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

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