1223 (three years before his death), when he arranged for a public manger to be set up in Greccio, a small town between Assisi and Rome. Those who have heard of the incident but are unfamiliar with the early accounts of Francis’s life may assume that, at Greccio, he simply participated in a Nativity play or paraliturgical activity of some sort. Yet he actually made arrangements for a Christmas Eve Mass, which he creatively embellished with audiovisual aides and enhanced by his preaching as a deacon. In this section, I will examine the Greccio episode in detail, after discussing the biographical sources for Francis and his disciple Clare that underscore their love for the Christ Child and their efforts to imitate him, especially his embrace of poverty. The corpus of Francis’s writings is quite small, and Clare’s even smaller, but they themselves speak of the Christ Child in a few passages, as do the hagiographical writings centered on these saints. Significantly, both Francis and Clare focused on Luke’s account of the Nativity, apparently disregarding the apocryphal legends about Jesus’ birth. As I explain below, at Greccio, Francis capitalized on the apocryphal detail about the ox and the ass, which seem part and parcel of his love of animals and of all creation more generally. The non-canonicity of these animals’ presence at Christ’s manger was probably not worrisome to Francis and his Christian contemporaries, considering that, at that time, these animals were widely assumed to have been present at the baby Jesus’ manger, which was literally a feeding box. On the whole, Francis, Clare, and their followers seem to have done very little, if anything, with the traditional apocryphal infancy legends. Instead, the two saints called attention to Jesus and Mary’s embrace of poverty at the Nativity despite their status as royalty—an embrace of poverty that is implied by the Gospel account but assumes central place in the Franciscan vision of Christ’s life and their attempts to imitate it exactly.
As we have seen, the Cistercians also meditated on the poverty of the infant Jesus and strove to imitate it by the simplicity of their monastic lifestyle, but they seem to have reflected more generally upon the poverty of the divine Word’s self-emptying (cf. Phil. 2:7), that is, his descent from his heavenly throne, assumption of human flesh, and living as a real human being, among other humans. In other words, the Cistercians did not apparently become fixated on specific circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth, such as the feeding bin in which he was placed and the meager strips of fabric with which he was swaddled—biblical details that captured the imagination of the Franciscans.110 In my view, the difference between early Franciscan and Cistercian approaches to the Nativity can be readily perceived by looking at two short and arguably representative passages that involve a visualization of the Mother and Child. In his De Jesu puero duodenni, Aelred encourages his reader to see “with the eyes of an enlightened mind” the Christ Child “lying in a manger, crying in his mother’s arms, hanging at her breasts”—an embodiment of God’s goodness, he says.111 The image of a lactating Virgin and Child that Francis supposedly offered his followers is much more concrete and emotionally intense. According to Thomas of Celano, the Franciscan who authored two of the earliest vitae of the saint, Francis “used to observe the Nativity of the Child Jesus with an immense eagerness above all other solemnities, affirming it was the Feast of Feasts, when God was made a little child (parvulus) and hung on human breasts.” Here, God’s amazing condescension in becoming a child is highlighted by his literal dependency on human (that is, his mother’s nourishing) breasts. Thomas immediately goes on to note that Francis “would lick the images of the baby’s limbs with a hungry meditation, and the melting compassion of his heart toward the child [Jesus] also made him stammer sweet words as babies do. This name [Jesus] was to him like honey.”112 Francis manifests his love for the Christ Child physically, by licking an effigy of Jesus and, further, by becoming like an infant, through his slippage into baby talk.113 So, while both Aelred and Francis imagine the infant Jesus nursing at Mary’s breast, Francis touches and even tastes the Christ Child with his inner senses, which are activated by external objects. Granted, the Franciscan text I have just quoted is a biographical one, whereas the Cistercian text that I have cited is not. Still, I think it is fair to say that Francis, in comparison to Aelred, was more concrete in the way he imagined the Christ Child and much more demonstrative in his piety toward the infant Jesus.
The aforesaid passage about Francis, which comes from Thomas of Celano’s Vita secunda (1245–47), contains the claim that Francis’s favorite feast was Christmas; it is this aspect of the saint’s piety that I will consider first. By affirming that the Nativity of the child Jesus “was the Feast of Feasts,” Francis (as he is presented by Thomas) gives the impression that he considers Christmas more important than Easter, the feast of Christ’s Resurrection, traditionally regarded as the climax of the liturgical year. In a sermon aimed at preparing Christians for the upcoming fast of Lent, Pope Leo the Great (d. 461) enunciates the common idea that Christmas is subordinate to Easter when he says: “we well know that the Paschal Mystery is the chief [of festivals], and the calendar of the whole year disposes us to enter into it properly and worthily.”114 Francis, I suspect, would have agreed with this idea; nonetheless, he sees the two feasts as inextricably linked and chooses to place rhetorical emphasis on the feast that commemorates the beginning of Christ’s life. In The Assisi Compilation (1244–60), an early Franciscan collection of stories about the saint, we are given Francis’s reason for holding Christmas in such high esteem: “although the Lord may have accomplished our salvation in his other solemnities, nevertheless, once he was born to us … it was certain that we would be saved.”115 In this passage, Francis cites part of Isaiah 9:6 (“For a child [parvulus] is born to us, and a son is given to us”). For Francis, this verse, which became the Introit for the Third Mass of Christmas, encapsulates the idea that the Son of God was born in order to be offered to God as a sacrifice that would redeem humankind. Francis seems to have been quite enthusiastic about this surprising and paradoxical mystery at the root of Christianity. Hence the verse occurs in the Office for the Passion that Francis himself composed, specifically, as the antiphon for the Vespers that were to be used from the Nativity to Epiphany: “This is the day the Lord has made / let us rejoice and be glad in it (Ps. 117:24). / For the Most Holy Child has been given to us (Isa. 9:6) / and has been born for us on the way [i.e., to Bethlehem] / and placed in a manger / because he did not have a place in the inn.”116 These verses express joy on account of the Father’s gift of the Son, who already begins to suffer at his Nativity, because of the lowly conditions in which Mary gave birth to her child. For Francis, then, the feast of Christmas commemorates the beginning of grace and points forward to Passiontide and, beyond it, to Easter; thus, the two main feasts of the liturgical year celebrate one and the same divine plan for the redemption. This explains why, at Christmas, Francis is not simply optimistic and merry, but confident of salvation and filled with profound joy. According to Thomas of Celano, the saint told his friars that they should eat meat if Christmas occurred on a Friday; he wanted “even the walls to eat meat on that day” or “at least be rubbed with grease!” He also desired that the poor be fed by the rich, and that oxen and asses be given extra hay. In addition, he wished to beseech the Emperor to issue a decree that wheat and grain be thrown on the roads for “our sisters the larks.”117
Yet joy was not the only emotion Francis experienced at Christmas. In the same chapter from the Vita secunda, Thomas goes on to recount how Francis was filled with compassion when he considered the circumstances of the Nativity: “He could not recall without tears the great want surrounding the little, poor Virgin (paupercula Virgo) on that day. One day when he was sitting down to dinner a brother mentioned the poverty of the Virgin, and reflected on the want of Christ her Son. No sooner had he heard this than he got up from the table, groaning with sobs of pain, and bathed in tears ate the rest of his bread on the naked ground. He used to say this must be a royal virtue, since it shone so remarkably in a King and Queen.”118 As is clear from such courtly language, Francis regards the paupercula Mary and her infant son as the ultimate royalty.119 The influential Franciscan theologian and Minister General Bonaventure (d. 1274) likewise emphasized the poverty that Christ embraced: “Christ was poor at his birth, poor during the course of his life, and poor at his death. In order to make poverty lovable to the world, he chose a most poor Mother.” For Francis, Christ’s wilful embrace of poverty required a radical response. Thus, in the anecdote mentioned above, he thinks it
