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

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