (or saying) nothing worth recording in Scripture, apart, of course, for the incident in the Temple, which the anonymous Franciscan author relates (in chapter 14) mainly to instill compassion for Mary in the reader. In this following chapter (15), the author switches gears, as it were, by claiming that, although Jesus had originally shown considerable promise after his return with his family from the Temple (cf. Lk 2:52), thereafter he did nothing commendable until the beginning of his public ministry. This led his neighbors to conclude: “He is an idiot, a no-good [person], foolish, and stupid.”²⁹⁰ Emphasizing the scorn that was directed at the young Jesus, the author adds: “He had no formal schooling, and among the people he was generally thought of as oafish and unbalanced (grandis et captivus).” Significantly, although this Franciscan Jesus seems incredibly passive, he nevertheless retains a faint trace of the vigor traditionally associated with Christ (especially in the earlier Middle Ages), when the anonymous author comments that the young Jesus wielded the paradoxical “sword of humility” in order “to bring low the haughty enemy.”²⁹¹ But even this detail, because of its emphasis upon Christ’s self-emptying (that is, the Son’s putting aside of his glory in becoming human, and a poor and powerless one at that), can be seen as characteristically Franciscan.

Jaime Vidal effectively summarizes, and also offers a rationale for, the Meditationes vitae Christi’s treatment of Jesus’ inconspicuous youth when he says: “The hidden life at Nazareth has hidden from his people the wonders which the Infancy Narrative has shown to us, and thus made possible the Messianic secret and the possibility of rejection.”²⁹² The overarching theme of the chapter in which the Franciscan author ponders what Jesus did from age twelve to twenty-nine is that Christ is a Deus absconditus (Isa. 45:15), a passage that is explicitly quoted in this chapter.²⁹³ As we shall see in subsequent chapters of this book, many medieval Christians believed that Jesus kept a low profile during his childhood and believed that this was not accidental but that he chose to do so for good reasons.