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 reiterate the traditional belief that Jesus is incarnated on the altar at Mass. The transformation of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood (an age-old doctrine officially promulgated as “transubstantiation” a few years earlier, at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215) paralleled Jesus’ assumption of flesh within Mary. In one of his “Admonitions,” Francis explains that when Christians view the host, they are unable to see Jesus in his humanity, just as the people around Christ were unable to see his divinity during his lifetime. Francis elaborates on this analogy: “Behold, each day he humbles himself as when he came from the royal throne (Wis. 18:15) into the Virgin’s womb; each day he himself comes to us, appearing humbly; each day he comes down from the bosom of the Father upon the altar in the hands of the priest. As he revealed himself to the holy apostles in true flesh, so he reveals himself to us now in sacred bread…. And in this way the Lord is always with his faithful, as he himself says: ‘Behold I am with you until the end of the age’ ” (Matt. 28:20).166 In this passage, Francis calls attention to the divine humility fundamental to the Incarnation and also to the Eucharist; in both cases, God puts aside his royal magnificence and invites humans to exercise faith in his presence, which cannot be truly, that is, fully, seen. By conflating the baby Jesus with the Eucharistic host, Francis underscores the continual presence of the Lord, which is also a perpetual manifestation of his humility.
To return to what can only be speculations regarding Francis’s attitudes toward the role of specific geographic places within Christians’ spirituality: might his undeniable belief in Jesus’ Eucharistic omnipresence, in time and place, have led him to regard pilgrimage to Bethlehem and the other holy sites as unnecessary and otiose? While this is possible, I think that Francis would have encouraged European Christians to go to the Holy Land if they had the means to do so, given his intense focus on the historical life of Christ as transmitted by the canonical gospels.
Both Thomas and Bonaventure are fairly specific when it comes to enumerating the physical objects that Francis requested be prepared for the upcoming celebration at Greccio. It is important to note the objects that are named and those that are not, rather than assume that the mise-en-scène devised by Francis was identical to the large, if not life-size, manger scenes that in modern times have been displayed at Christmastime.167 Thomas of Celano relates that Francis summoned a friend of his, a virtuous layman named John (the knight Giovanni Velita), and gave him instructions about what he should prepare. He also shared with him his reasoning for bringing about such a celebration: “For I wish to enact the memory of that babe who was born in Bethlehem: to see with my own bodily eyes the discomfort of his infant needs (infantilium necessitatum eius incommoda), how he lay in a manger (praesepe), and how with an ox and an ass standing by, he rested on hay.”168 This instruction regarding props, so to speak, is fairly simple yet its language is precise and thus in need of careful examination.
First, though, we might consider an objection regarding the whole scenario: given that Francis (according to Thomas of Celano) continuously meditated on the Gospel, it seems superfluous for the saint to have insisted upon seeing the Nativity with his bodily eyes. However, given that religious art (and presumably also the liturgy and religious drama) had a powerful effect upon him, Francis’s desire to use props and appropriate scenery should not surprise us. When praying before the crucifix in the church of San Damiano, in the early stage of his conversion, Francis heard Christ tell him to rebuild his church: there, at the cross, a wonder occurred, for “with the lips of the painting (labiis picturae