Medieval adults’ desire to recover purity through repentance and spiritual cleansing and also to return, more generally, to the more carefree way of life exemplified by children (if not, more spiritually, to acquire a childlike trust and dependency on their divine Father),94 probably helps explain to a large extent the attraction that the child Jesus held for medieval Christians.95 Believers seem to have taken to heart Christ’s famous words: “unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3–4).
Nostalgia of an escapist sort, rather than a healthy desire for personal reformation, may sometimes have instilled the urge to find a lost childhood. More specifically, medieval Christians may have chosen to reflect upon Jesus’ childhood in order to ignore, at least temporarily, the negative aspects of their own lives or to avoid thinking about the suffering Jesus endured as an adult. In the Life of Blessed Margaret of Faenza (d. 1330), a Vallombrosan nun, we learn that she spent a good deal of time, “perfecting her meditations on the childhood of the Savior.” She experienced such “marvelously sweet things (mirabiles dulcedines) during them” that “she did not care to pass onto Christ’s later life (ad altiora conscendere, literally, “to climb to higher things”).”96 Perhaps feeling somewhat offended by the way she ignored his adulthood, Jesus finally told her that it was “not right to wish to taste only the honey and not the gall (de melle meo … & non de felle).” Margaret henceforth concentrated completely on the Passion, with great intensity, apparently exchanging all the honey for gall (though Christ’s rhyming of words suggests that sweetness and bitterness may go hand in hand). Other evidence suggests that at least some medieval people perceived a danger in fascination with Christ’s childhood. Once Humiliana de’ Cerchi (d. 1246), a Franciscan tertiary, was subjected to an illusion by the devil, who, “understanding her desires, showed her the figure of Our Lady and the child Jesus, radiant of face and raiment,” yet the pious widow saw through this demonic trick, which interestingly reveals the imaginative seductiveness, for some, of the Mother-and-Child duo.97
Although Christ had acquired the characteristics of ordinary children by the later Middle Ages,98 in contemporaneous sources he often seems distant and aloof, and occasionally imperious, so we would be wise to avoid the over-generalization that, at that time, the figure of a formidable Christ, such as the exacting Judge of the eerie Dies irae hymn, was completely superseded by the suffering Savior on the cross, as well as the gentle Child who is perpetually open to reconciliation.99 All three manifestations of the Son of God are in fact referred to—in quick succession, suggestive of a conflation—in a much earlier passage by St. Jerome, with which medieval scholars well read in patristic writings would have been familiar. Intending to convince his friend Heliodorus of the superiority of the anchoritic way of life, Jerome concludes his letter to him by reminding him that the God who will come to judge him and the whole human race is he who was a lowly man and a child who suffered during life, implying that Christ will show mercy to those who are likewise simple, humble, and patient.100 Given the many aspects of Christ’s persona—the different forms he assumes at the various stages of his earthly life, and in his current and future state of glory, forms which are able to coexist by virtue of his divinity—it is not surprising that medieval Christians imagined the child Jesus as a multifaceted and rather unpredictable personage. In an exemplum found in an early fifteenth-century collection of religious tales, “evidently compiled by a Franciscan in northern Italy,” the Christ Child (perhaps to be expected of one who is “purus”) is initially ill-disposed toward a prostitute who prays to him, but is then mollified by his merciful mother.101 In the famous early thirteenth-century collection of tales by the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach, the Dialogus miraculorum, we learn, along similar lines, that the Christ Child turned his face away from a priest who presumed to consecrate the Eucharist unworthily.102 So the boy Jesus was not always imagined as a sweet and gentle child. He could express his displeasure in even more dramatic ways, as we have seen in an anecdote from the vita of Ida of Louvain, in which the Christ Child lashed out in a sort of temper tantrum at Ida’s sister, in defense of his beloved.
The Christ Child is, however, more often shown to be mysterious and elusive than retributive. In a didactic dialogue text transmitted in various medieval languages, the Child appears to the Emperor Hadrian; without at first identifying himself, he instructs the emperor in the central tenets of the Christian faith, and then disappears, immediately after revealing who he is.103 The Child likewise vanishes shortly after he appears to the boy Edmund of Abingdon (d. 1240), telling him that he was always beside him during his studies, and that he will continue to be with him.104 In his mystical dealings with the fourteenth-century Dominican nun Margaret Ebner, who cared for the infant Jesus as for a real child, Christ made a point of emphasizing his ability to leave her at will.105 In speaking of similar tales included in the so-called Sister Books that record the experiences and imaginary world of late medieval German nuns, Richard Kieckhefer remarks that “the theme of divine presence is expressed in these stories with something of the teasing playfulness associated with the Bridegroom in the Song of Songs.”106 While Kieckhefer’s comment is applicable in this more general discussion of the Child who often seems to be a flirtatious and inaccessible lover, I would stress the playful paradoxicality of a divine child who seems almost to play a game of “hide-and-seek” with his devotees.107 Along similar lines, in the vita of the Augustinian nun Clare of Montefalco by Berengario di Donadio, we learn that when she was still a child but had already entered the convent, the Virgin Mary appeared to her many times: “in her mantle the Virgin was [leading] the Child Jesus, who seemed to be the same age as Clare. Urged by his Mother, the Child Jesus [at times] approached Clare [on foot], took her hand, and filled her with wonderful consolations.” Yet Jesus made it clear to her that he was not accessible for play as she had assumed he would be, as someone her own age. “Seeing him thus with her own eyes, Clare wanted to take hold of him and play with him, but the Child eluded her and returned to his mother, leaving Clare in a state of deep desire.”108 Perhaps seeking to get at the ultimate untouchability of the child Jesus that stems from his divine majesty, an early fourteenth-century fresco based upon this episode depicts the young Clare kneeling before the child Jesus. Standing erect on his own two feet and partly sheltered by his mother’s mantle, the divine child blesses his young devotee (Master of St. Clare, Church of St. Clare, Chapel of the Holy Cross, Montefalco, c. 1333; fig. 3).
In the later Middle Ages, Christ not only at times suddenly absented himself from his devotees, but also often appeared all at once, showing himself to be engaged in an activity or in a form that caused surprise.109 Vito of Cortona, the Franciscan biographer of the devout Florentine widow Humiliana de’ Cerchi (d. 1246), recounts how Jesus once visited her as a four-year-old boy, playing in her room—a discovery that produced some flirtatious banter: “O sweet love! Dear boy! Don’t you know how to do anything except play?” Right after recounting this incident, the hagiographer casts a shroud of mystery on Humiliana’s interactions with the Christ Child, commenting: “There are several things about the child Jesus which we will not put down in writing lest we should relate uncertainties.” While Vito may seem dismissive of such mystical encounters, his further remark suggests that Humiliana herself chose not to disclose such intimate experiences: “We have also heard it said that she kissed his feet; and we believe it, because she received many more things from Jesus than can be related and she concealed more than she declared.”110 Explicitly calling Humiliana an “enclosed garden” (hortus conclusus, Sg. 4:12), her reticent biographer delicately preserves the mysterious character of Jesus’ apparitions to, and interactions with, the holy woman—thus in a way imitating John the Evangelist, who opted to leave much about Jesus’ life unspoken (John 21:25). Whereas Humiliana did not expect to find Jesus playing in her room, the Dominican tertiary Osanna of Mantua (d. 1505) must have been startled to an even greater extent when, in a vision, she saw the Christ Child bearing a crown of thorns on his head and a large cross on his shoulders.111 These examples show that the Christ Child was present to medieval Christians under many guises, and that he remained mysterious to them, despite their confidence in
