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

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