Who Do You Say That He Is?

In the early 16th century, Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, designed a method of meditation that came to be known as the Spiritual Exercises. The meditations involve a “composition of place,” a reconstructing in the imagination of a scene from Scripture. So at one point Ignatius writes that the goal “will be here to see with the sight of the imagination, the synagogues, villages and towns through which Christ our Lord preached.” The aim is to “see the persons with the sight of the imagination, meditating and contemplating in particular the details” of the scene and then applying the “senses” one by one so that we can immerse ourselves bodily in a particular setting. The next step is to explore the emotions that are aroused and the thoughts that are prompted by an imaginative encounter with the person of Christ and thus invite God’s transforming grace into every aspect of one’s interior life.

Ignatius’ method, which would have an influence on Christian poets such as John Donne, encapsulates and formalizes a way of encountering Christ that runs through the Middle Ages and is particularly evident in high medieval art. For example, in a Fra Angelico painting of the Crucifixion (1420 and now at the Metropolitan Museum), Christ on the cross is at the center of the painting while beneath and around him, forming a sort of semicircle, are various witnesses to the event. What is interesting about those present is their quite varied reactions to Christ, whose suffering is evident from the blood dripping from his upraised hands down his arms and from his side down the cross and into a puddle on the earth below. The responses vary from indifference, boredom, and curiosity to looks of horror, confusion, and wonder. Each of these responses is a possible reaction of viewers. The painting thus poses for each viewer the question: Who do you say that I am? And how do you respond to the event unfolding in your very midst? 

That painting is one of many featured in Grace Hamman’s Jesus Through Medieval Eyes: Beholding Christ with the Artists, Mystics, and Theologians of the Middle Ages. Weaving together a wide variety of authors and images, the book is beautiful, instructive, and moving. It includes numerous black-and-white and color reproductions of art from the period. The chapters are divided thematically, with each one taking up a particular way of encountering Jesus—as judge or knight, for example. The chapters end with nicely designed suggestions for concrete meditations or practices that might aid the reader in realizing the virtues espoused in the chapter. The book thus quite effectively reproduces for modern readers something like the experience that medieval persons would have had in relation to the texts or artwork. 

Anyone advocating a recovery of medieval spirituality is bound to face certain objections to anything “medieval.” Hamman faces squarely the disorders and excess of the period. But she follows C.S. Lewis in arguing that one of the advantages of turning to the past is that it can liberate us from the tyranny of the present. No doubt, as Lewis puts it, our predecessors made many mistakes, but they did not make our mistakes. This is not a matter of idealizing the past; as just mentioned, Hamman is blunt about some of the defects. She challenges not only those who want to dismiss the medieval period but also anyone overly prone to celebrate it, particularly those who yearn nostalgically for some imaginative order in the past. 

Considering medieval approaches to Jesus in their breadth and particularity will contain surprises for everyone. Understood in this way, the resources of the past provide unexpected gifts to those of us who live at some distance from it. We suffer from an atrophying of the imagination and a contraction in our vocabulary about good and evil, suffering and joy, and sin and redemption. We have lost, as Hamman notes at one point, the richness and “abundant flexibility of the virtues.” The medieval past, a past “saturated in beauty and the love of Christ,” offers contemporary Christians fresh ways of seeing the person of Christ and vital insights as to how his life can inform our own. 

In chapters on “Jesus as Judge” and “Jesus as Knight,” Hamman focuses on our need to expand our vocabulary concerning courage and battle. She notes that the images of Christ as judge, foreshadowing the Last Judgment, are sources of both fear and comfort. For the poor, images of members of the upper classes in Hell could be a consolation, underscoring that the inequities of this world will be rectified in God’s kingdom. Many of the images of Christ as judge also recall Christ’s words about the need to serve “the least of these” from Matthew 25. A 15th century painting by Petrus Christus, Christ, the Man of Sorrows, shows the risen Christ still bearing bloody wounds. As Christ looks directly at the viewer, the fingers of his right hand stretch open the wound at his side, revealing a gaping hole from which blood trickles down his midsection. Because the angels at his side carry the lilies of mercy and the sword of judgment, the painting is also known as Christ, Savior and Judge. Hamman notes the way in which justice and mercy are intertwined in the medieval depiction of the final judgment. There must be a reckoning for the cost of Christ’s sacrifice. She highlights the eschatological “marriage of true justice and true mercy,” which so often “seems impossible” on earth. Christ’s knighthood includes weeping and bodily vulnerability. It unites courage and joy. At the end of the chapter, Hamman composes a prayer: “Jesus the Knight, I remember your fortitude as I face battles in my own life. I name these battles. … Help me to lay down my human weapons and let you, the God armored in human nature, fight these wars that are so painful.” 

In the chapter on “Jesus as Mother,” Hamman draws from the work of such medieval female spiritual writers as the well-known Julian of Norwich and the lesser-known Marguerite d’Oingt, the latter of whom portrays Christ as a laboring mother desiring to give birth to souls renewed in love. For readers tempted to suppose that such a way of talking about Christ arises from marginal, perhaps even quasi-heretical figures, or at best only female authors, it is important to note that there is a scriptural basis for such imagery. In Matthew 23, Christ speaks of his desire to gather his people as a hen gathers her brood. That passage is the basis for a lengthy meditation on Jesus as mother in a prayer composed by the orthodox theologian Anselm of Canterbury, who writes:

And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother?
Are you not the mother who, like a hen, 
Gathers her chickens under her wings?
Truly, Lord, you are a mother;
For if you had not been in labor,
you could not have born death;
and if you had not died, 
you would not have brought forth.

Julian of Norwich offers a meditation on God’s maternal love in and through our failure: “We need to fail and we need to see our failing.” Failure and its recognition allow for indispensable self-knowledge, both of our own weakness or fallibility and of the graciousness of God’s love. The failure to acknowledge failure can be rooted in our need to sustain an image of ourselves as complete and invulnerable; it can also be rooted in a false conception of God as someone who would not allow us to fail. Hamman references the lies we love to tell ourselves and the explanations we concoct for things we cannot fully fathom.

One of the many virtues of Hamman’s book is its capaciousness, the way it includes texts and art, as well as central and marginal figures. The same book that offers expositions of obscure, at least to us, female authors also includes a lengthy reflection on the most influential theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (in a chapter on “Jesus as Word”). His Summa Theologiae remains a source of wisdom—these days not just for Catholics but for many Protestants as well. Yet the Summa, constructed according to the disputed-question model prominent in the nascent universities of the 13th century, is hardly accessible to contemporary readers. Hamman hits upon precisely the elements in Aquinas’ method that are nevertheless most needed in today’s churches. As she puts it, Aquinas provides contemporary Christians with a “Jesus big enough for questions.” At a time when we are tempted to run quickly to answers, which we embrace with unyielding certitude and often deploy as weapons against our ideological opponents, Hamman wants us to reflect on “what comes before answers”—namely, questions and objections. After the objections, Aquinas then offers a set of clarifications, distinctions, and arguments designed to resolve the questions. Finally, he returns to the objections and supplies responses to each.

Hamman makes a nice point about Aquinas’ habit of citing numerous other Christian authors: it underscores the fundamentally social nature of human inquiry—we “learn together.” While she highlights the importance of communal inquiry within the Church, we might also add that Aquinas has a generous attitude toward not only other Catholics but also Jews, Muslims, and pagans.

While Hamman devotes a specific chapter to the “Wounded God,” the theme of Jesus’ human suffering permeates the book, as it does medieval piety. Hamman admits that there is a risk in giving inordinate attention to suffering and that medieval approaches sometimes make her uneasy. The focus can shift to a quantification of suffering and can direct our attention away from God to ourselves. But for the writers and artists to whom Hamman draws our attention, the acceptance of suffering in response to our sins and to Christ’s own suffering is infused with hope and joy. This is precisely the section of the book in which Hamman discusses Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion with its varied onlookers. Her suggestions to her readers about how to engage this painting apply to every section of the book: “What stands out? How do you feel, what do you think, what strikes you as you stand under the cross just like Fra Angelico’s observers?” Her exposition here captures what is both instructive and moving about Jesus Through Medieval Eyes, a book that will repay slow, meditative, and repetitive reading.