more abstract levels of thinking and to undergo an inner reformation—to undertake, more broadly speaking, a spiritual quest that would culminate in an ineffable experience of the divine.
This chapter will focus on two works of Aelred of Rievaulx and on thirteenth-century texts by and about St. Francis and his disciple St. Clare, because scholars have traditionally (and rightfully so in my view) given the Cistercians and Franciscans major credit for initiating a new type of devotion to the child Jesus that became widespread in the later Middle Ages, an affective piety that was focused on the Christ Child’s hardships as well as his attractiveness and sweetness as a tender child. Yet, as we shall see, the Cistercian abbot Aelred focuses only to a small degree on the human qualities of Christ’s boyhood, preferring in his now famous treatise on the twelve-year-old Jesus to draw the attention of his monastic male reader to the process of conversion and spiritual development that he himself must undergo, a transformation that should parallel the Christ Child’s birth and growth throughout the life cycle. While Aelred’s other work to be considered below, a letter addressed to his sister, who was an anchoress, appeals more to the senses in the relatively short section on the historical life of Christ that is relevant here, the recluse is encouraged not just to imagine what the human Jesus was like at different stages of his life, but also to reflect deeply on her own status as a bride of Christ, who has turned from this world so as to prepare herself better for the next, in which the union with her beloved will finally be realized. To become more familiar with Christ in the here and now and also to make herself more worthy of being his bride, the anchoress is to imagine herself interacting with Jesus as did his mother and his other female followers featured in the canonical gospels. The recluse is also to imitate Jesus in the way he lived his life, as a poor and humble man, detached from the power structures and, to some extent, social obligations of this world (like reproduction and child-rearing). Just as such Cistercian works do much, in a literary way, with the relatively few details from the canonical gospels dealing with Christ’s early life, so do the early Franciscan sources succeed in making the child Jesus who is hidden in the Bible come to the fore. Whereas the Cistercians’ approach was more inward, that of the Franciscans was more performative and tangible (in the sense of being focused on real objects like the manger), yet in both cases audiences were encouraged to imitate and have a greater love for the lowly and tender Child who was born in Bethlehem and grew up in obscurity in Nazareth, in a loving and humble family that focused on the basics of everyday life. Significantly, both Francis and Clare, the founders of the first and second orders of Franciscans (the Friars Minor and the Poor Clares) had consciously turned away from the comfortable lifestyles that they could easily have enjoyed as adults (because of their families’ wealth and social standing) and, instead, embraced a life of total poverty. This may help explain why Christ’s lifelong scantiness of clothing and nakedness had an extremely strong hold on the Franciscans’ imagination from the very beginning of the movement.
The Christ Child in Aelred’s De Jesu puero duodenni
Aelred of Rievaulx’s treatise De Jesu puero duodenni, written sometime between 1153 and 1157, is the first meditational text produced in the West that concentrates on the boy Jesus.6 A clarification is in order, however, considering that the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which was originally composed in the second century in Greek and later translated into medieval Latin, was the first text that ever focused on the boy Jesus, covering as it does select events from the fifth to twelfth year of his childhood. Although these two texts center upon the same biblical personage, they are quite different in terms of their content and aims. At the end of his treatise, Aelred tells his addressee, a monk named Ivo from Wardon (a daughterhouse of Rievaulx), that he has given him seeds of meditation (meditationum semina), as the monk had earlier requested.7 By leaving his treatise open-ended and inviting his reader to personalize it, Aelred encourages the individual meditator’s appropriation of his text. In contrast, the anonymous author of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas seems primarily concerned with filling in the gaps left in the canonical gospels’ account of Jesus’ early life by recounting exceptionally remarkable events. Though the anonymous author compensates for only some of these lacunae, the reader is not invited to extend the work imaginatively further. Another crucial difference is that, instead of providing mundane or intimate details about Jesus’ childhood that would arouse the reader’s piety by increasing his or her yearning for Christ, as do Aelred’s treatise and other medieval texts, the apocryphal narrative focuses on the Boy’s mighty deeds and his precocious wisdom, which are displayed repeatedly during Jesus’ partially reconstructed childhood.
While the anonymous author of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas may have primarily intended his narrative to be informational (that is, by recounting some of the most notable things that supposedly occurred during Jesus’ childhood), by the later Middle Ages the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in Latin and its offshoots clearly took on the character of a devotional narrative. By this I mean that it was considered conducive to increasing one’s reverence for the God-man, who, according to the text, had assumed the form of an extremely gifted and exceptional child. The devotional character of medieval redactions of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is suggested by their survival in a number of manuscripts from monastic libraries and other indications of its being read by Christians intensely focused on their spiritual life, such as the work’s inclusion among the treasured devotional books of the pious dowager Cecily Neville (d. 1495).8 Though both the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and Aelred’s treatise may have been read in a devotional and meditative manner in the later Middle Ages, the overall thrust of these texts is quite different, as I have already indicated. Aelred, who focuses on a specific episode from the Gospel of Luke (the twelve-year-old Jesus’ staying behind in the Temple), is mainly concerned with helping his reader make progress in the spiritual life, through becoming more virtuous and Christ-like and by deepening his relationship with his spiritual bridegroom. In contrast, the original author of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and also the medieval redactors of apocryphal tales of Jesus’ childhood appear uninterested in promoting the reader’s contemplative union with Christ; instead, their ostensible aim is to impress the reader with the Boy’s powerful deeds and uncanny wisdom, more than anything else.9
In what follows, I provide an overview of Aelred’s treatise De Jesu puero duodenni, focusing on specific passages in order to show that it concentrates only to a small extent on the historical aspects of Christ’s childhood (specifically the literal details having to do with Jesus’ staying behind in the Temple, mentioned by Luke), compared to its repeated emphasis on the monastic reader’s spiritual development. Aelred clearly believes that the latter process rests on an experiential encounter with Christ—an imaginative experience of the incarnate God with one’s inner senses, paired with appropriate emotional responses. Modern readers might at first approach Aelred’s text as a spiritual classic or even as a creative work, an early example of historical fiction, without realizing that it is grounded in the traditional routine of monastic life. The fact that Aelred is commenting on a certain lectio evangelica, as he says early on in his treatise, means that the biblical text in question is one which the entire community of monks would have heard, “sung or read,” within the liturgy.10 Individual monks may have also read and meditated on the text from Luke (2:41–52) in their lectio divina (that is, their personal spiritual reading).
Aelred’s treatise is based upon the assumption that the individual monk’s task is to achieve greater knowledge about Christ’s childhood through private prayer, in other words, through intimate communication with Christ that occurs within the monk’s soul. Aelred regards his book as an aid to such prayer, rather than as an authoritative source of hidden knowledge about Christ’s boyhood, as, for example, the apocryphal infancy gospels claimed to be. In other words, Aelred’s book is not meant to provide all the answers, as it were, but rather to serve as a springboard for further reflection and contemplation.
At the beginning of the text, Aelred reminds his addressee Ivo that he requested plausible hypotheses as to what the twelve-year-old Jesus was doing during the three days when he was intentionally apart from his parents, after they left Jerusalem. Yet Aelred does not pretend to provide easy solutions. As if privy
