body and blood (an age-old doctrine officially promulgated as “transubstantiation” a few years earlier, at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215) paralleled Jesus’ assumption of flesh within Mary. In one of his “Admonitions,” Francis explains that when Christians view the host, they are unable to see Jesus in his humanity, just as the people around Christ were unable to see his divinity during his lifetime. Francis elaborates on this analogy: “Behold, each day he humbles himself as when he came from the royal throne (Wis. 18:15) into the Virgin’s womb; each day he himself comes to us, appearing humbly; each day he comes down from the bosom of the Father upon the altar in the hands of the priest. As he revealed himself to the holy apostles in true flesh, so he reveals himself to us now in sacred bread…. And in this way the Lord is always with his faithful, as he himself says: ‘Behold I am with you until the end of the age’ ” (Matt. 28:20).166 In this passage, Francis calls attention to the divine humility fundamental to the Incarnation and also to the Eucharist; in both cases, God puts aside his royal magnificence and invites humans to exercise faith in his presence, which cannot be truly, that is, fully, seen. By conflating the baby Jesus with the Eucharistic host, Francis underscores the continual presence of the Lord, which is also a perpetual manifestation of his humility.
To return to what can only be speculations regarding Francis’s attitudes toward the role of specific geographic places within Christians’ spirituality: might his undeniable belief in Jesus’ Eucharistic omnipresence, in time and place, have led him to regard pilgrimage to Bethlehem and the other holy sites as unnecessary and otiose? While this is possible, I think that Francis would have encouraged European Christians to go to the Holy Land if they had the means to do so, given his intense focus on the historical life of Christ as transmitted by the canonical gospels.
Both Thomas and Bonaventure are fairly specific when it comes to enumerating the physical objects that Francis requested be prepared for the upcoming celebration at Greccio. It is important to note the objects that are named and those that are not, rather than assume that the mise-en-scène devised by Francis was identical to the large, if not life-size, manger scenes that in modern times have been displayed at Christmastime.167 Thomas of Celano relates that Francis summoned a friend of his, a virtuous layman named John (the knight Giovanni Velita), and gave him instructions about what he should prepare. He also shared with him his reasoning for bringing about such a celebration: “For I wish to enact the memory of that babe who was born in Bethlehem: to see with my own bodily eyes the discomfort of his infant needs (infantilium necessitatum eius incommoda), how he lay in a manger (praesepe), and how with an ox and an ass standing by, he rested on hay.”168 This instruction regarding props, so to speak, is fairly simple yet its language is precise and thus in need of careful examination.
First, though, we might consider an objection regarding the whole scenario: given that Francis (according to Thomas of Celano) continuously meditated on the Gospel, it seems superfluous for the saint to have insisted upon seeing the Nativity with his bodily eyes. However, given that religious art (and presumably also the liturgy and religious drama) had a powerful effect upon him, Francis’s desire to use props and appropriate scenery should not surprise us. When praying before the crucifix in the church of San Damiano, in the early stage of his conversion, Francis heard Christ tell him to rebuild his church: there, at the cross, a wonder occurred, for “with the lips of the painting (labiis picturae deductis), the image of Christ crucified spoke to him.”169 Considering that he was profoundly influenced by religious art, I think it is fair to assume that Francis would have agreed with the thirteenth-century Dominican John Balbi of Genoa, who says that there are “three reasons for the institution of images in churches. First, for the instruction of the uneducated, who seem to be taught by them as if by books. Second, so that the mystery of the Incarnation and the examples of the saints may be the more in our memory while they are daily represented to our eyes. Third, to excite the feeling of devotion, which is more efficaciously aroused by things seen than by things heard.”170 Balbi’s first point reiterates the ancient view of Gregory the Great, which was repeated, more recently, by Peter Comestor, who said that pictures in churches serve, as it were, as books for the laity.171 Drama, as a “quick” (that is, living) book, was thought to have an even stronger impact on the imagination than a picture or a series of pictures.172
Scholars have often suggested that Francis’s Christmas celebration at Greccio was a popularization of the Christmas plays that had been performed in monasteries and cathedrals for at least two centuries. These plays imitated the dramatizations performed at Easter, which, as is well known, originally developed from an elaboration of the “Quem quaeretis” trope—the chanted question “Whom do you seek?” supposedly posed by an angel to the women who came to Jesus’ tomb on Easter Sunday morning.173 In medieval Christmas plays, midwives ask a similar question of the shepherds or the Magi.174 Such plays often involved a manger (praesepe) and an image of the Mother and Child, or just the Child, placed in or near it.175 According to the fourteenth-century liturgical ordinary for the Officium Pastorum performed at the cathedral at Rouen, “a manger is to be prepared behind the altar and an image of St. Mary placed in it.” When the shepherds tell the midwives that they are in search of “the Savior Christ,” the women, “opening a curtain, show them the Child, saying: ‘The infant is here.’ ”176 Although Francis may have been influenced by such plays performed in a number of monastic settings, he probably borrowed the idea of having Mass said over a manger more directly from the Christmas liturgy as it was executed at Santa Maria Maggiore. Francis certainly employed props at Greccio, but his manger scene—as far as we know—did not involve performers with scripted actions and speeches. As Erwin Rosenthal stated a number years ago: “The mise-en-scène at Greccio … cannot be called a liturgical play … but it does have in common with the ‘sacre rappresentazioni’ the intention of materializing the legend, of transposing it into living image. But,” he emphasizes, “there was no dialogue, there were no players in Greccio.”177
Let us pursue the question of Francis’s liturgical props further. According to Thomas of Celano, the saint asked for a manger (praesepe); he did not explicitly request that an image of the Christ Child (or of the Madonna and Child) be brought to the Christmas celebration. I think there are two possibilities here. First: that Francis was concerned that the participants in the Mass at Greccio recognize the Christ Child on the altar, in the Eucharistic host, and so did not actually use an effigy—a hypothesis to which I will return shortly. The second, and more likely, possibility is that when Francis asked for a praesepe he meant that an effigy of the Christ Child should be brought with a manger. But this Latin word is admittedly problematic. As Rudolph Berliner pointed out, the Latin words praesepe or praesepium literally “mean ‘a stable’ or ‘a manger.’ In this special case [of the Nativity], the words can mean the whole cave as well as only that concavity which was the actual resting place of the Child.”178 Although it is possible that Francis wanted a whole stablelike cave prepared when he requested a praesepe179 (the mountain in Greccio on which the event occurred is indeed rocky and cavernous),180 I suspect that by using the latter word he simply meant a “manger,” probably with an effigy in it. In his account of what actually happened that Christmas at Greccio (which, significantly, he describes in the present tense, as if the event were happening anew), Thomas noted that “over the manger (supra praesepe) the solemnities of the Mass are celebrated.”181 “Praesepe” here obviously means “feeding bin,” above (or perhaps near) which was placed a portable altar of some sort, since the Mass took place outdoors.182 Thomas describes the setting as a forest (silva), which would have been able to accommodate a large number of people, who might have gathered around an outdoor grotto. As we shall see, this rustic setting is important because it enabled people, animals, and even the natural surroundings to participate in the joyful re-presentation of the Savior’s birth.
The early artistic representations of the Mass of Greccio, which vary in detail, do not provide a definitive answer to the question of the actual furniture and accessory props used on this occasion (or the precise setting), nor do they help much in determining if some
