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

ways) is simply a literary version of contemporary Gothic depictions of Jesus as a recognizably human child.Yet the case is more complex: the Christ Child of the Meditationes vitae Christi is not simply a charming and loveable boy. Insofar as he is also endowed with uncannily mature characteristics, the Christ Child of the Meditationes can be said to resemble Romanesque-Byzantine portrayals of the child Jesus:⁷¹ the Romanesque image of a little man, seated on his mother’s lap, as if on a throne,⁷² or the Byzantine image of “Christ Emmanuel,” a depiction of a serious and wise-looking Boy, portrayed in isolation from his mother.⁷³

      In the Meditationes vitae Christi, we do indeed find a less childlike, if not completely hieratic, Christ Child in the account of the Epiphany, where Jesus “watches [the kings] benignly, with maturity and gravity, as though He understood them.” After they lay their gifts at and kissed his feet, the “wisdom-filled boy (puer sapientissimus) also stretched out his hand to them to be kissed, to give them greater solace, and to strengthen them in his love. He made the sign (of the cross) and blessed them as well.”⁷⁴ As Burrow remarks in his study on the importance of gestures in later medieval literature, “to kiss someone’s hand, leg, or foot evidently humbles the kisser and signifies respect.”⁷⁵ Yet the regal and gracious Jesus depicted here seems concerned, not just with the respect he deserves, but also with his visitors’ well-being, in a way allowing himself to be kissed as “a sign of Catholic unity, as … when a guest is received.”⁷⁶ Even more friendly interaction between the infant king and the Magi can be seen in a fourteenth-century fresco depicting the Adoration in the Monastery of the Sacro Speco of St. Benedict in Subiaco (fig. 2), in which the baby Jesus places his hand on the eldest king’s snow-white head, the latter’s crown having been removed. Here, as in other devotional works, the old man is shown kissing the Infant’s bare feet, a demonstrative act of reverence and supplication.⁷⁷ Regardless of what exactly the baby Jesus is said or seen to do in numerous Epiphany scenes, “the image of a mere baby receiving the homage of grown men … forcefully expresses the transcendent standing of the incarnate God in his relation to human hierarchies…. Old men submit to infants.”⁷⁸ In short, medieval texts and images that focus on the Epiphany often underscore the paradoxicality that medieval Christians perceived in the Christ Child.

      While the child Jesus throughout the medieval period was regarded by orthodox Christians as both God and man, there are differences—both striking and subtle—in how he is portrayed. Such differences give us some indications of how artists, writers, thinkers, and more ordinary people viewed the relationship between Christ’s two natures. To be sure, Christians’ attempt to understand the so-called hypostatic union was, to say the least, challenging. Traditionally, it has been considered erroneous to think that Jesus’ two natures were blended or otherwise modified by their intimate association within the person of Jesus Christ. Joseph Ratzinger recently reiterated this idea, in a book on the canonical infancy narratives, where, at one point, he discounts the idea that Greco-Roman myths offer parallels to Jesus’ virgin birth. Restating traditional doctrine, Ratzinger forcefully emphasizes that “in the Gospel accounts, the oneness of the one God and the infinite distance between God and creature is fully preserved. There is no mixture, no demi-god.”⁷⁹ Despite this perennial orthodox teaching, medieval Christians, as we shall see, sometimes verged on getting things wrong: coming close to or apparently detracting from (if not wholly discounting) the perfect divinity of Christ, by laying too much stress on the naturalness of his humanity, or, on the other hand, exaggerating his divinity to such an extent that his humanity was regarded as a mere act, which gave outsiders the wrong impression about his identity (specifically, by suggesting that he was not truly human).

Figure 2. The ministration of the midwives; the adoration of the Magi. Fresco attributed to the Master Trecentesco of Sacro Speco School, Monastero di San Benedetto, Subiaco (fourteenth century). By permission of Bridgeman Images.

      Though it is difficult to sort out all the various cultural components that contributed to a given medieval representation of the Christ Child or the Virgin Mary, the following study of select religious texts dealing with these figures suggests that the apocryphal narratives, which earnestly explore the duality of Christ’s identity, had a significant influence upon other later medieval writers’ attempts at reconstructing Jesus’ hidden years. Originally composed in the Early Christian period, these legends were revived and elaborated in the high and later Middle Ages, when they appeared in new Latin redactions and in vernacular translations. With varying degrees of frequency, depending on the particular tale, these legends were also depicted in Western art, even though many of these legends were without any (or hardly any) biblical basis.

      Artistic renderings of the apocryphal childhood of Jesus took a number of forms. Sometimes they helped fill out a sequence of images devoted to Christ’s childhood or were part of a cycle covering the span of Jesus’ life, thus providing a visual narrative paralleling the written accounts offered by devotional literature. Sometimes artistic scenes based upon the apocrypha were deftly mixed with more conventional images derived from Scripture, sometimes they themselves formed visual sequences depicting apocryphal legends. Artistically rendered in various ways, on the walls and ceilings of churches, as well as in Books of Hours and in illuminated manuscripts (occasionally as illustrations accompanying apocryphal texts), images of the apocryphal Jesus were viewed by both private and public audiences and were in no way limited to those who intentionally sought alternative Christologies.⁸⁰ Some of the legends were loosely tied to Scripture (such as the story about the Child’s destruction of the idols in Egypt, which was linked with Isaiah 19:1). Legends that ended up being depicted very frequently acquired quasi-canonical status, such as the latter tale and the belief that an ox and an ass were present at the Christ Child’s manger. A number of apocryphal or legendary details crept into standard scenes, like the representation of the midwives who were summoned to assist Mary at Jesus’ birth and arrived belatedly. In artworks these women are often shown helping her with childcare, often by bathing the baby Jesus. They clearly have a central place in a fourteenth-century fresco of the Nativity in the monastery of the Sacro Speco: while one of these handmaidens prepares a bath, the other zealously extends her arms, reverently covered with a cloth, in order to receive the baby Jesus from his mother Mary (fig. 2). The cloth covering the woman’s hands and arms indicates her recognition of the divinity of the Child, whom she is privileged to attend.

      In contrast, tales about the miracles that Christ supposedly worked as he was growing up, which were frowned upon by a number of medieval churchmen, were visually rendered much more rarely. In Chapter 3 I examine opposition to such legends on the part of the famous thirteenth-century Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas. Despite the reasonableness of Aquinas’s arguments against Jesus’ childhood miracles, stories about them were nevertheless popular since they appealed to both lay and clerical audiences, who regarded such material as both entertaining and devotional. In addition to providing diversion for their audiences, such legends would have been welcomed as sources of information about the unknown period of Jesus’ youth, even if this material were only piecemeal or hypothetical.

      Given the widespread popularity of such apocryphal stories, it is fair to suppose that late medieval writers were familiar with these accounts. The controversy surrounding the apocryphal legends may have actually drawn people’s attention to them, as well as impelled others to seek information from more reliable sources or to exercise their own creativity in dealing with Christ’s childhood. Chapter 4 considers the revelations of the fourteenth-century mystic Birgitta of Sweden concerning the Nativity and the family life of Jesus at Nazareth, some of which seem to respond to apocryphal traditions about Christ’s infancy and childhood (for example, by implicitly denying that midwives assisted Mary in attending to her newborn, a detail derived from early apocryphal narratives). Although this study could have focused on many other mystics from the later Middle Ages,⁸¹ I have chosen Birgitta since she provides