Childhood in Early Christianity

THE parabolic expression, “ Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” has been applied with force to the destruction of Judaism, and the reconstruction upon its ruins of a living Christianity* It may be applied with equal justice, though in more recondite sense, to the death of the old literature and art, and the resurrection of the beautiful creations of the human minsd in new form. The three days were more than a thousand years, and during that long sleep what had become of those indestructible forces of imagination and reason which combine in literature and art ? Roughly speaking, they were disjoined, and only when reunited did they again assert themselves in living form. The power which kept each in abeyance was structural Christianity, and only when that began to be burst asunder by the vital force inherent in spiritual Christianity was there opportunity for the free union of the imagination and reason. As the Jewish temple could no longer inclose divinity, but was thrust apart by the expansive power of the Christianity which was fostered within it, so the Christian church, viewed as an institution which aimed at an inclosure of humanity, was in its turn disrupted by the silent growth of the human spirit which had fed within its walls upon the divine life. After the birth of Christianity the parallel continuity of the old world was broken. The Greek, the Roman, and the Hebrew no longer carried forward their separate movements. Christianity, professing to annul these forces, had taken their place in history. Again, at the Renaissance, it was found that the three great streams of human thought had been flowing underground : they reissued to the light in a generous flood, each combining with the others.

It was during this long period of apparent inaction in literature and art that the imagination, dissevered from reason, was in a state of abnormal activity. The compression of its field caused the faculty to find expression through forms which were very closely connected with the dominant sphere of human life. Before religious art and ecclesiastical architecture had become the abundant expression of Christian imagination there was generated a great mass of legend and fable, which only by degrees became formally embodied in literature or perpetuated in art and symbol. The imaginative faculty had given it, for material in which to work the new life, the soul of man as distinctly related to God. An ethical principle lay at the foundation of Christianity, and the imagination, stimulated by faith, built with materials drawn from ethical life. The germinal truth of Christianity, that God had manifested himself to men in the person of Jesus Christ, however it might be obscured or misunderstood, was the efficient cause of the operations of the Christian imagination. This faculty set before itself the perfect man, and in that conceived not the physical and intellectual man of the Greek conception, nor the Cæsar of the Roman ideal, nor even the moral man of the Jewish light, but a man whose perfection was the counterpart of the perfection of God and its great exemplar, the man Jesus Christ. In his life the central idea of service, of victory through suffering and humiliation, of self - surrender, and of union with God was perceived with greater or less clearness, and this idea was adumbrated in that vast gallery of saints constructed by Christianity in its ceaseless endeavor to reproduce the perfect type. Through all the extravagance and chaotic confusion of the legendary lore of the mediæval church, one may discover the perpetually recurring notes of the perfect life. The beatitudes — those spiritual witnesses of the redeemed human character—are ever floating before the early imagination, and offering the standards by which it measures its creations. It was by no fortuitous suggestion, but by a profound sense of fitness, that the church made the gospel of All Saints’ Day to consist of those sentences which pronounce the blessedness of the poor in spirit, the meek, and the persecuted for righteousness’ sake ; while the epistle for the same day is the rollcall of the saints who are to sit on the thrones of the twelve tribes, and of the multitudes who have overcome the world.

It is not strange, therefore, that the imagination, busying itself about the spiritual life of man, should have dwelt with special emphasis upon those signs of the new life brought to light in the gospels, which seemed to contain the promise of perfection. It seized upon baptism as witnessing to a regeneration ; it traced the lives of saints back to a childhood which began with baptism; it invested the weak things of the world with a mighty power; and, keeping before it the pattern of the Head of the church, it traced in the early life of the Saviour powers which confounded the common wisdom of men. It dwelt with fondness upon the adoration of the Magi, as witnessing to the supremacy of the infant Redeemer; and, occupied as it was with the idea of a suffering Saviour, it carried the cross back to the cradle, and found in the Massacre of the Innocents the type of a substitution and vicarious sacrifice.

The simple annals of the Gospels shine with great beauty when confronted by the ingenuity and curious adornment of the legends included in the socalled Apocryphal Gospels. Yet these legends illustrate the eagerness of the early Christian world to invest the person of Jesus with every possible charm and power; and since the weakness of infancy and childhood offers the strongest contrast to works of thaumaturgy, this period is very fully elaborated. A reason may also be found in the silence of the evangelists, which needed to be broken by the curious. Thus, when, in the flight into Egypt, the Holy Family was made to seek rest in a cave, there suddenly came out many dragons ; and the children who were with the family, when they saw the dragons, cried out in great terror.

“ Then Jesus,” says the narrative, “went down from the bosom of his mother, and stood on his feet before the dragons ; and they adored Jesus, and thereafter retired. . . . And the young child Jesus, walking before them, commanded them to hurt no man. But Mary and Joseph were very much afraid lest the child should be hurt by the dragons. And Jesus said to them : ‘Do not be afraid, and do not consider me to be a little child; for I am and always have been perfect, and all the beasts of the field must needs be tame before me.’ Lions and panthers adored him likewise, and accompanied them in the desert. Wherever Joseph and the blessed Mary went, these went before them, showing them the way and bowing their heads, and showing their submission by wagging their tails ; they adored him with great reverence. Now at first, when Mary saw the lions and the panthers, and various kinds of wild beasts coming about them, she was very much afraid. But the infant Jesus looked into her face with a joyful countenance, and said : ‘ Be not afraid, mother ; for they come not to do thee harm, but they make haste to serve both thee and me.’ With these words he drove all fear from her heart. And the lions kept walking with them, and with the oxen and the asses and the beasts of burden which carried their baggage, and did not hurt a single one of them ; but they were tame among the sheep and the rams which they had brought with them from Judæa, and which they had with them. They walked among wolves and feared nothing, and no one of them was hurt by another.” ¹ So, too, when Mary looked helplessly up at the fruit of a palm-tree hanging far out of her reach, the child Jesus, “ with a joyful countenance, reposing in the bosom of his mother, said to the palm, ‘ O tree, bend thy branches, and refresh my mother with thy fruit.’ And immediately at these words the palm bent its top down to the very feet of the blessed Mary; and they gathered from its fruit, with which they were all refreshed. And after they had gathered all its fruit, it remained bent down, waiting the order to rise from him who had commanded it to stoop. Then Jesus said to it, ‘ Raise thyself, O palm-tree, and be strong, and be the companion of my trees which are in the paradise of my Father ; and open from thy roots a vein of water which has been hid in the earth, and let the waters flow, so that we may be satisfied from thee.’ And it rose up immediately, and at its root there began to come forth a spring of water, exceedingly clear and cool and sparkling. And when they saw the spring of water they rejoiced with great joy, and were satisfied, themselves and all their cattle and their beasts. Wherefore they gave thanks to God.”

The legends which relate to the boyhood of Jesus carry back with a violent or confused sense the acts of his manhood. Thus he is represented more than once as willing the death of a playmate, and then contemptuously bringing him to life again. A favorite story grossly misconceives the incident of Christ with the doctors in the temple, and makes him turn his schoolmaster into ridicule. There are other stories, the incidents of which are not reflections of anything in the Gospels, but are used to illustrate in a childish way the wonder-working power of the boy. Here is one which curiously mingles the miraculous power with the Saviour’s doctrine of the Sabbath : —

“ And it came to pass, after these things, that in the sight of all Jesus took clay from the pools which he had made, and of it made twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath when Jesus did this, and there were very many children with him. When, therefore, one of the Jews had seen him doing this, he said to Joseph, ‘ Joseph, dost thou not see the child Jesus working on the Sabbath at what it is not lawful for him to do? For he has made twelve sparrows of clay.’ And when Joseph heard this, he reproved him, saying, ‘ Wherefore doest thou on the Sabbath such things as are not lawful for us to do ? ’ And when Jesus heard Joseph he struck his hands together, and said to his sparrows, ‘ Fly ! ’ and at the voice of his command they began to fly. And in the sight and hearing of all that stood by he said to the birds, ‘ Go and fly through the earth, and through all the world, and live.’ And when those that were there saw such miracles they were filled with great astonishment.”

It is interesting to note how many of these stories connect the child with animals. The passage in Isaiah which prophesied the great peace in the figure of a child leading wild beasts had something to do with this; so had the birth of Jesus in a manger, and the incident of the entry into Jerusalem : but I suspect that the imagination scarcely needed to hunt very far or very curiously for suggestions, since the world over childhood has been associated with brute life, and the writers of the Apocryphal Gospels had only to make these animals savage when they would illustrate the potency of the childhood of Jesus.

“ There is a road going out of Jericho,” says the Pseudo-gospel of Matthew, “ and leading to the river Jordan, to the place where the children of Israel crossed ; and there the ark of the covenant is said to have rested. And Jesus was eight years old, and he went out of Jericho and went towards the Jordan. And there was beside the road, near the banks of the Jordan, a cave, where a lioness was nursing her cubs ; and no one was safe who walked that way. Jesus, then, coining from Jericho, and knowing that in that cave the lioness had brought forth her young, went into it in the sight of all. And when the lions saw Jesus they ran to meet him, and adored him. And Jesus was sitting in the cavern, and the lion’s cubs ran hither and thither round his feet, fawning upon him and sporting. And the older lions, with their heads bowed down, stood at a distance and adored him, and fawned upon him with their tails. Then the people, who were standing afar off, not seeing Jesus, said, ‘ Unless he or his parents laid committed grievous sins, he would not of his own accord have offered himself up to the lions.’ And when the people were thus reflecting within themselves, and were lying under great sorrow, behold, on a sudden, in the sight of the people, Jesus came out of the cave, and the lions went before him, and the lion’s cubs played with each other before his feet. And the parents of Jesus stood afar off, with their heads bowed down, and watched ; likewise, also, the people stood at a distance, on account of the lions ; for they did not dare to come close to them. Then Jesus began to say to the people,

‘ How much better are the beasts than you, seeing that they recognize their Lord and glorify him ; while you men, who have been made after the image and likeness of God, do not know him ! Beasts know me, and are tame ; men see me, and do not acknowledge me.’ ” To the mind of these early Christians the life of Jesus was compounded of holiness and supernatural power ; so far as they distinguished these, the holiness was the cause of the power, and hence, when the imagination fashioned saints out of men and women, it followed the same course which it had taken with the Master. The childhood of the saints was an anticipation of maturer virtues and powers, rather than a manifestation of ingenuous innocence. There was a tendency to explain exceptional qualities in lives by extending them backward into youth, thereby gaining for them an apparent corroboration. The instances of this in the legends are frequent. Mothers, like the Virgin Mary, have premonitions that their children are to be in some special manner children of God, and the characteristics of later life are foreshadowed at birth. The Virgin herself was thus dealt with. The strong human feeling which subsequently, when the tenderness of Christ had been petrified into judgment, interposed the Virgin as mediator, found gratification in surrounding Mary’s infancy and childhood with a supernatural grace and power, the incidents in some cases being faint reflections of incidents in the life of her son ; as when we are told that Joachim and Anna carried Mary, then three years old, to place her among the virgins in the temple of God. “ And when she was put down before the doors of the temple, she went up the fifteen steps so swiftly that she did not look back at all ; nor did she, as children are wont to do, seek for her parents. Whereupon her parents, each of them anxiously seeking for the child, were both alike astonished until they found her in the temple, and the priests of the temple themselves wondered.”

In like manner a halo of light played about S. Catherine’s head when she was born. The year of the birth of S. Elizabeth of Hungary was full of blessings to her country ; the first words she uttered were those of prayer, and when three years old she gave signs of the charity which marked her life by giving her toys and garments to those less fortunate than herself. A pretty story is told of her betrothal to Prince Louis of Thuringia. Herman of Thuringia sent an embassy to the king of Hungary, desiring the little Elizabeth, then only four years old, for his son ; and the maiden accompanied the embassy, carrying with

her a silver cradle and silver bath, which her father had given her. She was betrothed to Louis, and the little pair played happily together in the same cradle. S. Genevieve of Paris was a maiden of seven, who tended a flock of sheep at the village of Nanterre. Hither came S. Germain, and when the inhabitants were assembled to receive his benediction his eyes rested on the little shepherdess, and seeing her saintliness he set her apart as a bride of Christ. S. Gregory Nazianzen had a dream when he was a boy, in which two heavenly virgins of celestial beauty visited him : they were Chastity and Temperance, and so captivating was their presence, so winning were their words, that he awoke to take perpetual vows of continence. S. John Chrysostom was a dull boy at school, and so disturbed was he by the ridicule of his fellows that he went into a church to pray to the Virgin for help. A voice came from the image: “ Kiss me on the mouth, and thou shalt be endowed with all learning.” He did this, and when he returned to his schoolfellows they saw a golden circle about his mouth, and his eloquence and brilliancy astounded them. Martyrdom was the portion of these saintly children as well as of their elders. The story is told of Hilarion, one of the four children of Saturninus the priest, that when the proconsul of Carthage thought to have no difficulty in dealing with one of tender age, the child resisted all cajolings and threats. “ I am a Christian,” said the little fellow. “I have been at the collect [that is, assisted as an acolyte], and it was of my own voluntary choice, without any compulsion.” Thereupon the proconsul, who was probably a father, threatened him, as the story runs, “ with those little punishments with which children are accustomed to be chastised,” but the child only laughed at the idea of giving up his faith for fear of a whipping. “ I will cut off your nose and ears ! ” shouted the exasperated inquisitor. “ You may do it, but I shall be a Christian still,” replied the undaunted boy; and when he was ordered off to prison with the rest, he was heard to pipe forth, “ God be thanked,” and so was led away.

These random incidents are, for the most part, mainly anticipatory of mature experience. They can be matched with the details of Protestant hagiology as recorded in a class of books more common forty years ago than now. It is their remoteness that lends a certain grace and charm to them. The life of a little Christian in the fourth century is invested with an attraction which is wanting in the circumstance of some juvenile saint living in the midst of indifferent scoffers of the early part of the nineteenth century.

Occasionally, however, the legends inclose the saintly attributes in some bit of romance, or betray a simple, ingenuous sympathy with childish nature. The legend of S. Kenelm has a faint suspicion of kinship with the story of the babes in the wood. King Kenwulf of Wessex died, and left two daughters, Cwendrida and Burgenilda, and a son of seven years, named Kenelm. The elder of the daughters wished the child out of the way, that she might reign; so site gave money to Askbert, his guardian, the wicked uncle of the story, and bade him privily slay the boy. So Askbert took Kenelm into a wood, as if for a hunt, and by and by the child, tired with the heat, fell asleep under the shade of a tree. Askbert, seeing his time had come, set to work to dig a grave, that all might he in readiness ; but Kenelm woke, and said, “It is in vain that you think to kill me here. I shall be slain in another spot. In token whereof, see this rod blossom; ” and so saying, he stuck a stick into the ground, and it instantly took root and began to flower. In after days it was a great ash-tree, known as S. Kenelm’s ash. Then Askbert took the little king to another spot, and the child, now wide awake, began to sing the Te Deum. When he came to the verse “ The noble army of martyrs praise Thee,” Askbert cut off his head, and then buried him in the wood. Just as he did this, a white dove flew into the church of S. Peter in Rome, and laid on the high altar a letter, which it bore in its beak. The letter was in English, and it was some time before any one could be found who could read it. Then it was discovered that Kenelm had been killed and his body hidden away. The Pope thereupon wrote letters into England telling of this sorry affair, and men went forth to find the body of the little king. They were led by a pillar of light, which stood over the place where the body lay. So they bore it off and buried it ; but they built a chapel over the spot where they had found the body, which is known as S. Kenelm’s chapel to this day. There the chapel stands near Hales Owen ; how else did it get its name? and as Mr. Freeman sagely remarks, “ It is hard to see what should have made anybody invent such a tale, if nothing of the kind had ever happened.”

Another of the stories which has a half fairy-tale character is that of the martyrdom of the little S. Christina, who was shut up in a high tower by her father, and bidden spend her time before gold and silver gods; his private purpose being to keep her out of the way of troublesome lovers. Christina tired of her divine playthings, and in spite of her father’s indulgence, since he obligingly took away all the images but three, would have nothing to do with false gods. She was visited by angels and instructed in Christianity. She combined courage in her new faith with a fine spirit of adventure ; for she is represented as smashing the idols, letting herself down by a rope from her towerprison, distributing the fragments of the idols among the poor, and clambering up again before morning. Her martyrdom showed various ingenious inventions of torture, but the odd part of the story is the manner in which the gold and silver idols always suggest a girl’s playthings. We are told that when she was taken into the temple of Apollo she bade the idol step down and walk about the temple until she sent it back to its place. Then, proceeds the story gravely, she was put in a cradle filled with boiling pitch and oil, and four soldiers were set to rocking her.

In these and similar stories which abound in the Acta Sanctorum, the simple attributes of childish nature rarely shine through the more formal covering of churchly investiture. Nature could not always be expelled, but the imagination, busy with the construction of the ideal Christian life, was more concerned, as time went on, to make that conform to an ecclesiastical standard. It is pathetic to see the occasional struggle of poor humanity to break through the meshes in which it was entangled. The life of S. Francis of Assisi is full of incidents which illustrate this. His familiar intercourse with birds and beasts was but one of the signs of an effort to escape from the cage in which he was an unconscious prisoner. One night, we are told, he rose suddenly from the earthen floor which made his bed, and rushed out into the open air. A brother monk, who was praying in his cell, looked through his window and saw S. Francis, under the light of the moon, fashion seven little figures of snow. “ Here is thy wife,” he said to himself; “these four are thy sons and daughters; the other two are thy servant and handmaid : and for all these thou art bound to provide. Make haste, then, and provide clothing for them, lest they perish with cold. But if the care of so many trouble thee, be thou careful to serve the Lord alone.” The injunction to give up father and mother and family for the Lord’s sake, when obeyed by one so tremulously alive to human sympathy as was S. Francis, had in it a power suddenly to disclose the depths of the human soul; nor can it be doubted that those who, like S. Francis, were eagerly thrusting aside everything which seemed to stand between them and the realization of the divine life paid heed to the significant words of the Lord which made a child the symbol of that life. In practical dealing with the evils of the world the early church never lost sight of children. Orphans, especially the orphans of martyrs, were a sacred charge, and when monasteries arose and became, at least in the West, centres of civilization, they were refuges for foundlings as well as schools for the young. It is one of the distinct signs of the higher life which Christianity was slowly bringing into the world that the church adopted and protected children as children, for their own sakes. Foundlings had before been nurtured for the sake of profit, and we can easily do poor human nature the justice to believe in instances where pity and love had their honest sway ; but it certainly was left to the church to incorporate in its very constitution that care of helpless childhood which springs from a profound sense of the dignity of life, and a growing conviction of the rights which pertain to personality.

For the history of Christianity is in the development of personality, and childhood has, from the beginning, come under the influence of a power which has been at work lifting the world into a recognition of its relation to God. It was impossible that the few significant words spoken by Christ should be forgotten ; nevertheless, they do not seem to have impressed themselves upon the consciousness of men. At least it may be said that in the growth of Latin Christianity they do not come forward specifically as furnishing the ground and reason for a regard for childhood. The work to be done by the Latin church was largely one of organizing human society under an anthropomorphic conception of God. It gave a certain fixed objectivity to God, placed him at a distance from the world, and made the approach to him to be by a succession of intermediary agents. Nevertheless, the hierarchy which resulted rested upon ethical foundations. The whole grand scheme did, in effect, rivet and fix the sense of personal responsibility and personal integrity. It made each man and woman aware of his and her relation to law in the person of its ministers, and this law was a law which reached to the thoughts of the heart.

The system, as such, had little to do with childhood. It waited for its close, but it pushed back its influence over the line of adolescence, making as early as might be the day when the child should come into conscious relation with the church. Through the family, however, it powerfully affected the condition of childhood, for by its laws and its ritual it was giving religious sanction to the family, even while it was gradually divorcing itself from humanity under plea of a sanctity which was more than human. Its conception of a religious devotedness which was too good for this world, whereby contempt of the body was put in place of redemption of the body, and celibacy made more honorable than marriage, undermined its hold upon the world, which it sought to govern and to furnish with ideals.

Inasmuch as this great system dealt with persons in relations which could be exactly defined and formulated, it would be idle to seek in the literature which reflects it for any considerable representation of that period of human life in which the forms are as yet undetermined. Nevertheless, childhood exercises even here its subtle power of recalling men to elemental truths. Dante was the prophet of a spiritual Rome, which he saw in his vision outlined against the background of the existing hierarchy. It would be in vain to search through the Divine Comedy for many references to childhood. As he says himself in the Inferno, —

And the only picture of childhood in that vision is the melancholy one of the horrid sufferings of Count Ugolino and his children in the Tower of Hunger. In the Paradiso there are two passages of interest. Near the close of the twentyseventh canto, Beatrice, breaking forth into a rapt utterance of the divine all in all, suddenly checks herself as she remembers how the curse of covetousness shuts men out from entrance into the full circle of divine movement, and then, with a swift and melancholy survey of the changes in human life, cries bitterly : —

Again, in the thirty - second canto, S. Bernard is pointing out the circles of the Rose, and after denoting the degrees of saints before Christ and after, proceeds : —

Dante is perplexed by the difference even in these innocent babes, but S. Bernard reminds him that there is difference in endowment, but that all are subject to the divine all-embracing law : —

an interpretation of the vision which is really less scholastic than suggested by the deeper insight of the poetic mind.

The most significant passage, however, is found in the famous words at the beginning of the Vita Nuova, which fix his first sight of Beatrice when he was nine years old. “And since,” he closes, “to dwell upon the passions and actions of such early youth appeareth like telling an idle tale, I will leave them, and, passing over many things which might be drawn from the original where these lie hidden, I will come to those words which are written in my memory under large paragraphs.'’³ In these last words is apparent Dante’s own judgment upon the worth of his recollections of childhood : one page only in that book of his memory he deems worthy of regard, — the page upon which fell the image of Beatrice. It will be said with truth that the childhood of Dante and Beatrice is in reality the beginning of maturity, for it is counted only as the initiation of a noble passion. The time, indeed, had not yet come in the history of human life when the recollection of that which is most distinctive of childhood forms the basis of speculation and philosophic dream.

The absence of childhood from the visions of Dante is a negative witness to the absence from the world, in the age prior to the Renaissance, of hope and of simple faith and innocence. Dante’s faint recognition of these qualities throws them back into a quickly forgotten and outgrown childhood. The lisping child becomes the greedy worldling, the cruel and unloving man, and the tyranny of an empire of souls is hinted at in the justification by the poet of the presence of innocent babes in Paradise ; they are there by the interposition of a

sacrificial act. The poet argues to still the doubts of men at finding these children in Paradise. It would almost seem as if the words had been forgotten which characterized heaven through the very image of childhood.

Indeed, it is not to be wondered at that childhood was little regarded by an age which found its chief interest in a thought of death. “ Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio,” we are reminded by Mr. Pater, “ gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the plague in a country house.” The great Florentine work was executed under this dominant thought; nevertheless, an art which is largely concerned about tombs and sepulchral monuments implies an overweening pride in life and a weightier sense of the years of earth. The theology which had furnished the panoply within which the human soul was fighting its battle emphasized the idea of time, and made eternity itself a prolongation of human conditions. The imagination, at work upon a future, constructed it out of the hard materials of the present, and was always looking for some substantial bridge which should connect the two worlds; seeing decay and change here, it transferred empires and powers to the other side of the gulf, and sought to reerect them upon an everlasting basis.

Such thought had little in common with the hope, the fearlessness, the faith, of childhood, and thus childhood as an image had largely faded out of art and literature. One only great exception there was, — the representation in art of the child Jesus ; and in the successive phases of this representation may be read a remarkable history of the human soul.

Horace E. Scudder.