The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages. Mary Dzon
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of his conversion and the infant Jesus is appropriate because, in his youth, the future saint experienced a spiritual rebirth, in which he embraced a sort of newness. Like a newborn, who has no clothing or other possessions, Francis divested himself of all material goods, even his underwear, when he severed his ties with his father and rejected his worldly ways.127 Thomas of Celano comments on the advantage Francis gained by taking off his clothes: “Now he wrestles naked with the naked”—a reference to the traditional idea of spiritual combat, as well as an allusion to the ancient practice of pankration (which involved wrestling in the nude).128 Thomas adds that now “only the wall of the flesh would separate [Francis] from the vision of God,” implying that clothing and other earthly goods are a hindrance to one who intensely seeks union with the divine.
Throughout his life as a friar, Francis—who, again, could have dressed in fine clothes in life, because of his social standing, but decisively opted not to, just as the Word himself chose poverty—insisted on having only one rough tunic, which he often shared or gave away when he saw a person in need.129 At his death, he ordered that he be laid naked on the “naked ground.” A connection between the saint’s nakedness at the beginning and end of his religious life is explicitly made by Bonaventure, whose vita of Francis became the official version for the Franciscan Order in 1266: “In all things he wished without hesitation to be conformed to Christ crucified who hung on the cross poor, suffering, and naked. Naked he lingered before the bishop at the beginning of his conversion; and, for this reason, at the end of his life, he wanted to leave this world naked.”130 In praising Francis’s nakedness, Bonaventure may have in mind the famous remark of Job (1:21; cf. Ecclesiastes 5:14) about his exiting from his mother’s womb naked and leaving the world in that state as well. Yet, by saying that Francis was naked “at the beginning” (of his life as a religious), Bonaventure may also have in mind the nearly naked Christ Child. The popular Franciscan-authored devotional text Meditationes vitae Christi (about which I will say more below) draws attention to Christ’s lack of clothing at his birth and at his death when it describes Mary wrapping the baby Jesus in her veil and later “girding him with her head covering,” when he was stripped completely naked at the Passion.131
Figure 5. The converted St. Francis stripped of clothes standing next to the baby Jesus lying on the ground. Print by Rolando Dominici (twenty-first century). By permission of the artist.
Bonaventure himself conflates Christ’s infancy with his Passion in a few places of his writings. For instance, in his De perfectione vitae ad sorores, he remarks that “from the first day of his life to his last, from the instant of birth to the instant of death, pain and sorrow were his companions. So he himself has said through the prophet: ‘I am afflicted and in agony from my youth’ (Ps. 87:16); and elsewhere: ‘I have been scourged all the day’ (Ps. 72:14), meaning all his life.”132 In his Vitis mystica, Bonaventure reiterates the idea that Jesus’ entire life was filled with suffering, when he explains that “the term ‘passion’ ” does not apply “to the one day only on which he died, but to the whole extent of his life.”133 He again cites Psalm 87:16 in support of this interpretation.134 In a later chapter, Bonaventure reflects on the idea that “the crucifixion of Jesus actually began at his birth,” explaining that it was not an accident that he was “born in a strange place, in mid-winter, in the depth of the night, outside the inn, of a Mother poor and humble. Although at this time there was no shedding of his blood, it did come about after only seven days had passed,” that is, at the Circumcision.135 Along similar lines, St. Anthony of Padua, in a sermon for the feast of the Circumcision, observed, “Christ’s whole life was in blood … Christ was blood-red at the beginning and at the end of his life.”136 In light of such passages, which presumably distill the spirituality of the order’s founder, I think it is fair to say that Francis of Assisi was thought to have imitated Christ in the sufferings he endured, not just at his Passion, but throughout his life—including its earliest moments. Indeed, all of Christ’s life entailed suffering that stemmed from poverty.
The centrality of Christ’s poverty to the Franciscan way of life is evident from the Regula non bullata, the Rule that Francis composed for his friars and that Pope Innocent III orally approved in 1209. When Francis says that the friars ought to “strive to follow the humility and poverty of our Lord Jesus Christ,” having nothing but food and clothing, he likely has in mind the Christ Child as well as the adult Jesus, who lived as an itinerant preacher content with bare necessities. Francis continues by telling the brothers not to be ashamed to beg, since Jesus himself was not ashamed to do so. “He was poor and a stranger and lived on alms—he, the Blessed Virgin, and his disciples.”137 A more nuanced presentation of Jesus as a mendicant (literally, “one who begs”) is found in the Franciscan Meditationes vitae Christi, in the chapter on the Holy Family’s return from Egypt. Here, the boy Jesus seems to accept alms with unease: when his neighbors offered him money for traveling expenses for the family’s return from Egypt, “the boy was embarrassed … but out of his love of poverty, he opened his hand, shamefacedly accepted the money and expressed thanks.”138 The implication is that by going against his natural disinclination to accept handouts, the Christ Child reveals his love of poverty as well as his nobility.139 In the depiction of this incident in the well-known illustrated manuscript containing an Italian version of the Meditationes (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ital. 115, fol. 45r; fig. 6), a small-looking Christ Child (who, according to the text, would be about nine years old) appears a bit overwhelmed by the situation, as he opens his hand to receive money from an old man standing behind him.140 Aelred of Rievaulx had earlier suggested that the young Jesus had begged for necessities, specifically during his three-day sojourn in Jerusalem, yet he did not elaborate on that detail.141 Just as Francis and his followers can be said to have acted like the child Jesus by begging, so, by wearing “poor clothes” patched “with sackcloth and other pieces” (namely, “a tunic with a hood”),142 they arguably patterned themselves after the newborn Christ Child, who was humbly wrapped with swaddling clothes (Lk. 2:7).
While Francis himself, in the surviving texts written by him, does not explicitly speak about the strips of fabric Mary used to swaddle her infant, his disciple Clare of Assisi did. In the monastic Rule she wrote for her sisters, Clare emphasizes that the infant Jesus was scantily covered, a detail she weaves into her instructions concerning the nuns’ clothing: “Out of love of the most holy and beloved Child wrapped in poor swaddling clothes (pauperculis panniculis involutus) and placed in a manger and of his most holy mother, I admonish, beg, and encourage my sisters to wear poor garments.”143 Similarly, in her Fourth Letter to Agnes of Prague (a Bohemian princess who had become a Poor Clare nun around twenty years earlier), Clare urges her to contemplate Christ, her heavenly spouse: “Look, I say, at the border of this mirror, that is, the poverty of him who was placed in a manger and wrapped in swaddling clothes (in panniculis involutus). O marvelous humility! O astonishing poverty! The King of angels, the Lord of heaven and earth, is laid in a manger!”144 Clare’s use of the diminutive form of the word panni (“strips of fabric”), which appears in Luke 2:7, is suggestive of rags, or at least of paltry pieces of cloth—pitiful strips of fabric that barely, and not at all worthily, cover the royal Babe.145 Like Francis, Clare calls attention to the Infant’s royalty, which makes the humble conditions of the Nativity seem even more astonishing. Moreover, such a characterization emphasizes the nobility of Agnes’s heavenly spouse, a fitting match for a princess. Just as Francis was extremely ascetic as regards his use of clothing, occasionally appearing naked in public and instructing other friars to do so, as a form of penance,146 so Clare, a woman of the nobility, “was content with only one tunic of lazzo (a rough fabric) and one mantle,” as a witness testified in Clare’s Process of Canonization.147 Modestly wearing her rough-hewn garment, in deference to social norms, Clare nevertheless boldly envisioned herself fighting naked against the devil.148 Although Francis himself does not employ the image of pankration, as Clare rather remarkably does, they both seem to