and contemporary efforts to promote social justice, it would be misleading to ignore or seriously downplay the saint’s devotional aims in orchestrating the Mass under the stars at Greccio. His main goals were, in all probability, to inculcate a more tender devotion to the child Jesus and to remind his fellow friars and the laity of Jesus’ swaddled presence, so to speak, in the consecrated host.
Michael Robson captures a key element of the Greccio incident, which is easy for us to lose sight of, due to our familiarity with the story: Francis “wished to share with others his own sense of wonder. He was impelled to communicate to them the riches he had unearthed in the Gospel.”238 The newness of Greccio, in the most important sense, consisted in the participants’ experience of wonder, which Francis, like a child, seems to have possessed in great abundance and been able to share with others. As a cleric with an intuitive pastoral sensibility, Francis devised a plan for spreading his own enthusiasm for the Nativity, recognizing the impact that a multimedia presentation of a touching Gospel story would have upon ordinary people. Thomas of Celano conveys a sense of the excitement experienced by the participants when he says that they were delighted by the brightness of candles and torches that lit up the night, and “ecstatic at this new mystery of new joy.”239 The event at Greccio entailed not only an eye-catching spectacle, but also loud sounds: the singing of God’s praises, which, mixed with animals’ utterances, reverberated against the boulders, so that all of nature seemed to rejoice in the Nativity, just as it sorrowed at the Passion.240 In the previous century, Aelred of Rievaulx had expressed disapproval of elaborate singing at Mass.241 He lamented that a practice that was “instituted to awaken the weak to the attachment of devotion” had the effect of causing people to lose a sense of the sacred—to fail “to honor that mystical crib … where Christ is mystically wrapped in swaddling clothes, where his most sacred blood is poured out in the chalice.”242 Francis of Assisi, in contrast, seized the opportunity to embellish the liturgy with sights and sounds (and even smells), which would catch people’s attention and make an annual feast seem like a “new mystery”—without apparently worrying that the engagement of the senses would detract from the Real Presence. In the broadest sense, the “novelty” of the event at Greccio, which both Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure underscore, was the combination of the tangible and the everyday, with the mystical and the sacred. In my reading of the episode, Francis emphasized both the actual conditions of Christ’s Nativity, as it occurred hundreds of years ago, and the repeated sacramental embodiment of Christ upon the altar of every church.
The Meek and Ordinary, Though Peculiar Christ Child of the Meditationes vitae Christi
Francis of Assisi was so intensely focused on the Nativity and Passion of Christ—the central events of the Gospel—and the Lord’s enduring presence in the Eucharist that he might not have speculated much, if at all, on what Jesus did during the so-called “hidden years” of his childhood and adolescence. But, hypothetically speaking, if Francis had wondered about Christ’s “hidden years,” he would probably have reflected on the hardships that that phase of his life entailed and the virtues, such as humility, that Christ manifested at that time. Before moving on to consider, in the next chapter, the apocryphal portrayal of Jesus as a boy who displays his wisdom and power so dramatically that he calls much attention to himself, I will close this chapter by discussing the main features of the treatment of Jesus’ early life in the Meditationes vitae Christi, a Franciscan text I have already mentioned.243 The anonymous author of this popular devotional text owes much to Francis of Assisi and probably also to Aelred of Rievaulx, as regards the virtues of Christ he emphasizes, and the types of responses he hopes to elicit, when recounting the infancy and childhood of Christ. Although the Meditationes vitae Christi was not the only extensive treatment of Jesus’ youth in the later Middle Ages, it was very influential from the time of its appearance (probably in the early fourteenth century, possibly at its beginning) until the end 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
