such emotional suffering.61 Although Aelred does not exaggerate the misunderstanding between Mother and Child to such proportions, he does depict Mary as a very solicitous and dutiful mother, saying that she was “on fire with such anxiety” over the loss of her son. He also adds tender human touches, for example, by suggesting that Mary suspected that Jesus had gone off with other boys and was worried that he suffered injury from one of them.62 As already noted, Aelred conveys Mary’s sense of relief when she finally found her son (which echoes the exclamation of the bride in the Song of Songs: “I have found him”). He is careful, though, to point out that her negative feelings were caused more by being deprived of the delights caused by her son’s presence, than by overwhelming anxiety over his safety (which is later emphasized in the Meditationes vitae Christi).63 After all, he bluntly states, Mary knew that he was God.64 Along similar lines, Aelred remarks, in response to Luke’s comment that his parents did not understand Jesus’ words when they found him (Lk. 2:50), that Mary “could not be ignorant of any purpose of her son.”65 This implies that she somehow knew of her son’s redemptive mission, though the abbot here says too little to indicate what he actually thought about Mary’s understanding of the young Jesus.66 As we shall see, late medieval writers sometimes portrayed Mary as being aware of her son’s future sacrifice through her knowledge of prophecies, or learning about it early on and sometimes being reluctant to accept it as God’s will.
While Aelred touches upon (what we might call) some Mariological and Christological issues and certainly adds some tender, human notes to the episode of the three-day separation, his main purpose in the De Jesu puero duodenni is ostensibly to foster the soul’s union with Christ, which is here symbolized by Mary’s finding of Jesus on the third day of her troubling search.67 In the course of promoting such spiritual development, the Cistercian abbot has undeniably expanded the basic story about Christ’s staying behind in the Temple to great proportions. He achieves this not so much by adding mundane details that seem to derive from his own imagination (such as the idea the Jesus begged for food, which he mentions only briefly)68 but by applying passages from different parts of the Bible (especially the Song of Songs) to an anecdote about Jesus’ childhood. His overall goal is to treat of the soul’s progress toward greater intimacy with and also resemblance to Christ. Indeed, in some way the treatise can be said to be not so much about the Christ Child after all, but rather about the soul of its intended monastic reader.
While the other medieval texts I will explore in this book similarly add color to their depiction of the Christ Child by drawing on passages from different parts of the Bible, none of them seem to interweave biblical verses quite so intricately as does Aelred in the De Jesu puero duodenni. Although Aelred inserts some realistic details, much of what he adds to the Temple episode does not apparently derive from his exercise of poetic license or from oral or apocryphal traditions but from the Bible in some way (including the novel idea about Jesus’ conference with his Father, which builds upon Christ’s assertion that he had to be “about [his] father’s business” [Lk. 2:49]).
In the De Jesu puero duodenni, Aelred has not relied on any apocryphal infancy texts, as he does, admittedly in only one instance, in the De institutione inclusarum (discussed below), yet in both cases he evinces a fairly open-minded attitude toward material that is not strictly rooted in Scripture, in which, as we have seen, he is wonderfully immersed. He briefly addresses this issue in the De Jesu puero duodenni, when, in the course of speculating about who might have cared for the Child in his parents’ absence, he remarks, “It is attractive (libet) to form opinions or conjectures or surmises on all these matters, but it is wrong to make any rash assertions.”69 The apocryphal infancy legends explored in the following chapter have, as I have already noted, a quasi-dogmatic bent in their presentation of Christ’s childhood, in the sense that their narrators do not pause to offer alternatives or state that things might have happened differently. In an essay in which she concentrates on medieval French redactions of Christ’s apocryphal childhood, and contrasts them with the Franciscan Meditationes vitae Christi (which I discuss in the latter part of this chapter), Evelyn Birge Vitz draws an astute parallel between these two genres of texts (namely, apocryphal and meditative). It is helpful to consider her observation here since the Meditationes and the two aforementioned treatises by Aelred all encourage reflection on and visualization of the life of Christ, which, while guided, still leaves readers a good deal of freedom and, most importantly, invites them to see the biblical scenes and characters with their own inner eyes: “when one reads the Gospels, or any part of the Bible, as soon as one wishes to go beyond the schematic narrative and the theological formulations and tries to reconstruct in the mind’s eye a scene—tries to see Jesus in action—one automatically produces apocryphal, non-canonical details. Meditation is, thus, by its very nature, what I would term ‘apocryphogenic.’ ”70 While it is true that meditational texts and apocryphal narratives, broadly speaking, engage the reader’s imagination by going beyond the bare narrative of the biblical text, it is important to reiterate that the authorial narrators of the apocrypha do not invite their readers to speculate about Jesus’ boyhood or in any way suggest that he himself may enlighten them about his life or about other issues or concerns. As I have already stated, such narrators pretend to offer historical accounts and do not foster much creative visualization of the child Jesus himself or of homely details about his childhood (such as what his sleeping conditions were like),71 beyond the reader’s envisioning of the scenes that form the backdrop of certain incidents—the remarkable episodes deemed worthy of recollection. Yet, as the observation by Vitz suggests, the authors of these genres all participate in and foster an imaginative freedom that allows them and their readers, to varying degrees, to explore the life of Christ in concrete though hypothetical ways.
The visual orientation of Aelred’s De Jesu puero duodenni and his De institutione inclusarum (discussed in the following section) is clearly central to the abbot’s experiential approach to monastic spirituality. Speaking of Jesus as the bridegroom desired by the soul, both texts emphasize the Boy’s extraordinary beauty and encourage the reader to imagine his physical appearance and, even more so, to yearn to see him. At the very beginning of the De Jesu puero duodenni, Ivo is reminded of how he is accustomed to gaze at the Boy’s “most beautiful face.”72 Later, Aelred surmises that on the trip up to Jerusalem “the grace of heaven shone (refulsisse) from that most beautiful face (speciossimus vultus) with such charm as to make everyone look at it.”73 In describing Jesus as beautiful, Aelred and other medieval writers undoubtedly took their cue from Psalm 44:3, which speaks of one who is “beautiful above the sons of men.” William of St. Thierry, for example, cites this verse in Bernard of Clairvaux’s vita, when he recounts the pious boy’s vision of the Christ Child that occurred before Mass one Christmas Eve: “It was as if Bernard saw re-enacted the birth of the infant Word, more beautiful than all the sons of men…. And this made young Bernard’s heart overflow with a love and longing unheard of in a mere boy.”74 Like Bernard, Aelred regards Jesus’ beauty as having a powerful influence on the beholder. His beauty is not simply skin-deep, but divinely radiant and deeply affecting. As we shall see, the Christ Child’s face is similarly described as powerfully radiant in the De institutione inclusarum.
By encouraging his reader to look at Christ’s face without, it should be noted, actually providing a detailed description of it, Aelred increases his reader’s desire for the beatific vision, which was thought to transcend human experience (cf. 1 Cor. 13:12). At the end of his treatise on Jesus’ childhood, Aelred claims that when the soul has reached its twelfth year, so to speak, it will be able to gaze on the bridegroom, who is more comely than the sons of men (Ps. 44:3); in return the Lord will look back through the lattices (Sg. 2:9). Such language reinforces the Christian reader’s conviction that, although Jesus is hidden, he desires to make contact with and even be united with the human soul.75 Aelred concludes his treatise by encouraging Ivo to extend the gaze of his mind’s eye “into heaven’s secret places” (oculus mentis in ipsa caeli secreta radium porrexit).76 Like an eagle,77 the monk is to look up at the radiant sun, seeking to be more profoundly imbued with Christ’s
