depiction of Jesus as a Franciscan can also be seen in an early fourteenth-century painting of the Madonna and Child, ascribed to the Primo Maestro di Santa Chiara, now in the Museo Diocesano in Spoleto. Here the Christ Child is dressed as a Franciscan, with brown wool habit, triple-knotted cord, and bare feet.154 The anonymous author of the late thirteenth-century Meditatio pauperis in solitudine emphasizes Christ’s Franciscanism even more explicitly, stating that Christ “was the first and true Lesser Brother (frater minor) according to the perfection of the … virtues [viz., poverty, love and humility] which shone out in him in a most perfect way.”155
The Christ Child—Alive Again—at Greccio
Having made the case that Francis and Clare sought to imitate the Christ Child, particularly the Infant’s embrace of poverty, I will now consider the famous episode at Greccio on Christmas Eve in 1223. On this occasion, Francis celebrated the feast of the Nativity with an outdoor Mass, using props and the setting of nature to help his audience visualize the first Christmas, when the Son of God came forth from Mary’s womb to live among humans—a descent of the divine to earth that was later repeated by Christ’s embodiment in the Eucharist. The saint’s motives for orchestrating a celebration of Christmas that was certainly more dramatic than usual were, in my view, primarily devotional: he wished to draw his audience’s attention to the virtues of the Christ Child, which he himself had cultivated for many years, to awaken the participants’ piety toward the baby Jesus, and to help them realize that the Child was perpetually in their midst and accessible to them, in the consecrated Eucharistic host.
Franciscan belief in the comforting and indeed unfailingly protective presence of the child Jesus hidden within the Eucharist is dramatically illustrated by a story told about how St. Clare once pleaded with the Lord, before the Eucharistic host, that he defend the nuns from the Saracens who were on the verge of invading her convent of San Damiano. In the most detailed account of this incident that survives, a chapter from the Legend of Saint Clare, it is the Christ Child who answers her prayers: a voice, “as if of a little child,” resounded in her ears: “I will always defend you.” So even when the child Jesus was not audible or visible to his devotees, he continually watched over them through his abiding presence in the Eucharist.156 Fourteenth-century frescoes depicting this incident, in the oratory of the convent of San Damiano, depict Clare and her nuns kneeling before the Christ Child, who stands in the niche where a tabernacle or pyx used to be kept. The nuns’ reliance upon the power of the Christ Child, who blesses the sisters with his right hand, is vividly commemorated in this scene (fig. 9).157
Belief in the Christ Child’s presence in the Eucharist and a commemoration of the deprivations attending his Nativity, rather than his mighty power, stressed in the aforesaid tale about Clare and her convent, is central to the early accounts of the Christmas celebration at Greccio. In what follows, I will focus on Francis’s devotional motives, seeking to deduce from details found in the legendary accounts of the episode what he most admired about the Christ Child. In this section, I will cite the description of the event at Greccio that Thomas of Celano provides at the end of Book One of his Vita prima, since this is the earliest source we have, yet I will also refer to Bonaventure’s later account, which includes a few details not found in the earlier version. At Greccio, Francis emphasizes the poverty and suffering of the Christ Child, seeing the Nativity and the Passion as part of a single continuum, which is accessible to Christians, in various times and places, in a special way through the Eucharist.
Thomas begins his chapter on the incident at Greccio by saying that Francis continuously strove to trace Christ’s footsteps and meditated on his words and deeds so assiduously “that he scarcely wanted to think of anything else.” He adds that Francis was totally focused on the humility of the Incarnation and the charity of the Passion, a remark that implies that the saint concentrated on both the beginning and endpoints of Jesus’ life. As we have seen, Francis rejoiced at Christmas because he saw the Nativity as the first step of a divinely planned course of events that would, of necessity, lead to redemption. In a short exhortatory text he authored, Francis says that it was the Father’s will that the Son, “whom he gave to us and who was born for us (Isa. 9:6), should offer himself through his own blood as a sacrifice and oblation on the altar of the cross (ara crucis).”158 Francis’s association of the Nativity with the Passion and with the Eucharist is reflected in this passage and also (though more subtly) in Thomas’s account of Christmas at Greccio.
Figure 9. Above, St. Clare of Assisi and the nuns of San Damiano, in need of protection against the invading Saracens, praying before the Christ Child in a Eucharistic niche. Opposite, detail of the Christ Child blessing his devotees. Fresco, Oratory, San Damiano Convent, Assisi (fourteenth century). By permission of Stefan Diller.
Thomas’s statement that Francis’s greatest desire was “to retrace [Jesus’] footsteps completely” speaks to the saint’s eagerness to experience the life of Christ vicariously rather than as a disinterested observer, and to be perfectly conformed to it. Yet Thomas’s remark also raises the question of whether Francis sought to walk in Christ’s footsteps literally by making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Francis took great pains to visit the Sultan Malik al-Kamil in Egypt a few years prior to the incident at Greccio, probably wishing to achieve more than one end by his trip: his own martyrdom, the conversion of Muslims, and the securing of peace in the Holy Land, which was then under the sultan’s authority.159 While none of the early sources say that Francis went to Jerusalem, some later historians suggested and even claimed that he did.160 This position is no longer considered tenable, but it is worthwhile speculating here about Francis’s attitude toward pilgrimage, especially to the Holy Land, given that, in the episode under consideration, Greccio is made to resemble Bethlehem. Chiara Frugoni raises the possibility that the saint erected the manger scene at Greccio as a devotional alternative to pilgrimage to Bethlehem, which had been closely linked with the crusade movement. This is certainly one way of interpreting Thomas of Celano’s remark that “out of Greccio was made a new Bethlehem.”161
Perhaps Francis wished to convey the message that making a pilgrimage to the manger of Bethlehem was easier than it seemed, since Christmas was reenacted—or rather mystically recurred—on the altar at every Mass. Frugoni cites a passage from an anonymous treatise from the late twelfth century, in which a monk who wishes to go to Bethlehem is told that every altar, in every church, is the manger of the Christ Child: “You have no need to travel since you could find all these things at home. Christ, who was once born in Bethlehem according to the flesh, and was found in a manger, is now found everywhere, on all the altars of Holy Church … Therefore you do not need to go across the sea to seek in one place that which is found everywhere. Your altar a short way off is your Bethlehem.”162 The idea that the altar is the manger and also the cross is expressed in numerous homilies and commentaries on Scripture from the patristic and medieval periods.163 But if a medieval Christian, grasping such mystical conflations, still insisted on making contact with a relic of the Nativity, he or she could travel less distantly by going to Rome, to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where purported relics of the manger from Bethlehem had been venerated for centuries. There, in a special chapel, midnight Mass of Christmas Eve was celebrated at an altar that stood over “five small boards of Levantine sycamore venerated as the crib of Christ.”164 While Francis, at the Christmas celebration at Greccio, may have consciously imitated the nocturns and the Midnight Mass of the Roman liturgy as they were prayed in Santa Maria Maggiore (“supra praesepe”),165 I very much doubt that it was his intention to draw pilgrims away from either Rome or Bethlehem.
In all likelihood, Francis simply wanted to reinvigorate people’s devotion to the Christ Child as the loving Redeemer who incredibly humbled himself at the Incarnation and to
