The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages. Mary Dzon
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in the poor city of Bethlehem.” Thomas here is likely summarizing at least part of the saint’s sermon; the phrase “poor king,” in particular, sounds like something Francis would say, judging from other statements attributed to him in early hagiographical writings. Recall how (according to the Vita secunda) Francis once sat on the bare floor and was “bathed in tears” when he heard about the “royal virtue” of the Christ Child and his mother—their embrace of poverty.208 At Greccio, Francis may very well have stressed this virtue out of the three that Thomas mentions (simplicity, poverty, and humility). Elsewhere, Thomas tells us why Francis liked Greccio so much: its inhabitants were “rich in poverty.”209 So poverty was clearly uppermost in Francis’s mind on Christmas Eve in Greccio.
Although Thomas does not explicitly say that Francis cried on that occasion, he calls attention to the saint’s intense emotionality when he says that he stood “before the manger, filled with heartfelt sighs.” He was no doubt thinking about the Babe’s poverty, and likely reflected on his pitiful swaddling clothes, as well as his makeshift crib.210 In his account of this episode, Bonaventure, in comparison to Thomas of Celano, places greater emphasis upon Francis’s emotional response, specifically by saying that he was “bathed in tears,” a phrase which echoes the aforementioned passage from the Vita secunda.211 Along similar lines, in his Liber miraculorum, the Cluniac abbot Peter the Venerable (d. 1156), noted that “it is the custom of the same monastery [that is, Cluny] to celebrate the birthday of the Savior with a certain singular affection, more devotedly than other feast-days, and to solemnize it earnestly with the spirits of the angels, by means of the melodies of songs, lengthy readings, the burning of many sorts of candles, and—what is far more remarkable—with special devotion and much shedding of tears.”212 Although Francis was by no means the inventor of the Christmas Eve celebration, of the manger as a paraliturgical object,213 or of compassion for the sufferings of the lowly Christ Child,214 he breathed new life into the feast of the Nativity by emphasizing realistic details surrounding Christ’s birth, particularly the manger. He was also one of the first medieval Christians to manifest publicly and intentionally a tender sensibility for the Infant’s bodily sufferings and to encourage others to experience feelings of compassion as well as joyful gratitude for the Incarnation. Thus, in my view, it is fair to say that “compassion for the suffering Savior”—in both his infancy and at his Passion—“was given an archetypal expression in Francis and through him was channeled into Western devotion, art, and culture as a whole.”215
During his sermon, Francis manifests his “sweet affection” for the Child by his inability to utter the word “Bethlehem” without bleating like a sheep. Thomas says that he tasted the words “Jesus” and “babe of Bethlehem,” savoring their sweetness.216 Such gustatory imagery expresses the intensity of the saint’s loving meditation on Christ’s infancy, his experience of its immediacy, and his desire for union with the tender lamblike babe of Bethlehem, not to mention his devotion to the name of Jesus.217 Anna Vorchtlin, a nun at Engelthal, expressed this sentiment, but with more gusto, when she told the baby Jesus, whom she saw in a vision, “If I had you, I would eat you up, I love you so much!”218 Perhaps Francis’s indulgence in mystical sweetness compensated for the sorrow he experienced on this occasion when he recollected the sufferings that attended Christ’s birth.
Besides expressing his love for the infant Jesus and speaking of the incommodious conditions of his Nativity, Francis, by both his words and actions, likely reminded his audience of the presence of the Christ Child in the consecrated host. Indeed, by licking his lips, the saint may be manifesting his spiritual appetite for this heavenly food.219 In one of his “Admonitions” (which I have already mentioned), Francis emphasizes the importance of Christians seeing God in the Eucharist with their spiritual eyes. Just as, at Greccio, the bystanders (with the exception of John and Francis) were unable to see Jesus in the manger, so they, like the other participants at Mass, were unable to see Christ, in his human form, on the altar. Might Francis, during his sermon, have pointed to the manger under (or next to) the altar, telling his listeners that they would soon see, in the hands of the priest, the same child who was wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in the manger in Bethlehem hundreds of years ago? Perhaps he expressed, in simple terms, the metaphor that the early Cistercian Guerric of Igny (and others) had enunciated: that the sacramental species of bread and wine covered the divinity, as the swaddling bands enveloped the Christ Child.220
While the image of the lamb that Francis dramatically introduces into his sermon by bleating reveals, in a charming manner, his love of animals (lambs were definitely his favorite),221 he probably intended it as an imaginative cue that would prompt his audience to think of the Lamb of God who was sacrificed at the Passion (cf. Isa. 53:7), and still offered up by the priest at the altar at every Mass. The fresco depicting the Mass at Greccio in the Upper Church in Assisi may in fact represent the very moment in the liturgy when, at the beginning of the canon of the Mass, the choir chants the “Agnus Dei.” Like a snapshot, the scene captures a small number of friars singing, with opened mouths, as the priest bends over the host at the altar. Perhaps, though, the scene represents Francis seizing the baby Jesus at the very moment when the priest consecrates the host, which shortly thereafter would be elevated for adoration and viewing, with the priest saying: “Ecce Agnus Dei.” This could possibly explain why no one in the fresco (and all but one person in the written sources) seems to notice Francis’s encounter with the baby Jesus: while Francis holds the Lamb of God in his infant form, the other participants are about to behold Christ hidden under the Eucharistic species.222 At the end of the chapter, Thomas reintroduces the image of the lamb when he notes that a permanent altar was built over the manger and a church around it, “so that where animals once ate the fodder of hay (foeni pabulum), there humans … would eat the flesh of the immaculate and spotless lamb, our Lord Jesus Christ, who ‘gave himself for us.’ ” Thomas here cites Paul’s letter to Titus (2:14), where he speaks of Christ’s giving of himself “for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity,” but he also echoes Isaiah 9:6 (“A child is born to us, and a son is given to us”), which, for Francis, as we have seen, powerfully encapsulates God’s loving plan for the redemption of the human race.
Now that we have considered how some of Francis’s earliest followers viewed his devotion to the Christ Child, it is worth reflecting on how this devotion of the saint tends to be viewed more generally and popularly. In an essay on the Old English poem Christ III, the Anglo-Saxonist scholar Thomas D. Hill contrasts the “dark” Anglo-Saxon view of the Nativity with the modern-day festive attitude toward Christmas, which he traces back to St. Francis of Assisi.223 Contextualizing the Old English poem within early medieval culture, as well as viewing it within the development of Christian piety over the centuries, Hill connects the Anglo-Saxon poet’s presentation of the infant Christ as “covered in a pauper’s clothes” and “laid … in the darkness … on a hard stone” with contemporary iconography of the newborn Christ placed on an altar-like manger, as seen, for example, in the tenth-century Benedictional of Æthelwold (London, British Library, MS Add. 49598, fol. 15v). Significantly, the image in question lies opposite a blessing for Christmas taken from a homily of Gregory the Great, an early and influential source for the conflation of the Christ Child and the Eucharist, and the manger and the altar.224 Although Hill in this article seems predominantly to have in mind the jovial side of Francis’s personality as well as his typical association with affective piety, Francis’s view of the Nativity was in fact rooted in the same patristic-based imagery that is reflected in the illuminated Anglo-Saxon liturgical book and in Christ III. Hill contrasts the “square, block-like” altar mentioned in the poem and similarly depicted in the Benedictional with Francis’s “crib filled with straw” (“comfortable enough”).225 Yet the Italian saint’s display of compassion for the “discomforts” of the Nativity and the connection he almost certainly made in his sermon between the Infant in the manger and the Child soon to be present on the altar demonstrates that Francis’s Christmas was not merely an occasion for sentimentality and merry-making. Francis was just as aware of the biblical theme of “the sacrifice of the well-beloved son” (a phrase used by Hill) as was his predecessors—a mystery culminating in Christ’s Passion and death and his perpetuation