distance, the bereft father is clearly cut off from the bliss and perfection of her world, even though he painfully yearns to be part of it.269 In contrast, the gap between the Poor Clare reader and the child Jesus, in the passage cited above, is quickly closed up, since the Child, as soon as he sees her, leaves his playmates, runs up to her, and then converses with her. He is happy that she is there and invites her to join his family. Though he is still a child, Jesus’ welcoming attitude here can be said to illustrate a statement he made to his disciples when he was an adult: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me” (Matt. 19:14). In this and in other chapters from the Meditationes vitae Christi dealing with the Christ Child, the reader is certainly welcomed into Jesus’ presence; she is encouraged to follow the Holy Family in her imagination, as they go from place to place, serving the boy Jesus and his parents in a concrete way.270
Like the two treatises by Aelred considered above, the Meditationes vitae Christi does not attempt to provide definitive answers about Christ’s life, but instead offers meditational materials that will help the reader engage in prayerful interaction with the Lord and other holy personages. In his prologue to the work, the author praises St. Cecilia for “ruminating on [Gospel] episodes with sweet and gentle relish (dulci ac suaui gustu ruminans).”271 Cecilia, in other words, engaged in lectio divina, the monastic practice of spiritual reading that was commonly likened to “chewing the cud.”272 The reader of the Meditationes vitae Christi is given devotional stories and images that she is likewise to assimilate and transform to her own liking within her soul. Since the author’s main goals are affective and moral, rather than historical (as regards the specific details of Jesus’ biography), he remains open-minded to his own and his reader’s reconstruction of Christ’s life. So, although the Meditationes vitae Christi can be said to resemble a gospel harmony, a text that synthesizes information from the canonical gospels to form a continuous narrative, the author of the Franciscan text is more concerned about the possibilities of meditative expansiveness than about producing a historically accurate, restrained yet detailed, linear account of Jesus’ life.273 He thus alludes in his prologue to Augustine’s well-known argument for an expansive mode of exegesis, which encourages multiple interpretations of a biblical passage, all of which are valid so long as they not contradict the law of charity.274 Admittedly, despite the Franciscan author’s statements about the open-ended nature of his project, he often prefers one way of filling in the gaps left by the scriptural account of Christ’s life to another, insofar as one particular approach seems more conducive to inculcating piety and good morality, especially as regards Franciscan values. A memorable example of this is his response to the gastronomical question that he himself raises: what kind of food did Jesus want the angels to bring him after his forty-day fast in the desert? As a son devoted to his mother, Jesus must have wanted some of her cooking more than anything else.275 While the apocryphal narratives considered in the next chapter do not speculate about such matters, they do, however, follow a similar sort of logic in their reconstruction of Jesus’ hidden years: assuming that Jesus had certain traits (because Scripture seems to indicate as much or it just seems proper for him to be such-and-such a way), one can fill in details about his truly human, yet also very exceptional, life.
The Franciscan text’s general open-endedness can be seen in the author’s use of multiple and different kinds of sources for the chapters dealing with Christ’s early years. To be more precise: in the early part of his work, he frequently quotes passages from Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons in order to reinforce the importance of particular virtues276; he occasionally borrows details from Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica;277 he once refers to the revelations of a St. Elizabeth, to convey the intensity of the young Mary’s desire to please God;278 and he cites what he claims is an unnamed friar’s vision of the Nativity.279 These sources add credibility and value to the meditations he proposes, but the author mainly uses them eclectically to create a framework for meditation and to provide some valuable details that will help fill out the space created by his narrative. He does not suggest that these sources are completely accurate, in a historical sense, nor does he limit himself or his reader to what they have to say.
The author also makes use of the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which he (wrongly) refers to as a writing of Jerome, in order to tell how Mary divided the hours of the day when living in the Temple during her girlhood.280 The author arguably also incorporated a few apocrypha-related details (without explicitly designating them as such) in order to reinforce his depiction of the Christ Child’s piety. He mentions, for example, that the boy Jesus must have drawn water from a well for his mother—a scenario that appears in the apocrypha.281 Not only is the number of these details very small, but their traditional and legendary quality means that they were practically canonical; this is especially the case with the widespread belief that the idols fell down when the Christ Child entered into Egypt with his parents.282 Significantly, with the exception of the incident just mentioned, that is, the fall of the idols, which is depicted in one of the few surviving illustrated copies of the Meditationes (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 410, fol. 24v, top register; fig. 11), apocryphal legends concerning Jesus’ purportedly numerous childhood miracles are not incorporated into the narrative, not even the benign miracles, such as the Child’s commanding of a tree to bend down so that his mother might be refreshed by its fruits.283 In an aside, the anonymous Franciscan author actually reveals his disapproval of the apocrypha, probably as a body of legendary lore that others took so seriously, or at least found so appealing, when he says, when treating the Flight into Egypt: “because so little that is authentic can be found, I am not going to bother to relate the events that happened to them in the desert and along the way.”284 This remark clearly implies that he is aware of the apocryphal infancy stories (a number of which are set on the Flight to Egypt), yet has consciously chosen to disregard them in the composition of his narrative.
That the Franciscan author’s primary concern is to produce an affective response is evident from his treatment of the biblical episode in which the boy Jesus stays behind in the Temple. The majority of this chapter (which, significantly, is short, compared to Aelred’s handling of it in the De Jesu puero duo-denni describes the anguish that Jesus’ parents experienced upon realizing that he was lost and when they were searching for him with much difficulty. Echoing Aelred’s musings on the Child’s physical well-being during those few days, the Franciscan author briefly suggests that Jesus found food and lodgings at a hospice. In addition, he notes the Boy’s humility in listening to “the learned doctors, serene of countenance, wise and reverent … as if ignorant.” The author also points out Jesus’ humility in returning home with his parents, even though the Boy had stated his intention to focus on his Father’s business.285 Probably not incidentally, in this retelling of the Temple episode, the teachers’ response of amazement at the Boy’s speech (Lk. 2:47) is not at all mentioned. It was presumably this particular aspect of the story that seemed to justify the apocryphal authors’ presentation of Jesus as a wonder-child, a depiction out of sync with the Franciscans’ focus on their own self-abnegation and that of Jesus, their model of ideal human behavior.
Significantly, the idiosyncratic chapter from the Meditationes vitae Christi on what Jesus did from age twelve to thirty is much longer than the chapter on the episode about the Finding in the Temple.286 The Bible’s silence on what Christ did for so many years is here remedied by a Franciscan reconstruction of the young Jesus as a good-for-nothing, who purposely sought the scorn of those around him by doing nothing remarkable. The young Jesus is said to have withdrawn from the public, engaged in prayer, and carried out domestic chores. He is not portrayed as playing with other boys or even as going to school—the main activities ascribed to the Christ Child in the apocrypha, which are also things we would typically expect to hear about children. The author presents biblical support for this view of Jesus’ unimpressive youth: the comments of Jesus’ contemporaries, when he later began his public ministry, that he was merely the son of a carpenter (Matt. 13:55); John the Baptist’s role as his precursor, which would have been unnecessary
