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

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