The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages. Mary Dzon
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of the medieval period and even into the Early Modern era.244
That this widespread devotional text has, in the past, been misattributed to Bonaventure, a prolific Franciscan writer canonized in 1482, is not surprising considering the latter’s fame and the features that Bonaventure’s Lignum vitae shares with the Meditationes vitae Christi. In his short treatise Lignum vitae, Bonaventure touches upon Christ’s early life only briefly, unlike the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi, who is almost novelistic in the imaginary scenarios and extra-biblical details about Christ’s infancy and childhood he conjures up. Still, both authors repeatedly invite their readers to insert themselves into the life of Christ as it unfolds within their imaginations, thereby giving them the opportunity to engage in what Ewert Cousins has called the “mysticism of the historical event,” which Francis clearly exemplified at Greccio.245 That Bonaventure employs this mode of commemoration in the Lignum vitae is evident from the way he closes his brief account of the Nativity, with an instruction to enter into the event: “Now, then, my soul, embrace that divine manger; press your lips upon and kiss the boy’s feet.” Echoing what he says elsewhere, Bonaventure goes on to assert that Jesus began to suffer for humanity at the beginning of his life, “not delaying to pour out for you the price of his blood,” which he did at the Circumcision.246 A little further on, the reader is urged to join the Magi in “venerat[ing] Christ the King,” and then to imitate the old man Simeon at the Purification: “Let love overcome your bashfulness; let affection dispel your fear. Receive the Infant in your arms and say with the bride: ‘I took hold of him and would not let him go’ (Sg. 3:4). Dance with the old man.”247 The reader is further told to accompany the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt, “when the evil Herod sought to kill the tiny King.” Immediately afterward, the reader is instructed to search with Mary for her twelve-year-old son, who supposedly had never left his parents before. Linking these crisis situations through his narrative, Bonaventure tells his reader to imagine himself accompanying the young mother fleeing with her little son and later seeking him when he was twelve and then, when he is found in the Temple, questioning him about his apparently callous actions.248
While some of these passages seem to be closely modeled on Part Three of Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum, which is concerned with the biblical past, Bonaventure—not surprisingly, considering his intense focus on biblical details—omits the apocryphal tale about the encounter between the Holy Family and the good thief, which appeared in the earlier, Cistercian text.249 In addition, although Bonaventure cites a verse from the Song of Songs (3:4) in his account of Jesus’ early life (when describing how Simeon held Mary’s babe and did not want “to let him go”),250 his meditative text is not suffused with the erotic language of yearning for union with the child Jesus that is so prominent in Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum as well as his De Jesu puero duodenni. Another important distinction worth noting is that, whereas Bonaventure elsewhere, namely in his De quinque festivitatibus pueri Jesu, tells his reader to express her affection for the Christ Child and tend to him in a spiritual way (by “wrapp[ing] him up in the chaste folds of desires,” for example), in the Lignum vitae, he simply recommends embracing Jesus physically, as if his reader were truly in the Child’s presence.251 So the Lignum vitae is quite biblical and fairly straightforward in the imaginative and affective responses it seeks to elicit to the conventional events of Jesus’ infancy and childhood (that is, the incidents recounted in Scripture).
Like the De institutione inclusarum and the Lignum vitae, the Meditationes vitae Christi repeatedly urges its reader, originally a Poor Clare nun, to enter imaginatively into Jesus’ life. In addition, it frequently scripts the feeling of compassion as the appropriate response to the hardships and sufferings experienced by Jesus and Mary. A striking example of this occurs in the chapter on the Circumcision, which is the first time the reader is told to weep.252 The author claims that Mary herself circumcised her son, using a stone knife, and says that the Infant cried because of the sharp pain he felt in his “real flesh subject to pain (ueram carnem et passibilem).”253 The reader ought to “suffer together with him” and even to cry with him. She is also to share in the psychological pain of his mother, who was “terribly upset at the pain and tears of her son.”254 The psychological suffering of both Mother and Child is increased by each of them witnessing the other suffer, which likewise happens at the crucifixion,255 but on this occasion they pacify and comfort each other as the pain presumably subsides. As did Bonaventure in the Lignum vitae, the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi emphasizes that Jesus “began to suffer for us” at that time (that is, at the Circumcision).256 Jesus’ suffering and self-abasement are in fact highlighted throughout the text, even before this incident. For example, the author earlier remarks that Jesus humbly cloistered himself in Mary’s womb, “just like everyone else.” The reader is urged to “feel compassion for him [in the womb] that he reached so great a depth of humility.” In addition, she is informed that Jesus “was in ongoing affliction” from the moment of his conception until his death, and that his continual mental anguish, especially at the thought of the loss of souls (to the devil), was even greater than his physical suffering.257 When describing the Holy Family’s return from Egypt, the author claims that it was even more difficult than the journey there (which, as other texts emphasize, was an unexpected, anxiety-ridden flight from murderous pursuers), since the seven-year-old Jesus was too big to be carried the whole way and too small to walk very far. The author then references Psalm 87:16 as a prophecy of Jesus’ childhood (as did Bonaventure earlier): “O noble and delicate child, king of heaven and earth, how hard you have labored for us, and how early you have taken on those labors!”258 By eliciting the emotion of compassion for both the adult and child Jesus, the Meditationes vitae Christi certainly did much to promote affective piety for its Poor Clare readers and other late medieval Christians.
The Poor Clare reader is encouraged to experience delight as well as sorrow when meditating on the childhood of Christ, and to relate to the Boy on a simple level, as if she were a gentle child in his presence. At Greccio, Francis of Assisi may very well have interacted in such an intimate way with the Christ Child who, as I have already recounted, seems to have miraculously appeared during the Christmas Eve Mass celebrated there. In his Vita secunda, Thomas of Celano says that Greccio was the place where the saint “recalled the birth of the Child of Bethlehem, becoming a child with the Child (factus cum Puero puer)”—an intriguing comment upon which the author unfortunately does not expand.259 Citing this latter passage, Leah Marcus remarks that Francis was “far from scorning puerility.” Speaking of medieval Franciscans more generally, she claims that they “sought to infuse Christianity with a childishly playful spirit”; their “mingled gaiety and reverence” was “quite consciously childlike in its spontaneity and lack of decorum.”260 While Francis may be considered childlike on account of his simplicity, playfulness, and sense of wonder, he may also be thought to have become “a child with the Child” in a deeper sense, perhaps experiencing, as if vicariously, some of the divine child’s lowliness and abasement. Although we cannot pin down his meaning, it is fair to say that Thomas of Celano’s phrase “factus cum Puero puer” is echoed by the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi in the chapter on the Flight into Egypt, which instructs the reader to “become a little girl with the little child.”261
The chapter from the Meditationes vitae Christi dealing with the Flight to Egypt is worth examining more closely, since the author proposes much fruit for meditation regarding the seven years that the Holy Family spent in exile. To instill compassion in the reader, the author tells her what the family did to earn their living during that time. Implying that Joseph, an old man, brought home only a modest income as a carpenter, the author says that Mary plied the distaff and needle—a scene depicted in an illustrated Meditationes vitae Christi in Latin (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410, fol. 24v, bottom register; fig. 11) and also in an illustrated Italian version (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ital. 115, fols. 41r and 43r).262 When he was old enough to do so, the child Jesus acted as his mother’s agent in her home-based sewing business, returning the