The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages. Mary Dzon
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praesens in the life of Christ,17 yet when Aelred (on behalf of his reader) asks Jesus and later his mother questions like these concerning the Temple incident, such inquiries could be retrospective, as if the monk were conversing with Jesus and Mary in the reader’s present, rather than with them in the midst of the episode, as it unfolds, or immediately after it occurs. The past tense of the verbs in the queries cited above supports this alternative view, though Aelred’s addressing Jesus as a “dear boy” does seem to indicate that he is speaking to Jesus of the historical past (imaginatively re-presented).18 Be that as it may, it is clear that Aelred wants the reader of his text to replay the past in his memory and to insert himself in the course of events as if he were in the thick of their unfolding—to act as if such occurrences really matter in the here and now, to the reader who is imaginatively close to Jesus.
Aelred’s supposition in the above-cited passage that the Christ Child may have gone off with other children seems logical, considering that children are, and were, known to prefer the company of those their own age. Commenting on the biblical verse from Luke in which Christ essentially identifies himself with a young child (Lk. 9:47–48), the thirteenth-century Dominican exegete Hugh of Saint-Cher noted children’s natural affinity for each other: “they love each other.”19 As we shall see in the following chapter, the idea that the boy Jesus would have enjoyed being with his peers (and they with him) is highlighted in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and medieval texts derived from it, in which Jesus is repeatedly described as playing with other boys, usually outdoors.
The attention that Aelred’s treatise calls to children, here and elsewhere, arguably stems from his view that the boys who were privileged to interact with the twelve-year-old Jesus metaphorically represent monks, who, like Ivo, have chosen to enter a “hidden place” to gain access to Christ’s mysteries. Bernard of Clairvaux had earlier said that monastic life is characterized by three main features, one of which is hiddenness, a state that enables the monk to commune privately with his Lord.20 Thus, when Aelred speaks of boys going off with Jesus to a “hidden place,” he may very well have in mind the monastery, an environment chosen as conducive to acquiring greater intimacy with Christ, through meditation on the various stages of his life as well as other monastic practices. The fact that Cistercian communities did not accept child oblates (as did the Benedictines and other related groups) may, paradoxically, have given the monks more of an opportunity to envision themselves as children (and also parents) in a metaphorical sense.21 Aelred’s famous lament for his beloved friend and fellow monk Simon, found in his De speculo caritatis (Mirror of Charity), illustrates the abbot’s view of the monastery as a place where boys, as it were, are spiritually gathered around the child Jesus. Speaking, at one point, of a monk dear to his heart, Aelred tells how the “tender and delicate boy” Simon (puerum tenerum et delicatum) entered monastic life at a young age, running after the boy Jesus, who exuded “the scent of his perfumes” (Sg. 1:3). Aelred admires Simon for turning aside from his noble family and entering the abbey at Rievaulx in order to pursue his spiritual quest for Jesus. It was there that Simon succeeded in imitating the Christ Child, who “show[ed] him the manger of his poverty, the resting place of his humility, [and] the chamber of his charity decked with blossoms of his grace.”22 Like the bride in the Song of Songs, Simon yearned for the bridegroom of his soul, Jesus, and succeeded in interacting with him in the privacy of the cloister.
It should come as no surprise that Aelred, a disciple of Bernard of Clairvaux, alludes to the Song of Songs throughout the De Jesu puero duodenni, to speak of the soul’s search for Christ and to convey its delight in his spiritual presence. To give another example of how this poetical book from Scripture (a love song) permeates Aelred’s text: Aelred tells his reader to visualize how the people traveling with the boy Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem reached out and seized him: “Old men kiss him, young men embrace him, boys wait upon him…. Each of them, I think, declares in his inmost heart: ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth’ (Sg. 1:1). And to the boys who long for his presence … it is easy to apply the words: ‘Who will grant me to have you as my brother, sucking my mother’s breasts, to find you outside and kiss you?’ (Sg. 8:1).”23 Toward the end of the treatise, Aelred again quotes this verse from the Song of Songs when speaking of Ivo’s “longing for one kiss and one touch of [Jesus’] dear lips.” Aelred assures Ivo that when he sighs for Christ as for a brother, “Then certainly he will come to you with all the fragrance of ointments and perfumes.”24 The abbot’s repeated emphasis on fragrance emanating from Christ, a detail which appeared in the above-cited passage from the Mirror of Charity, is clearly based upon the olfactory imagery in the Song of Songs. The sensuousness of this latter text, in my view, helps explain why Aelred, at one point, asks the boy Jesus who bathed and anointed him when he was separated from his parents for three days. Without explicitly claiming that this image has homosexual connotations, Brian Patrick McGuire suggests as much when, referring to this passage, he speaks of “Aelred’s fantasy about a massage for Jesus.”25 If we keep in mind, though, that Aelred’s treatise is mainly concerned with the monk’s spiritual relationship with Christ and that Aelred constantly employs language and images from the Song of Songs, then the sensuousness of such passages will seem less startling and will less plausibly be read as a clear indication of Aelred’s putative homosexuality.26 Aelred’s concern about the Christ Child’s hygiene may stem, in part, from the maternal care toward monks that he himself was accustomed to exercise as abbot.27 It also suggests his identification with Mary in her search for Christ, insofar as she is envisioned in that episode as the bride par excellence yearning for the bridegroom, and also imagined as a solicitous mother. In this treatise, Ivo and the other monks are invited to identify with her. Toward the end of this work, when speaking of the rewards of the spiritual life, Aelred tells his monastic reader that he will eventually be able to utter the words that Mary herself said when she finally found her twelve-year-old son in the Temple: “Then there are embraces, then there are kisses, then: ‘I have found him whom my soul loves, I have held him fast and will not let him go’ ” (Sg. 3:4).28
Having discussed the overall orientation of the De Jesu puero duodenni—the way it encourages the monastic reader to envision himself as seeking the most beloved of boys, as did the Christ Child’s family, friends, and neighbors—I will now flesh out the treatise’s contents more precisely in order to show that it places greater emphasis upon spiritual growth than upon the actual or hypothetical details of the Temple episode. Aelred gives his treatise a tripartite structure, dividing it into sequential considerations of the historical, allegorical, and moral senses of the biblical anecdote about the twelve-year-old Jesus. Numerically speaking, only the first ten of the text’s thirty-two sections (according to how its modern editors have divided it) are devoted to what the Christ Child did during his three-day sojourn in Jerusalem or to the issue of his subsequent advancement “in wisdom, and age, and grace” when he returned to Nazareth (Lk. 2:52). In other words, less than a third of the treatise is concerned with the historical (or broader, Christological) sense of the biblical account about the twelve-year-old Jesus’ staying behind in the Temple.29 That Aelred is more interested in the episode’s moral sense is indicated by the fact that his treatise culminates in this mode of interpretation, and also by his reference to the theme of the soul’s infancy and development in sections that are ostensibly devoted to the historical and allegorical interpretations of the aforesaid biblical episode. For instance, early on, in the first (that is, historical) section of the treatise, after remarking that the boy Jesus did not come into the Temple “as a teacher, but as a boy who learns … [and] does not withdraw from the control of his parents” (a comment that, incidentally, undermines the potential view of Jesus as a disobedient and disrespectful child), Aelred suddenly reflects upon his own past sinful behavior, likening himself to the Prodigal Son (Lk. 15:11–32) who, through folly, soon found himself without food. In need of bread like the Prodigal Son, Aelred eventually came to his senses and returned to Bethlehem, a town whose name means “House of Bread.” There, on the altar in the Church, he found the Eucharist, which is none other than the Christ Child in the manger, and fed thereon.30 Aelred then offers a moral reading of his own behavior and of the beasts widely thought to have been gathered around the manger at the first Christmas: “This is the beginning of conversion, a spiritual birth as it were,