The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages. Mary Dzon

implanted in the ground).¹¹² Then he disappeared.¹¹³

      In this story, the giant is transformed from being a coarse fellow who seeks to advance his own interest into a humble servant who is aware of his own weakness and later embraces martyrdom. By accepting the task to care for the unknown child, he literally accepts Christ himself (Matt. 18:5), encountering him personally in an embodied form—one of ostensible human weakness. Note too that, in this story, the child Jesus does not comfort the future saint by allowing him to experience the tenderness of his boyhood; instead, he tangibly demonstrates his power—both to acknowledge Christopher’s faithful, vassal-like service and to teach him the paradoxicality of the Son of God, about whom the giant had already heard.¹¹⁴ The tale, which stresses who Jesus is rather than his lovability (that is, his essence rather than his appealing qualities), reflects, in an analogous way, the shift that occurred in medieval Christians’ stance toward the divine child in the high Middle Ages: from then on, they encountered the Christ Child more personally, while continuing to acknowledge his Lordship.

      A Child with Different Personae, Yet Always Lovable Lord and Savior

      One of the most important goals of this book is to show that at the same time that medieval culture increasingly emphasized Jesus’ humanity—his entrance into a human family and his assumption of the human condition—it never lost sight of his unique status as the Lord and Savior of humankind and as the divine Son of God. The frequent association of the infant Jesus with the Passion—the historical sacrifice on Calvary presented anew in the Mass—underscored the Christ Child’s vulnerability and selflessness as well as his transcendence of human time and unique propitiatory power, hence his divinity. Indeed, many medieval texts and images concerned with Jesus’ childhood convey the message that his salvific mission was his raison d’être and that he had knowledge of his work of redemption—and was even eager for it—from his earliest years. Mary thus makes her son’s seamless tunic when he is still a boy, not only because it is her maternal duty to clothe her child, but also because Jesus is definitely headed for the Passion, where his clothes will be rudely stripped from him and irreverently gambled for by uncouth participants in his execution. From a broad perspective, Jesus’ wearing of the same garment in his boyhood and at the Crucifixion signifies his ontological oneness as the Savior, who is both priest and victim,¹¹⁵ especially considering that the Jewish high priest was thought to wear a seamless tunic.¹¹⁶ Such a conceptualization of a priestly Jesus is dramatically underscored in a miniature from the fourteenth-century Missale for the Basilica of San Marco in Venice (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, cod. lat. cl. III, 111, fol. 177v; fig. 4). Here a young Jesus positioned frontally stands alone before billowy clouds of Eucharistic hosts, holding a large host in one hand and a chalice in the other, like a priest displaying the consecrated elements at the climax of the Mass, except that here the priest and the sacrificial victim are truly one and the same.¹¹⁷

Figure 4. The boy Jesus holding a Eucharistic host and chalice. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, cod. lat. cl. III, 111 (=2116): Missale Sancti Marci, fol. 177v (fourteenth century). By permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo—Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.

      Although much further work on the medieval Christ Child needs to be done, especially on sources from the earlier medieval period, my multifaceted research thus far seems to indicate more continuity than abrupt change with regard to images and conceptualizations of the Christ Child from the late antique and medieval periods.¹¹⁸ Devotion toward the personages, places, and objects associated with Jesus’ birth and early life was often reinvigorated and elaborated, rather than completely invented out of whole cloth in the later Middle Ages. This can be seen, for example, in devotion to the manger, which was originally an object in the Holy Land venerated as a relic, as indicated, for example, by St. Jerome, who tells how St. Paula reverently visited the crib in Bethlehem. Privileged to be in the presence of the sacred object, Paula was prompted to “behold with the eyes of faith the infant Lord wrapped in swaddling clothes and crying in the manger.”¹¹⁹ For pious Christians who lived during the many centuries of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages who, for reasons of practicality, where unable to go to the Holy Land, the manger was an object they could wistfully imagine. The crusade movement and the more frequent undertaking of pilgrimages to the Holy Land beginning in the high Middle Ages probably intensified Christians’ attraction to the mysterious food bin that served as a crib for the infant God, as well as other objects and sites associated with the events of Christ’s earthly existence. In the early twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux remarked offhand, when speaking of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, that “people are more moved by the remembrance of [Christ’s] death than of his life.”¹²⁰ Along similar lines, Jerusalem (specifically, Mount Calvary) was considered the exact center of the world—not Bethlehem, for all its importance in being the spot where God initiated his plan for the redemption.¹²¹ Yet all the places in the Holy Land—where Christ was born, lived, suffered, and died—were highly venerated. Moreover, one could make a mental as well as physical pilgrimage to the places and objects that had been physically touched by Christ. At the turn of the thirteenth century, Mary of Oignies envisioned Jesus as a poor boy lying in the manger,¹²² but it was St. Francis of Assisi who a little later popularized the crèche as a paraliturgical object, one that could be seen and touched by ordinary people in medieval villages and towns, as well as by those fortunate enough to visit or live within the great city of Rome, which was thought to possess remnants of the actual crib.

      The basin in which the baby Jesus had been bathed was likewise highly valued by the Christ Child’s devotees. Writing about half a century after the death of Agnes of Montepulciano (d. 1317), a Dominican nun considered a saint, Raymond of Capua tells how she “desired with great affection to visit the lands across the sea, where our Savior was conceived, born, lived, and suffered for our salvation.” Although the Lord denied the nun’s request for distant travel, he provided some consolation through an angel, who brought her a clod of soil from beneath the cross, moistened by Jesus’ blood, and “a piece of that basin in which our Savior was placed in his tender age and bathed in the manner of little ones.”¹²³ Centuries earlier, Arculf, a Frankish bishop who visited the Holy Land, saw a stone that was hollowed out by the water “in which the little body of the Lord was first washed”—the bath-water that was poured over a wall after it had been used. According to Adomnán (d. 704), the abbot of Iona who wrote a description of the Holy Land based upon Arculf’s travels, this stone in Bethlehem “has ever since been full of the purest water, without any diminution”¹²⁴—a wonder well-matched by the continuous stream of pilgrims who visited the places where Jesus himself had lived and died.¹²⁵ Such passages referring to the bathing of the Christ Child indicate that, throughout the Middle Ages, Christians imaginatively harkened back to the milestone events and also the everyday occurrences of Jesus’ childhood.¹²⁶

      Whereas Herlihy offered an economic and social explanation for the new interest in the Christ Child, Marcus suggested that the new cult of the child Jesus was (in part) a European reaction against scholasticism—an effort to return to the simplicity of childhood.¹²⁷ Rather than see the new devotion to the Christ Child as primarily stemming from social and economic conditions or as an inverse response to the highly intellectualized climate of the time—that is, mainly as a defensive measure—I prefer to view it as a natural outgrowth, to a large extent, of the increasing emphasis placed upon Christ’s humanity—on God’s having assumed the lowliness, deficiencies, and even miseries of the human condition, including the common characteristics of childhood. Numerous sources indicate that Christians in the later Middle Ages delighted in the paradox that ensued from having as their Lord a God who had become and, in some way, was still a child. Believers were probably drawn to their Savior even further, when they reflected that he began to save them from the very beginning of his life. The greater interest given to the Virgin, and the continual role she was believed to play in human salvation over the course of the centuries, undoubtedly also led medieval Christians to focus more intensely on the early stages of Jesus’ life, which he intimately shared with Mary (and