A Place for Jesus: A Walking Tour of the Christmas Crèche

By Scott P. Mages

Hope is an endangered virtue in today’s chaotic world. Yet Christmas provides us with the inspiring reminder that our true hope lies not in the understanding that people can sometimes be good, but that God, who is good, is also faithful and loves us in our unloveliness and graces us in our gracelessness.

In a unique guide for Christian travelers, Scott Mages marries the fascinating story of the figures that surround the infant Jesus in that inescapable seasonal tableau of shepherds and wise men, as told through the bible, folk tales, and art, with reflections on the enduring meanings of each. While addressing Christian curiosities like why so many manger scenes display Joseph with staff and lantern and where in the scripture we can find the ox and ass who preceded Mary in artists’ renditions, Mages leads others through the history of the figures of the crèche and their lessons while offering a spiritual preparation for Christmas.

Shared for the curious and pious, lovers of odd facts and forgotten legends, and seekers of more than the glitz that often passes for Christmas, A Place for Jesus guides Christians on an inspiring journey to learn and understand the lessons surrounding the figures of the crèche.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781973694229

Scott P. Mages

After earning his Master of Divinity degree summa cum laude from Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, MD, Scott Mages served at several parishes in the Pittsburgh area, as well as doing campus ministry and leading a support group for families who had experienced tragic death. During this time he authored a collection of short stories for young adults (Daydreams, Commonwealth Publications, 1995). One year he conceived an advent service that consisted of participants individually bringing up a statue at a time to “build” the manger scene, accompanied by a reflection and song. It took years of research and reflection for that tiny seed to blossom into “A Place for Jesus.

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Copyright © 2020 Scott P. Mages.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

ISBN: 978-1-9736-9421-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-9420-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-9422-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020911288

WestBow Press rev. date: 07/01/2020

CONTENTS

Introduction

A Bit of History

The Setting of the Nativity

The Ox Knows Its Master

Keepers of the Flock

Magi Bearing Gifts

Angels We Have Heard on High

The Just Man of Nazareth

Mother, Maiden, Queen

Filling the Crib

About the Author

Endnotes

Bibliography

In memory of Joyce,

Too few were the

Christmases

you brightened

with your presence.

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INTRODUCTION

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Keep Christ in Christmas protests the bumper sticker ahead of me. A placard in front of a neighborhood church trumpets, Jesus Is the Reason for the Season. Others, despairing of a way to rescue a celebration of the birth of Jesus from the season of inflatable Santas and garland-festooned wreaths, have abandoned Christmas altogether. It may seem futile to scrounge for evidence of faith in the Incarnate Lord amid the mounds of discarded wrapping paper and glistening ribbon. After all, every year since 1965, Charlie Brown has been lamenting the commercialism of the season and crying out to know what Christmas is all about. His plea began long before Black Friday entered common parlance and when Cyber Monday could only have been a science-fiction buff’s dream. Perhaps, as some believe, we live in a post-Christmas world, where Jesus has lost out in a popularity contest with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But I, for one, am hopeful about Christmas. Christmas is, after all, a season of hope.

Hope is an endangered virtue in this world of drive-by shootings and refugee camps, of topsy-turvy economics and car bombs. Still Christmas survives, even if only as a neo-pagan rite of midwinter because it has never ceased to be a season of hope. Look behind the sappiest television special, and you will find hope lurking. It will come disguised under a hundred versions of the true meaning of Christmas. Of course that true meaning will be a weak-kneed version of the Christian proclamation, something like forgiveness, brotherhood, or giving-rather-than-receiving. God may be entirely absent. But the Christmas I know insists that our true hope is not that people can sometimes be good, but that God, who is good, is also faithful. God, for whom nothing is impossible, has loved us in our unloveliness and graced us in our gracelessness. If we are hopeful for humanity, it is certainly not because we humans have proved we can save ourselves. Rather the Mighty One has done great things (Luke 1:49).

It was into a sinful, doubting, and hopeless world that our Savior once was born. Even absent automobiles and cell phones, it was in many ways a world we would recognize. A foreign power ruled Jesus’s homeland through a puppet king whose family had converted to Judaism out of political convenience. At the top of society were the wealthy few; at the bottom were beggars and lepers. The Sadducees who ran the temple maintained their authority by engaging in realpolitik with the Romans, while in the streets of Jerusalem roamed dagger-wielding sicarii, who believed that terror could topple the oppressive order. Out in the desert, extremists banded together into sects, believing only they were worthy to be saved as they counted the hours until divine judgment doomed the rest of humanity.

It was a world desperately in need of Jesus; it was a world that had no place for him. There was no room in the inn. Yet he transformed that world with his presence. He can do it again. The Christmas spirit may be a feeble substitute for the Holy Spirit, but where there is the Christmas spirit, the door is cracked for God to enter. The persistence of the themes of hope, brotherhood, and human kindness that scent the air at Christmas are like that proverbial spark waiting to be fanned into a flame. Its dim glow witnesses to a planet still longing for salvation, still wanting to believe.

Often the last holdout to secularism in our malls and homes is the Christmas crèche. That endearing and impossible amalgam of shepherds and wise men silently reminds us of the Lord of this feast. Yet it is a tepid witness, overburdened with sentiment, imperiled by familiarity. Once shepherds trembled at the mere reflection of the glory of God in his angelic heralds. Once a fearful king rampaged against helpless infants to quell the light that challenged the entrenched darkness. The Italians use a word, chiaroscuro, to describe the vivid contrast of light and dark that adds so much drama to the paintings of artists like Caravaggio. But centuries before Caravaggio, Matthew and Luke proved themselves masters of the craft. The biblical portrait of Christmas is not trite; it is painted in the chiaroscuro of divine majesty and human frailty.

Then let us start there. Why not retrieve the manger scene from its comfortable niche beneath the tinsel-laden tree and hold it up to the light? We can peer beyond the cliché coziness of mother and infant child to discover the word of God that speaks as distinctly today as ever. We can use statues of plaster and wood to lead us to matters of flesh and sinew. And we can capture the child’s delight in peeking in at baby Jesus to set free truths that still confound the aged.

As we make the journey back to the Palestine of Jesus’s day and ahead to our own time, we are awakened to look at the familiar with new eyes. This book is subtitled A Walking Tour of the Christmas Crèche for good reason. The author does not pretend to be a learned scripture exegete, an art historian, or student of folklore. This is not a scholarly opus, though it owes much to the scholarship of others. It is more a guidebook for travelers. It alerts the interested reader to stop and take note of the second wise man on the left and before exiting not to miss the staff in Joseph’s hand on the right. Here it invites one to open his Bible and reread a prophet’s words. Then it points over there to show how a familiar pose derives from a Renaissance fresco, which in turn recalls an ancient legend. It is a labor of one who as a child gazed in wonder at the elaborate eighteenth-century Neapolitan presepio that has been displayed annually since 1957 at the Carnegie museum in his native Pittsburgh and only years later stopped to ponder why in the typical crèche there were always three wise men, two white and one black, when the Bible mentions no particular number and speaks not a word about their race. Countless hours pursuing this and other related questions, grazing here and there among the fertile fruits of others’ learning, have resulted in this book, that is offered to readers with the hope that it will enrich their appreciation, not just of the Christmas crèche, but of the faith that these symbols silently profess from their perch on the coffee table. Most of all, it is hoped that in searching the old, each of us may rediscover the truth that is ever new. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (John 1:5).

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CHAPTER 1

A Bit of History

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Just when the tradition of fashioning replicas of the Bethlehem manger originated and who claims credit for authoring the idea is obscure, or more accurately, it is a matter of definition. The sentimental favorite is the Little Poor Man, Francis of Assisi. Tradition spotlights Christmas Eve in 1223. The saint had prevailed upon Giovanni da Velliti to prepare a manger in Greccio, Italy. Ox and donkey, manger, and hay were all in evidence, whereby the saint wished to impress upon the faithful who gathered for Christmas Mass the poverty and loving condescension of Christ incarnate.

St. Bonaventure, the so-called second founder of the Franciscan order, tells us that in this third year before his death, Francis, a deacon, chanted the gospel at Midnight Mass and preached to the people about the poor King. Bonaventure further relates on the testimony of a pious and truthful knight, John of Greccio, that a beautiful little boy appeared in the manger, who was picked up and embraced by St. Francis. So impressed were the people, they preserved the hay from the crib and found it to possess miraculous properties, healing sick animals and driving away pestilence.¹

Notably, neither Bonaventure nor Thomas of Celano, the contemporary biographer of St. Francis, mentions any human figures represented. They speak only of only animals and a manger. And though some have suggested an actual child or carved manikin was used, clearly Bonaventure understands the child beheld by Sir John to have been a miraculous apparition. So while St. Francis certainly stoked the fires of devotion to the infant Christ by displaying manger, hay, and animals, a vision of the poor Christ matched well the Franciscan ideal of poverty, in context, this was more a homiletic aid than the origin of the crèche.

Nor is St. Francis the only contender as the crèche’s inventor. Michael Walsh in Dictionary of Catholic Devotions² relates that some sources attribute the origin of the crèche to initiatives of Marie of Oignies (c. 1177–1213). Marie was a Beguine, indeed one of the original Beguines, a loosely organized group of women who made a religious commitment and accepted a life of simplicity and celibacy (though not necessarily lifelong) without having a particular rule or belonging to a canonical religious order. Unlike nuns of the day who were invariably cloistered, the Beguines continued to live in the world, either singly in their family homes or small communities called beguinages, sometimes subsisting solely on alms, with a commitment to prayer and gospel virtues. In subsequent centuries, beguinages commonly boasted a cradle with carefully sewn blankets lovingly readied for the Holy Child. Is it possible that such devotion began with Marie herself? This much is certain: Marie of Oignies, a contemporary of Francis of Assisi, had every ounce his devotion to the humanity of Jesus and just as profound a spirit of poverty. Her biographer, Jacques of Vitry, wrote,

The spirit of fear had given her so great a love of poverty that she deprived herself even of necessities. Once she wished to run away and beg from door to door … She often thought on the poverty of Christ who was born without a shelter … ³

Moreover, Jacques describes how Marie beheld Jesus in different aspects on various feast days. On the Nativity, Jesus showed himself to her as a boy nursing at the breast of the Virgin Mary or whimpering in a cradle.⁴ At very least then, Marie witnesses to a growing enthusiasm for the humanity of Jesus, especially the infant Christ, that was developing in her day. Both Francis of Assisi and Marie of Oignies inherited strains of the affective spirituality and love of the poor infant Jesus that in large part originated with Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) a century earlier.

A much later candidate for claiming honor as the crèche’s originator is Gaetano of Thiene, the founder of the Theatine order. After having a vision of a living child being taken into the arms of the Virgin Mary while he was celebrating Mass in the praesepe (manger) chapel at Santa Maria Maggiore in 1517, Gaetano took to erecting a crib in his monastery cell each year at Christmas. There he preached ecstatic sermons on the Nativity, accompanied by local shepherds playing their bagpipes.

However, no one person can truly be said to have authored the crèche devotion. Neither Marie of Oignies nor Gaetano of Thiene had a lasting influence on popular culture. And if St. Francis can be called the inventor of the crèche, it is less because he originated the practice than because he helped popularize a particular strain of devotion to the infant Christ and because to a large extent that piety was nurtured and spread by the mendicant friars who bore his name.¹

In some ways, the roots of the crèche tradition are far more ancient; on the other hand, the custom of setting up devotional manger scenes is far more recent. After all, reverence of the Nativity and even the use of a manger in liturgy antedated both Francis of Assisi and Marie of Oignies by scores of years. The very earliest surviving representation of Jesus’s birth is a mural in the catacomb of Saint Sebastian, dating to the end of the fourth century. A little over a century later, a model of the manger graced the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Apparently no crib was yet displayed in Bethlehem at the turn of the fifth century when Egiria (or Aetheria) recorded a diary of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. (And Egiria’s silence is telling, for she comments on the elaborate curtains, sacred vessels, and other appointments of the church.) However, just a few years later, around AD 420, Jerome knew of a silver manger in the Church of the Nativity. In fact this was a second crib, for it replaced a previous one of clay.²

It seems the Bethlehem manger inspired Pope Sixtus III to set up a wooden replica in a side chapel of the church of Sta. Maria Maggiore in Rome. St. Mary’s was the first basilica in the world consecrated to the honor of Jesus’s mother, being dedicated shortly after the Third Ecumenical Council (at Ephesus in 431) proclaimed Mary Theotokos, or God-bearer. According to legend, the Mother of God herself designated the site of St. Mary’s, marking the spot by a miraculous snowfall. Mosaics from the Virgin’s life adorned the main arch of the basilica, but the Nativity merited a chapel all its own. It was in the crib chapel of St. Mary’s that Pope Sixtus introduced the custom of celebrating Midnight Mass for Christmas in AD 440. The stature of this so-called praesepe chapel increased with the seventh-century acquisition of some relics claimed to be authentic remnants of the Christ-child’s crib, brought from Bethlehem to Rome for safekeeping. They remained beneath the main altar of Sta. Maria for generations until the close of 2019 when they were once more returned to the Holy Land.

Thus, for centuries before Francis’s time, cribs were used in worship. At High Mass at Sta. Maria Maggiore, it was even customary to place the consecrated bread in the manger. In the High Middle Ages, many local churches also commonly set up mangers at the altar for matins (morning prayer) on Christmas. Three vested clerics representing shepherds approached with censors, only to be met by an angel who announced Christ’s birth. In more developed form, but still the twelfth century, an image of the Christ-child and his mother was set in a box that suggested a stable and veiled by curtains. Then just before Midnight Mass, three vested shepherds entered and were met by a choirboy who represented the angel and who announced the Savior’s birth.

As the shepherds approached the manger, two other clerics asked them, Whom do you seek?

They replied, The Savior who is Christ the Lord.

Then the two priests, representing the midwives of the apocryphal gospels, drew the curtain to reveal an image of the child with his mother.

The minimal dialogue was spoken in Latin and served to introduce the choir’s song. The actors were vested, not costumed. This was not yet a play separate from worship, but a liturgical enhancement, much in the spirit of Francis’ Midnight Mass at Greccio and preceding him. From these rudimentary officii and presentationes developed elaborate medieval dramas where the mysteries of salvation were enacted. Mangers, costumed actors, live animals, and even statues were sometimes part of the mystery plays; still later puppets were used in bawdy shows. All these can claim ancestry to the crèche, though they differ in spirit.

And of course there was monumental art: large permanent sculptures, sometimes with painted backdrops, celebrated the Nativity in side chapels and crypts of churches and cathedrals. Again, one of the earliest examples were the figures of Mary, Joseph, and the child Jesus that Arnolfo da Cambio carved for the praesepe chapel of Sta. Maria Maggiore. In later Renaissance times, especially in areas of Franciscan influence, Holy Mountains were composed on wooded hillsides, often near convents. Such a Sacro Monte was comprised of shrines embracing large-as-life figures that depicted various scenes of the Lord’s life for the devotion and marvel of pilgrims.

Perhaps closer to the spirit of private devotion to the Nativity of the infant savior, which the crèche embodies, were the nuns who waited out Advent in the cloister by preparing Bethlehems, tiny houses equipped with baths and all else needed for the care of an expected child. Also in the spirit of private piety are surviving examples of cradles made to hold a statue of the Christ-child and attended by four little golden angels, fashioned after the one described by Margaret Ebner in her Revelations.⁵ Margaret (d. 1351) was a Dominican nun at the Monastery of Maria Medingen, in what is now Germany.

Graced with powerful mystical experiences, she conceived a deep devotion to the Christ-child. Reassured by the (incorrectly recalled) words of scripture that Whoever does the will of my Father is father and mother to me (cf. Matthew 12:50 and par.), Margaret related very personal episodes of prayer wherein she experienced intimate maternal bonding with Jesus. She actually felt the statue of Jesus in the manger called for her to pick it up to nurse him.⁶

Margaret immediately gives spiritual meaning to the experience, saying that she was being purified by his pure humanity, set afire by the ardent love coming from him, and drawn into the true enjoyment of his divine essence with all loving souls who have lived in the truth. Nonetheless, on another occasion, Margaret relates that she actually felt the statue of the child nurse at her breast. Then on the day after Christmas 1344, she speaks of a statue of Jesus in the crib, attended by four angels, a gift sent to her from Vienna. At night she beheld the child moving about playfully in the crib.

She asked, Why don’t you behave and be quiet and let me sleep? I tucked you in nicely.

But the child replied that he did not want to sleep, but to be picked up and held.

Margaret continues,

So with desire and joy I took Him out of the crib and placed Him on my lap. He was a dear Child. I said, Kiss me, then I will forget that you have awakened me. Then He fell upon me with His little arms and embraced me and kissed me.⁷

Although Margaret Ebner’s experiences are certainly unique, perhaps even a bit disturbing, they are not out of the spirit of her time. And if to modern ears they sound suspect, for our purposes it suffices that she provides evidence that cribs and statues of the infant Christ were at home in convents of her day. More importantly, she illustrates how the presence of such cribs was tied to a growing devotion to the Christ-child, which developed as one aspect of a more general preoccupation with the humanity of Jesus. Already witnessed by Francis of Assisi and Marie of Oignies, this focus on the human nature of Jesus became a widespread concern for fourteenth-century pietistic spirituality.

The New Oxford Book of Carols relates that in Rhineland nunneries of the Middle Ages, sisters commonly rocked the child Jesus in cradles, a custom that spread to the parish church in late medieval times. At Christmas vespers and matins, the priest would rock a cradle containing a statue of Jesus that had been set in front of the altar, keeping time to an appropriately composed cradle-song. The custom survived the Middle Ages, and special mention is made of a sixteenth-century church in the Netherlands that had two such cradles, one at the altar for the priest to rock and another, outfitted with bells, that stood in the congregation and was rocked by the children.⁸ The tradition of cradle rocking with sentimental songs composed specifically to accompany the tender action, such as Joseph lieber, Joseph mein, held the hearts of congregations, both Catholic and Protestant, in much of the German-speaking world in some venues until the nineteenth century.

All these can be seen as antecedents to the Christmas crèche and influenced its form. But the crèche properly so-called, which might best be described as a seasonal representation of movable figures, erected for private devotion apart from formal worship or public drama, is considerably more recent. It is the offspring of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, born of the preaching enthusiasm of the Jesuits and the Baroque extravagance of the Counter-Reformation. Large displays of clothed, movable figures were set up in churches—the first perhaps in Coimbra (Portugal) in 1560 and Prague in 1562—but soon centering in Bavaria and Austria. The Bavarian roots survive in the very word, crèche, a French borrowing of the Old High German kripja, or crib. The Jesuits of Munich experimented with one such tableau in 1607. Each year it grew, with more and more figures added, along with the related scenes of the Magi and the massacre of the infants. A year later, there is record of a display in Innsbruck.⁹

From Bavaria, the Jesuits carried the idea to Naples, the church of Gesu Nuovo. Italy also soon became a leader in crèche art, having centers in Rome and Genoa, but with Naples leading the way. Large church exhibits were soon imitated on a smaller scale (the figures ranging from about four to fourteen inches tall) in the homes of the wealthy, who vied for the most elaborate displays. The early eighteenth-century Hapsburg rulers of Naples even founded schools for modeling figures, while the Bourbon Charles III (ruler of Naples from 1734–1759) joined the craftsmen who carved figures for his extravagant palace display, as his queen and her ladies in waiting sewed garments for them. His Nativity scene inventoried just shy of 6,000 figures.¹⁰

From Southern Germany and Italy, the custom of the crèche spread across Europe, to Protestant and Catholic countries alike, with a third great center of crèche culture blossoming in Provence. The Neapolitan-style crèche was adopted in France in the eighteenth century, and though widely admired, only the wealthy could afford them. At the close of the eighteenth century, however, small clay figures called santons (little saints) began to be turned out by artisans at a modest price, especially after 1798 when Jean Louis Lagnel introduced a technique of mass production through use of plaster molds. The santons soon became a hallmark of the homes of common folk in Provence, their prevalence gaining a boost from the French Revolution, which banned church crèches and popular puppet shows of the Nativity.

Each of the three dominant regions of crèche culture developed its peculiar character.

1. The German-Austrian tradition delighted in details of landscape—trees, mountains, and flowing rivers—and symbolic figures.

2. The Neapolitan crèche typically included bright colors and clothed figures, usually set in the context of a ruin.

3. The Provençal style featured small clay figures and a busy town setting, where all but Mary, Joseph, and the Magi appear in traditional Provençal peasant garb.

Yet all are alike in that details of town and countryside have been greatly elaborated, and the company of the shepherds has increased to include all sorts of folk. Such elaborate crèche scenes were composed—and still are—with numerous and sometimes surprising figures. So developed are some settings that the viewer must strain to discern the Christ-child and related biblical figures—what the Neapolitans call the mistero—from the dozens of other figures in the intricate surroundings.

The Provençal tradition brings the peasant folk of bygone Midi to the manger, complete with all the residents of an active town, bakers, fishmongers, and the like. In Marseilles,