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Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art Eric Ziolkowski

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Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art

10.1057/9780230599758 - Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art, Eric Ziolkowski

Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture

The study of theology and religion nowadays calls upon a wide range of interdisciplinary skills and cultural perspectives to illuminate the concerns at the heart of religious faith. Books in this new series will variously explore the contributions made by literature, philosophy and science in forming our historical and contemporary understanding of religious issues and theological perspectives. Published titles: Harold Fisch NEW STORIES FOR OLD Biblical Patterns in the Novel Susan VanZanten Gallagher and M. D. Walhout (editors) LITERATURE AND THE RENEWAL OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE Philip Leonard (editor) TRAJECTORIES OF MYSTICISM IN THEORY AND LITERATURE Eric Ziolkowski EVIL CHILDREN IN RELIGION, LITERATURE, AND ART Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (editors) THE ARTS, COMMUNITY AND CULTURAL DEMOCRACY

Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–79469–9 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



General Editors: Elisabeth Jay, Senior Research Fellow, Westminster College, Oxford David Jasper, Professor in Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow

Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art Professor of Religion Lafayette College Pennsylvania



Eric Ziolkowski

© Eric Ziolkowski 2001

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–91895–9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ziolkowski, Eric Jozef, 1958– Evil children in religion, literature, and art / Eric Ziolkowski. p. cm. — (Cross-currents in religion and culture) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–333–91895–9 1. Bible. O.T. Kings, 2nd, II, 23–24—Criticism, interpretation, etc.– –History. 2. Elisha (Biblical prophet) 3. Children in the Bible. 4. Children in literature. 5. Children in art. I. Title. II. Series. BS1335.52 .Z56 2001 700’.452054—dc21 2001021946 10 10

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For Lee Upton




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Contents ix

Preface

x

List of Abbreviations

xv

Introduction Children and religion The sins of the sons

1 1 4

1

The Bad Boys of Bethel as Sacrilegious Type The good, the bad, and the ursine Ancient views of the child

12 12 28

2

Patristic and Medieval Views of 2 Kings 2.23–24 Tertullian and Augustine Greek fathers Later Latin fathers Medieval popular views

36 36 43 45 53

3

Children of the Passion Abusing the Man of Sorrows Iconographic reflections before 1450 Iconographic reflections after 1450

56 56 59 66

4

Urchins Plaguing Saints Hagiographic adaptability Pelting the poverello Pueri mali reduces Pictorial representations Modifying Ariès through Voragine

82 82 87 93 96 99

5

The Bethel Boys Motif at the Dawn of Modernity Reformation readings of Elisha’s mockery Picaresque and carnival influences Cervantes Shakespeare Ambiguities of innocence

102 102 106 108 113 114

6

Nineteenth-Century Antitypes Romantic and Victorian views of 2 Kings 2.23–24

125 125

vii 10.1057/9780230599758 - Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art, Eric Ziolkowski


List of Plates

7


Kierkegaard Dostoevsky Humour in the horror

132 138 142

Twentieth-Century Antitypes Literary legacies of 2 Kings 2.23–24 ‘For them, there was no better diversion’ Bethel boys around the world

145 146 152 154

Conclusion Real absence From the road to Bethel, to Neverland

175 181 184

Notes

189

Biblical Index

233

General Index

238



viii

1. Johnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula, Man and Naughty Boys’ Water Dreaming 2. Profanation of Noah, Thorn-Crowning of Christ, Elisha and the mocking boys with bears, from Biblia pauperum 3. Punishment of Elisha’s mockers, and Sack of Jerusalem, from Bible moralisée 4. Hans Multscher, Bearing of the Cross 5. Giotto and assistants, St Francis’s Renunciation of Worldly Goods 6. Punishment of Elisha’s mockers, panel on wooden cabinet from Eger/Cheb 7. Laurent de La Hyre, The Death of the Children of Bethel 8. Fallen Bess, Minister, and Taunting Children, from Breaking the Waves

ix 10.1057/9780230599758 - Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art, Eric Ziolkowski


List of Plates

As I now write, the fatal shooting of six-year-old Kayla Rolland by a classmate at Buell Elementary School outside Flint, Michigan on 29 February 2000 was only the most recent tragedy in the United States involving a murderous schoolboy. The case was quick to elicit the sort of public discussion reflected in the title of Erica Goode’s article in The New York Times, ‘Struggling to Make Sense Out of a Boy-Turned-Killer: Experts Explore the Issue of Culpability’ (2 March 2000, p. A25). Whenever children kill, and especially when their victims are other children, the public reactions registered in the news are swift and predictable. Television screens are filled with images of hastily cordoned school grounds, grim-faced police, frightened children, grieving families, and other witnesses showing emotions that range from bafflement, shock, and anxiety to anger or relief that they themselves or their own relations were not among the victims. Shortly thereafter, psychologists, psychoanalysts, sociologists, journalists, editorialists, legal experts, politicians, and clergy weigh in to debate various perceived causes behind the crime, such as the drug culture, the easy access to guns, the violence of video games, and the alleged breakdown of the family or decline of family values. In addition, broached almost invariably are questions about the responsibility of the parents or guardians of the juvenile criminal, and about whether juvenile criminals can or should be tried as adults. As noted by Goode, in the United States and most other industrialized countries children under seven years of age tend to be exempted from responsibility for crimes such as murder. This book does not directly concern murders or any other crimes perpetrated by or upon actual, contemporary children. Nor, for that matter, does it concern any of the ever-proliferating, equally distressing, actual examples of that inversion of the killer child: the murdered or abused child. I have in mind not only children killed or molested by other children, but the far greater, indeed, incalculable number of children who today are abducted, raped, prostituted, slain, or violated in some other manner by adults. In the debate over abortion, it should be noted, espousers of the ‘pro-life’ position extend the scope of this discussion to the womb. Yet the historical, social, and cultural context in which this book was written and appears is not irrelevant to the titular subject of Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art. In the United States today, as indeed elsewhere in the world, we find ourselves confronted and confounded by two opposed images: that of the rare yet highly publicized killer adolescent or killer child, and that of the legions of violated or murdered children from among whose x 10.1057/9780230599758 - Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art, Eric Ziolkowski


Preface

names relatively few ever become widely known. In turn, behind these two images, and conditioning the ways they are regarded, linger two equally opposed theological assessments of the human being with roots extending back to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. On the one hand, the image of the killer child would seem to crystallize the doctrine of original sin, whose mythological foundation is established in Genesis 2–3. On the other hand, the image of the violated or murdered child can almost inevitably – and most understandably! – evoke the thought of Jesus’ ascription of a heavenly innocence to children, coupled with his dire warning to any adult who might corrupt them. Both these opposed images, though mainly the first, bear directly upon the subject of this book. To be studied in what follows are the genesis, development, and religious significance of a motif that involves a gang of anonymous urchins, usually male, who mock or assault, sometimes by stoning, a holy or eccentric person. Originating in the biblical tale of the mockery of Elisha by a mob of boys on his way to Bethel (2 Kgs 2.23–24), this motif recurs in literature, hagiography, art from antiquity to our own time, and even finds manifestations in contemporary film. Although usually deriders rather than killers, the children involved in this motif often have in common with the killer child their tendency to be viewed as either agents or embodiments of evil. However, following their own misdemeanour, no fewer than 42 of Elisha’s mockers suffered a ghastly attack by two bears, apparently as a punishment, which is typically assumed to have been fatal. Consequently, those boys have come to embody, at least for some, an example of murdered or victimized children. And as often happens in cases of child criminals today, blame has often shifted away from Elisha’s mockers and onto their parents or the community elders. All the while, however, the theme of punishment, and hence the boys’ association with victimhood, has been missing from most later literary variations upon the motif, with the result that the association of the children with wickedness has come to the fore. The Introduction of this book broaches the subject of children and evil in the light of contemporary juvenile violence. Chapters 1–2 analyse Elisha’s mockery and the interpretation of that tale by Talmudic rabbis and Christian church fathers. Chapters 3–4 trace through the Middle Ages the related emergence of the apocryphal notion that children were present during Jesus’ Passion, and certain variations on Elisha’s mockery in Christian hagiography and iconography. Chapters 5–7 study the motif’s literary and pictorial adaptations from the sixteenth century to the present. The Conclusion relates the findings from the foregoing chapters to views commonly expressed today on children and the ‘breakdown’ of families. Given the scope of this study, which covers two millennia and encompasses materials from a gamut of exegetical works and literary and art media from a



Preface xi


wide variety of mainly Western cultures, the approach to be taken is necessarily interdisciplinary. Among the primary materials analysed are various versions of 2 Kings 2.23–24 (Hebrew, Septuagint, Vulgate, etc.), Talmudic commentaries and Christian patristic glosses on the tale, popular retellings of the Gospels’ Passion narratives, visual-artistic representations of the Passion, and variations on the motif of Elisha’s mockery in Christian saints’ lives and iconography, as well as in modern novels, poetry, and film. Also consulted as supporting documents are numerous modern studies in biblical exegesis, comparative religion, the history of Judaism and Christianity, literary and art history, as well as biographies and works of contemporary journalism. The primary and secondary sources drawn upon in this study were written in a considerable range of ancient and foreign languages. Unless otherwise indicated, biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version, and translations of other ancient or foreign-language sources are my own. Where a slash divides two numbers designating a biblical book or verse, as in ‘4/2 Kings’ or ‘Psalm 17.43/18.42’, the numbers before the slash pertain to the Vulgate or Septuagint, as the case may be, and those after the slash pertain to the Revised Standard Version. When quoting from a primary source written in an ancient or foreign language, I have tried as a general rule to supply references both to a standard edition in the original language and to a standard published translation, if one is available. My fascination with the tale of Elisha, the boys, and the bears goes back to my early adolescence. From that period onward, it was natural for me to notice every time I encountered variations on the same scriptural motif in works of literature or art with which I happened to be engaged. My observations and reflections in this regard were first recorded in my article ‘The Bad Boys of Bethel: Origin and Development of a Sacrilegious Type’, History of Religions 30 (1991):331–58. However, that article failed to exorcise my preoccupation with the motif. Although I moved on to commence and complete various other scholarly projects, I continued coming across and reflecting upon further instances of what I had labelled ‘the Bethel boys motif’, and I was more and more struck by the resonances of 2 Kings 2.23–24 with aspects of our contemporary culture. Eventually a book-length study seemed warranted. I presented portions of the first three chapters at the international meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature at Kraków in July 1998; at the ‘Ninth International Conference on Religion and Literature: Re-reading the Canon’ at Westminster College, Oxford, in September 1998; and as the Rabbi Moses Margolis Memorial Endowment Lecturer at The State University of New York, Binghamton in April 1999. I enjoyed immensely all three occasions. And the discussions with the responsive audiences after each stimulated my thinking as I completed the book.



xii

At Kraków, it was my good fortune to be given a tour of the Muzeum Czartoryskich by Agata Marczewska, to whom I am indebted for my serendipitous encounter with the cabinet from Eger/Cheb, whose drawer-panel representing the punishment of Elisha’s mockers is reproduced in this volume. Indeed, it was Ms. Marczewska who kindly arranged for that photograph to be made and given to me through the graces of Professor Janusz A. Ostrowski and Ms. Katarzyna Kopera-Banasik. Other individuals to be thanked for enabling me to acquire specific illustrations for this book are Geoffrey Bardon, the owner of the painting by Johnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula which I was lucky enough to see on exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in July 1992; Aster Crone and Cecilie Rui of Zentropa Entertainments ApS, Copenhagen, who made available the still shot from Breaking the Waves; and my Lafayette colleague Roxanne E. Lalande, who kindly facilitated my communication with the museum at Arras that houses Laurent de La Hyre’s Death of the Children of Bethel. It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to the superb co-editors of the series in which this book appears, David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay. I have appreciated their unflagging support of this project, especially because I greatly respect their own scholarship. Both of them, moreover, offered helpful suggestions on the text, particularly Chapter 6. Thanks also are due to my editors, Charmian Hearne and her successor, Eleanor Birne, for their smooth shepherding of the book through its production; and to Ruth Willats for skilfully seeing the book through to press. As a scholar and teacher at Lafayette College, I perpetually benefit from the superlative reference and interlibrary loan staff of David Bishop Skillman Library, which is directed with such professional circumspection by Neil McElroy. In particular, I owe much to Janemarie Berry, Dan Evans, and Doug Moore for the expertise and promptness with which they obtained for me many of the sources consulted in this book. Special thanks are also due to two of my most erudite colleagues and friends at Lafayette for their having read and soberingly critiqued specific chapters of the manuscript. Chapters 1 and 3 are much stronger for having passed under the rigorous scrutiny of my treasured magister linguae hebraicae Howard Marblestone, and the art historian Diane Cole Ahl. I also am grateful for funding I have received from Lafayette’s Academic Research Committee. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for any errors or inadvertencies that might remain anywhere in this book. As always, my family is the intellectual haven to which I perpetually and most appreciatively turn. Just as the consideration of Dostoevsky's views of children in Chapter 6 has been enriched by conversations about him with my sister Margaret C. Ziolkowski, so has the discussion of medieval literature in Chapter 2 profited from the informative and patient responses given by my brother Jan M. Ziolkowski to my numerous queries. As for my parents, Theodore Ziolkowski



Preface xiii

and Yetta Goldstein Ziolkowski, their influence as knowledge-sources extraordinaire, scholarly advisors sans pareil, and textual editors par excellence, haunts the following pages as ubiquitously as the smile of the Cheshire Cat. Finally, I am ever beholden to Theodora Beatrice Rose and Cecilia Charlotte Eleanore, each of whose own smiles would belie the opening image of this volume’s title. And to her to whom the book is dedicated, my cup of indebtedness runneth over. I am thankful for her frank and astute assessments of successive drafts of the entire manuscript, and even far more so, for her sheer presence, accompanied as it has been by constant and stimulating conversation over the years.



xiv Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art

List of Abbreviations James Hillman. ‘Abandoning the Child’. In Eranos Yearbook 1971. Vol. 40: The Stages of Life in Creative Process. Ed. Adolf Portmann and Rudolf Ritsema. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973, pp. 357–407. AF Analecta Franciscana sive chronica aliaque varia documenta ad historiam Fratrum Minorum spectantia edita a patribus Collegii S. Bonaventurae adiuvantibus aliis eruditis viris. Vol. 10: Legendae S. Francisci Assisiensis saeculis XIII et XIV conscriptae. Quaracchi-Florence: Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1926–41. ANT The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation. Ed. J.K. Elliott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. AV Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible). BC Ruth Bottigheimer. The Bible for Children: From the Age of Gutenberg to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. BT The Babylonian Talmud. 18 vols. Ed. I. Epstein. London: Soncino, 1935–52. C Augustine. Confessions. Latin quotes are drawn from the text as given in volume 1 of Augustine, Confessions, 3 vols, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). English renderings are mine, based largely upon the translation by William Watts (1631) in St. Augustine’s Confessions, 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912; and Confessions. Tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin. Middlesex: Penguin, 1961. CC Philippe Ariès. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Tr. Robert Baldick. New York: Random House, 1962. CCCM Corpus christianorum. Continuatio mediaeualis. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1966–. CCSA Corpus christianorum. Series apocryphorum. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1983–. CCSL Corpus christianorum. Series Latina. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1953–. CT Jaroslav Pelikan. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. 5 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971–89. DMG Alfred Stange. Deutsche Malerei der Gotik. 11 vols. Berlin: Deutscher Kuntstverlag, 1934–61. DS Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire. 17 tomes. Paris: G. Beauchesne & fils, 1937–95.

xv 10.1057/9780230599758 - Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art, Eric Ziolkowski


‘AC’

‘EI’

EJ ENP ER ERE FL GL

HC IB ICA

IDB JP

JPS LA LCI LFC LXX NAB NCE NEB NPN NRSV

Leslie Fiedler. ‘The Eye of Innocence: Some notes on the role of the child in literature’. In The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. 2 vols. New York: Stein & Day, 1971. Vol. 1, pp. 471–511. Encyclopaedia Judaica. 16 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1971–2. Max J. Friedländer. Early Netherlandish Painting. 14 vols. Tr. Heinz Norden. New York: Praeger, 1967–76. The Encyclopedia of Religion. 16 vols. Ed. Mircea Eliade. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. 13 vols. Ed. James Hastings. New York: Scribner, 1908–21. Thomas de Celano. First Life of St. Francis. Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. 2 vols. Tr. William Granger Ryan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Lloyd DeMause, ed. The History of Childhood. New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1974. The Interpreter’s Bible. 12 vols. New York: Abingdon, 1951–7. Gertrud Schiller. Iconography of Christian Art. Vol. 2: The Passion of Jesus Christ. Tr. Janet Seligman. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1972. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. 4 vols. and Supplement. Ed. George Arthur Buttrick et al. Nashville: Abingdon, 1962. Søren Kierkegaard. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. 7 vols. Ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–78. Citations by volume and entry numbers. A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures Acording to the Masoretic Text. 3 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962–82. Jacobus de Voragine. Legenda aurea: vulgo historia lombardica dicta. Ed. J.G. Théodor Graesse. 3rd edn. Breslau: G. Koebner, 1890. Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, 8 vols. Ed. Engelbert Kirschbaum. Rome: Herder, 1968–76. M.A. Screech. Laughter at the Foot of the Cross. London: Penguin, 1997. Septuagint. The New American Bible. Tr. Members of the Catholic Biblical Association of America. New York: Benziger, 1970. New Catholic Encyclopedia. 15 vols. Ed. at the Catholic University of America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. The New English Bible. The Old Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. 1st series. 14 vols. Ed. Philip Schaff. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1887–94. New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.



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List of Abbreviations

xvii

J.M. Barrie. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Peter and Wendy. Ed. Peter Hollindale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. P1 refers to Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. P3 refers to Peter and Wendy. Citations of both texts by chapter and page. P2 J.M. Barrie. Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. In The Plays of J.M. Barrie. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929, pp. 3–94. P3 See P1 above. PG Patrologia cursus completus, Series graeca. 161 vols. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1857–66. PL Patrologia cursus completus, Series latina. 221 vols. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1844–66. PINEA James H. Marrow. Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative. Kortrijk, Belgium: Van Ghemmert, 1979. PTS Patristische Texte und Studien. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1963–. RSV Revised Standard Version of the Bible. SE The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953–74. SFA St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis. 4th revised edn. Ed. Marion A. Brown. Tr. Raphael Brown et al. Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, Quincy University, 1983. SL Thomas de Celano. Second Life of St. Francis. Vulg. Vulgate Latin Bible. ‘WC’ Army Neff. ‘Wicked Children on Calvary and the Baldness of St. Francis’. In Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 34 (1990): 215–44.



P1

Children and religion Why are boys so little influenced by religion? is a question very often asked, and asked by those who feel really and deeply their responsibility in this matter, who see clearly what evil results follow from the absence of religion as a motive power in a boy’s life.1 This question, posed over a century ago by Ernest Layard, broaches a vexing problem: the relationship of children, particularly male, to religion. Except in –rtha Gautama, Jesus, and the miraculous birth stories of such figures as Siddha certain Christian saints, infants do not emerge from the womb as religious beings. Thus the idea that religious faith might be inborn in a person could be described by one of Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms ( Johannes Climacus) as ‘truly the non plus ultra in lunacy’.2 As scholars have recognized since the appearance of Arnold van Gennep’s Les Rites de passage (1909), human societies universally place great emphasis on ritual celebrations of the beginnings and ends of different life stages, including childhood.3 Yet while anthropologists and historians of religions have devoted much energy to the study of initiation practices, homo religiosus has tended to be viewed as an adult fait accompli, as if whatever qualities that make such a being ‘religious’ simply appear in the person sometime after youth, and have not been acquired by growth through earlier life-stages and levels of consciousness. Such a view is not new. As Thomas Arnold conceded upon his appointment as headmaster of Rugby in 1828, ‘my object will be, if possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make; I mean,’ he added, apparently forgetting or ignoring Jesus’ own teaching (see Matt. 18.3; Mark 10.15; Luke 18.17), ‘that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full development upon their practice.’4 1



Introduction


The question of the susceptibility of children to religious instruction continued to attract much attention through the latter half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, particularly in Christian churches and among contributors to the child-study movement and the movement for a psychology of religion in the 1890s and the following decade.5 The position taken in 1899 by the pioneering American psychologist of religion, Edwin Diller Starbuck (1866–1947), was that ‘religion is distinctively external to the child rather than something which possesses inner significance’.6 According to Starbuck, ‘spontaneous religious awakenings’ tend to occur only after childhood, during the ‘storm and stress’ of adolescence, which from his viewpoint spans from age ten or 11 to 25 (see chs 16–17). Noteworthily, as Starbuck was a former pupil of William James at Harvard, one of his conclusions is rehearsed in James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), where religious conversion is said to be ‘a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity’.7 The perception of childhood and religious conversion as mutually exclusive categories is sustained, albeit not without qualification, in James Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1908–1921), whose entry on ‘Childhood’ states that the world’s religions generally ‘show slight recognition, or none at all, of childhood capacity for religion’, and that only Christianity ‘has shown a tendency to push backward toward infancy the date’ at which that capacity is thought to develop in a person.8 Like Hastings’ Encyclopaedia, the next major encyclopaedia of religion to appear in English, that of Mircea Eliade (1987), contains a substantial entry on children.9 Yet only one major theorist of religion writing in the decades between those two encyclopedias ventured an extended hypothesis about the child’s relationship to the religious disposition. To be sure, Gerardus van der Leeuw treated briefly of ‘children of God’ in his seminal elaboration of a phenomenology of religion.10 The depth psychologist C.G. Jung, following a survey by the classicist Károly Kerényi, proffered a psychological explanation of the archetype of the primordial child.11 And the historian of religions Eliade and the mythologist Joseph Campbell discussed motifs of the abandoned child and the infant exile, the latter of which had already been made famous by the psychoanalyst Otto Rank.12 But the phrase ‘children of God’ amounts to a Christian metaphor for filiation to God in general, and the primordial child, abandoned child, and infant exile are purported to be figures of universal myths. Among twentieth-century theorists, only Freud, in his The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927), dared to hypothesize an analogy between religion, conceived hostilely as the universal neurosis of humanity, and what he viewed as the obsessional neurosis of children stemming from Oedipal feelings toward the father.13 Subscribing to the then widely held theory



2

of the recapitulation of phylogeny by ontogeny, which likens the child’s mind to the mind of ‘primitive’ humans, Freud drew upon a tradition of evolutionary thought that had begun with Auguste Comte, the nineteenth-century French positivist chiefly responsible for developing the idea that the child represents the childhood of the entire race.14 There is an obvious affinity between the titular idea of the fourth and last essay in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu, 1912–13), ‘The Return of Totemism in Childhood’,15 and Comte’s theory that human history has three stages, the theological, the metaphysical, and the positivistic, the first of which is recapitulated in the child’s thinking. This theory seems further refined in Erik Erikson’s notion that ‘all religions have in common the periodical childlike surrender to a Provider.’16 However, as shown in a letter written by the theologian and historian of religions Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) from North Africa in 1911, the same law of recapitulation could lead to the opposite conclusion that neither the ‘primitive’ nor the child can be religious. After rhapsodizing on the spectacular landscape surrounding Tenerife in the evening twilight, Otto asks himself whether ‘when primitive peoples, with their childish and impressionable minds [Gemüter], viewed such magnificence, they would intuit and discern the divine … . Do we not find here the root of religion?’ His answer is unambiguous: No. We do not find the root of religion here. Maybe those primitives were children. But then again, listen to the children outside. They are interested in ‘little dogs’ and our chocolate bonbons, in the traps with which they catch the gray-green canary birds, and in their musical tops. But they are indifferent to the divine splendor that surrounds them. A child does not notice the greatness and the beauty of nature and the splendor of God in his works.17 Six years later, Otto modified this position in his study Das Heilige (1917, The Holy; known in English as The Idea of the Holy). Inspired by the Kantian theory of the a priori categories of human thought and by a passage in the writings of the fourteenth-century German mystic Heinrich Seuse (in Latin, Suso), who recalled having felt a religious longing from earliest childhood, Otto contends that the ‘fundamental biogenetic law … which uses the stages and phases in the growth of the individual to throw light upon the corresponding stages in the growth of his species’, is borne out by the religious ‘predisposition’ manifest both in the individual and in the human species.18 An interesting variation upon this way of relating childhood to religion occurs late in James’s Varieties. There, despite his earlier association of religious conversion with adolescence, and his subsequent discussion of the theory of religion as a ‘survival’ of archaic thinking,19 he applies the term ‘childish’ not to religion itself but to those ultimately extraneous, ‘aesthetic’ sentiments that



Introduction 3


are among ‘the buildings-out of religion which the mind naturally spontaneously indulges in’ (lect. 19, 15:362). To the intellectual Catholic and the Protestant alike, he suggests, such sentiments are childish. But to the Catholic ‘they are childish in the pleasing sense of “childlike” – innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on’, whereas to the Protestant ‘they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods’ (15:363). James’s implication, of course, is that Protestantism, being ‘superior in spiritual profundity’ (15:363), is a maturer form of religion than Catholicism, because it lacks the latter’s ‘childish’ aesthetic outgrowths. Also significant is the almost schizophrenic split he illuminates in the conventional notion of childishness, which can positively connote innocence and amiability, and, negatively, idiocy and falsehood – or, we might add, even wickedness. As the present study will show, this split is in keeping with a bifurcation in Western attitudes towards children which is already detectable in the Bible, one of whose tales even allows for the association of children with evil.

The sins of the sons ‘The history of childhood,’ wrote Lloyd DeMause, a pioneering exponent of psychohistory in 1974, ‘is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken.’20 Or have we? We have now passed through what Ellen Key (1849–1926) forecast would be the Century of the Child, and several decades have transpired since the cultural anthropologist George Boas sensed the climax of the Cult of Childhood.21 Yet there has been considerable discussion of late in the news and among intellectuals about what the British journalist Angela Phillips calls the trouble with male children. Noting in effect the negative side of Boas’s observation that ‘If adults are urged to retain their youth, to “think young,” to act and dress like youngsters, it is because the Child has been held up to them as a paradigm of the ideal man’,22 Phillips (who does not cite Boas) asserts: ‘The trouble with boys is that they must become men and, if the only picture of men available is that of a brute, then in order to become male they must become brutish.’23 Because brutes, as non-human animals or beasts, by definition cannot aspire to the condition of homo religiosus, the question posed earlier by Layard becomes moot. If male children are seen as practically predestined in modern or postmodern society to be brutes, how might they ever be related to religion or religiousness in any meaningful way? For the poet Robert Bly, the pre-eminent spokesman for the contemporary American men’s movement, the inability of our immature ‘sibling society’ to convert boys into men results largely from the lack of male initiatory rituals of the sort practised in traditional societies.24 Yet not everyone agrees that the most promising cure for the trouble with boys or with men lies in engaging them in the sort of all-male fraternizing



4

retreats that Bly advocates for rekindling men’s ‘inner warrior’ and the ‘wild man’ within. Whether right or wrong, wise or foolish, Bly’s theory and praxis may have come too late to salvage the reputation of male children at this turn of the millennium, even when large numbers of their fathers have publicly sought consolation and atonement through such high-profile mass gatherings in Washington, D.C. as the Million Man March (16 October 1995) and the national jamboree of Promise Keepers (4 October 1997). To be sure, as betokened by recent books that examine perceived threats posed to boys in American culture, some psychotherapists and other researchers may be shifting their focus from the woes of girls to those of boys.25 Yet, according to Marina Warner, an image of boys that bespeaks their more violent tendencies in Western society has already embedded itself in the popular imagination. In one of her 1993 BBC Reith Lectures on ‘Myths of Our Time’, ‘Boys Will Be Boys: The Making of the Male’, she observed: ‘Fear of men has grown alongside belief that aggression – including sexual violence – inevitably defines the character of the young male.’26 In her next lecture, ‘Little Angels, Little Monsters: Keeping Childhood Innocent’, Warner suggested that the traditional image of children’s innocence had been inverted earlier that year by the abduction and slaying in Liverpool of two-year-old James Bulger by a pair of ten-year-old boys. In the words of Blake Morrison, who covered the Bulger case for The New Yorker, ours is ‘the age of Bad Boys – dwarf killers, noon shadows of men complete’.27 Despite a sociologist’s sober plea against all the ‘overblown language’ and ‘hoopla’ surrounding the issue of juvenile violence in the United States today,28 few are likely to deny the U.S. Attorney General’s claim that youth violence is ‘the greatest single crime problem in America today’,29 or a psychiatrist’s assertion that ‘the gravest threat to organized social life’ is posed by ‘male – particularly young male – violence’.30 During the mid-1990s, news from across the United States included frequent reports on brutal killings by boys: the story of five youths, ranging from 12 to 19 years of age, accused of burning a homeless man alive in Harlem; of two boys, aged 11 and 12, found guilty of dropping a five-year-old to his death from the fourteenth floor of a Chicago building; of a 12-year-old in Los Angeles charged in the torture and gang rape of a 13-year-old girl, and with murdering an 82-year-old woman; of nine children from Silsbee, Texas, none older than 14, arrested for torturing a horse to death; and a 15-year-old former altar boy, with a girl the same age, charged with stabbing to death a man in New York’s Central Park.31 Even more notoriously, there were the 16-year-old who opened fire in his high school in Bethel, Alaska (19 February 1997), and another boy of that age who murdered his mother and then went to his high school and fired at nine students, killing two, in Pearl, Mississippi (1 October 1997). And between those



Introduction 5


two events there were the two youths in northern New Jersey accused in May 1997 of fatally shooting two pizza delivery men simply to see – like latter-day Leopolds and Loebs – what it would be like. Such incidents were preambles to a six-month spate from December 1997 on, of multiple fatal shootings by schoolboys under 16 years of age, one as young as 11, in towns across the country: West Paducah, Kentucky; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Edinboro, Pennsylvania; Springfield, Oregon. The cumulative effect of these events clearly contributed to the readiness of prosecutors in Chicago in early August 1998 to jump to the premature (and eventually refuted) conclusion that two boys, aged seven and eight, were responsible for the brutal molestation and slaying of 11-year-old Ryan Harris on the city’s south side. The massacre of 12 students and a teacher on 20 April 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, though perpetrated by two older youths (ages 17 and 18) who then killed themselves, was generally viewed as the climax of this whole trend of puerile killing sprees. Reflected in the essentialist assumption that, ‘far from being the product of a particular cultural moment, juvenile violence is a manifestation of something inherent in human nature’,32 and hence that ‘Every child, especially every boy, is born a prime candidate for the hangman’s noose’,33 the growing wariness towards juveniles is not peculiar to the United States and Britain. In Japan, for example, killings by junior high school boys have reportedly led teachers and parents to be afraid of scolding youths.34 And outside the so-called First World, the situation is even graver. In certain war-torn Third World countries, the spectacle of battle-hardened, AK-47-toting killer boys is now commonplace, as there are currently an estimated 300,000 child soldiers worldwide35 – a bizarre millennial echo of the medieval Christian Children’s Crusade. While this book does not deal with contemporary cases of juvenile violence, or with the biological, psychological, social, political, or economic factors that are thought by some to underlie the inferred ‘link between masculinity and violence’,36 I do focus upon a particular timeworn type of bad boy manifest in religion, literature, and art. My purpose is to reveal a motif about children that, stemming from a terse tale in the Hebrew Bible, presents them as a sacrilegious type – ancient precursors, perhaps, of the ‘punks’, ‘skinheads’, and ‘wilding’ boys who have stalked the streets of modern metropolises and suburbs. As an analysis of classic and popular examples will show, the motif to which I refer has thrived over the centuries in literature and art, both sacred and secular, and tends to associate boys with evil and sacrilege. The puerile type to be examined finds its locus classicus in the biblical passage 2 Kings 2.23–24, which tells of little boys who mocked the prophet Elisha on his way to Bethel, and of how, after he cursed them, 42 of them were mauled by two bears. As enfants terribles, Elisha’s mockers would naturally stand in a subversive relationship to the Childhood Cult, that ‘primitivist’



6

cultural complex which in Boas’s view finds its religious roots in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, its epistemological formulation in Montaigne and Agrippa von Nettesheim, its adaptation as an appraisal of life in seventeenth-century England, and its appropriation as an aesthetic in Freud’s Vienna. Far removed from the cynicism of Ambrose Bierce (1842–c. 1914), who defined childhood as ‘the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth’,37 the attitude reflected in the Childhood Cult is summed up by the definition of ‘child’ in The Herder Dictionary of Symbols: ‘A symbol of spontaneity and innocence, qualities alluded to in the New Testament’, most notably in Matthew 18.3, ‘Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’ (AV).38 In examining the genesis and development of a literary motif that defies this perception and might support Bierce’s, I shall also consider related images in religious iconography and art that subvert the associations of moral purity stemming from the more familiar Christian figurings of children: the angelchild, the putto, the soul as child, Jesus as Holy Infant, the innocents slaughtered under Herod, and the children blessed by Jesus. Before proceeding, I should stress the need to take into equal account both verses of the biblical passage under consideration to understand the moral implications of the Bethel boys motif. Considered alone, the first verse (2 Kgs 2.23) could come across simply as an anecdote about obnoxious boys engaged in play, unfortunately at a prophet’s expense. The Hebrew Bible elsewhere yields a promise, as part of a messianic prophecy dating from 520–518 BCE, that when Yahweh returns to dwell in Zion, ‘the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets’ (Zech. 8.5). Around the same time, on the other side of the Mediterranean, the leading pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus equated eternity with a child playing at draughts; the kingdom, he cryptically added, is a child’s.39 If children at play cannot always boast such a beatific or cosmically regal aura, their image today might be pondered against a tradition of reflection some two centuries old that ascribes a positive cultural, anthropological, and philosophical significance to play. An aside on children in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843) alludes to ‘the endearing earnestness belonging to play’.40 This reference crystallizes the sentiment of the earlier Romantics, which has persisted up to our own time. Arguing for an aesthetic concept of play as connoting the art work’s own ‘mode of being’, Hans-Georg Gadamer notes the connection worked out in the early 1940s by Johann Huizinga between children’s and animal’s play and ‘holy play’.41 He does not mention that J.G. Frazer had already drawn a similar connection between children’s sport and certain spring fertility rituals of ‘primitive’ peoples, or that Eliade echoed this same point after Huizinga.42 However, that there is nothing positive or holy about the boys’ ‘playing’ in 2 Kings 2.23 is emphasized by the bloody price they pay in the next verse.



Introduction 7

8


‘Who knows, Mr. Les´ niewski, where life will lead this boy?’ ‘To the gallows!’ my worried father said bluntly.43 Although the Bethel boys are not killers, the harshness of their punishment can make them seem to have committed a mortal sin, and so they and the motif their misdeed engendered have often been associated with evil. This point is noteworthy, given the popular hesitancy today to dismiss the stereotype of childhood innocence even when the spectacle of juvenile killers presents itself. Almost inevitably, this stereotype haunts the recurrent debate over whether such killers should be tried as adults. After the fatal shootings of four schoolgirls and a teacher in March 1998 by two boys, aged 11 and 13, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, a writer for The New York Times observed how quickly ‘the explanations and analysis began whizzing by’; guns, the violent culture of American media, bad parenting, the breakdown of the family caused by liberal politics or economic stress, violence against women, lax juvenile justice laws – all these were invoked to account for the tragedy. It took George Steiner, when contacted by the reporter, to consider how the contemporary ‘spin cycle’ and thought-cheapening ‘sound-bite mentality’ are likely to exclude evil from consideration. Noting that Dostoevsky’s Diary records incidents of boys murdering other children, Steiner imagined that Dostoevsky ‘would deal with the transcendentally important question of evil in the child. Today the editor would say “Fyodor, tomorrow, please, your piece. Don’t tell me you need 10 months for thinking, Fyodor, tomorrow.”’44 A day earlier a Times editorialist had noted that his own resident 13-year-old, when asked for an opinion about the Jonesboro killers, spontaneously drew another literary allusion to associate them with evil: ‘Those kids are twisted. They’re evil. It’s “Lord of the Flies”.’45 Given the controversial contention of Philippe Ariès that the modern idea of childhood is not more than several centuries old,46 no strict definition of ‘child’ will be adhered to in this study. Let it suffice to say that few of the children whose images will concern us would seem to come within even five years of the limit set forth by the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child, Article 1, which defines the child as ‘every human being below the age of eighteen years’.47 Nor, despite this study’s overriding concern with literary and pictorial images of disrespectful, bad, or ‘evil’ boys, will a rigorous distinction be drawn between the male child and the female child. The term ‘boys’ and the gender-neutral term ‘children’ may at times seem to be used



Although readers today may wonder why children should be punished so harshly for an offence so seemingly minor, the association of naughty boys with capital punishment is by no means obsolete in the modern age. Thus occurs the following sardonic exchange in the story ‘The Sins of Childhood’ by the Polish writer Boleshaw Prus (1845–1912):

interchangeably by both me and by some authors under discussion. This might often be explained philologically, as when the masculine term 1 (boys, lads, youths) from the original Hebrew version of the tale is Latinized by St Jerome and Western Christian exegetes after him as pueri, a masculine noun that can denote either boys or, gender-neutrally, children. How, after all, could we expect pre-modern authors who did not necessarily share our views of children to distinguish between male and female children in the same way as people do today? Even regarding modern literary portrayals of children, Leslie Fiedler suggests that ‘it scarcely matters’ whether the child in a story is a he or a she.48 None the less there can be no denying that sharp distinctions have conventionally been drawn between boys and girls. If a sadly pervasive attitude of Kierkegaard’s time is given voice through the comment by one of his pseudonyms that ‘As a child, a girl is regarded as inferior to a boy’,49 the narrator of Heinrich Böll’s novel The Clown (Ansichten eines Clowns, 1963), Hans Schnier, can just as safely observe: For girls there is always a good chance of being regarded as ‘sweet’ and being nicely treated, but boys always start off by being shouted at if their parents aren’t around. For Germans, every boy is a naughty child, the always unspoken adjective naughty is simply merged with the noun.50 In a similar spirit, Böll’s American contemporary, Ogden Nash, could explain that his own ‘blood runs cold / When little boys go by’, because of his awareness that they would someday ‘grow to men’ and marry. No matter how they tarry, Eventually they marry. And, swine among the pearls, They marry little girls.51 If a distinction between boys and girls has been traditionally assumed, it is echoed in the popular English nursery rhyme of uncertain origin, to the effect that little boys are made of ‘Frogs and snails / And puppy-dogs’ tails’, as opposed to girls being made of ‘Sugar and spice / And all things nice’.52 As reductively dualistic and, today, jarringly out of vogue or offensive as it may be, this rhyme encapsulates a long-standing, clichéd way of distinguishing between boys and girls: ‘Boys are slimy and active; girls are sweet and accommodating. Boys belong outdoors, girls in the kitchen.’53 Consistent with this distinction, the biblical boys with whose image I am concerned are already presented as active and outdoors. The same is true of such familiar boys of modern literary myth as Huckleberry Finn, Pinocchio, Mowgli, Peter



Introduction 9


Pan, and even the reflective Little Prince. As I will suggest in my Conclusion, our biblical motif about boys behaving badly furnishes a prototype for a pronounced tendency in the modern Western imagination not only to consign boys as active creatures to the outdoors, but to render them absent from the normal adult world. In the Hebrew Bible, where Fiedler senses ‘a willful, to us almost perverse, resolve not to exploit the possibilities of the child, even in stories which demand for him a central role’ (‘EI’, p. 472), the Bethel boys are never mentioned outside 2 Kings 2.23–24. Like scriptural soul-mates of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, they exist for us only in the Neverland of that singularly terrible, isolated tale. Yet the spectacle of anonymous, unsupervised urchins showing gratuitous irreverence to a holy or eccentric person, usually male and adult, will be seen to occur repeatedly in literature, hagiography, and art from late antiquity to our own time. In limiting my scope mainly to Jewish and Christian contexts, I leave it to my readers to think of correspondences and contrasts between the Bethel boys motif and various revered images of boyish mischievousness in other traditions – such as the image of the divine child Krishna in his role as thief and mischief-maker, as celebrated in popular South Asian ra–s l īla–s.54 The image of boys irritating a spiritually inclined elder also crops up in a contemporary Australian Aboriginal painting that shows an old corroboree man chasing four boys away from his sacred water-dreaming spot beside a pond, where he has presumably gone for contemplative purposes (Plate 1). Many Aboriginal painters of the Western Desert use the tale of naughty boys being punished, because – according to one artist – ‘this story belongs to everyone: all people and all tribes’.55 A similar motif was rehearsed by the thirteenth-century –mi. Elaborating upon the image of –fi master and poet Jala– ludd īn Ru Turkish Su –mi’s poems urges the lischildren making light of a sacred person, one of Ru tener or reader to heed the advice of another poet to sleep in the tavern rather than wander out on the road when in ecstasy. ‘When a drunk strays out to the –mi, street,’ sings Ru children make fun of him. He falls down in the mud. He takes any and every road. The children follow, not knowing the taste of wine, or how his drunkenness feels.56

This variation on the Bethel boys motif, in which the mystic-qua-‘drunk’ is derided in the same way as Elisha, is made all the more interesting by the



10

Introduction 11

poet’s subsequent extrapolation. Consonant with the European carnivalesque notion of homo ludens made famous by Huizinga, the Islamic mystic contends:

God said, ‘The world is a play, a children’s game, and you are the children.’ God speaks the truth. If you haven’t left the child’s play, how can you be an adult? (p. 4) In other words, all life is like Elisha’s mockery. Most humans are ‘children’ at play, who will make sport of the few ‘adults’, or ‘those free of desires’, who enjoy an ecstatic ‘drunkenness’ which the majority have not experienced. Anticipating what is shown in the following chapters of this book, I venture that the perennially perpetuated image of boys abusing a holy man stemmed largely, at least in Western Christendom, from an irrepressible Augustinian perception of troublesome male children as living, walking, taunting reminders of inherited Adamic sin. Although in the Gospels Jesus ascribes a heavenly nature to children, the frequency with which Christians have ignored, rejected, or defied that view is reflected in a long tradition of literature and art that shows boys abusing holy men, including Jesus himself. The tendency among writers and artists to portray children as spectators at, or even as active contributors to, Jesus’ Passion, can be linked to the typological assumption of late-ancient and medieval exegetes that the Via Dolorosa and Crucifixion were prefigured by Elisha’s mockery. Only from the seventeenth century on, with the gradual dissipation of the typological tendency in biblical and Western thought, will we see the disappearance of the sense of Elisha’s mockery as a figuratively significant tale. What never subsides, nor seems ever likely to subside, is the cultural disposition to portray boys as disrespectful and misbehaving. Indeed, they have been shown doing that, even when not, as in Nash’s nightmare, being seen growing to adults and marrying.



All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire.

1

The good, the bad, and the ursine The tale in 2 Kings 2 about what happened to the prophet Elisha on his way from Jericho up to Bethel is hauntingly brief: approached by some little boys ( 1) from the city who jeer at him, chanting ‘Go up, you baldhead’ (v. 23b), he turns, sees them, curses them in Yahweh’s name, and two shebears emerge from the woods and maul 42 of the boys ( , v. 24b). Afterwards, as reported in the verse that completes the pericope 2.23–25, he proceeds ‘from there’ to Mount Carmel, and thence back to Samaria. Sceptics after the Enlightenment viewed this as one of the tales in the Bible that countenance meanness and immorality.1 Hence, in the nineteenth century, efforts were made to mitigate the story’s horror by exonerating Elisha for the violence done to his mockers, and playing up the mockers’ guilt. For example, defending the destruction of the 42 boys against the claim that it was ‘an act of cruelty and revenge’ by Elisha, the English biblical scholar Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780–1862) argued that the original phrase for little boys can mean ‘young persons who are grown up’; that, coming from an idolatrous city, Bethel, they probably insulted Elisha ‘at the instigation of the priests of Baal’; and that Elisha, in cursing them in the Lord’s name, did not himself cause their demise, but rather acted as a minister of the supreme Governor of the world; and by his order and in his name he foretold the punishment which was about to be inflicted upon these profligate idolaters. Had this denunciation proceeded from the angry resentment of the prophet only, and not from a divine impulse, such a signal event as the destruction of these profane young men of Beth-el would not have been the immediate consequence of it. (1:609)

12



The Bad Boys of Bethel as Sacrilegious Type

Similar points were made in Elisha’s defence by the Methodist preacher and writer Adam Clarke (c. 1762–1832) and the Anglican churchman Christopher Wordsworth (1807–85), both of whom found the mockers’ offence all the more serious because it amounted to an insult against God or the Holy Spirit.2 In addition, whereas Wordsworth allowed that the mockers were children ‘gathered’ and ‘instigated’ against Elisha by their parents,3 Clarke went so far as to submit that the mockers were probably a militia of young soldiers serving as a bodyguard to Ahab, and hence ‘were perfectly accountable for their conduct’.4 None of these contentions was unprecedented, as we shall see. Yet certain revisionist interpretations would later be offered of what befell the boys. From the narrator’s use of the phrase 1 (2 Kgs 2.24b: literally ‘and tore open’) to describe what the bears did, an early twentieth-century commentator wishfully inferred that the boys ‘were not necessarily punished by death, but were at least severely wounded’.5 More recent commentators have optimistically insisted that ‘“tare” means “to scare” ’, implying that the boys were only figuratively ‘torn up’, or ‘scared to death’;6 or that the phrase’s denotation of ‘to cut a cleft, to split into two’, implies that the bears ‘broke them up’ in the sense of dispersing a mob.7 Although it is conventionally assumed that the attack on the 42 boys was fatal,8 any scruples over this matter were cleared up to his own satisfaction by Richard G. Messner, a Christian seminarian in the mid-1950s who devoted his entire Bachelor of Divinity thesis to 2 Kings 2.23–25. Contending that God placed this story in the Bible for ‘a specific purpose’,9 Messner pointed out that there tend to be four main opinions on this canonization: the elimination view, which simply deletes this tale from the scriptures because it does not square with a preconceived notion of God’s ways; the derision view, which dismisses the tale as legendary and ridicules the Bible for trying to pass it off as true; the exhortation view, which regards the tale as legendary, but still ascribes great spiritual value to it; and the literal judgment view, which holds that the incident actually occurred in accordance with God’s will as a divine judgment.10 Messner defended the last view. And several decades later, the horror of the boys’ punishment could still be rationalized by an interpreter who, perceiving Elisha as a ‘type’ of Christ, considered the mockers’ insults ‘so much the more odious in that they are directed at the Spirit of Christ … . Folly like this is not even proper for children!’11 None the less, such unsympathetic reactions to the boys’ fate are rare, and, rightly or wrongly, few readers are likely to agree with a pair of recent scholars that this tale ‘is more in the comic vein than the tragic’,12 or ‘has all the hallmarks of a good piece of satire’.13 Some might consider the difficulty with the death of 42 children to be ‘largely a modern problem’,14 especially considering



The Bad Boys of Bethel as Sacrilegious Type 13


that the seventh-century Deuteronomists who preserved the tale may have connected its motif of the bears with a prophetic warning issued in the previous century, ‘Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!… It is … as if a man fled from a lion, and a bear met him’ (Amos 5.18–19a). Yet, just as certain rabbis of the Talmud would already baulk at the story's harshness, as we shall see, so most modern Bible scholars have found the tale repugnant.15 A British Victorian scholar and cleric called it ‘one of the stories which naturally repel us more than any other in the Old Testament’,16 while an eminent German Jewish contemporary attested that, from his youth, whenever he read this passage he would thank God he ‘was not created a prophet like Elisha’.17 It is, as John W. Wenham puts it, a ‘stumbling-block’ posed by the Hebrew Bible to belief in a benevolent God.18 Citing a student who said that this tale alone sufficed to turn him against the Bible, J. Sidlow Baxter observes: ‘Perhaps no incident in the Old Testament has called forth more criticism than this one. The Lord’s enemies have held it up as a trump card in their pack of arguments against the claim of the Bible to be the word of God’.19 One luminary specially qualified to judge the usefulness of this tale to ‘the Lord’s enemies’ was C.S. Lewis, who, as author of The Screwtape Letters (1940), had sought imaginatively to fathom the Devil’s own psychology. When asked his opinion of Elisha and the bears, Lewis suggested that the tale reflects ‘something [in the Bible] which, in its eccentric levels … was hardly moral at all, and was in some ways not unlike the Pagan religions’.20 Likewise, finding Elisha’s curse ‘astonishingly harsh’, and the boys’ punishment ‘premoral’, other commentators describe the tale as ‘repugnant’, ‘the most embarrassing tale in the Bible’, a story ‘from which the Bible reader shrinks’, or by which ‘the modern reader cannot but be a trifle shocked’, because it ‘offends our moral sense’ and ‘will not stand examination from any moral point of view’.21 The annotation in the Oxford editions of both the Revised Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version assures us that ‘not all ancient writers, to say nothing of modern, would have told a story like this to inculcate respect for a prophet’, and, additionally, the RSV note lists passages in the Gospels that ‘provide a better guide to Biblical teaching on how to treat children’.22 The horrific effect of 2 Kings 2.23–24 is intensified by the cool, detached mode of the tale’s delivery, which, constituting with verse 25 ‘a self-contained narrative’,23 displays a remarkable concentric symmetry.24 Like most biblical narratives, notes Wesley Bergen, this one offers no ‘explicit narratorial judgments’, and like all of Elisha’s miracles, the one reported here lacks ‘specific ethical or teleological framework’.25 Commenting on verses 1–18 of the same biblical chapter, Hermann Gunkel observed that all primitive story-telling, including Israel’s, fixes the reader’s attention mainly upon what can be seen or heard; the ‘inner life’, not yet sufficiently disclosed to be depicted in explicit detail, ‘finds only indirect expression: it is hidden behind actions and words’. 26



14

Consistent with what Erich Auerbach regarded as the stylistic hallmark of Hebrew Bible narrative, the tale of Elisha’s mockery seems ‘fraught with background’,27 eliciting more questions than it answers. A number of these stand out in commentaries from the last hundred years or so. Were Elisha’s mockers really boys? And where were they from? Anticipated by the Talmud, Horne, Clarke, and others, some twentieth-century scholars have thought that Elisha’s mockers were actually ‘young men’,28 ‘young hooligans’,29 perhaps ‘young false prophets of Baal’,30 or at least old enough to be ‘well aware of the outrage and wickedness of their conduct’.31 One exegete accepts ‘little children’ as a rendering of the phrase 1 at 2 Kings 2.23b, yet prefers (as did Horne) ‘young persons’.32 Others render the phrase as ‘youths’ (NIV)33 or ‘young lads’,34 on the grounds that such a translation suits the context better and is faithful to the typical usage of 1 elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.35 However, the 1 in this tale have more commonly been viewed as ‘little children’ (AV), and specifically ‘little boys’ (Douay, JPS), ‘small boys’ (RSV, NEB, NAB), or ‘young boys’.36 The adjective is assumed to preclude those other meanings,37 even though these ‘boys’ are called (possibly ‘youths’) in the next verse, and despite the use of the phrase 1 elsewhere to refer to a figure who is clearly not a small child (1 Kgs 3.7b; cf. 1 Sam. 16.11a). There is no consensus about where exactly to locate 2 Kings 2.23–24 geographically, or about whether Elisha’s mockers came from Bethel or from Jericho. Most exegetes assume that the anecdote originated in Bethel, and that Bethel is the ‘city’ the boys ‘came out of’ (v. 23b). However, some assign the tale to the environs of Jericho on the conjecture that if, as verse 24 indicates, the Bethel-bound Elisha ‘turned around’ to see his mockers, then they must have come from the same place he had set out from (that is, Jericho) and followed him thence.38 In connection with this question of the boys’ origin, the verb in their exclamation has perplexed some exegetes, particularly Germans. As shouted at Elisha, the imperative 1 (v. 23b) has been traditionally accepted in English as an expression of repulsion: ‘Go up!’ (AV, RSV, NAB), ‘Go on up!’ (NIV), ‘Go away!’ ( JPS, NRSV), ‘Get along with you’ (NEB). These renderings are in keeping with the standard Greek and Latin renderings: ’ ´ ß (LXX) and ascende (Vulg.). Glaring departures from these are the renderings in the Calvinist Geneva Bible (1560): ‘Come vp, thou balde head’;39 and in The New Jerusalem Bible (1990): ‘“Hurry up, baldy!” they shouted. “Come on up, baldy.”’ 40 These variants correspond to the way most Germans, from Luther on, have read the phrase. The Luther Bibel (1534; Ausgabe letzter Hand, 1545), received as the standard version of the holy scriptures among Germans from the Reformation on, renders 1 as a summons, ‘come up!’ (‘komm herauf!’).41





Among the difficulties this rendering poses is that it does not seem suitable as a derisive expression. Hence one scholar, consistent with the rendering in the Bible translation by Martin Buber with Franz Rosenzweig (‘Steig zu, Kahlkopf!’),42 interprets the phrase as ‘Go up!’ (‘Geh hinauf!’), an exclamation which he suggests could have made sense only if shouted by persons who came from that city up from which Elisha was heading. ‘Go up!’ would thus mockingly imply: ‘Make yourself scarce from our city!’ (‘Verschwinde aus unserer Stadt!’) – that is, Jericho.43 None the less, while likewise rendering the jibe as ‘Up, baldhead!’ (‘hinauf, Kahlkopf!’) and suggesting that the mockers came not against Elisha but followed and called after him from behind, another scholar still seems to assume that they came from Bethel.44 On the premise that Elisha, when accosted, was ascending the slope of Bethel, it has also been reasoned that they were telling him idiomatically ‘to keep going, not to enter their city, which would entail stepping onto a level plateau’.45 Why would Elisha be targeted for insult? Taking the emphasis in the boys’ insult to be on the verb, one scholar infers that Elisha had physical trouble ‘going up’, and thus that the boys mocked him literally for having difficulty walking.46 It has also been ventured that some children of idolaters recognized Elisha by his garb as one of the prophets, and hence as someone to be ridiculed; perhaps he was even wearing Elijah’s mantle.47 Yet most exegetes pondering why Elisha was jeered focus upon the epithet (2 Kgs 2.23: baldhead, baldpate, or baldy), while only few might share in the speculation that he actually did not have long hair, and that the boys were poking fun at him by using the term baldhead antiphrastically (like calling a fat man ‘thinny’).48 Whereas some assume that at the time of the incident Elisha was ‘showing signs of decrepitude, of old age’,49 others contend that he was still a young man who was to live some 50 years longer (see 2 Kgs 13.14), and who might have been afflicted by premature hair loss.50 It has also been speculated that the boys’ disrespect reflected the fear of baldness as a sign of leprosy (Lev. 13.42),51 or that the epithet might allude to lepers who shaved their heads and were detested as outcasts.52 In any case, to call someone ‘baldhead’ is usually assumed to have been vulgarly insulting,53 and baldness itself to have been ‘not an honourable sign of age in the East, but (a) of grief (voluntary baldness); (b) a discredit’.54 Others concur that a bald man was an object of jokes, reproach, and suspicion in the ancient Near East as among the Greeks and Romans.55 Elisha’s smooth head may have struck them as especially funny because it contrasted with his hairy master Elijah (2 Kgs 1.8).56 As some modern commentators contend, following an earlier Jewish interpretation, Elisha’s mockers may have sneeringly challenged him to legimate his claim to be Elijah’s successor by ‘going up’ (to heaven) as the latter had done (2 Kgs 2.11);57 perhaps not believing in Elijah’s ascension, they may have been mocking Elijah (sic) himself.58



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Still other theories have been proffered. Some scholars deny that the epithet ‘baldhead’, as insulting as it may have been, had anything to do with natural baldness. They contend that the boys could not have noticed such a detail as Elisha approached them from a distance,59 or that he, like other ancient Near Eastern men, would have travelled with his head covered and thus hidden from view.60 On little evidence, some of these scholars and others speculate that Elisha’s ‘baldness’ was actually a special prophetic coiffure (eine bestimmte prophetische Haartracht),61 a tonsure,62 or even a cicatrix63 signifying his prophetic vocation. Such a mark, it is conjectured, would have naturally caught the attention of the boys, to whom his and the other prophets’ ‘extravagant eccentricities must have been a regular source of amusement’.64 However, the boys’ conduct may not have been simply a stupid youthful escapade (Dummerjungenstreich); rather, as opposed to Elisha’s warm reception at Jericho (2 Kgs 2.15), they may have expressed the animosity which the citizens of Bethel, a centre of calf-worship, must have felt toward Yahweh’s prophets.65 Perhaps the hostility suggests that Elisha had already inveighed against the calf-worship.66 Or perhaps the boys were ‘warning Elisha not to speak against their immorality as Elijah had done’.67 Why was the punishment so harsh? Who or what effected it? And was it warranted? While 2 Kings 2.23 and Job 19.18 may show that ‘juvenile disrespect for elders was … not infrequent’ in biblical times, the question remains why it was viewed ‘as meriting drastic punishment’.68 The large number of Elisha’s mockers who were punished might suggest that ‘a fairly sizable number of others must have escaped’.69 However, some scholars take 42 to be a symbolically ominous number associated with death or victimization (cf. Judg. 12.6; 2 Kgs 10.14; Rev. 11.2; 13.5),70 or believe that it endows the story with an air of accuracy and verisimilitude,71 or refers to ‘an approximate count’72 or ‘an organized mob’.73 Whatever the number might imply, it ‘is a very large one to be destroyed by two bears’.74 Yet this destruction seems, with no pun intended, to bear out the Deuteronomistic doctrine of retributive justice (see esp. Deut. 7.10; 28.15–68) whereby prophet-mockers must be punished with death for having committed a crime tantamount to deriding God himself (Deut. 18.19; Lev. 24.10–16).75 In calling to mind the ‘continual intermingling of salvation and miracles of punishment’76 in the Hebrew scriptures, the account of the Bethel boys’ fate is compared to other narratives about wrongs committed and about how those transgressions were punished through curses or divine interventions (cf. Num. 11.1–3; 21.4–7; 1 Kgs 13.7–30; 20.33–43; 21.17–29; 2 Kgs 1.2–17; 5.20–27).77 Yet, like the aforementioned efforts to modify the deadly implication of the word ‘tore’, such contextualizing does little to mitigate the horror of Elisha’s curse or of the mauling itself. So it is not surprising that some scholars find the curse and mauling suggestive of something that transcends the normal





ethical categories of right and wrong, such as ‘the ambiguity of sacred power’,78 or even Rudolf’s Otto’s ‘imponderable mysterium tremendum’.79 Even aside from the fact that Elisha’s mockers are the only persons in the Bible cursed in God’s name,80 and the only non-royal persons cursed in the Deuteronomistic history with a form of

(to curse),81 it is in the curse itself that people’s ‘main objection [to this tale] lies’.82 One ‘cannot repress the shudder’83 elicited by reading of this imprecation, which, seeming ‘humourless and savage’,84 and ‘vindictive and vengeful’,85 diverges radically from the general pattern of the prophet’s compassionate intercessions.86 The punishment seems glaringly ‘disproportionate to the offence’.87 Viewing this passage as ‘part of a prophetic saga rather than strict history’, a commentator argues that to suppose that Elisha invoked Yahweh’s name to issue a curse with such terrible consequences ‘is derogatory to the great public figure, and borders on blasphemy’.88 To eliminate this problem, other commentators suggest that the phrase ‘in Yahweh’s name’ is a redactor’s addition to the original narrative,89 or that to conclude that the curse caused the bears to attack (‘as though propelled by the words [of Elisha’s curse]’90) is to succumb to the illogicality of post hoc, ergo propter hoc.91 None the less, most commentators assume that ‘the curse once uttered becomes a reality’ in the bear attack.92 As Bergen points out, Elisha also causes suffering in 2 Kings 5.27, and his deeds there and in 2 Kings 2.24 ‘undermine’ the prophet’s otherwise ‘grandiose picture’.93 Given the coldheartedness his mentor Elijah displayed toward King Ahaziah and the king’s servants (2 Kgs 1.9–16), the brutal consequence of Elisha’s execration might not seem scripturally anomalous. That the curse was uttered in Yahweh’s name indicates for some, as it did for Horne, that it was by Yahweh’s power, not Elisha’s, that the bears were called out.94 Not only is this one of a number of instances in the Hebrew Bible where animals serve as God’s agents, usually to punish humans,95 but the boys’ offence might seem blasphemous in so far as deriding God’s prophets is equivalent to deriding God himself (cf. Deut. 18.19; Lev. 24.10–16).96 Such blasphemy would be particularly grave if to call someone ‘bald-headed’ in Elisha’s time and place was really tantamount to saying he was ‘empty-headed’, had ‘no brains’, or was ‘stupid’.97 Still, the difficulties with Elisha’s curse do not end here. For Bergen, the problem is not that Elisha curses in Yahweh’s name, but that when we compare this curse with those in 2 Kings 1.10 and 1.12, our discomfort with Elisha’s curse is not lessened by either of two aspects that mitigate our discomfort with the casual way in which Elijah caused 102 men to die. The power Elijah exercised is attributed not directly to Yahweh, but to the prophet’s status as ‘man of God’, and it is Elijah himself who chooses the men’s punishment and thereby shoulders the blame for their deaths. In contrast, Yahweh is directly invoked in the Elisha story. And because the wording of Elisha’s curse is not given, the reader is left uncomfortably wondering whether it was



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Yahweh who chose to impose capital punishment upon a large number of boys. Readers must finally question either the propriety of Yahweh’s action, which can make him seem ‘crude and insensitive’ and ‘a harsh tyrant’,98 or Elisha’s propriety. As Bergen reminds us, this is not the only biblical passage to allow the first option (cf. 2 Sam. 6.6–8), but such an allowance is uncommon. And if, in contrast to 2 Kings 2.23, verse 24a’s increased attention to the detail of Elisha’s action (that is, his turning, seeing, and cursing) ‘allows readers to transfer this blame to Elisha, it does so only at the expense of giving control over the actions of YHWH to the prophet’.99 Another conjecture is that the punishment of Elisha’s mockers may have something to do with ‘the idea of the collective responsibility of parents and children’,100 as rooted in the Pentateuch. Rehearsing an idea drawn from the Augustinian interpretation of the tale, modern scholars often infer that Elisha’s mockers expressed, and hence were punished for, the irreverence of their parents and other apostate townspeople.101 If, after all, ‘The unripe behavior of the young generation which is growing up, always forms a shadowy reflection of the shallow opposition in moral and religious ideas which exists in public opinion,’102 then the boys’ punishment in this tale ‘would touch the parents in a way which nothing else could have done’.103 Yet another speculation, whose expositors will be cited later, eliminates the need to justify the curse and punishment. This speculation questions whether a curse was uttered in the first place: perhaps a mauling incident near Bethel really happened, not as the supernatural result of a curse or as divine punishment, but as a natural calamity coinciding with Elisha’s visit, of which this tale expresses a guilt-ridden recollection. What is the significance of the bears? Considered ‘probably the oldest sacred animal of all’,104 the bear has attracted considerable attention from Jungians, feminists, mythologists, and historians of religions because of its cultic and ritual identification with various forms of the ‘archetypal’ Great Mother in cultures around the world.105 Thus one guide to ‘symbols and sacred objects’ goes so far as to submit, creatively but erroneously, that Elisha’s ursine protectresses find their ‘originals’ in ‘the twin Ursae, nurses of the infant Zeus when his mother Rhea (another version of Artemis) hid him in the Dictean cave’, with ‘the whole biblical story having been falsely deduced from an icon’ – which the guide never documents – ‘of the Ursae among children’.106 In fact, the ursae ex machina of 2 Kings 2.24 are presumed to have been of the ursus arctos syriacus type which ‘was common in ancient Palestine, and appears in the Bible as a peculiarly fierce animal’107 (cf. 1 Sam. 17.34; Prov. 17.12; Hos. 13.8; Amos 5.19). However, there has been dissent on this point. On the supposition that such bears normally keep to themselves, are playful and gentle, and will only snatch a lamb from the flock when ravenous or go beserk if robbed of their





own cubs, one exegete contends that the miracle of the murderous bears is so incongruous ‘as to be almost ludicrous’.108 In the interest of ridding the biblical text of a possibly sexist innuendo, some new translations render (‘she bears’) in 2 Kings 2.24b simply as ‘bears’,109 which happens to concur with the rendering in the Douay Old Testament (1609–10), but diverges from the more accurate, gender-specific rendering in the King James Bible, the Revised Standard Version, and the version of the Jewish Publication Society. The Douay Bible, we should recall, was translated from the Latin Vulgate, whose rendering of as ursi accords with the Septuagint’s rendering, ␣ , in that both those nouns are masculine plural. Yet the Hebrew from which the King James and the Revised Standard Version were translated is unambiguous: the noun is feminine (in this one instance in the whole Bible), as dictated by the the forms of the verb of which it is the subject ( , 1 ), and by the feminine number (two). What is the tale’s moral point, if any? If Elisha may come across in 2 Kings 2.24 as ‘a bad-tempered wizard who strikes immediately at those who belittle him’,110 it has been suggested that this is so because the authors or redactors of the tales of his miracles meant to portray him as a ‘grim-faced person’, inferior to the ‘kind-hearted’ Elijah, that ‘second Moses’.111 More conventionally, however, it is supposed that this tale was recorded ‘to enhance the fame of the prophet’,112 and ‘to convey a popular understanding of [his] dignity’.113 As part of a perceived ‘mythological colouring’114 of the Elisha tradition, the story is thought to be aimed at inculcating respect for the prophet’s inviolable office and sacrosanct person,115 and, like the tales of his two preceding miracles (2 Kgs 2.14, 19–22), to confirm his inheritance of Elijah’s spiritual powers.116 Of course, not all ‘men of God’ in our own times have proved above reproach. Appearing in the wake of the televangelist scandals involving Jim and Tammy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, the 1991 Life Application Bible wrested from 2 Kings 2.23–24 a message for the present day. ‘When we are cynical and sarcastic toward religious leaders,’ warns the note on those verses, ‘we are in danger of mocking not just the person, but also the spiritual message. While we are not to condone the sin that some leaders commit, we need to pray for them, not laugh at them’ (p. 608). Assuming that the bear-mauling was a natural catastrophe, other commentators on 2 Kings 2.23–24 tend to shift the focus from the prophet and onto possible motives of the people who told the story. Some read it as ‘a Bubenmärchen to frighten the young into respect for their reverend elders’,117 or as ‘a puerile tale’ expressing ‘the memory of some catastrophe which happened to coincide with Elisha’s visit to Bethel and was turned to account by the local dervishcommunity to awe their children’.118 Another commentator concurs: ‘The well-known inclination of the common people to interpret such calamities as



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God’s punishment, and hence to inquire about guilt, could have led to the belief that the people themselves had wronged the prophet.’119 Agreeing that what may seem to us an accident would have struck the citizens of Bethel as an act of God, yet another interpreter opines that such tales as this were included in scripture as ‘popular and effective teaching aids to instruct the people of the danger of turning away from their God, and to demonstrate that the only security lay in rigid obedience to the will of God as expressed in his law and spoken by his true prophets.’120 Regardless of whether the tale of Elisha’s mockery was grounded in an actual event, scholars have displayed little interest in the negative image the story presents of the boys. So much attention is paid to the allusion to baldness, the harshness of the curse and punishment, the actions of the prophet and the bears, the question of Yahweh’s role (if any), the idolatrous practices and corruptive influences of the Bethel citizenry, and the mystery of the tale’s moral intent, that the questions asked about the pack of hellions whose misbehaviour triggered the incident concern mainly their age, provenance, and number. While it is said that ‘neither Elisha nor the bears behave in character’,121 no one would say the same about the boys. On the contrary, when their rudeness is commented upon, it is alleged to be typical of boys being boys, especially in the Middle East.122 The Bethel boys’ punishment, in paralleling the harsh penalties stipulated for displaying contempt to parents, is seen as proof that the boys were deemed ‘juvenile delinquents’.123 Because Elisha’s mockers have otherwise been mostly neglected, a troubling question is overlooked: what does this tale suggest about children, particularly boys, especially in their relation to holiness? The Bethel boys’ irreverence may illustrate an implication of Job 14.4: if nothing clean can be brought out of an unclean thing, the child must participate in the universal malignity of humanity.124 Yet, as already suggested, the tale implicates boys in the basic twofold Deuteronomistic lesson that God’s prophets are traditionally mocked and persecuted in this world, but that such injustice will be met by divine punishment (2 Chron. 36.16). The pertinence of this lesson’s first part to the Elisha tale is indicated by an early medieval Jewish legend about Jeremiah. As a lad, so the story goes, Jeremiah received the divine call to prophesy to God’s people but refused, saying, Master of the universe, I cannot prophesy to them. What prophet ever came forth to them whom they did not wish to slay? When Moses and Aaron rose to act in their behalf, did they not wish to throw stones at them …? Thou didst bring it about that the curly-haired Elijah rose to act in their behalf, and they laughed at him saying: Behold how he curls his locks! … And when Thou didst bring it about that Elisha rose to act in their behalf, they said derisively to him: Go up, thou baldhead.125





No mention is made here of the retribution which persecutors of prophets must ultimately face. Likewise, despite the expectation of John the Baptist that Jesus will come as both saviour and punisher (Matt. 3.12), the New Testament stresses the first part of the Deuteronomistic lesson almost to the exclusion of the second.126 In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus speaks of the persecution of prophets in earlier times (Matt. 5.12). He later opens his lament over the Judean capital by exclaiming: ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you!’ (Matt. 23.37). This same observation is recast as a bitter rhetorical question posed by the first Christian martyr, Stephen, to the elders of Jerusalem moments before they stone him to death: ‘Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered’ (Acts 7.52). Reportedly present at Stephen’s stoning and ‘consenting to his death’ was Saul (8.1), who later, as the converted missionary Paul, rehearses the motif in praising the Christians of Thessalonica for having effectually imitated the Christian churches of Judea: ‘for you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out’ (1 Thess. 2.14–15). In connecting the Crucifixion to the slayings of Hebrew prophets, Paul, like Stephen, provides scriptural justification for what will be the medieval Christian view of those prophets as forerunners of the persecuted Christ. A fateful corollary of this view will be the medieval typecasting of the Bethel boys as figurative precursors to Christ’s persecutors. That the New Testament emphasized the first part of the Deuteronomistic lesson does not mean that the second part was forgotten. In later centuries, the complete lesson would be rehearsed in the revealed scriptures of both Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, undoubtedly as a warning to anyone who might try to obstruct the prophetic missions of Muhammad and Joseph Smith, Jr.127 As for the second part of the Deuteronomistic lesson, the problem that remained peculiar to 2 Kings 2.23–24 was that there the punishable prophet-mockers were children. To be sure, the Hebrew Bible contains some brutal statements about children. The most controversial is God’s demand in Exodus 22.29b, ‘The first-born of your sons you shall give to me’, which chillingly resonates with the aqedah, the story of the ‘binding’ of Isaac (Gen. 22.1–19).128 Even if the Exodus verse is not taken literally as a demand for child-sacrifice, we know that parents were urged to subject their young offspring to harsh corporal beatings in order to ‘save’ the children’s lives from Sheol (Prov. 23.13–14). It is generally recognized that in early Israelite history a father could kill his sons and daughters if they did something seriously wrong (Gen. 42.37; Zech. 13.3). Although Torah (excepting Exod. 22.29b) and the prophets strongly condemn child-sacrifice, Deuteronomistic law condemns



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the stubborn and rebellious son to death (Deut. 21.18–21), and both the Covenant code and the priestly law stipulate that anyone who strikes or curses his father or mother must be put to death (Exod. 21.15, 17; Lev. 20.9).129 The severe retributive logic of 2 Kings 2.23–24 accords with one of the divine warnings conveyed by the prophet Isaiah to the people of Judah. If boys could be mauled for showing insolence towards a sacred elder, it seems consistent that God should threaten to punish the idolatrous and socially unjust Judahites by turning the social order on its head and creating a circumstance in which boys (1) shall be their princes, ‘babes [ 1 : abstractly, “caprice”] shall rule over them’, and ‘the youth [1] will be insolent to the elder’ (Isa. 3.4, 5b). Still, even if to be ruled by obnoxious boys was feared as the direst of collective punishments, the modifying treatments of 2 Kings 2.23–24 in the Babylonian Talmud suggest that the early rabbinic thinkers were troubled by the idea of divinely commissioned bears mangling boys at a prophet’s prompting.130 It is hinted that the whole incident could have been avoided if Elisha had not travelled alone; for ‘Whoever does not escort others or allow himself to be escorted is as though he sheds blood.’131 Moreover, pre-pubescent children could not be held morally accountable for their actions. So, according to the Aggadah, whose interpretation on this point was later reiterated by the commentators Rashi (1040–1105) and Radak (David Kimhi, c. 1160–1235),132 Elisha’s mockers were 1 in the sense not of ‘children’ but of ‘youths’, that is, adult water-sellers from Jericho who ‘were bare [menu‘arim] of precepts’.133 In describing them as little (), the scripture implies that they were ‘little of faith’, because their livelihood had just been ruined by his miraculous healing of Jericho’s waters (2 Kgs 2.19–22). Or, they were grown-up youths who behaved like small children and silly boys.134 When Elisha looked back, what did he see that made him curse them? The Talmud, besides noting that death and calamity befall wherever the sages set their eyes, submits that he ‘saw’ that his mockers had been conceived on the Day of Atonement, when cohabitation was taboo; or that their hair was plaited like that of the heathen Amorites; or that they were oblivious of the commandments, as all their descendants must have been135 – that is, in Rashi’s words, ‘that neither in them nor in their descendants would there be any “sap” of good deeds’.136 Had but a single righteous man (tzaddik) been destined to descend from them, Elisha would not have cursed them.137 As for the punishment of Elisha’s mockers, a Talmudic rabbi regards it as ‘a miracle within a miracle’; given that ‘there was no forest nor were there any bears’, the forest and bears must have sprung up miraculously.138 (Amusingly, this point finds support in a modern commentator’s quibble that 1 at 2 Kings 2.24b ‘signifies not “forest” but rather maquis’.139) The Talmud also notes that the number of the bears’ victims corresponds to the 42 sacrifices





offered by Balak (Num. 23.1, 14, 29), and that Elisha’s overreaction to the boys did not go unpunished, as God, to purge him of that sin, made him endure three bouts of disease, the third one fatal.140 Talmudic exegetes in later centuries would elaborate upon why Elisha might have been targeted for derision. In the attempted literal interpretation or peshat in the popular Mezudat David (1782, Fortress of David) by David Altschuler, the idea is introduced that Elisha was mocked because he looked so different from the allegedly hairy Elijah; for Altschuler, it is as though the mockers were saying Elisha was not Elijah’s equal. As noted by Isaac ben Judah Abrabanel (1437–1508) and Malbim (Meier Loeb ben Jehiel Michael, 1809–79), ‘Go up, baldy!’ may connote: ‘Just as your hairy master ascended to heaven, you, the baldheaded disciple, may do so too.’ Hence, reasoned Abrabanel, Elisha ‘saw’ that the boys were mocking not only him but his master as well, and that they had been ordered by their parents to do so. At Bethel, the site of Jeroboam’s golden calf (1 Kgs 12.28–29), such disrespectfulness towards God’s prophets could be expected.141 By transforming the boys into men and denying that God condoned Elisha’s intemperate reaction against them, the Talmudic explanations of 2 Kings 2.23–24 not only discard the vexing image of the prophet as a curser of children (a character less easily absolvable than a curser of adults) but eschew the equally troublesome notion of boys as prophet-mockers, and of God as the condoner of an unethical outburst by his own prophet. Yet no such ethical scruples seem to have plagued the producers of the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, traditionally known as the Septuagint or LXX, which is thought to have been begun in the early third century BCE and completed over the next two centuries. That Elisha’s mockers were children, not adults, is emphasized by the Septuagint’s reference to them as ´ ´ (4/2 Kgs 2.23); because the noun ´ denotes ‘young children’, the adjective ´ (‘small’ or ‘little’) seems almost tautological. Serious qualms about the ethical implications of the tale may account for the minor but provocative accretions to it in two of the more important variant versions of the Septuagint. One is the Septuagint revision by the mysterious second-century figure named Theodotion, upon which Origen (c. 185–254 CE) drew extensively in filling in the Septuagint’s gaps in his own Hexapla (completed 245), a vast edition of the different Greek renditions of the Old Testament. The other Greek version that adds something to the Elisha tale is the ‘Lucianic’ or ‘Antiochian’ recension, one of the Septuagint’s so-called trifaria varietas or ‘threefold variety’ (the other two belonging to Origen and Hesychius, d. 311) which is thought to be based largely upon a comparison with the Hexapla and is traditionally attributed to Lucian, the presbyter of Antioch martyred under Maximinus in 311 or 312 CE.142



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Perhaps reflecting a desire to infer a moral rationale behind Elisha’s wrath toward the boys, Theodotion’s version of 4/2 Kings 2.23 inserts the following clause after Elisha’s curse: ‘And he said: children of transgression and idleness [ ´ ß´ ` ´]’.143 As the noun ´ denotes children specifically in the sense of ‘offspring’ or ‘descendants’,144 the suggestion that Elisha’s mockers were born ‘of transgression and idleness’ is presumably meant to disparage the parents who brought them into the world and reared them. In shifting the blame for the boys’ irreverence from them and onto the parents, this inserted barb casts a new light upon the subsequent bear-mauling, which in turn, rather than seeming an excessive punishment of naughty boys, might now be seen as a suitable punishment of the parents for their own corruption. The underlying idea seems to be that it is morally appropriate for transgressive and unworthy parents to lose the children they corrupt. Whereas the inserted barb in Theodotion’s version may thus be meant to make Elisha’s curse more ethically palatable, the Lucianic version seems meant to justify Elisha’s wrath by making the boys’ crime more severe. Among Lucian’s distinguishing features is his ‘endeavour to seek out, and incorporate, what in the recensionist’s judgement were the most ancient and best attested readings, for the conservation of which he has no hesitation in resorting to conflation’.145 True to this rule, he adds the phrase ‘and they stoned him’ (` ´ ’ ´ ) to the verse about Elisha’s mockery, perhaps to accommodate another Greek translation that mistook the (‘and they mocked’) of the Masoretic text for (‘and they stoned’).146 Although Alfred Rahlfs, one of the twentieth century’s most thoroughgoing Lucianic researchers, dismissed the variant rendering of the Masoretic term as a doublet resulting from the confusion of (mock) with (stone, or put to death by stoning),147 others have seen it also as possibly ‘an embellishment which sought to explain the prophet’s violent outburst against the children’.148 Whatever the case may be, the inserted phrase turns the boys’ offence into something far graver than mere taunting. In the Hebrew scriptures stoning is always presented as deadly, whether employed to execute sinners (Num. 15.36; Josh. 7.25) or holy men (1 Kgs 21.13; 2 Chron. 24.21), and this remains true in the New Testament, which reports it to be the means used to kill St Stephen (Acts 7.58–60) and other Christian martyrs (Heb. 11.37). What became of the two versions of the Greek Old Testament produced by Theodotion and Lucian? Theodotion’s version was widely used and greatly influenced the formation of later Septuagint manuscripts, and, according to St Jerome, Lucian’s Septuagint recension became by 400 CE the accepted text of the Greek Old Testament throughout Asia Minor.149 Yet it was Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament from their original languages that was to become the authorized Bible of the Catholic





West. And because no mention is made of stoning in the Vulgate version of 4/2 Kings 2.23, the violent punishment of the boys seems as disproportionate to their crime in that version as it did in the original Hebrew. The Vulgate rendering would therefore have done nothing to discourage a negative response to this tale among such heretical groups as the Marcionites and the Manicheans, who were predisposed to hold the entire Old Testament in contempt. As we shall see later, their leaders appear to have denounced the tale and singled it out to illustrate why they rejected the moral authority of the Jewish scriptures. Despite the ambiguities of 2 Kings 2.23–24, various elements of the tale took on somewhat amusing lives of their own quite early in the oral and written traditions of Judaism and Christianity. For example, the Hebrew expression ‘no she-bears, no forest’ (1 ), used for a cock-and-bull story,150 came straight from the Talmudic commentary considered above. And while the medieval Jewish expression for the tonsured Roman Catholic priest, ‘baldhead’,151 may or may not have derived from that tale, the laughter which a tenth-century Byzantine satirist is thought to have directed against St Paul’s receding hair might recall Elisha’s mockery.152 In any case, religious thinkers and poets from the early centuries of the Christian era on through the Middle Ages evidently could expect readers to recognize allusions to that tale and to its association of Elisha with bears. One such allusion occurs in the humorous late-ancient prose text, ‘Cyprian’s Supper’ (Cena Cypriani), about a fanciful banquet at which all the guests are biblical characters. A fleeting glimpse is caught of Elisha when the narrator pairs certain characters with specific animal species with which they were scripturally associated: ‘Then others held their portions, which they had caught in hunting: Abraham held a portion of calf, Esau of stag, Abel of lamb, Noah of ram, Samson of lion, Elisha of she-bear [Helisaeus ursinam]’.153 Notably, no mention is made here of the Bethel boys, even though in the Kings tale they became the hunted, whereas the bears, not Elisha, were the hunters. As presented in ‘Cyprian’s Supper’, the prophet could seem the supreme ingrate as he prepares to devour flesh of the same animal species that produced his two avengers. This same linkage of Elisha with the bear recurs unaltered in two Carolingian versions of ‘Cyprian’s Supper’: an abridgment prepared around 855 by the monk Hrabanus Maurus of Mainz (776/84–856), and a versification composed in 876 by John the Deacon of Rome (c. 825–880), who, still without mentioning the Bethel boys, augments an earlier allusion to Elisha in ‘Cyprian’s Supper’ by affixing their epithet for the prophet (‘baldhead’) to the latter’s name.154 More than four centuries later, the irony of Elisha’s ursine diet would not have escaped Dante, whose Commedia refers to Elisha as ‘qual colui che si vengiò con li orsi’ (‘he who was avenged by the bears’).155 This association of Elisha and the bears with revenge may show how well Dante knew his Aquinas, who had cited Elisha’s execration to affirm the



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lawfulness of cursing and vengeance.156 Yet in Dante, as in ‘Cyprian’s Supper,’ the boys go unmentioned. The same is true of an apparent allusion to Elisha’s mockery in one of the 30 Vaticinia de summis pontificibus (Prophecies concerning the highest pontiffs), which were spuriously attributed to the twelfth-century Cistercian mystic Joachim of Fiore, and have been deemed to provide ‘some of the wildest and weirdest reading to be found anywhere in the world’.157 Whereas the first 15 prophecies, derived from a Byzantine source, are thought to have been composed in Italy by a colleague of the Spiritual Franciscan leader Brother Angelo Clareno around the time of Pope Benedict XI’s death (1304), the second 15 were probably produced by Tuscan Fraticelli just prior to 1356.158 The initial prophecy of that second series opens: Ascende Calue, ut ne amplius decalueris, qui non uereris decaluare sponsam: ut comá ursae nutrias159 (Ascend, baldhead, so that you will not lose more hair, you who are not afraid to cut off your bride’s hair so that you nourish the hair of the she-bear). Again nothing is said of the Bethel boys, though the initial phrase echoes their exclamation to Elisha. The noun ursa in the final clause has been taken as a double entendre alluding figuratively to the bears that avenged Elisha, and phonetically to the noble Orsini family, one of whose sons is the subject of the prophecy: Giovanni Gaetano Orsini (1210/20–1280), the ‘unholy’ Pope Nicholas III (from 1277), whose notoriety for nepotism, simony, and intrigue earned him a place in Dante’s hell.160 As it had been common to refer to the Orsini as filii ursae (sons of the bear) during the final decade of the thirteenth century,161 the ‘bride’ in the quotation above may connote the Church, whom Nicholas (‘baldhead’) took advantage of politically and financially (that is, making her metaphorically bald by cutting off her ‘hair’) in order to benefit his family (that is, ‘to nourish the hair of the she-bear’). In this prophecy, several deeply ironic inversions are suggested by the phrase calqued from 4/2 Kings 2.23 in the Vulgate, and by the linkage of that phrase with the Orsini/ursa association. Addressed by the same epithet as Elisha, Nicholas deserves the disrespect it suggests. As an unholy pope and thus Elisha’s antithesis, he seems also an inversion of the sainted Pope Silverius (d. 537), whose excommunication of his own exilers was likened by Aquinas to Elisha’s cursing his own mockers.162 Doomed to hell, Nicholas has not the option to ‘go up’ as he is commanded to do. For in unethically nourishing the ‘bear’ (the House of Orsini), an animal known for its voraciousness, and whose females were considered especially ferocious when protecting their young,163 this latterday ‘baldhead’ does the symbolic opposite of what occurs in the Elisha tale. There, the bears protect the ‘baldhead’, not vice versa, and they do so by attacking, not guarding, the young – that is, the human young, not the bears’ young. The lack of any mention of the Bethel boys in the allusions to Elisha’s mockery in ‘Cyprian’s Supper’, the Inferno, and the Vaticinia might seem to





suggest that those ill-fated urchins were erased from medieval memory almost as decisively as 42 of their bodies are mangled in the biblical tale. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. By the end of the Middle Ages, 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 furnished the paradigm for a literary and artistic topos explicitly concerning boys. Instances of this topos, which I term the Bethel boys motif, exhibit the following definitive pattern: an adult, usually male and known for his holiness or for some marked eccentricity or unpopular distinction, is gratuitously mocked, stoned, or abused in some other way by a pack of anonymous urchins. The assumption that seems almost inevitably to underlie the motif can be summed up by a pronouncement 2 Kings 2.23–24 elicited from a nineteenth-century German minister and scholar: ‘Young people are always ready to make wanton sport of any peculiar appearance which they do not understand.’164 As we shall later see, variations of the Bethel boys motif in literature and art over the centuries have reflected a particular negative image of children that opposes the more conventional Jewish, Christian, and, much later, Romantic views. Let us first consider certain ancient perceptions of children that may have helped perpetuate the motif.

Ancient views of the child The association of childhood with mischief, wildness, and affrontiveness was by no means peculiar to the ancient Hebrew folklorists who told of Elisha’s encounter with the Bethel boys. The behaviour of those urchins would not have shocked Plato, whose Athenian observes: ‘Now of all wild young things a boy is the most difficult to handle. Just because he more than any other has a fount of intelligence in him which has not yet “run clear”, he is the craftiest, most mischievous, and unruliest of brutes’.165 Consistent with the allusions to children as a curse in the dramas of Euripides, the fragments of Democritus and Menander, and the dicta of Epicurus,166 the Athenian in Plato’s Laws recommends that corrective chastisement befitting a slave be administered to any boy by any free person in whose presence the boy commits a serious fault (bk 7, 808d). Aristotle, Plato’s former pupil, proved less zealous than Plato about punishing children. But he viewed them no less adversely as living ‘at the beck and call of appetite’,167 a view that would later be elaborated upon by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE–50 CE). For Aristotle, the child is ‘imperfect’, the child’s ‘excellence’ being ‘not relative to himself alone, but to the perfect man and to his teacher’, as the slave’s is to a master.168 Aristotle was fortunate enough to see one boy he tutored grow up and achieve unprecedented triumphs as commander and king. However, not every philosopher had the privilege of mentoring a young Alexander. Seneca, the



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Roman Stoic, tutored the adolescent Nero. Later, when Nero acceded to the Roman imperial throne (54 CE), Seneca became his counsellor and minister, and lived to know all too well the grim consequences of this one bad boy. When Nero’s deadly tyranny as emperor was reaching its height and his ordering of Seneca’s death (65 CE) was not more than two years away, Seneca – already retired by then from Nero’s service – recorded: ‘It is no surprise to me, at my age, that nothing but evil attends us from our early youth; for we have grown up amid the curses invoked by our parents.’169 We might only speculate that Seneca was generalizing upon the example of his psychotically murderous former pupil. In Jewish and Christian contexts, the question of children’s imperfection becomes far more complicated on account of the biblical idea of ‘man’s’ creation in God’s ‘image’. As introduced in Genesis 1.26–27, this notion suggests perfection. Disregarding the old yet unresolved linguistic-theological debate about whether that priestly text refers to concrete resemblance or is meant to convey a more abstract, spiritual idea such as that of human personality in its relation to God, we need only note that the concept underwent a momentous metamorphosis as it became assimilated into Christian thought. The Hebrew scriptures never imply that the image ( ) or likeness ( ) of God was lost through the Fall or that ‘man’ no longer possesses that image. In contrast, except in 1 Corinthians 11.7, which retains the Hebraic view, the New Testament consistently presents God’s ’´ or imago (the Greek and the Vulgate translations of ) as something alien to ‘man’ and identifies it instead with Christ, through whom the believer is transformed into that image.170 How do these biblical considerations bear upon Jewish and Christian views of children? According to St Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–200), Adam himself ‘was a child, not yet having his understanding perfected’.171 However, despite this claim, or, a millennium later, the suggestion by the Jewish poet and philosopher Judah Halevi (c. 1075–1141) amid the Spanish reconquista that God created the first man ‘in the form of an adolescent, perfect in body and mind’,172 Western thinkers and artists have generally assumed that the first man was created as a young adult – an idea frescoed by Michelangelo upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, having been inscribed much earlier in the Talmud, which asserts that Adam was not like a child but like a 20-year-old.173 Yet neither the Hebrew scriptures nor the Christian scriptures indicate whether children attain that image before they reach maturity. Except in such rare, negative passages as 2 Kings 2.23–24 and Isaiah 3.4–5, or the ones cited earlier that condemn child-sacrifice while condoning the killing of unruly children, the Hebrew Bible concentrates positively upon the relation of children to the family and the importance of progeny as a sign of God’s favour.174 Likewise the New Testament’s sole disclosure about Jesus’ boyhood serves to





confirm the primacy of his relationship to God over his relationship to his earthly parents (Luke 2.49). Notwithstanding a modern historian’s examination of influences that might have shaped Jesus’ childhood and youth,175 one wonders whether the almost total silence in the New Testament about Jesus’ so-called ‘lost years’ might betray a reluctance on the part of the ‘inspired’ authors to depict the embodiment of divine perfection as an adolescent boy. Philo, the Hellenistic Jewish thinker whose lifetime coincided with Jesus’, expresses the generally low opinion of childhood that had been passed down from the ancient Greeks. Like Aristotle, he evidently regards children as irrational creatures wholly controlled by their instinctual appetites: ‘In the first stage of our coming into existence’ – which, in the next sentence, he labels ‘the stage of boyhood’ ( ` ´) – the soul is reared with none but passions to be its comrades, griefs, pains, excitements, desires, pleasures, all of which come to it through the senses, since the reason is not yet able to see good and evil and to form an accurate judgement of the difference between them, but is still slumbering.176 In one place, Philo recounts an anecdote that approximates the Bethel boys motif in displaying the mischievous readiness of boys to mock anyone strange or eccentric. When Herod Agrippa, newly assigned to the throne of his uncle Philip’s tetrarchy, stopped in Alexandria en route to his kingdom, the antiJewish faction of the city’s citizenry could not contain their resentment at this elevation of a Jew: There was a certain lunatic named Carabas … . He spent day and night in the streets naked, shunning neither heat nor cold, made game of by the children and the lads who were idling about [ ´ ` ´

´ ]. The rioters drove the poor fellow into the gymnasium and set him up on high to be seen of all and put on his head a sheet of byblus spread out wide for a diadem, clothed the rest of his body with a rug for a royal robe, while someone who had noticed a piece of the native papyrus thrown away in the road gave it to him for his sceptre. And when as in some theatrical farce he had received the insignia of kingship and had been tricked out as a king, young men carrying rods on their shoulders as spearmen stood on either side of him in imitation of a bodyguard. Then others approached him, some pretending to salute him, others to sue for justice, others to consult him on state affairs. Then from the multitudes standing round him there rang out a tremendous shout hailing him as Marin, which is said to be the name for ‘lord’ in Syria.177



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It is not clear from this report whether the anonymous ‘children’ and ‘lads’ who derided the naked lunatic are the same ‘rioters’ who set him up as ‘king’. None the less, a significant percentage of the rioters were assumably not adults, and, as reported above, their distinctly Bethel boy-like behaviour seems blended with the carnivalesque practice of mock-kingship for a day which has been found exemplified in societies around the world.178 As butt of this mockery, Carabas is used by the rioters as a surrogate for Herod, just as the mocked Elisha, according to some interpreters, was used by the boys as a stand-in for the deceased Elijah or even for Yahweh himself. The reluctance of the authors of the canonic Gospels to depict Jesus as child seems well founded in the light of the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, whose account of childhood events (paidika) in Jesus’ life is prompted by the Lucan tale of the visit of the 12-year-old saviour to the Temple.179 In some instances in this apocryphal Gospel, as in the related Gospel of PseudoMatthew, the boy Jesus comes across as unchristian, malevolent, and unsettlingly prone to employing his miraculous powers to kill other children who annoy him – such as the scribe’s son whom he causes to wither up for having dispersed some puddles of water; or another child whom he causes to fall down and die for having accidentally bumped his shoulder.180 Given the notoriety the little Jesus earns in his village as serial killer,181 it is no wonder that when one of a number of children playing on a roof is pushed off and fatally falls, the dead child’s parents accuse Jesus of the crime (Thomas 9.1–2). Despite the apocryphal tales of the little killer Jesus, tales that would persist in popular medieval literature,182 children as a species took on a new significance in the canonic Gospels. There, the adult Jesus teaches that only by becoming ‘like’ children can someone enter heaven, and that the heavenly kingdom ‘belongs’ to such as them (Matt. 18.3, 19.14; Mark 10.14–15; Luke 18.16–17). These claims, the most renowned biblical statements about children, might seem to dissociate the child from the guilt of Adam (who is traditionally imagined as an adult when he committed his fatal sin) and reverse the Greek philosophical notion of the child as imperfect. To be sure, Jesus never pronounces the child perfect or innocent; if the child, like the poor, the ignorant, and the sinner, is privileged by him in the order of salvation, it is not because of any inherent spiritual qualities or dispositions.183 Yet it seems safe to surmise that if Jesus’ association of children with humility and salvation had persisted in the West as the only view of youngsters, the Bethel boys motif could hardly have survived the dawn of the Christian era as a theologically viable topos. Although the same association is promoted by the advice of 1 Peter 2.2 (‘Like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk’), Jesus’ exaltation of children is stiffly opposed elsewhere in the New Testament. Addressing the Christians of Rome, Paul admits to having been ‘once alive apart from the





law’, prior to ‘when the commandment came’ and ‘sin revived and I died’ (Rom. 7.9). Whether or not it is correct to construe this verse as ‘a reminiscence of a thoughtless, carefree boyhood brought to an end (death) by the dawning sense of moral obligation and guilt’,184 the famous analogy Paul invokes elsewhere to illustrate his religious conversion seems to contradict Jesus’ positive assessment of childhood: ‘When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways’ (1 Cor. 13.11). For Paul, abandoning ‘childish ways’ means realizing that both knowledge and the capacity to express it in prophecies or tongues are faulty, and are therefore to be valued less than faith, hope, and love as gifts of the spirit. In terms that seem to assume the Aristotelian notion of the child as an imperfect being whose ‘excellence’ is relative to the perfect man, he submitted in the preceding verse that ‘when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away’ (1 Cor. 13.10). Here ‘perfect’ connotes spiritual maturity (‘I became a man’) or the awareness that love, faith, and hope are the greatest gifts, while ‘imperfect’ denotes spiritual infancy (‘childish ways’) or reliance on tongues and prophecies. Paul, in effect, is exhorting his audience to grow up, and not to think like children (see 1 Cor. 14.20). The implication that adulthood is spiritually superior to childhood accords with Paul’s understanding of the first man. For if it was through Adam’s disobedience that humankind inherited sin, condemnation, and death, he is the ‘type’ of Christ, the second or last Adam who acquits, justifies, and restores humankind to life (Rom. 5.12–21; 1 Cor. 15.45–47). From this typological view it would seem to follow that infancy and childhood, of all stages of life, are the two most closely linked to original sin. For Paul, all infants are born into the world as heirs of Adam’s fallen state and cannot hope to be redeemed unless they convert later in life to faith in Christ, as did Paul himself on the road to Damascus. The lack of explicit evidence in the New Testament for the baptism of infants may or may not suggest that this purificatory rite symbolizing the first step towards redemption was reserved for adults. The implicit Pauline linkage of infancy and childhood with Adamic sin achieved explicit expression several centuries later in the writings of St Augustine, especially the opening books of his Confessions. A fascinated observer of babies,185 Augustine was convinced that the earliest symptoms of sin could be detected in infants’ behaviour, and therefore that all unbaptized children, even those born of the faithful, perish ( pereunt).186 Having observed that an infant, even if fully fed, will grow angry and jealous upon seeing another infant at the mother’s breast, he concluded that ‘it is not the mind of infants that is innocent, but the weakness of their members’ (C, 1.7.11 [7]); in other words, infants would sin if only they were physically capable of doing so. This rule, deemed ‘Freudian’ by a modern scholar,187 was applied by Augustine to older



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boys as well. It has been said that nothing reveals Augustine’s preoccupation with the frailty and misguidedness of the human will more clearly than his own boyhood recollections. His African readers tended to consider a boy innocent until the latter reached puberty, ‘as if,’ wrote Augustine, ‘there were no sins except those that are committed by the genitals.’188 But Augustine, guilt-ridden for having resisted the Catholic faith as a youth, looks upon childhood as the time when all youngsters participate in the pernicious legacy of Adam’s fall, much as Paul recalled having lived lawlessly as a child. Reminiscing about the beatings he and his classmates received for idleness at school, he reflects: ‘Many [boys] before us had built up these ways of misery, by which we were confined to pass over, increasing greatly the labor and sorrow of the sons of Adam’ (C, 1.9.14 [8]). The association of boyhood with Adamic guilt rather than with the heavenly humility that Jesus ascribed to children becomes clear as Augustine strains to square Jesus’ view with the memory of his own boyhood peccadillos: lying, theft, cheating, and indulgence in frivolity. Through such sins as these, he had been cast into ‘the whirlpool of filthiness’ as a boy. Is this boyish innocence [innocentia puerilis]? It is not, Lord. It is not, I pray you, my God. For these are the same things, the very same things, which, as we depart from teachers and masters, from nuts and balls and pet birds, proceeding to kings, gold, estates, and slaves, continue on as more years pass in succession, just as greater punishments succeed the ferule. Therefore, our King, it was simply because they are small that you used children to symbolize humility when you commended it, saying: To such belongs the kingdom of heaven. (1.19.30 [15]) Because the sins of the child portend those of the adult, they are more haunting than the adult’s. Under this awareness, Augustine devotes a considerable portion of the next book to recalling and pondering a single act of youthful vandalism: his stealing fruits from a neighbour’s pear tree with a gang of boys when he was sixteen years of age. Consistent with his appraisal of children as innately sinful ‘sons of Adam’, the repentant Augustine seems to associate this boyhood pilferage with Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit: ‘it pleased us to do what was not permitted’ (2.4.9 [19]). While belonging to an order of mischief different from Elisha’s mockery, Augustine’s boyhood theft has several traits that resemble the Bethel boys motif: the perpetration of the misdemeanour by a gang of anonymous boys (Augustine being the only one identified in his account); the crime’s gratuitousness (‘we carried away huge loads [of pears] not for our own meals, but to throw to the swine’ [2.4.9 (19)]); the corruptive propensity of gang psychology





(‘I absolutely would not have done it on my own’ [2.8.16 (22); cf. 2.9.17]); and Schadenfreude regarding the adult victims (‘We laughed as if tickled at the heart, because we deceived them, who did not think we had done this and would not have endured it’ [2.9.17 (22)]). Unlike Elisha’s mockers, young Augustine and his companions were not punished for their escapade. Yet overhanging his account of it is the aura of a far more ominous consequence: his soul’s perdition. Of the evil in his heart he recalls: ‘It was foul, but I loved it. I loved to perish ( perire): I loved my defect, not that for which I committed wrong, but my wrong itself’ (2.4.9 [19]; cf. 2.6.12–14). Despite Augustine’s memories of his own moral defects in childhood, one anonymous, unseen child does figure positively in his Confessions: the one whose voice, he says, prompted his conversion to the Catholic faith (8.12.29 [101]). Accordingly, there emerged in later centuries the popular apocryphal anecdote about Augustine’s miraculous seaside vision of a benign little boy, putatively the Christ Child, who questioned the ability of human intelligence to comprehend the Holy Trinity. This tale began to be represented in Italian art in the fifteenth century, later travelled northward, and first took literary form in the English adaptation of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea, The Golden Legend by William Caxton (c. 1422–91), who claims to have seen the miracle ‘painted on an altar of S. Austin at the black frirs at Antwerp’.189 According to the tale, while walking on the North African coast and contemplating the Trinity, Augustine encountered a little child who, having dug a small pit in the sand, was ladling water into it with a spoon. Asked by Augustine what he was doing, the child replied that he intended to fill the pit with all the water of the sea. When Augustine replied that it was impossible to do that, the child responded that it would be easier and quicker to fill this pit with all the water of the sea than it would be for a mortal mind to comprehend the Trinity. The child then vanished. Despite his conversion experience and regardless of this later legend, however, Augustine’s general attitude towards children remained one of mild horror. Aware that certain pagans charged Christ ‘with childishness [ puerilis], because’ (in John 8.6, 8) ‘He stooped down and wrote on the ground, and, after answering the people who were questioning Him, began writing again,’ Augustine did not object to the negative notion of childishness that underlies the charge; rather, he replied that such critics fail to grasp ‘that certain virtues in great minds resemble closely the vices of little minds, not in reality, but in appearance’.190 In The Trinity (c. 399–419) he asks, ‘what then is to be said about the mind of an infant [de infantis mente] which is still so small and sunk in such vast ignorance of things that the mind of a man which knows anything shudders at the darkness of that infant mind?’191 All that can be said about an infant boy ( puer infans) is that ‘with his mind unawakened he possesses nothing’ (14.14.19 [50a:447/385]). It is no wonder, then, that Augustine



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believes that the mysteries of the Christian scriptures are inaccessible to children ( pueri), and that the scriptures must therefore grow with children ( C, 3.5.9 [26]: parvuli). City of God extends such notions to defend the harsh corporal punishments used to discipline children in Roman schools. Citing the paternal advice of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 30.12 (‘Bow down his neck in his youth …’), Augustine suggests that such strict measures are necessary for counteracting children’s natural inclination towards sloth, indolence, and other vices; like all other ills in life, the miseries of school are but a natural consequence of the perverted nature with which every child is endowed at birth as the result of Adam’s sin.192 If sustained by God’s grace, parental and pedagogical discipline in Augustine’s view can aid in leading a child’s mind out of its natural ‘darkness’ and towards reverence for God. Thus, in noting that a schoolboy guilty of a linguistic barbarism might be whipped for citing one of Virgil’s more grammatically liberal turns of phrase as an excuse, Augustine seems not at all bothered that the punishment would be so harsh.193 His rigorous stance on disciplining children bears profound ramifications for his understanding of God. If in his view fathers should beat their sons like slaves to break their wills, ‘His idealisation of the severe father is clearly perceptible in his vision of the just God, who would punish wayward sons eternally, and without mercy … . Oppressive schooling was the unwitting mould for cruelly repressive religious beliefs.’194 As one might expect Elisha’s mockery to have epitomized for Augustine the irreverence of unruly boys, it is not surprising that his writings contain references to the tale. However, rather than his wariness towards boys, it was another facet of his interpretation of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 that had the most fateful impact on the way later Western church fathers regarded the tale. As we shall see, Augustine’s hermeneutic fostered a typological linkage of Elisha with Christ, and hence of Elisha’s mockers with the people who were doctrinally scapegoated for Christ’s death: the Jews.




2

Tertullian and Augustine It was largely in the context of their struggles against two prominent heresies that the early Latin church fathers responded to the story of Elisha’s mockery. Tertullian (c. 160–220), that pioneering Christian theologian of North Africa, refers twice to the tale in his polemic Against Marcion (Adversus Marcionem, written 207–8). Separating justice and goodness, the heretic Marcion (d. 160) contended that the Old and New Testaments present two different gods: the judgmental, ‘fierce and warlike’ demiurge or creator god of the Old Testament, whom he calumniated, and the ‘mild and peaceable, solely kind and supremely good’ god of (Marcion’s version of) the New Testament, whom he revered.1 On this distinction Marcion may have easily exploited the tale of Elisha’s mockery as illustrating the ethical inferiority of the one god to the other; in keeping with his theology, he may have argued that the setting of bears upon small children reflects an ‘evil’ compatible with the justice of the Old Testament God, but incompatible with the goodness of the New Testament God. Tertullian, in reaffirming the inseparability of Christ and the Old Testament God, first invokes the tale of Elisha’s mockery to illustrate his own counterclaim that there are two kinds of evil: evils of sin and guilt (mala delicti, mala culpae), and evils of punishment and penalty (mala supplicii, mala poenae), and that God is author not of the criminal sort, but only of the penal sort, which are included in divine justice: ‘[Evils of punishment] indeed are evil to those on whom they are inflicted, though on their own account they are good things because they are just things, defensive of good deeds and hostile to sins, and in this respect worthy of God’ (2.14.2 [1:126/127]). Such penal evils are exemplified, says Tertullian, in the stories of the great flood, the razing of Sodom, the plagues of Egypt, and even the punishments God periodically levels against his own people, the Israelites, for their ingratitude (e.g., Num. 11.1;

36 10.1057/9780230599758 - Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art, Eric Ziolkowski


Patristic and Medieval Views of 2 Kings 2.23–24

21.6): ‘He sent bears against certain children, but they had been showing disrespect to a prophet.’2 In contrast to the aggadic comments on the Kings tale, this passing allusion is innovative in so far as it shifts the responsibility for the bear attack from the prophet, whose curse evoked the bears, and onto God, whom the scripture never actually affirms to be the instigator of the attack. The same shifting of responsibility occurs in Tertullian’s second allusion to 4/2 Kings 2.23–24, just prior to his claim that the loving consideration shown for infants by the ‘true’ New Testament Christ would be impossible for Marcion’s god because the latter opposes marriage. Tertullian leads up to this claim by contending that Christ’s love of children is not irreconcilable with the Creator’s harshness towards Elisha’s mockers. ‘But see,’ he writes, paraphrasing a Marcionite claim, ‘Christ loves the little ones [parvulos], and teaches that all who ever wish to be the greater, need to be as they; whereas the Creator sent bears against some boys, to avenge Elisha the prophet for mockery he had suffered from them’ (4.23.4 [2:386/387]). To this assertion Tertullian replies: A fairly reckless antithesis, when it sets together such diverse things, little children and boys [parvulos et pueros], an age as yet innocent, and an age now capable of judgement, which knew how to mock, not to say, blaspheme. So then, being a just God, he did not spare even boys when disrespectful, but demanded honour to old age, and more particularly from the younger. (4.23.5 [2:386/387]) Tertullian’s suggestion here is clear. To infer that the Creator’s role in the Kings tale is antithetical to Christ’s view of children would be erroneous because the mauled boys ( pueri) in the tale were old enough to be accountable for their crime and therefore cannot be equated with the little children ( parvuli) whom Christ extolled. Whereas to send bears to maul such ‘innocent’ children would be a sin of evil, the Creator’s punishing of ‘disrespectful’ boys by that method was a penal evil and therefore a just and ‘good’ evil. For this reason, according to Tertullian, the Creator’s inferred role in the Kings tale accords with Christ’s attitude. Elsewhere, adds Tertullian, the Creator’s ‘good’ love of children was revealed by his blessing the Hebrew midwives for having protected the newborns whom Pharaoh had ordered slain (Exod. 1.15–22). Christ and the Creator share this love of children, a love which Marcion’s anti-marital god must lack. To posit these points, Tertullian took an exegetical liberty hardly less radical than the one taken by his Eastern contemporary Origen when, with the same aim of ridding the slaughter of the Bethel boys of its air of impropriety, he proposed that they were handed over to spiritual bears (like the ‘lion’ of 1 Pet. 5.8),



Patristic and Medieval Views 37


not real ones.3 Tertullian knew no Hebrew, but did know Greek,4 and so might have encountered the Elisha tale through the Septuagint. However, ‘Although he sometimes chose to provide his own spontaneous translation of scriptural texts, he more often employed an already existing [Latin] translation.’5 In any case, again reading God into 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 as the sole instigator of the bears’ attack (as if Elisha’s curse played no role), Tertullian appears to have concocted his own distinction between the Bethel ‘boys’ as pueri and Christ’s exalted ‘children’ as parvuli not upon any solid scriptural-linguistic grounds, but simply for his argumentative purpose.6 Sensitive to heretical abuses of allegorical interpretation of the scriptures, Tertullian spurned it as an exegetical method.7 While seeking to reconcile God’s inferred role in 4/2 Kings 2.24 with Christ’s attitude towards children, he never hinted that the mocked Elisha might be viewed as a prefiguration of Christ. Although, almost two centuries later, St Ambrose (339–97) would find Christ ‘prefigured’ in such miracles as the resuscitation of the Shunammite’s child (4/2 Kgs 4.8–37) and the curing of Naaman (5.1–27),8 it was left to Augustine to associate Elisha’s mockery figuratively with the Crucifixion, an association that would govern Christian exegesis of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 throughout the Middle Ages. Like Tertullian’s two references, Augustine’s first allusion to the tale of Elisha’s mockery crops up in a polemic against a heretic, in this case the Manichean Faustus of Milevis, who denied the prophetic pertinence of the Old Testament to the New. However, unlike Tertullian in Against Marcion, Augustine in his Against Faustus the Manichaean (Contra Faustum Manichaeum [397–98]) bases much of his defence of the Old Testament upon figurative readings. To Faustus’s insistence that the Old Testament contains no prediction of Christ, Augustine responds that Christ and the Church are prefigured throughout that Testament. The tale of Elisha’s mockery furnishes but one of Augustine’s numerous passing examples: ‘The children [pueri] that mocked Elisha by calling out Baldhead [calue], are devoured by wild beasts, as those who in childish folly [ puerili stultitia] scoff at Christ crucified on Calvary [in loco Caluariae] are destroyed by devils.’9 This terse gloss is innovative in several respects. First, whereas the Septuagint and the Vulgate versions of the tale conform with the Hebrew in saying the bears ‘tore’ (4/2 Kgs 2.24: ␣ ␯⑀´␳␳η␰␣␯, laceraverunt) the boys, Augustine says the bears ate (comedunt) them. Second, Augustine associates Elisha’s mockery figuratively with the Crucifixion, playing upon the etymological kinship between calvus (‘baldhead’) and Calvaria, a translation of the Greek, ␬␳␣␯␫´␱␯ (‘skull’). (The phrase Calvariae locus, literally ‘site of the Skull’ [K␳␣␯␫´␱␷ T␱´␲␱], occurs three times in the Vulgate, referring to the Golgotha, the Crucifixion site [Matt. 27.33; Mark 15.22; John 19.17].) Third, in establishing the linkage with the Crucifixion and thereby associating Elisha with



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Christ, and the prophet-mocking boys with Christ’s scoffers, Augustine introduces a fateful anti-Jewish innuendo to the Kings tale. Although he does not mention the Jews, they are unquestionably the scoffers he has in mind. Consistent with the scapegoating of them in the Gospels, he elsewhere holds the Jews responsible for Christ’s execution.10 In his allusion to Elisha’s mockery, the sacrilegious image of the mockers is therefore further besmirched by their being figuratively linked to a people already demonized in the Christian imagination. Thus Augustine’s negative attitude towards childhood reinforces his hostility towards the Jews, a people ‘destroyed by devils’. Why else would he characterize as ‘childish’ the ‘folly’ which he says possessed them to scoff at Christ? After the polemic against Faustus, the association of Elisha’s mockery with the Passion resurfaces four times in Augustine’s verse-by-verse Expositions (enarrationes) on the Psalms, which he had begun writing sometime before 392 and which he continued writing almost to his death. The first occasion was in his Exposition on Psalm 44/45, which he preached at Hippo in September 403. The opening paragraph offers an excursus on ‘the sons of Korah’ (filii Core), the phrase in the Psalm’s title identifying those for whom the psalmist claims to be singing. For Augustine, who did not know Hebrew, that phrase is a figurative code referring to Christian believers. Assuming that ‘every title in the sacred writings conveys some hidden meaning’, and knowing of the accepted equivalency of the Hebrew name Korah (transliterated as Core in Latin) and the Latin word calvus, Augustine reports that the ‘sons of Korah’ have been interpreted as ‘sons of the bald-head’ (filii Calui).11 This interpretation allows that name to be linked with the tale of Elisha’s mockery: This name let us not take in a ludicrous sense, lest haply we should prove ourselves to have but the ‘understanding of children’ – such children as we read of in the Book of Kings, as insulting the holy Prophet Elisha, and crying after him, Go up, thou bald-head [Adscende calue]. … For those children so foolishly loquacious, and cursing to their own ruin, were devoured by wild beasts that came out of the wood. (Expos. Ps. 44/45.1 [38:493(16–22)/2:226]) According to Augustine, who again turns the bears into boy-eaters, what happened to the 42 boys connects figuratively with a teaching of Paul on the ignorance of children: ‘That thing then which that past event signified [figurauit] of times to come, ought not to overtake us. For in those children are typified [significati] foolish men, having the “understanding” of ignorance, such as the Apostle would fain have us not be, where he says, Be ye not children in understanding [Nolite pueri esse mentibus]’ (38:494[24–8]/2:226–7). In paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 14.20, Augustine here is well aware of the contradiction we




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And because the Lord had exhorted us to the imitation of children [ puerorum], (when he placed a little one before Him, and said, ‘unless one shall be as this child, he shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven,’) even in that very passage the cautious Apostle, whilst he would have us not be of the understanding of children, yet on the other hand calls us to the imitation of children. Be not children (says he) in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, that in understanding ye may be full-grown [perfecti]. Let him who delights to imitate the child, delight not in its ignorance [imperitia], but in its innocence [innocentia]. (38:494[28–35]/2:227) Here we should recall that the ‘innocence’ of children, for Augustine, refers not to their minds but to their physical incapacity to act on their sinful dispositions (see C, 1.7.11 [7]). Having thus played down Jesus’ exaltation of children from a Pauline perspective, Augustine turns to the main point of his own exegesis of the Kings tale: his figurative linkage of Elisha’s mockery with the Passion. If ‘it was from ignorance, that those children insulted that bald-headed Saint of God [sancto Dei caluo] … [crying] after him, Bald-head! Bald-head! [calue, calue]’, and if wild beasts ‘devoured’ them for that reason, then ‘they prefigured [figurauerunt] those men who with equal childishness of “understanding”, made a mock of a certain Bald-headed One [quemdam caluum], (“bald-headed” as having been crucified in the place of a skull [in Caluariae loco])’ – that is, Christ. [Christ’s mockers] then were possessed by a sort of wild beasts; i.e. by demons; the devil and his angels, who work in the children of disobedience [in filiis diffidentiae]. Such children [ pueri] as these were those who stood before the hallowed Cross, and wagged their heads, and said, If He be the Son of God, let Him come down from the Cross. (38:494[35–43]/2:227) Having reiterated his old association of the epithet calvus with the place-name Calvaria, Augustine again does not mention the Jews by name. Yet here once more they are unquestionably whom he is alluding to when he paraphrases Ephesians 2.2 about ‘the sons of disobedience’, and Matthew 27.39–40 about Christ’s deriders. Augustine was evidently captivated by his threefold linkage of the name Korah, the Passion, and Elisha’s mockery. The Exposition on Psalm 44/45 is



noted earlier between attitudes expressed by Jesus and Paul towards children. He thus proceeds to quote from Matthew 18.2–3, reading into Jesus’ meaning a distinction derived from the Pauline statement:

the first of several of his Psalm expositions in which those associations are drawn. Ten other Psalms claim in their titles to be sung ‘for the sons of Korah’. In Augustine’s Expositions on seven of those Psalms, the translation of Core or Korah as ‘bald’ is again noted, and the referent of that name is again interpreted as a type of Christ.12 In three of those seven Expositions, that is, on Psalms 46/47, 83/84, and 84/85, all of which he preached at Hippo during the years 410–15, Elisha’s mockery is again associated with Korah and viewed as prefiguring Christ’s Passion. At first glance, the connections among ‘the sons of Korah’, Elisha’s mockery, and the Passion might appear so similarly drawn in these three Expositions and the earlier one on Psalm 44/45 that all four excursuses on those linkages might seem interchangeable with one another. In each of the three later Expositions Augustine reiterates the Core–calvus–Calvaria linkage and reemphasizes the typological association of Korah with Elisha, of both those figures with Christ, and of Elisha’s mockers with Christ’s. And each of those later Expositions again has the bears ‘devour’ the boys,13 and has Christ’s scoffers ‘possessed’ or ‘devoured’ by devils or demons.14 Other continuities exist. For example, the characterization of Elisha’s mockers as ‘senseless children’ (insensati pueri) in the Exposition on Psalm 83/84 (2 [39:1147(9)/4:147]) is consistent with the description of them as ‘foolishly loquacious’ in the Exposition on Psalm 44/45 (cf. the reference to their ‘childish folly’ in Against Faustus). Aside from a paraphrase of Matthew 19.14 (‘Suffer them to come unto Me …’), no interpretive ideas or biblical allusions that were not already introduced in the Exposition on Psalm 44/45 are found in the one on Psalm 46/47. In the latter Exposition, Augustine again quotes Matthew 18.2 and 1 Corinthians 14.20 to exhort the listener, in the manner of Paul, to imitate children in their humility, not in their foolishness or lack of understanding (see Expos. Ps. 46/47.2 [38:530(34–5, 38)/2:277]). Despite these continuities, however, certain nuances in the later three excursuses reflect an interpretation of the Elisha tale that is further developed than the interpretations reflected in the Exposition on Psalm 44/45 and Against Faustus. For the first time in Augustine, a direct association of Elisha’s mockers with pestilence and evil now complements those boys’ association with childish folly and ignorance.15 At the same time, unlike Tertullian, Augustine now acknowledges Elisha as the active issuer of the curse, and reads into the malediction a specific request that ‘bears might come … and devour them’.16 Whereas the biblical account, by never specifying that the bear-attack was Elisha’s idea, left open the plausibility that it was God’s, Augustine now holds the prophet responsible for what happened to the boys. However, he qualifies that it was ‘not so much in cruelty as in mystery’17 that Elisha cursed them. For Augustine, to be masticated and gulped down does not necessarily betoken a negative fate. Elsewhere, interpreting figuratively the comparison of the





lover’s teeth to ‘a flock of shorn ewes’ in Song of Songs 4.2, he envisages the redemption of human beings as a process of their being cut off from their errors by ‘the teeth of the church’ and transferred to the church’s body ‘after their hardness has been softened as if by being bitten and chewed’.18 Thus, while he acknowledges the negative implication of the ‘devouring’ of Elisha’s mockers, namely, that ‘they perished as children, who would one day have perished in old age’,19 and that their parents were left to mourn them (see Expos. Ps. 84/85.2 [39:1162[14]/4:167]), he now suggests that the calamity had the positive impact of impressing ‘fear of the mystery’ on people.20 The most fateful development in two of these three later Expositions is their explicit identification of the Jews as Christ’s taunters and crucifiers, and hence as antitypes of Elisha’s mockers. What was anti-Jewish innuendo before becomes outright anti-Jewish polemic in the Exposition on Psalm 84/85, which states that Christ, as antitype of bald-headed Elisha, ‘was mocked as if bald by the Jews’ (Expos. Ps. 84/85.2 [39:1162(16)/4:167]). In the Exposition on Psalm 46/47 he warns: Let none then mock the Cross of Christ. The Jews were possessed by devils, and devoured; for in the place of Calvary, crucifying Christ, and lifting on the Cross, they said as it were with childish sense [sensu puerili], not understanding what they said, Go up, thou bald head [Adscende, calue]. For what is, Go up [Adscende]? Crucify Him, Crucify Him [Crucifige, crucifige]. (2 [38:530[29–34]/2:277])

Here, the earlier, implicit reinforcement of Augustine’s negative attitude towards childhood by his hostility towards the Jews becomes explicit through his attributing to them a ‘childish sense’, and through his equating the Bethel boys’ derisive exclamation with the bloodthirsty chant heard at Jesus’ trial: ‘Crucify him’ (Mark 15.13; Luke 23.21; John 19.6; cf. Matt. 27.22–3). If the Bethel boys uttered their taunts ‘not understanding what they said’, Augustine finds that same lack of understanding in the Jews, about whom he would assume the Crucified said: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’ (Luke 23.34). Equated thus with the Bethel boys, the Jews are branded, like the Bethel boys, as ‘senseless children’ (Expos. Ps. 46/47.2 [38:530(44)/2:277]: pueri insensati). By crucifying Christ, they ‘earned to be devoured by beasts’, while Christians merited ‘to be crowned by Angels’ (38:530[45–6]/2:277). This antithesis between Jews and Christians emerges as a primary feature in Augustine’s contemplation of the Elisha tale. In worshipping the antitype of ‘baldhead Elisha’, Christians might as well be called ‘sons of the Bald’ (38:530[17]/2:276: filii calui), as opposed to those ‘sons of disobedience’, the Jews: ‘For on the very Cross whereon he was insulted, He permitted not our



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Greek fathers If Tertullian and Augustine had to defend the tale of Elisha’s mockery against its use by heretics to deny the pertinence of the Old Testament to the New, an early Eastern Church exegete could feel similarly compelled to defend Elisha against the charge of having sinned by delivering ‘inexperienced infants’ to their deaths through his curse.21 Yet Augustine, whose typological reading furnished the basis for the medieval Western Christian interpretation of the Elisha tale, was not translated into Greek, and hence remained more or less unknown in the Eastern half of the Christian world. There the Greek fathers followed a separate, original course in their interpretation of the tale, as exemplified in a certain Greek compilation of Responses to scriptural questions that was spuriously attributed to Justin Martyr (c. 100–65) but putatively written by some later author, plausibly of Syrian origin. This text introduces the idea – not found in Augustine or any of his Latin patristic predecessors – that the boys’ taunt ‘go up!’ was meant as a mockery of Elijah’s assumption, or his having been ‘taken up’.22 Even as notorious an enemy of the Jews as Augustine’s older contemporary, St John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), the patriarch of Constantinople from 398, did not read into the tale the anti-Jewish figurative innuendos Augustine read into it. A strict literalist in his exegetical approach, Chrysostom mentions the tale without comment in his Synopsis of the holy scriptures, and elsewhere refers to Elisha’s mockers only to say that they had reached an age of reason sufficient to be punished for their sins.23 Likewise, no Augustinian influence is discernible when Elisha’s curse against the boys is glossed by Procopius of Gaza (c. 475–528), the first Greek exegete to compile extensive catenae, or chains, of excerpts from patristic and other ancient commentaries on the Bible: Through this punishment [Elisha] became a benefactor to the boys themselves, as well as to their parents. The former, because he inhibited their malice from increasing with the progress of time; the latter, in truth, by teaching them that they should educate their children not in this manner but in fear of the Lord and in reverence for good men. He thus taught the adults by not sparing even the tender age.24



forehead to be bald [non permisit caluam esse frontem nostram]; for with His own Cross He marked it’ (38:530[48–50]/2:277). Once introduced by Augustine, as we shall see, the anti-Jewish linkage of Elisha’s mockery with the Crucifixion would persist in the Western Christian imagination for a thousand years. But how, in the meantime, was the tale interpreted among the fathers of the Eastern Church?


We cannot help but be struck by Procopius’s enthusiasm for Elisha’s malediction. Like Tertullian, who suggested that the boys’ punishment was not evil in itself, Procopius evinces none of the troubled concern the Talmudists betrayed over the thought of the prophet as an intemperate killer of children. Procopius also finds a kindred spirit in the author of those aforementioned Responses. In defending Elisha against the charge that he showed impatience toward the boys, that other author contends that Elisha was severe with them only because patience would not effect a correction of the injury he had sustained under them, and therefore that ‘severity is more useful than patience, especially to those who will not be corrected’.25 Unlike Tertullian, but like the author of the Responses, Procopius does not hesitate to acknowledge Elisha as the instigator of the boys’ punishment. (In this respect alone does his interpretation resemble Augustine’s.) His blaming the boys’ misbehaviour upon their parents is consistent with the contention in the Responses that the boys had learned from their parents to scorn the prophets, and that, through the boys’ punishment, Elisha was actually castigating the parents ‘so they might learn not to abuse the prophets, and through them the Lord’ (no. 80 [PG, 6:1321C]). These correspondences between Procopius and the author of the Responses suggest that their interpretations may have been directly or indirectly affected by the inserted phrase ‘children of transgression and idleness’ in Theodotion’s Septuagint version of the tale. What are new are these two interpreters’ views of Elisha as the moral corrector of and hence ‘benefactor’ to both the boys and the boys’ parents. In regarding the prophet’s curse so positively, these two exegetes even go beyond Tertullian’s affirmation that the boys’ punishment was just. Only in the second half of Procopius’s gloss does the focus shift from Elisha, as instigator of the punishment, to God (not the bears, who go unmentioned), as its agent. All in all, however, the judgment of God, while they were boys, destroyed those who it foresaw would become worse, and by their destruction educated those who were not corrupt. For the rest it declared that God avenged the injuries brought upon the saints, namely upon Abraham in Egypt, Isaac in Gerar, and I will omit to speak here of Abel. David, indeed, said of the just man: If they bless him, they will inherit the earth, and if they curse him, they will be exterminated. And even if they aren’t punished in the present, nonetheless they will not escape future judgment. (PG, 87, pt 1:1184A–B)

Here, in contrast to Augustine’s typological view of Elisha’s curse and of the boys’ punishment as a prefiguration of the punishment of Christ’s crucifiers,



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Procopius reads the Elisha tale literally as one in a tradition of Old Testament tales that illustrate the lessons of Psalm 36/37 (vv. 9, 11, 29) about God’s protection of the just against the wicked. So eager is Procopius to link the tale to those earlier biblical episodes that he forgets that Isaac was not harmed in Gerar, and hence that the son of Abraham never needed to be avenged there (see Gen. 26.1–22). Another Greek exegete, Theodore Prodromus, who flourished sometime during the first half of the twelfth century, would find 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 to strengthen the link between Elisha and Elijah. His vast collection of four-verse poems (tetrasticha) on the Old and New Testaments includes two on Elisha’s mockery. The first stresses the ironic contrast between the prophet’s baldness and the shagginess of the bears to whom he delivered his mockers to be devoured. The second poem finds the mockers’ delivery to the bears to suggest that if Elisha had a double portion of Elijah’s grace } ␪␱).26 (␹␣ ␳␫), that quality doubled the severity of Elisha’s disposition (␩

Later Latin fathers Such links as this one between Elisha and Elijah, and the ones between Elisha’s mockery and the earlier scriptural tales of Abel, Abraham, and Isaac were not drawn in the West, where the Augustinian interpretation held sway. It is not that new associations with the tale did not crop up independently of Augustine’s influence. In a compilation of ‘promises and foretellings of God’, attributed by some to Augustine’s younger contemporary St Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390–after 455), a chapter analysing Elisha as a type of Christ contains a reference to 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 that yields a unique pair of New Testament associations. It is suggested that when Elisha ‘handed over to beasts’ (bestiis tradidit) his puerile mockers, this action not only anticipated what Jesus taught ‘through Paul’ about children in 1 Corinthians 14.20 (‘Brethren, do not be children in your thinking’), but was tantamount to delivering the boys over to ‘unclean spirits’ in the way that the author of 1 Timothy claims to have ‘delivered’ (tradidi, Vulg.) certain unfaithful to Satan so as to discourage them from blaspheming (1 Tim. 1.20).27 However, as far as post-Augustinian typological interpretations of Elisha’s mockery go, this one is highly unusual in that it does not use that tale to implicate the Jews in the Crucifixion. Around the time that Procopius was writing in the East, Augustine’s linkage of Elisha’s mockery with the Crucifixion caught the eye of St Caesarius (c. 470–542/43), theologian, preacher, and bishop of Arles from 503. With the assistance of clerical disciples, Caesarius made a cottage industry of compiling popular sermons, in part extracted from the patristics, especially Augustine, and partly composed by himself.28 Of the 238 extant sermons believed to be composed or revised by Caesarius, well over 100 are scriptural discourses,





many involving typological exegesis, of which five are devoted to distilling allegorical Christian meanings from episodes involving Elisha, whom Caesarius examines as a figure of Christ.29 Sermon 127, Caesarius’s second Elisha sermon, focuses upon the tale of the prophet’s mockery. Elaborating upon his brief excursus on that tale in his earlier discourse about the punishment of sinners by holy and just men (Serm. 40.3–4 [179/1:203]), this sermon’s typological exegesis crystallizes most of the essential aspects of the way 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 would be read throughout the Middle Ages. The sermon opens by citing a slanderous charge the heretical Manicheans made against Elisha’s conduct in the mockery tale: ‘As enemies of God and of their own souls, the exceedingly foul Manichaeans, who not only refuse to accept the writings of the Old Testament, but even presume to blaspheme with raging lips, are wont to say: What great cruelty that was in Eliseus, to cause forty-two boys to be torn to pieces on account of the jesting words of children!’ (Serm. 127.1 [524/2:220]). This charge could not be taken lightly, as it insinuates that the Old Testament God himself was cruel to cause or allow the bears to carry out the prophet’s curse. Caesarius’s response will epitomize Augustine’s figurative method of scriptural exegesis. In Elisha’s time, Caesarius observes, the Judean prophets ‘were even held in derision and disgrace’. Given that the military chiefs of Jehu would brand one of Elisha’s prophetic protegés insane (4/2 Kgs 9.11), he infers that the ‘undisciplined boys’ (pueri indisciplinati) who mocked Elisha did so at their own parents’ instigation (Serm. 127.1 [524/2:220]: parentibus suis instigantibus). Such shifting of blame away from the boys and onto their parents was not new; it accords with the inserted reference to these boys as ‘children of transgression and idleness’ in Theodotion’s Septuagint revision, and is reminiscent of the blame Seneca placed upon parents for the evil that attends youth. Nor was Caesarius the last to blame the iniquity of the Bethel boys on their parents. Sometime during the next several centuries the author of a Latin treatise on miracles in the scriptures would assert that it was not because of the personal insult that Elisha cursed the boys so angrily; rather, ‘by just vengeance he punished the sons of those who, having turned away from the Lord and from the Law of the fathers, sacrificed to idols in Bethel, when, indeed, as it was the custom then, small boys were consecrated to the idols’.30 Much later still, a similar explanation would be given in the marginalia accompanying this tale in the English Bible prepared by the English theologian and reformer John Wycliffe (c. 1330–84) and his associates: [T]hese children weren tau´t and stirid of her fadris and modris, idolatrouris, to scorne the profete of the Lord, and therfor he curside hem, that her fadris and modris schulden be punyschid, and that the children schulden no more be stirid, to the malice of fadris and modris; for he wiste



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Eight centuries before Wycliffe, Caesarius already suggests that the intention behind the punishment of the Bethel boys was to discipline their elders. Unlike Wycliffe, however, he does not ascribe that intention to Elisha. Like Tertullian, he absolves Elisha from responsibility for the bear-mauling. But whereas Tertullian shifted the responsibility by remaining silent about the prophet’s curse and emphasizing the Creator’s inferred role as the dispatcher of the bears, Caesarius whitewashes Elisha by attributing to the Holy Spirit the causative volition behind the bears’ action and portraying the prophet as the passive mediator ‘through’ whom that volition achieved its effect: Therefore, blessed Eliseus grieved over the ruin of the people, or rather the Holy Ghost through blessed Eliseus wanted to check the pride of the Jews, and caused two bears to come and tear to pieces forty-two boys. The reason for this action was so that when their children were struck their elders might be disciplined, and the death of their sons might mean the training of the parents. Then, they might learn at least to fear the prophet they refused to love when he was working miracles. (Serm. 127.1 [524/2:221]) The theological lesson Caesarius derives from the tale is akin to Exodus 20.5b (which he does not cite), where Yahweh describes himself as ‘a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children’. In defending Elisha, Caesarius adds a Christian twist to that lesson, stressing that ‘what happened to those boys is not to be believed the action of his own power but the Holy Ghost working through him [per illum]. This was arranged in great goodness and ineffable mercy, as I said, so that since the Jews refused to believe in God when the prophets preached with humility, they should fear him when inflicting punishment with severity’ (Serm. 127.1 [525/2:221]; cf. Serm. 40.3 [179/1:202–3]). In short, what the Manicheans construed as Elisha’s cruelty is in Caesarius’s view the benevolent desire of the Holy Spirit to reform unfaithful Jews. Caesarius’s sermon assumes a whole new tone and purpose upon his suggestion that the real provocation for the boys’ mauling was ‘the pride of the Jews’. What began as a defence of Elisha against Manichean charges becomes an anti-Jewish diatribe, based upon further figurative gleanings. The Jews, alleges Caesarius, ‘had continued in their evil so long that they wounded themselves with the remedies, and acquired death where they might have obtained salvation’ (Serm. 127.1 [524/2:221]). (The last clause echoes Augustine’s claim about Elisha’s mockers: ‘they perished as children, who



bi God schewinge, that her deth ou´te to come sone aftir his cursing, which he brou´te forth bi the sentence of Goddis ri´tfulnesse.31


would one day have perished in old age.’) In the Jews, Caesarius thus finds ‘fulfilled’ the prophet’s complaint in Jeremiah 2.30: ‘I struck your children’ – as represented by the mauled boys in the Kings tale – but ‘the correction you did not take’ (as paraphrased in Serm. 127.1 [525/2:221]).32 Responding to anyone who might criticize the Old Testament God for punishing boys so violently, Caesarius notes the similar occurrence in the New Testament’s tale of Ananias, who dropped dead after Peter rebuked him for lying to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5.1–6; cited in Serm. 127.1 [525/2:221]; cf. Serm. 40.4 [179/1:203]). Up to this point in the sermon, Caesarius’s blatant anti-Judaism has informed only his comments about Jews in Old Testament times. However, one of his standard exegetical concerns is to search the Old Testament for prefigurations of the Jews’ hostility towards Jesus.33 So in turning his attention to the New Testament’s Passion story, he adapts Augustine’s figurative linkage of Elisha’s mockers with Christ’s scoffers, whom he identifies with the Jews. After asserting that the mocked Elisha was ‘aroused with God’s zeal to correct the people, rather than moved by unwholesome anger, when he permitted the Jewish children [Iudaeorum parvulos] to be torn to pieces’, Caesarius suggests that Christ’s Passion was ‘prefigured’ by this tale. (His use of the term parvuli in the sentence just quoted, and of pueri in the next quoted sentence below, shows that he either was unaware of or ignored Tertullian’s aforementioned distinction between parvulus and puer. Likewise other exegetes after Caesarius would use those terms interchangeably in reference to Elisha’s mockers.) Just as those undisciplined children [pueri illi indisciplinati] shouted to blessed Eliseus: ‘Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head [ascende calve, ascende calve],’ so at the time of the Passion the insane Jews with impious words shouted to Christ the true Eliseus [vero Heliseo Christo]: ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ [crucifige, crucifige] What does ‘Go up, thou bald head,’ mean except: Ascend the cross on the site of Calvary [Ascende crucem in loco Calvariae]? (Serm. 127.2 [525/2:221–2]; cf. Serm. 40.3 [179/1:202]) Here, Caesarius’s Latin word-play draws out the figurative correspondence between the Kings tale and the Crucifixion scene. In adapting Augustine’s linkage of the repetitious chants of the Bethel boys with those Augustine ascribed to the Jews (‘Go up, you baldhead! Go up … !’; ‘Crucify, crucify him!’), Caesarius fits the boys’ imperative, ascende, into the command he imagines the Jews to have shouted at Jesus, Ascende crucem in loco Calvariae (‘Ascend the cross on the site of Calvary’), even though that taunt is not recorded by the Evangelists. This word-play supplements the etymological link already noted by Augustine between calvus and Calvaria.



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Caesarius also finds the punishment of Elisha’s mockers to foreshadow the siege and sack of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, an event that entailed thousands of deaths among Jews by starvation and sword, resulting in the Diaspora. Like Augustine (in City of God, 18.46), Caesarius looks back upon that catastrophe as the Jews’ divinely ordained punishment for the Crucifixion. Furthermore, he calculates, ‘just as under Eliseus forty-two boys were killed, so forty-two years after the Passion of our Lord two bears came, Vespasian and Titus, and besieged Jerusalem’. Elisha’s two bears prefigured (figurabant) Jerusalem’s devastation, in which Caesarius finds ‘fulfilled’ the Hebrew psalmist’s dire prediction concerning the ‘vine’ of Israel: ‘The boar from the forest lays it waste, and the beasts of the field feed upon it’ (Ps. 79.14/80.13; as quoted in Serm. 127.2 [526/2:222]). The particular associations by which Caesarius relates 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 to the Passion and to the Jews’ subsequent misfortunes furnished the paradigm for the Western ecclesiastical interpretation of Elisha’s mockery throughout the Middle Ages. This is not surprising, given the predominance of Augustinian hermeneutics throughout the medieval West, and the exceptional vogue that Caesarius’s sermons enjoyed throughout central Europe from the sixth to the twelfth century, and in ascetical circles from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.34 The same associations, complemented by several others, are rehearsed almost formulaically in glosses on this tale by a long line of biblical commentators from the patristic period up through the twelfth century. Perhaps the earliest such glosses were offered by the influential scholar, theologian, and archbishop St Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) in two of his exegetical works on sacred scriptures.35 Following Augustine and Caesarius, Isidore links the tale typologically with the Passion and its aftermath. Of the associations by which he establishes Elisha as a type of Christ, the following five were also made by Caesarius: first, that the boys who mocked Elisha prefigure the Jews who mocked Christ ‘in childish folly’ (puerili stultitia, a phrase drawn from the allusion to this tale in Augustine’s Against Faustus); second, that the nickname ‘baldhead’ (calvus) portends the ‘site of the Skull’ (Calvaria), just as, third, the taunt ‘go up!’ (ascende) portends Christ’s going up on the Cross (Christus ascensurus erat in crucem); fourth, that the bears prefigure Vespasian and Titus; fifth, that the number of mauled boys matches the number of years from the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, to the sack of Jerusalem. In addition to these five associations, which will serve as core links between Elisha’s mockery and the Passion in later medieval glosses on the tale, Isidore introduces several typological ideas which neither Caesarius nor Augustine drew: that the name Elisha, interpreted as ‘salvation of God’ (salus Dei), links the prophet to God’s son, the Saviour (Salvator); that Bethel, interpreted as ‘house [beth] of God [El]’ (domus Dei, as Jerome, like Origen before him, had translated it36), links Elisha’s heavenly destination to Christ’s Ascension; and





that just as Elisha brought about the boys’ demise by cursing them, so Christ, after his Ascension, cursed the Jews, causing Jerusalem to be destroyed. Together with the five core links, these three associations would become stock features of the glosses by later commentators on that tale. Until the ninth century, Isidore’s comments would be repeatedly cribbed, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, with certain phrasings being copied verbatim, in exegetical works by the bishop Claudius of Turin (d. 827); the Benedictine scholar and abbot Hrabanus Maurus of Fulda (776/84–856); Hrabanus’s pupil, the abbot Walafrid Strabo (c. 808–849); and an all-but-forgotten Benedictine monk of Luxeuil, Angelomus (d. c. 855).37 That the five core links between Elisha’s mockery and the Passion still underlay the typological interpretation of the Kings tale in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is attested in glosses by four commentators from that period: the Benedictine cardinal St Peter Damian (1007–72); the Gregorian abbot Rupert of Deutz (c. 1075–1129); the theologian and mystic Hugh of SaintVictor (late eleventh century–1141); and Honorius of Autun (c. 1080/90–1156), a monk of Regensburg who wrote under the nom de plume Augustodunensis. Most or all of the five links are manifest in each of these authors’ glosses. However, several of the authors, through their own elaborations and innovations, extend the tale’s typological parallelism with the Passion beyond where Caesarius, Isidore, and the ninth-century exegetes left off. For Peter Damian, who overlooks the translation of Elisha as salvus Dei, the character we are to perceive ‘through’ ( per) Elisha in 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 is the ‘Mediator of God and men’.38 Interpreted as domus Dei, Bethel represents ‘the blessedness of heaven’, says Peter, and so the the road on which Elisha ascends to Bethel anticipates not Christ’s ascent on the Cross, but the heavenward Ascension foreseen by Christ when he told his disciples (as quoted by Peter Damian) ‘but now I am going to him who sent me’ (John 16.5). Unlike earlier exegetes, Peter not only associates Elisha’s mockery with the Passion, but blends the two stories together: But while he ascended to Bethel, that is, while he went through the mystery of his most sacred Passion to return to the Father, little boys came out of the city and mocked him [ei], saying: ‘Go up, baldhead, Go up, baldhead [ascende, calve, (etc.)],’ because the Jews, who are in weight of character utterly empty of gravity and wisdom, and that immaturity of the child [illa pueritia parvuli], of whom it is said, ‘the boy accursed for a hundred years,’ led him [eum] by force to the site which is called ‘of the Skull’ [Calvariae], and kindled against him viperish derision and rages of opprobrium. At the opening of this passage, because the verbs ‘ascended’ (ascendit) and ‘went’ (contendit) appear to have the same subject, the images of Elisha’s



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ascent towards Bethel and of Christ’s Passion are invoked as if they were one and the same. Likewise, because Elisha and Christ go unnamed, and because the object of the boys’ mockery, ‘him’ (ei), is not distinguished from ‘him’ (eum) whom the Jews allegedly mocked and led to Calvary, the images of those mocking boys and Jews are barely distinguishable from one another, and even seem conjoined in the metaphor of ‘the boy accursed for a hundred years’, a distorted paraphrase of Isaiah.39 Undoubtedly assuming the calvus– Calvaria linkage to be self-evident, Peter bolsters it with his explanation of the descriptive phrase ‘site of the Skull’ (locus Calvariae). According to him, that place was named for amputated ‘bald heads’ (calvitia, another cognate of calvus) because condemned men were habitually beheaded there.40 Peter also draws an association of his own regarding the location where Elisha was mocked: the specification that his mockers had come ‘out of the city’ (4/2 Kgs 2.23) squares with the Pauline claim that ‘Jesus also suffered outside the gate’ (Heb. 13.12). Peter Damian thus did not shy away from innovating in his exegesis of the Kings tale. Yet his gloss falls in the same tradition as the earlier ones we have considered. He even cribs a metaphor which, having been introduced by Isidore, was also cribbed by Hrabanus, Walafrid, and Angelomus: just as the two bears came ‘out of the woods’ (4/2 Kgs 2.24: de saltu), so their antitypes, Titus and Vespasian, came ‘out of the woods of the gentiles’ (de silvis gentium). Rupert of Deutz, who believed himself to have been endowed with special insight into the scriptures by a series of visions during adolescence,41 proves as innovative as Peter Damian in elaborating upon the core associations by which the earlier exegetes had related the tale of Elisha’s mockery to the Passion and the destruction of Jerusalem. To those links Rupert adds his own suggestion that Jerusalem’s demise was portended not simply by Elisha’s mockery and the boys’ mauling, but by the fact that the whole incident was preceded by Elijah’s ascent to heaven and Elisha’s sojourn in Jericho. For Rupert, those two events prefigure a momentous pair of occurrences prior to the destruction of the Jewish capital: Christ’s Ascension and the crossing over of the apostles to the gentiles. In specifying that Vespasian and Titus came ‘from the city of Rome’ (ab urbe Roma)42 just as the bears came ‘out of the woods’, Rupert avoids re-using the vaguer metaphor from Isidore which other exegetes consistently cribbed: ‘out of the woods of the gentiles’. However, to account for the destruction of Jerusalem he adapts and further alters Peter Damian’s already distorted paraphrase of Isaiah (‘the child accursed for a hundred years’), blending the image of Elisha’s mockers once again with that of Jews tormenting Christ. Jerusalem was destroyed, he writes: because the boys mocked Elisha, because the foolish Jews [stulti Iudaei] and their chiefs, ‘the children of a hundred years’ [pueri centum annorum], for




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Here, even more so than in the earlier glosses, figurative interpretation of Elisha’s mockery becomes an excuse for implicating the Jews in the Passion beyond even the anti-Jewish allegations already present in the Gospels.43 Rupert’s lack of concern about literal canonic accuracy is betrayed by the fact that the acts of cruelty and mockery he says the Jews committed against Christ (spitting, buffeting, robing, crowning, whipping) are attributed by three of the four canonic Gospels not to the Jews but to the soldiers of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, whom he never mentions.44 In calling the Jews ‘foolish’ and associating them with Elisha’s mockers, Rupert echoes Augustine’s suggestion (echoed also by Isidore) that the Jews mocked Christ in ‘childish folly’ just as those boys had mistreated Elisha. But unlike Augustine, and to an even greater degree than Peter Damian, Rupert combines the two biblical stories to slander the Jews further. He does not simply link the boys’ taunt, ‘Go up, you baldhead!’ with the taunt of ‘Ascend the cross!’ which he, following Caesarius, places in the mouths of the Jews. Unlike Caesarius, he also transfers the boys’ taunt to the Jews’ mouths! By Rupert’s time, when the Marcionite and Manichean heresies had been quelled for centuries and the inseparability of the Old and New Testaments was taken for granted, Christians pondering Elisha’s mockery no longer felt it necessary (as Tertullian and Caesarius had done) to defend the prophet or the Old Testament God against insinuations of child abuse. In a lengthy songin-verse on 4/2 Kings, attributed to Hildebert of Lavardin (c. 1056–1133), poet and archbishop of Tours from 1125, Elisha’s cursing of the boys is perfunctorily excused by the narrator’s inference that the prophet deemed their mockery ‘severe’ ( grave).45 None the less, Rupert seems as intent as Caesarius on justifying Elisha’s imprecation. Yet he has no need for Caesarius’s contention that when the curse was uttered, the Holy Spirit was mercifully working ‘through’ Elisha to reform the irreverent Jewish elders. Instead, Rupert suggests that Elisha himself ‘understood their [i.e., the boys’] mockery through a prophetic spirit [ prophetico spiritu] … . He saw them clearly, and understood them, and perceived in them the future children, the wicked children [pueros futuros, pueros malignos]’, that is, those ‘foolish Jews’ who would torment Christ before his Crucifixion (lines 1177–78, 1180–81). Elisha, therefore, cursed the boys ‘not out of wrathful bitterness, but by reason of foresight’.



which reason they are accursed, mocked our Lord, and spat upon him, covered his face, buffeted his ears, put a purple cloak on him, crowned him with thorns, whipped him, and at last said: ‘Go up, baldhead! [Ascende calue] …’ Where? Ascend the cross on the site of the Calvary! [in locum Caluariae, in crucem ascende]. (lines 1170–76)

Whereas the core links between Elisha’s mockery and the Passion are reiterated rather perfunctorily and incompletely in the terse gloss on 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 dubiously ascribed to Hugh of Saint-Victor (d. 1141),46 Honorius adds one new, self-referentially monastic twist in his own, otherwise unoriginal gloss.47 Rehearsing the idea that the Jews, in the manner of Elisha’s mockers, mocked Christ, who ‘for us was scourged, and made bald [decalvato] on the cross on the site of the Skull [in Calvari loco]’, Honorius adds that in ancient times the custom was to remove the hair from those about to be crucified: ‘Indeed, as it is even indicated in the sacred scriptures, “[God’s] sword shall devour flesh, of the blood of the slain and of the captivity, of the bare head [nudati capiti] of the enemies”.’ As quoted by him here, the peculiar Vulgate rendering of Deuteronomy 32:42b–d (whose Hebrew original refers to ‘the long-haired heads of the enemy’ [RSV]!) allows Honorius to infer that captives who were to be sold had their hair removed (decalvabantur), and hence that the tonsure of his own monastic order (tonsura nostra) was prefigured by that harsh judgment of Christ – or, to put it symbolically, by that ‘removal of his hair’ on Calvary which in turn was prefigured by the mockery of ‘baldhead’ Elisha. One last unscriptural assertion which Isidore, Hrabanus, and Angelomus all made, but which Peter Damian, Hugh, and Honorius did not, and Rupert only implies, is that just as Elisha cursed the boys, so Christ cursed the Jews (maledixit Judaeis), thereby dooming Jerusalem. Walafrid goes so far as to identify Christ as the one who ‘sent’ (immisit) the two ‘bears’, Titus and Vespasian, to destroy the Jews.48 Ironically, this interpretation would have supported the use Marcion and Faustus made of this tale, as Christ is now presented as no less fiercely vengeful than the ‘Old Testament God’ from whom those two heretics sought to dissociate Christ.

Medieval popular views One medium through which the typological reading of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 clearly had a popular impact was the Aurora. A metrical Latin summary of most of the Bible, with figurative interpretations derived largely from Isidore, Hrabanus, and other exegetes, the Aurora was finished towards the end of the twelfth century by the French canon and versifier Peter Riga (c. 1140–1209), and for several centuries was recommended by teachers to students, appropriated freely by poets, and used for devotional reading by clerics.49 To 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 Riga devoted 14 lines, which are compressed into the following eight in the extensive redaction of the Aurora produced by Aegidius of Paris during the first decade of the thirteenth century: Ascendat calvus, pueri clamant Helyseo; Sed necat ursus eos, devorat ille simul.




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[Go up, baldhead, the boys shouted at Elisha, / but the one bear killed them, and the other ate them at once. / Justly ‘baldhead’ signifies Christ: the Site of the Skull of course / Is said to be part of the place where Christ perished. / There are two bears: Titus, Vespasian: / This one tore, that one slew, the Jerusalem citizens. / Shouting: Crucify Jesus! Crucify! they are slain, / And the sins of the fathers are visited upon all the descendants.] Although none of these typological connections is new, Aegidius in his last line becomes the first author to apply explicitly the lesson of Exodus 20.5b to the linked tales of Elisha’s mockery and the Passion. The irony is that the Bethel boys, whose sin prefigures that of Christ’s crucifiers, are not ‘fathers’ but sons, 42 of whom do not survive to become fathers. The popular impact of the typological interpretation of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 is further reflected in a sermon preached to crusaders by Roger of Salisbury, a Paris-educated theologian, at some point while he was Bishop of Bath and Wells between 1244 and his death in 1247. The sermon’s text is Matthew 8.23, ‘And [ Jesus] ascended into the ship [ascendente in naviculam]’, a passage whose allusions to travel, ship, and sea are easily brought to bear upon the crusading enterprise. Roger suggests that Christ’s ascent of the Cross, as anticipated by the ascent into the ship, is also prefigured by what the boys yelled at Elisha (Adscende, calve, adscende). Rehearsing the standard identification of Jesus as the ‘true Eliseus’, and of Elisha’s mockers as an adumbration of the ‘crucifying Jews’, he also hints at the usual calvus–calvaria linkage by elaborating innovatively that Jesus upon the cross ‘was shorn [decalvatus] at the front [in parte … anteriori]’: ‘When he lost [amisit] his disciples who were with him, he is said to be shorn of them just as if someone were to lose [amittat] his frontal hair, which made him attractive’.51 The popularization of the typological linkage of Elisha’s mockery with the Passion reaches a climax in the so-called Biblia pauperum (Bible of the poor), whose earliest manuscripts were prepared in southern Germany in the thirteenth century. A widely copied and, later, widely printed compendium of prose and verse passages with scriptural quotations and illustrations linking Old Testament types with New Testament antitypes, the Biblia pauperum connects Elisha’s mockery and the profanation of Noah by Ham (Gen. 9.21–25) with Christ’s Thorn-Crowning (Plate 2), as well as with four other Old Testament



Jure notat calvus Christum: calvaria nempe Dicitur esse loci pars, ubi Christus obit. Ursi sunt illi duo: Titus, Vespasianus: Jerusalem cives hic secat, ille necat. Clamantes: Crucifige Jesum! crucifige! necantur, Et patrum culpas tota propago luit.50

verses on the theme of blasphemy and derision (Ps. 21.8/22.7; Prov. 19.29; Isa. 1.4; Lam. 3.14). Although the Evangelists identify Christ’s crowners as Roman soldiers (Matt. 27.27–9; Mark 15.16–17; John 19.2),52 the Biblia pauperum pointedly implicates the Jews: Elisha, taunted by the boys, ‘signifies Christ, whose own boys (that is, the Jews) mocked him in his crowning and suffering’.53 How deeply ingrained the anti-Jewish association of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 had become in the popular Christian imagination is evidenced in another widely copied, widely translated compendium of scriptural typological connections, the Speculum humanae salvationis (The mirror of man’s salvation), composed probably between 1310 and 1324. In alluding once to Elisha’s mockery, the Speculum’s unknown author employs the tale not as a type of a Passion scene, but as the source of one in a long list of Old Testament images illustrating what Christ might have done to defend himself against the Jews when allegedly arrested by them at Gethsemane. Addressing the Jews, the Speculum assures them that if Jesus had wished, he might have bidden fire and brimstone to rain down upon them as in Sodom and Gomorrah, or summoned the waters of heaven to drown them as he once flooded the entire world, or – following a number of other examples, as worded in the Speculum’s anonymous late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century English translation – ‘he might have rent you with the teeth of ravening bears / As he once did the forty boys mocking Eliseus.’54 There could hardly have been a more devious ploy in anti-Jewish propaganda from Augustine on than the portrayal of Jews as a collective antitype of Elisha’s mockers (with the innuendo that the Jews, like them, had to be fatally punished). By the same token, the harshest conceivable judgment of Elisha’s mockers was to characterize those boys as types of Christ’s mockers. This characterization continued up through the times of Peter Damian and Rupert of Deutz, affecting the way Passion scenes would be imagined in later centuries. By the twelfth century, so deeply were the parallels between the Passion and Elisha’s mockery ingrained in the Christian imagination that images of children began to insinuate themselves into narrative and artistic depictions of the Passion, even as allusions to the Elisha tale became less explicit or were no longer made at all.




3

Abusing the Man of Sorrows Not surprisingly, given Jesus’ uniformly positive statements about children, the Gospels never implicate children in the story of the Passion. Luke 23.27 does not specify whether youngsters were among the ‘great multitude’ that followed Jesus as he was led to Calvary. When the next verse quotes Jesus telling the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ to weep not for him but for themselves and their children, it does not say whether those women’s children were there with them. For a millennium after the Gospels were composed, Christians were manifestly content to imagine the various Passion scenes as involving no children. This was true even though, as M.A. Screech observes, the crowd that taunted Jesus is said to have done so ‘as a cruel child might laugh and taunt for the sheer fun of it’.1 The Greek word used by Matthew and Mark for ‘to mock’, ⑀ ␮␲␣␫´␨␻, means ‘to mock in the sense of to scoff as a child scoffs’ (p. 24). So the fact that its Latin Vulgate rendering (illudo) is the same word the Vulgate uses in 4/2 Kings 2.23 for the mocking of Elisha allows that passage to be linked with Matthew 27.41, which describes the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocking (illudentes) Jesus on the cross.2 This possibility eventually proved too tantalizing not to be exploited, as exemplified by the Cistercian preacher and theologian St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) during the Second Crusade (1146). For Bernard, Christ is identifiable with Elisha because the Crucifixion occurred ‘on the site of the Skull’ (In Calvariae loco), a ‘blessed place’ of ‘Good baldness’ (bona calvities): ‘To that baldness Eliseus ascended … “Ascend, baldhead!” [Ad hanc calvitiem Elisaeus ascendebat … ascende, calve].’3 Christ’s further identification as the ‘baldhead’ and ‘our Eliseus’ seems verified by his own observation, quoted by Bernard (ibid.), that ‘the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Luke 9.58). Elsewhere, meditating upon the Crucifixion site as one of the holy places the



Children of the Passion

Children of the Passion 57

We go out indeed to Mount Calvary where as the true Elisha was mocked by foolish servants [verus Elisaeus ab insensatis pueris irrisus] in order to win eternal joy for his sons, of whom he says, ‘Behold, I and my children [ pueri mei] whom God has given me.’ These are good children [Boni pueri] who, unlike those evil ones [illorum malignantium], heed the exhortation of the Psalmist, ‘Give praise, you children of the Lord [ pueri, Dominum]; praise the name of the Lord.’4 This passage, with its quotations about good children from Isaiah 8.18 (cf. Heb. 2.13) and Psalm 112.1/113.1, owes much to the Augustinian tradition of typological commentary on Elisha’s mockery. The recognition here of Jesus as ‘the true Elisha’ complements Bernard’s acknowledgement elsewhere that the name Elisaeus is interpreted as ‘the Lord’s salvation’ (Salus Domini),5 an insight retraceable to Isidore of Seville. In characterizing Jesus’ mockers as insensati pueri, Bernard plays upon the dual meanings of puer, which can denote either boy or servant.6 He probably draws that phrase from Augustine, who used it to scapegoat the Jews, Jesus’ (falsely) accused crucifiers, as antitypes of Elisha’s mockers. In calling the Bethel boys ‘evil’, Bernard might also seem in accord with Rupert of Deutz, who, as we saw in Chapter 2, compared them to ‘foolish Jews’ and called the Jews ‘wicked children’. What distinguishes Bernard’s remarks is his own silence about the Jews. Bernard was an outspoken condemnor of the persecution of Jews. So when he reinforces the contrast between the good and evil children by invoking Psalm 8.3 (‘Praise is perfected in the mouths of holy infants and suckling babes’7) and Isaiah 1.2 (‘I have raised my children … but they have spurned me’), he makes no typological use of this contrast to set Christians and Jews in moral opposition. Nor, in adding that ‘our bared head [i.e., Jesus] went up himself, ascending his cross’ (Ascendit itaque crucem calvus noster),8 does he acknowledge that such a blending of the cross-bearing image with the Elisha tale results from the tendency among typological exegetes from Augustine and Caesarius on to link the Bethel boys’ taunt, ‘go up, baldhead’, to what those exegetes imagined the Jews might have shouted at Jesus: ‘Ascend the cross on Calvary!’ Aside from his jettisoning of the anti-Jewish agenda that underlay the linkage of Elisha’s mockery with the Passion by earlier exegetes, Bernard’s connection is distinctive because it is not drawn in a formulaic gloss on 4/2 Kings 2.23–24, but is simply woven into a meditation on Calvary. Although Bernard will not be the last author to mention boys as mockers in a Passion account, subsequent authors will do so without alluding to the typological link with Elisha’s mockery. This loss of recognition of the scriptural referent in a descriptive account has been called ‘the transformation of metaphor into narrative’.9



Crusaders, the ‘new knights’, are to guard, Bernard allegorizes:


In a thirteenth-century meditation on the Passion by Pseudo-Bede, the Bethel boys’ derisive exclamation is echoed, albeit with no acknowledgement of the source, in what the mob is said to have shouted once the cross was prepared: Ascende, Jesu, ascende.10 Although no children are mentioned in PseudoBede’s meditation, such is not the case in the Dialogus beatae Mariae et Anselmi de passione Domini (Dialogue of the blessed Mary and Anselm on the Passion of the Lord), a text falsely ascribed to St Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033/34–1109), but now thought to have been composed in the thirteenth century under the influence of Franciscan hagiography.11 In the Dialogus, quoting Luke 23.27, Jesus’ mother portrays to ‘Anselm’ the crowd that converged behind Christ on the Via Dolorosa: ‘And there followed him a great multitude of the people, and of women who bewailed and lamented him.’ Then she observes apocryphally: ‘And boys also followed, throwing mud and stones at him [Sequebantur etiam pueri projicientes lutum et lapides in eum].’12 Like the reference to ‘boys’, this reference to ‘mud and stones’ embellishes the Gospels, which say nothing about anything being cast at Jesus during his Passion. Perhaps derived from Psalm 17.43/18.42 (lutum) and John 8.59 (lapides), the same imagery recurs in another legend of Mary and Jesus from the first half of the thirteenth century, the Vita beate virginis Marie et Salvatoris rhythmica (Versified life of the blessed Virgin Mary and the Saviour). There, however, the ones throwing mud and stones at the Cross Bearer are described only as ‘certain persons’ (quidam) from the large crowd of Jews and soldiers.13 In the Dialogus, Mary’s specification that the culprits were boys allows her further to augment as follows a quotation of Jesus from Luke 23.28–31. (The non-Lukan phrases are italicized.) But, turning to the mothers, my son Jesus said: Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children, who are throwing mud and stones at me, not knowing what they do. For behold the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore …’ For if they do this when the wood is green, that is, in childhood, what will happen when it is dry, that is, in old age?14

The supposition that irreverence in childhood leads to irreverence in old age seems borne out by the presentation of the same Passion event in a later work. Embellishing the image of the ‘flock of people’ who, in the thirteenth-century text Planctus Mariae (The Lament of Mary), are said to have abused the Cross Bearer,15 a Middle-Low German adapter of that text in the early fourteenth century adds that ‘the old and the young, / the wise and the stupid’ (de olden unde de jungen, / de wisen unde de dummen) were among them.16 Here, the participation of ‘the young’ in Jesus’ abuse does not merely anticipate their own irreverence



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in old age, but corresponds to the irreverence of those already ‘old’ who have joined them in tormenting Christ. Another late-medieval German Passion account that mentions puerile mockers and stoners without alluding to Elisha’s mockery is Das Minnebüchlein (The little love book), which is attributed to the Dominican mystic Heinrich Seuse (c. 1295–1366), known in Latin as Suso. Addressing ‘Christ’, the author laments: ‘Because you were condemned by the judge to the shameful death on the Cross … you were then scandalously taken out and mocked, and were pelted under your face with dirt by children [und von den kinden mit horwe under din antlüt geworffen]’.17 Seuse’s reference to ‘children’, like the allusions to ‘boys’ in the Dialogus and to the ‘young’ in the German adaptation of the Planctus Mariae, would not have raised the eyebrows of anyone contemplating the Passion in the late Middle Ages. On the contrary, the appearance of children as mockers and abusers on the Via Dolorosa would have been almost expected. By the time these texts were composed, the typological linkage of the Passion to Elisha’s mockery had become so common that the mere mention of boys tormenting Christ would have implied a parallelism with that Hebrew Bible tale. Let us consider the manifestation of this typology in late-medieval and subsequent iconography, which would have reinforced the parallelism in the popular imagination.

Iconographic reflections before 1450 As exemplified by a miniature in the León Bible (1162) showing a bald-pated Elisha raising his hands to curse a group of jeering boys, some of whom are already being mauled by a pair of bears,18 the image of Elisha mocked is illustrated in a number of extant manuscripts ranging in date from the ninth through to the late fourteenth century, and is also depicted in several medieval works in enamel, fresco, stained glass, and sculpture.19 As Amy Neff observes of this tradition, ‘the formal iconography of the scene is constant despite differing typological juxtapositions and widely separate places of manufacture. No doubt, all ultimately derive from one prototype, probably an early [Byzantine] Bible illustration.’20 As medieval iconography relied upon a Christian scheme to express what another scholar calls ‘the mysterious connection between the facts of the Old and New Testament’,21 the adaptation of Elisha’s mockery as a standard scene in that scheme ensured that the Bethel boys would continue to be linked with Christ’s tormentors and crucifiers. This linkage finds illustration in a Regensburg manuscript of around 1170–80, De laudibus sancte crucis (In praise of the holy cross). A miniature there shows Elisha ascending a slope, but turning to curse the mocking boys, just as the bears pounce upon them.22 Suspended





between prophet and boys, a cross hints at the scene’s Christological import, upon which the text briefly elaborates.23 The association becomes more provocative in late-medieval picture books, especially manuscripts of the Biblia pauperum from the early and mid-fourteenth century. Formally consistent with the picture of Elisha’s mockery in the León Bible, and with the related images of the scene in other Spanish and Mozarabic Bibles, in the late twelfth-century Gumperts Bible, and in the Arsenal Bible (c. 1260),24 the illustrations in the Biblia pauperum typically show a bald, bearded Elisha raising one or two open hands in a gesture of malediction, and gazing at a group of diminutive taunters, labelled pueri, as one or two bears stalk or attack them. As a rule, such a picture is juxtaposed with one of a typologically-related Passion event: Christ’s Trial before Herod, or, more often, his Crowning with Thorns (Plate 2).25 The Crowning, and also Christ’s blindfolding and mockery, are the episodes for which Elisha’s mockery is listed as an Old Testament type in the Pictor in Carmine, a compilation of types and antitypes for artists prepared in England around 1200.26 Manuscripts of the Bible moralisée, an enormous, illustrated biblical commentary produced in France in the thirteenth century, contain paired miniatures that link Elisha’s mockery with the Crucifixion, and the mauling of his mockers with the sack of Jerusalem by Titus and Vespasian (Plate 3).27 Those latter connections stem directly from the Augustinian–Isidoran tradition of exegesis which we discussed in Chapter 2.28 However, as in the textual tradition, the explicit association of the Passion with Elisha’s mockery would gradually disappear from art, to be replaced by an array of more distant, implicit allusions to the tale. Although clusters of soldiers had appeared in Passion illustrations as early as the sixth century,29 the even more crowded, ‘populous Calvary’ emerged only in late medieval literature and art.30 With this development, children for the first time insinuated themselves into the enlarged Passion crowds which authors and artists conjured up. The Pisa Pulpit (1260) by Nicola Pisano may have initiated the representation of a dense crowd of figures around the Cross, many of them ‘superfluous’ in the sense that they cannot be identified as individuals who the Gospels say were present at the event.31 This development allowed for the inclusion of children. On a Crucifixion relief on the Siena Pulpit which Nicola completed by 1268 with his son Giovanni, two infants appear amid the mourning women beside the Cross.32 Strictly speaking, the claim to being the earliest known Passion image with children belongs to this work, and not, as another scholar suggests, to a pair of miniatures on facing pages in the Supplicationes variae, a Genoese manuscript dated 1293.33 But unlike the earlier relief, in which one of the infants may symbolize the birth of the Church out of Crucifixion event, the two miniatures allude typologically to Elisha’s mockery. In the first miniature, five children stand watching Christ bear the Cross, one



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of them pointing at him and clenching a fist, while four others perch in a leafless tree. In the second, two of the children from the first miniature watch Christ ascend the already erect Cross on a ladder, the antitype of Elisha ascending to Bethel.34 The significance of the mocking children in these two images cannot be overstated. As Neff points out, the Jews whom Christian exegetes had defamed as foolish children actually ‘have become children. This is not only a new formal iconography but also a new mode of symbolic expression.’35 The motif of children grouped beneath the Cross recurs in a fresco of the Ascent of the Cross produced in the early fourteenth century by the school of Pietro Cavallini (active 1273–1308) in Sta Maria Donna Regina, Naples.36 This fresco shows four children, one of them pointing up at Christ. Among the picture’s other typological allusions, one may be to Elisha’s baldness: the pulling of Christ’s hair by a tormentor atop the Cross.37 The image of children at the Crucifixion crops up again, somewhat modified, in a panel attributed by some to the Florentine master Giotto (1267/75–1337) or one of his pupils.38 Whereas the former picture shows four children standing amid the crowd below Jesus as he is being nailed to the upright Cross, only two appear in the latter picture, standing off to the side. In both representations, the apocryphal children are situated close to the swooning Mary, another unscriptural image that began flourishing in the second half of the thirteenth century. Interestingly, the swooning not only expresses Mary’s compassionate suffering, but is associated with childbirth: Mary becomes the new Eve, mother to humanity in salvation, and hence mother of the church (Mater Ecclesiae).39 As Gertrud Schiller observed several decades ago, the children in the Naples fresco (and, I would add, those in the Crucifixion images in the Supplicationes and on the panel ascribed to Giotto) find counterparts in later portrayals of the Bearing of the Cross where children represent Elisha’s mockers ‘transferred to the Passion of Christ’.40 However, Schiller, who was neither the first nor the last art historian to identify the Elisha tale as the source for derisive children in medieval Passion art,41 failed to mention that the transference of Elisha’s mockers to the Bearing of the Cross had already occurred in the miniature of that scene in the Supplicationes and the Cavallinesque fresco of the Way of the Cross that accompanies the Ascent of the Cross in Sta Maria Donna Regina.42 The latter fresco shows one boy with arm cocked, ready to throw a stone at Christ, while another boy bends down to pick up a stone. Two different explanations have been offered by art historians for this image of children casting stones at Christ. James Marrow regards it as a typological reference to the stoning of David by Shimei, son of Gera (2 Kgs/2 Sam. 16.5, 13), whereas Neff connects it to the motif in Franciscan lore and iconography of children stoning St Francis of Assisi,43 a motif to be considered in our next chapter. As intriguing as these hypotheses are, I believe that the image of





children stoning Christ can be explained more simply and plausibly as a legacy of the insertion in 4/2 Kings 2.23b in the Lucianic Septuagint recension: ‘and they stoned him’. Both Marrow and Neff affirm the typological connection between Elisha’s mockery and the Passion, but seem unaware of Lucian’s embellished rendering of the Elisha tale, in which the boys stone as well as mock the prophet. Although, as we suggested in Chapter 1, the Lucianic Septuagint was known mainly in Asia Minor, there is no reason not to suspect that the notion of Elisha’s mockers as also stoners became known elsewhere. The idea is even pictorially manifest in a manuscript of the Biblia pauperum dating from around 1450, whose illustration of Elisha’s mockery, juxtaposed with one of the taunting of Christ, shows the boys picking up and throwing stones at the prophet even as they jeer.44 What is the significance of this transference of Elisha’s mockers and stoners to the Passion? While sometimes remotely resembling the children in imperial procession scenes on ancient Roman friezes,45 the children in Passion art crystallize the medieval view of Elisha’s mockery as a prefiguration of Christ’s sufferings. It is as if the Bethel boys, having been typologically linked for centuries with Jesus’ tormentors, now infiltrated the Passion, an event of whose incalculably tragic import such children would have not an inkling. If the Passion, after Adam’s fall, constitutes the most pivotal Christian exposé of human sin (while at the same time being believed to pave the way to redemption through death and resurrection), the presence of children in Passion scenes implies that even such ‘little ones’ are not exempt from indictment by the Cross. In fourteenth century Florence and Siena, artists for the first time elaborated the traditional Cross-bearing scene to include what Robert Koch deems ‘a substantial procession of figures’.46 How casually the figures of boys could be slipped into the scene is evident in two panels from the dismembered Orsini Polyptych produced perhaps in the early 1340s by the Sienese painter Simone Martini (c. 1284–1344), the Road to Calvary and Crucifixion. In the former panel, three children walk just ahead of Christ as part of the procession; of these children, the two who are fully visible glance back to mock and cast stones at him. A half-dozen other children appear amid the crowd beneath the Cross in the Crucifixion: one boy, his hands clasped, gazes up at Christ; a second, with his arm around the first’s back, points toward the swooning Mary; a third child, appearing beside St John, also looks at the Virgin; while, standing behind John, three more boys gaze up at Christ. If Neff is correct in contending that the first three of these six boys seem devout, no devout children appear in the next panel from Simone’s polyptych, the Deposition: there, the only non-adults are two youths playing at the foot of the Cross.47 According to Andrew Martindale, Simone’s inclusion of small children in the Road to Calvary ‘is extremely unusual (though they are normal in the Entry



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into Jerusalem)’.48 The parenthetical clause is correct. Although the accounts of Palm Sunday in the canonic Gospels say nothing of children, the apocryphal Acts of Pilate state that ‘the children of the Hebrews held branches in their hands’ (1.3 [ANT, p. 171]). Accordingly, in Byzantine depictions of the Entry into Jerusalem from as early as the sixth century, children appear in the crowd, and boys scale trees in the background to break off palms to lay in Jesus’ path.49 In western Europe, this motif was dramatized as early as the Carmina Burana (composed c. 1180). Consistent with the Carmina’s image of children (pueri) strewing fronds and garments and lifting olive branches in Jesus’ path,50 later Western pictorial representations of the Entry often show boys scaling the trees. Such children’s enthusiastic veneration contrasts with the irreverent gawking by the boys in the Naples Crucifixion and the disrespectful behaviour in Simone’s Passion scenes. However, contrary to what Martindale has said, children do frequently appear in late medieval Passion depictions,51 sometimes standing by idly, sometimes playing or gawking, or, beginning in the third decade of the fifteenth century, sometimes actively tormenting Jesus. In the Bearing of the Cross (c. 1365–68) by Andrea da Firenze in the Spanish Chapel of Sta Maria Novella, Florence, two children linger among the crowd behind Jesus.52 Three smaller children appear in the same spot in a painting of this scene by the Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo (c. 1399–1482).53 By his time, the motif of children in this scene had made its way north of the Alps, as evidenced by two French miniatures putatively based upon Simone Martini’s rendition. One of them, in the Très Belles Heures de Jean de France, Duc de Berry by Jacquemart de Hesdin (d. after 1413), shows a trio of diminutive stick-wielding figures, presumably children, walking beside Jesus, who stoops beneath the weight of the cross as the crowd presses him forward.54 Another, in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1411–16) by the famed Limbourg brothers, depicts two children walking in front of the Cross Bearer.55 The Très Riches Heures also contains folios showing children among the observers of Jesus’ departure from Pilate’s praetorium, and at the Deposition.56 The introduction of boys into Passion art of late medieval Germany was formally congruent with the established motif of the presence of dwarves with bodies as proportionally small as the bodies of children. For example, a splendidly garbed dwarf figures in the centre of a Middle-Rhenish painting (c. 1400) of Pilate washing his hands as Jesus is led away.57 This dwarf, who stands next to the governor’s throne and holds an oversized sword, dangles his free hand over a small jumping dog. If he resembles the boy with a stick in the Crucifixion on the Aggsbach Altar by Jörg Breu the Elder (c. 1475/80–1537),58 which we shall discuss later, this dwarf’s accompaniment by a dog anticipates the stock motif of children with canine companions in Passion art from the early fifteenth century on. In turn, given how commonplace dogs became in





late medieval Passion literature and art as allusions to those mentioned in Psalm 21/22, which were perceived as ‘types’ of Christ’s tormentors,59 it is easy to see how boys were drawn into that association. An early German example occurs in the Bearing of the Cross by the Master of the Darmstadt Passion altar (c. 1455),60 where a pair of cheerful boys in the procession are mirrored by a pair of cavorting dogs. One of the boys tugs the other by the wrist and gestures towards the two prisoners being marched ahead of Christ. A legacy from Simone and his predecessors, the motif of children on Calvary persists in several Italian frescoes depicting the Crucifixion from the second half of the fourteenth century: one in the Life of Christ ascribed traditionally to Barna da Siena (fl. 1330–50), but now to Lippo Memmi (fl. 1317–50), in the Collegiata, San Gimignano;61 one (c. 1365–68) by Andrea da Firenze,62 adjoining his Bearing of the Cross in the Spanish Chapel; and one (1372–82) by the Veronese painter Altichiero in the Basilica del Santo, Padua.63 In the first, two children appear behind three kneeling soldiers who draw lots for Jesus’ garment near the base of the blood-drenched Cross. Both children face the viewer, their expressions reflecting the opposite extremes of irreverence and reverence displayed by the adult multitude. One child, enraptured by the lot drawing, smiles gleefully. The other, his hand raised, glances up anxiously at the haloed, mounted centurion (the legendary Longinus) who, in a gesture of recognition, points at the Crucified as the Son of God (see Matt. 27.54; Mark 15.39). In Andrea’s depiction, several youths appear among the multitude. The two most prominent stand in the central foreground, their backs to us, conversing at the bloody foot of the Cross; one points to the Crucified, and the other has his arm around his companion, a pose perhaps derived from Simone’s depiction. To the right appear two other youths gazing up at the Crucified. In the left portion of Altichiero’s three-part picture, a small child stands among the onlookers, his wrist grasped by a pregnant woman standing beside a mother who holds a tiny infant. Another child accompanied by a woman stands as an observer beneath the Cross in the centre. On the right, yet another child, like one in the San Gimignano fresco, watches the lot-drawing soldiers. While the presence of children on Calvary in Italian painting is traceable from the thirteenth through to the fifteenth century,64 it was perhaps towards the early fifteenth century that motifs of children made their way into portrayals of Golgotha by northern European artists. This is suggested by the appearance of several children in the ‘Large Calvary’ produced sometime between 1410 and 1440 by a master of Cologne,65 which was possibly derived from a ‘Netherlandish pre-Eyckian tradition now lost’.66 In the Cologne painting, according to Schiller and Friedrich Gorissen, such motifs as the burgher’s wife holding a child by the hand and the beggar with a child at the base of the Cross may have been inspired by Passion plays in which the populace



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participated, with children raising questions and mothers answering as commentators.67 Although this inference may be correct, Schiller is wrong to suggest that the first one of these two motifs was ‘new’; rather, the motif of the woman with child on Golgotha seems derived from the Paduan Crucifixion of Altichiero. New motifs concerning children are introduced in two densely populated German Crucifixions from the first half the fifteenth century: one painting (c. 1430s) by the Master of Veronica, in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne;68 the other by a South German artist, in the Städelsche Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.69 The Cologne painting shows a small child riding on a man’s shoulders in the central foreground (perhaps an allusion to St Christopher), facing the Cross. The Frankfurt picture shows several little children at play among the crowd, the most prominent of whom frolics on a hobby-horse in the foreground. Significantly, this gleeful boy is unaccompanied. As in Italian Passion art, once children begin to be shown in northern Passion art, they often appear free of adult supervision. There are, we have seen, several activities of children in late medieval Passion art. Those of gawking and playing are summed up by a pair of boys in the Vienna Crucifixion (1449) by the Salzburg painter Conrad Laib (fl. c. 1440–60),70 known for his Italianate style. One of the boys has been likened to the child in Altichiero’s Crucifixion.71 Standing on the picture’s left side, his wrist held by a Pharisee, he stares at the Crucified. The other boy wrestles gaily with a dog near the foot of the Cross, between the mourning Mary and a skull. The first of these boys finds an analogue in another, similar Crucifixion painted by Laib eight years later (1457).72 There, in the bottom left, a small child stands with his hand held by a pregnant woman (a borrowing from Altichiero?), staring at the Crucified. In the right foreground, two older boys stand beside two dogs. Pointing to the Crucified, one of the boys casually talks with the other. If such children are thematically akin to Elisha’s mockers, even more to the point are the tiny urchins who figure in the Bearing of the Cross on the Wursach Altar (1437) by the German artist Hans Multscher (c. 1400–67; Plate 4).73 The blunt realism of the picture epitomizes the style for which Multscher is known. Yet the several little boys in the foreground, with minuscule genitalia exposed, two of whom pelt Jesus with stones, embody an unmistakeable allusion to Elisha’s mockers.74 In contrast to what appears to have been the case in ancient Cyprus, which produced numerous cultic limestone figurines of apparently innocuous male children, many of them attired in a short tunic drawn up to expose their genitals,75 exposure of private parts in late medieval Europe was considered symptomatic of depravity and expressive of mockery.76 What is more, the boys’ particular misdeed in Multscher’s painting matches the Lucianic insertion in 4/2 Kings 2.23b, ‘and they stoned him’.





The motif of little scamps stoning Jesus recurs in the rendition of the Way of the Cross in the left half of the many-figured Passion painting, dated 1449, by the so-called Master of the Jünteler Epitaph,77 a work putatively influenced by Multscher. In the right half, which portrays the Crucifixion, other children play beneath the Cross, one of them with a dog, and a woman among the adult spectators holds an infant. An image whose prototype may be traced to Altichiero’s Crucifixion, the woman with infant is so close to the Cross that we are reminded of the Augustinian doctrine that even infants bear that inherent sinfulness for which humans can be redeemed only by the Christ’s death. Yet, as a symbol of innocence, an infant might also counterbalance morally the general spectacle of human wickedness. As the most important iconographic legacy of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24, the inclusion of children in Passion depictions was to persist beyond the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, and on, implying that the child could not be divorced from the notion of the general sinfulness of humanity.

Iconographic reflections after 1450 In Ariès’s view, visual artists of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance hesitated to portray children in any light other than a pleasant one, or as anything other than fully integrated members of society. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, even while the old tradition of depicting the holy childhood of Jesus and of various saints persisted, a lay iconography detached itself but continued portraying children in a generally fawning manner. Anecdotal paintings that present the child with playmates, in a crowd, at school, or serving as apprentice to some craftsman, suggest that ‘children mingled with adults in everyday life’ and that ‘painters were particularly fond of depicting childhood for its graceful or picturesque qualities … and they delighted in stressing the presence of a child in a group or a crowd’.78 Although Ariès writes mainly of secular art, his point seems challenged by the motifs we have considered in late medieval Passion art, as well as by criticisms of his views which we will consider in Chapter 4. Another older motif to be examined in that same chapter is that of a pair of boys, sometimes with stones in hand, looking on as Francis publicly renounces his patrimony. This motif was also inspired by Elisha’s mockery. Like the lay pictures documented by Ariès, the depictions of Christ’s Passion and Francis’s Renunciation that include children naturally stress the mingling of children in adult groups. But unlike the subjects depicted in that new lay tradition, the Passion and Renunciation are hardly everyday life scenes, and the children in them sometimes seem malevolent. Passion motifs involving children were taken up, developed further, and routinized by artists of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Certainly the motif



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of the infant held by a mother, who is often standing with Veronica, and who sometimes has also an older child at her side, remains a stock feature in Crucifixions and depictions of other Passion scenes from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.79 Also, in Passion depictions from the mid-fifteenth century on, children continue to appear as gawkers and voyeurs, even at events preceding the carrying of the cross. In a panel from a mid-fifteenthcentury Alsacian Passion altar now in Karlsruhe,80 a boy has scaled a tree to watch the stripping of Jesus by the mob; this boy, an eager observer of Jesus’ humiliation, seems an ironic foil to the benevolent tree-scaling lads who so often appear in late medieval depictions of the Entry into Jerusalem. In a now lost painting of the Crowning with Thorns by Cornelis Engebrechtsz. of Leiden (1460/65–1527), a child standing beside Jesus points at him,81 while in a Swabian painting of around 1495 a child watches the Crowning from close by, disconcertingly clutching a stick.82 The implicitly threatening potential of this last child seems supported by the Crowning with Thorns from the disassembled Würzburg Altar (c. 1490) by Wolfgang Katzheimer the Elder of Bamberg. In that painting, by virtue of his holding a mean-looking, growling dog, an obnoxiously gesturing boy is marked as one of the ‘dogs’ tormenting the perceived Christ-type at Psalm 21.17/22.16: ‘Yea, dogs are round about me; a company of evildoers encircle me.’83 Of all the Passion events prior to the Cross Bearing, none is more regularly depicted with at least one boy in the picture, and often a barking dog, than the Ecce homo.84 This is perhaps because, scripturally speaking, the exhibition of Jesus by Pilate is the first Passion event to unfold before a large public gathering which children might have been likely to attend. The woodcut of this scene in Albrecht Dürer’s Large Passion (1498–99) shows a small boy holding a sharp-ended stick among the hostile crowd.85 We cannot know if he, any more or less so than the child in the Swabian Crowning with Thorns mentioned above, intends to take a swat at Jesus. Yet both boys with their sticks reflect the inherent human potential for committing the kind of violent, wicked action in which Jesus’ adult persecutors are engaged. Indeed, that same potential is even more manifest in a Swabian Master’s Ecce homo (c. 1450) which shows a stone-throwing boy,86 a figure that recurs in two early sixteenthcentury renditions of the scene: a painting (c. 1515) by the German Jerg Ratgeb (c. 1480–1526),87 and an engraving from six years earlier by the Netherlander Lucas van Leyden (c. 1494–1533).88 A boy appears in each painting of the Ecce homo on wings from three separate altars by Hans Holbein the Elder (c. 1465–1524): one altar in Donaueschingen (c. 1496–98);89 one in Frankfurt (1501);90 and the Kaisheim High Altar (1502), now in Munich.91 In the Donaueschingen and Frankfurt pictures, which are practically identical in format, two stupid-looking little boys – one of whom is thought by some to resemble a portrait of the artist’s own three-year-old son





Ambrosius (b. 1494/5)!92 – occupy analogous foreground positions among the onlookers. Both boys face the stooped Jesus and are accompanied by a sneering adult (in the Frankfurt picture, a Pharisee holding a scroll with pseudoHebraic lettering). Like some of the other onlookers, both boys are muttering with mouths wide open. In the Kaisheim/Munich picture, whose format differs from that of the other two, a small boy stands beneath Jesus, reaching up and almost touching him. Unlike the boys in the first two pictures, this one emulates the derisive gesticulations of the adult spectators, as will the boy in the quite similar Ecce homo from the altar (c. 1520) in the Heilig-Blut-Kirche, Pulkau.93 A comparable spectacle occurs in an Ecce homo of around 1506 by a North Saxon master in the Landesmuseum, Braunschweig.94 Deemed an impressive example of the connection between pictorial art and mystery drama,95 this painting transposes the whole biblical scene from Jerusalem to the marketplace of a north German city. There, standing out from the adult onlookers in the foreground, beneath the praetorium porch on which Jesus and the other prisoners are being displayed, three small boys have come to have fun. Looking up at the prisoners, two of the boys hold their own arms up with wrists crossed, mocking the bound wrists of Jesus and his fellow convicts. If such pictures as this one and those by Dürer, Holbein, and the Master of Pulkau expose humanity as being so depraved that children join in the public ridicule of the world’s redeemer, a kindred exposé is made by a wood relief of the Ecce homo dating from 1520–30 on the Passion altar, known as the ‘Elfenaltar’, of the cathedral of Hildesheim.96 In this portrayal, a man in the jeering crowd attends to a little boy whose hand he holds, and who seems eager to get a glimpse of the displayed Jesus. Yet no depiction of this scene employs a boy’s image more explicitly as a symbol of humanity’s fallen state than the one on the left wing of the Passion altar triptych of Domschatz, Aachen, painted around 1505 by a Cologne master.97 Near the central foreground, away from the adult onlookers, a small boy plays with a monkey. According to one scholar, this boy displays conspicuous symptoms of Down’s syndrome, and this condition, together with his untroubled, idiotic comportment and his literal linkage (by a tether) with the monkey, a stock symbol of Satan, makes the boy a striking antithesis to the stooped Jesus in the background. As anticipated by the two stupid-looking boys in the pictures on the Donaueschingen and Frankfurt altars, this afflicted child seems to symbolize the blindness of human understanding that led to Jesus’ condemnation.98 Children also appear in depictions of the Ecce homo by artists of the early Netherlandish tradition. In a pair of paintings by the Haarlem artist Jan Mostaert (c. 1475–1556), boys loiter before the porch on which Pilate displays Jesus. In the foreground of one rendition,99 two little children are talking, one of them gesticulating towards Jesus, the other holding a stick, while a third,



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larger boy runs towards them carrying a small bow and arrows. A fourth child looks on from the side of the porch. In the other rendition,100 dating from around 1520, two stylishly dressed older boys look at Jesus from an even closer vantage. While it is impossible to determine the emotions of these two youths, one of whom has his back to the viewer, the three children in the foreground of the first painting hardly seem sensitive to the unfolding tragedy. In contrast, explicit disrespect is shown by two boys wrestling with each other beneath the exhibited Jesus in an Ecce homo by Lambert Lombard (1505–66),101 and some children in renditions by other painters seem blatantly derisive. Like the first of the two Mostaert depictions, an Ecce homo (1505–08) by Jan Joest von Kalkar (d. 1519) shows two children conversing beneath the porch. One of them is smiling, and the other, whose arm the first child grasps, waves mockingly at the bloodied, thorn-crowned Jesus.102 A pair of derisive boys is also presented by the Master of Delft in a painting (c. 1510) of Jesus being led down the steps of the town hall to take up the Cross.103 Standing aside from the crowd, this boy leans over a low railing and waves a hand in Jesus’ path. An Ecce homo perhaps by the same artist, who is thought to be of the same generation as Mostaert and Engebrechtsz., shows two boys who seem more interested in the gesticulation of a man in the crowd than in the exhibited Jesus.104 In certain panoramic Netherlandish depictions of the Ecce homo the crowds become so populous that some of the children, like some of the adults, seem unaware of the unfolding event. This is true of several children in the foreground of the large Ecce homo (1510) engraved by Lucas van Leyden,105 one of whom a woman leads by hand near a dog. All these children face away from the exhibited Jesus, and only one, gesturing towards him, seems aware of him. The case is similar with the children, some of them naked, amid the numerous populace in an Ecce homo by the Dutch painter Pieter Aertsen (c. 1508–75).106 Facing outward from the foreground, these children seem patently unaware of the exhibited Jesus on the townhall porch in the distant background. Many more children are interspersed among the dense crowd in an Ecce homo of 1610 by the Flemish painter Pieter Pietersz (1543–1610).107 A mother holds her child up to afford it a view over the crowd. Another mother leads her daughter by the hand to get a closer view. Some boys scale pillars. And a toddler, grasped by his mother, urinates on the ground. What is to be made of these Ecce homo kids? Granted, the children in the Passion paintings by the Delft Master appear ‘where they do not belong, where they disturb, where none pays attention to them’.108 Yet crucial questions remain. Why are the children there at all? Why did the Delft Master and his contemporaries, with no scriptural authority and no remaining typological impetus, believe it appropriate to depict among Jesus’ tormentors, executioners, and unsympathetic spectators, the very creatures whom Jesus specifically blessed?





An art historian’s praise for the portrayals of children in an Ecce homo by Mostaert and in a Crucifixion by one of his contemporaries does nothing to answer these questions.109 Nor is another scholar fully convincing in inferring that the Delft Master included children among the crowds ‘primarily from a desire to fill out the composition evenly and without gaps’.110 The inclusion of boys in late medieval portrayals of the Passion may well accord with the genre, adding to the embellishment of the scenes.111 Yet, as we saw earlier, children were associated with the Passion in a narrative by St Bernard long before the association manifested itself iconographically. And this non-scriptural association still found literary expression in the century preceding the Reformation. In telling how Jesus was led ‘staggering and with great pain and sorrow’ to his death, a fifteenth-century Dutch account states: ‘And the women and children [die kinderen] and many others who ran to see him also mocked him’.112 A postReformation Passion tract from the West Netherlands embellishes further: ‘And the people, indeed even the children in the streets [ja die kijnder vander straten], yelled and cried out in mockery “Wait! Wait! The King is coming!” And then they joined in casting things at Him.’113 In short, it could hardly have been out of formal or stylistic concerns alone that artists pictured children in Passion scenes. Rather, having resulted from the late ancient and medieval exegetical linkage of the Passion with Elisha’s mockery by the boys, the imagined presence of children at the Passion seems to have eventually become a popular idée fixe. This is not to deny that reminders of the association of the Passion with Elisha’s mockery crop up in art after the Middle Ages. No such reminder is evident in the series of Passion scenes depicted by the Master of Schöppingen in the 1450s on the alterpiece of the Pfarrkirche of Schöppingen114 and on the Soester Altar.115 Yet it does not bode well that in each of these similar paintings, one of the several children behind Jesus in the Cross-bearing scene carries a stick. These lads are omens of more certain reminders to come. For example, James Marrow has demonstrated how, in certain Passion portrayals produced in Northern Europe in the early sixteenth century, the image of the trumpet-blowing child embodies a conflation of the motif of Elisha’s mockery by children with the biblical association of mockery and blasphemers with horn-blowing (2 Macc. 15.25; Matt. 6.2) and song (e.g., Lam. 3.14; Job 30.9; Ps. 68.13/69.12).116 In one scene, the connection with Elisha’s mockery is reinforced, as in the Cavallinesque Ascent of the Cross two centuries earlier, by the image of Christ’s hair being yanked, an abuse that will make him baldheaded like Elisha.117 Stone-throwing lads also continue to appear as inherent reminders of the Lucianic embellishment upon 4/2 Kings 2.23b. If the little stone-throwers in the Ways of the Cross by Multscher and the Jünteler Epitaph master seemed like throwbacks to Elisha’s mockers, so do those in several works produced



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toward the end of the fifteenth century and in the early sixteenth century. One is the Bearing of the Cross from the Würzburg Altar by Katzheimer.118 Alluding typologically to both Psalm 21.17/22.16 and 4/2 Kings 2.23, this panel associates Christ’s tormentors with beastliness by pairing among them a dog and a boy: like the dog, the boy sticks out his tongue, and he stoops in an identical posture to gather up stones.119 Another work is the Bearing of the Cross from the Altarpiece of the Passion (1490–1500) in the Church of St Nikolai, Kalkar, Nordrhein-Westfalen.120 Begun by the Netherlandish sculptor Master Arnt (d. 1492), this densely populated bas-relief was completed by the central German sculptor Ludwig Jupan (Meister Loedewich, d. 1538). Here a stonewielding boy, with arm cocked, takes aim at Jesus, while other children appear behind the mounted Pilate, Caiaphas, and a soldier.121 The same motif recurs in the Bearing of the Cross by Hans Holbein the Elder from the Kaisheim/ Munich altar.122 In the foreground, a barefooted boy grasps a stone, preparing to hurl it in Jesus’ direction. Stone-carrying boys appear in other German Bearings of the Cross from the same period,123 and near the central foreground of a painting in Pommersfelden of Christ in the Winepress (c. 1520), by a German master, possibly Jörg Breu.124 There, holding a stick, and lifting his garment to contain stones (as do boys in earlier Italian depictions of Francis’s Renunciation, and in certain Passion scenes by earlier German artists125), a small boy appears in the crowd of men and women jeering at the Christ who, fallen beneath the cruciform beam of the press, already bears the stigmata of the Crucifixion. The representation of Christ as Wine-Treader had evolved in earlier centuries out of the typological association of his sacrificial death with Isaiah 63.1–6: ‘I have trodden the wine press alone …’ (v. 3a). Christ’s portrayal in the Pommersfelden painting reflects the Wine-Treader’s transformation into ‘a eucharistic image of the Passion in the sense of a Man of Sorrows sacrificing his blood and suffering under the sins of mankind’.126 Given his stick, stones, canine companion, and threatening stance toward the Christ figure, the boy in the Pommersfelden painting may be linked to another lad as well: the stick-wielding boy with two dogs who likewise lifts his garment (perhaps to contain stones) near the fallen Jesus in the foreground of the large engraving of the Bearing of the Cross (c. 1475–80) by the Rhenish master Martin Schongauer (1435/50–91).127 The Scenes from the Passion of Christ (1470–71) by Hans Memling (c. 1430/40–94),128 a multi-episode narrative painting which Schongauer may have seen, also includes a boy with dog. Yet Memling’s boy, like the child in a late fifteenth-century Bearing of the Cross by the Swabian artist Bernhardin Strigel (c. 1460–1528),129 is accompanied by a man and walking some distance ahead of the crucifixion procession. Like the depictions of the Via Dolorosa by Dürer and Raphael to be considered below, Schongauer’s engraving is thought to have been influenced by a now





lost Bearing of the Cross by the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck (c. 1395–1441) or an associate, known through some putative copies.130 Two of these show children amid the procession: a pen drawing in Vienna’s Albertina, in which a child is led by an adult spectator;131 and a late fifteenth-century Flemish painting in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, which shows a child walking between two horsemen behind Jesus.132 Numerous impressions were made of Schongauer’s print, which, with the Bearing of the Cross in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, is assumed to have influenced the portrayal of that episode on the Kalkar Altarpiece of the Passion.133 Although scholars also have proposed that the Schongauer print inspired Dürer and Raphael,134 no child appears in Dürer’s renditions of the Bearing of the Cross (1498–1520)135 or in Raphael’s altarpiece, the Madrid Lo Spasimo di Sicilia (c. 1515–16).136 However, Schongauer’s boy accompanied by dogs furnishes the prototype for the same motif in Bearings of the Cross by later artists,137 not to mention the children in the aforementioned Ecce homo by Lucas van Leyden, who had apparently sought with that work to rival the acclaim of Schongauer’s Bearing of the Cross.138 Schongauer’s boy also anticipates the even younger lad without a dog in Dürer’s Ecce homo, and provides the prototype for the stick-holding boys who often appear in subsequent Passion art, sometimes with a dog. Schongauer’s boy, like the lads in some other pictures we have discussed, may betray a desire to join the adult crowd in tormenting the Man of Sorrows. The large Bearing of the Cross is not the only of Schongauer’s Passion works to feature prominently a child. In each of a series of his engravings of the Crowning, the Ecce homo, and the Cross-bearing,139 the last of which is not to be confused with his more famous large Bearing of the Cross, a snub-nosed boy with long, unkempt hair shows up in close proximity to Jesus amid the taunting, sadistic crowd. In the first scene, holding a cudgel in one hand, and with two fingers of the other hand in his mouth, the boy whistles at the seated Jesus. In the second, anticipating the lads in two of Holbein’s Ecce homo renditions, this boy with open mouth stands beneath the praetorium porch, taunting and gesticulating towards the exhausted Jesus. In the third, his Schadenfreude still unsatiated, the boy squeezes against the side of the Cross-bearer, whom he seems ready to prod with the sharp end of his cudgel. This boy finds a counterpart doing the same thing in another depiction of this scene: a panel, modelled closely upon Schongauer’s engraving, from a fifteenth-century Passion altarpiece in Dijon.140 However, no boy appears in Schongauer’s own engraving of Pilate’s hand-washing,141 though the top of Pilate’s throne is adorned by a pair of naked putti, one of whom exposes his genitalia like the boys in Multscher’s Bearing of the Cross. Two particularly apt antitypes of Elisha’s mockers are the hellish boys featured in the central foregrounds of the Bearings of the Cross on the Altar of



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Aggsbach (1501)142 and the Altar of Melk (c. 1502),143 both by the painter Jörg Breu, who specialized in Passion images that emphasize the infernal sadism of Jesus’ tormentors. As in Breu’s other Passion depictions, the adult abusers in these two pictures look freakishly cruel and imbecilic; several of them deride the fallen Jesus by distorting their faces with their hands. The two boys, each standing directly before Jesus, emulate the adults by mocking him face-toface. One boy, his fingers stuffed in mouth, whistles. The other, grotesquely pulling down his own eyelids, steps on a portion of Jesus’ gown and leans towards his face. Additionally, the mysterious figures of a lamenting woman and her small child in the background of the Aggsbach painting may allude to Christ’s warning to the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ of the dire fate that awaits the city’s women and children (see Luke 23.28–29).144 The persistence with which a boy’s presence could be thought suitable on the Via Dolorosa can be illustrated by a legacy of Raphael’s Spasimo. Although there is no child in the Spasimo, the young man who appears behind Simon of Cyrene as the latter helps Jesus carry the cross is replaced by a young turbaned boy in one of the work’s replicas produced within a decade and a half after the Spasimo.145 From the late fifteenth century on through the early decades of the Reformation, the Passion events leading up to and including the Cross-bearing were not the only ones to be depicted with children. A sense of déjà vu is felt if we turn from the Deposition in the Très Riches Heures, which shows two children in the central foreground, to a London painting of before 1484 by the Dutchborn master of the Bruges school, Gerard David (c. 1460–1523),146 which shows two children atop the hill in the central background, overlooking the place where Jesus is being nailed to the Cross. Both pairs of children are seated, and a child in each picture holds a stick. That the one scene marks the commencement of the Crucifixion, and the other, its completion, is reflected by the opposite positions in which the two pairs of children are located in relation to Jesus and the viewer. In the illumination in the Limbourg manuscript, the children have their backs to the viewer and look up at the Corpse as it is being removed from the Cross, whereas in David’s picture they face the viewer, looking down upon the living Jesus who is stretched prostrate on the Cross that still lies horizontally on the ground. Notably, the children in David’s painting are the first spectators on the scene, having presumably hurried ahead of the crowd seen approaching in the background. The London painting is not the first by a northern European artist to present the Nailing to the Cross as something other than an exclusively adult event. No painting implicates a boy more deeply in the violent abuse of Jesus than the painting of the Nailing from the Karlsruhe Passion altar.147 From the centre of that scene a coarse-looking boy in his early teens gazes out at us with a vacuous expression as several equally crude men nail Jesus to the Cross.





In contrast to the children in the London painting by David, this boy is no idle spectator. Holding a gimlet under his right armpit, pressing his right knee and left elbow on the thighs and rib-cage of the bloody, supine Jesus, this young abettor in the Nailing might fittingly personify Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil. Perpetuating another set of motifs from late medieval art, a number of late fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century paintings of the Crucifixion show children near or beneath the Cross, sometimes as gawkers, sometimes as idle bystanders. Indifference toward Christ on the Cross is displayed by the pairs of little children in the staffages of two different altarpieces of the Crucifixion, now in London and Turin, ascribed to the Master of Delft. In the London painting,148 a pair of exotically garbed children casually converse near the foot of the Cross, one dragging a strung bow (a calque from Mostaert’s Ecce homo?). The Turin painting shows two children seated near the foot of the Cross, preoccupied with a couple of dogs,149 much like the child petting the dog in the central foreground of Lucas van Leyden’s engraving of the Crucifixion (1517).150 The motif of puerile indifference culminates in the Crucifixion by Breu from the Aggsbach Altar. In that picture,151 beside the foot of the Cross, a cross-eyed, stupid-looking boy looks lethargically towards us. With a swollen bodily gestalt that may anticipate the affliction of the boy in the Aachen Ecce homo,152 this boy seems a throwback to images in two late medieval works considered earlier. Like the little stoners in Multscher’s Bearing of the Cross, he is disrespectfully half-naked, with genitals exposed. Like the boy in the Frankfurt Crucifixion, he hops over a stick he holds, using it as a hobby-horse. Not incidentally, this last image recurs in another Crucifixion of 1501, on the Schinkelaltar in the Church of Mary, Lübeck,153 and will be contemplated almost 200 years later by the English Puritan preacher and writer John Bunyan as an allegorical ‘comparison’ to human conceit.154 In keeping with the theme of childish indifference, the children in several other Calvary scenes from this period gaze at objects other than Jesus’ body. In a Crucifixion (c. 1470) by the Lower Rhenish painter Derick Baegert,155 a pair of children stand with the women to the left of the Cross, unaware that Jesus is just then being lanced in the side: one child points to the image on Veronica’s veil, while the other gazes at a man who lies drinking on the ground. In Dürer’s unfinished engraving ‘The Great Crucifixion’ (1523),156 a child’s chubby visage appears among the women at the base of the Cross. Like one of the boys in Simone Martini’s Crucifixion two centuries earlier, this child looks off to the side at the Virgin Mary. Amid the multitude in the Delft Master’s Oxford Lamentation,157 a little boy with a stick stands at the feet of the dead Jesus’ body and watches a soldier climb down the ladder from the Cross. This boy, like one of the two children who sit chatting beside the corpse, seems oblivious of the body’s presence.



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Contrasting with these children’s apparent indifference is the banal interest of an open-mouthed, stick-holding, solitary boy who waves rudely at Christ in a Crucifixion from the 1460s by a German painter (der Meister des Münsterer Nikolaustodes).158 Hardly less banal seems the curiosity displayed by some little lads in a Crucifixion of 1495/96 by Rueland Frueauf the Younger (c. 1470/ 75–1545),159 and in another, from around 1517, by a fellow German painter, Ulrich Apt (d. 1532).160 In Frueauf’s painting, to the left of the Cross, a small boy with an adult guardian gawks at the wound being opened in Christ’s side by the centurion’s spear. In Apt’s painting, which presents the scene after the wound has been inflicted, a comparable boy accompanied by a middle-aged man leans forward to stare up at Christ’s bleeding wound. In fact, the curious boy with adult guardian became something of a stock feature of Crucifixions in these two artists’ time. Their more famous countryman Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), having employed the motif similarly in the left foreground of one Crucifixion (c. 1515),161 brings the question of adult corruption of minors to a head in the central foreground of a later rendition (1538),162 with the image of a short, stocky boy whose wrist is gripped by a sinister hunchback at the foot of the Cross. The boy, his mouth open, looks up inquisitively at the man, who gestures towards the Crucified. Despite the persistence of child motifs in Renaissance Passion art, the further artists were removed in time and spirit from the Middle Ages, the less likely they were to know or care about the typology that had originally inspired the inclusion of children in Passion portrayals. Increasingly, children were included not as allusions to Elisha’s mockery but because their presence in Passion scenes had become an artistic convention, and because of the predilection of Renaissance artists for portraying children as integrated members of society. As a result, the crowds leading Jesus to his execution could hardly be imagined without children in their midst. In turn, the use of child motifs in Crucifixions from the late Middle Ages on may help explain the presence of children among the onlookers in portrayals of the torturing of various Christian martyrs – for example, in paintings by Altichiero and his assistant Jacopo Avanzi, and Dosso Dossi (before 1490–1541/2), through Guido Reni (1575–1642) and the Frenchman Laurent de La Hyre (1606–56).163 The increased readiness of artists to portray children as onlookers at public executions is also manifest in the fresco of 1526 by the Sienese painter Sodoma (1477–1549) depicting the beheading of Nicolò di Tuldo,164 one of the ‘death-row’ inmates visited by St Catherine of Siena. In this picture, the small, luridly curious boy who squeezes between the executioner and a soldier for a better look at the bloody severed head is an analogue to any number of gawking boys in Passion art. Other child motifs had become so clichéd in Passion art that a pair of them seem to have been simply transferred to the scene of classical pagan martyrdom in the terracotta relief Phalaris and





the Bull of Perillus (1590/1600) attributed to the Italian artist Giovanni Caccini (1556–1613).165 Here, a mother accompanying a child, and two other children playing with a dog, figure prominently among the crowd watching the unfortunate artist Perillus being stuffed into the body of his own brazen bull to be roasted. The routinization of child motifs culminated during the fourth decade of the sixteenth century, as the popularity of the Bearing of the Cross reached a zenith. ‘Reflecting the growing spirit of Reformation within the Church, and of humanistic interest in the physical world,’ artists began making this scene ‘essentially a landscape subject’.166 This statement by Robert Koch does not apply to the painting of the Cross-bearing (c. 1540–41) by the Haarlem artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574).167 Steeped in an Italian aesthetic earlier in his career, Heemskerck seems to have approached the scene mainly as a study of human figures. Amid the dense crowd depicted, a young, exaggeratedly muscled boy makes an obnoxious gesture towards Christ, in a way reminiscent of several boys in the Ecce homo paintings we discussed earlier. However, Koch’s statement holds true for the sweepingly panoramic, manyfigured paintings of the Cross-bearing produced by Netherlandish artists in Antwerp during 1530s, 1540s, and early 1550s, in which children abound – some in the Crucifixion procession, others as bystanders on its periphery; some accompanied by adults, others not; some running, others walking, standing, or climbing a tree.168 Of these paintings, which are clearly related to one another in style and figuring, let us consider one of the most important, the Princeton Road to Calvary (c. 1535) by the Flemish landscape specialist Herri met de Bles (c. 1510–after 1550).169 This painting, which was ‘well regarded and influential’170 in its time, is not the only version of this scene which Bles painted with children in it.171 Corresponding to this painting are several pen drawings from an anonymous Flemish sketchbook that is still extant.172 These, if produced by Bles, might suggest that he conceived of the painting as a landscape study and added the figures later.173 The procession is modelled after Schongauer’s large Bearing of the Cross, from which several telltale details are retained, including the boy with dog.174 In Bles’s painting, the related drawings, as well as its underdrawing (revealed through infrared reflectography),175 the boy with dog runs alongside the procession, while children appear elsewhere: several not far ahead of the Cross-bearer; one walking with an adult, far ahead; another with an adult, behind the procession; and three climbing a barren tree for a better view. Like the tree-scaling boy in the Karlsruhe Passion, these last children seem an ironic counterpoint to the tree-scaling lads in portrayals of the Entry into Jerusalem, a theme still popular among artists contemporary with Bles. Bles’s painting is assigned a foremost place among interpretations that ‘prepare the way for’ the monumental presentation of the Cross-bearing theme by



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Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525–69).176 Yet to be recognized is that Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary (1564)177 represents the climax of child motifs in Passion art. In contrast to Bles’s Princeton Calvary, in which the crucifixion procession moves across the rugged terrain outside a sprawling, high-walled, fantasized Jerusalem, Bruegel’s painting presents the typical, almost carnivalesque preamble to a public execution on a relatively flat space in sixteenth-century rustic Flanders, involving a teeming mass of Flemish commoners and Spanish mounted soldiers.178 Of the over 500 figures in the picture, many are children, who appear everywhere, quarrelling, fighting, teasing, playing, or hopping across a streamlet. Given that ‘In Bruegel the sacred is completely secularized’,179 and that public executions were not uncommon events in his time and place, this spectacle might seem ironically to support Ariès’s thesis about the integration of children among adult groups in Renaissance depictions of daily life; indeed, the Cross-bearer himself seems almost lost in the dense throng. None the less, Bruegel’s juxtaposition of the realistic contemporary execution scene with the conflicting Gothic image of four holy figures in the foreground prevents the viewer from mistaking the Passion for a drama of everyday life.180 Moreover, intermingling in a crowd whose ‘faces express nothing but listless indifference and fainthearted impotence’,181 the ubiquitous children seem a far cry from the pleasant sort Ariès had in mind; for they seem no less implicated than the adults in the ‘general air of resignation [at] … the inevitability of what is about to occur’.182 Consistent with one of the theological hallmarks of the Reformed doctrine with which he may have sympathized, that is, the uncompromising reaffirmation of the doctrine of original sin, Bruegel’s Calvary depicts human society as a swarm of beings whose inherent fallenness knows no distinctions of age.183 Almost all the figures, children and adults alike, make up the depraved ‘procession’ leading Jesus to his execution. What this sight may reflect, pace Ariès, is that the Lutheran and Calvinist emphasis upon innate human sinfulness must ultimately render age distinctions morally insignificant. As Roger Marijnissen puts it, whenever children appear in Bruegel’s works, they are ‘old-looking’: ‘Absorbed in their games as they are, they do not seem to be having any fun but look more like adults forced to work hard all day long.’184 This blurring of the difference between children and adults is consonant with Bruegel’s didactic painting, Children’s Games (1560),185 which portrays an entire town as a playground full of swarming children, all of them with faces of grown-ups, and some, aping such adult rituals as baptismal and marriage processions.186 A comparable view of human life was later given verbal expression by Jacob Cats (1577–1660), known as vader Cats (Father Cats), the Dutch poet, politician, and espouser of Reformed orthodoxy.187 In his poem Kinder-Spel (1625, Children’s game), Cats wrote: ‘This game, which seems




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Their antick Tricks, fantastick Modes, and way, Shew they like very Boys, and Girls, do play With all the frantick Fopp’ries of this Age; And that in open view, as on a Stage; Our Bearded men, do act like Beardless Boys; Our Women please themselves with childish Toys.189 John Calvin and his followers in Bruegel’s time did not view games and pastimes with such extreme disapproval as would Calvinists in the seventeenth century, when naughty children were depicted in the Dutch theatre as those who preferred to spend their time at play, and regular indulgence in games and amusement was equated with moral abandonment.190 However, seven years before Bruegel painted Children’s Games, and eleven before Bruegel’s Calvary, the German Lutheran Meistersinger Hans Sachs (1494–1576) had portrayed the biblical Cain as someone who would ‘mit den bösen Buben laufen, / Spieln und mit ihn’ schlagn und raufen’ (‘run with wicked lads, to play and smack and brawl with them’) instead of obeying his parents.191 In this view, the children in Bruegel’s Calvary appear as worthy successors of Cain; as Jesus is marched to his execution in their midst, they engage in the same ludic activities mentioned by Sachs. Child motifs certainly did not disappear from Passion art after Bruegel. Two notable examples are afforded by the Swiss-born German engraver Matthäus Merian (1593–1650), a man of fervent Reformist convictions, in his Icones biblicae (1625–27). In the right foreground of Merian’s Ecce homo,192 a man tugs a shirtless boy by the arm to join the crowd gawking at Jesus. In the same spot in Merian’s Cross Bearing,193 a fully clothed boy with uplifted hands tags along amid the crucifixion crew. Whereas the latter boy seems implicated in the sadism of the crucifiers, the boy in the Ecce homo seems not to have arrived on the scene by his own will, but to have been brought by the man tugging him. The same seems true of a shirtless child who is led toward the Cross by a muscular, bare-chested, helmeted Roman soldier in the left foreground of the Crucifixion (1757) by the German-born convert to the Moravian Christian movement of Count von Zinzendorf, John Valentine Haidt (1700–80),194 whose works are among the earliest known paintings produced in Colonial America. Even more clearly innocent is the naked infant held by the sorrowful mother in the bottom left corner of Merian’s picture of the Cross-bearing. This image recalls the mother



meaningless, / Contains a whole world in microcosm. / The world and all its activity / Is only a children’s game.’188 Bunyan would characterize the seventeenth century as a time when adults behaved like irresponsible children at play:

cuddling her infant in Lucas van Leyden’s Crucifixion, and the mother nursing her swaddled infant on the wooden altarpiece of the Crucifixion ascribed to an associate of the Upper Rhenish sculptor Hans Wydytz (active c. 1497–1515).195 All three mothers are seated or kneeling: Lucas’s, in the foreground, with her back to the three distant crosses; the Wydytz associate’s, on the periphery of the assemblage of blessed figures (Virgin Mary, Mary of Magdalene, and so forth); Merian’s, with her back to the Cross Bearer, amid an analogous group lamenting his plight. The mother and child in Passion scenes give us pause to reflect, for this image represents a remarkable contradiction. We have found the motif of a mother holding an infant in a number of Crucifixions by artists from the thirteenth through to the fifteenth century. Yet, among those earlier examples, only Nicola Pisano represented the mothers seated. Like those, the seated or kneeling mothers with infants in these works by Lucas, Wydytz’s associate, and Merian recall disconcertingly the conventional pose of the Madonna and Child. This last image might dovetail, of course, with the already mentioned childbirth associations of the swooning Mary motif. But in suggesting a state of infantile, Christlike innocence (contrary to the doctrine of original sin), the tiny being in its mother’s arms might also furnish a visual moral foil to the overall spectacle of evil and cruelty which such a picture presents. While the images we have discussed in Merian’s Icones biblicae hark back to the children in earlier Passion pictures, the reascription of innocence to childhood during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries influenced the way boys and girls were to figure in illustrations of the Crucifixion in Protestant Bibles and children’s Bibles. In an engraving from a seventeenth-century edition of Luther’s German Bible, the popular Protestant motif of Christ’s triumph over death and the devil is combined with an image of the Crucifixion and of Christ in the winepress.196 The resurrected Christ stands in the winepress, leaning forward beneath its cross-shaped beam as he stabs with his pennon a dragon lying prostrate beside a skeleton. The press stands atop a mound between the people of the old and new churches, as God’s promise of redemption, conveyed through quotations of Zechariah 9.11 and Hebrews 9.14, is addressed to both flocks. The Redeemer’s blood sprays out upon the entire multitude in front of the mound, including several small children. In the bottom portion of the engraving, Christ preaches from a large Bible to a gathering of contemporary people, including three children, one of whom, with a small book in hand, steps towards him. This engraving, as far as its pictured children are concerned, opposes and yet paradoxically fulfils what Bruegel’s Calvary suggested. Just as the ubiquity of children in Bruegel’s picture seemed to indicate that they cannot be exempted from a Reformed vision of the universal depravity of humanity, so their presence in this picture emphasizes their inclusion among that portion





of humanity whom God has predestined for redemption. In showing the one child stepping toward Christ, the picture may imply that children, as exalted by him, will be the first among the Elect to be redeemed. How different the children in this picture are from the stoning, gawking, or idly indifferent children in earlier Passion art! If this picture manifests the ‘new’, more kindly attitude towards children of which Ariès wrote, the same attitude is reflected at an even further stage of development in two engravings of the Crucifixion in a book of Bible stories for children that appeared almost a century and a half later. In the illustration on the title-page of 60 biblische Geschichten des neüen Testaments (Sixty biblical tales of the New Testament), produced in 1779 by Johann Rudolf Schellenberg (1740–1806), three children stand before a picture of the Crucifixion, to which their classically garbed muse directs their attention.197 In contrast to the portrayals of children actually present at the event in late medieval and Renaissance Crucifixions, this picture removes them both spatially and temporally from the site of the Cross. Having occurred in the remote past, the Crucifixion is not an event they directly experience but an image for them to contemplate, as it is meant to be also for Schellenberg’s juvenile readers. In another Crucifixion in Schellenberg’s Bible,198 a little girl appears as an actual observer at the event. But she wears eighteenth-century garb, as do the children on the title-page, one of whom she even resembles in posture and hairstyle. Moreover, she stands on a foreground bluff that is so far from the crosses of Jesus and the two criminals in the background that, for all intents and purposes, she seems to be gazing upon the event as upon a picture. In distancing the pictured juvenile observers from the Cross both spatially and, in the case of the first illustration, temporally, these two engravings in the Schellenberg Bible convey the import of the Crucifixion as a subject for children’s contemplation without compromising the idea of childhood innocence in the way that including them in the actual staffage around the Cross almost inevitably does. None the less, infants and children were not to disappear from Passion art. In particular, the mother-and-child motif was to remain standard. For example, in a bas-relief of the Cross-bearing wrought in 1839 by the Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), a woman leading a child walks ahead of Joseph of Arimathea.199 That the mother-and-child motif could still be employed in Passion depictions towards the end of the nineteenth century was demonstrated by the Hungarian romantic-realist artist Mihály Munkácsy (1846–1900) in two giant paintings, Christ before Pilate (1881)200 and Ecce homo (1895/96).201 The choice of subject for the first painting was influenced by the French scholar and critic Ernest Renan,202 whose Life of Jesus (Vie de Jésus, 1863) had helped popularize a new humanized conception of Christ. However, in depicting amid the crowd in both scenes a woman who holds an infant (and whom, in the Ecce homo, a



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little youngster joins, tugging at her gown), Munkácsy rehearsed a motif that he had used often before, mostly in secular scenes,203 and that we have seen to be centuries-old in Passion art. What is new about the young mother and infant in Munkácsy’s Christ before Pilate, which was esteemed by his contemporaries as one of the greatest masterpieces of modern art,204 is their spatial and thematic centrality. Although she calmly stands in the background of the excited crowd that surrounds Jesus, this mother with her infant occupies the exact centre of the canvas. In one critic’s view, her compassion represents ‘Christianity, just coming into existence’, and her infant signifies ‘the future’.205 This innocent babe thus embodies an optimistic antithesis to the vulgar little hellions who stone Jesus in Multscher’s Bearing of the Cross. From Multscher to Munkácsy the attitude towards children could not have lightened more, even though several little children could still be hauntingly pictured by a nineteenth-century artist as they linger among the crosses in the twilight gloom at the abandoned Crucifixion site, two of them intently examining one of the nails that only recently were removed from Jesus’ flesh.206 As sensed here, the Western imagination could never be safe from descendants of the Elisha’s mockers. Before examining in Chapters 5–7 the literary legacy of the Bethel boys motif from the sixteenth century to the present, let us consider the adaptation of that motif in Christian hagiography, and particularly in the legends and iconography of Francis of Assisi.




4

Hagiographic adaptability From the dawn of the Christian era, the motif of a holy man taunted, physically tormented, or even killed by a pack of boys proved adaptable for literary and artistic use, especially in the Christian hagiographical traditions and their accompanying iconographies. The saints were distinguished from the rest of humanity by their perceived holiness, and many of them, in their aura of difference, were deemed not only eccentric but condemnable by pagan society. Thus the martyrologies from the early persecutions in the Roman Empire tell of St Cassian of Imola (dates uncertain), who fell prey to murderous schoolboys. The earliest extant account is a hymn by the Christian Latin poet Prudentius (348–after 404), who says he once, bowing before Cassian’s tomb, saw a picture of the martyr’s body covered with a thousand wounds, all his parts torn, and his flesh punctured with tiny pricks as countless boys (innumeri pueri) around him were piercing him with little styluses.1 According to Prudentius, this picture conveyed a true, previously recorded story: Cassian, a Christian schoolmaster, refused to sacrifice to idols, and so was turned over to his young students, who beat his head with their wax tablets and stabbed him to death with their iron pens (9.17–93 [2:222/223–226/227]). From Prudentius this tale was picked up by the Gallic bishop St Gregory of Tours (538–94), who included an abridged version in his own book (c. 584–94) on martyrs,2 which became a source for the versions in most subsequent martyrologies leading up to the definitive one issued under Pope Gregory XIII in 1583.3 The stylus-stabbing of Cassian by schoolboys, a mode of torture that recurs in the legend of St Mark, Bishop of Arethusa, Syria (fourth century),4 makes Elisha’s mockery seem genteel in comparison. Yet the implication that the boys were put up to the crime by their elders anticipates the way Procopius, Caesarius, and later commentators blame the elders of Bethel for the irreverence of Elisha’s mockers (see Chapter 2 above). The Christian East and the



Urchins Plaguing Saints

Christian West alike afforded fertile grounds for perpetuating the Bethel boys motif, as in the legends of those outlandish figures, often canonized in the Orthodox tradition, known in Greek as saloi or ‘fools for Christ’s sake’. Let us consider the case of the first and prototypical Eastern holy fool, St Simeon (sixth century), one of whose iconographic emblems is of children pointing at him blowing bubbles.5 According to his Greek life, written in the early seventh century by Leontius, bishop of Neapolis, Cyprus, Simeon lived for 29 years as a hermit in the desert near the Dead Sea, and then went to Emesa, Syria, where he comported himself so outrageously that he was nicknamed ‘the madman’ (salos). Two episodes recall Elisha’s mockery. The first coincides with Simeon’s arrival at Emesa. Running in through the city gate, dragging a dead dog (possibly an allusion to Calvary6) by a rope belt, he is spotted by some boys (˜ ) from a nearby school: ‘At this sight, the boys began to shout: “Aha! This monk is a fool!” And they began to run after him, and they assailed him with slaps to the cheeks.’7 On a later occasion, clairvoyantly aware of a plague impending over Antioch, Simeon greets some schoolboys and their teacher at that city and warns some of them, singled out by God, to flee: ‘But the teacher, making fun of him, struck him with a whip, and incited the boys, who impudently insulted him’ (6.38 [PG, 93:1717/1718A]). Leontius never refers to Elisha’s mockery. Nor does the instigating teacher in the second incident find an analogue in the Kings tale. Yet that teacher’s role supports our earlier point about the narrative use of boys as a type for expressing the hostility of their elders toward holy men. The two episodes from Simeon’s life display interesting consistencies with the Kings tale, especially that tale’s embellished version in the Lucianic recension which Leontius probably read. Elisha’s run-in with the boys and the first of Simeon’s two incidents both occur in transitional contexts: the prophet’s approach to Bethel, the hermit’s entry into Emesa. Both scenes involve catchy verbal insults by the boys: ‘Go up, you baldhead!’ and ‘This monk is a fool!’ The abuse of Simeon in both his incidents is comparable to the stoning by the boys in the Lucianic account of Elisha’s mockery. Although no bears pounce upon Simeon’s insulters, the account of his second incident with schoolboys is followed by a coda reminiscent of the Bethel boys’ fate: ‘The calamity [i.e., the plague] having then come, indeed not one of those survived whom the monk Simeon had greeted, but all died’ (6.38 [PG, 93:1717/1718A]). These examples from Simeon’s life show how readily adaptable the Bethel boys motif could be in eastern Christian hagiography, which presents being mocked and abused by children in the street as standard fare for an Orthodox saint. The adaptability of this motif in western Christendom is reflected in a particular legacy of the Greek text of Barlaam and Ioasaph, which, appearing in Constantinople in the eleventh century, was putatively drawn from the first



Urchins Plaguing Saints 83


Christian version, the Old Georgian Balavariani. In Barlaam and Ioasaph, the pagan king Abenner, father of the Christian-saint-to-be Ioasaph, rebukes the chief satrap of the royal household for having renounced the world’s vanities and become a Christian monk. In doing this, says Abenner, the satrap has made himself ‘the laughing stock of boys’ (´ ´ ).8 This expression is repeated in Voragine’s abridged Latin version of the tale: ‘Look, you have made yourself the butt of children’s jokes [ludum puerorum]!’9 The perpetuation of the Bethel boys motif in the medieval West can be explained by the ‘foolishness’ of certain saints, most notably Francis of Assisi, and also by the predominance of the Augustinian notion of children as born inheritors of Adam’s fallen nature, a doctrine that never took root in the East.10 To be sure, the notion of childish innocence had not wholly dissipated among western Christians. In reacting against the rationalism of the scholastics, Joachim of Fiore reiterated Jesus’ teaching that the things hidden from the wise and intelligent are revealed to children (Matt. 11.25).11 And the Children’s Crusade which originated in northern France and Germany in 1212 is seen as not only a culmination of anti-scholastic, anti-rationalist reactions, but a remarkable manifestation of the elect status of the child in popular piety, combining the myth of the Holy Innocents and Jesus’ blessing of children.12 Overall, none the less, the medieval Western attitude towards children in general and boys in particular appears to have been ambivalent at best. Thus Hrabanus Maurus construes puer allegorically as both Christ, who leads as a child (Isa. 11.6), and the Jews of childish understanding (sensu puerilis): pueri are the innocents who dwell in heaven and the Jews who, like Elisha’s mockers, jeered and were destroyed.13 Accordingly, the frequent appearance of children as innocuous generic figures or symbols of innocence in Italian art of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries coincides with the emergence of the typologically significant bad boy motifs in Passion art, as we saw in our last chapter, and also in Franciscan iconography, as we shall see later in the present chapter.14 As often as not, medieval views of children even seem downright unfriendly. The sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict, which so deeply influenced the spirituality of Western monasticism in later centuries, explains how to reprove boys ( pueri minori aetate). Assuming that they, in the same way as youths (adulescentiores aetate) and certain older persons, tend not to comprehend the gravity of excommunication, the Rule specifies that when they commit wrongs, ‘they should be subjected to severe fasts or checked with sharp strokes so that they may be healed’.15 Yet surely the Benedictines would not have approved of the curse reportedly uttered by the Irish abbot St Féchín (d. 647) when the noise of children hurling on the green beside his cell disturbed him at his devotions: ‘Says Féchín: “I permit you to go and be drowned in the lake, and your souls will be free (to ascend) to heaven.” Then the children went into



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the lake, and they were drowned and they obtained a reward for their souls. Wherefore from them Loch Macraide “Children’s Lake” is (so called) for ever.’16 In this curse by Féchín, which has been likened to Elisha’s curse of the Bethel boys,17 the saint’s apparent assumption that the souls of children are sufficiently innocent to ascend directly to heaven upon death is peculiarly reconciled with his brutal wish that they will drown for having annoyed him. Other medieval sources would have questioned if not denied outright the children’s qualifications for heaven. The surviving corpus of Middle High German texts reflects a belief, like St Augustine’s, that ‘children are pure only because they lack the ability to sin’; in this view, ‘the child is the deficient other of the man’, and so the child’s freedom from sin is ‘relative’.18 Even if deemed sinless, the child was considered unworthy of salvation unless baptismally ‘cleansed’. Reminiscent of the boys and unmarried girls (pueri innuptaeque puellae) whom Virgil pictured among the pathetic crowds swarming the banks of Acheron in Tartarus (Aeneid, 6.307), the souls of unbaptized infants (infanti) are among the throngs of souls whose plaintive sighs the poet of the Inferno (4.30) hears in Limbo. An even harsher vision was conveyed by Dante’s younger contemporary, the Augustinian theologian Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358), who was called ‘torturer of children’ (tortor infantium) for asserting that the souls of dead unbaptized children are condemned to eternal hellfire.19 On a more humorous note, yet still expressing displeasure with children, a thirteenth-century manuscript of the farcical Old French work La riote du monde (The riot of the world) contains the following declaration: I have never cared for children, little, medium-sized, or big [Si n’amai onques petit anfant ne moien ne grant]: the little one is hard to rear and does not let the people sleep at night; the middle-sized one runs down the street and must be kept from horses and carts; the big one battles with father and mother to get rich estates, and he has to be brought back continually from the taverns.20 A harsh reality supported the negative stereotype of boys. Parts of medieval Europe were the habitat of youth groups that shunned the conventions of civilization and behaved in ‘wild’ ways. As Hans Peter Duerr puts it, ‘the youths of the Middle Ages, having turned into demons and animals, used to come out of the wilderness during the time between Christmas and Twelfth Night, pillaging and sometimes raging destructively through the settled areas. These youths were in fact outside normality and the law.’21 In Ireland, as another scholar shows, the violence of socially marginal, hunting and warring youthgangs known as fíana was reflected in the so-called Fenian legend tradition. Stories about fénnidi, the members of those gangs, as in the twelfth-century narrative Macgnimartha Finn (Boyhood deeds of Finn), ‘reflect a dimly visible





social reality, namely, some institutionalized form of extrasocial life’, an ‘outlawry’ on the boundary between wilderness and society, the immaturity of childhood and the responsibilities of settled adult life.22 While belief in the universal inheritance of Adam’s fallen nature remained axiomic in Western medieval anthropology, not every flaw in children was assumed to develop before birth. This point is evidenced in the earliest biography of Francis of Assisi, ‘the most important document concerning St Francis and things Franciscan that we have’.23 Thomas de Celano (c. 1185–1260) opens his First Life of St. Francis (Vita prima S. Francisci, 1228) with a hyperbolically negative portrayal of Francis before conversion, emphasizing the vanity, pride, and wretched habits in which the saint had been steeped from his earliest years by his parents. Inspired by St Augustine’s remorseful ruminations over his own sins of youth, this portrait is blended with a broad polemic against the corruptive upbringing of children in a society that seemed only nominally Christian. For this very evil custom has grown up everywhere among those who are considered Christians in name, and this pernicious teaching has become so established and prescribed, as though by public law, that people seek to educate their children from the cradle on very negligently and dissolutely. For, indeed, when they first begin to speak or stammer, children, just hardly born, are taught by signs and words to do certain wicked and detestable things; and when they come to be weaned, they are forced not only to speak but also to do certain things full of lust and wantonness.24 To support his case, Celano paraphrases the line from Seneca we quoted earlier. ‘Because we have grown up amid the practices of our parents,’ he writes, replacing Seneca’s noun ‘curses’ (execrationes) with ‘practices’ (exercitationes), ‘we therefore pursue all evil things from our childhood on’ (FL, 1 [5–6/229]). The paraphrased line was meant by Seneca as a complaint against the harmful consequences of prayers made to the gods on behalf of children by nurses, mothers, and guardians. Through the indicated noun-substitution, Celano incorporates that complaint into his own indictment of the harmful effects he sees parental habits and teachings having on children in his own ‘Christian’ society. ‘This testimony [by Seneca] is true,’ he continues: for so much the more injurious to their children are the desires of the parents, the more successfully they work out. But when the children have progressed a little in age, they always sink into worse deeds, following their own impulses. For from a corrupt root a corrupt tree will grow, and what has once become wickedly depraved can hardly ever be brought into harmony with the norms of uprightness. But when they begin to enter the portals of



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adolescence [adolescentiae portas], how do you think they will turn out? Then, indeed, tossed about amid every kind of debauchery, they give themselves over completely to shameful practices, in as much as they are permitted to do as they please. For once they have become the slaves of sin by a voluntary servitude, they give over all their members to be instruments of wickedness. (FL, 1 [6/229–30]) While not denying the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, Celano makes it more complex in this passage. Rather than simply to accentuate the notion that children inherit Adam’s sinfulness (as when they are left to ‘following their own impulses’), he emphasizes the sinful influence of parents upon children, much as Christian exegetes blamed the Jewish elders for the misbehaviour of Elisha’s mockers. As we shall see, when Francis confronts members of his society for the first time as ‘an example to all of conversion to God’ (FL, 2 [7/231]), they will victimize him as the boys victimized Elisha. Although the literary transformation of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 was to begin in the narratives of Francis’s life that appeared in the decades after his death, the Middle High German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170–1220) stopped just short of unwittingly employing the Bethel boys motif in his epic poem Parzival, which he composed in the first decade of the thirteenth century – coincidentally around the time of Francis’s conversion in Italy (late 1204/ spring 1205–c. July 1206).25 When the titular hero of Wolfram’s poem, a ‘pure fool’ (reiner Tor) garbed in dunce’s clothing, rides into Nantes for the first time, some small children (diu kindelîn) follow him to King Arthur’s palace.26 Nothing more is said about them. Yet their cameo appearance conveys the primary social ingredient of the Bethel boys motif: the magnetic attraction that a holy or eccentric adult, or in this case a foolishly dressed older youth (Parzival), may hold for a group of children. If, as St Paul suggested, divine wisdom is likely to appear foolish in the eyes of the world (1 Cor. 1.18–29), it seems fitting that one of the most hallowed imitators of Christ who ever lived should be reported to have been abused in a manner reminiscent of Elisha’s mockery. The transformation of the Bethel boys motif in the early tellings of Francis’s life deserves close examination. Although his chief early biographies ‘are undoubtedly of an historical nature despite the use of the term “Legenda”’,27 the motif emerges through their narrative artifice of biblical allusions and allegories.

Pelting the poverello By the end of 1205, few citizens of Assisi would not have heard of the strange, recent change in the personality and behaviour of Francesco Bernardone, then





in his mid-twenties, and his conflict with his father Pietro, a prosperous linen merchant of that Umbrian city. Assisians had known Francis as the epitome of charming, fun-loving, carefree youth. A band of young people had elected him their master of revels (see SL, 7 [134/366–7]),28 a role he cheerily accepted and fulfilled. However, the young man’s reputation as a bon vivant was gradually eclipsed as he metamorphosed into a Christian paragon, or even the alter Christus.29 The crises that precipitated Francis’s metamorphosis into the saintly poverello are well known: his year-long imprisonment in Perugia as a soldier of the defeated Assisian army; his lengthy severe illness after his return home; his prophetic vision commanding him to serve God rather than pursue worldly glory; and his consequent abandonment of his plan to join in a military expedition to Apulia by the pontifical army. These crises marked the beginning of his conversion, a gradual process that entailed such holy acts as serving, embracing, and kissing lepers; giving away his clothes to the poor; and pilgrimaging to Rome. His transformation culminated toward the end of 1205. Obeying the instruction uttered to him by a crucifix in the abandoned and dilapidated church of San Damiano, not far outside Assisi, he resolved to renounce all worldly ties and to repair the church.30 Without taking leave of his parents, with whom he had always dwelled in Assisi, he began sojourning at San Damiano, but only after he one day carried off from his father’s shop some expensive cloth, which he sold in a neighbouring town, together with his own horse, for money to offer the solitary priest of San Damiano. Meanwhile, Pietro Bernardone, incensed upon learning of this seeming profligacy, came out with consorts to San Damiano in the hope of retrieving his son, but Francis evaded him by hiding in an underground refuge near the church. Where and how does the Bethel boys motif enter this story? To be fully appreciated, the bearing of the motif upon Francis’s life must be considered in the context of the immediate reaction of the Assisian citizenry to the public scandal his conversion became. As imagined in the versified biography composed around 1232–34 by Henry d’Avranches (c. 1190–1272), Francis must have become the subject of lively conversation among the malicious idlers and gossip mongers in the piazza of Assisi. From their perspective, nothing but drug-taking, demon possession, or madness could have induced such a young man to forsake family, wealth, chivalric dreams, and worldly pleasures for some unfathomable higher pursuit.31 When he finally came out of hiding and returned to the city, the reaction of the first people he encountered seems to have resembled that which Elisha elicited from the Bethel boys. The earliest account is Celano’s: [B]earing the shield of faith to fight for the Lord, armed with a great confidence, he took the way toward the city; aglow with a divine fire, he began



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to accuse himself severely of laziness and cowardice. When those who knew him [qui noverant eum] saw this, they compared what he was now with what he had been; and they began to revile him miserably. Shouting out that he was mad and demented [insanum ac dementem], they threw the mud of the streets and stones at him. They saw that he was changed from his former ways and greatly worn down by mortification of the flesh, and they therefore set down everything he did to exhaustion and madness [dementiae]. But since a patient man is better than a proud man, the servant of God showed himself deaf to all these things and, neither broken nor changed by any of these injuries, he gave thanks to God for all of them. (FL, 11 [12–13/238]) This passage makes several biblical allusions, beginning ironically with the metaphor of the ‘shield of faith’ (scutum fidei) from Ephesians 6.16. Whereas that chapter of Paul’s epistle began by exorting children to honour and obey their parents (6.1–3), and fathers to raise their children in the instruction and discipline of God (6.4), Francis’s entry into Assisi will conversely climax with his being assailed by his own unchristian father who seeks to divert him from the saintly path. The crowd’s targeting of him with ‘mud of the streets’ (lutum platearum, from Ps. 17.43/18.42) and ‘stones’ (lapides, cf. John 8.59) establishes his rapport with Christlike persecution. As we saw earlier, mud and stones were likewise involved in the abuse of Christ by boys recorded in the Dialogus beatae Mariae et Anselmi. This scene in the First Life thus adumbrates Francis’s eventual desire for martyrdom (FL, 55–6) and his acquisition of Christ’s stigmata (112–14). Given Francis’s affinities with Christ, together with the typological connections drawn by exegetes between Christ’s Passion and Elisha’s mockery, it seems natural that the above-quoted passage from Celano should display parallels with 4/2 Kings 2.23. Both passages present a holy man returning to a city where he is well known (Bethel, Assisi), and who, on his way, is taunted and, according to the Lucianic addition to the Kings tale, stoned. At first glance, there also appear three notable differences between the two passages, but each of these differences must be qualified. First, although Francis’s attackers, like Elisha’s, remain anonymous, Celano describes them not as boys but ‘those who knew him’. How might Celano’s failure to specify boys here be reconciled with 4/2 Kings 2.23–24? As there is no reason to doubt that such an incident actually did befall Francis, it is possible that Celano was simply unaware of any children having participated in the attack, or that he had some didactic reason for implying that the attackers were grown-ups. Perhaps he crafted his account of the attack to conform to his opening polemic against corruptive adult influences upon children. For the medieval reader in the habit of interpreting hagiographical phenomena in





constant conjunction with biblical prefigurations, there could hardly have been a graver moral indictment of society than the image of adult citizens abusing a saintly youth in a manner reminiscent of the mistreatment of God’s prophet by the Bethel boys, especially given the typological association of those boys with Christ’s mockers. Still, the description ‘those who knew him’ does not rule out the possibility that boys were among them. The second seeming difference concerns the question of what prompted the attacks on Elisha and Francis, and of how those two incidents fit within the complete sagas of the two men’s lives. While, as far as the reader of Kings can tell, Elisha’s alleged baldness may alone have attracted the boys’ mockery, Celano hints that a more complex impulse must have governed Francis’s tormentors. Their mockery was triggered not only by the bizarre spectacle Francis embodied as he approached, physically haggard and self-accusing, but by their contrasting ‘what he was now with what he had been’, and by their pre-judgement that such a dramatic change of character betokened madness. None the less, certain textual considerations may justify our questioning whether the motives behind the attack on Francis really do distinguish it from Elisha’s mockery. The latter incident is scripturally recorded only ten lines after Elisha’s reception of Elijah’s mantle (4/2 Kgs 2.13), which signified Elisha’s inheritance of Elijah’s spirit and role as leader of the prophetic guild, ‘the sons of the prophets’ (2.15). According to 4/2 Kings 2.17, the taunting incident could have occurred as few as three or four days after that event. Analogously, Francis’s return to Assisi coincided with his own transformation into the ‘new soldier of Christ’ (FL, 9 [11/236]) and ‘new athlete of Christ’ (FL, 10 [12/237]). So the attack on him serves the same narrative function in the First Life that Elisha’s mockery served in Kings. Each incident demarcates the new status of a holy man, revealing him to be an attractive target for abuse. Readers of 4/2 Kings, which originally constituted a single book with 3/1 Kings, were presumably expected by the book’s Deuteronomistic authors or editors to associate Elisha’s mockery with the same tradition of anti-prophetic hostility that Elijah decried to God on Mount Horeb: ‘the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant … and slain thy prophets’ (3/1 Kgs 19.10). In turn, readers of the First Life might find the Assisians’ attack on Francis reminiscent of 4/2 Kings 2.23. As Caesarius noted about that verse, the association of prophets with madness is not uncommon in the Hebrew Bible. From among Elisha’s own disciples, the young prophet whom he commissions to anoint Jehu is perceived as mad (4/2 Kgs 9.11: insanus; cf. Jer. 29.26; Hos. 9.7).32 The same Vulgate biblical term, insanus, was used to mock Francis in a passage we quoted earlier from the First Life, whose sequel accordingly relates that Pietro considered Francis’s service to Christ to be ‘madness’ (SL, 12 [137/372]: insania). Had the Bethel boys suspected that the ‘baldhead’ approaching them was a prophet and hence insane (as they perhaps did, recognizing him from his



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recent visit to their town in Elijah’s company [4/2 Kgs 2.2–3]), they would have had a particularly strong motive, like Francis’s attackers, to deride him. The third apparent difference between Francis’s assault and Elisha’s mockery is that the saint’s assaulters went unpunished, because there was no miraculous intervention on his behalf. Contrary to Elisha, who cursed his own tormentors in Yahweh’s name, Francis cursed no one, but ‘exposed himself openly to the curses [maledictis] of his persecutors’ (FL, 10 [12/238]). Demonstrating that ‘a patient man is better than a proud man’ (FL, 11 [12/238], quoting Eccles. 7.9/7.8), he ignored his insulters, remained unaltered by the injuries they inflicted upon him, and actually thanked God for those injuries ( pro his omnibus [inuriis] gratias Domino referebat [FL, 11 (13/238)]). Celano reports that the assault continued unabated in the face of this saintly display, which reminds him of a pair of Jesus’ Beatitudes (see Matt. 5.10–12; Luke 6.22–23): ‘In vain does the wicked man persecute one striving after virtue, for the more he is buffeted, the more strongly will he triumph’ (FL, 11 [13/238]). Much as the first two differences between the Elisha tale and its Franciscan analogue dissipated under scrutiny, so does this third difference fail to weaken the linkage between the two episodes. Rather, what reportedly transpired after the attack on Francis suggests a Christian inversion of the brutal punishment of Elisha’s mockers. The noise and shouting of Francis’s abusers echoed throughout the city’s streets, eventually reaching his father’s ears. Whereas Elisha was rescued from his own mockers by a pair of beastly females (although the gender of the she-bears is obfuscated by the Vulgate Bible’s use of the masculine plural ursi for ‘bears’), Francis’s assault by the mob climaxes with his being violently accosted and captured by a beastly, albeit human male. Pietro, upon realizing that the ‘commotion among the citizens’ centres on Francis, hurries to the scene ‘not indeed to free him but rather to destroy him’ (FL, 12 [13/239]). He does not lacerate Francis as a bear might do, but he attacks like a wild beast pouncing on prey, ‘with no regard for moderation’ (nulla moderatione servata): ‘he rushed upon [Francis] like a wolf upon a sheep [tamquam lupus ad ovem], and looking upon him with a fierce and savage countenance [torvo ac truci vultu], he laid hands upon him’ (FL, 12 [13/239]). The comparison of Pietro to a wolf strengthens this scene’s linkage with 4/2 Kings 2.24. In the Hebrew Bible, whose later messianic predictions of a time when the wolf and the lamb will dwell together (Isa. 11.6; 65.25) are violently defied here, the wolf, like the bear, is known for its fierceness (e.g., Gen. 49.27; Hab. 1.8). Other figurative references to wolves (Ezek. 22.27; Zeph. 3.3) seem practically interchangeable with one to a lion or bear (Prov. 28.15), just as Elisha’s bears would apparently seem interchangeable with dogs or lions by the end of the Middle Ages.33 And if a wolf from the desert might be among the predatory beasts God will dispatch against the unfaithful (Jer. 5.6), so





might he have sent bears, had he not been merciful, to vanquish the Egyptians during the plagues (Wisd. of Solomon 11.18/11.17), and so is God himself comparable to a bear lying in wait to tear his victim (Lam. 3.10–11). Biblically speaking, therefore, it was as much like a bear as like a wolf that Pietro next ‘dragged [Francis] shamelessly and disgracefully to his home’. There, as a bear might drag its prey to its lair, ‘without mercy, he shut him up in a dark place for several days, and thinking to bend his spirit to his own will, he first used words and then blows and chains’ (FL, 12 [13/239]). While behaving like the bulls, lions, dogs, and wild oxen that oppress the popularly perceived typos of Christ in Psalm 21/22, Pietro inverts the role of Elisha’s bears by assaulting not the holy man’s attackers but the holy man himself. In illustrating the traditional wisdom that a sinner is as hostile to a godly man as a wolf is to a lamb (Ecclesiasticus [Sirach] 13.21/13.17), the image of the violent father charging upon his saintly son ‘like a wolf upon a sheep’ harks back to the New Testament’s repeated use of wolves to symbolize evil people who threaten God’s faithful (Matt. 10.16; Luke 10.3; Acts 20.29; see also Matt. 7.15; John 10.12). According to Celano, Francis was not deterred by Pietro, ‘For he who is commanded to rejoice [ gaudere] in tribulation cannot swerve from the right intention … or be led away from Christ’s flock, not even by scourgings and chains’ (FL, 12 [13/239]). Anticipated by Celano’s earlier allusion to the Beatitudes, this passage presents Francis as a walking fulfilment of the exhortation to those who suffer revilement and persecution in Jesus’ name: ‘Rejoice [ gaudete] … for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets’ (Matt. 5.12). Celano’s portrayal of Francis is indelibly coloured by the image of the biblical prophets as sufferers of persecution, mockery, and stoning. In emphasizing the mistreatment Francis endured during his conversion, Celano associates him with the prophets’ image as foreshadowers of the persecuted Christ, ‘the Great Prophet’ (SL, 71 [174/423]). The First Life tells of Francis’s ‘spirit of prophecy’ (26–8), and Celano’s Second Life of St. Francis (Vita secunda S. Francisci, completed 1247) offers a lengthy excursus on this theme (27–54), labelling him ‘the prophet of our time’ (54 [164/410]).34 Among the countless quotations from and allusions to the Vulgate that saturate both texts,35 scores of references are made to the Bible’s Latter Prophets, especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The effect is that Celano’s narration of the saint’s life continually resonates with canonic prophetic expressions. After his association with Christ, Francis’s most special linkage in the First Life is with that almost inseparably related tandem duo among the Bible’s Former Prophets and perceived ‘types’ of Christ, Elijah and Elisha, whose opposition to the Baalist culture of their time and place is paralleled by Francis’s renunciation of the unchristian aspects of medieval Italian society. In regularly referring to Francis as ‘man of God’ (vir Dei and homo Dei, both



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phrases from the Vulgate), Celano evokes associations with Elisha, to whom the Bible applies that standard epithet for prophets far more often than to any other figure. These associations begin in the First Life precisely where the dénouement of the episode analogous to Elisha’s mockery also, as we shall see, evokes associations with his succession of Elijah. After Francis’s mother, Pica, releases him from the place where Pietro imprisoned him, Pietro brings him publicly before the city’s bishop, Guido II, to demand that Francis renounce all his possessions into Pietro’s hands (FL, 13–14). Francis gladly does this, and more. As if to mimic the tenth of the 14 Stations of the Cross, he strips himself naked before everyone present and gives his clothes back to his father, thus completing his Renunciation of worldly goods and kinship ties (FL, 14–15; cf. SL, 12). This scene, which ends the episode of Francis’s abuse, not only recalls Elisha’s abandonment of his own parents to follow Elijah (3/1 Kgs 19.20–21) but closes with a reference to Elisha’s succession of Elijah, Jesus’ foreshadower as a messianic figure (see Matt. 16.14; Luke 9.8): just as Elijah claimed Elisha as a disciple by putting his own ‘mantle’ (pallium [3/1 Kgs 19.19; cf. 4/2 Kgs 2.13]) around him, so Guido, admiring Francis’s fervour, embraces and covers him with his own mantle (pallium [FL, 15 (14/241)]). Fittingly, Francis’s first major miracle after founding the Order of Friars Minor will recall the final miracle attributed to Elijah in Kings. Before a group of his dazed brothers, Francis’s soul appears riding in a ‘fiery chariot’ (currus igneus [FL, 47]), a vehicle identical with the one that conveyed Elijah out of the presence of the startled Elisha and up to heaven (4/2 Kgs 2.11).36 But what about the absence of boys in Celano’s account of the attack on Francis? In Celano’s Legenda ad usum chori (c. 1230, Legend for use in choir), a brief summary of the First Life, they are again replaced by ‘citizens’: ‘He was spurned by the citizens, impeded by mud, stones, but, fixing [his] spirit upon God, he rendered himself deaf to all these things.’37 The Second Life, written almost 20 years after the First Life, skips over this scene. In d’Avranches’s Legenda versificata and Julian Speyer’s short Vita S. Francisci (1232–39, Life of St Francis), both of which are based upon the First Life, the episode is recapitulated with no substantial alterations, and again with no reference to boys.38 None the less, the boys would be back.

Pueri mali reduces The image of some anonymous boys of Assisi was to win restitution to the motif in Francis’s lives that was rightfully bequeathed to them by their Bethel prototypes, but from which they had been banished by Celano, d’Avranches, and Speyer. The mysterious reintroduction of boys to the motif begins in several minor liturgical legends based upon the First Life.





While four such legends do not mention the attack on Francis,39 three others do, revising Celano’s account by shifting the timing of the attack within the chronology of events and by specifying that the attackers were boys (pueri). The first to do this is the Legenda liturgica antiqua Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum (1256–60, Primitive liturgical legend of the Order of the Friars Minor) by Humbert of Romans (c. 1194–1277), fifth master general of the Dominican Order. Reordering the chronology in the way suggested by Celano’s Legenda ad usum chori,40 the Legenda liturgica antiqua situates the episode of the attack (from FL, 11) immediately after rather than before the episodes of Francis’s imprisonment by his father (from FL, 12), his liberation by his mother (from FL, 13), and his trial before the bishop (from FL, 14–15). Describing him then as ‘clad only in scanty garments’ (semicinctiis involutus, a phrase from FL, 16 [15/242]), the Legenda liturgica antiqua relates: ‘And the madness of boys went after him with mud and stone as though he were a fool’ (et eum puerorum vesania cum luto et lapide quasi fatuum sequebatur).41 Two other liturgical legends, abridgments of the Legenda liturgica antiqua, retain the revised chronology (albeit without mentioning Francis’s liberation by Pica) and copy almost verbatim the latter Legenda’s description of boys going after Francis ‘with mud and stones as though he were a fool’.42 We cannot know for sure why these three liturgical texts replaced Celano’s ‘citizens’ with ‘boys’ in this episode. Perhaps Brother Humbert heard oral testimony, to which Celano had not been privy, identifying Francis’s attackers as boys. In any case, the phrase ‘as though he were a fool’ in each account suggests that it was considered normal for boys to mock and stone perceived fools. As we shall see, this reintroduction of boys to the episode analogous to Elisha’s mockery was given the imprimatur of St Bonaventure (1221–74), minister general of the Franciscan Order from 1257, in his Minor Life of Saint Francis (Legenda minor S. Francisci). This text is an abridgment, for choir use, of his Major Life (Legenda maior) which he completed by 1263 to fulfil a directive by the order’s general chapter at Narbonne (1260) for a standard life of Francis to replace the entire assemblage of existing legends.43 Drawing extensively upon earlier documents, Bonaventure appropriated countless narrative elements from Celano, including the penchant for associating Francis with Hebrew prophets, especially Elijah and Elisha.44 So it comes as no surprise that Bonaventure, in recounting the incident analogous to Elisha’s mockery, plagiarizes from Celano and Speyer, who himself copied Celano: [Francis] laid aside his fear and left his hiding place, taking the road towards [the city of] Assisi. When the townspeople [cives] saw his haggard looks and the change which had come over him, they thought that he had gone mad, and they threw stones and mud from the streets at him, shouting insults after him as if he were a lunatic [luto platearum et ‘lapidibus impetebant’ et



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tamquam insano et dementi clamosis vocibus insultabant]. But [the servant of the Lord] was deaf to it all and no insult could break or change him. When his father heard the uproar, he immediately rushed after him, determined to crush him, not to protect him. Throwing compassion to the winds, he dragged him home where he tried to persuade him first with words and then with blows, before he finally put him in chains. But that only made Francis more eager … to carry out his plans, as he realized the words of the Gospel, ‘Blessed are those who suffer persecution in the cause of right; the kingdom of heaven is theirs.’45 Here again emerge some basic ingredients of a Christian inversion of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24: the man of God abused by a crowd; the beastly father who comes not to avenge, as did the biblical bears, but to punish the holy man; and the explanatory quotation of Matthew 5.10, which, in the Gospel, is followed by a reference to the persecuted prophets of old (Matt. 5.12). In the Minor Life, these same Celanian linkages of Francis’s assault to Elisha’s mockery are supported with an allusion from the liturgical legends. Whereas the Major Life followed Celano in casting citizens as the Bethel-boy analogues, the Minor Life reassigns ‘children’ that role: [Francis] came out bravely into the open and went into the town, without the slightest fear. When the children [iuvenes: literally ‘youths’] saw his haggard looks, they thought that he was out of his mind and had gone mad. They threw mud from the streets at him, as if he were a half-wit, and shouted after him insultingly. (ch. 1, lesson 6 [AF, p. 657, lines 10–12/SFA, p. 796]) As if replacing ‘citizens’ with ‘children’ or ‘youths’ were not enough to strengthen the allusion to Elisha’s mockery, Bonaventure next has Pietro arrive on the scene ‘raging and “growling”’ (furens et ‘fremens’ [ch. 1, lesson 7 (AF, p. 657, line 2/SFA, p. 796)]),46 like one of Elisha’s bears, not to mention the lion that threatened one of Christ’s other Hebrew-biblical types (rapiens et rugiens [Ps. 21.14/22.13: ‘ravening and roaring’]). In 1266 the general chapter of the Franciscan Order in Paris pronounced Bonaventure’s Major Life, and by extension his Minor Life, the official biography of Francis, decreeing that all previous accounts of the saint’s life were to be destroyed.47 While this decree had a devastating effect on the fate of those earlier documents, including Celano’s, the Minor Life went on to enjoy ‘exceptional success in the domain of hagiographic literature’.48 Therefore Bonaventure’s reference to Francis’s attackers as children has been received as canonic ever since. To be sure, the entire episode of Francis’s abuse, except his capture by Pietro, goes unmentioned in some later thirteenth-century biographies.49 When the event is mentioned in another important account of Francis’s life





compiled from the earliest documents, the saint’s attackers are described in accordance with Celano’s First Life not as boys but as ‘those who already knew him’ (illi qui prius noverant eum).50 None the less, youths mocking and stoning the holy man do figure among the images by which Francis, Elisha, and Christ are associated with one another in the Meditatio pauperis in solitudine (2.2, A poor man’s meditation in solidude), which was written in the early 1280s by an unknown author. In this text, the ‘other angel’ of the Sixth Seal of the Apocalypse, who ascended ‘from the rising of the sun’ (Rev. 7.2), is said to typify Francis. Like Lot in the Vulgate rendering of Genesis 13.11 (recessit ab oriente), the poverello ‘“leaves the Orient” freely to devote himself to God, rejecting all the riches of the world. For Francis is Elisha himself over whom the “double-spirit” of Elijah “came to rest” [4/2 Kgs 2.9]; and “who went up” from the rising of the sun “to Bethel” [4/2 Kgs 2.23], that is, into the Order of the Friars Minor, which truly is the home of God.’51 Mocked by the boys, Elisha’s baldness typifies Christ’s ‘poverty’ on Calvary, and hence pertains also to Francis: Truly he too is ‘bald,’ he too is without hair, he too is denuded of all things of the world, because, literally, at the beginning of the conversion of blessed Francis youths mocked him not only with words but even ‘throwing mud of the street and stones,’ as is written in his Legend.52 According to the Meditatio, it was because these ‘boys of worldly sense’ (pueri sensibus) typify the ‘earthly, animal, and diabolic’ wisdom spoken of in James 3.15 that the bears came and tore 42 of them, the number of the power of the beast, which is bestowed with ‘a mouth speaking blasphemy’ (see Rev. 13.5). As he ‘truly is bald [calvus]’, in the sense of having renounced the world and embraced Christ’s poverty, Francis came especially to call [us] to ‘weeping and baldness and girding with sackcloth’ [Isa. 22.12] … who took for himelf ‘a rope instead of a girdle,’ ‘baldness instead of coiffeured hair,’ and assumed ‘a hair-shirt instead of clothing with decorated bands’ [Isa. 3.24].53 Only rarely accompanied by these other associations, the bad boys motif from Franciscan hagiography has persisted in his modern biographies (to be discussed in Chapter 7), and was also perpetuated in early Franciscan iconography.

Pictorial representations Although Francis’s abuse in the street upon his return to Assisi from San Damiano is not among the scenes included in the major illustrations of his



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legend that were painted during the first several centuries after he lived, the bad boys motif survived in portrayals of his Renunciation, one of the standard scenes in pictorial cycles representing his life.54 Alastair Smart finds the ‘essential iconography’ of this scene established on the altarpiece of the Bardi Chapel of St Francis, in Santa Croce, Florence – the so-called Bardi Saint Francis Master Dossal (1240–50) – and in a severely damaged fresco in the Lower Church of San Francesco, Assisi,55 a work some authorities believe was painted two decades later. The composition of both pictures divides into two groups of figures. In the Bardi Dossal depiction, Pica and Pietro stand on one side facing their haloed son who, having stripped himself and cast his garments to the ground, stands naked on the other side, flanked by the seated Bishop Guido, in whose mantle he is partially draped. Except for another cleric beside the bishop, no other figures are present. In the Assisi Lower Church picture, whose right side is destroyed, Francis stands naked in the foreground, gazing heavenward. Behind him stand the bishop, embracing him with the mantle, and a group of onlookers. Pietro, who does not appear on the surviving portion of the fresco, must have been pictured on the side that has perished. We cannot know whether other citizens were pictured with him. But if we knew for sure that this fresco, like the Bardi Dossal, was painted before Bonaventure’s two legends were disseminated as Francis’s official biography (with its reinstatement of bad boys in the episode of the saint’s abuse), then we might surmise that no children were pictured on that damaged extant side. We notice a striking development when we turn to the Renunciation in the Legend of St Francis cycle (c. 1300), traditionally though debatably attributed to Giotto (1267/75–1337), in the Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi.56 This version of the scene elaborates upon the bifurcated form inherited from the established iconographic tradition. A wrathful Pietro appears to the left of centre, as in the Dossal picture, but Pica is absent. He is being physically restrained from striking Francis, whose abandoned clothes he has picked up and holds draped over his left arm. The naked Francis stands before him, to the right of centre, as in the Dossal picture, and prays heavenward, covered only from waist to shins by the mantle held by Guido. Unlike the Dossal picture, but like the fresco in Assisi’s Lower Church, this fresco shows a crowd of onlookers, including Pietro’s restrainer. And with them stand two boys.57 At first glance, these boys might seem innocuous. In the Upper Church fresco, one of the boys gravely stares and gestures towards Francis, while the other, with equal seriousness, watches the first child’s face as if to gauge its reaction. It is ironic that their faces lend themselves to stylistic comparison with types repeated by the Italian painter Pacino di Bonaguida (fl. c. 1302–40) in his portrayals of the Christ child and other youthful figures,58 because these boys in the Assisi fresco are by no means little innocents. Employing their





outer garments as containers for stones,59 they embody a sinister reference to Bonaventure’s account of the earlier mockery and stoning of Francis by children. Two boys are also present in the Renunciation in the Francis cycle frescoed by Giotto and his assistants in the Bardi Chapel (c. 1315–20, Plate 5). Although the Assisi Renunciation clearly furnished the basic model for this version, the latter makes more explicit the boys’ bad intentions and their association with irreverence and violent mischief.60 The adult onlookers are clustered on either side of the conflicting central protagonists (Pietro, Francis), and the boys, now separated, stand on opposite peripheries of the two groups. Both boys, like their counterparts in the San Francesco Upper Church fresco, are equipped with stones: one boy holds a bag presumably filled with them, while the other is presumably using his own tunic as a receptacle for some. However, unlike the boys in the Upper Church fresco, the one on the left side of the Bardi Chapel fresco grips a large, visible stone in his right hand and tries to cast it at Francis. But he, like the lad on the opposite side of the lunette, is restrained by an adult pulling his hair, just as Pietro is prevented by several citizens from lunging at Francis. As Amy Neff notes, the carefully dressed, curly hair of the two boys in this fresco harks back to the image drawn from Isaiah in the Meditatio pauperis, ‘baldness instead of coiffeured hair’, whereas the adults restraining them are, in Neff’s words, ‘spiritually bald, a tonsured monk and a woman whose head is covered by a simple veil’.61 Still, the boy on the left has an even more immediate symbolic referent: clutching his bag of stones in the left hand while trying to cast one with the right, he seems a dwarfish parody of Pietro, who clutches his own garment with his left hand while trying to strike Francis with the right. This parodic implication, which would seem to support Celano’s tirade on the corruption of children by their elders, is lost in the Allegory of Poverty (c. 1317–35) in Assisi’s Lower Church.62 As Francis and Lady Poverty are having their hands joined in marriage by Christ in the fresco’s centre, they are harassed by two boys in the lower foreground: one, on the right, jabs at the Lady with a rod, while the other, on the left, prepares to cast a stone. Although the latter boy seems modelled after the boy on the left in the Bardi Chapel Renunciation,63 the Allegory shows no corrupt adult in an analogous pose. Nor is the parodic implication of the Bardi Chapel Renunciation adapted in the rendition of that scene painted in the 1330s by Giotto’s pupil Taddeo Gaddi (d. 1366) for the sacristy of Santa Croce, Florence.64 In condensing Giotto’s Bardi scene, Taddeo’s panel retains the two stoning boys on either side, but presents each in a posture different from Pietro’s. None the less, Giotto’s parodic idea does seem to have been noted by Benozzo Gozzoli (c. 1420–97), whose own Life of St Francis cycle (1452) in San



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Francesco, Montefalco includes a portrayal of the Renunciation.65 Unlike the Bardi Chapel depiction, but like the one in the San Francesco Upper Church, Benozzo’s situates the two boys together on the bottom left of the bifurcated composition. But like the Bardi Chapel portrayal, the Montefalco fresco depicts one of the boys – who reaches with his right hand into his garment, which he holds with his left, to grab a stone – in a posture matching that of Pietro, who, much as in the Bardi Chapel fresco, clutches his own garment with his left hand while preparing with his right to lash Francis. The early iconography of the Renunciation, from the Bardi Dossal through the frescoes in Assisi’s Upper Church, in the Bardi Chapel, and at Montefalco, supports an observation by Rona Goffen. Whereas the early representation of the Francis legend on the Bardi Dossal depends upon Celano’s accounts ‘not only for the events depicted but, perhaps more importantly, for the way in which those events are interpreted’, Giotto’s frescoes – like those in Assisi’s Upper Church, we might add – rely on Bonaventure’s two Lives, which had not been written when the Bardi Dossal was painted.66 Reflecting the crisis between the Spiritual and Conventual factions in the early Franciscan Order, the juxtaposition of the Bardi Dossal with Giotto’s murals in the same Florentine chapel represents for Goffen ‘the visualized confrontation between the Spiritual Francis of Celano and the Conventual Francis of Bonaventure’. The two cycles together ‘constitute a truncated history of the Order of Friars Minor and of their changing interpretation of their founder’s life and personality’ (p. 29). This ‘changing interpretation’, as we have seen, entailed reinstating bad boys, the typological descendants of the Bethel boys, to an episode from Francis’s life that Celano had implicitly associated with the tale of Elisha’s mockery. The boys’ reinstatement first occurred in the liturgical legends of Francis, then was made official in Bonaventure’s two legends, and later was reflected in the frescos of the Renunciation in Assisi’s Upper Church, the Bardi Chapel, and Montefalco’s Franciscan Church.

Modifying Ariès through Voragine The adaptation of the Bethel boys motif in Franciscan hagiography and iconography invites us to reconsider Ariès’s thesis that the absence of lifelike representations of children in pictorial art throughout most of the Middle Ages suggests that ‘childhood’ had no place in the medieval world. According to Ariès, only in about the thirteenth century do several types of children begin to appear that approximate the modern concept of childhood: the angelic being; the holy child, such as the Infant Jesus and the Infant Notre Dame; and the symbol of the soul as a naked child. Images of children were limited to such expressions of an inchoate ‘sentimental realism’, even when





portrayals of the Virgin and Child ‘changed in character and became more and more profane: the picture of a scene from everyday life’.67 Ariès’s surmise that the idea of childhood did not exist in the Middle Ages and that children then were viewed simply as diminutive adults is often criticized.68 As Ilene Forsyth shows, he seems to have overlooked numerous examples from the art of the Carolingian, Ottomanian, and Romanesque periods in which children are portrayed with a dramatic, even poignant wit and understanding that reflect ‘a particular awareness of this phase of life and a keen rapport with its special qualities’.69 His thesis also does not stand up to the fact that already by the late Middle Ages the deferral of privileges of the Jewish bar mitzvah to the age of 13 and the delay of Christian oblation to the age of 12 or 14 expressed an attitude that ‘membership in a religious community filled with rules and difficult regimens should be undertaken only by a person of sufficient maturity’.70 Moreover, the implication that boys, whether by their inherent nature or because of corruptive adult influences, might be prone to taunt a saint, did not prove unique to Franciscan hagiography. In his renowned compendium (1260–80) of saintly legends, the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine omits the scene analogous to Elisha’s mockery from his retelling of Celano’s accounts of Francis’s life.71 However, in his legend on the apostle John, Jacobus relates an anecdote which he acknowledges having derived from the Conferences (Collationes, 419–29 CE) of the monk John Cassian (c. 360–432/35). According to Jacobus, someone gave the apostle a partridge, which the apostle proceeded gently to hold and stroke. Seeing this, a boy [adolescens] laughed and called to his companions: ‘Come and watch this old man playing with a little bird like a child!’ The saint, knowing by the spirit what was going on, called him and asked what it was that the youngster held in his hand. The boy [ juvenis] said that it was a bow, and John asked what he did with it. The answer was: ‘We shoot birds and animals!’ Then the lad [juvenis] stretched his bow and held it taut in his hand, but when the apostle said nothing, he loosened it. John asked him why he loosened the bowstring, and he replied: ‘Because if you keep it stretched too long, it gets too weak to shoot the arrows.’ So John told him: ‘That’s how it is with human fragility: we would have less strength for contemplation if we never relaxed and refused to give in now and then to our own weakness.’72 This anecdote, while not alluding to the tale of Elisha’s mockery, betrays a comparably pessimistic view of boys. The main boy in the anecdote, in summoning his pals, clearly expects them to join him in laughing at the holy man’s eccentric activity. The unexpected twist is that the apostle John, unlike



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Elisha, is tipped off ‘by the spirit’ and hence able to avoid mockery by evoking the incident as a means to teach the boy a moral lesson. As rehearsed by Jacobus, the same anecdote has been altered since its recording by Cassian over 800 years earlier, not to mention the very different version of the partridge motif found in an eleventh-century Greek manuscript of the apocryphal Acts of John (second century?).73 In Cassian’s version, the person who sees the apostle with the partridge is apparently not so young as the adolescens of Jacobus’s account, but is instead ‘a certain philosopher’ (philosophus quidam), albeit an older lad or ‘young man’ (iuuenis), dressed as a hunter and carrying a bow. This person neither laughs at John nor summons any companions, but asks him why such an illustrious man as he would spend time petting a partridge. John replies by moralizing, appealing to the bow metaphor, about everyone’s need for occasional spiritual repose.74 The replacement of the innocently curious young philosopher by the disrespectfully laughing boy in Jacobus’s version of Cassian’s anecdote is analogous to the reinstatement of bad boys to the episode of Francis’s public abuse in the aforementioned liturgical legends and Minor Life. Neither one of these revisions could have been arbitrary. Like Bonaventure and the authors of the liturgical legends, Jacobus perpetuated a stock notion of boys as sacrilegious creatures ever ready to deride a holy man or anyone else who might seem funny or eccentric. As we shall see, this notion has never gone away.



Urchins Plaguing Saints

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If Ariès is at all correct in his account of the evolution of the modern, sympathetic idea of childhood, which he does not find fully developed until the eighteenth century, there are two complicating facts he does not take into adequate account. First, the old, Augustinian wariness towards children never disappeared. It persisted as a competing attitude, as reflected in the popularity of the tale of Elisha’s mockery and the Bethel boys motif among moralists and literary artists from the sixteenth century on. Ariès acknowledges a ‘continuance of the archaic attitude to childhood’ up to the time of Molière, qualifying only that ‘this survival, for all that it was stubborn, was precarious’. However, the ‘archaic attitude’ Ariès has in mind is not the Augustinian view of children as wicked, but the view of them as constituting part of ‘adult society’, and the notion that any ‘infant who was too fragile as yet to take part in the life of adults simply “did not count” ’.1 Second, the particular span of time through which Ariès traces the modern ‘discovery of childhood’ encompasses the Age of Reform, whose dominating theologies re-emphasized the old doctrine of original sin and thereby reaffirmed the assumption that children are innately depraved. For this reason, before we examine the emergence of the pícaro in sixteenth-century Spanish literature and the related perpetuation of the Bethel boys motif in literature from Cervantes and Shakespeare on, let us consider how the tale of Elisha’s mockery fared in the early sixteenth century under the scrutiny of the period’s leading Christian humanist, and of that one-time Augustinian friar credited with having initiated the Protestant Reformation.

Reformation readings of Elisha’s mockery In September 1515, two years and a month before Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenberg, there appeared in Strasbourg an edition of Desiderus Erasmus’ Lucubrationes which included the author’s first 102 10.1057/9780230599758 - Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art, Eric Ziolkowski


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work of biblical exegesis, a mainly tropological Exposition of Psalm 1. Although the tale of Elisha’s mockery may seem to illustrate the theme of the mad laughing at the mad in Erasmus’ earlier and most famous work, the Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium seu laus stultitiae, 1509),2 only in this oft-reprinted Exposition does Erasmus allude to that tale. Psalm 1’s Vulgate Latin version opens by characterizing the blessed man as one who ‘has not sat on the plague-seat’ (in cathedra pestilentiae non sedit). Erasmus finds this expression to refer to persons whose conscience has been so thoroughly corrupted through association with sinful company that, in their madness, ‘they are not afraid to scoff at the Holy Scriptures’, or ‘to inveigh scornfully against the simplicity of pious men’, or ‘to insult Christ and to voice impious and heretical ideas’.3 No master of Hebrew, Erasmus appeals to Jerome to confirm that this reading squares with the phrase used in the original Hebrew, (Ps. 1.1b), meaning ‘on the seat of the mockers’, which Jerome likened to the prophet’s boast of not sitting ‘in the council of scoffers’ (Jer. 15.17).4 Linking this last passage with 4/2 Kings 2.23 and Matthew 27.40, 42, Erasmus equates the sort of scoffers Jeremiah had in mind with ‘those who say such things as “Get along with you, bald-head …!” and “If he is the son of God, let him now descend from the cross” ’ (63:22). In explaining Psalm 1.1 tropologically, Erasmus thus associates the mockers of Elisha and those of Christ in a way that recalls their linkage by medieval exegetes. Luther in his own voluminous writings alluded at least three times to the tale of Elisha’s mockery. When considered in the order in which he made them, these passing allusions show that his thinking about the tale during a single decade progressed through the same two stages of development through which the Christian exegesis of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 had progressed over the previous thousand years. He went from associating the Bethel boys pejoratively with the Jews to seeing the boys’ punishment as a comment upon original sin. Luther first alludes to Elisha’s mockery in his Commentary on Psalm 109 (1526). According to him, Psalm 109 is spoken by Christ against Judas the betrayer and Judaism the religion. Eager to justify the harsh curses in this Psalm as ‘curses of faith’, Luther denies that they conflict with Matthew 5.44’s prohibition against cursing. While it is wrong for someone to curse for vengeance or any other personal end, he contends, it is permissible to curse out of faith or to protect God’s Word against heresy. Just as Christ’s alleged cursing in Psalm 109 ‘is not on account of His person but on account of His office and His Word, because the error of the Jews is seeking to establish itself and to beat down the Gospel’, so ‘In a curse on account of the Word of God it is correct to take the name of God and to curse by God’, as – adds Luther – when Elisha cursed the Bethel boys (den kindern Bethel) in God’s name, or when similar imprecations were uttered in Zechariah 3.2 and Acts 23.3.5





Whereas this first allusion to Elisha’s mockery is indirectly linked to Luther’s agenda of pitting Psalm 109 against the Jews’ ‘error’, his next allusion is more brazenly anti-Jewish, and thus squares with a prominent legacy of the medieval interpretation of the tale. In his seventh sermon on John 7, preached in Wittenberg sometime in the early 1530s, Luther finds the exclamation attributed to the Jews in verse 35 (‘Where does this man intend to go that we shall not find him?’) to speak to his own plight as preacher and Reformer. A mockery of Jesus’ words, that exclamation strikes Luther as identical with the criticisms directed by his own contemporaries against himself and his fellow Reformers. When we preach much, they laugh at us; when we promise and hold out God’s grace to them, they befoul and malign us … But that is part and parcel of it. He who cannot take such ingratitude from his pupils had better give up preaching. When Isaiah took the Jews to task severely in his preaching, they opened their mouths wide and stuck out their tongues against him [Isa 57.4]. Children [die Kinder] jeered at Elisha, calling him a baldhead. (33:421/23:265) Here Luther seems caught between the two interpretive stages we mentioned before. He appears to enter the second stage when he says of his own mockers, whom he compares to the Bethel boys: ‘They are typical children of the world [rechten weltkinder], these hypocrites. When they hear terrifying sermons on God’s wrath, they feel called upon to make fun of it secretly, to mock it, and to deride us to our face’ (33:421/23:265). In associating them with Elisha’s mockers as ‘typical children of the world’, Luther anticipates the moral insignificance of age distinctions reflected in Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary. As we saw in Chapter 3, adults and children together in that picture comprise the teeming Passion multitude, a guilt-ridden, collective antitype of Elisha’s mockers. Yet Luther reverts in his next breath to the sort of demonizing, anti-Jewish rhetoric that typified the Christian exegesis of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 in earlier centuries. While letting his critics ‘have their way, laugh, mock, and point their finger at us,’ says Luther, ‘we will keep an eye on their ultimate lot. … It will be like that of the Jews. Now they laugh, and for 1,500 years they have gone begging. And they will end body and soul with the devil in hell, since they scorn Christ, the Saviour’ (33:421–2/23:265). This chilling passage reveals how well Luther knows his Augustine, who characterized Elisha’s mockers, with the Jews, as possessed, destroyed, and devoured by devils. Luther lastly alludes to 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 in his Lectures on Genesis, which he began delivering at the University of Wittenberg in June 1535, and which progressed to the ninth chapter of Genesis by autumn the following year.



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Ruminating upon Genesis 9.3, where God grants as food to Noah ‘every moving thing that lives’, Luther wonders how the human being can inspire terror in all animals, when wolves, lions, bears, boars, and tigers devour and therefore terrify humans. He decides that animals fear the human because they know the human is endowed with reason, which animals lack to their disadvantage. However, he speculates, this terror felt by animals was greater at the time of Noah and the patriarchs, ‘since righteousness flourished and there was less sin. When saintliness of life declined and sin increased, this blessing also began to wane, and wild animals began to be a punishment for sin’ (42:357/2:135). To illustrate this point, Luther cites God’s threat to send ‘the teeth of beasts’ against Israel as punishment for sin (Deut. 32.24), the plague of fiery serpents in the desert (Num. 21.6), and the laceration of Elisha’s mockers by bears. Why, he asks, did the beasts not retain ‘the terror of man’ in this instance? ‘Why did they rage against people? Was not sin the reason?’ (42:357/2:136). If this passage is assumably not one of those in the Lectures on Genesis whose theology was adulterated by Melanchthonian editors to conform to the developing orthodoxy of the second generation of Lutherans,6 Luther may be seen here to have fully entered the second stage of Christian interpretation of the Bethel boys. No longer associating them with Jewish ‘error’, he now finds them to represent human sin, and specifically that new phase of deeper sin into which humans sank sometime between the patriarchal and Mosaic periods. In identifying this deepened human depravity as the rationale for the calamity that befell Elisha’s mockers, Luther’s rhetorical question ‘Was not sin the reason?’ is consistent with the most basic axiom of his own pessimistic anthropology, which also set the tone for the way the other two pre-eminent sixteenth-century Continental Reformers assessed human nature. The tremendous emphasis Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli placed upon the universal human inheritance of Adamic sin precluded any ultimate moral differentiation between children and adults. To be sure, Luther could believe us to be nourished by infants, ‘for because of those innocents God supplies necessaries, and we aged sinners partake with them’.7 Yet for him and the other Reformers, every human, notwithstanding the baptismal and Eucharistic sacraments which they accepted, is helplessly suffused by sin from birth to death, while faith in the grace of God is proffered as the person’s only hope for justification.8 This understanding represented a fateful departure from the Catholic tradition in which, from St Cyprian (200–58) and St Augustine on, infant baptism had as a rule been practised and, on the basis of the Vulgate version of Acts 2.38, been believed to achieve ‘the remission of sins’ (in remissionem peccatorum).9 Luther, Calvin, and eventually Zwingli all defended infant baptism (although Zwingli had rejected it in his early writings). Yet all three denied





that baptism or any other rite could wash away original sin; rather, as they saw it, baptism at most ‘effects forgiveness of sins’.10 It was left to Anabaptist theologians to take the Reformation principle of sola scriptura to the extreme of rejecting infant baptism on the grounds that the Bible does not mention any instance of the practice. Largely from Mark 16.16, they inferred that only someone spiritually mature enough to have become a believer and repented is qualified for baptism. Convinced thus that any adult believer who was baptized as an infant needs to be rebaptized, the Anabaptists (literally ‘Rebaptizers’) distinguished infancy and childhood from adulthood in a way that might lead to an interesting interpretation of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24. From an Anabaptist perspective, the boys’ irreverence towards the prophet could furnish a paradigmatic illustration of why children are unfit for baptism. Had those boys lived in Christian times and been under 13 years of age, what would have been the fate of the 42 who were torn by bears before becoming mature enough to be legitimately baptized? With regard to children who died before being able to give the ‘inward yes of the heart’ which, as the prerequisite to baptism, cleanses the soul, one Anabaptist theologian, Balthasar Hubmaier (d. 1528), could demur from pronouncing them saved or damned and leave the question to God’s judgment.11 Another, Menno Simons (c. 1496–1561), could grant that children, especially those of Christian parentage, are promised eternal life and have a share in the covenant,12 though he denied that this share was a reason for baptizing them (404/241). Although Ariès never links the modern ‘discovery of childhood’ with the Radical Reformers, the Anabaptists may have contributed as significantly as any other group or individual to sharpening the distinction between children and adults. In regarding infants and children as unqualified for baptism, they conceptually – not to mention sacramentally – isolated childhood from adulthood in a way that was inadmissible to defenders of infant baptism, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. None the less, despite the illustrative support which 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 could have furnished to the Anabaptists’ low assessment of the nature of children, the introduction of the Bethel boys motif to modern European literature found its most important anticipation not in those central and northern regions of the Continent where Anabaptist sects cropped up, but in Spain, during that country’s period as the staunchest bastion of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Picaresque and carnival influences The variations of the Bethel boys motif in modern European literature are harbingered by the emergence of that distinctive type of roguish, socially marginal boy, the pícaro, who makes his debut in two Spanish works, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1553) and Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1605),



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and is subsequently adapted by authors in other countries. Picaresque narrative, typically autobiographical in perspective, is the first fictional form to give a voice to the bad boy type and to allow him, later as a repentant adult looking back upon his early life, to tell his own story. Depicted in cynical, realistic tones, the pícaro’s childhood not only inverts the Holy Infancy theme which preoccupied European visual artists, but exposes a less innocent side of juvenility that was obscured in the Renaissance subject paintings discussed by Ariès. Lázaro and Guzmán, sons of a woman of loose morals and a prostitute respectively, are clever, mischievous, and thieving urchins who renounce their own unethical ways only after serving under a series of masters and reaching maturity. The pícaro’s rascality and social marginality might seem to qualify him superficially as a literary soul mate of Elisha’s young tormentors. A telling affinity between the Bethel boys motif and the picaresque form is their carnival aspect. Although the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin does not extend his discussion of carnival to Hebrew Bible narrative, the tale of Elisha’s mockery displays some of the definitive traits of folk carnival culture and grotesque realism expounded in his classic study of Rabelais: ‘mocking the deity’, ‘carnival laughter’, ‘degradation’, and ‘abusive language’ in the boys’ derision of the prophet; ‘oaths and curses’ in the prophet’s execration; and ‘bodily dismemberment’ in the mauling by bears.13 Similarly, the early picaresque novel is in Bakhtin’s terms a ‘directly carnivalized’ form, a ‘basic source of carnivalization’ for post-Renaissance literature.14 With its carnival spirit, the picaresque was promptly perceived as a threat to the official culture of Roman Catholic Christendom. Hence Lazarillo, with its merciless barbs against the clergy, was banned by the Inquisition in 1559. However, the carnival connection between the tale of Elisha’s mockery and the picaresque must be qualified. The pícaro differs from the Bethel boys, as he does from St Francis’s puerile mockers, in so far as he ordinarily is not anonymous and does not run with a gang, and his mischief against adults is generally not gratuitous, but aimed at achieving some simple practical end, like getting a bite to eat. Also, unlike the typical picaresque narrative, the Bethel boys story departs from the carnivalesque in its conclusion. Carnival’s ‘sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities’15 is negated by the boys’ grisly punishment, which reaffirms the stern, absolute authority of God and his prophet. None the less, in helping to spawn the pícaro novel, the Renaissance carnival influence enabled the Bethel boys motif to be transformed in a way that ignored or even defied the idea of God’s omnipotence and retributive justice. This transformation occurred when the motif was taken up by two authors whom Bakhtin ranks among the most carnivalesque of all time, Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare.




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Cervantes

As they were entering it, the Evil One [el malo], who is the author of all mischief, and young boys [muchachos], who are worse than the devil, appeared on the scene. A couple of audacious, mischievous urchins forced their way through the crowd, and one of them lifting up Dapple’s tail and the other Rocinante’s, inserted a bunch of furze under each. The poor beasts felt the strange spurs and added to their discomfort by pressing their tails tight and bucking, as a result of which they flung their masters to the ground. Don Quixote, embarrassed and humiliated, hurried to remove the plume from his poor nag’s tail, while Sancho did the same for Dapple. His conductors tried to punish the audacity of the boys, but there was no possibility of doing so, for they hid themselves among the hundreds of others that were following them.16 To recognize this scene as a variation on 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 we need not assume that Cervantes was thinking of Elisha’s mockery when he composed it, although an earlier passage in the Quixote seems to allude to the fiery chariot and whirlwind by which Elijah ascended to heaven while Elisha watched (2 Kgs 2.11–12).17 One fact from Cervantes’s biography suggests that the account of Don Quixote’s entry into Barcelona may have been partially inspired by the ‘official’ adaptation of the Bethel boys motif in Bonaventure’s Minor Legend of Francis. In keeping with the ‘predominantly Franciscan’ character of Iberian monasticism in his time,18 Cervantes joined the Tertiary Order of St Francis at Alcalá de Henares on 2 July 1613 – that is, no more than a year and a half before he composed the above passage.19 It is hard to imagine that a novice in that order, especially a novice as highly literate as Cervantes, would have been unacquainted with the standard version of the life of its founder, to whose order Don Quixote himself makes a passing reference shortly before arriving at Barcelona (see 2.58, 2:955/743–4). What befell Don Quixote as he enters Barcelona recalls the mockeries of Elisha and Francis in so far as it involves the gratuitous derision of an eccentric man, and in this case his humorous companion, by anonymous urchins. This similarity is doubly fascinating in view of the tendency of some Quixote critics to consider the mad knight Christlike and to regard his stay in Barcelona as part of his ‘Passion’.20 (As we saw in Chapter 4, it was Francis’s Christlike nature that led him to be associated with such a long-established ‘type’ of



Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha (pt 1, 1605; pt 2, 1615), known in English as Don Quixote, is generally considered the first and prototypical modern novel. Toward the end of it the mad knight of La Mancha and his peasant squire, Sancho Panza, arrive astride their horse and donkey at Barcelona:

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Christ as Elisha.) Don Quixote’s entry into Barcelona, marred as it is by the boys’ tormenting of Rocinante and Dapple, might seem parodically reminiscent of medieval depictions of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem in which it is common for the children welcoming him to tease the donkey on which he rides or to clown around with one another elsewhere in the scene.21 However, the Quixote modifies the Bethel boys motif. Whereas Elisha was mocked in a marginal zone beside the woods outside a city (2 Kgs 2.23a: ‘while he was going up on the way’), the prank played on Don Quixote occurs within the bounds of Barcelona (‘As they were entering it’), just as Francis was taunted upon entering Assisi. From Cervantes on, in fact, new adaptations of the Bethel boys motif will occur most often in scenes set within cities or towns, indicating a growing propensity to associate the wildness of boys with everyday urban life. Another modification in the Cervantine scene is that the victim is not a bald-headed prophet, but a tall, gaunt, bearded middle-aged madman wearing archaic armour and a barber’s basin as a helmet, who imagines himself a knight. Whereas Elisha’s fame by the time he returned to Bethel had resulted from his association with Elijah and the demonstration of his own miraculous power at Jericho (2 Kgs 2.15–22), Don Quixote is notorious throughout Spain by the time he reaches Barcelona because everyone has read or heard of the published history of his misadventures, part 1 of the Quixote. Also modified in the Quixote scene is the means of torment: offensive namecalling (‘baldhead’) is replaced by mischievous tampering with the victim’s horse. Finally, the outcome of the incident differs as well. Unlike Elisha’s tormentors, Don Quixote’s escape unpunished, and this difference illuminates a contrast between the biblical and Cervantine narrators. While the biblical narrator expressed no opinion on Elisha’s mockers and let their bloody fate speak for itself as a moral commentary on their action, the Quixote’s narrator characterizes boys as worse than the Evil One, apparently ascribing to them an inherently naughty disposition. This bias of Cervantes’s narrator against boys may satirically betray the influence of Augustine, whose Confessions ‘had a significant impact on the religious culture of Cervantes’ age and the major literary modes by which it gave expression to the Christian mysteries of sin and redemption’.22 For Alban Forcione, who discerns Augustinian traits in one of the most famous of Cervantes’s Exemplary Stories (Novelas ejemplares, 1613), The Dogs’ Colloquy (Coloquio de los perros, written c. 1605–6), the question of whether or not Cervantes read the Confessions hardly matters. For Augustine’s ‘essential Christian ideas and symbolic images and motifs were undoubtedly mediated to him through sermons, devotional works, and popular fiction’.23 However, on the basis of a passage in the Colloquy which has yet to be linked with Augustine, a case could be made that Cervantes had a detailed knowledge of the opening book of the Confessions. Not far into the tale, one of its two




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And so I say again what I’ve said before: that we inherit [heredamos] the tendency to do and speak evil from our first parents and absorb it with our mother’s milk. You can see this clearly in the fact that the child [el niño] has barely got his arm out of his swaddling clothes before he raises his hand as if he wanted to have his revenge on the person who he thinks has offended him; and almost the first word he utters is an insult to his nurse or his mother.24 Here Cervantes is comically willing to overlook the fact that because his speakers are dogs they could not have inherited a sinful ‘tendency’ or anything else from Adam and Eve, who were not their ‘first parents’. This passage might lead us to suspect that Cervantes knew well the first book of the Confessions, where Augustine imagines how he himself must have behaved as an infant when his wishes were not met: ‘And when I was not obeyed, either because I had not been understood or because what I wanted would harm me, I would be angry at my elders who would not submit to me, and at people who were not my servants, and I would avenge myself upon them by crying’ (C, 1.6.8 [5]). It could be merely coincidental that both this passage and the one from the Colloquy focus upon the infant’s instinct to avenge itself – se vindicare (Augustine), ‘vengarse’ (Berganza) – upon parents or caretakers who fail to comply with its wishes. As Augustine remarks, ‘this is the way all babies behave’ (C, 1.6.8 [5]), and so there is no reason to doubt that Berganza (or Cervantes) could have likewise reached this conclusion through personal observation. However, the likelihood that Berganza’s comments on infants were directly influenced by the Confessions will seem strengthened by further considerations. Berganza’s allusion to breastfeeding evokes one of Augustine’s favourite images in book 1 of the Confessions. In characterizing mother’s milk as a medium through which the sin of ‘our first parents’ is passed on to the infant, the dog almost seems to satirize Augustine, who made the opposite point that neither his mother nor his nurses, but God, filled their breasts with ‘woman’s milk’ (lac humanum) to nourish him as an infant (C, 1.6.7 [5]). Images of mother’s milk and breastfeeding then recur in an anecdote about a well-fed baby who displayed jealousy toward his foster-brother whenever he saw him feeding at the breast. Augustine, who witnessed this scene himself, recounts it in order to debunk the notion of infantile innocence (C, 1.7.11). Berganza’s association of mother’s milk with the inherited sin of children is consistent with Augustine’s negative generalizations about infancy, which were aimed at illustrating biblical claims that ‘no man is clean of sin, not even a one-day-old infant on earth’ (C, 1.7.11 [6]; cf. Job 25.4) and that ‘I was



canine interlocutors, Berganza, tells his companion, Scipio (Cipión):

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conceived in iniquity, and in sin conceived by my mother in her womb’ (C, 1.7.12 [7]; from Ps. 50.7/51.5). Even Berganza’s observation that infants will raise a hand to strike adults at whom they are angry seems to echo Augustine’s contention that it is wrong for a child to cry for everything ‘he’ wants, to throw tantrums against adults, and ‘to try his best to strike and hurt others who know better than he does, including his own parents, because they do not give in to him and refuse to pander to whims which would only do him harm’ (C, 1.7.11 [6]). Not surprisingly, given the Augustinian wariness of children that seems humorously vindicated by the account of Don Quixote’s entry into Barcelona, that scene is not the last in which the knight stirs the curiosity of anonymous boys. When he later makes his debut in Barcelona’s downtown streets, where he attracts everyone’s attention, he observes to his host: ‘See, Don Antonio, even the boys [los muchachos] of this city know me without ever having seen me’ (2.62, 2:991/770). Later, upon his return home, we are told: ‘At the entrance of the village … Don Quixote saw two boys [dos mochachos] quarrelling’ (2.73, 2:1057/821). Then, ‘with the boys [mochachos] capering around them’ (2:1059/823), he and Sancho entered the town. These allusions may not be arbitrary. As the narrator has already associated boys with the devil, ‘the author of all mischief’, their ubiquity in the Barcelona streets may portend the disaster that awaits at the end of Don Quixote’s sojourn there: his defeat by the Knight of the White Moon, which ends his chivalric career. The quarrelling urchins at the entrance of his village may be similarly portentous. As if to parody the way Augustine was led to conversion by the child’s chanting of tolle lege (C, 8.12.29 [101]: ‘take and read!’), the vanquished knight takes a random utterance by one of the boys as an omen that he will never again behold his beloved Dulcinea (see 2.73, 2:1057/822). The lack of retributive justice after the tormenting of Don Quixote by the Barcelona urchins cannot be simply attributed to the absence of carnivorous bears. There can be no divine punition in the novel if that genre really is, as Georg Lukács described it, ‘the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God’.25 In the scene with those urchins, as everywhere else in the Quixote, the seeming godforsakenness of the world permits the carnival sense of ‘gay relativity’ (Bakhtin) to assert itself in a manner that would have been impossible in the biblical tale of Elisha’s mockery. The same is true of the most perfect Renaissance specimen of the Bethel boys motif, in another of Cervantes’s Exemplary Stories, The Glass Licenciate (El licenciado vidriera), known also in English as The Glass Graduate or Man of Glass. Written around 1606–7, this tale rehearses the Quixote’s theme of insanity and illusion, featuring as the protagonist a quixotic young licenciate and peregrinator, Tomás Rodaja. Shortly after Tomás goes mad and becomes convinced that his body is made of glass, we are told of what happens whenever he appears in the streets of Salamanca, the




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Then the boys [los muchachos] flocked round him, but he would stop them with his staff, and beg them to speak to him from a distance, so that he did not break; for as he was a man of glass, he was very fragile. Boys, being the most mischievous creatures in the world, in spite of his pleas and shouts began to throw rags at him and even stones, to see if he really was made of glass as he said; but he shouted so much and made such a fuss that the men scolded and punished the children to stop them throwing things at him. But one day when they worried him a lot, he turned to them and said, ‘What do you want, you wretched boys, who keep pestering me like flies, who are as dirty as bedbugs and as impudent as fleas? Do you think I’m Mount Testaccio in Rome, to hurl all these pots and tiles at me?’ When they heard him tell them all off they always followed him in crowds, and the boys thought it would be a much better game to listen to him than to throw things at him. (2:39–40/130) This incident humorously resembles the mocking of Elisha and Francis, and anticipates the same motif in Don Quixote’s comical entry into Barcelona: the unprovoked tormenting of an eccentric man by anonymous urchins. There are additional affinities between the two Cervantine scenes. The denigration of boys by Tomás as ‘the most mischievous creatures’ matches their mockAugustinian condemnation in the Quixote as being ‘worse than the devil’. And the description of the knight’s tormentors as ‘audacious, mischievous’ seems almost paraphrased by Tomás’s description of his own abusers as ‘impudent as fleas’ (‘atrevidos como pulgas’). This might also be read as ‘bold as fleas’, a Homeric simile that reflects his classical education and betrays a grudging respect for his attackers: like the ones who flustered Don Quixote’s nag, these eschew the effort by some men to punish them. Unlike the knight, however, Tomás turns on his assaulters and berates them in a manner that recalls Elisha’s curse. The phrase ‘he turned to them and said’ (‘se volvió a ellos, diciendo’) recalls the Vulgate rendering of Elisha’s reaction to the boys: Qui cum respexisset, vidit eos, et maledixit eis (4/2 Kgs 2.24), literally, ‘Who, when he looked back, saw them and cursed them.’ What distinguishes Tomás’s disparaging words from Elisha’s curse is that the former do not bring down the wrath of God, a failure that again reveals the lack of divine retributive justice in Cervantine narrative. Tomás’s insults only enhance his tormentors’ pleasure. None the less, the full extent to which the Bethel boys motif has been assimilated in The Glass Licenciate – whether wittingly or not on Cervantes’s part, and whether directly from the Bible or



city where he resides and from whose university he took his degree in law:


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On one occasion, when he was going through the old-clothes market in Salamanca, a woman who kept one of the stalls said to him, ‘I’m sorry in my heart for you, Licenciate; but what can I do, for I can’t shed any tears?’ He turned to her and very deliberately said to her, ‘Filiae Hierusalem, plorate super vos et super filios vestros [Daughters of Jerusalem, weep for yourselves and your children].’ The woman’s husband realized what a subtle answer it was and said to him, ‘Brother Glass,’ for that is what he said he was called, ‘you are more of a rogue than a fool.’ (2:40/130) It is unimportant here that Tomás got the Latin wording slightly wrong when he quoted Luke 23.28, which in the Vulgate reads: Filiae Jerusalem, nolite flere super me, sed super vos ipsas flete, et super filios vestros (‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children’).26 Judged from the reaction of the woman’s husband, Tomás’s biblical riposte may have been meant insultingly to suggest that her own children are not her husband’s.27 Yet the phrase filios vestros (‘your children’) might also be a reference to all the urchins who have been hounding Tomás. Given his paranoic fear of being shattered by their stones, he would have ‘good reason’ to paraphrase to her the words Jesus uttered to the wailing women on the Via Dolorosa. By repeating Jesus’ words, Tomás amusingly casts himself as a Christ-like martyr and, by implication, likens his own juvenile persecutors, those ‘sons’ of Salamanca, to Jesus’ crucifiers, the ‘sons’ of Jerusalem.

Shakespeare Regardless of whether or not Cervantes was aware of the medieval linkage of Elisha’s taunters to Christ’s, the method of torment employed by the urchins in The Glass Licenciate is the same that was attributed to their Bethel prototypes in the Lucianic recension of the Septuagint, as well as to their counterparts in Francis’s life: stoning. Unbeknownst to Cervantes, the image of man-stoning boys was taken up around the same time in a number of dramas by his English contemporary, Shakespeare. When the titular protagonist of Coriolanus (1607–8) returns to Antium, the city whose misery he has caused, he comes in disguise, ‘Lest that thy wives with spits and boys with stones / In puny battle slay me’ (4.4.5–6).28 If the boys of Antium are like those of Shylock’s Venice, Coriolanus’s caution is well advised. In The Merchant of Venice (1596–97), after Shylock creates a public scandal over his daughter’s



indirectly through some filtering story such as Francis’s life – becomes evident when the passage proceeds:


elopement and his loss of money, it does not take long for the local urchins to target him for ridicule. As Salerio observes, ‘Why, all the boys in Venice follow him, / Crying, his stones, his daughter, and his ducats’ (2.8.23–24). Conspicuously absent from these two lines is any hint that the boys in question might be punished for mistreating Coriolanus or Shylock. On the contrary, were the Antium boys to stone the Roman general, they would be enforcing their city’s majority sentiment, as the Venetian boys do by taunting the ‘hated Jew’. Consistent with Shakespeare’s toying with the Bethel boys motif in these instances, the scattered references to boys throughout his oeuvre comprise a distinct grammar of negative imagery. To be sure, the ill-fated Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale (1610–11), ‘Shakespeare’s only significant portrait of a child’,29 is portrayed as ‘gracious’ and ‘sweet’ (2.1.2, 4). But elsewhere male children are spoken of as petty nuisances at best or budding sadists at worst – from Antonio’s string of unpleasant associations in Much Ado About Nothing (1598–99): ‘Boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks, milksops!’ (5.1.91), to the Earl of Gloucester’s anti-theodicean simile in King Lear (1605): ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods’ (4.1.36). One could distil from several of the history dramas written in the 1590s a set of counsels to political leaders on the importance of remaining aloof from boys, who are associated with rebellion (see 2 Henry IV [1598] 4.1.32–5). The decision of the titular villain of Richard III (1592–93) to ‘converse with iron-witted fools / And unrespective boys’ (4.2.28–9) is an omen of his imminent demise, and thus supports the point King Henry IV makes in cautioning against the example of his own predecessor, Richard II, who ‘gave his countenance, against his name, / To laugh at gibing boys’ (1 Henry IV [1596–97] 3.2.65–6).

Ambiguities of innocence The negative images of boys in Shakespeare and Cervantes contradict Jesus’ exaltation of children, even though the two authors’ deaths, both in 1616, preceded the period that saw the genesis of what Ariès rightly or wrongly calls the modern idea of childhood innocence. Based upon Jesus’ teaching, and anticipated by Montaigne as well, this idea was propagated by seventeenth-century moralists and pedagogues, finding expression in didactic treatises such as François de Grenaille’s L’honneste fille (1639, The honest girl) and L’honneste garçon (1642, The honest boy), and Alexandre-Louis Varet’s De l’éducation chrétienne des enfants (1666, On the Christian education of children). The growing popularity of the idea was reflected in the frequent pictorial representations produced then of Jesus’ blessing of children, a Gospel scene that had rarely been depicted in medieval art.30 Although Ariès concentrates upon the development of this idea in western Europe, particularly France, the same idea came to remarkable fruition in



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more eastern regions through the writings of Johannes Amos Comenius (1592–1670), that Czech-born bishop of the Unitas Fratrum whom some esteem as the father of modern education and an anticipator of the child-rearing doctrines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Dr Benjamin Spock. Citing Christ’s consecration of children, Comenius opens his own treatise on education (1633) with the assertion that God, in expressing his own love of humanity, ‘calls us children as if there were no more excellent name by which to allure us’.31 In Comenius’s view, ‘children are priceless to God and ought to be so to parents’, precisely ‘because being innocent, except for original sin, they are not yet the defaced image of God and are unable to discern between good and evil’ (p. 60). This view would have struck many of Comenius’s more theologically stringent contemporaries as giving short shrift to original sin, by which children no less than adults were believed to be tainted. As there was no consensus in the seventeenth century over whether the child is a morally innocent tabula rasa or naturally prone to evil,32 the general reascription of innocence to childhood did not occur without noteworthy qualifications or dissent even among thinkers whose attitudes were not established upon decidedly religious grounds. For example, the fabulist La Fontaine (1621–95) pronounces childhood an age ‘without pity’ and one that ‘loves nothing’.33 And the political theorist Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651) valuates children hardly more positively, even though he chides the Church for having priests blow three times in the face of an infant about to be baptized, and command the unclean spirit out of that child, ‘As if all Children, till blown on by the Priest were Dæmoniaques’ (4.44).34 Observing, as did Aristotle, Philo, and Augustine, that children ‘are not endued with Reason at all’ (1.5, p. 116), Hobbes consigns children to the same category of ‘Persons’ as ‘Fooles’ and ‘Mad-men’, who ‘may be Personated by Guardians, or Curators; but can be no Authors … of any action done by them’ (1.16, p. 219); indeed, ‘only Children, and Madmen are Excused from offences against the Law Naturall’ (2.27, p. 345). According to Hobbes, therefore, among the inconveniences of the monarchical form of commonwealth is ‘that the Soveraigntie may descend upon an Infant, or one that cannot discerne between Good and Evill’ (2.19, p. 243). On account of their lack of both reason and moral discernment, children deceive themselves in the same way as do adults who commit crimes of craft and deception (see 2.27, p. 342). Given his denial of an absolute good or absolute evil, and his view that the terms good and evil are relative to the person who uses them (see 1.6, p. 120), the amorality of children does not mean for Hobbes that children are wicked. Rather, as he observed in De cive (1642), translated as The Citizen (1651), children are naturally governed by a self-centred and irritable disposition, so that when they are not given all they demand, ‘they are peevish and cry, aye, and strike




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Yet are [children] free from guilt, neither may we properly call them wicked; first, because they cannot hurt; next, because wanting the free use of reason they are exempted from all duty. These when they come to riper years, having acquired power whereby they may do hurt, if they shall continue to do the same things, then truly they both begin to be, and are properly accounted wicked. (ibid.) In other words, the child is not naturally depraved. But the child’s natural amorality, solipsism, and peevishness, if left unchecked by education, experience, and the development of reason, will degenerate into wickedness in the adult, making the wicked man ‘almost the same thing with a child grown strong and sturdy, or a man of childish disposition’ (ibid.). A century later Dr Johnson would likewise claim that pity, being ‘not natural to man … is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason’. Children, he added, like savages, ‘are always cruel’.36 It is against this Hobbesian assessment of the child’s nature that Rousseau reacts in his own treatise on education, Émile (1762), which opens with the declaration that all things are made good by God but become corrupt in the hands of human beings. Here, any lingering whiff of Augustinian or Hobbesian wariness towards children evaporates. Rousseau finds nothing wrong with children in their natural, unsocialized condition. On the contrary, he says, ‘Nature wants children to be children before being men. … Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling which are proper to it.’37 If, according to Augustine, children are so vicious that it must have been simply because they are small that Jesus invoked them to symbolize humility (C, 1.19.30 on Matt. 19.14), Rousseau contends that the child’s apparent inclination to destroy is not from wickedness but because the action which gives shape is always slow and the action which destroys, being more rapid, fits his vivacity better. At the same time that the Author of nature gives children this active principle, by allowing them little strength to indulge it, He takes care that it do little harm. (bk 1, p. 67) Rousseau here means to refute Hobbes’s notion of the wicked man as a robust child,38 even though he later enters into unacknowledged agreement with Hobbes in suggesting that the child’s actions are ‘devoid of all morality’ (bk 2, p. 92). In concluding that the child can do nothing morally bad,



their parents sometimes’.35 Whereas Augustine applied virtually the same observation in profiling children as inheritors of original sin, Hobbes avers:

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punishable, or reprehensible, Rousseau could not be more sharply opposed to Augustine, whom he never mentions, but who supported corporal punishment of children as an antidote to what he deemed their hereditarily sinful propensities. Oddly, when Rousseau contends that the capriciousness of children which adults find objectionable ‘is never the work of nature but is the work of bad discipline’ (bk 2, p. 121), he might seem to agree with those Christian exegetes from Augustine on who blamed the Bethel boys’ offence upon the boys’ upbringing by idolatrous parents. The persistence of this tendency among English Protestant biblical commentators contemporary to Hobbes is exemplified by Joseph Hall (1574–1656), Bishop of Exeter (1627–41) and of Norwich (from 1641); the royalist writer and clergyman Thomas Fuller (1608–61); and the Presbyterian Matthew Poole (1624–79). Anticipating our own contemporary concept of ‘learned behaviour’, Bishop Hall assumes in one of his oft-cited biblical Contemplations (1612–26) that the Bethel boys must ‘have learned to scoff at a prophet; the spite of their idolatrous parents is easily propagated: children are such as their institution.’39 Hall acknowledges that these ‘ill-taught children’ upbraided the prophet for ‘but a slight natural defect, not worthy the name of a blemish, the want of a little hair’. While ‘the rude terms of waggish boys’ might strike us as being not ‘worthy of any thing but neglect’, Hall compares Elisha’s ‘severe’ reaction and curse to Elijah’s deadly summoning of ‘fire upon the two captains and their fifties’ (see 2 Kgs 1.10, 13–14). However, Hall insists, ‘Divine justice,’ not Elisha, was responsible for the boys’ deaths: This was not the revenge of an angry prophet, it was the punishment of a righteous judge. God and his seer looked through these children at the parents, at all Israel; he would punish the parents’ misnurturing their children, to the contemptuous usage of a prophet, with the death of those children which they had mistaught. Some of the conjectural points underlying both Hall’s condemnation of the Bethel boys’ parents and his exoneration of Elisha for the boys’ deaths find agreement in the interpretation of the tale offered in Fuller’s historical-topographical study (1650) of Palestine. Viewing the prophet’s deriders as anything but innocent, Fuller defends their harsh punishment: ‘Some will say Elisha had better have called for two rods than two bears out of the wood. … But his severity will appear needful’ when it is considered that, first, ‘Probably (though termed children) they were striplings of some bigness, who durst adventure out of the city by the wood-side’; and secondly, ‘No doubt the chickens crowed as the cocks had learned them, and followed the precedents of their idolatrous parents.’40





Harking back to the Talmudic insinuation that Elisha’s mockers were not children, and to the vilification of their parents by Christian exegetes from Augustine on, these two conjectural justifications of the boys’ harsh punishment are followed by four more. According to Fuller, thirdly, the boys’ offence was worsened by the fact that it was repeated (‘Go up …! Go up!’). That Elisha is said to have turned back and looked at them suggests, fourthly, that they continued taunting him as he passed them, and fifthly, that had their countenances betrayed any remorse, he would not have condemned them. Lastly, that he cursed in the Lord’s name suggests that he cursed ‘not out of spite, but with God’s Spirit, and the judgment followed accordingly’ (p. 228). Curiously, despite Fuller’s refusal to call the mockers children, his conclusion betrays that this is precisely what he thinks they were. ‘Probably some of them escaped to the city,’ he says, echoing another of Hall’s speculations,41 ‘and there might instruct their mothers and nurses, never more to fright children with fond tales of bugbears, but seriously to inform them of the truth of this sorrowful accident’ (p. 228). We might ask, do ‘striplings of some bigness’ report back to ‘mothers and nurses’? Poole proves no less happy than Fuller and Hall to justify the harshness of the Bethel boys’ punishment. Synthesizing the insights of a host of ancient, medieval, and Reformation commentators, he interprets 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 as follows. Elisha went ‘up to Bethel’, the capital of idolatry, to inform the beleaguered school of Yahwist prophets there of Elijah’s assumption and his own succession to Elijah’s office, and to console them. ‘Out of the city’, that is, from Bethel, came the ‘small boys’, or perhaps young men, those who are often signified by the pertinent Hebrew words from both 4/2 Kings 2.23b (cf. Gen. 22.5a, 12a; 41.12a; 2 Chr. 13.7b; Isa. 11.6b) and 2.24b (cf. Gen. 32.23a/22; 37.30b; Ruth 1.5b). These boys or youths ‘mocked him’ petulantly and vehemently, ridiculing both him and his prophetic office. By telling him ‘go up’, they meant up to heaven, where he had said Elijah had gone. Their implication was, ‘Oh that the same Spirit would take you up also, that we might not be bothered by you.’ By calling Elisha ‘baldhead’, they engaged in the sin of deriding his natural infirmity. Through their repetition of this insult they betrayed that their scoffing was no mere slip of the tongue, but rooted in impiety and hatred of God and his prophets.42 Poole thus draws together seven defences proffered by earlier exegetes for Elisha’s having cursed the boys in the Lord’s name. First, it was out of not carnal or vengeful passion, but divine zeal, that he cursed. Second, as recognized by God, the mockers had expressed contempt not so much for Elisha’s person as for his prophetic vocation. Third, the instigation to mock the prophet had come to them from their idolatrous parents. Fourth, God therefore wanted to punish the parents more even than to punish the boys. Fifth, if the boys were not punished for their offence and removed now from their idolatrous



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education, they would ultimately become more wicked, and deserving of not only temporal but eternal destruction. In this sense their present punishment was a blessing. Sixth, by the boys’ destruction God wanted to remind others that the sacred ministry should never be mocked, and thus to reconsecrate reverence toward elders and holy men. Seventh, through the Holy Spirit Elisha perceived that these boys may have been guilty of other heinous crimes deserving of death. Therefore, although the ‘two she-bears’ that carried out the punishment may have been robbed of their whelps and hence all the more fierce (cf. Prov. 17.12; Hos. 13.8), their extraordinary fury was miraculously elicited by God for the purpose of punishing the boys’ parents and the town’s magistrates. Given that both Fuller and Poole could question the littleness of Elisha’s mockers while impugning the boys’ parents, how did the image of these children fare in the treatments of their tale in picture Bibles and children’s Bibles, a genre that had emerged in the sixteenth century? To protect the idea of childhood from all negative associations would have been impossible in any Bible story collection that told of Elisha’s mockery. In children’s Bibles, to be sure, the retellings of tales are typically distinguished by ‘Creative compositional amendment and emendation’.43 Yet, pace the aggadic rabbis, Fuller, and Poole, most readers prior to our own time assumed that Elisha’s mockers were children, not older youths or adults. Perhaps no single illustration of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 was more widely disseminated into the modern age than the one in Merian’s popular and influential Icones biblicae, which contains 233 copperplate engravings, most of them accompanied by an explanatory text in carmina rhymes, and each intended to entertain and edify readers by inspiring them consult the depicted biblical passage.44 That the tale of Elisha’s mockery was among the those which Merian portrayed is significant, as his representation gave it a prominence which it otherwise may not have obtained. Together with his depiction of Absalom’s death (2 Sam. 18.9–18), labelled ‘Punishment: Example of the Punishment of Naughty Children’ (pp. 214–15), his depiction of the Bethel boys tale unavoidably suggests an other-than-innocent association with boys. Labelled ‘Example of What Happens to Those Who Ridicule God’s Servants’, the picture shows a lush, wooded setting, with a small city visible on a hill in the background, overlooking an idyllic lake. In the left foreground, the robed, baldheaded, bearded prophet watches calmly as two bears maul several boys while a number of other boys scatter in all directions with uplifted hands (pp. 240–1). True to his own literalist, Reformist interpretive principles, Merian deals with this Hebrew tale on its own merits, not as a foreshadowing of the Passion. The only element in the picture that might lend itself to figurative interpretation is the prophet’s uplifted hand, with the thumb, forefinger, and





middle finger extended in a Christlike manner.45 Even this element is absent from the utterly untypological panel depicting this scene on a wooden cabinet (1648; Plate 6) now in Kraków,46 but made in the town of Cheb (formerly Eger), near Karlovy Vary in today’s Czech Republic. This panel, based upon a Dutch drawing whose pattern somewhat resembles the Merian engraving, includes a comparable background (lush wood, hilltop city, idyllic lake) and likewise shows the prophet bearded, robed, and looking back at the mauling of several boys while other children scatter with outstretched arms. The main difference is that the prophet has more hair atop his head; is walking, not standing; and only one bear appears. An absence of Passion allusions also characterizes the paintings by two seventeenth-century artists inspired by the Elisha tale. The Netherlandish painter Willem van den Bundel (1575–after 1653), a landscape specialist from Brussels, captured the entire drama of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 on a single canvas.47 Set on a wayside in a densely wooded area above a gothic-styled temple, his painting shows the prophet in the foreground, still encircled by eight mocking boys, wagging a finger of execration at them, while in the background other children desperately flee from the already attacking bears. Despite this drama, however, the human and ursine figures seem dwarved by the spectacular surrounding landscape, whose portrayal seems to have been the artist’s primary concern. More innovatively, a painting by van den Bundel’s French contemporary Laurent de La Hyre (1606–56) not only re-situates the Elisha tale within an unbiblical, classical landscape and a framework of predominantly unscriptural, mythological allusions, but passes entirely over the tale’s drama. Considered one of La Hyre’s masterpieces, The Death of the Children of Bethel (1653; Plate 7) does not depict the mockery, the prophet’s curse, the bear attack, or the children’s terror and punishment. What is shown is the episode’s unrecorded aftermath, when the mothers of the dead boys have come to collect the corpses. Probably by mere coincidence, the painting makes manifest what Bishop Hall conveyed several decades earlier in his own speculation over this imagined scene: ‘how did the distressed mothers wring their hands for this woful orbation! and now, when they came forth to fetch the remnants of their own flesh, what a sad spectacle it was to find the fields strewed with those mangled carcasses!’48 As noted by two scholars, The Death of the Children of Bethel depicts the moment when all that remains of the recorded incident is the lesson of death and desolation resulting from the failure of human children to recognize the divine presence under a common guise. Through the anachronistic imagery of classical temple ruins and classically garbed women, and through mythic references to the spring-side Narcissus (see the adolescent on the left, with his face in the shadow) and to Niobe, who failed to recognize the power of the



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gods, La Hyre’s painting de-biblicizes the Bethel tale.49 The mourning mothers, despite their sons’ guilt, may seem analogous to the horrified, bereft mothers shown in countless portrayals of the Slaughter of the Innocents from the Middle Ages on. Yet if this painting by La Hyre makes any figurative allusion to the Bible, the referent may just as likely be not from the New Testament but from elsewhere in the Old: the sacrificial Isaac, whose earlier portrayal by La Hyre resembles that Narcissus-like youth in the left foreground of The Death of the Children of Bethel.50 This is not to suggest that the medieval typological exegesis of the tale was forgotten in the seventeeth century. That approach is recalled in L’Histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament (The History of the Old and the New Testament), the first French vernacular Bible for children,51 written in 1670 by Nicolas Fontaine (1625–1709), a member of Port-Royal. Fontaine recounts the tale of Elisha’s mockery straightforwardly, and then offers a figurative excursus, paraphrasing Augustine to the effect that the prophet’s wrath marked off ahead of time (‘marquoit par avance’) the calamity of those who, bearing the name of children of the church, insolently mock at Jesus Christ and his cross; because on Calvary he suffered all sorts of outrages of the Jews, as Elisha had been mocked by those children because he was bald. There are many such children, said St Augustine, and if they are not visibly devoured by bears, this is because they are being more unfortunately devoured in spirit by devils, to whom they make themselves prey by insulting Jesus Christ, not with injurious words, but by the actions of their utterly dissolute lives.52 After Fontaine, the typological interpretation of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 dissipated, and the tale was told mainly for the didactic purpose of warning boys of the dire consequences of irreverent misbehaviour. Of German children’s Bibles that exemplify this trend, the most notable is the Lutheran Johann Hübner’s (1668–1731) best-selling Zweimal zwei und fünfzig auserlesene biblische Historien aus dem Alten und Neuen Testamente (1714, Twice fifty-two selected biblical stories from the Old and New Testaments), which functioned for decades as ‘a point of propagation for Bible stories via the schools’.53 Like Nicolas Fontaine, Hübner embellishes only slightly the biblical account of Elisha’s mockery. Given the idolatry in Bethel, he says, it follows that Elisha’s taunters were children of idolaters. While adhering to Luther’s trademark rendering of their insult as a summons (‘Kahlkopf, komm herauf’), Hübner describes Elisha’s response not as ‘he cursed’ (‘fluchte’, as Luther accurately rendered the Hebrew) but as ‘he threatened’ (‘drohete’), a modification that would seem to ascribe to the prophet a foreknowledge of, and perhaps also an active role in effecting, the boys’ dire punishment. The points Hübner hopes





to convey to his young readers about crime and punishment are suggested by the two quiz-like questions he poses at the end: ‘How did the boys [die Knaben] of Bethel insult Elisha?’ ‘What happened when Elisha threatened the wicked boys [den bösen Knaben] in the name of the Lord?’54 In branding the boys wicked, Hübner, like Fontaine, raises a problematic question which he does not seek to answer. Are the boys wicked because they mocked Elisha? Or did they mock because they were wicked by nature? From a strict Lutheran or Calvinist perspective, the latter explanation would have to be correct. Thus, in two children’s Bibles composed by English Calvinists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this tale was retold to encourage juvenile readers to avoid the fate which Puritans like John Bunyan warned could await all children: ‘Their sinful Nature prompts them to rebel, / And to delight in Paths that lead to Hell.’55 As stated in the subtitle of Youths Divine Pastime (3rd edn, 1691) by Bunyan’s contemporary Nathaniel Crouch (1632?–1725?), the versified ‘Scripture Histories’ that make up the book are intended for ‘virtuous’ youngsters and aim at ‘preventing vain and vicious Divertisements’.56 Crouch’s readers are to be moral opposites of the children who figure in the book’s 25th poem, ‘Upon the Bears destroying Forty [sic] Children. 2 Kings 2’ (p. 54). The accompanying woodcut shows two bears mauling children, as the prophet, inexplicably endowed with a full head of hair, placidly looks on, gesturing towards the carnage. The poem, in working up to telling of that awful moment, sticks closely to the biblical account: Then doth he toward Bethel go, But as he past along, Many young Children from the Town Him followed in a throng. And mocking him they loudly cry’d, Go up thou Bald-head, go, He meekly hears them for a while, Which made them bolder grow. They still mock on, at length he turns And sternly doth them eye, His angry words are worse than blows As they find instantly. (p. 55) As an embellishment upon the scriptural text, the suggestion that the mockery persisted ‘for a while’ is perhaps meant to help justify the prophet’s harsh



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response and the fatal retribution that then comes instantaneously:

Who soon do these young Scoffers seize, And them in pieces tear, They in a moment forty [sic] slay, While others fly for fear. Thus these Youths justly lost their lives, Because they did miscall Gods Prophet; Ah! Young Men, let this A warning be to all. (p. 55) Whereas the word ‘justly’ in this final quatrain begs the question, no such ambiguity arises from the retelling of this tale in the Divine Songs (1715) for children by Isaac Watts (1674–1748). A nonconformist minister and hymnologist born of a dissenting Southampton family, Watts had little patience with bad children. ‘How rude,’ he once lamented, ‘are the boys that throw pebbles and mire!’57 With other godly writers of children’s books in his time, he shared the view that the ‘pleasure’ a book offers to readers should ‘consist … primarily in a sense of pious rectitude; and children were to be brought to this state of bliss largely by frightening, or at least admonishing them by setting out the terrors of this world and the next – chiefly of the next – which lay in store for the sinner.’58 Rather than simply recount the Elisha tale, therefore, Watts’s six-quatrain song ‘Against Scoffing and calling Names’59 opens by urging against ‘railing’ at other people (quatrain 1), and warns of the ‘Hell-fire’ and cutting-off-of-lips that await anyone who ‘calls his Brother, Fool’ or who dares ‘To mock and jeer and scoff / At Holy Things or Holy Men’ (quatrains 2–3). Quatrains 4–5 recount the Elisha tale for illustration: When Children in their wanton Play Serv’d old Elisha so, And bid the Prophet go his way, ‘Go up, thou Bald-head, go.[’] God quickly stopt their wicked Breath, And sent two raging Bears, That tore them Limb from Limb to Death, With Blood and Groans and Tears.



He doth them in the Lords Name Curse, And quickly there appears [sic], Out of the dismal neighbouring Wood, Two ravenous fierce she Bears,


Given the song’s ‘retributive sadism’,60 and especially the gory ‘audio-visual aid’61 of the last line quoted above, the opening lines of the next and final quatrain seem to state the obvious: ‘Great God, how terrible art thou / To Sinners ne’er so young!’ Left to shudder at this mysterium tremendum, the childish reader is offered only the desperate hope of rehearsing the closing prayer: ‘Grant me thy Grace and teach me how / To tame and rule my Tongue.’ Even outside the Elisha tale, the image of an unappreciated holy man mocked by urchins could be readily conjured up in Hanoverian England. The novelist Henry Fielding, for example, evokes it in his ‘Apology for the Clergy’ (1740), lamenting that some ‘successor of Christ’s disciples’ could be derided by ‘boys and beaus, and madmen, and rakes’.62 None the less, the Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and later the Victorians, were to develop further the competing notion of childhood innocence. In some cases, as we shall see, the result would be a greater sympathy towards the Bethel boys.



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It was Rousseau, according to Ariès, who introduced the modern, positive association of childhood with primitivism and irrationalism.1 Yet Rousseau, as Hegel rightly observed, was preceded by Jesus in exalting the child as norm.2 And childhood was virtually hallowed by Romantic poets and theorists who came after Rousseau, most notably Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge in England, and Schiller and Novalis in Germany. Anticipated by both Jesus and Rousseau, as well as the notion of the seventeenth-century English religious poets Thomas Traherne and Henry Vaughan that the child views the world through prelapsarian eyes, the Romantics equated childhood with the innocent condition of Adam in Eden and exalted the child’s ‘freshness of sensation’ (Coleridge) as a norm for adult artistic experience.3 This is not to suggest that Romanticism, which all but cleared the atmosphere of the old Augustinian wariness towards children, precluded a sober acknowledgment that childhood innocence might be tempered by experience. The child figures prominently as a type in both Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) and his Songs of Experience (1794), which, when published jointly, bore the subtitle: ‘Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’. None the less, it would have seemed natural during the Romantic Age to concur with Rousseau that the child, being devoid of morality, is incapable of doing anything morally wrong or worthy of punishment. But how, then, might a sensitive soul be expected to react to the tale of Elisha’s mockery, and particularly to the punishment that befell the 42 boys? Let us turn to an author whose writings may suggest an answer to this question.

Romantic and Victorian views of 2 Kings 2.23–24 Lamb Another exemplar of Romantic views on children was Charles Lamb (1775– 1834), the English poet, critic, and friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge. 125 10.1057/9780230599758 - Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art, Eric Ziolkowski


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Whether or not it really was from them that Lamb ‘learned of the glory of childhood and the place of memory in poetry’,4 his reverence for children is a recurrent theme in his writings. ‘The solitude of childhood,’ he opined, ‘is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration.’5 In his essay ‘The Old and the New Schoolmaster’ (1821), included in his Essays of Elia (1823), he asserts: ‘Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people. The restraint is felt no less on the one side, than on the other. – Even a child, that “plaything for an hour,” tires always.’6 Listening to the ‘sweet’ noises of children sporting on the green outside his window as he writes, he feels ‘inexpressibly’ transported from the labour of my task. It is like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They ought at least to do so – for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far unlike the harsh prose-accents of man’s conversation. – I should but spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling in their pastime. (2:53) Given such sympathy for children, it seems natural that Lamb, in alluding elsewhere to Elisha’s mockery, would betray a one-sided concern with the prophet’s taunters rather than with the prophet himself, a man who evidently failed to see those children as ‘capital fellows’ or to discern ‘music’ or ‘poetry’ in their jeers. This passing allusion occurs in another of Lamb’s Elia essays, ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’ (1821). Esteemed by some as one of the most beautiful prose writings in English literature,7 this essay conveys memories from Lamb’s early childhood as the son of a legal clerk living in London’s Crown Office Row, Temple. Recapturing his own early perceptions through ‘the eye of childhood,’ he asks, ‘Why must every thing smack of man, and mannish? Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child’s heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?’8 Chief among those ‘enchantments’ in Lamb’s own childhood were the old benchers of the essay’s title, the Temple’s unforgettable senior denizens. One of them, Thomas Coventry (d. 1797), ‘made a solitude of children wherever he came, for they fled his insufferable presence, as they would have shunned an Elisha bear. His growl was as thunder in their ears’ (2:85). In capturing ‘the morbid humour’ of the biblical incident,9 this allusion affords a fortuitous insight into how a temperament steeped in Romantic, sanctifying notions of childhood might respond to the tale of Elisha’s mockery. The ‘humour’ of Lamb’s ‘Elisha bear’ image may stem from his thwarting the possible association of Coventry with the mocked Elisha. Although Coventry might seem as eccentric a codger as any bald prophet, Lamb makes



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no mention of ever having ridiculed Coventry or any of the other old benchers as a boy, and so associates him not with Elisha but with the bears that put an end to Elisha’s mockery. Earlier in the paragraph, an aura of holiness befitting a prophet was satirically evoked when Lamb recalled the old lawyers as striding daily upon the Temple’s terrace with ‘footsteps which made its pavement awful’ (that is, awful in the sense of awe-inspiring), as they ‘had it almost sacred to themselves’ (2:85). Lamb will later summarize in mockreligious terms his boyhood veneration of these geezers who made up for him ‘the mythology of the Temple’: ‘In those days I saw Gods, as “old men covered with a mantle,” walking upon the earth’ (2:90). However, when confronted with the immediate spectacle of the oncoming Coventry, young Lamb perceived him as neither a god nor a man of God (‘covered with a mantle’ like Elijah or Elisha) but a terrifying, threatening beast – hence ‘an Elisha bear’ – ‘whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his face square as the lion’s, his gait peremptory and path-keeping’, as ‘Clouds of snuff, aggravating the natural terrors of his speech, broke from each majestic nostril, darkening the air’ (2:85). In bypassing a seemingly logical analogy between Coventry and Elisha as risible eccentrics in order to draw a less obvious but even funnier association between Coventry and Elisha’s bears, Lamb must have thought of those beasts not positively and theologically as god-sent avengers of a persecuted prophet, but negatively and naturalistically as maulers of boys. Recalling the Elisha tale probably from his daily reading of the Bible as a schoolboy at Christ’s Hospital,10 and perhaps also from his reading of Watts’ Divine Songs,11 Lamb viewed the tale only from the boys’ perspective. What struck him was the bears’ attack, not what provoked it. To acknowledge the provocation would have been to acknowledge a cruel streak in boys that contradicted his exaltation of them as ‘capital fellows’. The Romantic consecration of childhood had deep and lasting literary effects. Its introduction of the child as an important, continuous theme in English and American literature has been traced through sentimental permutations in works of Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Mark Twain, and Richard Jefferies.12 However, just as biblical typology of the sort Augustine championed left a remarkable impress upon Victorian literature and art,13 so the centuries-old Augustinian wariness towards childhood did not entirely dissipate. Detecting a linkage between the portrayal of children in English Victorian literature and the concepts of the fall and original sin, Robert Pattison finds this connection prefigured in Augustine and the controversy in the early church over the appraisal of human fallenness.14 Perhaps this residual Augustinianism helps explain why, as Ruth Bottigheimer notes, ‘English children’s Bibles kept Elisha and his bears on their pages even in the nineteenth century, in a period when modern readers



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believe they are more likely to encounter idyllic scenes than to confront beastly carnage.’15 Whatever the case, the tale of Elisha’s mockery evidently weighed more heavily upon some nineteenth-century English minds than upon Lamb’s.

Among English luminaries who found occasion to comment upon 2 Kings 2.23–24 in the years immediately before and during the Victorian era, three of the most important are Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), John Ruskin (1819– 1900), and Benjamin Jowett (1817–93). Whereas Arnold and Jowett were renowned primarily as educators, the former striving to transform the public school into a Christian community, and the latter committed to cultivating the socially ‘best’ of Britain’s ‘gilded youth’, the polymathic Ruskin pioneered the discipline of art criticism while also establishing a reputation as a poet, artist, and social reformer. In their comments on Elisha’s mockery, all three figures shared the appearance mostly as ‘liberals’ in an era when a host of evangelical commentators would have cast children simply as embodiments of inherited sin. During his tenure as headmaster at Rugby (1828–42) it was only natural for Arnold to choose as texts for three of his numerous sermons to the schoolboys a trio of verses that pertain to children: 1 Corinthians 13.11, 2 Kings 2.24, and Matthew 18.6.16 At the outset of the second of these sermons, re-emphasizing a point broached in the first (see Serm. 5, 2:48), he notes that the Bible was written mainly for grown-ups, whose ‘faults … are different from those of boys’ (Serm. 7, 2:62). He then recites and interprets the tale of Elisha’s mockery. Although the word translated as ‘little children’ might instead be rendered as ‘boys, or young men’, he asserts, the persons so ‘heavily punished’ by the bears were ‘not grown up to manhood; they had all the excuse that youth could give them’ for their offence, which ‘we should call rather carelessness and idle mischief, than deliberate wickedness’ (2:64). In laughing at Elisha’s baldness, ‘just as … persons, with any thing in their appearance at all strange or remarkable, are sometimes insulted now’, the Bethel boys exhibited ‘the very spirit of idle boys, at all times, and in all countries’ (2:64). Although to blame the Bethel boys’ misbehaviour on idleness was a tendency as old as Theodotion, Arnold is the first to suggest that they behaved the way such boys in any time or place behave. But this is not his ultimate point. Comparing the prophet’s mockery to the way congregations of Methodists ‘have been sometimes laughed at and disturbed among us, and their singing and preaching made a jest of’ (2:64–5), he instructs his listeners to note ‘that God is angry with the faults of young persons as with those of grown-up men, and that he punishes them as heavily’ (2:65). Then he differentiates the kinds of punishment God could be expected to mete out before and after the new



Arnold, Ruskin, and Jowett


Of course, the rest of the story is not applicable: God’s punishments are not now punishments upon our bodies in this life, but punishments upon our immortal bodies after the resurrection, when we shall all be called before the judgment-seat of Christ. And a man, who, being thus insulted, were to curse those who were insulting him, and to wish for God’s judgments upon them, would certainly now be a great deal worse than the boys who had provoked him. (2:65) The lesson to be derived from the boys’ punishment is that ‘the faults of our youth … are not considered by God as trifling, but are punished by him after the same measure as the sins of men’ (2:65–6). According to Arnold, the reason men so often speak of the sins of boys as insignificant and look back indifferently upon their own conduct at school is that men ‘measure the guilt of faults by the harm which they do in this world, and not by the harm which they do in unfitting us for the kingdom of God, by making us unlike God and Christ’ (2:66). Little harm may be done in the world by the typical faults of boys, such as lying, extravagance, idleness, and ill-treatment of one another. Yet ‘the real evil of every fault is its offence in the sight of God, its making us more unlike his image, and more like the image of the devil’ (2:67). Remarkably, having reduced the worldly implications of the Bethel boys’ fault almost to a triviality by finding them like ‘idle boys, at all times, and in all countries’, Arnold attributes an ‘infinite’ spiritual significance to that fault. Alluding to the Gospel claim that ‘he who is unjust in the least is unjust also in much’ (Luke 16.10, AV), he extrapolates that just as the effects of ‘the greatest crimes’ committed by ‘the most powerful tyrant ever’ might be ‘as the least thing in the sight of God’, so ‘the consequences of the common school faults of the youngest boy are infinitely great’.17 The sermon thus ends on a note opposite to the one on which it began. Whereas Arnold started off by playing down the Bethel boys’ fault, he ends as if possessed by the moralistic spirits of Crouch and Watts and desiring to scare the wits out of his young listeners. The difference is that, unlike Crouch and Watts, who relished recounting the bloody physical punishment of the Bethel boys, Arnold relishes forecasting the spiritual price to be paid for puerile sin: ‘if you displease God, which you know you do by every fault, the evil of your conduct is infinite, and its consequences are infinite; not doing injury here, but doing injury far greater – injury to your immortal souls, ruin to your immortal happiness’ (2:69). As much as Arnold’s work at reforming the public school helped shape Victorian notions of education, Ruskin’s prodigious output as critic helped condition Victorian tastes in art. It is therefore of interest that in the first of



dispensation under Christ:


three instances when the image of Elisha’s mockery occurs to him, he draws it into the same Gospel association into which Arnold drew it when the latter followed up his own sermon on 2 Kings 2.24 with a sermon on Matthew 18.6: ‘Whoso shall offend one of these little ones …’ (AV). In defending the PreRaphaelite artists in 1854 against a clergyman’s denunciation of them as ‘exceedingly young men of stubborn instincts’,18 Ruskin links 2 Kings 2.23 with Matthew 18.10. Granting ‘it is woeful, when the young usurp the place, or despise the wisdom, of the aged’, and that ‘among the many dark signs of these times, the disobedience and insolence of youth are among the darkest’, Ruskin asks: But with whom is the fault? Youth never yet lost its modesty where age had not lost its honour; nor did childhood ever refuse its reverence, except where age had forgotten correction. The cry, ‘Go up, thou bald head,’ will never be heard in the land which remembers the precept, ‘See that ye despise not one of these little ones.’ (12:164) In suggesting that irreverence like that of Elisha’s mockers will develop among children only in a society that despises youth, Ruskin expressed a sympathy towards boys which would manifest itself even more strikingly ten years later when he addressed the pupils of the Free Grammar School of Manchester during a visit to that city. It was usual to say that ‘boys would be boys,’ he remarked. But if the expression meant ‘a boy is something light and frivolous’, Ruskin did not believe it. ‘The boy ought to be in all ways a true boy – eager to play and ready to work. He ought to play more than a man, but we made him work harder, and we never gave him work interesting enough for him. This, however, was all being corrected now. Boys now were being allowed to play; nay in our great public schools’ – like the late Arnold’s Rugby, where the game named after the school was created – ‘they were being compelled to play.’19 Together with his earlier response to 2 Kings 2.23, Ruskin’s espoused ideal that the ‘right sort’ of boy should be not only ‘ready for work’, as any good Augustinian might urge as an antidote to idleness, but ‘eager to play’, marks the new level to which the Victorian sympathy for children had risen. Elsewhere he alludes to Elisha’s mockery to support his own rejection of the idea that great artists and pioneers prosper from the world’s scorn. He seems to want to exonerate Elisha’s mockers, pointing out that children ‘know no better’.20 It is not that Ruskin condones those boys’ irreverence. Years later he will submit that the children of Nanterre, including the young St Geneviève, who escorted St Germain of Auxerre to that village, did so ‘in more kindly manner than Elisha’s convoy’.21 Yet as shown by his remarks at the Manchester



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Grammar School, what he esteems in boys is that ludic impulse which, being active in Elisha’s mockers, might seem threatening to any Augustinian. Here, we should recall Arnold’s avowal that the massacre of the Bethel boys is no longer ‘applicable’ as a scriptural example, since God’s punishments are no longer physical and this-worldly but spiritual and pertinent to the afterlife alone. Although Arnold wrung out from 2 Kings 2.24 a frightful spiritual lesson for boys, the renowned Oxonian Jowett later denied the prudence of such an effort. In his influential essay ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’ (1860),22 which attacks the revival of typological modes of scriptural interpretation by John Keble and John Henry Newman, Jowett cites the tale of Elisha’s mockery, together with the image of Samuel ‘hew[ing] Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal’ (1 Sam. 15.33), among ‘examples in the Old Testament which were not written for our instruction’ (p. 417). Such passages, he submits, ‘are liable to misunderstanding’, since ‘the poor generally read the Bible unconsciously’, responding to it with as little reflection as children on the moral questions it raises: ‘The child is only struck by the impiety of the children who mocked the prophet; he does not think of the severity of the punishment which is inflicted on them’ (pp. 417–18). Crouch and Watts would have strongly disagreed with this last claim. Yet their views on the matter, not Jowett’s, were becoming obsolete at the height of the Victorian Age. Jowett’s dismissal of 2 Kings 2.23–24 as useless for instruction anticipated the disapprobation with which the tale has commonly been regarded ever since. In American literature, whatever negative Augustinian views of children had survived the sway of European Romanticism were ultimately compromised in the reverence for what Leslie A. Fiedler calls the ‘good bad boy’. This figure develops from Huckleberry Finn up through Jack Kerouac as the embodiment of ‘America’s vision of itself, … crude and unruly in his beginnings but endowed by his creator with an instinctive sense of what is right.’23 At its height, such reverence could make even a designated ‘bad boy’ look good, as in Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s (1836–1907) novel The Story of a Bad Boy (1870). Considered an important precursor to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1885), this novel presents a hero whose self-portrayal hardly matches the expectations aroused by the title: ‘I have no dark confessions to make. I call my story the story of a bad boy, partly to distinguish myself from those faultless young gentlemen who generally figure in narratives of this kind, and partly because I really was not a cherub.’24 Despite the sanctification of the child in the nineteenth century, the Bethel boys motif did survive, attesting to the less pleasant implications of the innate amorality of children which Rousseau had praised. Even a writer as consummately Romantic as E.T.A. Hoffmann could not resist drawing upon the archetypal association of a pack of wild urchins with the demonic in the opening





scene of his contemporary Märchen or fairy-tale, ‘The Golden Pot’ (‘Der goldene Topf’, 1814). The protagonist, an emotionally and psychologically unstable young student of theology, is first seen rushing through the northwest gate of Dresden, where he clumsily knocks over a market-woman’s basket of apples. The fruit scatters all around, and ‘urchins in the street [die Strassenjungen] joyously divided the booty that was thrown their way by this precipitous gentleman’.25 Although the urchins disappear from the narrative as spontaneously as they appeared, neither to be seen again nor to be included in the Äpfelweib’s subsequent curse of Anselmus, it is they who complete his accidental ‘crime’ by making off with the apples. Through an associative process essential to Hoffmann’s narrative art, these boys become implicated in the reader’s imagination with the sinister force of darkness represented by the hag, much as the boys of Bethel became associated in the medieval Christian imagination with the demonized Jews. After all, had the boys’ theft not prevented the Äpfelweib from retrieving the spilled apples, her curse might not have been necessary. As we saw earlier, the motif of boys stealing fruit is a thematic sibling of the Bethel boys motif, finding its locus classicus in Augustine’s Confessions and recalling Adam’s transgression. Although the fruit-stealing motif will recur a century later in the opening chapter of Hermann Hesse’s Bildungsroman Demian (1919), where it is again associated with evil,26 the Bethel boys motif is next exploited by two of the most formidable nineteenth-century authors, each of whose usage of it is so innovative as to warrant being considered at length.

Kierkegaard Enough is known about the singular childhood of the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) to confirm a biographer’s claim that ‘if ever the child was father of the man, it was in this instance’.27 Of his religious indoctrination in earliest childhood by his austere, gloomy father, Kierkegaard recalled having been ‘rigorously and earnestly brought up in Christianity, insanely brought up’, with the result of becoming ‘a child attired, how insane, as a depressed old man’.28 Given this melancholy upbringing, Kierkegaard could never romanticize childhood as a stage of life. Suffused with his father’s Lutheran notion of human beings as creatures born of sin, he had also rebelled against German Romanticism by the time he began composing and publishing his pseudonymous works of the 1840s. Therefore his pseudonyms never accept uncritically the Romantics’ association of children with the innocent pre-fallen Adam. The assumption that children are innately depraved is expressed, for example, by both the aesthete and the ethicist of Either/Or (1843). In the book’s opening, the aesthetic pseudonym ‘A’ sardonically cites the baby’s first babbling



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utterance, ‘da-da’, which in Danish also means ‘spanking’, as a symptom of ‘hereditary sin’.29 Judge William (‘B’), the ethicist of Either/Or, takes up the same point. In response to the aesthete, who found it ‘esthetically beautiful that a child is born in pain’, the Judge emphasizes that the Church declares the painful birth of a child ‘as the universal destiny of humankind, and that a child is born in sin is the most profound expression of its highest worth’.30 As Kierkegaard had tried early on to determine the ‘significance’ and ‘independent value’ of childhood as a stage in life, concluding that ‘childhood is the paradigmatic part of life; adulthood its syntax’,31 other allusions to childhood and children appear not infrequently throughout his oeuvre. Some of these suggest a positive attitude. In Stages on Life’s Way (1845), the ‘Married Man’ ( Judge William, again) asserts with respect to religion ‘that one learns the best things as a child’, and that the task of the intelligent individual is ‘to preserve and regain childhood’s pious faith’ and to recall ‘what he himself once upon a time in childlike innocence wholeheartedly accepted’.32 But the religiously inclined narrator of the later section entitled ‘“Guilty”/“Not Guilty?”’, known also as ‘Quidam’s diary’, alludes to another, less innocent side of children. Not only does he identify with the sense of the unmercifulness of life which ‘an insect with which children are playing must feel’ (p. 365; cf. p. 199), but he records a scene he witnessed which calls to mind Elisha’s mockers: ‘I saw a drunken woman in the street; she fell down, and the boys laughed at her’ (p. 322). Still later, the ‘religious’ spokesman Frater Taciturnus makes subtle use of the Bethel boys motif and its more cynical assumption about children when he comments in his ‘Letter to the Reader’ upon ‘“Guilty”/ “Not Guilty?”’, which he himself authored as ‘An Imaginary Psychological Construction’ on suffering. Calling the narrator of that diary ‘mad’, Taciturnus doubts that Quidam would succeed as a faithful lover in the real world: ‘How funny it would be to see such a spook, troglodyte, or cave dweller come sneaking out after listening secretly to people’s romantic talk and claim to be an unhappy lover of the first rank! He would have the street urchins on his tail, that is certain’ (pp. 400–1). Anticipating Kierkegaard’s comment shortly before his death that ‘it is sheer nonsense that [children] are supposed to be Christians’,33 Taciturnus betrays an assumption about children that informs the scene in a theatrical farce described by the pseudonym Constantin Constantius in Kierkegaard’s Repetition (1843): a character with a little bundle on his back and a stick in hand walks onto the stage ‘followed by street urchins whom one does not see’.34 It is assumed that urchins as a type are instinctively prone to pursue eccentric persons, often to mock them. The obvious kinship of this assumption to the Bethel boys motif is supported in ‘“Guilty”/“Not Guilty?”’ by Taciturnus’s comparison of the mad, potentially-urchin-plagued lover of Quidam’s diary to Don Quixote,35 whose own connection with that motif we considered in





Chapter 5. As we shall see, Taciturnus’s image of the perceived madman being pursued by urchins proved prophetic of the actual predicament in which Kierkegaard found himself within a year after Stages appeared. Kierkegaard’s own attitude towards children is difficult to determine, given his authorial practice of concealing his views behind the cloak of pseudonymity. He was keenly aware of the tension between Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18.3 that only one who becomes like a child can enter heaven, and Paul’s recollection in 1 Corinthians 13.11 of having given up ‘childish’ ways upon becoming a man. As a preacher, he invoked both those verses in sermons of 1844, and again in Practice in Christianity (1850), which appeared under the pseudonym Anti-Climicus, with Kierkegaard named as ‘editor’.36 The previous year, Kierkegaard had mused that the way you assess your own childhood in the light of the Christic and Pauline views on children provides a key to your personality. Quoting 1 Corinthians 13.11, he remarks: ‘one could speak on the theme: what judgment do you make on your childhood and your youth? Do you judge that it was foolishness and fancies?’ – in consistency with Paul. ‘Or do you judge that you were at that time closest to the Most High?’ – in consistency with Jesus’ claim that heaven ‘belongs’ to ‘such’ as children (Matt. 19.14; Mark 10.14; Luke 18.16). ‘Just tell me how you judge your childhood and your youth, and I will tell you who you are.’37 Although Kierkegaard’s notion that one’s ‘openness’ towards God ‘increases as one becomes more and more a child’38 accords with Matthew 19.14 and the Markan and Lukan counterparts of that verse, and although he once had enunciated a warning consonant with the one Jesus issued about the fate that awaits corrupters of children (Matt. 18.6),39 he betrayed little sympathy for conventional literalistic readings of the Gospel scene where Jesus calls for children to be brought to him. At the close of his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (1846), his pseudonym Johannes Climacus warns that a ‘sentimental’ understanding of Jesus’ exaltation of children in effect satirizes Christianity and makes the religion ludicrous.40 The child, says Climacus, is ‘a sinner without the consciousness of sin’ (1:592).41 Were it true that children confront none of the difficulties that adults must face to enter heaven, then it would seem ‘best to die as a child’ (1:593). Any doubt that Climacus is expressing Kierkegaard’s own view should be allayed by several journal entries of 1854, the year before his death, where Kierkegaard dismisses the conventional interpretation of Matthew 19.14. ‘But to interpret this passage in the way it has already been repeated millions and trillions of times: Now let us simply have children, for Christ says, “Let the little children come to me” – this is either stupid animalism or insolence, impudence.’42 In another entry, observing that ‘it is not Christ who addresses himself to the little children or orders them to be brought to him’, and that it is only ‘when the disciples want to push them and their mothers away’ that



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he says to let the children come to him, Kierkegaard concludes: ‘Christ does not deny that the disciples are right in thinking that Christianity is really not for infants – but he also admonishes the disciples to become themselves like children.’43 Kierkegaard elsewhere brings Matthew 19.14 to bear upon the attack he was waging on Christendom during the last two years of his life. On the assumption that ‘The Christianity of the majority consists approximately of these two statements … first, the statement about the infants, that one becomes a Christian as a child, that to such belongs the kingdom of God; the other is the thief on the cross’, he contemptuously sums up the ‘Christianity’ of Christendom as ‘a mixture of childishness and crime’.44 From 1846 on Kierkegaard had a special reason to look sceptically upon the Gospel passages concerning children. His sympathy for Jesus’ exaltation of children must have been severely tested by his own role as victim in what amounted to constant real-life enactments of the Bethel boys motif in the streets of Copenhagen during the period of his notorious conflict with that city’s popular journal, The Corsair. The so-called Corsair affair, which still ranks as the most notorious literary controversy in Danish history, was one of the most traumatic and crucial events of Kierkegaard’s life. Finding its origin in a dispute between Kierkegaard and one of The Corsair’s editors, the prolonged débâcle entailed relentless lampooning of Kierkegaard in that journal. From January 1846, for almost a year, one issue after another featured articles that ridiculed Kierkegaard’s public persona and private life. These articles were accompanied by caricatures accentuating the peculiar aspects of his physique and attire: the misshapen back and spindly shanks, the wide-brimmed hat, the walking cane, and the uneven lengths of his trouser legs. The upshot was that Kierkegaard, already resented by Danes for his criticisms of their morals and society, was reduced to a national laughingstock, a physical freak embodying ‘the eccentric, the outsider, the figure of fun’.45 Among other disastrous effects upon his life, the ruination of Kierkegaard’s reputation through the Corsair affair deprived him of the pleasure of his daily walk, or ‘people bath’ (Menneskebad ), as he spoke of it in his journals.46 That ritual, which had been essential for his health and his communication with society, was now replaced by the ‘daily drenchings of rabble-barbarism’47 to which he was subjected by his fellow citizens. As Roger Poole explains, Passers-by in the street would nudge each other and exchange meaningful glances. The philosopher’s name, Søren, was made into a street call. ‘Tss Tss’ – the whisper behind the back – was developed to sound behind the philosopher as he passed down the street. According to Kierkegaard’s own testimony, passers-by would stare intently at the trouser legs to decide whether they were of uneven lengths, and even come up to the philosopher to inquire whether these were, indeed, ‘the’ trouser legs that they had




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Traceable as far back as Socrates, the image of the peripatetic philosopher had been reimpressed upon Kierkegaard’s generation by Heinrich Heine’s (1797–1856) amusing account of the routine strolls of Immanuel Kant.49 But the quotidian placidness of the Kantian Philosophengang was inverted in the daily ‘terrorism of the street’ endured by Kierkegaard. As his journals reveal, one of the worst aspects of that terrorism was the constant derision by young boys. On 9 March 1846, after the first flurry of attacks by The Corsair, he notes: ‘Every kitchen boy feels justified in almost insulting me in accordance with The Corsair’s orders; young students titter and grin and are happy to see a prominent person trampled on.’50 Also in that year, lamenting his loss of the satisfaction of anonymously ‘gadding about on the streets’, he comments: ‘Now this is all upset; the rabble, the apprentices, the butcher boys, the school boys, and all such are egged on.’51 To be mocked by boys in the street was the ultimate insult of ‘rabble-barbarism’, Kierkegaard’s favourite phrase for denoting the vulgarity of the masses unleashed against him by The Corsair.52 Having always employed his extraordinary irony to defend himself or attack others, he realized immediately that he could ‘not play to such a public’, because ‘the completely uneducated class, the school boys and the butcher boys, of course, have no requisite conditions [for irony]’.53 What he found most unpleasant was not what was said about him in the Corsair, but to whom it was said. Things about himself which he could laugh at with a friend who shared the same intellectual background, he could not laugh at in the company of such ‘riff-raff’ as ‘Jewish peddlers, shop clerks, prostitutes, school boys, butcher boys, etc.’.54 As Kierkegaard’s abuse by the ‘rabble’ persisted, his mockery by boys figured as an essential aspect of his self-image as ‘a martyr of laughter’, a Christ-like hero sacrificed on the altar of the masses’ derision.55 Evoking the apocryphal image of children amid the crowds present at the events of Christ’s Passion, he notes in 1846: The most terrible expression of the way Christ was misunderstood would not have been that he had been completely ignored – no, but that he became the object of curiosity to the unthinking crowd, so that the eternal truth walked about in life and street-urchins ran after him and house-maids poured into the streets to stare at him – but no one, not one, thought about what he was. ( JP, 1:302, emphasis mine)



seen in The Corsair, so that they could assure their friends they had really seen them. An entire terrorism of the street was rapidly invented and deployed, and the daily walks turned into a nightmare.48

Having presumably related this thought about Christ to his own plight, he reflects in 1847: ‘what comes out in a newspaper once would not mean much if it did not give the vulgar the mandate to insult one day after day, abuse one on the public street, schoolboys, brash students, store clerks, and all the scum yellow journalism stirs up’ ( JP, 5:5998, emphasis mine). The following year he elaborates: ‘but when it is the rabble, the utterly brutish humanity, the rowdies, silly women, school children, and apprentices who abuse me: that is the meanness and lack of character of a people directed against one who truly merits something from his people’ ( JP, 6:6160, emphasis mine). It is little wonder that Kierkegaard would lament that his countrymen had abused him ‘as children abuse a costly present’.56 Whether he knew it or not, these accounts of Kierkegaard’s mockery fit squarely in the literary tradition of the Bethel boys motif. Derided by boys for his funny appearance, he seems analogous to ‘baldhead’ Elisha. Ridiculed by them also for his perceived madness, he seems like St Francis, Don Quixote, and Tomás Rodaja. Yet unlike Cervantes, he did not employ the motif merely as a fictional device; once he himself became the object of puerile mockery, the motif was for Kierkegaard no longer really a ‘motif’, but a humiliating existential fact. As the first writer to convey the motif through first-person testimonies of the actual mocked man, he analysed the misconduct of the children who participated, and found society blameable. The popular press which had ruined his reputation furnished ample evidence to support his pessimistic outlook on the future of his society. Appalled that children in his time were writing in newspapers, some of which were published for schoolboys, he was haunted by the proclamation of the ancient prophet that the severest punishment upon the disobedient Israelites would be that they would be judged by children (Isa. 3.4).57 Realizing from the Corsair affair that the popular press could corrupt children by allowing them ‘to read about a man being mistreated in this way, practically inviting the whole bunch of school boys to whistle at him on the streets’,58 Kierkegaard remained convinced that a very different effect could be achieved by showing a child an image of the Crucifixion. In his journal of 1848, and later as the pseudonym Anti-Climacus in Practice in Christianity, he proposed a thought experiment which significantly departs from the tendency of late medieval and Renaissance artists to include children as spectators, gawkers, and, in some cases, stoners, among the crowds present in depictions of Passion scenes. If from no other source, Kierkegaard would have known the motif of the child at the Passion from Thorvaldsen’s bas-relief of the Bearing of the Cross at the base of the vaulted ceiling behind the altar in the Vor Frue Kirke, where he sometimes preached.59 However, in his thought experiment, rather than to implicate children in the Passion, Kierkegaard pondered how a modern child, unfamiliar with





Christ, would react to being shown a picture of the Crucified alongside pictures of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and other such heroic figures: ‘The child, with this picture as with every one of the others, asks: Who is it? Say to the child: That was the most loving man who ever lived – then the child will ask: But who killed him and why did they kill him?’60 According to AntiClimacus, the child would forget the pictures of the other heroes, then be amazed that nothing was done by God to prevent Christ’s execution, and finally resolve ‘that when he grew up he would slay all those ungodly people who had treated this loving person in that way; the child would have made this decision, childishly forgetting that it was over eighteen hundred years since those people lived.’61 Kierkegaard was not the only eminent philosopher of his century to be tormented by insensitive scamps. Friedrich Nietzsche, while sojourning in Turin, was victimized by children who put in his folded umbrella some stones which, when he opened it, poured onto his head; prophet though he was of the Übermensch, he chased after but could not catch those kids.62 Nor was Kierkegaard the only nineteenth-century author whose interest in children and in their moral and religious character gave rise to variations on the Bethel boys motif.

Dostoevsky It was in Russian literature, with the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), that the nineteenth-century theme of childish innocence reached its climax. As portrayed in Prince Myshkin of The Idiot (1869) and Alyosha of The Brothers Karamazov (1880), a joyful love of children and direct contact with them bespeak a special sign of grace and a proof of human virtue.63 This sympathy reflects not only the influence of Romanticism, but the fact that the Western, Augustinian doctrine of original guilt had never held sway over the Orthodox theological tradition to which Dostoevsky adhered. ‘Love children especially,’ declares Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and as it were to guide us.’64 The idea that children are born guilty is also rejected on rational moral grounds by Ivan Karamazov in his famous discussion with his brother, the monk, Alyosha, in the Metropolis Tavern (5.4). Like Augustine’s understanding of children, Dostoevsky’s is largely based upon his own observations. The Diary of a Writer, a collection of his journalistic writings from 1873, 1876–77, and 1880–81, is filled with reflections on children, their education, and their abuse, and includes entries on such experiences as his encounter with a begging urchin in the street, his visits to a colony of juvenile delinquents and other children’s schools, and even his dreams about children.65 From firsthand knowledge, he was as keenly aware as



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Kierkegaard had been of the corruptibility of children and the bifurcation that often distinguishes the moral character of boys. As Captain Snegiryov remarks in The Brothers Karamazov, which Dostoevsky originally conceived as a novel about children,66 ‘Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels of God, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless’ (4.7, p. 188). Encapsulating a recurrent theme in Dostoevsky, this statement recalls the basic idea recorded in his notes to his earlier novel A Raw Youth (1875), ‘that children are as capable of great good and great evil as any adult.’67 What elicited Captain Snegiryov’s statement was a situation stemming from an earlier incident that bears suggestive affinities with the tale of Elisha’s mockery. On a road in the provincial Russian town in which the story is set, Alyosha encounters six young boys, aged nine to twelve, as they head home from school. Extremely fond of children, he stops to talk with them, noticing that they all hold stones in their hands. Beyond a nearby ditch stands another boy, who has evidently feuded with his schoolfellows. This boy, his coat pocket visibly bulging with rocks, suddenly throws one that hits Alyosha, and in response the other boys stone the solitary boy, whom Alyosha then tries to protect by running forward to block the missiles. Against the other boys’ warnings, Alyosha goes over to find out who the boy is: ‘They told me that you know me, and that you threw a stone at me on purpose,’ said Alyosha. The boy looked darkly at him. ‘I don’t know you. Do you know me?’ Alyosha continued. ‘Let me alone!’ the boy cried irritably, but he did not move … ‘Very well, I am going,’ said Alyosha; ‘only I don’t know you and I don’t tease you. They told me how they tease you, but I don’t want to tease you. Goodbye!’ ‘Monk in silk trousers!’ cried the boy, following Alyosha with the same vindictive and defiant expression … but Alyosha turned, looked at him, and walked away. He had not gone three steps before the biggest stone the boy had in his pocket hit him a painful blow in the back. (4.3, p. 163) Commenting on the use here of the children’s rhyme, ‘Monk in silk trousers!’ (Monakh, v garniturovykh shtanakh), which he renders as ‘Friar, friar, pants on fire!’, Victor Terras finds this scene to reflect the cliché of the Orthodox saint who is mocked and abused by children in the street.68 This Eastern variation upon the Bethel boys motif invites us to consider the scene in the light of 2 Kings 2.23–24. There is no evidence that Dostoevsky modelled Alyosha’s encounter with the schoolboys after Elisha’s mockery. However, the prophet Elijah, with whom





Elisha is so closely associated, is venerated and feared in Russia as a Thor-like thunderlord, because he was conveyed to heaven in a fiery chariot.69 Whether as a result of this association or not, certain aspects of Alyosha’s incident with the schoolboys seem like residual traits from 2 Kings 2.23–24. The names Elisha and Alyosha (from Aleksei), despite their near assonance, are etymologically unrelated. Yet just as Elisha’s mockery occurred shortly after he left the company of his prophetic disciples in Jericho, so Alyosha’s encounter with the schoolboys occurs shortly after he left the company of the other monks at his monastery. Like Elisha, who had recently witnessed Elijah’s miraculous ascent, Alyosha only hours earlier was with his own spiritual mentor, Zosima, who, credited with a ‘fresh “miracle”’ (4.1, p. 155), lay dying in bed. Minutes after another monk spoke of being borne away ‘In the spirit and glory of Elijah’ (p. 154, an allusion to Luke 1.17), Zosima assures Alyosha, ‘I shall not die without your being by to hear my last word’ (p. 155). In this connection we cannot help but recall that Elijah, upon his own departure from the world, promised Elisha a double portion of his spirit if Elisha saw him being taken up (2 Kgs 2.9–10). Alyosha’s reaction to Zosima’s promise would have befitted the awed Elisha when the latter inherited Elijah’s mantle: ‘But the promise that he should hear [Zosima’s] last word on earth, that it should be the last gift to him, Alyosha, sent a thrill of rapture through his soul’ (p. 155). Alyosha’s encounter with the boys involves some of the same thematic ingredients as the Elisha tale (holy man, boys, mockery), but here these ingredients are reconfigured with added complications. The incident starts off not with the holy man, Alyosha, being mocked by the boys, but with one of the boys, Ilyusha, being taunted by and squaring off with the other six. When Alyosha is attacked, first with stones (an element shared with the Lucianic version of the Elisha tale and the legends of Sts Simeon and Francis), then with derision (‘Monk in silk trousers!’), the attack is perpetrated not by a mob of boys, but by a single boy. When Ilyusha finally rushes at Alyosha ‘with rage … like a little wild beast’s’ (4.3, p. 163) and bites one of Alyosha’s fingers to the bone, he acts like the wild bears who ‘tore’ Elisha’s mockers, though he assaults, rather than protects, the holy man. The reconfiguration of the Bethel boys motif becomes even more complex when Alyosha meets Ilyusha’s father, Captain Snegiryov (4.6), in a scene that inverts the punitive act that brought the tale of Elisha’s mockery to a close. Upon learning what happened between Alyosha and Ilyusha, Snegiryov ostentatiously refuses to punish Ilyusha, even though Alyosha never requested that he be punished. Snegiryov declares that Ilyusha must have attacked Alyosha to avenge a wrong that had recently been done to Snegiryov by Alyosha’s brother, Dmitri. Dmitri had dragged Snegiryov out of a tavern into the marketplace by his beard, humiliating him in front of everyone present, including Ilyusha and the other boys who had happened to be coming out of school



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just then. The incident had ended with Ilyusha rushing up and kissing Dmitri’s hand, begging him to forgive Snegiryov. It is in this regard that Snegiryov calls schoolboys ‘a merciless race’. Ever since the incident, they had teased Ilyusha and nicknamed his father ‘wisp of tow’, a derisive allusion to Snegiryov’s beard, which Dmitri had pulled. This revelation completely reshuffles the ingredients of the Bethel boy motif. All at once, Alyosha (‘monk in silk trousers’), as analogue to the mocked Elisha (‘baldhead’), is complemented by Snegiryov (‘wisp of tow’), the derided father of Alyosha’s mocker and attacker. Ilyusha, as mocker and attacker, is complemented by Dmitri, the assaulter of Ilyusha’s father and brother of Ilyusha’s victim. And the schoolboys, Ilyusha’s tormentors, now assume their genuinely Bethel boy-like role as mockers of an innocent man, Snegiryov. With one schoolboy attacking a monk, and a group of others mocking a classmate’s middle-aged father who has already been humiliated by a younger man, this episode which began with Alyosha’s encounter with the boys presents a spectacle of disrespect by the young for their elders, and approximates what Edward Wasiolek finds to be at stake in the novel’s central, patricidal theme: ‘the right of the child to raise his hand against his father is for Dostoevsky the right of man to raise his hand against God’.70 If this episode is strangely reminiscent of Elisha’s mockery, it may be because the ancient scenario of a prophet mocked by boys was already a harbinger of the modern theme of human rebellion against God. Later in the novel, the Grand Inquisitor, that demonic creation of Ivan Karamazov’s imagination, invokes the image of ‘little children rioting and barring out the teacher at school’ (5.5, p. 237) as a metaphor for rebellion against the church. Despite the thematic affinities we have discussed, and despite any Bakhtinian plea that the novel’s ‘polyphony’ must preclude discernment of any one central argument, The Brothers Karamazov stands in moral and ideological opposition to the outcome of 2 Kings 2.23–24. Consistent with Snegiryov’s refusal to thrash his son as punishment for the boy’s assault on Alyosha, Ivan rebels against God on the conviction that, as he compels Alyosha to concede, a world whose harmony allows for the unavenged suffering of a single child is unworthy of consent (5.4). One of the horrible anecdotes of child abuse that he tells to support his case calls vividly to mind the tearing of the boys by Elisha’s bears.71 Although Dostoevsky did not fulfil his initial plan to allot a larger narrative portion to the schoolboys later in the novel,72 they by no means remain an anonymous mob like the Bethel boys. Book 10, entitled ‘Boys’, is devoted to them, and two of them, Ilyusha and Kolya Krasotkin, emerge as fully rounded, important characters. Most importantly, the final dénouement of the novel’s schoolboy subplot inverts the conclusion of the Elisha tale. Not only do the boys not meet a violent end, but Alyosha becomes their champion through his exemplary Christian guidance,





having helped reconcile Ilyusha and the other boys before Ilyusha died from illness. Nowhere in literature does the Bethel boys motif find a more cathartic inversion than in this novel’s final scene. There, having extolled the memory of their dead friend and announced their love for Alyosha, the boys accept the monk’s assurance that they will all rise after death and see Ilyusha and each other again. By this point, Kolya and the other boys have undergone a moral transformation which the Bethel boys were not allowed. Their past cruelty to Ilyusha, if not forgotten, has been sublimated; as Alyosha told them, ‘let us always remember how we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones’ (Epilogue, ch. 3, p. 733). In the end, the biblical image of bad boys being punitively mauled is replaced by that of spiritually reformed boys contemplating resurrection. And the rude chant of Elisha’s mockers, ‘Go up, you baldhead!’ falls silent to the closing choral shout of Kolya and his schoolfellows as they set out for Ilyusha’s funeral dinner: ‘Hurrah for Karamazov!’ (p. 735).

Humour in the horror From the late nineteenth century on, modern psychology and the newly developing social sciences of anthropology, sociology, and criminology fostered theories of childhood and adolescence that are more harmonious with the Bethel boys motif than were the Romantic and conventional Victorian views. In 1876, Cesare Lombroso published his L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man), whose reflections on criminality among children corroborates the imputation of a violent instinct to Elisha’s mockers in the Lucianic version of 2 Kings 2.23. As leader of the so-called Modern Penal School of criminal anthropology, Lombroso argued that ‘The criminal instincts common to primitive savages would be found proportionally in nearly all children, if they were not influenced by moral training and example.’73 For him the child ‘represents what is known to alienists as a morally insane being and to criminologists as a born criminal, and it certainly resembles these types in its impetuous violence’ (p. 131). Manifesting a similar albeit more sympathetic and amused outlook on children was Lombroso’s contemporary countryman, the writer Carlo Collodi (1826–90), author of The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le avventure di Pinocchio, 1881–83). Like the other of the two most popular Italian books for children, Edmondo De Amicis’s Cuore (1886; known in English as A Boy’s Heart), Collodi’s novel about a puppet-boy is often didactic towards children. Thus it warns: ‘children who don’t heed the advice of those who know better than they do always end up in some kind of trouble’; ‘Boys who give up studying and turn their backs on books, schools, and teachers to do nothing but play games and have fun are bound to come to a bad end’; ‘all lazy boys who hate



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books, schools, and teachers … must end up sooner or later by turning into little jackasses.’74 Yet this novel’s scholastic intent is secondary in importance to what a commentator calls the ‘vital link’ between Pinocchio and the street kid (ragazzo di strada), ‘a species of urban humanity that held an enormous fascination for Collodi and with whom he felt a strong affinity’.75 Aware of the biblical prototype of naughty street kids, we may not be amazed to encounter in Pinocchio a scene comparable to Elisha’s mockery. While it is Lampwick, Pinocchio’s companion, that most fully embodies this bad-boy type in Collodi’s novel, at no time is street kid mischievousness more dramatically displayed than when the puppet is attacked on the seashore by a band of schoolmates who duped him into playing hooky (ch. 27). This scene, memorably depicted in one of Enrico Mazzanti’s sketches in the book’s original edition,76 amounts to a bizarre variation upon the Lucianic version of the Bethel boys motif: a gang of seven nameless boys barraging an eccentric figure (the puppet) with their schoolbooks (including two of Collodi’s own which he had written prior to Pinocchio). As in the stone-throwing scene in The Brothers Karamazov, which appeared in Russia several years before Pinocchio appeared in Italy, this scene is part of a larger episode that reconfigures and complicates a number of thematic ingredients introduced in the Elisha tale. First, there is the victim’s laughable eccentricity, which was earlier stressed by the knee-jerk reaction he elicited when he made his initial appearance at school: ‘Just imagine those devilish boys [Figuratevi quelle birbe di ragazzi] when they saw a puppet walk into their school! There was no end of laughter. They played all sorts of tricks on him’ (ch. 26, p. 291). The imperative ‘Just imagine’ reflects an assumption that mockery is the response we should expect boys automatically to have towards any eccentric. The narrator will use the same phrase again in describing the reaction elicited when Pinocchio is sent sprawling by a donkey’s kick: ‘Just imagine [Figuratevi] the hoots and howls of laughter of all those boys who were looking on’ (ch. 31, p. 361). Second: the boys’ anonymity. Unlike Elisha, Pinocchio knows his attackers and is one of their peers (disregarding that he is a puppet and they are not). Yet they, like Elisha’s mockers, were introduced anonymously as ‘a pack of his usual comrades’ (ch. 26, p. 293), and none of their names is disclosed until after the incident. Third, fourth, and fifth: irreverence, mockery and insult, and gratuitousness. Although Pinocchio’s attack, like Elisha’s mockery, is gratuitous, its unwarrantedness may seem obscured by the scrambling of the elements of irreverence, derision, and insult in Collodi’s narrative. Pinocchio, unlike Elisha, is no holy figure. But the attack is precipitated by the fact that he has become the teacher’s pet for being ‘attentive, studious, and bright, always the first to arrive at school and always the last to get up and leave when school is over’ (p. 293) – in short, for embodying the moral antithesis of the street kid.





Thus, together with the subsequent attack, his being lured into skipping school expresses his attackers’ irreverence towards virtues extolled by society through the education system. ‘You too,’ the schoolmates goad Pinocchio before the attack, ‘have got to hate school, and lessons, and the teacher: our three great enemies’ (ch. 27, p. 301). When the puppet laughingly calls these boys ‘the seven deadly sins’ (p. 301: i peccati mortali), they acquire ipso facto an air of mock-theological blasphemousness that would seem to parody the real blasphemy of the Bethel boys. Moreover, in comparing this incident with 2 Kings 2.23–24, we see that the mocking role has shifted from boys themselves to their victim-to-be. Motivated by the boys’ desire to punish the teacher’s pet, the attack is finally prompted by his calling them ‘cuckoo’ several times in quick succession, after the manner of the Bethel boys’ insulting chant. Sixth and seventh: fatal punishment. Consistent with what happens in virtually all modern variations on the motif from 2 Kings 2.23–24, Pinocchio’s attackers escape unpunished. But before they run off, one of them is accidentally struck on the temple and knocked to the ground, almost unconscious, by a particularly large volume thrown by one of the other boys. So the theme of fatality does parodically enter in as this boy lies full-length on the sand, crying ‘Oh mother, help me … I’m dying’ (ch. 27, p. 305). Inverting the punitive theme of the Elisha tale, it is not the attackers, but the victim, Pinocchio, who ends up beset by a fierce animal. This happens after the other boys run off and two carabinieri arrive and assume that Pinocchio was the one who wounded the fallen boy. When the puppet tries to run off, they set their huge mastiff after him. Pinocchio has a happy ending, with the puppet becoming a boy. Yet the fate of children, which of course had never been so simple, would prove even less so in the century after Collodi’s. Heralded prematurely as the Century of the Child, what actually ensued was an age of wars, genocide, and other mayhem of unprecedented proportions, which counted innumerable children among the fathomless sum of innocent victims. As we will see in the next chapter, this reality has lent a special horror to some twentieth-century adaptations of our motif, even while in others, humour too has prevailed.



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Having seemed almost parodied in Collodi’s Pinocchio, Lombroso’s association of the child with criminality was none the less taken up seriously in G. Stanley Hall’s encyclopaedic study, Adolescence (1904), which established the modern concept of its titular subject. Viewing adolescence as ‘preeminently the criminal age’,1 Hall saw the child as a creature that ‘revels in savagery’ (1:x) and that displays ‘nativistic and more or less feral instincts’ (1:xi). His discussion of adolescent criminality as a kind of ontogenic recapitulation of an earlier, more brutish phylogenic stage of human development (see 1:325–410) anticipated later studies on such familiar ‘boy’ problems as gangs and delinquency,2 and presaged the realistic portrayals of juvenile delinquents in American novels of the 1930s.3 Yet the death-blows to the sentimentality surrounding the Victorian child were delivered not by Lombroso or Hall, but by the impact of Samuel Butler’s (1835–1902) posthumously published novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) and, above all, by Freud’s hypothesis of infantile sexuality, which freed the assessment of the child’s nature from the impediments of both the myth of original sin and the myth of original innocence.4 It is tempting to wonder what the founder of psychoanalysis would have made of the tale of Elisha’s mockery. What would he have said of the phallic implications of the prophet’s bald pate, or about the tale’s peculiar inversion of the Oedipal/primal horde hypothesis by which he himself tried to explain the origin of moral restrictions and religion? While the Freudian theory has vengeful sons kill and eat the primal, dominant father to gain possession of his wives,5 this tale has the wrathful father-figure (Elisha) avenge himself upon the pack of aggressive sons (boys) by summoning mothers (she-bears) to lacerate them. Although Freud never commented upon 2 Kings 2.23–24, his thought proves relevant to the first of several allusions to that tale in twentieth-century literature.



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Literary legacies of 2 Kings 2.23–24

Given the obvious bearing of Freud’s theories of verbal association and the unconscious upon the narrative technique of the Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941), those theories are pertinent to an intriguingly funny echo from the Elisha tale in his Ulysses, which was published serially in the Little Review from 1918 before appearing as a book in 1922. If Ulysses records, as Joyce put it, ‘simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious’,6 then the following passage from that novel furnishes a fortuitous glimpse at the associative working of the Bethel boys motif upon the consciousness of both Joyce as artist and of Stephen Dedalus as protagonist. Early in the novel’s third episode (‘Proteus’) Stephen contemplates the lack of beauty in the stagnant bay of Marsh’s library where you [i.e., Stephen] read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Cambell, Lanternjaws. Abbas father, furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff! Descende, calve, ut ne amplius decalveris. A garland of grey hair on his comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace (descende!), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down, baldpoll! (3.107–16 [1:81])7 Based upon the Vulgate rendering of the insult shouted at Elisha by the boys, Ascende, calve (‘Go up, baldhead!’), the Latin in this passage was drawn from the opening clause of a prophecy in the late medieval Vaticinia Pontificum, wrongly attributed to Joachim Abbas – that is, Joachim of Fiore, the twelfthcentury Cistercian mystic.8 Notwithstanding the humorous translation proposed by a Joyce commentator, ‘Come down, bald priest, lest you be deballed’,9 a more literal rendering would be: ‘Go down, baldy, so that you will not lose more hair.’ Later, in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses, Stephen gives his own more playful translation: ‘Down, baldynoddle, or we’ll wool your wool’ (10.852–3 [1:521]). Joyce’s firsthand familiarity with the 1589 Venetian edition of the Vaticinia in St Sepulchre Library, referred to here as Marsh’s Library (after its founder Narcissus Marsh), in the close of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, is attested by the Library’s sign-in records. These indicate that he visited on 22–23 October 1902 to read the book.10 That experience accounts for the scene in the extant portion of Stephen Hero, his avowedly autobiographical rough draft of 1904–06



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for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15), where Stephen visits Marsh’s Library and reads the Vaticinia, having been intrigued by the allusions to Joachim in Yeats’s short story ‘The Tables of the Law’ (1897).11 Although there is no evidence that Joyce knew of the relationship of the words descende, calve, ut ne amplius decalveris to 2 Kings 2.23, the phrase clearly caught his fancy and lodged itself in his memory. A letter of early August 1906 to his brother Stanislaus asks for the Latin quotation from Joachim’s writings, apparently for intended use in rewriting ‘A Painful Case’, one of the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners (1914).12 Whether or not we might rightly suppose that Joyce ‘had some trouble deciding where’ to employ the phrase, he evidently ‘carried [the phrase] about the Continent for sixteen years before [he] found a use for it; but he held onto it, watched and waited, tried it here and presumably there, and finally worked it into his mosaic.’13 What meaning does the phrase descende, calve bear for Stephen? Certain associations surrounding his quotation of it suggest that on some level of consciousness Stephen (and therefore Joyce) may be aware of the phrase’s biblical derivation, and that this awareness may help account for the phrase’s surfacing among Stephen’s thoughts. In conveying an image of the human multitude which the Joycean artist abhors and from which he must isolate himself,14 the phrase ‘The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close’ (a probable allusion to the crowded slum that surrounded St Patrick’s close in Joyce’s time) might recall the faceless mob of boys who alienated Elisha through mockery. This association may help explain the next several sentences in Joyce’s narrative as an unconscious jumbling of elements from 2 Kings 2.23–24 with several more immediate associations in Stephen’s mind. The ‘hater of his kind’ and ‘furious dean’ are assumed to be Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), dean of St Patrick’s from 1713. Having been associated with Joachim by Yeats in ‘The Tables of the Law’, Swift also was commonly viewed as a misanthrope suffering from a diseased mind that gradually lapsed into insanity – hence Stephen’s image of him running ‘from them to the wood of madness’. 15 But madness also is sometimes associated with prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and ‘the wood of madness’ might evoke the foliage from which the bears emerged to maul the boys in the Elisha tale. From a Freudian perspective, the subsequent images of equestrian beastliness that come to Stephen’s mind (‘mane foaming’, ‘eyeballs stars’, ‘Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled’, ‘oval equine faces’) might appear as displaced allusions to those biblical bears. For just as Stephen associates the phrase descende, calve with an unspecified ‘offence’ that ‘laid fire to [the] brains’ of Swift (‘furious dean’), Joachim (‘Abbas father’), and several persons whom Stephen has known (‘Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws’), so the boys’ cry of ascende, calve was insulting enough to provoke Elisha’s curse.





If an implicit awareness of the biblical derivation of the phrase descende, calve really does figure in the associations revolving around those words in Stephen’s mind, then the reference to ‘his comminated head’ is especially suggestive. The allusion is thought to be to Joachim of Fiore, some of whose teachings were condemned after his lifetime by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). But a deeper association with ‘baldhead’ Elisha might also exist. To comminate is to threaten with divine vengeance or punishment, or to curse, as Elisha imprecated his mockers. Consistent with the replacement of other thematic elements from the Elisha tale by their opposites in Stephen’s stream of consciousness (that is, the replacement of ascende by descende, and of the emergence of avenging bears from the woods by the running of the offended man into the woods), Stephen may be imagining his own Elisha-counterpart in a ‘comminated’ role ironically analogous to that of the boys whom Elisha cursed. Strangely, with his doubling of the pronouns ‘him me’ in the remainder of the sentence (‘see him me clambering down [cf. descende!] to the footpace, clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed’), Stephen seems momentarily to identify with the officiating priest who has been ordered to descend.16 In turn, Stephen may also be associating himself indirectly – as the alienated artist named after the first Christian martyr – with the prophet whom the boys told to go up (ascende!). While taking for granted that Stephen’s reading of the Joachim prophecy ‘has little or nothing to do with its original intent’,17 we should note that his apparent lightheartedness in recalling the descende, calve phrase squares neither with the tone of the original prophecy nor with that of the biblical expression which the phrase parodies. As we know from our earlier consideration of Lamb, to find humour in the horror of that tale would not have been new with Joyce. In the next case to be examined, humour permeates an entire poem inspired by the Elisha tale. Klein Born to an Orthodox Jewish family from Russia, and thus steeped from childhood in the Hebrew and Yiddish traditions, the Canadian poet A.M. Klein (1909–72) unquestionably knew well the tale of Elisha’s mockery before he read Ulysses for the first time as a student in the late 1920s. However, given his regular rereadings of Ulysses once every two years thereafter, his obsessive, Talmudic, word-by-word approach to deciphering that novel’s hidden meanings, and the tremendous, sustained influence that Joyce exerted upon his poetry and self-conception as an artist, it seems plausible that the indirect echoing of the Elisha tale in Joyce’s ‘Proteus’ episode figured in the inspiration behind Klein’s ‘Baldhead Elisha’ (c. 1932/34).18 This poem is one of several he composed on biblical personages in the early 1930s. An earlier poem, ‘Elijah’ (c. 1931), whose own biblical subject also figured in Ulysses, opens with an



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Baldhead! Baldhead! The little children mocked As surly Elisha Through the town stalked. Baldhead! Cleancrown! Smoothpate! Noodlenude! The little children twittered The little children mewed. The prophet Elisha He turned in his wrath And cursed the urchins With a terrible oath. Whereupon there sallied Bears from the grots Who tore to giblets Forty-two tots! Such was the horrible Vengeance that bears Wreaked for the honour Of forty-two hairs!20 If one of Klein’s overarching aims as artist was to achieve through his poetry ‘a modern “translation” of Judaism into English’,21 ‘Baldhead Elisha’ illustrates this point. While transposing to English idiom a tale extracted from Hebrew scripture, the poem retains the tale’s biblical essence. The structural symmetry of the 2 Kings version is maintained almost unaltered, with the first two stanzas corresponding to 2.23; the next two, to 2.24; and the last, added as a coda, reflecting sardonically upon the tale’s outcome. Except for the coda, only a few substantive modifications of the tale are made, and these serve primarily a humorous end. Elisha is now cast as a threatening, ‘surly’ figure, mocked not while ‘on the way’ to Bethel, as the Bible put it, but as he ‘Through the town stalked’. The bears emerge not from woods but ‘from the grots’, a change that allows for the rhyme with ‘tots’. Yet rhyme, as Klein would observe, is employed only rarely in the Hebrew Bible, whose ‘poetry is distinguished from its prose by the peculiar parallel construction’.22 So in Klein’s second stanza,



image of children laughing at the bearded prophet hobbling with a staff in the market.19 But it is ‘Baldhead Elisha’, quoted in its entirety below, that naturally crystallizes the Bethel boys motif:


that basic characteristic of biblical poetry is parodied through the succession of three vernacular synonyms of ‘baldhead’, and through the parallelism between the stanza’s third and fourth lines. In transforming a deadly serious biblical tale into a kind of playful nursery rhyme, Klein effectually refutes through poetic example (as he will later do discursively, twice, as critic) Ernest Renan’s bizarre claim that Jews lack the faculty for laughter.23 Just as Klein will retort that ‘The Bible is full of satiric thrusts and ironic counterpoint’,24 so the final stanza of ‘Baldhead Elisha’ ironically equates the number of hairs on the mocked prophet’s head with the number of torn boys, implicitly submitting Elisha’s ‘horrible/Vengeance’ as a satiric corollary of Mosaic law: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a tot for a hair. ‘Baldhead Elisha’ was not the last literary work to allude to 2 Kings 2.23–24. Heinlein So notorious did the tale of Elisha’s mockery remain that Jubal Harshaw, the cantankerous agnostic in Robert A. Heinlein’s (1907–88) bestselling 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, retells it to some female companions to illustrate why he disdains traditional religion. After citing as evidence of the Bible’s immorality the scene in which Lot offers his virgin daughters to the crowd outside his house (Gen. 19.8), Jubal exclaims: ‘Damn it, look it up! … That’s not the only shock in store for anybody who actually reads the Bible. Consider Elisha. It says here that Elisha was so allfired holy that merely touching his bones restored a dead man to life. But he was a bald-headed old coot, like myself. So one day some children made fun of his baldness, just as you girls do. So God personally interceded and sent two bears to tear forty-two small children into bloody bits. That’s what it says – second chapter of Second Kings.’25 As did the ancient heretics Marcion and Faustus, Jubal cites the Elisha tale to justify his own rejection of the Old Testament. In the broader context of Heinlein’s novel, which elsewhere mounts a biting satire of modern evangelical religion, Jubal’s characterization of Elisha as ‘all-fired holy’ carries a special resonance; he regards the ‘bald-headed old coot’ as a religious fanatic in the service of a fanatical, conscienceless God. For Jubal, there is none of the humor in 2 Kings 2.23–24 that Lamb, Klein, and plausibly Joyce discerned. Jubal’s apparent conviction that God’s punishment of Elisha’s mockers far exceeded the seriousness of their crime – a conviction shared by many modern biblical commentators and implied by the closing stanza of Klein’s ‘Baldhead Elisha’ – calls our attention to a crucial thematic omission in virtually every



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literary transformation of the Bethel boys motif: never are the offending boys punished. We saw this to be the case in Chapter 4 with the boys who reportedly abused St Francis, and in Chapters 5 and 6 with the recurrences of the motif in Cervantes, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky. Consistently, the boys’ wrong-doings seemed all the more wicked when left unpunished. In some cases, like that of Francis, the boys’ victim seemed all the holier as his abuse went unavenged. Padilla Beyond the English-speaking world, in his poem ‘A sidewalk café: Budapest, autumn’ (‘Una restaurante al aire libre en el otoño de Budapest’), the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla (b. 1932) makes a direct allusion not to 2 Kings 2.23–24, but to Laurent de La Hyre’s painting of the tale’s imagined aftermath, the retrieval of the Bethel boys’ corpses by their mothers (see Chapter 5 above). Recalling the experience of sitting at an outdoor restaurant in Budapest on a chilly autumn day, he writes: the waiter raises his hand scarred by war, a haunch of venison falls before me like the twisted arm of van de Velde, like La Hire, painting in huge strokes ‘The Death of the Children of Bethel’ … (el camarero alza su mano herida por las guerras, / una pierna de reno cae ante mí / como el brazo torcido de van de Velde, / como La Hire [sic], pintando a manotazos / ‘La muerte de los niños de Bethel’ …)26 Any of several associations raised earlier in the poem may have helped bring La Hyre’s painting to the poet’s mind. ‘Trunks of blackened trees’ (‘los troncos renegridos’) around the restaurant could recall the woods in the picture’s background, from which the bears had emerged. The ‘wool shawls’ (‘las mantas de lana’) with which ‘the old waiter’ (‘el viejo mozo’) covers the poet and his dining companions seem reminiscent of the prophetic mantle inherited from Elijah by Elisha shortly before the Bethel incident. The ‘hand scarred by war’, ‘haunch of venison’, and ‘twisted arm’ might combine to evoke thoughts of meat and mangling – thoughts pertinent to what happened to the boys whose corpses La Hyre depicted. The enduring ability of 2 Kings 2.23–24 to excite the artistic imagination is also attested by the 1980 percussionist composition by the American composer Bruce Penner entitled The Bears of Elisha, whose 164-measure score for vibraphone, gong, cymbal, and drum is prefaced by those two verses.27 But what




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about indirect twentieth-century literary variations on the Bethel boys motif? Before considering a number of such variations, let us see how it has fared in some modern biographies of St Francis.

Perhaps no greater windfall benefited the survival of the Bethel boys motif in the twentieth century than what The Oxford Dictionary of Saints describes as the ‘widespread revival of interest in Francis [of Assisi]’.28 Along with this renewed fascination, which began towards the end of the nineteenth century, numerous new biographies of Francis were written, most of which rehearse the scene from the Minor Life by St Bonaventure in which Francis is abused by boys in the street. This scene proved appealing to Francis’s modern biographers, starting with the French Protestant pastor and historian Paul Sabatier (1858–1928), whose Life of St. Francis of Assisi (Vie de S. François d’Assise, 1893) helped trigger the restoration of scholarly and public curiosity in the saint. Although Sabatier, in keeping with the positivist spirit of his times, could complain that ‘embellishments’ by Francis’s ecclesiastical historians had obscured ‘the real Francis’,29 he does some embellishing of his own when he recounts the scene from the Minor Life. When [Francis] appeared, pale, cadaverous, his clothes in tatters, upon what is now the Piazza Nuova, where hundreds of children [enfants] play all day long, he was greeted with a great shout, ‘Pazzo, Pazzo!’ (A madman! a madman!) ‘Un pazzo ne fa cento’ (One madman makes a hundred more), says the proverb, but one must have seen the delirious excitement of the street children of Italy at the sight of a madman to gain an idea of how true it is. The moments the magic cry resounds they rush into the street with frightful din, and while their parents look on from the windows, they surround the unhappy sufferer with wild dances mingled with songs, shouts, and savage howls. They throw stones at him, fling mud upon him, blindfold him; if he flies into a rage, they double their insults; if he weeps or begs for pity, they repeat his cries and mimic his sobs and supplications without respite and without mercy. (p. 59)30 Not content with simply recounting Francis’s abuse by children, Sabatier brings it to life by blending into his narrative both an Italian proverb on the tendency of madmen to attract crowds of mockers, and his own observations of the abuse of madmen by children in contemporary Italian streets. In effect, the biographer bestows an aura of timelessness upon the image of the mocking boys.



‘For them, there was no better diversion’

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On Sabatier’s example, abusive street urchins have regularly appeared in accounts of this scene by subsequent biographers, none of whom raises the question as to how it happened that Bonaventure, and hence Sabatier, portrayed children in that role in the first place.31 Today, the image of Francis besieged by a mob of mocking boys remains so deeply ingrained in his hagiography that an imaginative biographer can feel free to vivify the scene by specifying the male sex of the children, and attributing to them specific sounds and possible motives that, while not implausible, were indicated neither by Bonaventure nor by any of the other early recorders of the saint’s life. In the following account from the 1989 biography of Francis by the Franciscan priest Ignacio Larrañaga, I have italicized those claims that are based purely upon the author’s own inferences from the available data. The cries grew louder. Boys ran to the streets. For them, there was no better diversion than this. They snarled and whistled, some mocking him in fun, others out of curiosity, and some with malicious intent.32 In purporting to recount something factual while relying so heavily upon the author’s inferences, this passage borders on fiction, and may thus help reveal why the motif we are examining has cropped up so often in literature. Larrañaga’s assumption that the boys mocked Francis because ‘there was no better diversion’ perhaps reveals how deep-seated the Augustinian wariness towards male children and their inclinations remains. The fictional appeal of the image of Francis’s abuse by children is confirmed in a work by the Greek novelist and poet Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957), who cultivated a lifelong sense of spiritual kinship with Francis, his ‘favourite saint’.33 While visiting Assisi in 1924 he met the Danish writer, poet, and Catholic convert Johannes Jørgensen (1866–1956), whose popular biography of Francis he would translate in 1943 at the invitation of some Greek Catholic monks. Not for another decade, however, did Kazantzakis write and publish his own novel Ho phtochoules tou Theou (1953, The poor man of God), known in English as Saint Francis (1962), in whose prologue he acknowledges the ‘need’ he felt ‘to match the Saint’s life with his myth, bringing that life as fully into accord with its essence as possible’.34 True to this plan, and influenced by Jørgensen’s account of the assault by boys, Kazantzakis fancifully recreates that episode. Just as Jørgensen recounted it from the perspective of Francis’s father,35 so Kazantzakis presents it from the fictionalized viewpoint of the saint’s companion Brother Leo, who claims to have witnessed the incident in the city square. Suddenly: Laughter, shouts, jeering. Everyone turned to look. Francis was visible at the edge of the square, hopping, dancing, his robe tucked up.





‘Come one, come all!’ he was calling. ‘Come, brothers, come to hear the new madness!’ Behind him ran a hoard of laughing children, chasing him and throwing stones. I raced in back, threatening them with my staff, but more appeared from every street, and soon they all joined together and charged Francis. He, calm and laughing, turned from time to time, held out his arms to the children, and shouted, ‘Whoever throws one stone at me, may he be once blessed by God; whoever throws two stones at me, may he be twice blessed by God; whoever throws three stones at me, may he be thrice blessed by God’ – whereupon a continuous stream of stones rained down upon him.36 What attracted Kazantzakis to this scene and led him to embellish it is not hard to fathom. While at work on the novel, he reportedly once remarked, ‘The old hagiologists emphasized the Poverello’s state of beatitude, neglecting the arduous path that leads to this beatitude. It must have been a hard struggle; and it’s precisely this struggle that moves me.’ 37 In conjuring the image of the saint mocked by boys, Kazantzakis employed an ancient stock emblem of a holy man’s plight in an unappreciative society. It cannot be assumed that Kazantzakis contemplated the kinship of this motif to 2 Kings 2.23–24, any more than that the modern biographers of Francis who have perpetuated the motif ever did. None the less, when Kazantzakis (through Leo’s voice), like some of those biographers, has Pietro burst upon the scene with ‘a roar’, ‘a huge giant [who] had rushed forward and grabbed Francis by the scruff of the neck’ (p. 80), the novelist is unwittingly rehearsing a thematic inversion introduced by the authors of Francis’s earliest legends: the replacement of the she-bears who mauled the derisive boys to rescue the derided prophet, by the beastly man who interrupts the boys’ mockery to brutalize the mocked saint.38

Bethel boys around the world However one may view human nature, and regardless of the truism that images of the child can vary according to the different times and places in which they have been culturally ‘constructed’, the tale of Elisha’s mockery might plausibly reflect a more or less timeless, universal proclivity among children, especially boys. According to a scholar in the 1920s, the children encountered by Elisha ‘are the same in all places and all times; they are the children of the streets, the newsboys, gamins, sharp-eyed waifs. The muckers of the city of Bethel were in nowise different from the muckers of Paris, London, or Chicago.’39 The same view is expressed by other scholars,40 although some suggest that the rudeness of Elisha’s mockers especially typifies



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boys of ‘the East’,41 just as Sabatier claimed that the behavior of Francis’s abusers was typical of Italian street children. In fact, mischievous analogues to Elisha’s mockers rear their heads in a wide array of twentieth-century literary works, films, and even an opera.

The notion of children as persecutors of the eccentric adult came naturally to Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Hypersensitive to noise of any kind, he harboured a lifelong revulsion against children’s racket, and hence against their very presence. Having once informed his future fiancée that, with children around, ‘my blood refuses to flow, it becomes congealed’,42 he later evinced outright paedophobia while staying at a summer home in a village 60 miles south of his native Prague. ‘Enemies everywhere,’ he complains to his editor. ‘Children outside this room and also outside the other.’43 Although he distinguishes between a nasty group of children, and a lovely looking group, ‘the noise made by both was the same. It drives me from my bed, out of the house in despair, with throbbing temples through field and forest, devoid of all hope like a night owl’ (p. 338). Plagued by ‘the horrible voices of the Prague children’ (p. 341) quartered nearby, ‘some two hundred’ of whom made ‘A hellish noise, a scourge of humanity’ (p. 339), he cannot stand the sight of several arriving in the morning with their toy haywagon: ‘It is not the children who are the night’s creatures, rather it is they who in the course of play pry up the stone from my head and “favour” me with a glance into it.’44 Recognizing all these children as being ‘harnessed to existence,’ he senses that the worst thing, of which they are innocent and which ought to render them loved rather than feared, is that they represent the last stage of existence. Whether they appear terrible by their noise or delightful by their silence, beyond them begins that chaos invoked by Othello. (p. 346) According to one biographer, while such a response to children may have served as a gloomy reminder to Kafka of his own childlessness, and while their vitality and energy may have served in Kafka’s mind to ‘call into question existence itself’, the fact that children became his bane leads one to wonder whether ‘the absence of children in his fiction is not in itself his way of revenging himself on the noise they had made, or else a reflection of how, by excluding them from his fiction, he could somehow exclude them from his life’.45 However, children are not absent from Kafka’s fiction. In 1903 he worked on a novel, now lost, entitled Das Kind und die Stadt (The Child and the City),46 and his first short-story collection Meditation (Betrachtung, 1913) opens with the tale ‘Children on a Country Road’ (‘Kinder auf der Landstraße’). As Reinhard Kuhn



Kafka


points out, ‘children abound’ in Kafka’s other stories and fragmentary novels, although most Kafka critics have ignored this fact.47 Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle (Das Schloß), written in 1922 and published in 1926, two years after his death, contains arguably his most complex presentation of children. They are ubiquitous in the village at the base of the castle,48 and embody ‘seemingly sinister forces’ in relation to the land-surveying protagonist.49 Yet it is in Kafka’s other fragmentary, incomplete novel, The Trial (Der Prozeß, written 1914–15, published 1925), that an incident resembling the Bethel boys motif occurs. When Joseph K., charged with an undisclosed ‘crime’, goes to be interrogated by the Court for the first time, he finds the building to which he was directed, but then has trouble locating the inquiry room. On his way up he disturbed many children [viele Kinder] who were playing on the stairs and looked at him angrily as he strode through their ranks. ‘If I ever come here again,’ he told himself, ‘I must either bring sweets to cajole them with or else a stick to beat them.’ Just before he reached the first floor he had actually to wait for a moment until a marble came to rest, two children with the lined, pinched faces of adult rogues holding him meanwhile by his trousers; if he had shaken them off he must have hurt them, and he feared their outcries.50 Like Elisha’s encounter with children, K.’s occurs as he ascends to a place with an already negative association. But the association here is not with idolatry but with an obscure judicial bureaucracy. And, as opposed to the inspired prophet whose role it was to convey God’s judgments, K. is the one being judged. As for the boys he encounters, their silence contrasts markedly with the jeers of Elisha’s mockers. These boys seem to be, in Kuhn’s words, ‘sinister agents of obstruction, the sullen guardians of the portals to the antechambers of the law’, and therefore, like the pack of depraved little girls whom K. later encounters (ch. 7), they ‘represent a menace; they belong to the tribunal’.51 With their adult-like visages, they might finally resemble Elisha’s mockers in seeming to mirror the enigmatic corruption of their elders. Yet K., again, is no Elisha: rather than curse the pests, he can only wonder whether next time to tempt them with candy or to whack them with a stick. Hesse and Eliade A pair of terse scenes worth considering in relation to the Bethel boys motif occur in two literary works set in India, written during the first half of the century by two Europeans who both had firsthand experience of that land: Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), the Swiss-born German novelist who journeyed to India in 1911; and Mircea Eliade (1907–86), the Romanian fiction writer



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and historian of religions who sojourned and travelled there as a student from December 1928 to January 1931. Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922), subtitled Eine indische Dichtung (An Indian poem), takes place in the time of the Buddha. When the titular hero, whose given name is the same as the Buddha’s, passes through a village one afternoon as a wandering ascetic, we are told: ‘Children danced about in the lane in front of the clay huts. They played with pumpkin-stones and mussels. They shouted and wrestled with each other, but ran away timidly when the strange Samana appeared.’52 These playful yet passive children obviously pose no threat to the arriving stranger, and their presence simply lends colour to the scene. In contrast, the possibly worldwide, transcultural inclination of children to harass an eccentric adult seems reflected in Eliade’s roman à clef Bengal Nights, published first in Romanian as Maitreyi (Bucharest, 1933), and later in French as La Nuit bengali (Paris, 1950). The novel has a scene in which the narrator-protagonist Alain, a young French engineer in India, wanders on foot out of Calcutta to BelurMath, ‘overcome with passion and sadness’ over his failed love affair with a young Indian woman, Maitreyi (assumed to be modelled after Maitreyi Dasgupta, Eliade’s actual one-time lover): I did not turn back but continued on the same road, towards Ranaghat. I arrived at Rally at sunset. I looked for the Ganges, and then, seated on a rock, smoking peacefully, contemplated it for a long time. I sat marvelling at the vast stretch of water, flowing silently back to Calcutta. Some children approached and surrounded me. At first they squealed, in garbled English, ‘White monkey!’ Then, seeing that I did not get angry but only looked at them, tears in my eyes, they came closer and stood there awkwardly until I spoke to them in Bengali and distributed some coins. They escorted me in procession to the other end of the village.53 Midway through this passage certain requisite ingredients seem in place for a recurrence of the Bethel boys motif: anonymous children gratuitously mocking a racially different, foreign adult. This situation started out seeming more threatening than the somewhat analogous one in Siddhartha. Unlike the children who fled from Siddhartha, those who approached Eliade’s Alain were more aggressive. But fortunately for Alain, they ended up showing a capacity for pity, in contrast to their ancient Bethel counterparts. Mann Such pity is lacking in the children whom the narrator of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus, 1947) recalls as having plagued the more high-profile eccentrics of his fictive hometown, Kaisersaschern, in central Germany. Indeed, the Bethel boys motif emerges as a prominent feature of




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The stamp of old-world, underground neurosis … betrays itself in Kaisersaschern by the many ‘originals’, eccentrics, and harmlessly half-mad folk who live within its walls and, like the old buildings, belong to the picture. The pendant to them is formed by the children, the ‘young ‘uns’, who pursue the poor creatures, mock them, and then in superstitious panic run away.54 Among the regular targets of such mockery was the type of old woman whose physical features seemed sufficiently ‘queer’ to approximate the popular image of a witch – ‘small, grey, bent, with a spiteful face, rheumy eyes, hooked nose, thin lips, a threatening crook’ (p. 37). Of all such specimens harboured in Kaisersaschern, the most popular, most teased and feared was Cellar-Lise, so called because she lived in a basement in Little Brassfounder’s Alley – an old woman whose figure had so assimilated itself to popular prejudice that even the most unaffected could feel an archaic shudder at meeting her, especially when the children were after her and she was putting them to flight by spitting curses. (p. 37) From one of Zeitblom’s further recollections, it would be easy to fathom how such behaviour was encouraged by the children’s parents. All good burghers, they nevertheless can see ‘something daemonic in the poverty of a little old woman’ and therefore ‘will clutch their children to them when she approaches, to save them from the evil eye’ (pp. 37, 38). Presumably the same kind of parental conditioning led children to torment the man who, if called to on the street, would compulsively execute a strange sort of dance: ‘His face was both ugly and sad, but as though he were begging pardon, he would smile at the urchins bawling at his heels’ (p. 38). Kosinski The children of Zeitblom’s Kaisersaschern and the Indian children who hassled but then benevolently escorted Alain in Bengal Nights seem like little saints when compared with the gangs of East European boys that periodically turn up to persecute the unnamed pre-pubescent protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski’s (1933–91) novel The Painted Bird (1965). Separated from his parents as a sixyear-old at the outbreak of World War II, this boy wanders through villages of rural eastern Europe (putatively Poland) for the next four years. Taken for



chapter 6, where the narrator Serenus Zeitblom describes the cultural residue of the late Middle Ages which still characterizes such towns.

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a Jewish or Gypsy waif because of his olive complexion, dark hair, and brown eyes, he is subjected to various cruelties and witnesses one atrocity after another: massacres, tortures, rapes, beatings, pillaging, and more. Although the perpetrators are mostly adults (Slavic peasants, German soldiers, Kalmuk riders), gangs of boys also figure in the panoply of human cruelty constituted by the narrative. The first such mob is seen stoning, catching, and then setting fire to a squirrel the protagonist had befriended.55 Later, when the boy has been captured by German soldiers and is being taken through a town on a slow-moving cart, he and the severely wounded adult prisoner next to whom he is seated, are surrounded and stared at by some children who were playing in the road. The troop of children increased; children jumped out of every house. Suddenly one of the older and taller boys struck the prisoner with a long birch twig. The wounded man shuddered and drew back. The children became excited and began pelting us with a barrage of rubbish and rocks. The wounded man drooped. … A few stones hit me also. … The children were making great sport of us. We were being pelted with dried lumps of cow dung, rotten tomatoes, reeking little cadavers of birds. One of the young brutes began to concentrate on me. He walked alongside the cart and with a stick methodically hit selected parts of my body. I tried vainly to ball up enough saliva to spit into his derisive face. (p. 111) The shriek of the crowd in the next paragraph confirms our suspicion that this incident, surely unbeknownst to Kosinski, amounts to a reversal of the medieval Christian typological interpretation of Elisha’s mockery. Whereas that interpretation took 2 Kings 2.23–24 to adumbrate the Passion, casting Elisha as a type of Christ, and Elisha’s mockers, the boys, as types of the Jews–qua–’Christ killers’, the children who assault the boy and the wounded prisoner in Kosinski’s novel take those two victims to be Jews and quickly become the vanguard of a crowd of anti-Semites who ensure that the passage of these ‘Jews’ through town becomes a veritable Via Dolorosa. The derided, abused Elisha/Christ figure of medieval allegory is replaced by a pair of ‘Jews’ whom mid-twentieth-century East European peasants, no less so than medieval Christian exegetes, could be prone to view as already damned descendants of Christ’s ‘killers’, those Gospel antitypes of the Bethel boys. 56 And the Bethel boys/Jews of the medieval allegory are replaced by the pack of violently bigoted goyim, who delight in persecuting these ‘Jews’. Adults joined the crowd around the cart. They shrieked, ‘Beat the Jews, beat the bastards,’ and egged the children on to further attacks. … The wounded




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No bears are there to intervene. But the abuse is suddenly brought to a halt by a ‘small, stout priest’ in a ‘torn, faded cassock’ (p. 111), who leaps out of a house and scatters the mob by beating them with a cane. The sadism displayed by packs of children in The Painted Bird is symptomatic of the wickedness that seems to characterize the whole human species in this novel, whose prefatory epigraph from Vladimir Mayakovsky reads: ‘and only God, / omnipotent indeed, / knew they were mammals / of a different breed.’ In the course of the novel, given the constant anticipation or repetition of human behaviour by animal images,57 and the recounting of sexual acts between human beings and animals, the distinctions between humans and beasts seem to blur. Thus a mob of boys can prove as territorial and sexually impulsive as a pack of dogs. Catching sight of the protagonist as he approaches their village in the evening twilight on a frozen marsh, ‘a gang of boys’ (p. 158) surrounds him, beats him, and tries to rape him. That they take him for ‘a Gypsy bastard’ (p. 159) seems almost irrelevant, given his awareness from a prior experience that such gangs would rape a boy simply if he wandered into their territory. After the war ends and the Soviet Red Army chases off the Germans, Kosinski’s protagonist winds up in an orphanage with hundreds of other children, all of them wounded or traumatized by the war’s violence. There, beaten up regularly by older, stronger boys, he inhabits a children’s hell of attacks and brawls, beyond the control of the teachers and attendants: ‘Every fight drew blood. Boys and girls battled for their lives and could not be separated. At night even worse things happened. Boys would assault girls in dark corridors. One night several boys raped a nurse in the basement’ (pp. 214–15). In this atmosphere we arrive at a moral pole opposite the one evident in 2 Kings 2.23–24. If children here are aggressors against each other and occasionally against an adult, it is because they have been degraded and abused, often sexually, by adults, whose sexual practices and most violent forms of warfare the children’s behaviour seems to mimic. This is even suggested by the nicknames the children have assumed in honour of the particular form of violence in which each child specializes. There is, for example, Tank, who ‘pummelled with his fists anyone who stood in his way’; Cannon, who ‘threw heavy objects at people for no particular reason’; and Sabre, who ‘slashed his enemy with the edge of his arm’ (p. 214). In Kosinski’s novel, the abused child, not the derided man of God, is the one in need of respect and revenge. Thus the protagonist reflects upon the lesson



man and I now provided excellent targets. A new hail of stones struck us. My cheek was cut, a broken tooth was dangling, and my lower lip was split. I spat blood into the faces of those nearest to me, but they leapt back adroitly to aim other blows. (p. 111)

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about self-esteem and vengeance he learned from a Soviet soldier who taught him that a man should never let himself be abused: ‘What would preserve his self-respect and determine his worth was his ability to take revenge on those who wronged him’ (214). Although concocted as a code for survival in a hellish world that yields not the slightest hint of a benevolent deity, the soldier’s teaching captures an idea strangely consistent with the Deuteronomistic justification for the vengeance wreaked upon Elisha’s mockers. Wiesel and Endo In the wake of the Shoah in Europe and the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, catastrophes notorious for their blind inclusion of infants and children among millions of innocent victims, the Bethel boys motif also recurred in a novel by a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and in one by a Japanese Catholic, both of whom were preoccupied by God’s ‘silence’ in the face of their protagonists’ unspeakable sufferings. Elie Wiesel’s (b. 1928) La Ville de la chance (1962, City of Luck), known in English as The Town Beyond the Wall, recounts a series of scenes from the childhood of Michael, a young East European Jew who survived imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp. He recalls these scenes while being tortured in a post-war Communist prison after he secretly returned to his home town behind the Iron Curtain and was arrested there. Some of his earliest recollections, including the following, involve the village drunk, a madwoman known as Old Martha, who suffered a plight not unlike Cellar-Lise’s in Doctor Faustus: Michael is entranced by the desiccated face. He has never seen her this way. Children liked to run along behind her and throw stones at her, but as soon as she turned they fled, an exhilarating terror prickling their heels. She chased them hotly, shouting, ‘You’ll burn in hell. Your children will die young. Your tongues will fall in the mud. And your eyes with them.’ 58 Michael again recalls this scene in his monologue to his silent cell-mate near the novel’s end: ‘and in the wild countryside of some country just awakening or just falling asleep there is a woman, some woman, being stoned for a reason, some reason, and nothing can save her from human beings’ (p. 176). As in the earlier examples of our motif, we find here the eccentric adult (only this time, a female), the anonymous children, and, in accordance with the Lucianic embellishment upon the Elisha tale,59 their stoning of her. At first glance the prediction ‘you’ll burn in hell’ might seem no more consequential than the oaths uttered by Cervantes’s ‘glass man’ against his mockers, or the attempt by Don Quixote’s conductors in Barcelona to punish his own tormentors. Yet Martha’s execration takes on a chilling aura of effectuality,





given that she and the children she curses will all most likely end up literally burning in the ‘hell’ of Nazi furnaces, victims not of God’s retributive justice but of his apparent and inexplicable refusal to aid his chosen people during their time of ultimate need. One of Michael’s most searing memories of the concentration camp reveals how the Nazis devised for the prisoners there a world that grimly parodied what a Hebrew prophet had once warned idolators and the unjust: ‘And I will make boys their princes, and babes shall rule over them’ (Isa. 3.4; not cited in the novel). Michael remembers Yankel, ‘the Pielpel, the spoiled child of those in charge’ (p. 54) – a Jewish child whom the Germans had inexplicably spared, and who, ‘too young to resist’ or ‘even [to] know he ought to resist’, was well fed, warmly dressed, and set up by them to ‘rule’ as Kapo over his elders in the barracks: The little prince: He had reigned over a kingdom of old men, had imposed his law, his moods, his will upon them. He had spoken to them as a master, conscious of his superiority, of his absolute powers. One word from him announced hope or the death of hope. His power illustrated the grotesque side of the situation: thousands of men trembled before an urchin playing games. (p. 65; cf. p. 55) The novel Silence (Chinmoku, 1966) by Shusaku Endo (1923–96), whose echoing of the Bethel boys motif is not unique in post-war Japanese fiction, tells of a seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuit, Sebastian Rodrigues (modelled after a historical person, Giuseppe Chiara), who goes on a mission to Japan at the height of the persecution of Christians under the Tokugawas there, only to be captured and forced to apostatize. Prior to his apostasy, as his captors march him on a bare-backed horse into the little town of Omura, the priest reflects upon the contrast between his present plight and the earlier period when Christianity was allowed to be openly embraced in Japan: Sometimes stones from the hands of children skimmed past his face as he was led along the long and narrow road. If Valignano was right, this Omura was the district upon which the missionaries had expended their greatest effort. It had had many churches and a seminary; the peasants and even the samurai ‘listened to our talks with great enthusiasm’ – as Frois had put it in one of his letters. Even the feudal lords had become ardent Christians and he had heard that they were practically converted in a body. But now, when the children threw stones and the bonzes shouting in derision covered him with ugly spittle, there was no samurai amongst the officials who made any attempt to check them.60



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The Bethel boys motif could not be clearer in this passage, with the Lucianic spectacle of nameless Japanese children stoning the condemned adult who, for them, naturally cuts an eccentric figure: Western, Caucasian, Christian, priestly. What Rodrigues suffers here is but one stage in his own Passion: ‘He simply closed his eyes and thought of the Stations of the Cross, one by on … a meditation calling to mind the details of the Passion of Christ’ (pp. 151–2). His abuse by children reminds us once again of the medieval exegetes’ perception of Elisha’s mockery as a prefiguration of Christ’s Passion. The narrator’s indication that Rodrigues’s stoning by the children is condoned by the local samurai makes clear that these children, unlike the abusers of Elisha, but like those of Christ, St Francis, Don Quixote, and Tomás Rodaja, will go unpunished. The same is true much later, after his apostasy, when Rodrigues is taunted and stoned in Nagasaki by children chanting ‘Apostate Paul! Apostate Paul!’, who then are merely shooed away by a woman (see p. 261). As reflected in most of the scenes we have considered, the bad boys motif from 2 Kings 2.23–24 has persisted as a foil to the more conventional Christian and Romantic notions of childhood that are still reflected in such places as a French literary theorist’s rêverie of childhood as being ‘psychologically beautiful’ and a reminder of ‘the beauty of the first images’.61 Wherever the motif crops up it exposes a ‘savage’ or even demonic impulse in children that would appear utterly alien to Jesus’ perception of them as embodiments of heavenly innocence. Golding Aptly enough, one of the most pessimistic fictional exposés ever written of the inherent barbarism attributed to young boys takes as its title a translation of the Hebrew term ba al zebub (lord of flies), which is used in 2 Kings 1.2 and again in verses 3, 6, and 16, presumably as a derisive distortion of ba al zebul (‘lord of the high abode’ or ‘Baal Prince’), one of the epithets for the god Baal, rival of Israel’s God. The title of William Golding’s (b. 1911) novel Lord of the Flies (1954) may invoke the Satanic connotation which B⑀⑀␭␨⑀␤␱␷´␭ later bore in the Synoptic Gospels (see Matt. 10.25, 12.24; Mark 3.22; Luke 11.15, 18–19) and which Beelzebub retained in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, the titular linkage of Lord of the Flies to 2 Kings 1 suggests an even more pregnant connection between Golding’s novel and the tale of Elisha’s mockery in the next chapter of that biblical book. Through the device of an aeroplane crash, which leaves a group of English schoolboys stranded on an ocean island, Golding’s narrative depicts pre-pubescent savagery free of adult interference, sharing with 2 Kings 2.23–24 its wilderness setting and several other prominent traits: the boys’ constant jeering and name-calling (with the boy ‘Piggy’ replacing ‘Baldhead’ as the object of the taunts); their Lucianic violence (with stones and spears); their attack on a Christ-figure (with the martyred boy





Simon replacing the Christ-type Elisha); and the threat of a wild creature (with fear of an unseen beast replacing the attack by bears). Anticipated by the unsentimental portrayal of castaway children in Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), which later appeared under the title The Innocent Voyage, Lord of the Flies has been viewed as a grim refutation of Robert Michael Ballantyne’s (1825–94) moralistic novel The Coral Island (1857), about three shipwrecked English boys in the South Pacific who conduct themselves nobly in their predicament. Ballantyne’s classic even makes an allusion to Beelzebub. Explaining why his ship’s captain favours the work of Christian missionaries among the South Sea Islands, a pirate warns one of the young protagonists about the reputed savagery of the unconverted natives: ‘For my part, I don’t know and I don’t care what the Gospel does to them, but I know that when any o’ the islands chance to get it, trade goes all smooth and easy; but where they ha’nt got it, Beelzebub himself could hardly desire better company.’62 Lord of the Flies, which closes with an allusion to The Coral Island, reverses this thesis, suggesting that even the most ‘civilized’, well-raised English schoolboys, if freed from the restraints of ‘civilization’, will revert to barbaric practices worthy of Beelzebub.63

Lamorisse Produced two years after Lord of the Flies appeared, the award-winning French film The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge, 1956) suggests the validity of that novel’s pessimistic thesis about the nature of boys without removing them from civilization. Barely over half an hour long, this film, written and directed by Albert Lamorisse, features a striking variation upon the Bethel boys motif: the prolonged spectacle of a swarm of anonymous urchins relentlessly pursuing a small boy and his cherished magical balloon through the cobbled streets of the Ménilmontant and Montmartre districts of Paris. Eventually, these boys corner the balloon in an abandoned, rubble-strewn plot, where they stone it until it bursts. Like the boys in Golding’s novel, those in The Red Balloon – identified simply as ‘some of the tough boys of the neighborhood’ in the story’s book version64 – distinguish themselves from the Bethel boys by venting their savage compulsion not against an eccentric or holy adult, but against another boy, or, more specifically, his balloon. Yet like the Bethel boys, Lamorisse’s urchins commit their bad acts from no apparent motive other than the sheer joy of doing mischief.

Interlude: Frazer, Milne, and Nash To the boys of The Red Balloon, no less so than to their counterparts in Lord of the Flies or The Painted Bird, would apply what James Frazer once suggested



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It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society, and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture, has upon the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.65 As an agent of early monotheistic civilization, the prophet Elisha was all too familiar with such ‘subterranean forces’, and his mockery marks his conflict with one of them: irreverence, manifest in the boys. In the story, he (or Yahweh) counters this decivilizing force by invoking an even more savage power, one that could still threateningly haunt a child’s imagination in Victorian and post-Victorian England. Not only are bears among the beasts that stalk the Lost Boys and other inhabitants of Neverland, that fanciful place far removed from the civilization fled by Peter Pan, but even a little goody-goody like A.A. Milne’s (1882–1956) Christopher Robin in the heart of modern London has to be ever so careful while walking the street … to watch my feet; And I keep in the squares, And the masses of bears, Who wait at the corners all ready to eat The sillies who tread on the lines of the street, Go back to their lairs[.]66 One might sense in this childish paranoia a distant displacement of the ancient anxiety expressed in the Elisha tale about the fate that awaits boys who step out of line, or on one. By the same token, that same anxiety seems inverted, or projected back upon adults, in a poem by the American writer Ogden Nash (1902–71) which both lampoons the romantic association of the child with meekness and mildness, and satirizes the Freudian adult suspicion of children. Don’t look for compassion in tots, the poem warns. Citing Milne’s Winnie the Pooh as the sort of fable which ‘innocent infants’ will spurn once they learn that its protagonist ate honey and nuts rather than human flesh, the poem ascribes to infants a particular desire that virtually inverts the consequence Elisha’s mockery had for the boys: All they want is for somebody to be eaten up. Therefore I say unto you, all you poets who are so crazy about meek and mild little children and their angelic air,



about ‘civilized’ society as a whole:

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If you are sincere and really want to please them, why just go out and get yourselves devoured by a bear.67

The depiction of boyish violence in Lord of the Flies is said to find a Japanese analogue in the novel by Yukio Mishima (1925–70), known in English as The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (Gogo no eiko, 1963). Despite his considerable knowledge of Western literature, Mishima presumably did not know the tale of Elisha’s mockery. Yet his novel’s final episode unfolds like a philosophized variation on the Bethel boys motif, involving the ganging up on a naval officer (Ryuji) by a band of brazenly nihilistic 13-year-olds in a secluded clearing to which they have lured him outside their Japanese coastal town. Here, far removed both temporally and geographically from the motif’s ancient Hebrew origin, the motif turns deadly once again. But this time the boys are not the ones who die. Like Elisha’s mockers, they burst out laughing at their victim-to-be; this happens when he tries to entertain them by singing a sailor’s song. As planned, they drug and kill him to preserve their idealized image of him as a seafaring adventurer, an image he has destroyed by his recent decision to forsake the sea to settle down and marry the young widowed mother of one of the boys. Earlier, as they planned this murder, the boys’ chief, a kind of sociopathic, nihilistic Peter Pan named Noburu, egged them on with a tirade against the evil of adulthood. ‘This is our last chance,’ he warned: ‘If we don’t act now we will never again be able to obey freedom’s supreme command, to perform the deed essential to filling the emptiness of the world. … If we don’t act now we’ll never be able to steal again, or murder, or do any of the things that testify to man’s freedom. We’ll end up puking flattery and gossip, trembling our days away in submission and compromise and fear, worrying about what the neighbours are doing, living like squealing mice. And someday we’ll get married, and have kids, and finally we’ll become fathers, the vilest things on earth! ‘We must have blood! Human blood! If we don’t get it this empty world will go pale and shrivel up. We must drain that sailor’s fresh lifeblood and transfuse it to the dying universe, the dying sky, the dying forests, and the drawn, dying land. ‘Now! The time is now! … Besides, we’re almost fourteen.’68 In this scene our motif finds its ultimate inversion. The boys project their wickedness onto the image the chief evokes of ‘normal’, heterosexual, bourgeois adulthood (married with children), and their execution of the vilified adult authority figure might seem at long last to avenge the mauling of their ancient Bethel predecessors. The transcultural applicability of the motif was



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borne out by the successful adaptation of Mishima’s novel to a contemporary British setting in the 1976 film by the same title, written and directed by Lewis John Carlino.69

While Mishima’s novel and its film adaptation both end with the murder of a man by a gang of children, the motif of children mocking an ostracized accused murderess actually figures in the plot-framing device used in the three-act opera Lizzie Borden, which was given its world première by the New York City Opera on 25 March 1965. Its libretto composed by Kenward Elmslie (b. 1929), and its musical score, by Jack Beeson (b. 1921), the opera is based on the actual case of the double murder of 32-year-old Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts on 4 August 1892, for which Lizzie was indicted four months later and tried the following June. Set in the Bordens’ living-room the day before the murder, act 1 opens with Lizzie, in the company of the minister from her church, conducting a group of Sunday School children in their rehearsal of a hymn. After portraying the successive incidents of family strife that supposedly precipitated the murders, which themselves occur offstage at the climax of act 3, the opera closes with a brief epilogue set again in the living-room, sometime after the trial in which Lizzie was acquitted. During this epilogue, the minister drops by again, only this time he is there to sympathize with Lizzie because her donation to the church has been rejected: Your gesture is all the more Christian when I recall how the congregation shunned you in your time of trial, and shun you even now that your innocence is vindicated.70 Although no children have appeared since the opera’s opening scene, they are once again present as singers during and after the minister’s visit. Only now, Lizzie lives alone as a pariah, cast in ironically Christlike terms: ‘shunned’ in her ‘time of trial’. Despite the minister’s unsuccessful attempt to chase the children away, they now loiter outside her house to taunt her with renditions of that well-known anonymous child’s verse inspired by her notoriety: Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. Lizzie stood behind the door and gave her father forty more. (p. 21)



Elmslie–Beeson


Aside from its role in immortalizing the ‘legend’ of Lizzie Borden, this song seems all the more haunting for implying, almost subliminally, something ominous about the countless children over the decades who have found pleasure in singing it. As amusing as the song might seem, it bespeaks an extreme insensitivity in making light of a ghastly crime, which it makes even ghastlier by transforming the murdered woman from Lizzie’s stepmother to ‘mother’, by changing the murder weapon from a hatchet to an ‘axe’, and by more than doubling the actual total number of ‘whacks’.71 Moreover, one is entitled to wonder why children might sing so merrily about a matricide and patricide. Thus the opera’s closing image might seem unavoidably to betray a certain sinister ambivalence in the high-voiced children and their song. To be sure, in singing this song to the very person it is about, they mean to taunt her. Yet in recounting her alleged atrocity through a merry lyric which fails to hint at any negative judgment upon the crime, these children might also come across as jolly little soul mates to the accused murderess, or perhaps even as little Lizzie Borden wanna-be’s. Lessing Almost ten years after Lizzie Borden’s première, and twenty years after Lord of the Flies had appeared, there was published in England a novel whose futuristic portrayal of a dying city, most likely London, includes the repeated image of roving hordes of savage children. Doris Lessing’s (b. 1919) The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), a work often compared to Golding’s novel, is narrated by an unnamed, middle-aged woman whom a mysterious stranger has presented with a 12-year-old girl, Emily, to look after. One of the tale’s most striking aspects is the woman’s ability periodically to pass ‘through’ her living-room wall into a realm of ulterior reality on the other side, where she revisits scenes of a certain child’s life – perhaps Emily’s, or perhaps the narrator’s own earlier life. Yet it is on ‘this’ side of the wall, in the ‘actual’ world of the narrator’s stricken city, that a phenomenon resembling the Bethel boys motif develops through the novel’s latter half. According to the narrator, a primary symptom of her city’s decay is the prevalence in the streets of large gangs of young people whose members have ‘relinquished individuality’, exhibit ‘pack judgement’, and behave ‘like dogs coming together in a park or a waste place’.72 Later there arrives a group of younger children whose behaviour is utterly unpredictable, anarchic, and violent. Subsisting in the city’s Underground ‘like moles or rats in the earth’ (p. 170), ‘squatting and scratching all together, like monkeys in a too small cage’ (p. 175), and mutilating and eating rats, birds, dogs, and perhaps humans (see pp. 175, 190, 204, 210), these children prove radically different from any the community has encountered. Before, the numerous, parentless children, though ‘wild and difficult, problematical, heartbreaking’ (p. 172), attached themselves to families or



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Not so this new gang of ‘kids’. Gangs, rather: soon we learned that there were others; it was not only in our district that such packs of very young children defied all attempts at assimilation. For they were very young. The oldest were nine, ten. They seemed never to have had parents, never to have known the softening of the family. Some had been born in the Underground and abandoned. (p. 172) How these children survive, the narrator admits, is a mystery. Yet survive they do, stealing what is necessary, and wearing minimal clothes: They were … no, they were not like animals who have been licked and purred over, and, like people, have found their way to good behaviour by watching exemplars. They were not a pack, either, but an assortment of individuals together only for the sake of the protection in numbers. They had no loyalty to each other. … They would be hunting in a group one hour, and murdering one of their number the next. (p. 172) Although not based upon 2 Kings 2.23–24, Memoirs presents here an analogous horde of aggressive, nameless children, comparable even in number: ‘There were thirty or forty in the pack’ (p. 172). Yet unlike Elisha’s mockers, who aggrieved a single man on one occasion, these even wilder children become ‘everyone’s problem’ (p. 171), ‘menac[ing] everyone in the neighbourhood’ (p. 177), ‘terrorising everyone’ (p. 179) everyday. Compared with Golding’s schoolboys, whose accidental removal from ‘civilization’ allowed their inherent brutality to come to the fore, the sociopathic children of Memoirs seem even more terrifying because they still inhabit a civilization, albeit one that is moribund. Another poignant sign of the society’s collapse is the adults’ declining ability to maintain in the face of these menacing children a traditional notion of children as innocents for whose well-being grown-ups are naturally responsible. The narrator may have once believed, quaintly, in ‘The child’s right to be naughty’ (p. 58). And Emily, under the domination of her chieftain-like lover Gerald, seems content to assist in heading a commune of semi-socialized children collected from the streets. But the completely wild kids of the Underground are another matter, as demonstrated when a woman goes out alone one day with food to see if she might do something to help: they eat it ‘then and there, tearing it and snapping and snarling at each other’ (p. 173), and



other clans. Although ‘not like the children of a stable society’, they ‘could be handled inside the terms of what was known and understood’ (p. 172):


then surround her, wielding bows and arrows. ‘When I looked at them,’ the woman later recalls, ‘they were only kids – that was what I couldn’t get into my thick head; they were just children … but they are wicked’ (p. 173). This testimony betrays the dissipation of the last vestige of an implicit association of children with innocence. Yet these ‘wicked’ children, from whom the altruistic woman ran and barely escaped alive, still have a champion in Gerald, who feels a mysterious responsibility for them, and takes it upon himself to do something about it. The narrator likens him to ‘a Pied Piper’ (p. 174) as she describes his leading a score of these little ‘savages’ (pp. 175, 177, 203) from the Underground to his household. Just as the image of Gerald as Pied Piper inverts that of Elisha as victim of derisive boys, so does Memoirs take to an elaborate extreme the linkage of children with wickedness which was tersely established by 2 Kings 2.23–24. In contrast to The Town Beyond the Wall, where the conditions in which a child (Yankel) could be corrupted into ‘ruling’ harshly over a society of adult prisoners were furnished by the uniquely unnatural, morally inverted anus mundi or Arschloch der Welt (a term by which the Nazis themselves spoke of the concentration camp), Memoirs presents a world in which the anarchic nightmare of Isaiah 3.4 (‘and babes shall rule over them’) threatens to become a reality through the degeneration of ‘normal’ society. With the rules of Social Darwinism overturned, the retributive principles which usually underlie parental discipline and surely underlay the mauling of Elisha’s mockers, become meaningless. This is evident when Emily and Gerald, abandoned by their semi-socialized children and left alone with the ‘new’ wild children, try to reason with them and warn of ‘retribution’: ‘The trouble was, no retribution was possible; everything had already happened to these outcasts’ (p. 176). Gerald here ceases to resemble the Pied Piper and seems more like the victimized Elisha. When two of the children attack Emily, one of them hitting her with a cudgel, Gerald intervenes, only to find himself, ‘too, being hit, bitten, scratched, and by a dozen or so of them’ (p. 176). Unlike Elisha, however, he does not curse them. Although it takes all his and Emily’s strength to ward off the children, not one of whom is over ten years old, he and she feel ‘paralysed’ by ‘the inhibition against hitting or hurting a child’: ‘“How can you hit a child?” Gerald had demanded, even though Emily’s arm was badly bruised’ (p. 176). The futility of Gerald’s unflagging compassion for the children is exposed that night, when they set fire to the building they inhabit with him and Emily. After the fire is extinguished and he again pleads with them, a catapulted stone just misses his eye and cuts open his cheekbone. Although God and religion go conspicuously undiscussed in this novel, these ‘lethal children’ (p. 195), the very sight of whom is ‘enough to make one’s stomach muscles tighten in anxiety’ (p. 203), would pose a particularly vexing problem from a biblical perspective. On the one hand, the stated



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impossibility of retribution would render irrelevant any punitive lesson such as the one imparted by the tale of Elisha’s mockery. On the other hand, the children’s behaviour, and the narrator’s assessment of them as ‘worse than animals, worse than men’ (p. 177), could make Jesus’ exaltation of children seem naive and obsolete. With no apparent model, biblical or otherwise, on which to plan a course of action, over 500 adults convene in the street to decide what to do about the ‘threat’ posed by these children. When some 40 of the latter show up and stand nearby listening, the adults initially feel encouraged by the thought that maybe the children are there because they understand that the meeting concerns them. But then something happens that recalls the shouting of Elisha’s mockers: Then they began stamping around and chanting, ‘I am the king of the castle, you are a dirty rascal.’ It was terrifying. This ancient children’s song was a war-song; they had made it one, they were living it. But, more than that, we could all see how familiar words could slip out of key – how quickly things could change, we could change. … Had changed: those children were ourselves. We knew it. (p. 178) If Elisha’s puerile mockers may have expressed the hostility their idolatrous elders felt toward him, how analogous seems this situation in which the adults now sense their own identification with the malevolent children around them. But whereas Elisha responded by cursing only the boys whom he saw mocking him, Lessing’s adults ‘come to see all children as, simply, terrifying’ (p. 189, emphasis mine). The biblical nightmare of a society ‘ruled’ by children seems realized by the sway they gain over their champion, Gerald. He might remain the only adult to consider it ‘essential … to rescue the children’ (p. 179), and the narrator herself might think that perhaps Gerald’s gang of children ‘was only lethal as a unit, but the individuals were savable’ (p. 190). Yet one of the last images of him could pass for a grim parody of the Gospel scene of Jesus amid the children: ‘They sat on either side of him, those little things, about seven or eight years old: they were his, his creatures; he had made himself theirs; he had his gang, his tribe … but at the cost of doing what they wanted, serving them’ (p. 196). By the novel’s end, the narrator, Emily, and Gerald develop a strange modus vivendi with these menacing children to whom he caters like a servant. They believe that the children ‘might come down one night and kill us because we [are] their friends’ (p. 205). Gerald, in fact, is almost martyred for his Christlike but seemingly misguided compassion for them. Outside the building in the snow one day, he is suddenly showered by stones catapulted by them from windows above. As he quietly stands there ‘presenting himself as a target’, his hands




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‘But they are just little kids,’ he said again. … ‘That’s all they are.’ His face was all incredulity and pain: I don’t know what it was in Gerald that could not – could not even now – bear what those children had become. I do know that it was deep in him, fundamental; and to give them up was to abandon – so he felt – the best part of himself. (pp. 209–10) The phrase ‘what those children had become’ misleadingly implies that their present evil represents a departure from initial innocence. Yet nothing in the novel suggests that they ever were innocent. All earlier disclosures about them would refute Gerald’s idée fixe that there is something sacrosanct about ‘little kids’, and that to protect them amounts somehow to safeguarding our own ‘best part’. Reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s assertion that, ‘Within us, still within us, always within us, childhood is a state of mind’,73 Gerald’s association of childhood with our ‘best part’ appears erroneous, especially as he proceeds to tell of a four-year-old boy whom he recently found participating with some children in an act of murder and, it seems, cannibalism. ‘If no one saves them,’ he pleads one last time on the children’s behalf, ‘then that’s the same as blaming them, isn’t it?’ (p. 211). However, in the nihilistic, morally exhausted world on ‘this’ side of the narrator’s living-room wall, the dilemma of blaming or saving becomes moot. The only alternative, unarticulated until the novel’s last sentence, seems no less miraculous than the manifestation of the forest and bears seemed for the Talmudic rabbis pondering the punishment of Elisha’s mockers. When the narrator and Emily pass through the wall ‘into another order of world altogether’, Gerald is ‘drawn after them’, but hesitates ‘in a fearful conflict, looking back and around. … And then, at the very last moment, they came, his children came running, clinging to his hands and his clothes, and they all followed quickly on after the others as the last walls dissolved’ (p. 213). Unlike the mauling of Elisha’s mockers or the salvation for children promised by Christ, the fate of these children in that other world’s ‘order’ remains uncertain. Von Trier Forty years after The Red Balloon won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival (1956), that same prize went to the Danish director Lars von Trier’s



‘loose at his sides, … not smiling, but unworried, unalarmed, waiting’, Emily runs out to coax him back in, and the onslaught resumes with a ‘fusillade of stones, bits of metal, offal, rubbish’ (p. 209) that draw blood from his temple and hit her as well, causing her to stagger back. As the children stamp and chant, ‘I am the king of the castle’, he and she retreat into the building and rejoin the narrator, who cannot fathom why Gerald remains committed to the children:

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film Breaking the Waves (1996), several of whose concluding scenes furnish a remarkable case of the Bethel boys motif. Set in the early 1970s in a small, fiercely Calvinist community on the northern Scottish coast, the story is about young Bess (Emily Watson), an innocent and naive young woman who falls deeply in love with and marries Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), a worldly, experienced oil-rig worker. When Jan becomes incapacitated and bedridden after an accident at work, he implores her to prove her love for him by carrying on with her life and having sexual relations with other men. Bess complies, convinced by her faith that her doing so will miraculously help Jan to recover. By the end of the film, as her husband’s condition has declined and her unusual lifestyle has become known by her family, friends, and others in her congregation, Bess evolves into an unlikely amalgam of a female Christ figure and the stereotyped image of Mary Magdalene as the holy whore. Eventually she will prostitute herself a second time to a pair of knife-wielding, sadistic seamen, allowing herself to be martyred by them in a final effort to save her moribund husband. He indeed will miraculously recover his health after her death. But before that tragic end, Bess is condemned and banished from church by the local council of elders. And it is the next morning, shortly before her fatal encounter with the seamen, that the Bethel boys motif comes into play. Like the ostracism of Lizzie Borden by her community and church at the end of the Elmslie–Beeson opera, Bess’s excommunication is reinforced through her mockery by children. This occurs when she tries to visit her mother. As Bess, dressed in her hooker gear, pushes her moped, some children congregate around her. A boy shouts ‘Who’s a tart!’, and the others laugh. As they close around her and she tries to escape, the children pick up handfuls of pebbles and throw them at her, running behind her chanting ‘Who’s a tart! Who’s a tart!’74 When she reaches her mother’s house and begs to be let in, only to be refused entry by her ashamed mother, a clod of soil whizzes past her ear from the street. To escape, she has to make another break for it, running the gauntlet of children (p. 118). Bess flees, and the children pursue her, throwing mud and stones. The assault climaxes as she struggles with her moped up the hill towards the church, with the children still tagging along, harassing her. (The obvious analogy with Christ ascending Calvary with his cross seems reinforced by a glimpse we catch of a number of cruciform utility poles on a distant hillside.) When she halts near the building, they hesitate, but she then passes out, falling onto the road. The minister arrives and shoos the children away, somewhat as the minister at the end of Lizzie Borden tried to do with the children tormenting the protagonist. Although Bess’s tormentors do stand back, the minister feels their eyes upon him from down the lane as he glances at the woman prone on the gravel (see Plate 8). Then he promptly departs, abandoning her there.





The variation on a Kierkegaardian theme in this film could not be clearer. Replacing the established Church of Denmark which Kierkegaard attacked under the label of ‘Christendom’, the Hebridean Free Church is presented in Breaking the Waves as a more cloistered, fanatical brand of Christendom, but one whose denizens seem no more truly Christian in their comportment than did the complacent Danish Lutherans whom Kierkegaard likened to first-century pagans. Blinded by their own fervour, not to mention their sexism, the elders and other members of Bess’s congregation fail to perceive what Kierkegaard might call her teleological suspension of the ethical, and her consequent entry into an authentically religious (as opposed to aesthetic or ethical) stage of life as a female ‘knight of faith’. Nor do they appreciate her representation of the Christ of love in their midst, especially as they know nothing of the private, quasi-mystical conversations in which she regularly engages with God, whose words she herself enunciates in a gruff voice. Hence a handful of their children, all but one of whom in the film are boys, assault her in the same spirit of irreverence in which those ancient sons of Bethel derided God’s prophet. The minister who shoos them away may seem to fulfil a protective role analogous to that of Elisha’s bears. But unlike them, he is not divinely commissioned; he quickly abandons her lest he be seen with her; and he makes no effort to punish the boys. And unlike Elisha’s mockers, but like so many of their other literary antitypes, Bess’s childish tormentors go unpunished.



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Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.’ (Luke 18.15–17; cf. Matt. 19.13–15; Mark 10.13–16) These words bring us back to a crucial question raised by our study: why has a topos as clearly inconsistent with Jesus’ view of children as the Bethel boys motif recurred so persistently over the ages in literature and art? Certainly Jesus’ association of children with a humility worthy of heaven has held a dominant sway over Christian attitudes towards them over two millennia. His view accords with the earlier Hebrew notion that children are their parents’ reward from God (Ps. 127.3) and a sign of God’s favour (see Ps. 128.3–4), a notion assumed by the Yiddish proverb that only through the merit of children can humanity be redeemed. In the twentieth century, the theologian Karl Barth observed that the tendency to experience God in the child, as in other human likenesses such as personality and woman, has become a modern ‘fetishism’.1 Yet our study has shown that Jesus’ exaltation of children has been consistently shadowed over the centuries, both within and without the Christian tradition, by a counter-tradition of opinion that proved most hospitable to the perpetuation of the Bethel boys motif. Augustine, we saw, spoke of childhood as both a model of humility to imitate and a form of folly to shun. As James Hillman points out, these ‘contradictory instructions’ had been anticipated not only by St Paul (1 Cor. 14.20) but by Plato, whose Lysis, Republic, and Laws express a view of the child very different from the one expressed in the Meno. These opposed poles later appear in the two concepts of childhood 175 10.1057/9780230599758 - Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art, Eric Ziolkowski


Conclusion


analysed by Ariès (indulgent coddling by family vs rational disciplining by society, church, and education), and again ‘in education theory today, between the tender-minded who take their lead from Rousseau, Fröbel and the Romantics and their vision from “childlikeness”, and the tough-minded who follow a pattern more Classical, more Medieval, seeing in the child a miniature adult whose waxlike impressionable “childishness” requires moulding by Bildung.’2 The resulting modern ambivalence towards children is captured in the image of the Darling children of Peter Pan as ‘three wicked inmates breathing angelically as they slept’ (P3, 3.98, emphasis mine).3 None the less, the stubborn persistence of the Bethel boys motif cannot be accounted for simply by admitting that the image of the humble child must be rounded off by an acknowledgement of ‘the shadow of childishness’, including ‘the unadapted pitiless feelings, the child’s cruelty, the short memory, stupidity, which too form the stuff of innocence’.4 We must also consider the cultural reaction against the thought of the child’s ‘innocence’. A compelling explanation for our bad boys motif was unwittingly provided by Barth’s contemporary, Romano Guardini, in his 1937 book on Jesus as Christ in the New Testament. When Jesus fetches a child, places it in his disciples’ midst, and, seating himself, puts his arm around it (Mark 9.35–37; cf. Matt. 18.1–5; Luke 9.46–48), he in effect says, as Guardini puts it: ‘Look, you wrangling, self-interested, grown-ups here is the opposite of the lot of you! This child can teach you how to evaluate and behave!’5 In typecasting children as the contrary of adults, Jesus touched a hidden ‘vital nerve’ in the adult consciousness. ‘In the child,’ explains Guardini, ‘life begins again with all its primeval freshness, regardless of the adult already installed and his adaptive measures. Thus in spite of natural affection, there is often a trace of secret, unconscious resentment in the attitude of the grown-up towards the child’ (p. 308). Anticipating Leslie Fiedler’s assessment of the child as ‘the touchstone, the judge of our world – and a reproach to it in his unfallen freshness of insight, his unexpended vigour, his incorruptible naïveté,’6 Guardini’s inference of a hidden adult ‘resentment’ of children also calls to mind a more ancient suspicion regarding the parental attitude towards them. As Kierkegaard once noted, Plato’s Socrates suggests in the Republic that ‘parents are afraid of the children and out of fear of them have to amuse and entertain them exactly the way they want.’7 Such points may help lead to an answer to the question we posed above. Neither Guardini nor perhaps any other exegete has pondered the Gospel passages about Jesus with children in connection with the tale of Elisha’s mockery. Yet each recurrence of the Bethel boys motif would seem, at least momentarily, to assuage that ‘vital nerve’ which Guardini thought is irritated by the idea of children representing the fresh, untarnished renewal of life. Whenever bad boys mocking a holy or eccentric figure appear in literature or



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art, such a cameo must confirm on some level of adult consciousness the kind of protest that Guardini registers against the popular view of Jesus’ teaching about the need to become like a child: ‘But the child is not innocent. The Bible is much too realistic to call a child innocent. It knows human nature, and that even the one-day-old infant is a carrier of evil’ (p. 311). Pressing on in this Augustinian vein, which could have entered his thoughts out of the ruminations on infancy in the Confessions, Guardini declares: ‘No serious pedagogue can claim that children are innocent. The “innocent child” is an invention of grown-ups eager to stake a sentimental claim to the vanished purity of their own childhood’ (p. 311). Reconsidered in the light of Guardini’s assertions, which are supported by J. Blinzler’s claim that the idea of the ‘childlike pure soul’ (‘kindlich reinen Seele’) is as foreign to the Old Testament as to the New,8 the tale of Elisha’s mockery still seems antithetical to Jesus’ exaltation of children. Whereas the Bethel boys call after the prophet, in the Gospels it is the Messiah who insists that children be allowed to come to his side. Whereas Elisha’s mockers are the aggressors against him, Jesus is the defender of children who announces, ‘Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me’ (Matt. 18.5; Mark 9.37; cf. Luke 9.48), a statement which Guardini sums up as follows: ‘A divine chivalry protects that which is unable to protect itself and declares: I stand behind it!’9 Whereas bears maul the Bethel boys, thereby avenging God and his prophet, Jesus warns adults of a deadly consequence that will befall anyone who harms a child. He adds that children are guarded by angels who ‘always behold the face of my Father’ (Matt. 18.10). Guardini’s inference that ‘He who lays impious hands upon [a child] does something so terrible that it would be better for him to have been put out of the way before like a dangerous animal’ (p. 310), reveals how perfectly Jesus’ teaching inverts the plot and lesson of the Elisha tale, where the children, not adults, proved ‘impious’ and were therefore ‘put out of the way’ by ‘dangerous animals’. In belying Jesus’ lofty estimation of children, the tale of Elisha’s mockery ascribes to them a wicked inclination that seems almost to anticipate the pessimistic pronouncement made by a contemporary psychiatrist about little boys: ‘Every man jack of them [is] a potential sociopath.’10 If Jesus meant to celebrate, in Guardini’s words, that the child ‘lives in a world of unruffled trust’, ‘has no intentions’, ‘meets reality as it is, with simple acceptance’, ‘permits [things] to be themselves’, ‘is completely natural’ and ‘simple and candid’ because ‘it does not yet feel the inhibitions that make it so difficult for the adult to be honest’, then all these qualities that make the child’s honesty ‘a living reprimand’11 to adults are shown to have a moral counter in 2 Kings 2.23–24. There the children do speak candidly, but what they say is wickedly derisive, and so the only ‘reprimand’ is not embodied by them towards us as adults, but directed at them by the holy man.



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These thematic contradictions none the less should not prevent us from recognizing a provocative continuity between the Elisha tale and the Gospel passages about Jesus with children. This continuity will become clear when Jesus’ open and consistent hostility towards the family as a social unit is taken into account. A virtual runaway once at the age of 12 (see Luke 2.42–49), albeit one who subsequently obeys his parents (2.51), Jesus is never quoted by the Evangelists as speaking with his earthly father, Joseph. As an adult he expresses exasperation with his mother’s clinging (John 2.4) and publicly disowns her and his brothers as family (Matt. 12.46–50; Mark 3.31–35; Luke 8.19–21). Accordingly, he not only requires that his disciples renounce all they have (Luke 14.33) and take up their own crosses (Matt. 10.38; Luke 14.27), but urges his followers to break off from and leave their families (Matt. 4.22; Mark 1.20; cf. Luke 5.11; 18.29–30), to go ‘against’ their families as ‘foes’ (Matt. 10.35–36; cf. Luke 12.52–53), to love him more than they love their families (Matt. 10.37; cf. 19.29), and even to ‘hate’ their parents, wives, children, and siblings (Luke 14.26).12 Although these exhortations against family and other earthly bonds are in harmony with other classic master–disciple relationships exemplified in the scriptures and lore of the world’s religions,13 Kierkegaard is one of the few Christian thinkers ever to confront head-on this ‘remarkable teaching on the absolute duty to God’.14 His pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, insists that Jesus’ words in Luke 14.26, rather than being ignored or in some way modified exegetically or lexicologically, ‘are to be taken in their full terror’ (p. 72). When Jesus’ anti-familial stance is taken into account, his putting his arm around a child or asking for children to be brought to him assumes a poignant new significance, one that might even seem threatening to any loving parent. For his gesture seems aimed at subverting the parent–child bond. The drawing of children towards him betokens their being drawn away from their parents and other family members – not just bodily, through the children’s physical movement towards him, but spiritually, through their reception of his blessing. This hard truth is acknowledged by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, AntiClimacus, who addresses Jesus himself as follows: We pray for all. For the little infant, whom the parents take to you, that you will draw it to yourself. And if the parents later influence the child in such a way that it is led to you, we pray you to bless this work of theirs; but if they have a disturbing influence upon the child, we pray that you will make up for it so that this disturbing influence will not draw the child away from you.15 Parents, as Anti-Climacus seems to suggest, can be the primary obstacle to a child’s spiritual progress towards Jesus. It is not that Jesus is the prototype of



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the Pied Piper of Hameln; on the contrary, a distinguishing feature of that anti-hero of German legend is the falsity of his promises and the wickedness of his intention. Nor do the Gospels imply that ‘the people’ (parents? other family members? friends?) who brought the children to Jesus (Matt. 19.13; cf. Mark 10.13; Luke 18.15) knew that they themselves might thereby be symbolically initiating the children’s spiritual crossover from family loyalty to devotion to the master. Yet in view of Jesus’ teaching that detachment from family is essential to becoming his follower, his consecration of children seems not simply a display of his affection for ‘little ones’, but a symbolic illustration that the spiritual distancing of his potential followers from their parents might ideally begin in infancy. As the Roman Catholic Catechism puts it: Family ties are important but not absolute. Just as the child grows to maturity and human and spiritual autonomy, so his unique vocation which comes from God asserts itself more clearly and forcefully. Parents should respect this call and encourage their children to follow it. They must be convinced that the first vocation of the Christian is to follow Jesus.16 Be this as it may, it can be no mere coincidence that in Matthew’s account the blessing of the children immediately follows Jesus’ allusions to ‘eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ (19.12). In becoming like little children in a very physiological sense, such spiritually inclined, self-made eunuchs destroyed their capacity for ever producing children. Such a willingness on heaven’s behalf to surrender the biological capacity to procreate represents a polar opposition to the attitude addressed in the catechismal clause above, namely, the natural, atavistic reluctance among parents to surrender their children to Jesus. More secular and medically less extreme examples of the ideal of remaining childless are encapsulated in what Ian Watt calls the four ‘myths of modern individualism’: Don Quixote, Don Juan, Faust, and Robinson Crusoe.17 Despite their obvious differences from Jesus, all four of these literary-mythic bachelors have in common with him their family-less, spiritually solitary status, whether stranded on an island (Crusoe), or questing after endless chivalric adventures (Don Quixote), infinite women (Don Juan), or universal knowledge (Faust). Underlying all four myths and exposing their spiritual kinship – yes, even Don Juan’s! – to Jesus’ ideal of ‘eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ is an old assumption which was articulated by that inveterate empiricist, Francis Bacon: ‘Certainly, the best workes, and of greatest Merit for the Publike, have proceeded from the unmarried, or Childlesse Men.’18 As an affront to the married man ‘burdened’ with children, that assumption carries a humourously pathetic ramification that did not escape the notice of Kierkegaard’s ethicist, Judge William.



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How often have you not gloated over the outraged sensibilities of such family men at all the petty details that life entails, when the children have to be spanked, when they spill on themselves, when they scream, when the great man – the father – feels frustrated in his venturesomeness by the thought that his children tie him to the earth?19 Unlike the ‘unconscious resentment’ towards children about which Guardini spoke, the paternal frustration described by Kierkegaard’s ethicist is triggered not by envy of children’s ‘primeval freshness’, but by their presence, by which ‘tragic-comic family men’ feel bound to earth. This point helps expose the continuity between the tale of Elisha’s mockery and the Gospel passages about Jesus with children. Inspired by the dream of radical, venturesome, male individualism in the mode of Faust, Crusoe, Don Juan, or even Don Quixote, such ‘family men’ might realize a kind of wish-fulfilment in contemplating the image of Jesus luring children to his side, or, more extremely, of the bears dismembering the Bethel boys. Both images are suggestive of children ending up ‘far, far away’ from parents, whether spiritually, by entering Jesus’ flock, or physically, by quitting this life through beastly jaws. The crucial difference is between the ultimate destinations towards which children are implicitly being propelled in the two images. Jesus, in blessing children, emphasizes their humility, which qualifies them for everlasting life in heaven. Forty-two of the Bethel boys meet an opposite fate. In their community’s view the horror of the boys’ being mauled, plausibly killed, and hence irrevocably ‘cut off from their people’, to borrow the Mosaic penal refrain, might have been compounded by a legal awareness that the laceration of their flesh by wild beasts rendered the boys’ corpses unclean, like the ritually unusable carcass of a sacrificial animal torn by beasts (see Exod. 22.31; cf. Lev. 7.24; 17.15; see also Ezek. 4.14). In the end, however, to reduce the sanguinary consequence of Elisha’s mockery to a fulfilment of the wishes of frustrated or resentful fathers would be too easy, not to mention anachronistic and erroneous. As much as it might square with the attitude of the modern ‘tragic-comic family man’, such an interpretation is inconsistent with the ancient Hebrew belief that a man’s children are his blessings, ‘like olive shoots around [his] table’ (Ps. 128.3). In accord with this is a Hasidic explanation for why a celestial decree was once rescinded that would have unleashed catastrophe upon the Jews. A mother of five told the Master of the Universe, weeping, that every time her children shed a tear it broke her heart. ‘ “But You, Father”,’ she continued, ‘ “You have so many more. Every man is Your child, and every one of them is weeping



‘How often have you not been amused by these tragi-comic family men with four darling children whom they secretly wished were far, far away?’ he asks.

and weeping. Even if Your heart is made of stone, how can You remain indifferent?” And … God decided she was right.’20 So what conclusion can be reached about a biblical tale whose outcome intensifies 42-fold the poignancy of the East European Jewish adage that a child’s tears rend the heavens, or of the saying rehearsed by Kierkegaard’s Frater Taciturnus that ‘it was a mother at her child’s sickbed who invented prayer’?21 Let me pause to elaborate upon this question.

Real absence ‘We move through a world of books in which the child is so accepted a feature of the landscape that we are aware of him chiefly when he is absent.’22 With these words Leslie Fiedler opened his study ‘The Eye of Innocence’ (1971), a revised compilation of five essays of his from 1958 on children in literature. Remarkably portentous, his image of the child’s absence would suitably complement the endangerment today of the very ‘idea of childhood’ (Ariès), young as that idea may be in Western thinking. That the modern concept of the child could now be threatened with obsolescence is suggested by the crisis that has attracted during the past two decades a cottage industry of studies under titles like The Disappearance of Childhood,23 Children without Childhood,24 The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon,25 Our Children Are Dying: Recognizing the Dangers and Knowing What to Do,26 Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids.27 As the president of Walt Disney Pictures remarked, ‘Today’s 8-year-olds are yesterday’s 12-year-olds. They watch some very edgy programs on television. There isn’t this innocence of childhood among many children, what with broken homes and violence.’28 If ‘resentment’ (Guardini) is felt for the ‘reproach’ (Fiedler) the child represents against the world, a backlash against the Cult of Childhood began to find theological, psychological, and literary expression long before now. Jesus’ call for adults to become like children struck Guardini as the source from which ‘something weak and adolescent has crept into the Christian attitude: a dependency that is offensive.’29 For Hillman, ‘The dominance of the child archetype in our psychological thinking, besides softening our intellect, has deprived the adult of his imagination.’30 Likewise Fiedler found ‘the profanation of the child’ in the art of such writers as Faulkner and Nabokov to reflect ‘a growing awareness on the part of us all that our society has tended (at least aspired) to become not the conspiracy against the child against which our ancestors raged – but a conspiracy in his favour, against the adult’, and ‘a new tyranny’ that renders us ‘slaves of our anxiety about our children, guilt-ridden by our fear of rejecting them, not giving them enough security or love, robbing them of spontaneity or creativeness; and like slaves everywhere, we grow sullen and resentful’.31



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Since the time when Fiedler made that point, the child’s ‘profanation’ has taken a final step. In 1966 George Boas prophetically suspected that Richard Hughes and William Golding, as novelists depicting ‘downright wicked’ children, had ‘started a new trend’.32 Already supported by the portrayal of the serial-killer child in William March’s novel The Bad Seed, which, unnoted by Boas, had appeared in 1954 and been adapted for the screen in 1956, Boas’s suspicion was to be further borne out by the fixation with depictions of the satanic child in popular fiction and film, most notably Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), David Seltzer’s The Omen (1976), and their respective film versions of 1968, 1973, 1976. By 1977, a psychiatrist commenting on the portrayal of children as ‘emissaries of death and destruction’ in American popular novels from the previous three years could list over a dozen best-sellers contributing to this trend, which seemed to ‘reflect a disturbing change in the way we think and feel about our young, a public indulgence in atavistic fears of them’.33 Joyce Carol Oates proposes that we ‘isolate’ the year of the publication of The Bad Seed ‘as a curious watershed year before which, in popular culture, children were usually portrayed as angelic, and after which children might be as demonic as adults’.34 Her proposal is interesting. Yet such post-1954 works as those just mentioned, together with Doris Lessing’s horrific tale of a malevolent gnomic boy, The Fifth Child (1988), would appear to be not so much an unprecedented development as the terminus ad quem of the same tradition of negative attitudes towards children that always shadowed the more dominant tradition of positive attitudes from the Hebrew Bible on. Anticipated by the words Theodotion ascribed to Elisha when he addressed the mocking boys (‘children of transgression and idleness’), such rare New Testament expressions as ‘son of the devil’ (Acts 13.10: ` ß´ ), ‘children of the devil’ (1 John 3.10:. ´ ˜ ß´ ), and ‘sons of disobedience’ (Eph. 2.2; 5.6; Col. 3.6: ` ˜ ’ ´ ) feed into the same negativist tradition, even if they were not originally applied specifically to infants or youngsters. These formulaic descriptives, in implying that wicked persons must descend from a wicked source, would justify the feelings of guilt which any parent today with rudimentary knowledge of modern genetics might harbour for having conceived and brought into the world a pathologically delinquent child. As Oates points out, both The Bad Seed and The Fifth Child focus upon the troubled conscience of the ‘evil’ child’s mother. Christine Penmark, mother of the murderous Rhoda in March’s novel, painfully assumes responsibility for the girl’s criminality, having ‘carried the bad seed that made [Rhoda] what she is’.35 Likewise the guilt-ridden mother of the sociopathic Ben in Lessing’s novel risks her marriage and the happiness and safety of her other children to try to care for him herself, even though, as Lessing once commented, Ben ‘isn’t evil at all. He’s just out of the right place. If he is in fact the result of a gene which



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has come down through many centuries, all he is, is a different race of being.’36 Elisha’s mockers, none the less, were not the result of an anomalous gene. And we must remind ourselves of the dual structure of their tale, whereby the image of their naughtiness is counterbalanced by the horror of their punishment. For the slaughter of the 42 lads taps a pair of basic human fears that are repeatedly reflected and at times interrelated in the Hebrew scriptures. One is the dread of attack by wild beasts, which is exploited by Yahweh in his warning of how he will punish his ungrateful, forgetful people: So I will be to them like a lion, like a leopard I will lurk beside the way. I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs, I will tear open their breast, and there I will devour them like a lion, as a wild beast would rend them. (Hos. 13.7–8) The other scriptural fear is that of loss of children. Most notably, the saga of Moses begins with the Egyptian king’s command requiring the execution of Hebrew newborn sons (Exod. 1.15–22). Later, the Exodus itself can commence only after Pharaoh’s stubbornness is broken by the loss of his own child (12.29). Likewise, the last, climactic loss endured by Job is of his children (Job 1.18–19). Elsewhere in the scriptures the terror of being bereft of a child is combined with the first fear, as when Jacob is led to believe that his son Joseph has been devoured by a wild beast (Gen. 37.33), or when God warns the Israelites that he will punish their disobedience by letting loose wild beasts which will rob them of their children (Lev. 26.22a). Inherited from the Hebrew scriptures, the anxiety over losing children becomes a central topos in the Gospels, whose whole drama prior to the Resurrection culminates in a singular event (the Crucifixion) that leaves a father (God) and mother (Mary) son-less. As the authors of Kings knew long before Luke, this anxiety lends poignancy to scenes where someone’s child is miraculously brought back from death. Jesus himself, as implied by Luke 4.25– 26, was aware that his raising of the widow’s dead son at Nain (7.11–17) had been foreshadowed by the similar miracle performed by Elijah (1 Kgs 17.17–24), which had also prefigured Elisha’s resuscitation of the Shunammite’s dead child (2 Kgs 4.32–37). Although Jesus later appealed unabashedly to the maternal fear of child-loss in his parting utterance to the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’, nowhere in the Gospels is this fear more dramatically exploited than in the killing of the male children of Bethlehem under Herod (Matt. 2.16). Clearly intending it as an antitype of Exodus 1.15–22, Matthew also finds ‘fulfilled’ in the Massacre of



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the Innocents ‘what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more” ’ (Matt. 2.17–18). Here we may ignore that this passage from Matthew transforms into a vignette of ‘unmitigated grief’ a verse which in Jeremiah (31.15) introduced ‘the promise of restoration’;37 that the latter verse had Rachel mourning her children’s exile, not their deaths; and that the prophet in that verse was using the term ‘children’ metaphorically to refer to the northern tribes of Israel. What matters is that Matthew’s Jesus, in paraphrasing the Jeremian verse, means for its final clause to be taken literally: ´ , ‘because they are not’. This phrase accurately captures the sense of the original Hebrew of Jeremiah 31.15b ( ) and matches verbatim that verse’s rendering in the Septuagint, where it is numbered 38.15. Given how Matthew’s Jesus employs it to convey a sense of the children’s total, real absence, that is, of their literal non-being or death, the phrase ‘because they were not’ raises the very issue I wish to take up in closing.

From the road to Bethel, to Neverland Maybe not everyone would agree with the narrators of the Quixote and The Glass Licenciate that boys are ‘the most mischievous creatures in the world’, even ‘worse than the devil’. Yet the continual recurrence of the Bethel boys motif in literature and art across the centuries suggests that few people would ever deny that it would have been only natural and consistent with naughty, boyish instincts for some urchins in ancient Israel to have mocked or perhaps even stoned a prophet whose bald head struck them as funny. Such misbehaviour appears to be timeless. Thus a game called ‘Scorn’, which was familiar at children’s parties in early New England, may have been derived from the old French pastime called ‘Risées’ or ‘Derision’, which is mentioned by the chronicler and poet Jean Froissart (c. 1333–1404) as an amusement of his childhood.38 And an anthology of the lore and language of modern British schoolchildren records street jeers analogous to the Bethel boys’ chant: ‘They call “Bald ’ed!” after anyone with a mop of hair, “Look at him robbing the barber.” Someone with a crew-cut is a “Bean head”, “Bullet head”, or “Convict number 99”.’39 That Elisha’s mockers acted as a mob must have lent special credence to their tale in the eyes of Augustine, who insisted that he himself would not have stolen pears as a boy had he not been accompanied by a gang of friends. Later thinkers such as Comenius and Thomas Arnold shared this insight into the corruptive power of peer pressure, and warned of the proclivity of boys to behave badly when they are allowed to mingle with naughty companions.40 Dostoevsky’s Captain Snegiryov likewise would have found familiar the behaviour of Elisha’s mockers, as it would support the distinction he drew



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It was a spontaneous utterance of the childish heart when a small boy, after an account of the heaven of good children, asked his mother whether she did not believe that, after he had been good a whole week in heaven, he might be allowed to go to hell on Saturday evening to play with the bad little boys there.42 However, the fact that the Bethel boys earned their place in scripture as a mob of anonymities should not obscure their resemblance in one suggestive respect to the four named characters of modern children’s literature who might be called puerile counterparts to Watt’s ‘myths of modern individualism’: Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Despite the obvious differences among them, each of these literary-mythic orphans is an individualist and isolato, whether because he is a puppet striving to become a boy (Pinocchio); was raised by animals in the jungle (Mowgli); comes from a tiny, isolated planet, of which he was the only human inhabitant (Little Prince); or has escaped the temporal world and renounced the necessity of ever growing up (Peter Pan). Much more radically so than their midwestern American predecessor Huck Finn, who fled from his abusive, alcoholic father to pursue a life of adventure with a runaway slave on the Mississippi before expressly renouncing ‘sivilization’ at the end of Twain’s novel, all four of these boys experience life in realms free from the dominion of human adults. In this respect, Mowgli’s jungle habitat is as similar to the Little Prince’s people-less planet as Peter Pan’s Neverland and its cache of lost boys are to the Funland (Paese dei balocchi) where Pinocchio winds up. The latter place is one whose ‘population was made up entirely of boys. … In the streets there was such gaiety, such a din, such wild shouting as to take your head off! Groups of urchins were everywhere.’43 While Fiedler may be right that children are so common in modern literature that we notice them mainly when they are absent, it can be no accident that these myths of male childhood repeatedly place the boys in scenarios radically removed from the normal, adult, ‘sivilized’ world, whether to a lonely planet, the jungle, Funland, or Neverland. (The consigning of Alice and Dorothy to Wonderland and Oz shows a similar tendency at work in two of our most popular modern myths of female childhood.) Bearing out the psychoanalytic axiom that, as Jacqueline Rose puts it, ‘childhood is something in which we continue to be implicated and which is never simply left behind’,44 this tendency probably reveals as much about adults as it does about the children who



between schoolboys ‘individually’ as ‘angels of God’ and schoolboys ‘together’ as ‘a merciless race’. That distinction, which anticipates Reinhold Niebuhr’s thesis about ‘the inferiority of the morality of groups to that of individuals’,41 seems consonant with the following anecdote:


adults pretend are the primary intended audiences of these stories. What Rose says about Peter Pan to illustrate ‘the impossibility of children’s fiction’ might apply to each of those other three myths of boyhood: ‘Peter Pan is a front – a cover not as concealer but as vehicle – for what is most unsettling and uncertain about the relationship between adult and child. It shows innocence not as a property of childhood but as a portion of adult desire’ (p. xii). At the same time, as distinguished from the works of Collodi, Kipling, and Saint-Exupéry, Barrie’s ‘is in fact one of the most fragmented and troubled works in the history of children’s fiction to date. Peter Pan … recapitulates a whole history of children’s fiction which has not yet come to an end’ (p. 11). As a story that paradoxically makes visible and present to the reader boys who are lost and absent, Peter Pan also seems to recapitulate and transform the motif that furnished the subject of the present study. The journey from the spot ‘on the way’ to Bethel where Elisha encountered his mockers, to Neverland, is a traversal from one extremity to the other in the Western contemplation of boys and of their absence. At the one pole appears an anonymous horde of urchins whose sacrilege against a holy man provokes the grisly shredding of 42 of their bodies. At the other pole appears that singular boy, Peter. Having ‘escaped from being a human when he was seven days old’ (P1, 2.12) and yet having now ‘broken through from’ Neverland (P3, 1.77), back to our world, he will forever remain a ‘Betwixt-and-Between’ (P1, 2.17; 6.57). The modern adult dream of ‘The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up’45 counters the ancient parental nightmare of boys who could not grow up – because they were dead. Mauled boys, their lives snuffed out for their blasphemy, are replaced by lost boys, ‘children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses’ (P3, 3.94–95). It seems a curious continuity between Peter Pan and 2 Kings 2.23–24 that the Neverland isle of the lost boys is cohabited not only by pirates, ‘redskins’, and fairies, but by legions of blood-thirsty counterparts to the two manglers of Elisha’s mockers: a ‘great and motley’ assortment of ‘lions, tigers, bears, and the innumerable smaller savage things that flee from them, for every kind of beast, and, more particularly, all the man-eaters, live cheek by jowl on the favoured island’ (P3, 5.116). Yet it also seems more than a mere coincidence that the same fear of man-eating beasts is exploited in our other three modern myths of boyhood. Mowgli must survive in a jungle of carnivorous animals. Pinocchio finds himself reunited with his maker, Geppetto, in the belly of a shark. And the Little Prince, whose story’s narrator had a childhood fascination with boa constrictors swallowing their prey, is threatened and finally bitten by a lethal snake. Perhaps each of these modern mythic boys harks back to the Bible’s first man and woman, who lost their innocence through the wiles of a serpent, just as



186

the legendary Babylonian Gilgamesh lost the plant of everlasting life to a member of that same species. Moreover, the images of each of these boys being physically menaced by wild beasts are corollary to the seemingly timeless association, remarked in our Introduction, of male children with activeness and the outdoors. The tale of Elisha’s mockery, in which the boys come ‘out of the city’ and the bears, ‘out of the woods’, locates the calamity at a site between civilization and wilderness. As we have seen, this symmetry is lost in most post-biblical adaptations of the Bethel boys motif, which relocate the action of the motif squarely inside rather than outside the boundaries of cities or towns – Francis’s Assisi, Don Quixote’s Barcelona, Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen, Old Martha’s Sighet, and so forth. In adaptations of the motif to Jesus’ Passion, some scenes are set inside the city (Thorn Crowning, Ecce homo, Departure from the Praetorium), while others, to be sure, are set outside (Cross Bearing, Nailing to the Cross, Crucifixion, Deposition). Yet neither the Via Dolorosa nor Calvary itself is often associated with wilderness, and any children depicted as present during the Passion are inevitably outnumbered by adults. Only in the adaptations of the motif in Pinocchio and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea does the action return to a secluded spot outside town, comparable to the spot by the woods ‘on the way’ to Bethel in the Elisha tale, with no adults around (other than Ryuji in the Mishima novel). In emphasizing so pointedly the opposition between the isolated wilderness of the lost boys’ Neverland and the urban domesticity of the Darlings’ London household, Peter Pan brings to a head a recurrent gravitation of the Western imagination towards a basic metaphorical scenario: the lostness of boys in relation to ‘home’. Metaphorically, how different is the lostness of Peter Pan and the lost boys from that of the 42 Bethel boys, who, punished for blasphemy, end up ‘lost’ in the fatal sense? No less so than the deaths the Bethel boys met away from home by the curse of an adult stranger, the lostness of the boys in Peter Pan anticipates the nightmarish but all too real, epidemic phenomenon of missing children in today’s world. As stated in a study of missing persons, or ‘mispers’ as they are dubbed by British police, ‘One of the most shocking images in America – one that resonates terribly – is that of children going missing from sidewalks. It seems to contradict our deepest and most heartfelt sense of order.’46 Among all categories of the modern missing, the numbers of missing children are the most distressing: ‘We count it among the first of our instincts – protect the children – and our horror is total, our guilt is relentless and deep, our fear is absolute, when we find we are unable to watch over them’ (pp. xix–xx). Despite the thematic consonance of the two stories with this disturbing reality of contemporary life, the ending of Peter Pan uniquely opposes the deadly consequence of Elisha’s mockery. Never mind that the other three modern myths of boyhood close with Mowgli returning to the society of ‘Man’, with



Conclusion 187


Pinocchio becoming ‘a proper boy’, and with the Little Prince being felled by a snake bite and disappearing from Earth, with the implication that he has not really died but returned to his planet. When their stories end, it can be assumed that Mowgli and Pinocchio will grow to adulthood and eventually die. For all we know, the Little Prince, like Peter Pan, may never grow old or die. Hence one Jungian’s well-known disapproval of the Little Prince as a puer aeternus47 seems akin to another critic’s observation that the end of Barrie’s play, where Peter flutters about alone, while Wendy and the other children have resolved to grow up, seems ‘unacceptable … because the stubbornly sentimental refusal to bring fantasy – an impotent fantasy in this case – down to earth makes Barrie’s cult of the child seem morbidly regressive.’48 None the less, the Little Prince disappears from our sight, giving no indication that he will ever return to Earth. In contrast, despite Peter’s being the eternal lost boy, we are assured that he will unendingly shuttle between Earth and Neverland: ‘Every spring-cleaning time, except when he forgets’, Peter returns to take Margaret, the young daughter of Wendy’s grown daughter Jane, to Neverland, just as he once took the young Wendy, and later took the young Jane, and just as he will some day take a young daughter of the grown Margaret, ‘and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless’ (P3, 17.226). There we have it. By this closing notion of Peter Pan’s eternal return, with the ambiguous image of children as ‘gay and innocent and heartless’, we are brought back to the focal tale of this book. Gay, innocent, heartless – like the Bethel boys: mocking the prophet, provoking the bears. If literature, film, and art are at all mimetic in relation to reality, the obstinacy with which the Bethel boys motif has recurred in different times and places could lead to several suppositions. Perhaps, contrary to the thesis argued by the psychologist J.H. van den Berg, the nature of children may never change over time.49 Perhaps, despite the alleged variance of attitudes towards the child in different cultures, such as the ‘superiority’ which Paul Hazard attributed to Northern Europeans over Southern Europeans in their ‘feeling for childhood’,50 children are everywhere the same, being always subject to the same natural instincts. Perhaps, as Thomas Arnold seemed to suggest earlier, it is a timeless, universal truth that boys will be boys, in the worst sense of the phrase.



188

Notes

1. Ernest B. Layard, Religion in Boyhood; or, Hints on the Religious Training of Boys (New York: Dutton, 1896) p. 1. 2. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments. Johannes Climacus, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) p. 96. 3. See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, tr. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 4. Thomas Arnold, letter of 2 March 1828 to John Tucker, in Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., 2 vols (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1860) 1:88. 5. For references see ERE, 3:520–1, s.v. ‘Childhood’, sec. 4. 6. E.D. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness (1899; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906) p. 194. 7. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, lect. 9, in Works of William James, ed. Fredson Bowers et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–) 15:165. Cf. Starbuck, Psychology, pp. 224, 262. 8. ERE, 3:520. 9. ERE, 3:524–46, s.v. ‘Children’; ER, 3:243–5, s.v. ‘Child’. 10. See G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, tr. J.E. Turner (1938; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986) pp. 515–16. 11. See C.G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myths of the Divine Child and the Divine Maiden, tr. R.F.C. Hull (1949; rev. edn, New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 12. See Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, tr. Rosemary Sheed (1958; Cleveland: World, 1963) pp. 247–50; Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974) pp. 32–51; Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings (1932; repr. New York: Random House, 1964) pp. 3–96. 13. SE, 21:42–5. 14. See George Boas, The Cult of Childhood (London: Warburg Institute, 1966) pp. 61–8; ERE, 3:521, s.v. ‘Childhood’, sec. 5; ‘AC’, p. 385. 15. SE, 13:100–61. 16. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd edn, rev. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963) p. 250. 17. Letter of 1911 from Tenerife (?) to Martin Rade, in Rudolf Otto, Autobiographical and Social Essays, tr. and ed. Gregory D. Alles (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996) p. 72. 18. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational, tr. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923; 2nd edn, 1950) p. 116. 19. See James, Varieties, lect. 20, in Works, 15:387. 20. ‘The Evolution of Childhood’, in HC, p. 1. 21. See Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1909); Boas, The Cult of Childhood, passim.



Introduction


22. Boas, Preface, Cult of Childhood, p. 9. 23. Angela Phillips, The Trouble with Boys: A Wise and Sympathetic Guide to the Risky Business of Raising Sons (New York: Harper Collins, 1994) p. 270. 24. See Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990); The Sibling Society (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996). 25. See Carey Goldberg, ‘After Girls Get the Attention, Focus Shifts to Boys’ Woes’, New York Times, 23 April 1998, pp. A1, A14. 26. Marina Warner, Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More (New York: Random House, 1995) pp. 32–3. 27. Blake Morrison, As If: A Crime, a Trial, a Question of Childhood (New York: Picador, 1997) p. 8. 28. Barry Glassner, ‘School Violence: The Fears, The Facts’, New York Times, 13 August 1999, p. A21. 29. Janet Reno, quoted by Karen L. Kinnear, Violent Children: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC–CLIO, 1995) p. 1. In a national survey conducted in June 1999 by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News, 58 per cent of respondents ranked youth violence as a top concern; cited by Glassner, ‘School Violence’, p. A21. 30. David Gutmann, ‘The Paternal Imperative’, The American Scholar 67 (1998):125. 31. As reported in the New York Times, 15 August 1995, pp. B1, B4; 20 October 1995, p. A16; 3 August 1996, p. 6; 24 September 1995, National Report, p. 18; 24 May 1997, pp. 21, 23. Cf. the headlines listed in Morrison, As If, p. 8. 32. Harold Schechter, ‘A Tragedy Repeated in History: Young Killers Aren’t New’, in New York Times, 23 May 1998, p. 15. 33. Robert Fairchild, ‘Addicted to Violence’ (letter), in The American Scholar 68 (1999):159. 34. As reported by Ryuichiro Hosokawa, ‘Child Killers: Who’s to Blame?’, World Press Review, June 1998, p. 9; repr. from Japan Times, 23 February–1 March 1998. 35. As reported by Jan Goodwin, ‘Sierra Leone is No Place to be Young’, New York Times Magazine, 14 February 1999, p. 48. See also Ed Cairns, Children and Political Violence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) p. 131. 36. See, e.g., Myriam Miedzian, Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link between Masculinity and Violence (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 37. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (New York: Dover, 1993) p. 16. 38. The Herder Dictionary of Symbols: Symbols from Art, Archaeology, Mythology, Literature, and Religion (Wilmette, IL: Chiron, 1986) p. 37. 39. As cited by Hippolytus of Rome, Philosophumena or Refutatio omnium haeresium (The Refutation of All Heresies), 9.9.4 (PTS, 25 :344/ANF, 5:126): ` ˜ ´ , ´. ` ß´ . 40. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. Repetition, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) p. 122. 41. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd, rev. edn, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1991) pp. 101, 104; citing J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture [tr. unnamed] (Boston: Beacon, 1966) pp. 24–5. 42. See James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abr. edn (New York: Macmillan, 1922) p. 375; Eliade, Patterns, p. 11. 43. Boleshaw Prus, The Sins of Childhood and Other Stories, tr. Bill Johnston (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996) p. 150. 44. Quoted by Peter Applebome, ‘Spin Cycle: Round and Round in the Search for Meaning’, New York Times, 29 March 1998, pp. 1, 5.



190

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

Frank Rich, ‘Lord of the Flies’, New York Times, 28 March 1998, p. A15. Criticisms of Ariès’s thesis will be considered in Chapter 4. Cited by Cairns, Children and Political Violence, p. 9. ‘EI’, p. 471. Victor Eremita, as ‘quoted’ in Søren Kierkegaard, Stages On Life’s Way, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) p. 58. Heinrich Böll, The Clown, tr. Leila Vennewitz (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1965) p. 218. ‘Song to Be Sung by the Father of Infant Female Children’, in Ogden Nash, Verses from 1929 On (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959) p. 117. Iona Opie and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) pp. 100–1. James A. Schultz, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100–1350 (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1995) p. 43. See John Stratton Hawley, ‘Thief of Butter, Thief of Love’, History of Religions 18 (1979): 203–20; idem, with Shrivatsa Goswami, At Play with Krishna: Pilgrimage Dramas from Brindavan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). Mick Namerari Tjapaltjarri (c. 1925–, Pintupi tribe), paraphrased by Geoffrey Bardon, Papunya Tula: Art of the Western Desert (Ringwood, Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1991) p. 86. The statement refers to Mick Namerari’s painting, Naughty Boys’ Dreaming (1971), Marlipi, west of Sandy Blight Junction, Western Australia (custodian: Tjapaltjarri-Tjungurrayi; ill. in Bardon, Papunya Tula, pp. 86–7). The painting to which I referred, Man and Naughty Boys’ Water Dreaming (1972), by Johnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula (c. 1932–, Loritja tribe), is a variant of this painting. See Plate 1 in the present study; for analysis and colour reproduction, see Bardon, Papunya Tula, p. 55. ‘A Children’s Game’, in The Essential Rumi, tr. Coleman Barks with John Moyne et al. (San Francisco: Harper, 1995) p. 4. See also ‘On Children Running Through’ (p. 238).

1 The Bad Boys of Bethel as Sacrilegious Type 1. See, e.g., Thomas Hartwell Horne et al. (eds), An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures [1818] 4 vols, 11th edn, rev. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1863) 1:597. 2. Cf. Karl Christian W.F. Bähr, The Books of the Kings, 2 bks, tr., ed., enlarged by Edwin Harwood and W.G. Sumner [vol. 6 of A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, ed. John Peter Lange] (New York: Charles Scribner, 1872) bk 2, p. 25. 3. Christopher Wordsworth (ed.), The Holy Bible, with Notes and Introductions, 6 vols (London: Rivingtons, 1865–71) 3:95. 4. Adam Clarke (ed.), The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testament: The text carefully printed from the most correct copies of the present authorized translation, including the marginal readings and parallel texts, with a commentary and critical notes [London, 1810–25] new edn, 6 vols (London: W. Tegg, 1854) p. 480. 5. F. J. Foakes Jackson, ‘I. and II. Kings’, in Arthur S. Peake (ed.), A Commentary on the Bible (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1920) p. 305; quoted by I.W. Slotki, Kings: Hebrew Text & English Translation (London: Soncino, 1962) p. 175. Cf. John W. Wenham, The Goodness of God (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1974) p. 129; Russell H. Dilday (ed.), 1, 2 Kings (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987) p. 273.



Notes 191


6. Robert T. Boyd, Boyd’s Bible Handbook (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1983) p. 179. 7. Herbert Chanan Brichto, Toward a Grammar of Biblical Poetics: Tales of the Prophets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) pp. 197, 198. 8. See, e.g., F.W. Farrar, The Second Book of Kings (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894) p. 28; Wenham, Goodness, p. 128; The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, 4 vols, rev., gen. ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1982) 2:71, s.v., ‘Elisha’, by J.H. Stek; The Life Application Bible: New International Version (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Pulishers, 1991) p. 608. Cf. M. Pierce Matheney, Jr. and Roy L. Honeycutt, Jr., ‘1–2 Kings’, in The Broadman Bible Commentary, 12 vols (Nashville: Broadman, 1969–72) 3:233; The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6 vols, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 2:472, s.v. ‘Elisha’. 9. Richard G. Messner, ‘The Story of Elisha and the Bears: 2 Kings 2:23–25’, B.D. thesis, Grace Theological Seminary, Winona Lake, Indiana (1956) p. 2; abridged by the author as ‘Elisha and the Bears: A Critical Monograph on 2 Kings 2:23–25’, Grace Journal 3 (1962):12–24. 10. Messner, ‘Story of Elisha’, pp. 20–8. 11. H.L. Rossier, Meditations on 2 Kings (Sunbury, PA: Believers Bookshelf, 1988) p. 35. 12. Brichto, Toward a Grammar, p. 198. 13. David Marcus, From Balaam to Jonah: Anti-Prophetic Satire in the Hebrew Bible (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995) p. 45. Cf. Wesley J. Bergen, Elisha and the End of Prophetism (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999) p. 11n.1. 14. Bergen, Elisha and the End, p. 69; echoing Richard D. Nelson, First and Second Kings (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987) p. 161. Against this notion, consider in our Conclusion the discussion of the terror reflected elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures at the loss of children. 15. In addition to the views I am about to cite, consider those cited by Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, p. 25. 16. Farrar (n. 8 above), p. 27. 17. Arnold B. Ehrlich, Mikrâ ki-Pheschutô, 3 vols (Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1899–1901) [in Hebrew] 2:334; as quoted by Marcus, From Balaam, p. 44. 18. Wenham, Goodness, p. 13. 19. J. Sidlow Baxter, Mark These Men: Practical Studies in Striking Aspects of Certain Bible Characters (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1949) p. 61. 20. C.S. Lewis, letter of 14 May 1955 to ‘Mrs. Ashton’, in Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. W.H. Lewis, rev. and enlarged edn, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1993) p. 448. 21. The quotations are from, successively, Joan Comay, Who’s Who in the Old Testament together with the Apocrypha (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971) p. 117, s.v. ‘Elisha’; Broadman Bible, 3:233; IDB, 2:92, s.v. ‘Elisha’; Brichto, Toward a Grammar, p. 196; IB, 3:197, ‘exposition’ by Raymond Calkins; Theodore H. Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (New York: Harper & Row, 1969) p. 517; J. Mauchline, ‘I and II Kings’, in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, ed. Matthew Black and H.H. Rowley (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962) p. 348; IB, 3:197, ‘exegesis’ by Norman H. Snaith. 22. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: Revised Standard Version Containing the Old and New Testaments, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) p. 456; The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books: New Revised Standard Version, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 466.



192

23. Robert C. Culley, ‘Punishment Stories in the Legends of the Prophets’, in R.A. Spencer (ed.), Orientation by Disorientation: Studies in Literary Criticism and Biblical Literary Criticism (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1980) pp. 167–81; here 169. For references to other scholars who agree on this point, see Burke O. Long, 2 Kings (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991) p. 33. 24. See Marcus, From Balaam, pp. 61–5, who observes that Elisha’s going up to Bethel at the start of the tale parallels his going on to Mt Carmel at the end; and that the children’s coming out of the city parallels the bears’ coming out of the woods. 25. Elisha and the End, pp. 69, 177. 26. Hermann Gunkel, ‘Elisha – The Successor of Elijah (2 Kings ii.1–18)’, The Expository Times 41 (1929):182–6; here 182. 27. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953) p. 12. 28. For example, Howard F. Vos, 1, 2 Kings (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1989) p. 140. Cf. Boyd, Boyd’s Bible Handbook, p. 178; Life Application Bible, p. 608. The Revell Bible Dictionary (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1990) even reduces the number, suggesting that Elisha cursed ‘several jeering young men’ (p. 338). 29. Messner, ‘Story of Elisha’, p. 53; see also 34. Brichto considers them to be ‘worthless oafs, hooligans, hoodlums’ or ‘mean-spirited rascals’ (Toward a Grammar p. 198). 30. Thomas L. Constable, ‘1 and 2 Kings’, in The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures. Old Testament, ed. John F. Walvoord and Roy B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985) p. 541. 31. J. Rawson Lumby (ed.), The First and Second Book of the Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909) p. 20. 32. Slotki (n. 5 above), p. 175. Cf. Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, pp. 11, 17, 25. 33. Also Donald J. Wiseman, 1 and 2 Kings: An Introduction and Commentary (Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1993) 198. 34. Wenham, Goodness, p. 129; Tanach: The Torah, Prophets, Writings. The Stone Edition, ed. Nosson Scherman (New York: Mesorah, 1996) p. 881. Likewise Georg Hentschel, Könige, 2 vols (Wurzburg: Echter Verlag, 1984–5) 2:11, renders it as ‘junge Burschen’. 35. See Wenham, Goodness, p. 129n. 3. 36. Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1988) p. 38. Cf. Dilday (n. 5 above) pp. 272–3; Bergen, Elisha and the End, p. 70. The phrase is likewise rendered as ‘kleine Knaben’ in Ernst Würthwein (tr. and ed.), Die Bücher der Könige, 2 vols (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977–84) 2:278. 37. See, e.g., F.C. Cook (ed.), The Holy Bible according to the authorized version (A.D. 1611), with an explanatory and critical commentary and a revision of the translation, by bishops and other clergy of the Anglican Church, 10 vols (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909–15) 3:8; Marcus, From Balaam, pp. 49–51. 38. See, e.g., Hans-Christoph Schmitt, Elisa: Traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur vorklassischen nordisraelitischen Prophetie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1972) pp. 180–1; Hentschel (n. 34 above), 2:11. 39. The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) p. 165. 40. The New Jerusalem Bible: Reader’s Edition (New York: Doubleday, 1990) p. 339. 41. This rendering is retained in Würthwein (n. 36 above) 2:278; Hentschel (n. 34 above), 2:11.



Notes 193


42. Die Schrift, 13 vols, tr. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (Berlin: Lambert Schneider, 1926) 9:148. 43. Schmitt, Elisa, p. 180. 44. August Klostermann, Die Bücher Samuelis und der Könige (Nördlingen: C.H. Beck, 1887) p. 397. Cf. W. Tom, ‘“Kaalkop, ga op!, kom op! of: vaar op!”?’, Gereformeerd Theologisch Tijdschrift 59 (1959): 149–51. 45. Brichto, Toward a Grammar, p. 197. 46. See Yair Zakovitch, ‘Get up Baldy! Get up Baldy!’, Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 8 (1985): 9–10 [in Hebrew]; cited by Marcus, From Balaam, pp. 59–60n.73. 47. See Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, p. 17; Lumby (n. 31 above), p. 20. Cf. John Gray, I & II Kings: A Commentary (1964; 3rd, rev. edn, London: SCM Press, 1977) p. 480. 48. This ‘parodic’ possibility is raised by Marcus, From Balaam, p. 60. 49. Rossier, Meditations, p. 34. 50. Wiseman (n. 33 above), p. 198. D.E. Hart-Davies estimates that Elisha was then ‘not more than twenty-five’ (The Severity of God [London: Pickering & Inglis, n.d.] p. 50). Cf. Lumby (n. 31 above), p. 20; Messner, ‘Story of Elisha’, 35; Wenham, Goodness, 128; Vos (n. 28 above), p. 140; Marcus, From Balaam, pp. 57–8. 51. James Hastings (ed.), A Dictionary of the Bible: Dealing with its language, literature, and contents, including the Biblical theology, 5 vols (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1898– 1904) 2: 283–5, s.v. ‘Hair’, by W. Ewing. 52. See Constable (n. 30 above), p. 542. 53. See, e.g., Baxter, Mark These Men, p. 66; Gaster, Myth, Legend, p. 517. 54. Jackson, (n. 5 above), p. 305. 55. See, e.g., Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, 1:234–5, s.v. ‘Baldness’, by A. Macalister; I. Benzinger, Die Bücher der Königer (Freiburg: Mohr, 1899) p. 132; John Skinner (ed.), Kings, rev. edn (New York: T.C. & E.C. Jack [1904]) pp. 281–2; IB, 3:197, ‘exegesis’; Gaster, Myth, Legend, pp. 517–18. For disagreement, see Brichto, Toward a Grammar, p. 197; Marcus, From Balaam, p. 59. 56. See, e.g., Lumby (n. 31 above), p. 20; Slotki (n. 5 above), p. 175. 57. See Messner, ‘Story of Elisha’, pp. 39–40; Tom, ‘“Kaalkop, ga op!”’, 149–51; Slotki (n. 5 above), p. 175; Constable (n. 30 above), p. 541; Wiseman (n. 33 above), p. 198; Marcus, From Balaam, p. 61; all of whom were preceded by Horne, Introduction to the Critical Study, 1:609, and, as we shall see, by certain Jewish exegetes before him, in linking the boys’ taunt to Elijah’s ascent. This interpretation is rejected by Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, p. 17; Farrar (n. 8 above), p. 27n. 1; R.A. Carlson, ‘Élisée – le successeur d’Élie’, Vetus Testamentum 20 (1970): 385–405; see 404n. 2; and Schmitt, on the assumption that 2 Kings 2.23–25 originated from a source independent of the tale of Elijah’s ascent (Elisa, p. 180n. 6). 58. See, e.g., Wenham, Goodness, p. 128; Rossier, Meditations, p. 35. 59. Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, p. 17. 60. See, e.g., A. Šanda, Die Bücher der Könige, 2 vols (Münster: Aschendorff, 1911–12) 2:14; Simon Landersdorfer, Die Bücher der Könige (Bonn: Peter Hanstein, 1927) p. 143; Gray (n. 47 above), p. 480; Wenham, Goodness, p. 129; Bernard P. Robinson, ‘II Kings 2:23–25 Elisha and the She-Bears’, Scripture Bulletin 13 (1982):2; Constable (n. 30 above), p. 542; Vos (n. 28 above), p. 140. 61. Bernhard Stade, ‘Beiträge zur Pentateuchkritik’, Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 14 (1894): 306–7n. 3. 62. See Šanda (n. 60 above), 2:14–15; Landersdorfer (n. 60 above), p. 143; James A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Books of Kings, ed. Henry S. Gehman (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1951) p. 355; J. Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient



194

63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1962) p. 68; The Jerome Biblical Commentary, 2 vols, ed. Raymond E. Brown et al. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968) 1:198; A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, rev. edn, gen. ed. Reginald C. Fuller (London: Thomas Nelson, 1969) p. 339; Schmitt, Elisa, p. 181; Hentschel (n. 34 above), 2:11; J. Robinson, The Second Book of Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) p. 28; Gray (n. 47 above), p. 480; Würthwein (n. 36 above), 2:278; Gwilym H. Jones, 1 and 2 Kings, 2 vols (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1984) 2:390. The tonsure theory is doubted or disputed by Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, p. 18; Rudolf Kittel, Die Bücher der Könige (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1900) pp. 190–1; Martin Rehm, Das zweite Buch der Könige: Ein Kommentar (Wurzburg: Echter Verlag, 1982) p. 36; T.R. Hobbs, 2 Kings (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1985) p. 24; Cogan and Tadmor (n. 36 above), p. 38; Marcus, From Balaam, p. 58. So suggests Brichto, who thus renders the boys’ insult as ‘Move on, scarface!’ (Toward a Grammar, p. 198). Gray (n. 47 above), p. 479. So opines Klaus Dietrich Fricke, Das zweite Buch von den Königen (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1972) p. 35. Cf. C.F. Burney, Notes on the Hebrew Text of the Books of Kings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1903) p. 267. As speculated in Fuller, New Catholic Commentary, p. 339. Life Application Bible, p. 608. Marvin H. Pope, Job (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965) p. 142n. 18. Marcus, From Balaam, p. 53. Cf. Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, p. 18. Johannes Hermann calls it a ‘Totenzahl’ (‘Die Zahl zweiundvierzig im Alten Testament’, Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 13 [1910]: 150–2; here 151). See also Montgomery (n. 62 above), p. 356; Würthwein (n. 36 above), 2:278; Hentschel (n. 34 above), 2:12; Nelson (n. 14 above), p. 161. Against this view, see Hobbs (n. 62 above), p. 24. See, e.g., Gray (n. 47 above), p. 480; B. Robinson, ‘II Kings 2:23–25’ (n. 60 above), p. 2; Gwilym H. Jones (n. 62 above), 2:390; Marcus, From Balaam, p. 53. Yet the idea of two bears mauling 42 boys in one shot strikes other scholars as unrealistic; e.g., Hentschel (n. 34 above), 2:12. See, e.g., Hermann, ‘Die Zahl zweiundvierzig’, p. 152. Wiseman (n. 33 above), p. 198. Cf. Wenham, Goodness, p. 129; Constable (n. 30 above), p. 542. Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, p. 18. As noted by J. Robinson, Second Book (n. 62 above), p. 29; Wiseman (n. 33 above), p. 198. Cf. Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, pp. 18, 29. Leonhard Goppelt, Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New, tr. Donald H. Madvig (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1982) p. 75. See Robert C. Culley, Studies in the Structure of Hebrew Narrative (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976) pp. 100–1; Culley, ‘Punishment Stories’, pp. 169–70; Long (n. 23 above), p. 34. Long, p. 33. Marcus, From Balaam, p. 51. As noted by Zakovitch, ‘Get up Baldy!’, p. 11; cited by Marcus, From Balaam, p. 55n. 54. As noted by Robert Polzin, ‘Curses and Kings: A Reading of 2 Samuel 15–16’, in J. Cheryl Exum and David J. A. Clines (eds), The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity, 1994) p. 221n. 25. Wiseman (n. 33 above), p. 198.



Notes 195

83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

107.

108.


Farrar (n. 8 above), p. 28. Gaster, Myth, Legend, p. 517. Marcus, From Balaam, p. 54. As noted by Farrar, p. 28. Cf. Marcus, From Balaam, p. 54. Farrar, p. 28. Cf. Robert C. Elliot, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960) p. 289; Fricke (n. 65 above), p. 35; Brichto, Toward a Grammar, p. 197. Gray (n. 47 above), p. 480. See Würthwein (n. 36 above), 2:278. Long, p. 33. B. Robinson, ‘II Kings 2:23–25’ (n. 60 above), p. 2. Culley, Studies, p. 100. Cf. Culley, ‘Punishment Stories’, p. 169. Bergen, Elisha and the End, p. 13; see also 71–2. See, e.g., Messner, ‘Story of Elisha’, pp. 43, 49; Fricke (n. 65 above), pp. 35–6; Life Application Bible, p. 608. For example, 1 Kgs 13.24, 26; 17.4; 2 Kgs 17.25–26; Jer. 15.3; Ezek. 14.15–21; 39.17–20. See also Elijah Judah Schochet, Animal Life in Jewish Tradition: Attitudes and Relationships (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1984) p. 55. As observed by J. Robinson, Second Book (n. 62 above), p. 28. Boyd, Boyd’s Bible Handbook, p. 178. J. Robinson, Second Book (n. 62 above), p. 29. Bergen, Elisha and the End, p. 71. Fuller, New Catholic Commentary, p. 339. See Wordsworth (n. 3 above), 3:95; Cook (n. 37 above), 3:8–9; Messner, ‘Story of Elisha’, pp. 40–1, who cites others holding this view. See also International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, 2:71; Dilday (n. 5 above), p. 273. Paulus Cassel, quoted in Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, p. 29. Lumby (n. 31 above), pp. 20–1. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (1991; London: Penguin, 1993) p. 70; see also 28–9, 71, 326. In addition to the source cited in our last note above, and the first source cited in our next note below, see J.J. Bachofen, Der Baer in den Religionen des Alterthums (Basel: Ch. Meyri, 1863); Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 2nd edn, tr. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963) pp. 183n.22, 274, 302, 303; Herder Dictionary of Symbols, pp. 19–20, s.v. ‘Bear’; ER, 2:86–9, s.v. ‘Bears’; Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989) pp. 113, 116–19. Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1988) pp. 363, 364, s.v. ‘Bear’. The author derives this conjecture from Robert Brown’s suggestion that mythological stories about the twin ursae show them ‘frequently in a Semitic connection’ (Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology [London: Williams & Norgate, 1898] p. 64; quoted by Walker, Woman’s Dictionary, p. 363). Brown, however, did not cite the Elisha tale as an example. Nor does Hesiod mention bears in his account of Rhea’s concealment of the infant Zeus (Theogony, lines 477–84). Montgomery (n. 62 above), p. 356. See also F.S. Bodenheimer, Animal and Man in Bible Lands (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960) pp. 21, 45; Gray (n. 47 above), p. 480; Cogan and Tadmor (n. 36 above), p. 38. Brichto, Toward a Grammar, p. 197.



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109. For example, NIV and God’s Word: Today’s Bible Translation That Says What It Means (Grand Rapids, MI: World Publishing, 1995) p. 429. 110. Long (n. 23 above), p. 33. 111. F. Deist, ‘Two Miracle Stories in the Elijah and Elisha Cycles and the Function of Legend in Literature’, in Wouter C. van Wyk (ed.), Studies in Isaiah (Pretoria: University of Pretoria, 1979) pp. 79–90; here 83. 112. IDB, 2:92. 113. NAB, p. 430, note to 2 Kgs 2.23–24. Cf. EJ, 6:666, s.v. ‘Elisha’, by Yehoshua M. Grintz. 114. S.H. Hooke, Middle Eastern Mythology (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1963) p. 158. 115. See Benzinger (n. 55 above), p. 132; Skinner (n. 55 above), p. 281; Lindblom, Prophecy, p. 62; Jerome Biblical Commentary, 1:198; Broadman Bible, 3:233; IB, 3:197, ‘exegesis’; Nelson (n. 14 above), p. 161. 116. See Jerome Biblical Commentary, 1:198. Cf. Lindblom, Prophecy, p. 62. Elisha’s identification as a ‘new Elijah’ is also supported by parallels between 1 Kings 17 and 2 Kings 2, culminating with the contrast between Elijah’s invocation of Yahweh’s name to raise the apparently dead child of the respectful widow, and Elisha’s invocation of that name to curse the boys who mocked him; see Anchor Bible Dictionary, 2:465, s.v. ‘Elijah’, by Jerome T. Walsh. 117. Montgomery (n. 62 above), p. 355. For disagreement see Brichto, Toward a Grammar, p. 197. 118. Gray (n. 47 above), p. 479. 119. Rehm (n. 62 above), p. 37, translation mine. 120. J. Robinson, Second Book (n. 62 above), p. 29. 121. NAB, p. 430. 122. As discussed further in Chapter 7, pp. 154–5. 123. David Marcus, ‘Juvenile Delinquency in the Bible and the Ancient Near East’, The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University 13 (1981):31–52; here 51. 124. So suggests S. Légasse, Jésus et l’enfant: ‘Enfants’, ‘petits’ et ‘simples’ dans la tradition synoptique (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1969) p. 282. 125. Pesikta Rabbati 26.1/2 (Pesikta Rabbati: Discourses for Feasts, Fasts, and Special Sabbaths, 2 vols, tr. William G. Braude [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968] 2:526–7). Cf. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1909–38) 4:295. 126. Cf. Goppelt, Typos, p. 75. 127. See Qur’an 4.155 (cf. 6.49); and The Book of Mormon (published 1830): 2 Nephi 26.3; Jacob 4.14. 128. See Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 129. As noted by W. Corswant, A Dictionary of Life in Bible Times, tr. Arthur Heathcote (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960) p. 73, s.v. ‘Child’. 130. Cf. Alexander Rofé, The Prophetical Stories: The Narratives about the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, their Literary Types and History (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1982) p. 15 [in Hebrew]; cited by Bergen, Elisha and the End, p. 69. 131. Sotah 46b (BT, 3:244). 132. As quoted in A.J. Rosenberg (ed. and tr.), II Kings: A New English Translation (New York: Judaica, 1980) pp. 250–1. 133. Sotah 46b (BT, 3:244).



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134. Sotah 46b (BT, 3:244); paraphrased by Ginzberg, Legends, 4:239–40; 6:344n.4. See also Slotki (n. 5 above), p. 175. 135. Sotah 46b (BT, 3:244–5). 136. As quoted in Rosenberg (n. 132 above), p. 251. 137. Ibid. 138. Sotah 47a (BT, 3:245); Ginzberg, Legends, 4:240; Cogan and Tadmor (n. 36 above), p. 39. 139. Gray (n. 47 above), p. 480. 140. Sotah 47a (BT, 3:245–6); Baba Mezia 87a (BT, 5:503); cf. Ginzberg, Legends, 4:240, 245–6; 6:344n.4, 347n.20. 141. As cited by Rosenberg (n. 132 above), pp. 250–1; quote on p. 251. See also Cogan and Tadmor (n. 36 above), p. 39. 142. On these two authors and versions see Alfred Rahlfs (ed.), Septuaginta, id est, Vetus Testamentum Graece iuxta LXX interpretes, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Privilegierte Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1935; 3rd edn 1949) 1:xxvii–xxviii, xxx–xxxi; IDB, 4:275–6, s.v. ‘Septuagint’; 4:618–19, s.v. ‘Theodotion’; Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) pp. 83–94, 157–71. For more on Lucian, see below. For more on Theodotion, see Frederick Field’s preface to his edition Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt; veterum interpretum graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum fragmenta, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1875) 1: xxxviii–xlii. 143. Rahlfs, Septuaginta, id est, Vetus Testamentum Graece, 1:697n.; Origenis Hexaplorum, 1:654. 144. Cf. Job 21.8 and Isaiah 44.3 in LXX, which uses ´ as the equivalent of , which is renderable in these two instances as ‘offspring’ (RSV). 145. Jellicoe, Septuagint and Modern Study, p. 168. 146. Rahlfs, Septuaginta, id est, Vetus Testamentum Graece, 1:697n.; Klostermann, Die Bücher Samuelis und der Könige, p. 397. See also the sources cited in our next note below. 147. Alfred Rahlfs, Septuaginta-Studien, 3 vols (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1904–11) 3:195. Cf. Montgomery (n. 62 above), p. 357. 148. Cogan and Tadmor (n. 36 above), p. 38. This was first suggested in The Books of Kings: Critical Edition of the Hebrew Text, ed. Bernhard Stade, with Friedrich Schwally, notes by R.E. Brünnow and Paul Haupt (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1904) p. 184n. 149. See Rahlfs, Septuaginta-Studien, 2:236–7; Rahlfs, Septuaginta, id est, Vetus Testamentum Graece, p. xxx; IDB, 4:275. 150. As noted by Brichto, Toward a Grammar, p. 198; Marcus, From Balaam, p. 48. 151. Noted in Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, p. 18. 152. The Patriot (Philopatris, 965/969 C.E.) sec. 12, in Lucian, 8 vols, Greek with translation by M.D. Macleod, Loeb Classical Library (London: W. Heinemann, 1927–67) 8:436/437, 437n.8. This work formerly was spuriously ascribed to Lucian of Samosata. On the uncertainties about author and date, see M.D. MacLeod’s preface in Lucian, 8:413. See also LFC, p. 148. 153. Cena Cypriani, lines 98–100, ed. Karl Strecker, in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Poetae Latini aevi Carolini 4/2 (1923): 870–900 (bottom of pp.); here 882. Compare the variant version edited by H. Hagen in his ‘Eine Nachahmung von Cyprian’s Gastmahl durch Hrabanus Maurus’, Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie 27 (1884): 179–87, which has Elisaeus ursinam (p. 182). On both these versions, and the two others referred to in our next note below, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750–1150 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) pp. 57–8.



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154. Elisha is linked with the bear in Hrabanus Maurus, Caena Cypriani (aka Caena Hrabani), ed. H. Hagen in ‘Eine Nachahmung’, pp. 165–79; see 170; John the Deacon, Versiculi de cena Cypriani, ed. Strecker, in Monumenta Germaniae historica, pp. 827–900; see v. 121b, p. 882. In another context, John’s versified version employs the phrase Lavit calvus Eliseus (v. 98, p. 880), literally ‘baldhead Elisha washed’, a phrasing that combines allusions to 4/2 Kings 2.23 (calvus) and to 5.10–14 (lavit). 155. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, 26.34, in The Divine Comedy, 6 vols, tr. with commentary by Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970–5; 2nd printing, with corrections, 1977) 1:272/273. 156. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt 2, question 76, article 1; question 108, article 1, reply obj. 4. 157. Henry Bett, Joachim of Flora (London: Methuen, 1931) pp. 27–8. 158. See Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) pp. 193, 402, 412. See also Bett, Joachim, p. 27. 159. Prophecy 1, in Vaticinia, siue prophetiae abbatis Ioachimi, & Anselmi Episcopi Marsicani (Venice, 1589) n.p. In this edition, as in other fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury editions, the later 15 prophecies are placed before the earlier 15. Hence this first prophecy of the second series appears as the first of all 30. 160. Inferno, 19.31–120. 161. As documented in Isidoro Del Lungo, Dal secolo e dal poema di Dante (Bologna: Ditta Nicola Zanichelli, 1898) p. 469; cited by Singleton, Divine Comedy, 2:339, commenting upon Inferno, 19.70, where the shade of Nicholas III describes himself as ‘figliuol de l’orsa’ (Divine Comedy, 1:196/197: ‘a son of the she-bear’). Prophecy 16 in the 1589 Venetian edition of the pseudo-Joachimist Vaticinia, which, like prophecy 1 in this edition, has Nicholas III as its subject, refers to the Orsini as genus nequam ursa catulos pascens (‘that nefarious species the bear, feeding its young’); cited and translated by Singleton, Divine Comedy, 2:339. The Orsini/bear association is illustrated in the woodcuts accompanying these two prophecies. The woodcut by prophecy 1 shows Nicholas seated, with two bear-cubs on their hindlegs reaching for his knees. The woodcut by Prophecy 16 shows Nicholas standing, with two larger bears on hindlegs beside him, and a she-bear suckling three cubs atop his crowned head. 162. Aquinas, Summa, pt 2, question 108, article 1, reply obj. 4. 163. As noted by Singleton, Divine Comedy, 2:339. 164. Paulus Cassel, quoted in Bähr (n. 2 above), bk 2, p. 29. 165. Plato, Laws, bk 7, 808d, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (1961; 2nd printing with corrections, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963) p. 1379. 166. References in ERE, 3:539, s.v. ‘Children (Greek)’, by W.H.S. Jones. 167. Nicomachean Ethics, bk 3, sec. 12, 1119b6, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols, ed. Jonathan Barnes, the revised Oxford translation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) 2:1767. 168. Politics, bk 1, sec. 13, 1260a31–33, in Complete Works, 2:2000. 169. Letter 60, par. 1, in Seneca ad Lucilium epistulae morales, 3 vols, Latin with translation by Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (London: W. Heinemann, 1917–25) 1:422/423. The original Latin reads: Iam non admiror, si omnia nos a prima pueritia mala secuntur; inter execrationes parentum crevimus.



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170. IDB, 2:682–5, s.v. ‘Image of God’. Another exception is James 3.9, which retains the Hebrew view in alluding to God’s ´, the New Testament translation of (likeness). 171. St Irenaeus, The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, tr. J. Armitage Robinson (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920) sec. 12, p. 82. 172. Judah Halevi, The Kuzari (Kitab Al Khazari): An Argument for the Faith of Israel, tr. Hartwig Hirschfeld (New York: Schocken, 1964) p. 64. 173. See Ginzberg, Legends, 1:59; 5:78n.21. 174. See IDB, 1:588, s.v. ‘Child’; Corswant, Dictionary of Life, pp. 73–4, s.v. ‘Child’. 175. See Robert Aron, A Boy Named Jesus (Berkeley: Ulysses Press, 1997). 176. Philo, On Mating with the Preliminary Studies, 15.81, in Philo, 10 vols, Greek with translation by F.H. Colson and G.H. Whitaker, Loeb Classical Library (London: W. Heinemann, 1929–62) 4:498/499. 177. Philo, Flaccus, 6.36–39, in Philo, 9:322/323. 178. See Eric J. Ziolkowski, ‘Sancho Panza and Nemi’s Priest: Reflections on the Relationship of Literature and Myth’, in Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger (eds), Myth and Method (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996) pp. 247–99, esp. 267–80. 179. As noted by Elliott’s commentary in ANT, p. 68. 180. See Infancy Gospel of Thomas 3.1–4.2 (ANT, p. 76). Cf. Pseudo-Matthew 26 and 29 (ANT, p. 89). 181. After each incident, Jesus’ father Joseph is reproached by the dead children’s parents; see Infancy Gospel of Thomas 3.3; 4.2 (ANT, p. 76); cf. Pseudo-Matthew 29 (ANT, p. 89). 182. See, e.g., Cursor Mundi (The Cursur o the world): A Northumbrian Poem of the XIVth Century in Four Versions, 7 vols, ed. Richard Morris, Early English Text Society, O.S. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1874–93) 2:684–723, lines 11929–12576. I am indebted to Carol Kaske for the epithet ‘killer Jesus’. 183. Légasse, Jésus et l’enfant, pp. 340–1. 184. RSV, Oxford edn (1973) p. 1368n. 185. Cf. Richard B. Lyman, ‘Barbarism and Religion: Late Roman and Early Medieval Childhood’, in HC, pp. 88–90. 186. For example, Serm. 294.18 (PL, 38:1347), delivered at Carthage, 413 C.E. 187. ‘AC’, p. 370. 188. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber (393 C.E.), 10.13.23 (PL, 34:417). Cf. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) p. 172. 189. The Golden Legend, or Lives of the Saints, as Englished by William Caxton, 7 vols (London: J.M. Dent, 1900) 5:65–6. 190. St Augustine, Against Faustus the Manichaean (Contra Faustum Manichaeum), 22.25 (PL, 42:417/NPN, 4:282). 191. De trinitate, 14.5.7 (CCSL, 50a:429); as rendered in Saint Augustine, The Trinity, tr. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle (New York: New City Press, 1991) p. 375. 192. Augustine, City of God, 22.22.34. 193. See Augustine, Against Faustus, 22.25. 194. Keith Hopkins, ‘Everyday Life for the Roman Schoolboy’, History Today 43 (October 1993): 25–30; here 27.

2 Patristic and Medieval Views of 2 Kings 2.23–24 1. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, 1.6.1, in the two-volume edition with translation by Ernest Evans (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972) 1:14/15. All references are to this edition.



200

2. Adversus Marcionem, 2.14.4 (1:126/127). 3. Origen, Homilia in Ezechielem, 4.7 (PG, 13:701/702A); cited by R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance of Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1959) p. 219. 4. Timothy David Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971) p. 92. 5. Ibid., p. 277. 6. This supposition is supported by the following considerations. The two scenes in which Jesus identifies true greatness with children and blesses them as possessors of God’s kingdom are recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels: the first scene in Matthew 18.1–5, Mark 9.33–37, Luke 9.46–48; the second, in Matthew 19.13–15, Mark 10.13–16, Luke 18.15–17. In the Koine, five of these six passages use the terms ´ and ´ to denote ‘child’ and ‘children’; the exception, Luke 18.15–17, uses both ß´ (v. 15: literally ‘infants’) and ´ (v. 16) to refer to the same children. Given that the Septuagint identifies Elisha’s mockers as ´ ´ (4/2 Kgs 2.23: ‘little children’) and ˜ (2.24: ‘children’), the pueri–parvuli distinction which Tertullian imposes between them and Christ’s ‘infants’ appears untenable. The distinction seems further negated by the Vulgate Latin renderings of the Kings tale and the six Gospel passages. Composed fewer than 200 years after Tertullian’s anti-Marcionite treatise, the Vulgate, like Tertullian, designates Elisha’s mockers as pueri – or more specifically, pueri parvi (4/2 Kgs 2:23: ‘small boys’). And not only does the Vulgate also use puer and pueri interchangeably with parvulus and parvuli as renderings of ´ and ´ in the six Gospel passages, but in Luke 18.15–17 the Vulgate uses pueri (v. 16) to connote infantes (v. 15), its equivalent of ß´. 7. See Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis, ch. 19 (PL, 2:866B–67A); cited by Barnes, Tertullian, p. 127, including n.5. 8. St Ambrose, Epistola 81.5 (PL, 16:1329C); Expositio super septem visiones libri Apocalypsis, 3rd vision, ch. 6, v. 7 (PL, 17:837A–B). 9. Against Faustus, 12.35 (CSEL, 25, pt 1:361/NPN, 4:194). 10. See, e.g., pars 4–8 of Augustine’s Expos. Ps. 63/64, preached as a sermon at Hippo in April 395 (CCSL, 39:810–12 / Expositions on the Book of Psalms, by S. Augustine, 6 vols, tr. English Church members [Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1847–57] 3:235–8). Citations hereafter are successively by the Psalm’s Vulgate and RSV numbers (separated by a back-slash); the Exposition’s paragraphs; the volumes, pages, and lines from the CCSL edition; and the volumes and pages from the Oxford translation. Italics in English renderings is retained from the Oxford translation. The Expositions are dated according the chronological table in CCSL, 38:xv–xviii. 11. Expos. Ps. 44/45.1 (38:493 [11–12, 16]/2:226). In explaining the phrase filii Core Augustine relied upon available concordances, or ‘the explanations of all the words used in Scripture’ (38:493 [14–15]/2:226). In translating that same Hebrew phrase in another psalm, he would rely upon those ‘who know that language [qui illam linguam nouerunt]’ (Expos. Ps. 83/84.2 [39:1146 (3–4)/4:147]). Cf. 46/47.2 (38:529–30 [12–15]/2:276); 84/85.2 (39:1162 [7–8]/4:166). 12. See Expos. Pss 41/42.2; 43/44.1; 45/46.1; 46/47.2; 47/48.1; 83/84.2; 84/85.2. Cf. Expos. Ps. 51/52.9, preached in January 413 at Carthage, where Augustine refers to links between Core, calvitium, Calvaria, and Christ (39:629 [15–16]/2:395), even though Psalm 51/52 itself does not mention ‘the sons of Korah’. 13. Expos. Ps. 46/47.2 (38:530 [26]/2:276): deuorari; Expos. Ps. 83/84.2 (39:1147 [12]/ 4:147): comederent; Expos. Ps. 84/85.2 (39:1162 [13]/4:167): comederunt, rendered in this last instance by the Oxford translation as ‘destroyed’.



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14. Expos. Ps. 46/47.2 (38:530 [21–2, 30]/2:276–7): a daemonibus … deuorantur, and sunt possessi a daemonibus et deuorati. Cf. Expos. Ps. 83/84.2 (39:1147 [8–9]/4:147); Expos. Ps. 84/85.2 (39:1162 [10–11]/4:167). The phrasing in Expos. Ps. 44/45.1 (38:494 [39–40]/2:227) was: Possessi … a daemonibus. 15. They are referred to as ‘sons of wickedness’ (Expos. Ps. 83/84.2 [39:1147(7)/4:147]: filii pestilentiae); and ‘children who were wicked enough to mock’ (Expos. Ps. 84/85.2 [39:1162 (13)/4:167]: pueri male ridentes). 16. Expos. Ps. 83/84.2 (39:1147 [11–12]/4:147). 17. Expos. Ps. 46/47.2 (38:530 [25]/2:276). 18. De doctrina christiana, 2.6.7 (CCSL, 32:35–6); as rendered in St Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, tr. D.W. Robertson, Jr (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958) p. 37. 19. Expos. Ps. 83/84.2 (39:1147 [13–14]/4:147). Cf. Expos. Ps. 46/47.2 (38:530 [26–8]/ 2:276). 20. Expos. Ps. 83/84.2 (39:1147 [14–15]/4:147). Cf. Expos. Ps. 46/47.2 (38:530 [28–9]/ 2:276–7). 21. See Responsiones ad orthodoxos de quibusdam necessariis quaestionibus, no. 80 (PG, 6:1321B). 22. Responsiones, no. 80 (PG, 6:1321C). 23. John Chrysostom, Regnorum IV, in his Synopsis veteris et novi testamenti (PG, 56:351); Adversus oppugnatores eorum qui vitam monasticam inducunt, 3.17 (PG, 47:378). 24. Procopius of Gaza, Commentarii in librum quartum Regum, 2.24 (PG, 87, pt 1:1184A). 25. Responsiones, no. 80 (PG, 6:1321C). 26. Theodore Prodromus, Epigrammata in Vetus et Novum Testamentum ex editione Basileensi (PG, 133:1173B–74A). 27. Liber de promissionibus et praedictionibus Dei, 2.31.68 (PL, 51:805D–806A). 28. See DS, 2, pt 1:421, 424, s.v. ‘Césaire’, by Gustave Bardy; and the introduction to Caesarius of Arles, Sermons, 3 vols, tr. Mary Magdeleine Mueller (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1956; Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1964–73) 1:xx–xxi. Citations are by, successively, sermon and paragraph, followed by the page from the Latin edition in CCSL, vol. 103, and the volume and page from Mueller’s translation. 29. Sermons 126–30 (521–38/2:216–36). See our previous note for mode of citation. 30. De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae, 2.23 (PL, 35:2183–4). This text is believed to have been produced in Ireland sometime after 660 CE; see ‘Admonitio’, PL, 35:2149. 31. The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers, 4 vols, ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850) 2:240. 32. In the Vulgate this passage reads: percussi filios vestros, disciplinam no receperunt. Caesarius alters the wording slightly, inserting et (‘and’) after the comma, and replacing receperunt (‘they have taken’) with recepistis (‘you have taken’). Whereas in the Vulgate it is the struck ‘children’ (filii) that are accused of failing to receive correction in the Vulgate, Caesarius’s alteration makes their parents the ones accused of that failure. The Vulgate passage is likewise altered when paraphrased in Caesarius’s excursus in Sermon 40.3 (179/1:203). 33. Joël Courreau, ‘L’Exégèse allégorique de Saint Césaire d’Arles’, Bulletin de Littérature Ecclésiastique 78 (1977):181–268; see 191–3. 34. Caesarius’s influence is discussed in Germain Morin, ‘Studia Caesariana’, Revue Bénédictine 23 (1906):350–72; see 371–2; cf. introduction to Caesarius, Sermons, 1:xxiii.



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35. St Isidore, Allegoriae quaedam sacrae scripturae, 98 (PL, 83:113C); Mysticorum expositiones sacramentorum seu quaestiones in Vetus Testamentum, 545: In Regum Quartum, 3.1–2 (PL, 83:419C–20A). 36. Jerome, letter 118.7 of 406 C.E. to Julian (PL, 22:966). Cf. Origen, Epistola ad Gregorium, 2 (PG, 11:89D); Homiliae in librum Judicum, 5.4 (PG, 12:971A); Homiliae in Canticum canticorum, 2.12 (PG, 13:56D); In Canticum Canticorum, bk 3 (PG, 13:178C). 37. See Claudius of Turin, XXX quaestiones super libros Regum (written 824): Libri IV (PL, 104:773B–C); Hrabanus Maurus, Commentaria in libros IV Regum (written 834): In librum IV, 2 (PL, 109:225B–D); De universo (written c. 844) 3.2 (PL, 111:67B); Allegoriae in sacram scripturam, s.v. puer (PL, 112:1033A); Walafrid Strabo, Glossa ordinaria: Liber quartus Regum, 2 (PL, 113:612A–B); Angelomus, Enarrationes in libros Regum: In librum quartum, 2 (PL, 115:497D–98A). The above-cited gloss by Claudius also occurs in the Commentarii in libros Regum, which is included in the appendix of PL, 50 (see 1183D–84A) among works falsely attributed to St Eucherius of Lyons (d. 449). On the question of authorship see NCE, 3:922, s.v. ‘Claudius of Turin’, by P. Bellet. Angelomus’s gloss plagiarizes word for word the gloss in Hrabanus’s Commentaria, which repeats verbatim some of Isidore’s phrasings. Walafrid’s gloss is an avowed abridgment of Isidore’s. See also Pseudo-Bede’s Quaestiones super Regum libros, whose gloss on Elisha’s mockery (PL, 93:447D–48C) corresponds verbatim with Isidore’s gloss. 38. All citations are of Testimonia libri quarti Regum, 2 (labelled In sermone de S. Cassiano), in Collectanea in Vetus Testamentum ex oposculis B. Petri Damiani ab anonymo illius discipulo excerpta (PL, 145:1123A–C). 39. Damian’s reference reads: Maledictus puer centum annorum (PL, 145:1123B). Contrast Isaiah 65.20c–d (Vulg.): quoniam puer centum annorum morietur, / et peccator centum annorum maledictus erit (‘for the child shall die a hundred years old, / and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed’ [RSV]). Whereas the Vulgate sets up the child ( puer) and the accursed sinner ( peccador maledictus) as moral antitheses, Damian combines the two figures. 40. Cf. LA, ch. 53, 226/GL, 1:206. 41. See NCE, 12:723, s.v. ‘Rupert of Deutz’, by B.S. Smith. 42. All citations are of Rupert of Deutz, De Sancta Trinitate, 26.22 (CCCM, 22:1438–9, line 1169). 43. Much has been written on those allegations, their dubious nature, and their tragic historical consequences; see, e.g., John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 1995). 44. See Matt. 27.27–31; Mark 15.16–20; John 19.1–3. But according to Mark 14.65, after the chief priests condemned Jesus, and before they delivered him to Pilate, they spat on him, covered his face, and struck him. Mark does not mention their robing, crowning, or whipping him. Luke, whose Gospel is the only one to report Jesus’ being brought before Herod Antipas, asserts: ‘And Herod with his soldiers’ – not Pilate with his soldiers – ‘treated [ Jesus] with contempt and mocked him’ (23.11). But Luke goes on to mention only one of the specific acts alluded to by Rupert: the arraying of Jesus ‘in gorgeous apparel.’ The absence of an analogous passage in the other two Synoptic Gospels and John suggests that the whole account in Luke 23.6–12 is ‘legendary’, its purpose being ‘to transfer the mockery of Jesus from the Roman soldiers … to Antipas’ ( IDB, 2:593, s.v. ‘Herod’, by S. Sandmel). The apocryphal Gospel of Peter likewise exonerates Pilate and blames the Jews without naming them; according to Peter, Pilate delivered Jesus to the ‘people’, who, before



Notes 203

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54.


leading him off to crucify him, crowned, spat on, pricked, scourged, and mocked him (see 3.7–9 [ANT, p. 155]). Hildebert, Carmen in libros Regum, 1203 (PL, 171:1253B). Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum, 7.21 (PL, 175:715B). Citations are of Honorius, Speculum Ecclesiae (PL, 172:1052C–D). See the glosses by Isidore, Hrabanus, Angelomus, and Walafrid as cited above. See Paul E. Beichner’s (ed.) introduction to Aurora: Petri Rigae Biblia Versifica. A Verse Commentary on the Bible, 2 vols (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965) pp. xxvii–xlvii; NCE, 11:228, s.v. ‘Peter Riga’, by M.I.J. Rousseau. Aegidius of Paris, Fragmenta ex libro Petri de Riga cui titulus: Aurora (PL, 212:39C–D). Peter’s own treatment of the tale occurs in Liber quartus Regum, lines 85–98, in his Aurora, ed. Beichner, 1:307–8. From the Sermon attributed to Roger of Salisbury, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Hatton 37, in Penny J. Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095– 1270 (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1991) p. 227; as translated by Cole, p. 169; cited by Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 155. But contrast the Gospel of Peter 3.8, which identifies ‘the people’ (2.5) as the crowners (ANT, pp. 154–5). As translated by Avril Henry (ed.), Biblia Pauperum: A Facsimile and Edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987) p. 94. The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun: A Middle English Translation of ‘Speculum Humanae Salvationis’ [ch. 17, lines 1959–60], ed. Avril Henry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987) p. 109. My dating of the Speculum and Mirour is based upon Henry’s introduction, pp. 10, 19.

3 Children of the Passion 1. LFC, p. 25. 2. See ibid., p. 33, including n. 2. 3. St Bernard of Clairvaux, Meditatio in passionem et resurrectionem Domini, 7.16 (PL, 184:752A). 4. Liber ad milites templi de laude novae militiae, 10.17, in St Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera, 7 vols, ed. Jean Leclercq et al. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–74) 3:229; also PL, 182:932A–B; as rendered by Conrad Greenia (tr.), In Praise of the New Knighthood, in St Bernard of Clairvaux, Treatises III (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1977) p. 153. 5. St Bernard, Sermones de diversis, 95.1 (PL, 183:718). Cf. his Sermones in Cantica Canticorum, 16.1–2 (PL, 183:848–50). 6. As observed by the translator of Bernard, In Praise, 153n.3. 7. This translation is of the Vulgate version of the passage. The corresponding passage in the RSV, numbered 8.1–2, reads somewhat differently. 8. Bernard, In Praise, 10.17 (Opera, 3:229/Treatises III, p. 153). 9. See PINEA, esp. pp. 195–205; Neff, ‘WC’, pp. 228–9. 10. De meditatione passionis Christi per septem diei horas, 6th hour (PL, 94:566B). 11. See ‘WC’, p. 228. 12. Dialogus beatae Mariae et Anselmi de passione Domini, ch. 8 (PL, 159:281C). Collated with this text in the footnotes of the PL edition are variant passages from another



204

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

version, Planctus beatae Mariae virginis ad Anselmum de passione Domini. On the question of authorship see PL, 158:39D–40A; H. Barré, ‘Le “Planctus Mariae” attribué a Saint Bernard’, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique, 28 (1952), reissued by Culture et Civilisation (Brussels, 1964) pp. 243–66, at 266; Elisabeth Roth, Der Volkreiche Kalvarienberg in Literatur und Kunst des Spätmittelalters (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1958) p. 147n.48. Vita beate virginis Marie et Salvatoris rhythmica, 3, lines 4802–5 (ed. Adolf Vögtlin [Stuttgart: Litterarischer Verein, H. Laupp, 1888] p. 164). Dialogus, ch. 8 (PL, 159:281C–82A). See Liber de passione Christi et doloribus et planctibus matris ejus, 701 (PL, 182:1135A); known also as De planctu beate Marie or Planctus Mariae. On the question of authorship see Barré, ‘Le “Planctus Mariae”’, pp. 252–9; Roth, Volkreiche Kalvarienberg, p. 147n.47; DS, 12, pt 2: 1798, s.v. ‘Planctus Mariae’, by Théodore Koehler. Ein mittelniederdeutsches Gedicht über die Kreuzigung, das Begräbnis und die Auferstehung Christi aus der Königsberger Handschrift nr. 905, ed. F. Rohde (diss., Königsberg 1911) 73, vv. 216–17; quoted by Roth, Volkreiche Kalvarienberg, p. 120. Das Minnebüchlein, ch. 1, in Heinrich Seuse, Deutsche Schriften im Auftrag der Württembergischen Kommission für Landesgeschichte, ed. Karl Bihlmeyer (Stuttgart, 1907; repr. Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1961) p. 542, lines 17–21. MS. 3, fol. 156r, Colegiata de San Isidoro (ill. in EJ, 6:666). As documented in The Princeton University Index of Christian Art, s.v. ‘Elisha: Mocked’. See also LCI, 1:618, s.v. ‘Elisäus’. ‘WC’, p. 221. Margaret Stokes, ‘Iconography of the Christian Scheme’, in Adolphe Napoléon Didron, Christian Iconography; or, The History of Christian Art in the Middle Ages, 2 vols, tr. E.J. Millington (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851–91) 2:189. De laudibus sancte crucis, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, clm 14159, fol. 4 (ill. in ‘WC’, p. 221, Figure 5). As noted in ‘WC’, pp. 216–17. See ‘WC’, pp. 221, 241n.17. In addition to our own Plate 2, see the examples in the following manuscripts of the Biblia pauperum: Clm 23425 (c. 1300) fol. 5r, Staatsbibliothek, Munich (ill. in DMG, 1:figure 219); Cod. III. 2073 (c. 1310) fol. 6v, St Florian, AugustinerChorherrnstift (ill. in ‘WC’, p. 222, figure 6); MS. (c. 1460) in Avril Henry (ed.), Biblia Pauperum: A Facsimile and Edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987) p. 92; and two similar versions from different manuscripts in Henrik Cornell (ed.), Biblia Pauperum (Stockholm: Thule-Tryck, 1925) p. 238, figure 22; pl. 17. No. 98 in M.R. James, ‘Pictor in Carmine’, Archaeologia or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity 94 (1951): 141–66; see 161; cited in ‘WC’, p. 218. See MS. 270b, fols 175v–176r, The Bodleian Library, Oxford (ill. in A. De Laborde, La Bible moralisée, illustrée conservée à Oxford, Paris et Londres. Reproduction intégrale du manuscript du XIIIe siècle, 5 vols [Paris: Pour les membres de la Société, 1911–27] 1:pls 175–6; also ‘WC’, p. 223, figure 7 [detail of fol. 175v]). Cf. MS. 1179, fol. 128, Imperial Library, Vienna (Laborde, Bible moralisée, 4:pl. 683). Cf. ‘WC’, p. 220. As noted by Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 143. See Roth, Volkreiche Kalvarienberg, passim. See Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà, La croce dipinta italiana e l’iconografia della Passione (Rome: Multigrafica Editrice, 1980) pp. 49–50.



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32. Pulpit wall, Cathedral, Siena (ill. in ICA, figure 507). 33. ‘WC’, pp. 221–2. 34. In Supplicationes variae, plut. 25.3, fols 375v, 376r, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence (ill. in ‘WC’, pp. 217–18, figures 1, 2). 35. ‘WC’, p. 222. 36. Ill. in ICA, figure 319; ‘WC’, pp. 224, figures 8, 9 (detail); Derbes, Picturing the Passion, p. 141, figure 85. 37. As noted in ‘WC’, p. 222. 38. Staatliches Museen, Berlin (ill. in Roberto Salvini, All the Paintings of Giotto, 2 vols, tr. Paul Colacicchi [New York: Hawthorn Books, 1963] 2:pl. 254). On the debate over attribution, see ibid., 2:90. 39. See Amy Neff, ‘The Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross’, The Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 254–73. Cf. Sandberg-Vavalà, La croce dipinta Italiana, p. 49. 40. ICA, p. 87. 41. Cf. Frederick P. Pickering, ‘The Gothic Image of Christ. The sources of medieval representations of the Crucifixion’ (from the original German version of 1953), in his Essays on Medieval German Literature and Iconography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) pp. 3–30; see 14; PINEA, pp. 145–9; Cäsar Menz, Das Frühwerk Jörg Breus des Älteren (Augsburg: Kommissionsverlag Bücher Seitz, 1982) p. 60; ‘WC’, pp. 225–38. 42. PINEA, figure 87; ‘WC’, p. 225, figure 10. 43. See PINEA, pp. 145–7; ‘WC’, pp. 225–38. 44. MS. 52, Seraglio Museum, Istanbul (ill. in G. Adolf Deissmann and Hans Wegener [eds], Die Armenbibel des Serai: Rotulus Seragliensis Nr. 52 [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1934] pl. 21; PINEA, figure 86). 45. See, e.g., the detail from the Column of Trajan, Rome, reproduced in Fritz Saxl, ‘Studien über Hans Holbein D.J.I.: Die Karlsruher Kreuztragung’, Belvedere 9–10 (1926):139–54; ill. figure 12; and the detail from the Imperial Procession frieze of the Ara Pacis (13–19 BCE), reproduced in H.W. Janson, History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day, 2nd edn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977) p. 170, figure 243. 46. Robert Alan Koch, ‘Martin Schongauer’s “Christ Bearing the Cross”’, Record of The Art Museum, Princeton University 14/2 (1955):22–30; here 26. 47. The Road to Calvary is in the Louvre, Paris. The Crucifixion and Deposition are in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Antwerp. For the entire polyptych and each of those three individual panels, see Andrew Martindale, Simone Martini, complete edn (New York: New York University Press, 1988) pls 118–21. The Road to Calvary is also reproduced in Saxl, ‘Karlsruher Kreuztragung’, figure 2; ‘WC’, p. 226, figure 11; Giulietta Chelazzi Dini, Alessandro Angelini, Bernardina Sani, Sienese Painting: From Duccio to the Birth of the Baroque [tr. unnamed] (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998) p. 94. The Crucifixion is also reproduced in ‘WC’, p. 227, figure 12. For discussion, see Martindale, Simone Martini, pp. 171–3; ‘WC’, pp. 223–5, 227, 236. 48. Simone Martini, p. 172. 49. For example, ICA, figures 34, 38. 50. The Passion Play (Ludus de passione) from the Carmina Burana (Bressanone?) 4.31–33, in Nine Medieval Latin Plays, tr. and ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 203. 51. Cf. Axel Hinrich Mürken, ‘Die Darstellung eines mongoloiden Kindes auf dem Aachener Passionsaltar’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 33 (1971):313–20; see 318; and Menz, Frühwerk Jörg Breus, p. 60.



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52. Ill. in Saxl, ‘Karlsruher Kreuztragung’, figure 5; Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death: The Arts, Religion, and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978) figure 38; PINEA, figure 97. 53. Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore (ill. in The Walters Art Gallery: A Selection of Memorable Objects [Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1964] figure 22). This is one of five panels from the now dispersed Pecci Altarpiece, painted in 1426. 54. MS. 11060–1 (‘Brussels Hours’) fol. 106, Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels (ill. in PINEA, figure 111). Juxtaposed reproductions of this miniature and Simone’s Road to Calvary appear in Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 2:pl. 20, figures 45–6. 55. MS. 65, fol. 147, Musée Condé, Chantilly (ill. in Saxl, ‘Karlsruher Kreuztragung’, figure 10; Raymond Cazelles and Johannes Rathofer, Illuminations of Heaven and Earth: The Glories of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988] pp. 152, 154–5). 56. Fols 146v, 156v (ill. in Cazelles and Rathofer, Illuminations, pp. 152, 153, 160). In Christ Leaving the Praetorium (ill. also in PINEA, figure 112), four children – one of them holding hands with a woman (cf. the same motif in the fresco by Altichiero discussed below) – stand in the foreground as onlookers. In the Deposition, whose composition Cazelles and Rathofer find ‘indebted to’ Simone’s Deposition (Illuminations, p. 160), a child appears in the left foreground, and two other figures, seated in the centre foreground, seem to be children as well. All three watch the lowering of the corpse. 57. Altar-wing from St Stephan, Mainz, now in the Mittelrheinisches Landesmuseum, Mainz (ill. in DMG, 3:figure 164; Mürken, ‘Darstellung’, p. 316, figure 221; p. 317, figure 222 [detail]). Cf. the misshapen dwarf who figures centrally in the fifteenthcentury Crucifixion from the parish church, St Martin, now in the Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar (ill. in DMG, 4:figure 99). 58. As noted by Mürken, ‘Darstellung’, p. 318. 59. See James Marrow, ‘Circumdederunt me canes multi: Christ’s Tormentors in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance’, The Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 167–81. 60. Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt (ill. in DMG, 3:figure 195). 61. Ill. in ICA, figure 509; Chelazzi Dini et al., Sienese Painting, p. 109. 62. Ill. in ICA, figure 510. This entire Spanish Chapel wall, including Andrea’s Way to Calvary, Crucifixion, and Limbo, is reproduced in Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena, figure 96. 63. The pertinent detail from the left portion of Altchiero’s Crucifixion is reproduced in Ludwig von Baldass, Conrad Laib und die beiden Rueland Frueauf (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1946) figure 2. The entire left and right portions are reproduced twice in Gian Lorenzo Mellini, Altichiero e Jacopo Avanzi (Milan: Comunità, 1965) pp. 8–9, figures 62–3. For the pertinent detail from the central portion see Mellini, figure 66. 64. See Neff’s list of 23 examples; see ‘WC’, pp. 239–40. 65. From St Andrew’s Cathedral, Cologne, now in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne (ill. in ICA, figure 522; Lotte Brand Philip, The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan van Eyck [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971] figure 169). 66. Philip, Ghent Altarpiece, p. 158n.312; cf. 159n.314. 67. ICA, p. 157; Friedrich Gorissen, Ludwig Jupan von Marburg (Düsseldorf: Rheinland Verlag, 1969) p. 65. 68. Originally from St Columba’s Cathedral, Cologne (ill. in DMG, 3:figure 99; ICA, figure 521).



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69. Ill. in DMG, 4:figure 113. 70. Belvedere, Vienna (ill. in Baldass, Conrad Laib, figures 35, 37 [detail], 41 [detail]; Roth, Volkreiche Kalvarienberg, frontispiece). 71. See Baldass, Conrad Laib, p. 14. 72. Diözesanmuseum, Graz (ill. in Baldass, Conrad Laib, figures 36, 46 [detail]). 73. Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (ill. also in ICA, figure 292; PINEA, figure 88). 74. As noted by Schiller, ICA, p. 87. 75. See Cecilia Beer, Temple-Boys: A Study of Cypriote Votive Sculpture, 2 vols ( Jonsered: P. Aströms, 1994). I am grateful to Agata Marczewska for this reference. 76. See Menz, Frühwerk Jörg Breus, p. 60. 77. Painting from the Rheinhau Cloister, now in the Museum of Schaffhausen. A reproduction of both parts of this painting appears in DMG, 4:figure 223; for discussion see 4:153–5. 78. CC, pp. 37–8; cf. 105. 79. In addition to the occurrence of this motif on an altarpiece of the Crucifixion by Hans Wydytz to be discussed later, consider its occurrences in three other Crucifixions whose pertinent details are reproduced in Gorissen, Ludwig Jupan, figures 85, 87, 88: the Passion high-altar (1490–1500) in the Church of St Nikolai in Kalkar, to be discussed later; the Schinkelaltar (1501) in the Church of St Mary, Lübeck (ill. also in DMG, 6:figure 212); and one of the fragments from a Crucifixion in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid (formerly Castagnola), perhaps from the high altar (completed c. 1480) of the church of St Nikolaus oper Matena, Wesel, by Derick Baegert (c. 1440–after 1502). Gorissen conjectures that the artists who created these three works shared the same model, presumably an illustration on a page of paper (see Ludwig Jupan, p. 65). The motif recurs amid the crowds in three Bearings of the Cross: a painting (1479) produced in the workshop of Michael Wolgemut, from the high altar in the Marienkirche, Zwickau (ill. in PINEA, figure 89); an engraving by Israhel van Meckenem (d. 1503), Lehrs 149, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (ill. in Gorissen, Ludwig Jupan, figure 86 [detail]; Jutta Schnack, Der Passionszyklus in der Graphik Israhel van Meckenems und Martin Schongauers [Münster: Aschendorff, 1979] figure 35); a painting (1617) by Frans Francken II (1581–1642; Flemish), The Art Museum, Princeton University. The motif also occurs in a window of the building depicted in Urban Görtschacher’s painting of the Ecce homo (1508), Österreichische Galerie, Vienna (ill. in PINEA, figure 95). 80. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe (ill. in DMG, 4:figure 118; ICA, figure 314). 81. Ill. in ENP, 10:figure 84, pl. 70. 82. On one of eight Passion panels [painter unknown], now in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. 83. As interpreted by Marrow, ‘Christ’s Tormentors’, p. 175, who identifies this wing panel as Inv. No. MA 3422 from the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, on loan to the Mainfränkisches Museum, Würzburg (p. 175n.65; ill. p. 176, figure 22; PINEA, figure 20). 84. Cf. ICA, p. 75. 85. Ill. in Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 2 vols, 3rd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948) 2:figure 88. 86. Formerly Art Trade, Cologne; present location unknown (ill. in PINEA, figure 91). 87. Inv. no. 2408, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (ill. in PINEA, figure 92). 88. From the engraved Round Passion of 1509 (ill. in PINEA, figure 93).



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89. From the Grey Passion, originally a winged altarpiece, cat. no. 11f, Fürstlich Fürstenbergische Gemäldegalerie, Donaueschingen (ill. in Norbert Lieb and Alfred Stange, Hans Holbein der Ältere [Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1960] figures 18, 25 [detail]; ICA, figure 265; Mürken, ‘Die Darstellung’, p. 319, figure 225 [detail]). 90. From the Frankfurt Dominican Altar, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main (ill. in Lieb and Stange, Hans Holbein, figure 55; Mürken, ‘Die Darstellung’, p. 319, figure 224 [detail]). 91. Cat. no. 21f, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (ill. in Lieb and Stange, Hans Holbein, figure 71; ICA, figure 268). 92. See, e.g., Lieb and Stange, Hans Holbein, p. 11. For disagreement, see Mürken, ‘Die Darstellung’, p. 320n.31. 93. Ill. in Marrow, ‘Christ’s Tormentors’, p. 176, figure 21; PINEA, figure 19. 94. Ill. in Alfred Rohde, Passionsbild und Passionsbühne: Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Dichtung und Malerei im ausgehenden deutschen Mittelalter (Berlin: Furche-Kunstverlag, 1926) pl. 14. 95. See ibid., p. 19. 96. Ill. in ICA, figure 266. Schiller identifies Levin Storch as the probable artist (ICA, p. 245). 97. Ill. in Herbst des Mittelalters: Spätgotik in Köln und am Niederrhein. (Ausstellung) Kunsthalle Köln, 20. Juni–27. Sept. 1970 (Cologne: Kunsthalle, 1970) figure 14; Mürken, ‘Die Darstellung’, p. 313, figure 218; p. 314, figure 219 (detail). 98. Mürken, ‘Die Darstellung’, passim. Cf. Menz, Frühwerk Jörg Breus, p. 60. 99. City Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri (ill. in Horst Gerson, De Nederlandse schilderkunst, 3 vols [Amsterdam: Contact, 1950–61] 1:figure 28; ENP, 10:addendum figure 178, pl. 120). 100. Interior shutter, Altarpiece of the Deposition (‘Adrichem triptych’), Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (ill. in ENP, 10:figure 1, pl. 1). 101. Altarpiece panel, Church of St Denis, Liège (ill. in ENP, 13:figure 102a, pl. 49). 102. Left wing, Passion high altar, Pfarrkirche St Nicholai, Kalkar (ill. in Gerson, De Nederlandse schilderkunst, 1:figure 31). 103. Left shutter, Altarpiece of the Crucifixion, National Gallery, London (ill. in ENP, 10:figure 60, pl. 42). 104. Left shutter, Altarpiece of the Crucifixion, Galleria Sabauda, Turin (ill. ENP, 10: figure 66 VI, pl. 53). 105. British Museum, London (ill. in James Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575 [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985] p. 459, figure 531). 106. Location unknown (ill. in ENP, 13:figure 310, pl. 155). 107. Formerly owned by Alberto J. Pani, Mexico (ill. in Gerson, De Nederlandse schilderkunst, 1:figure 95). 108. ENP, 10:31–2. 109. See Martin Conway, The Van Eycks and Their Followers (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1921), pp. 436, 439. 110. ENP, 10:32. 111. As suggested by Menz, Frühwerk Jörg Breus, p. 60. 112. From Dat lyden ende die passie ons Heren Jhesu Christi. Voor ‘t eerst uitgegeven, ed. Alfred Holder (Groningen: J.B. Wolters, 1877) p. 40; as quoted in Roger H. Marijnissen, Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Works, assisted by Peter Ruyffelaere ([S.l.]: Tabard Press, 1987) p. 279. 113. MS. IV 115 [c. 1570] (cat. no. 5), fol. 113v, Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels; as quoted in PINEA, p. 147.



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114. Ill. in DMG, 6:figure 4; PINEA, figure 109 (detail). 115. Destroyed by fire in Berlin, 1945 (ill. in DMG, 6:figure 5; Schnack, Passionszyklus, figure 38). 116. See PINEA, p. 155 on examples of this motif in Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, Crowning with Thorns, from his Large Woodcut Passion (1511–14), 3rd edn, copy Bibliothèque nationale, Paris; Albrecht Dürer, Flagellation (woodcut); and the Bearing of the Cross from the sculpted retable of Opitter, Belgium, probably made in Antwerp, c. 1525–50 (all three ill. in ibid., figures 105–7). 117. In Dürer’s Flagellation, as noted in PINEA, p. 320n. 656. 118. Stiftsmuseum, St Florian (ill. in Marrow, ‘Christ’s Tormentors’, p. 169, figure 2; PINEA, pl. I opp. p. 2). 119. As noted by Marrow, ‘Christ’s Tormentors’, p. 175; PINEA, pp. 39, 148. 120. Photographs of the entire altar, which depicts a series of Passion episodes, appear in Gorissen, Ludwig Jupan, figures 36–40. For details from the Cross Bearing, see Saxl, ‘Karlsruher Kreuztragung’, figure 15; Gorissen, Ludwig Jupan, figures 54, 56–8. 121. These children are especially visible in Gorissen, Ludwig Jupan, figures 66, 69–70, 75 (details). 122. Ill. in Lieb and Stange, Hans Holbein, figures 71g, 75 (detail). 123. See the Bearing of the Cross from the Zwickau high altar (n. 79 above); and the woodcut attributed to Hans Schäuffelein in the Speculum passionis domini nostri Jesu Christi, published by Ulrich Pinder (Nuremberg, 1507) fol. 49r (both ill. in PINEA, figures 89–90). 124. Picture gallery, Schloss, Pommersfelden (ill. in ICA, figure 811). 125. For example, in the bottom right foreground of Jerg Ratgeb’s Ecce homo (mentioned above), and in the bottom left foreground of the Bearings of the Cross by Michael Wolgemut and Hans Schäuffelein (cited in nn. 79 and 123 above). 126. Schiller, ICA, p. 228. 127. Lehrs 9, Albertina, Vienna (ill. in Max Dvoraák, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte: Studien zur abendländischen Kunstentwicklung [Munich: R. Piper, 1924] figure 34 opp. p. 182; Saxl, ‘Karlsruher Kreuztragung’, figure 9; Koch, ‘Schongauer’s “Christ Bearing the Cross”’, p. 24, figure 1; Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 2:figure 15; Ferdinando Salamon, The History of Prints and Printmaking from Dürer to Picasso: A Guide to Collecting [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972] p. 110; Hella Robels, ‘Israhel van Meckenem und Martin Schongauer’, in Israhel van Meckenem und der deutsche Kupferstich des 15. Jahrhunderts. 750 Jahre Stadt Bocholt 1222–1972 [Bocholt, 1972] pp. 31–50; see p. 39, figure 44; Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, p. 283, figure 290). 128. Galleria Sabauda, Turin (ill. in Dirk De Vos, Hans Memling: The Complete Works [Ghent: Ludion Press, 1994] pp. 106–7, pl. 11; Koch, ‘Schongauer’s “Christ Bearing the Cross”’, p. 24, figure 3 [detail]; Reindert L. Falkenburg, ‘Marginal Motifs in Early Flemish Landscape Painting’, in Norman E. Muller, Betsy J. Rosasco, and James H. Marrow (eds), Herri met de Bles: Studies and Explorations of the World Landscape Tradition [Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University; in collab. with Turnhout: Brepols, 1998] pp. 153–69; see 156, figure 135). 129. In the upper right background of Strigel’s panel featuring Pilate washing his hands before the crowned and scourged Jesus. This panel, now in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, is one of four in Strigel’s Scenes of Christ’s Passion, from an altarpiece in the Carthusian monastery built 1495–1500 in Buxheim, Swabia. 130. See Dvoraák, Kunstgeschichte, pp. 179–80; Saxl, ‘Karlsruher Kreuztagung’, pp. 146–7; Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 1:220; Koch, ‘Schongauer’s “Christ Bearing the Cross”’, pp. 26–8; Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 1:237.



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131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

137.

138. 139.

140.

141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

Ill. in Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 2:figure 304, pl. 169. Ill. in Koch, ‘Schongauer’s “Christ Bearing the Cross”’, p. 25, figure 5. See Saxl, ‘Karlsruher Kreuztragung’, p. 154; Gorissen, Ludwig Jupan, pp. 59–60. See Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 1:60, 220; Salamon, History of Prints, p. 97. See Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 2:figures 89, 189, 191, 275. Prado, Madrid (ill. in John Pope-Hennessy, Raphael: The Wrightsman Lectures delivered under the auspices of the New York Institute of Fine Arts [New York: New York University Press, 1970] figure 16; Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Raphael: His Life and Works, tr. Sarah Brown [Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1985] p. 204, figure 211). It goes without saying that this is true of the masterful, reverse copy of Schongauer’s Great Cross Bearing by Israhel van Meckenem (Lehrs 32; ill. in Robels, ‘Israhel van Meckenem’, p. 38, figure 43). In addition to the examples in the painting ascribed to Jörg Breu which we discussed earlier, and the painting by Herri met de Bles to be discussed later, compare the boy with dog in the Cross-Bearing scene in the ‘Great Wood Retable’ ascribed to the Antwerp studio of Cornelis Engebrechtsz., in the Musée de Cluny, Paris (ill. in Émile Gavelle, Cornelis Engebrechtsz.: L’école de peinture de Leyde et le romantisme Hollandais au début de la Renaissance [Lille: Émile Raoust, 1929] pl. 24); and the small laughing boy whose hand is held by a stout, robed man behind the fallen Jesus in a painting of Christ Carrying the Cross (c. 1515), inv. no. 64, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe (ill. in Saxl, ‘Karlsruher Kreuztragung’, figure 1; John Rowlands, Holbein: The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger. Complete Edition [Boston: David R. Godine, 1985] figure 219). This last picture, which includes a dog (albeit on the opposite side from the boy), has been ascribed to various artists, including both the elder and the younger Holbein, and Hans Herbst; see Rowlands, Holbein, p. 230. As suggested by Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, p. 458. Lehrs 23, 25, 26; all three in the Albertina, Vienna (ill. in Schnack, Passionszyklus, figures 28, 30, 36). The Ecce homo and Bearing of the Cross are also reproduced in Marrow, ‘Christ’s Tormentors’, p. 176, figures 16, 19; PINEA, figures 13, 16. The Master of the Pink of Baden (Thüring Meyerhofer?), The Bearing of the Cross, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon (ill. in DMG, 7:figure 172; Marrow, ‘Christ’s Tormentors’, p. 176, figure 18; PINEA, figure 15). In another work modelled after Schongauer’s engraving, the boy appears further in the background, accompanied by an adult; see the Bearing of the Cross (c. 1480) ascribed to the Master of Liesborn, which was privately owned when Stange published it (DMG, 6:33–4; ill. figure 60). Lehrs 24 (ill. in Robels, ‘Israhel van Meckenem’, p. 32, figure 33; Schnack, Passionszyklus, figure 34). Augustiner-Chorherrnstift, Herzogenburg (ill. in Menz, Frühwerk Jörg Breus, figure 21). Stift, Melk (ill. in Menz, Frühwerk Jörg Breus, figure 42). See Menz, Frühwerk Jörg Breus, pp. 54–5, and figure 22 (detail). Majolica plaque (copy of Raphael’s Spasimo), Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ill. in Pope-Hennessy, Raphael: The Wrightsman Lectures, figure 17). National Gallery, London (ill. in Gerson, De Nederlandse schilderkunst, 1:figure 15; ICA, figure 316). Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe (ill. in DMG, 4:figure 120; ICA, figure 315). National Gallery, London (ill. in Gerson, De Nederlandse schilderkunst, 1:figure 38; ENP, 10:figure 60, pl. 43). Galleria Sabauda, Turin (ill. in ENP, 10:figure 66 VI, pl. 53). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (ill. in Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, p. 460, figure 532).



Notes 211


151. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (ill. in Menz, Frühwerk Jörg Breus, figure 23; Mürken, ‘Darstellung’, p. 317, figure 223 [detail]). 152. As suggested by Mürken, ‘Darstellung’, p. 318. 153. Ill. in DMG, 6:figure 212; Gorissen, Ludwig Jupan, pl. 87 (detail). 154. John Bunyan, ‘Upon the Boy on his Hobby-horse’, poem 67 in his A Book for Boys and Girls, or, Country Rhimes for Children (London, 1686) p. 73. 155. High altar, Propsteikirche, Dortmund (ill. in DMG, 6:figure 96; PINEA, figure 96). 156. Ill. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 2:figure 280. 157. Christ Church, Oxford (ill. in ENP, 10:figure 64, pl. 50). 158. Louvre, Paris (ill. in DMG, 6:figure 89). On the question of date see ibid., 6:53. 159. Stiftsmuseum, Klosterneuburg (ill. in Baldass, Conrad Laib, figure 128; Neff, ‘Pain’, p. 264, figure 20). 160. Alte Pinakothek, Munich (ill. in ICA, figure 524). 161. Destroyed in Strasbourg during World War II (ill. in Max J. Friedländer and Jakob Rosenberg, The Paintings of Lucas Cranach, rev. edn [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978]) pl. 69). 162. Art Institute, Chicago (ill. in ibid., pl. 377). 163. See Altichiero, St George Punished on the Wheel, Oratory of St George, Padua (ill. in Mellini, Altichiero, p. 47 [detail], figure 176); Altichiero, St Catherine Punished on the Wheel, Oratory of St George, Padua (ill. in ibid., figures 181, 220 [detail]); Jacopo Avanzi, Martyrdom of St James, Chapel of St James, Basilica del Santo, Padua (ill. in ibid., p. 27); Dosso Dossi, The Martyrdom of St Stephen, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid (ill. in David Ekserdjian, Old Master Paintings from the ThyssenBornemisza Collection, ed. MaryAnne Stevens [Milan: Electa SPA, 1988] no. 17, p. 55); Guido Reni, St Andrew led to Martyrdom (1608), Church of San Gregorio al Celio, Rome (ill. in Cesare Garboli, L’opera completa di Guido Reni [Milan: Rizzoli, 1971] pls 12–13); and scenes 8, 11–13 in the series of drawings by Laurent de La Hyre, History of St Stephen (1646–7?), Louvre, Paris (ill. in Pierre Rosenberg and Jacques Thuillier, Laurent de La Hyre, 1606–1656: L’homme et l’oeuvre [Geneva: Albert Skira, & Musée de Grenoble, 1988] p. 259, figure 215; p. 261, figure 219; p. 262, figures 221–3). 164. St Catherine Chapel, San Domenico, Siena (ill. in Chelazzi Dini et al., Sienese Painting, pp. 377, 378 [detail]). 165. Art Institute, Chicago. 166. Robert Alan Koch, ‘A Rediscovered Painting, “The Road to Calvary”, by Herri met de Bles’, Record of The Art Museum, Princeton University 14/2 (1955): 31–51; here 37. All references are to this edition, although the article is reprinted in Muller et al., Herri met de Bles, pp. 9–21. 167. From the Saint Lawrence Altarpiece (1538–42), Domkyrka, Linköping, Sweden (ill. in Jefferson C. Harrison, ‘The Brazen Serpent by Maarten van Heemskerck: Aspects of Its Style and Meaning’, Record of The Art Museum, Princeton University 49/2 (1990): 16–29; see 20, figure 4). 168. In addition to the versions of the Way to Calvary by Herri met de Bles cited below, see the four by Pieter Aertsen reproduced in ENP, 13:figures 311–14, pls 155–7 (figure 312 also in Falkenburg, ‘Marginal Motifs’, p. 163, figure 140); and versions by other Netherlandish artists of that period, reproduced in Fred C. Willis, ‘Zur Kenntnis der Antwerpener Kleinmeister des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts’, Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 7 (1914): 43–7; figure 1, pl. 11; figure 6, pl. 13; Julius Held, ‘Notizen zu einem niederländischen Skizzenbuch in Berlin’, Oud-Holland 50 (1933): 273–88, including 278, figure 3; 281, figure 5; ENP, 12:figures 230–1, pl. 124; ENP, 13:figure 49, pl. 25. Cf. Koch, ‘Rediscovered Painting’, p. 51n.32.



212

169. The Art Museum, Princeton University (ill. in Koch, ‘Rediscovered Painting’, figures 1, 2–5 [details]; Muller et al., Herri met de Bles, p. 172, pl. 1). 170. Koch, ‘Rediscovered Painting’, p. 50. 171. There is also Bles’s Road to Calvary, Galleria Doria, Rome (ill. in ENP, 13:figure 67, pl. 35; Luc Serck, ‘La Montée au Calvaire dans l’oeuvre d’Henri Bles: Création et composition’, in Muller et al., Herri met de Bles, pp. 51–72; see 52, figures 47, 48 [detail]). Bles produced a number of variants of this painting; for the most complete listing, see Serck, ‘La Montée au Calvaire’, pp. 61–70, with p. 55, figure 50. While showing different landscapes, these replicas of Bles’s Doria Road to Calvary all retain the same group of figures, including children. An etching that corresponds in reverse to the Doria version is discussed and reproduced in F.W.H. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts ca. 1450–1700, 42 vols [Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1949–93] 2:58; Serck, ‘La Montée au Calvaire’, p. 53, figure 49). 172. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (ill. in Willis, ‘Zur Kenntnis’, figure 3; Held, ‘Notizen,’ pp. 274–5, figure 1; Koch, ‘Rediscovered Painting’, pp. 43–5, figures 8–10; the brochure by Betsy Rosasco and Norman Muller, curators to the symposium at The Art Museum, Princeton University, ‘Anatomy of a Painting: The Road to Calvary by Herri met de Bles’ [10 October–26 November 1995] figures 2–3; and Norman E. Muller, ‘Technical Analysis of the Princeton Road To Calvary’, in Muller et al., Herri met de Bles, pp. 23–37; see pp. 23–4, figures 15–16). 173. So opines Koch, ‘Rediscovered Painting’, pp. 44–7. Rosasco and Muller leave open the question of whether the sketchbook’s draftsman was ‘possibly a follower or assistant [of Bles] copying the underdrawing or its prototype’ (‘Anatomy of a Painting’, n.p.). 174. See Koch, ‘Rediscovered Painting’, pp. 42–3, 50; idem, ‘Schongauer’s “Christ Bearing the Cross”’, p. 22. Cf. Serck, ‘La Montée au Calvaire’, pp. 52–3. 175. See Muller, ‘Technical Analysis’, p. 31, with figure 23. 176. Koch, ‘Rediscovered Painting’, p. 51; cf. Roger H. Marijnissen, Bruegel, photographs by M. Seidel (New York: Harrison House, 1984) p. 46. 177. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (ill. in ENP, figure 25, pl. 32; figure 26, pl. 33 [detail]; Marijnissen, Bruegel, pls pp. 200–11; Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, p. 508, figure 578; Michael Gibson, Bruegel, tr. and rev. idem [New York: Tabard, 1989] pp. 85–92, figures 72–81; Falkenburg, ‘Marginal Motifs’, p. 164, pl. 141). Bruegel is known to have produced more than one painting of this subject, although only this one survives. 178. Cf. Robert L. Delevoy, Bruegel: Historical and Critical Study, tr. Stuart Gilbert (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1959) pp. 76–7. 179. Marijnissen, Bruegel, p. 27. 180. Cf. Gibson, Bruegel, p. 68. 181. Marijnissen, Bruegel, p. 200. 182. Ibid. Friedländer finds the town’s ‘entire populace’ to be ‘licking its chops in anticipation of witnessing an execution … What dominates the picture is the dullwitted crowd, baleful in its effect, a broad stream of meanness’ (ENP, 14:25). 183. Bruegel’s religious views are notoriously hard to determine. On the question of whether he felt a Protestant sympathy, see Marijnissen, Bruegel, pp. 27, 33; Gibson, Bruegel, p. 68. 184. Marijnissen, Bruegel, p. 34. 185. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (ill. in Dvoraák, Kunstgeschichte, figure 40 opp. p. 228; Mary Frances Durantini, The Child in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983) p. 182, pl. 85; Marijnissen, Bruegel, pls pp. 106–9; Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, p. 498, figure 565).



Notes 213


186. As noted by Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, p. 499. 187. On the bearing of Bruegel’s Children’s Games upon Cats, see Durantini, The Child, pp. 181–5; Marijnissen, Bruegel, pp. 32, 35. 188. As translated in Marijnissen, Bruegel, p. 43. In Friedländer’s view, ‘Bruegel’s instinctive response to mankind’, as reflected in the painting Children’s Games, ‘was that children were more human than adults’ (ENP, 14:23). 189. Bunyan, ‘To the Reader’ (2nd par.), Book for Boys and Girls, n.p. 190. See Durantini, The Child, pp. 187–9, 347n.58. 191. Comedia: die ungeleichen Kinder Evae (1553) Act 2, in Hans Sachs, Werke, 2 vols (Berlin: Aufbau, 1992) 2:291; quoted also by Durantini, The Child, p. 189; translation mine. 192. Engraving in the Strassburg, 1630 edition, reprinted as Matthäus Merian, Iconum Biblicarum (Wenatchee, WA: AVB Press, 1981) p. 455. 193. Iconum Biblicarum (1981) p. 459. 194. Moravian Historical Society, Nazareth, Pennsylvania (ill. in John Dillenberger, The Visual Arts and Christianity in America: The Colonial Period through the Nineteenth Century [Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984] pl. 25). 195. From Freiburg, Upper Rhineland, Germany, now in The Cloisters, New York (ill. in William D. Wixom, ‘Medieval Sculpture at the Cloisters’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 46/3 [1988–9]: 17). 196. Title-page of Kurfürstenbibel, printed at Nuremberg by Wolffgang Endter (1641) (ill. in ICA, figure 812). My description of this picture follows Schiller’s (ICA, p. 229), though she makes no mention of the children shown. 197. Johann Rudolf Schellenberg, 60 biblische Geschichten des neüen Testaments in Kupfer geätzt (Winterthur: Heinrich Steiner, 1779) 8o Th. bibl. 1168/76, Niedersächsische Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen (ill. in BC, p. 193, figure 12.5b). 198. Ill. in BC, p. 192, figure 12.5a. 199. Frieze above the altar (in choir), Vor Frue Kirke, Copenhagen. The woman and child in this work replace the two disciples who appeared in its plaster sketch (inv. no. A 560, Christ Hall, Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen); as noted by Eugene Plon, Thorvaldsen: His Life and Works, tr. I.M. Luyster (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873) p. 247. 200. Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (ill. in András Székely, Mihály Munkácsy [Budapest: Offset and Card Printing House, 1980] pl. 63; Zsuzsanna Bakó, Mihály Munkácsy and László Paál: A Guide to the Permanent Exhibition of the Hungarian National Gallery [Budapest: Publications of the Hungarian National Gallery, 1992] pl. 9). 201. Déri Museum, Debrecen (ill. in Székely, Mihály Munkácsy, pl. 66). 202. See Bakó, Mihály Munkácsy and László Paál, p. 19. 203. See, e.g., Székely, Mihály Munkácsy, pls 27, 29. 204. As stated by E. de Bukovics, ‘History of the Painting’, in Charles Sedelmeyer, Christ on Calvary by M. de Munkacsy, Companion to the Painting Christ before Pilate, 4th edn (Paris [?]: C. Sedelmeyer, n.d.) p. 28. For equally hyperbolic praise by other contemporaries, particularly regarding Christ before Pilate and its pendant, Christ on Calvary (1884), see ibid., pp. 45–56. 205. Bukovics, ‘History of the Painting’, p. 25. 206. Engraving, ‘Where they Crucified Him’, in Hitchcock’s New and Complete Analysis of the Holy Bible, or, The Whole of the Old and New Testaments Arranged According to Subjects … on the Basis of Matthew Talbot, as Improved … by Nathaniel West: Illustrated with Steel Plate Engravings and Maps … by … Thomas Nast and F.B. Carpenter (New York: A. J. Johnson, 1870) opp. p. 58.



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Notes 215

1. Prudentius, Crowns of Martyrdom (Peristephanon liber) 9.10–16, in Prudentius, 2 vols, Latin with translation by H.J. Thomson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949–52) 2:222/223. 2. Gregory of Tours, De gloria beatorum martyrum, ch. 43 (PL, 71:745A–B); ch. 42 in Raymond Van Dam’s translation, Glory of the Martyrs (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988) p. 65. 3. The Roman Martyrology, Published by Order of Gregory XIII, Revised by Authority of Urban VIII and Clement X, Augmented and Corrected in 1749 by Benedict XIV: The Third Turin Edition, tr. Raphael Collins and Joseph B. Collins (Westminster, MD: Newman Bookshop, 1947) p. 180. See also S. Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, 16 vols, new & rev. edn (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1914) 9:130. 4. See Butler’s Lives of the Saints, 4 vols, ed. & rev. Herbert Thurston and Donald Attwater (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1962) 1:698; 3:317. 5. As noted in Maurice and Wilfred Drake, Saints and Their Emblems (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1916) p. 159. 6. According to the Dialogus beatae Mariae et Anselmi de passione Domini, 10 (PL, 159:282C), Calvary was a place where dead dogs and other carrion were thrown. 7. Leontius, Vita S. Symeonis sali confessoris, 5.31 (PG, 93:1707/1708C–D). 8. John of Damascus, Barlaam and Ioasaph, 2.9, Greek with translation by G.R. Woodward and H. Mattingly, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914; repr. 1983) p. 17; also PG, 96:867/868C. No boys or children are mentioned in the analogous passage in book 1, section 3 of the Old Georgian version; see The Balavariani (Barlaam and Josaphat): A Tale from the Christian East translated from the Old Georgian, tr. David Marshall Lang (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) p. 54. It is now assumed that the Greek translation was produced not by John of Damascus, to whom it was traditionally ascribed, but perhaps by St Euthymius the Athonite (d. 1028). 9. LA, ch. 180, p. 811/GL, 2:355. 10. See G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, 2 vols, 2nd printing with corrections (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) 1:221–3; Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, The Orthodox Church, rev. edn (London: Penguin, 1993) pp. 224–5; CT, 2:182, 260. 11. See Paul Fournier, Études sur Joachim de Flore et ses doctrines (Paris: Alphonse Picard & Fils, 1909) p. 11; and Paul Alphandéry and Alphonse Dupront, La Chrétienté et l’idée de croisade, 2 vols (Paris: Albin Michel, 1954–59) 2:146. 12. See Alphandéry and Dupront, La Chrétienté, 2:145–8; Mircea Eliade, ‘Survivals and Camouflages of Myths’, in his Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (New York: Crossroad, 1988) pp. 40–1. 13. Allegoriae in sacram scripturam, s.v. puer (PL, 112:1032D–33A); cited in ‘WC’, pp. 237–8. 14. Cf. Neff, who notes the coexistence of ‘wicked children’ and ‘innocent children’ in late medieval Italian art (‘WC’, passim). 15. St Benedict, Regula, 30.1–3, in RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict, in Latin and English with Notes, ed. Timothy Fry (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981) pp. 226/227. As the editor notes (p. 226n.), the corresponding chapter of the sixth-century Regula Magistri, 14.78–87, upon which Benedict’s Regula is largely based, prescribes whipping for boys up to 15 years of age, a limit also specified in Benedict’s Regula, 70.4. 16. ‘Life of S. Féchín of Fore’ (Betha Féchin Fabair, par. 43) tr. Whitley Stokes, Revue Celtique 12 (1891):318–53; here 349.



4 Urchins Plaguing Saints


17. See Robert C. Elliott, Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960) p. 290; David Marcus, From Balaam to Jonah: Anti-prophetic Satire in the Hebrew Bible (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995) p. 44n.7. 18. James A. Schultz, The Knowledge of Childhood in the German Middle Ages, 1100–1350 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) pp. 53, 54, 69; see also 247. 19. As noted in NCE, 6:797, s.v. ‘Gregory of Rimini’, by G. Gál. 20. La riote du monde, ed. J. Ulrich, in Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 8 (1884): 282; translated in Urban Tignor Holmes, Jr, Daily Living in the Twelfth Century, Based on Observations of Alexander Neckam in London and Paris (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952) p. 206. 21. Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, tr. Felicitas Goodman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985) p. 60. 22. Joseph Falaky Nagy, The Wisdom of the Outlaw: The Boyhood Deeds of Finn in Gaelic Narrative Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) p. 18. Cf. Kim R. McCone, ‘Werewolves, Cyclopes, Díberga, and Fíanna: Juvenile Delinquency in Early Ireland’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 12 (1986):1–22. 23. Placid Hermann, Introduction to FL and SL in SFA, p. 186. 24. FL, par. 1, in AF, p. 5; as translated in SFA, p. 229. Hereafter all citations of Celano’s First Life and Second Life are by paragraph, followed when necessary by the pages from the edition in AF, and from the translation in SFA. 25. Establishing the chronology and dates of the events in Francis’s life from the available evidence is a notoriously daunting task. Hereafter, except where otherwise indicated, the dates provided are based on the chronological table in Omer Englebert, Saint Francis of Assisi: A Biography, tr. Eve Marie Cooper, 2nd English edn, rev. Ignatius Brady and Raphael Brown (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1965) pp. 364–96, as adopted in SFA, pp. xi–xiv. For a different calculation of the dates of Francis’s conversion, see n. 30 below. 26. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 2 vols, Middle High German text, ed. Karl Lachmann, with modern German translation by Wolfgang Spiewok (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981) 1:252 (division 147, line 12). Although Spiewok renders diu kindelîn loosely in modern German as ‘die Schar der Pagen’ (1:253: ‘the troop of pages’), a more literal rendering is ‘little children’, as offered in A.T. Hatto’s English translation, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1980) p. 84. 27. Marion A. Habig, Foreword, SFA, p. vi. Except where otherwise noted, I rely on Habig’s dating of these biographies (pp. vi–vii). 28. Cf. Legenda trium sociorum [Legend of the Three Companions, 3.7], ed. Théophile Desbonnets (Rome: Collegio S. Bonaventura, 1974) p. 94/SFA, p. 896. 29. For references on this perception of Francis see Neff, ‘WC’, p. 242n.38. 30. Paul Sabatier dates the conversion differently, concluding that it occurred in stages between spring 1204 and spring 1206 (Life of St. Francis of Assisi, tr. Louise Seymour Houghton [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920] pp. 15–27) and that the San Damiano vision and the Renunciation occurred in spring 1206 ( pp. 53–67). 31. See Henry d’Avranches, Legenda S. Francisci versificata, 2.189–201 (AF, p. 420); translated in Arnaldo Fortini, Francis of Assisi, tr. Helen Moak (New York: Crossroad, 1981) pp. 218–19. Although d’Avranches’s legend is based upon Celano’s First Life, this imaginary conversation is not recorded by Celano. 32. Perhaps the most perspicacious discussion of prophecy and psychosis remains that of Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) pp. 390–409. Heschel rejects the theory that the prophets actually were psychotic, and the



216

33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

premise (propounded, e.g., by Max Weber and A.R. Johnson) that psychotic states were revered as holy in ancient Israel. The illustration of 4/2 Kings 2.23–24 in Rotulus Seragliensis No. 52, Seraglio Museum, Istanbul clearly shows several hounds attacking the boys (ill. in Adolf Deissmann and Hans Wegener [eds], Die Armenbibel des Serai [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1934] pl. 21; PINEA, figure 86). A woodblock illustration (c. 1460) of the same scene shows a lion among the attacking beasts (ill. in Avril Henry [ed.], Biblia Pauperum: A Facsimile and Edition [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987] p. 92; see also p. 141n. 10). Cf. the references to Francis’s prophetic power in SL, 4 (132/364]); 13 (139/373). As documented extensively in the annotation to the texts in AF and SFA. Just as the scenes of Elijah’s ascension and Elisha’s mockery are closely related by their placement a mere dozen verses apart in the biblical narrative, and by the Vulgate’s effectual parodying of Elijah’s upward movement (ascendit Elias [2 Kgs 2.11]) by the taunt of Elisha’s mockers (ascende, calve; ascende [2.23]), so the implicit comparison of Francis to Elijah in the First Life’s ‘fiery chariot’ scene was prepared for by the implicit comparison of Francis to Elisha in the scene of his assault by the citizens. Legenda ad usum chori, sec. 3 (AF, p. 119, lines 1–2). See d’Avranches, Legenda versificata, bk 2, lines 224–35 (AF, p. 421); bk 3, lines 1–8 (AF, p. 422); Julian Speyer, Vita S. Francisci, 7 (AF, p. 339). See Legenda S. Francisci liturgica breviarii minoritici Vaticani (AF, pp. 531–2); Legenda choralis Carnotensis (thirteenth cent.), whose third section includes the scene before the bishop but omits the attack scene (AF, p. 538); Bartholomew of Trent, Epilogus in S. Franciscum (1243–51), whose first section sums up FL, 10–15 but omits the stoning scene (AF, pp. 540–1); Legenda choralis Umbra (AF, pp. 543–54). The successive episodes of Francis being attacked by citizens (FL, 11) and imprisoned by his father (12) were reversed in Celano’s Legenda ad usum chori, with the imprisonment by the father occurring in section 2 and the attack by citizens following in section 3. The version of the Legenda ad usum chori in AF, pp. 119–26 says nothing of Francis’s being freed by his mother (FL, 13) or his trial by the bishop (FL, 14–15). However, as quoted in the collational notes to Legenda ad usum chori, section 3 (AF, p. 119), a sentence recounting the trial immediately follows the account of the attack by citizens in one of that legend’s other codices. Humbert of Romans, Legenda liturgica antiqua Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum, lectio 2 (AF, p. 533). On the attribution of this text to Humbert, see the editors’ Preface, AF, p. lvi. Legenda liturgica Ordinis Praedicatorum brevior e priore excerpta, lectio 2 (AF, p. 535, lines 3–4); Legenda liturgica brevissima e praecedenti extracta, lectio 1 (AF, p. 537, line 6). See Damien Vorreux, Introduction to Bonaventure’s Major and Minor Life of St. Francis, in SFA, p. 615. See also Hermann, Introduction to FL and SL, in SFA, p. 210. Like Celano, Bonaventure speaks of Francis’s ‘spirit of prophecy’ (Major Life, 11.3 [AF, p. 606, line 1/SFA, p. 713]) and adapts the ‘fiery chariot’ scene from Celano’s First Life in order to portray Francis as ‘a second Elias’ (alter Elias [Major Life, 4.4 (AF, p. 573, line 15/ SFA, p. 656)]). He also follows Celano, as other biographers had done, in regularly referring to Francis by that epithet most closely associated with Elisha, ‘man of God’. On the Francis/Elisha association drawn by Bonaventure as well as by Bartholomew of Pisa, see also Neff, ‘WC’, pp. 233–4; Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp. 108–9.



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45. Major Life, 2.2 (AF, p. 564, lines 8–17/SFA, pp. 641–2). 46. The translation here is mine. The rendering of this phrase in SFA as ‘beside himself with rage’ does not do full justice to the term fremens, which stems from the Greek verb ´ (‘roar’). 47. See the afore-cited introductions by Hermann and Vorreux, SFA, pp. 210–11, 615; Rona Goffen, Spirituality in Conflict: Saint Francis and Giotto’s Bardi Chapel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1988) pp. 49, 110n.124. 48. Vorreux, Introduction to Bonaventure’s Major and Minor Life, in SFA, p. 623. 49. See the biography of Francis by Voragine (LA, ch. 149, p. 663/GL, 2:221); and the anonymous Legenda Monacensis S. Francisci (c. 1275) par. 6 (AF, 697). 50. Legenda trium sociorum, 6.17 (ed. Desbonnets, p. 103), translation mine; rendered more loosely as ‘friends and relatives’ in SFA, p. 907. Whereas Théophile Desbonnets, in his Introduction to this text in SFA (p. 877), finds it to date from 1246, Habig believes it was produced in the early fourteenth century (Foreword, SFA, p. vii). 51. Ferdinand M. Delorme (ed.), Meditatio pauperis in solitudine auctore anonymo saec. xiii (Florence-Quaracchi: Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1929) p. 146; as translated in ‘WC’, p. 234. See also Derbes, Picturing the Passion, p. 155. 52. Meditatio pauperis, pp. 146–7; as translated in ‘WC’, p. 234. 53. Meditatio pauperis, p. 148; as translated in ‘WC’, p. 234. 54. The history of the iconography of this scene is traced by Henry Thode, Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien (1885; Vienna: Phaidon, 1934) pp. 132–4. George Kaftal documents representations of 41 episodes from the saint’s life in cycles from 1235–1486 (Iconography of the Saints in Tuscan Painting [Florence: Sansoni, 1952] cols 388–401). While there were no representations of Francis’s abuse, Kaftal documents seven of the Renunciation (col. 389). 55. Alastair Smart, The Assisi Problem and the Art of Giotto: A Study of the Legend of St. Francis in the Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1983) p. 164. Goffen includes a reproduction of the Bardi Dossal, with a detail of the Renunciation (Spirituality, pl. 1; figure 25). For the surviving portion of the Renunciation in the Lower Church, Assisi, see Beda Kleinschmidt, Die Wandmalereien der Basilika San Francesco in Assisi (Berlin: Atlantis, 1930) pl. 2a. 56. Ill. in Smart, Assisi Problem, pl. 3b; ‘WC’, p. 232, figure 17. 57. Ill. in Smart, Assisi Problem, pl. 51b (detail). 58. See ibid., pp. 240–1, with Pacino’s Madonna and Child, Accademia, Florence (ill., pl. 51c). 59. As noted by Thode, Franz von Assisi, p. 133; Smart, Assisi Problem, p. 164. 60. Cf. ‘WC’, p. 229, whose reproduction of the entire fresco (figure 14) is followed by a detail of each boy (pp. 230–1, figures 15–16). 61. ‘WC’, p. 235. 62. Ill. in ‘WC’, p. 235, figure 19. 63. As suggested by ibid., p. 235. 64. Now in the Accademia, Florence (ill. in ibid., p. 233, figure 18). 65. Ill. in Diane Cole Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) p. 55, pl. 57b; and idem, ‘Benozzo Gozzoli’s Cycle of the Life of Saint Francis in Montefalco: Hagiography and Homily’, in Sandro Sticca (ed.), Saints: Studies in Hagiography (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996) pp. 191–213; see figure 7. For comparison, Thode includes a reproduction of Gozzoli’s Renunciation directly below one of Giotto’s (Franz von Assisi, pl. 6).



218

66. Spirituality, p. 29. See also ‘WC’, p. 229, where other references are provided on the relationship of the Assisi frescoes to Bonaventure’s text (p. 242n.36). 67. See CC, p. 36. 68. See, e.g., Lloyde DeMause, ‘The Evolution of Childhood’, in HC, pp. 5–6; Richard Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982) p. 8; Schultz, Knowledge of Childhood, pp. 4–9, 19, 110, 267; and the sources cited in nn. 69 and 70 below. Other critiques are listed by Wayne E. Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p. 226n.3. 69. See Ilene H. Forsyth, ‘Children in Early Medieval Art: Ninth Through Twelfth Centuries’, The Journal of Psychohistory 4 (1976): 31–70; here 33. 70. Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) p. 126. 71. For reference, see n. 9 above. 72. LA, ch. 9, sec. 8, p. 61/GL, 1:54. 73. See Acts of John 56 (ANT, p. 326). In the opinion expressed by Eric Junod and JeanDaniel Kaestli (eds), Acta Iohannis (CCSA 1:145–58), the partridge episode is unrelated to the Acts of John, and is probably an isolated anecdote of unknown origin, dating from well before Cassian, which was passed down in monastic circles (1:156). 74. Collatio 24.21, in Jean Cassien, Conférences XVIII–XXIV, Latin with French translation, ed. E. Pichery, in Sources Chrétiennes, gen. ed. H. de Lubac and J. Daniélou (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1940–) 64:192–3.

5 The Bethel Boys Motif at the Dawn of Modernity 1. CC, p. 128. 2. As noted in LFC, p. 68; see also 74. 3. An Exposition of Psalm 1, ed. Dominic Baker-Smith, tr. Michael J. Heath, in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–) 63:22. 4. Given in Jerome, Breviarium in psalmos (PL, 26:872C); as quoted by Erasmus, Collected Works, 63:22. 5. Commentary on Ps. 109, D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883–) 19:596; as translated in Luther’s Works, 55 vols, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Daniel E. Poellot (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–86) 14:258. Except where otherwise indicated, references to Luther are to these German and English editions, with all translations being drawn from the latter. 6. See Jaroslav Pelikan, Introduction to Luther, Works, 1:xi–xii. 7. As quoted by John Amos Comenius, The School of Infancy, ed. Ernest M. Eller (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956) ch. 1, p. 62. 8. Luther deals with this point in, e.g., ‘The Adoration of the Sacrament’ (1523), Works, 36:301; and ‘Comfort for Women Who Have Had a Miscarriage’ (1542), Works, 43:247–50. 9. See CT, 1:291–2; 4:318. 10. Martin Luther, Kleiner Katechismus, 4.6 (Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelischlutherischen Kirche, 2nd edn [Göttingen, 1952] p. 515); quoted in CT, 4:318. 11. See Balthasar Hubmaier, Von der christlichen Taufe der Gläubigen, 6 in Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte (Gütersloh, [etc.]: C. Bertelsmann, 1911–)



Notes 219

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.


29:155; idem, Ein Gespräch auf Zwinglis Taufbüchlein, 4, in Quellen und Forschungen, 29:201; both cited in CT, 4:318. Menno Simons, Verklaringe des christelycken Doopsels (1539, Explanation of Christian Baptism), in his Opera omnia theologica, ed. Hendrick Jansz Herrison (Amsterdam, 1681) p. 429; cited in CT, 4:318. For English see The Complete Writings of Menno Simons c. 1496–1521, tr. Leonard Verduin, ed. John Christian Wenger (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1956) pp. 280–1. Phrases quoted from Mikhail Bakhtin, Introduction to his Rabelais and his World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) pp. 1–58. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) p. 157. Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 11. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha (2.61), 2 vols, ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Juventud, 1955; new edn, 1979) 2:987; as rendered in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, The Ormsby translation, ed. Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas (New York: Norton, 1981) pp. 767–8. Hereafter all citations are by, successively, part and chapter, and, where necessary, volume and pages of the Spanish edition, and pages from the translation. The pertinent statement by Don Quixote about knights-errant reads: ‘They always take them away through the air with marvellous swiftness, enveloped in a dark thick cloud, or on a chariot of fire [en alguna parda y escura nube, o en algún carro de fuego]’ (1.47, 1:474/368). Cf. Juan Antonio Monroy, La Biblia en el ‘Quijote’ (Madrid: Suarez, 1963) pp. 122–3. William A. Christian, Jr, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981) p. 15; citing Augustin Redondo, Antonio de Guevara et l’Espagne de son temps (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1976) pp. 94–9. The dating of Sancho’s letter to his wife in part 2, chapter 36 of the Quixote (see 2:806/629) is taken to indicate that by 20 July 1614 Cervantes had reached no further than chapter 36 in composing his sequel to part 1. He completed part 2 in February 1615. See William Byron, Cervantes: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978) pp. 491, 503. On Cervantes’s joining of the Franciscan Tertiary Order, see Byron, Cervantes, pp. 491; Malveena McKendrick, Cervantes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980) pp. 281–2. See Eric J. Ziolkowski, The Sanctification of Don Quixote: From Hidalgo to Priest (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991) esp. ch. 5. As noted by Ilene Forsyth, ‘Children in Early Medieval Art: Ninth Through Twelfth Centuries’, The Journal of Psychohistory 4 (1976):31–70; see 50. Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness: A Study of ‘El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) p. 89; cf. 96. Ibid., p. 91. Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, 2 vols, ed. Francisco Rodríguez Marín (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1975) 2:240; as rendered in Cervantes, Exemplary Stories, tr. C.A. Jones (London: Penguin, 1972) p. 208. All references to the Exemplary Stories are to these editions, and all translations of them are from the latter. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, tr. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971) p. 88. Tomás’s error does not escape Marín in his note on the pertinent line in Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, 2:40. Cf. Marín, Novelas ejemplares, 2:40, note to line 10.



220

28. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). The dates of composition I give are those proposed by Evans, pp. 47–56. 29. Walter Kendrick, ‘From Huck Finn to Calvin Klein’s Billboard Nymphets’, The New York Times Magazine, 8 October 1995, pp. 84–7; here 86. 30. See CC, pp. 100–27; LCI, 2:513–14, s.v. ‘Kindersegnung Jesu’. 31. School of Infancy, p. 59. 32. See Wayne E. Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in SeventeenthCentury Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p. 140. 33. Jean de La Fontaine, Fables, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966) bk 9, fab. 2, line 54 (p. 242); bk 11, fab. 2, line 4 (p. 288). Cf. LFC, p. 24. 34. Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968; repr. 1985) p. 636. 35. Preface to The Citizen, in Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (1972; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991) p. 100. 36. As quoted from conversation on 20 July 1763 by James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6 vols, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev., enlarged edn by L.F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934–) 1:437. 37. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, tr. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979) bk 1, p. 90. 38. Rousseau cites Hobbes’s notion earlier on the same page (Emile, 67); cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse (1755), in his The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters, tr. Roger D. and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964) p. 129. 39. Joseph Hall, Contemplations on the Historical Passages of the Old and New Testaments (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1844) 19.6, p. 311. All quotes are from this page. 40. Thomas Fuller, Pisgah Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof; with the history of the Old and New Testament acted thereon (1650; London: William Tegg, 1869) p. 227. 41. See Hall, Contemplations, p. 311. 42. The foregoing is a summation of the claims set forth in Matthew Poole, Synopsis criticorum aliorumque sacrae scripturae interpretum et commentatorum, summo studio et fide adornata, 5 vols (1669–76; 2nd edn, Frankfurt am Main, 1678) 1:1697–8; reiterated in his posthumously published Annotations on the Holy Bible, 2 vols (1683–5), republished as A Commentary on the Holy Bible, 3 vols (London: Banner of Truth, 1962) 1:719. Poole’s numerous sources are noted in his Synopsis, which, with Fuller’s Pisgah Sight, is cited in LFC, pp. 34–5. 43. BC, p. 183. 44. See Matthäus Merian, in the preface to his Icones biblicae (Strassburg, 1630), reprinted as Iconum Biblicarum (Wenatchee, WA: AVB Press, 1981) p. 22. 45. Jesus holds his fingers in the same position in Merian’s illustrations of the Entry into Jerusalem and the Cross Bearing (Iconum Biblicarum [1981] pp. 441, 459). 46. Inv. XIII-641, Muzeum Czartoryskich. 47. Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. 48. Contemplations, 19.6, p. 311. 49. See Pierre Rosenberg and Jacques Thuillier, Laurent de La Hyre, 1606–1656: L’homme et l’oeuvre (Geneva: Albert Skira & Musée de Grenoble, 1988) p. 327, including figure 313. 50. See La Hyre’s painting, The Sacrifice of Abraham (1650), Musée Saint-Denis, Reims (ill. in Rosenberg and Thuillier, Laurent de La Hyre, p. 309, figure 275). 51. As noted in BC, p. 41.



Notes 221


52. [Nicolas Fontaine], L’Histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament, avec des explications édifiantes tirées des saints Pères, pour régler les moeurs dans toutes sortes de conditions. Par le sieur de Royaumont, Prieur de Sombreval, ‘new edition’ (Paris: A. Belin, 1817) pp. 216–17, translation mine. 53. BC, p. 41. 54. Johann Hübner, Zweimal zwei und fünfzig auserlesene biblische Historien aus dem Alten und Neuen Testamente (Philadelphia: Schäfer & Koradi, n.d.) p. 205. 55. John Bunyan, ‘Upon the Disobedient Child’, Poem 66, A Book for Boys and Girls: or, Country Rhimes for Children (London: Printed for N.P., 1686) p. 71. 56. Youths Divine Pastime. Containing Forty Remarkable Scripture Histories, turned into common English Verse. With Forty Curious Pictures proper to each Story. Very Delightful for the Virtuous imploying the Vacant Hours of Young Persons, and preventing vain and vicious Divertisements. Together with several Scripture Hymns upon divers occasions, 3rd edn (London: Nathaniel Crouch, 1691). 57. ‘Innocent Play’, Song 2 from A Slight Specimen of Moral Songs, in The Works of the Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D., 7 vols (Leeds: Edward Baines, 1800?) 7:207. 58. J.H.P. Pafford (ed.), Introduction to Isaac Watts, Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language For the Use of Children: Facsimile reproductions of the first edition of 1715 and an illustrated edition of circa 1840 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) p. 6. 59. Isaac Watts, Song 18, Divine Songs (London: M. Lawrence, 1715) pp. 26–7 (Oxford facs. edn, pp. 174–5). In the illustrated edition of c. 1840, the woodcut accompanying this song shows the baldheaded prophet surrounded by tiny mockers as the bears leap out upon them. He curses, clutching a staff with one hand and raising the other in a fist (p. 35 [Oxford facs. edn, p. 235]). 60. Geoffrey Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) p. 77; echoed by BC, p. 72. 61. Pafford, Introduction to Watts, Divine Songs, p. 44. 62. The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., 16 vols, ed. William Ernest Henley (London: Heinemann, 1903) 15:283.

6 Nineteenth-Century Antitypes 1. See CC, p. 119. 2. As noted by M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973) p. 382. 3. See ibid., pp. 377–84; Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood. The Individual and Society: A Study of the Theme in English Literature, rev. edn (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967) pp. 37–90. 4. Alan D. McKillop, ‘Charles Lamb Sees London’, The Rice Institute Pamphlet 22 (1935): 105–27; here 124; quoted by George L. Barnett, Charles Lamb: The Evolution of Elia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964) p. 49. 5. Quoted by E.V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, 2 vols (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905) 1:40. 6. Charles Lamb, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 7 vols, ed. E.V. Lucas (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903–5) 2:53. The quotation in this passage is from the opening line of one of Lamb’s poems for children, ‘Parental Recollections’ (Works, 3:398). 7. For example, Alfred Ainger (ed.), in his Introduction to Charles Lamb, The Essays of Elia (New York: A.C. Armstrong & Son, 1892) p. xv. 8. Lamb, Works, 2:83, 84–5.



222

223

9. Alan Jacobs, ‘Elisha’, in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1992) p. 235. 10. See Lucas, Life of Charles Lamb, 1:68; Barnett, Charles Lamb: The Evolution of Elia, p. 222. 11. On the assumption that Lamb read the Divine Songs, see J.H.P. Pafford (ed.), Introduction to Isaac Watts, Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language For the Use of Children (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) p. 87. 12. See Coveney, Image of Childhood, pp. 91–302. 13. See George P. Landow, Victorian Types and Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). 14. Robert Pattison, The Child Figure in English Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978). 15. BC, p. 72. 16. See Sermons 5, 6, and 8 in Thomas Arnold, Sermons, 3 vols (London: J.G. & F. Rivington, 1832–4) 2:46–54, 62–80. 17. Ibid., 2:67–8. 18. Quoted in ‘Addenda’ to ‘Lecture IV: Pre-Raphaelitism’, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, delivered at Edinburgh in November, 1853, in The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: G. Allen, 1903–12) 12:163. 19. ‘A Few Words to Schoolboys’ (1864), repr. from Manchester Examiner (8 December 1864), in Works of John Ruskin, 18:555–6. 20. The complete passage reads: ‘From Elisha, saviour of life though he be, no saving of life – even of children’s, who “know no better”, – is to be got by the cry, Go up, thou bald-head’ (Modern Painters [1843–60] vol. 5, pt 9, ch. 12, in Works of John Ruskin, 7:452). 21. ‘Our Fathers Have Told Us’: Sketches of the History of Christendom for Boys and Girls Who Have Been Held at its Font (1880–85) pt 1: ‘The Bible of Amiens’, ch. 2, in Works of John Ruskin, 33:56. 22. Benjamin Jowett, Essays and Reviews, 7th edn (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1861) pp. 330–433. 23. ‘EI’, p. 483. 24. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Story of a Bad Boy (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870) p. 7. 25. E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der Goldene Topf: Ein Märchen aus der neuen Zeit, ed. W.F. Mainland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967) p. 1; as rendered in Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, ed. and tr. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969) p. 14. 26. On this use of the motif in Demian, see Theodore Ziolkowski, ‘Religion and Literature in a Secular Age: The Critic’s Dilemma’, The Journal of Religion 59 (1979): 18–34. 27. Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942) p. 54. 28. Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View: On My Work as an Author. The Point of View for My Work as an Author. Armed Neutrality, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) p. 79. 29. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) p. 19. Cf. entry of 1836–7, JP, 5:5184; repr. in the Supplement of Either/Or, Part I, p. 467. 30. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) pp. 91–2. 31. JP, 1:265, 266.



Notes


32. Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way: Studies by Various Persons, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) pp. 152, 153. 33. Entry of 1854, JP, 4:5007. 34. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. Repetition, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) p. 164. 35. See Kierkegaard, Stages, p. 402. 36. See Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) pp. 240 (on Matt. 18.3), 399 (on 1 Cor. 13.11), and 384, where Kierkegaard identifies ‘the child’ as the one who Christ suggested ‘is poor in spirit and therefore sees God’ (cf. Matt. 5.3, 8); Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) pp. 191–2 (on Matt. 18.3), 198 and 393n.71 (for an apparent allusion to 1 Cor. 13.12, the verse immediately following the one in question). 37. JP, 1:271. 38. Entry of 1849, JP, 1:272. 39. Kierkegaard, entry of 1837, JP, 1:91. 40. See Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, 2 vols, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) 1:592–605. 41. For elaboration on this point see Eric Ziolkowski, ‘The Child and Kierkegaard’s “One Who Loves”: The Agapic Flip Side of Peter Pan’, in Robert Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Works of Love (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999) pp. 279–303, esp. 286–94. 42. JP, 1:370. 43. Kierkegaard, entry of 1854, JP, 1:548. 44. Kierkegaard, entry of 1854, JP, 1:549. 45. Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993) p. 194. 46. For discussion see ibid., pp. 17, 127, 165–74. 47. Kierkegaard, Point of View, p. 67. 48. Poole, Kierkegaard, p. 16. 49. See Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (completed 1834), bk 3, in Über Deutschland, in Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, 6 vols, ed. K. Briegleb (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1968–76) 3:594–5; The Works of Heinrich Heine, 12 vols, tr. Charles Godfrey Leland (London: W. Heinemann, 1891–1905) 5:136–7. 50. JP, 5:5887. This entry and most others to be cited in connection with the Corsair affair are reprinted, sometimes with revised punctuation, in the Supplement of Søren Kierkegaard, The ‘Corsair’ Affair and Articles Related to the Writings, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) p. 212. 51. Entry of 1846, JP, 5:5894. 52. This phrase occurs, e.g., in the entry of 1846, JP, 5:5888; the entry of 1847, JP, 5:5998; and several entries of 1849, included not in JP, but in ‘Corsair’ Affair, pp. 237, 239. 53. Entry of 1846, JP, 5:5894. Cf. Kierkegaard, Point of View, p. 64. 54. Entry of 7 September 1846, JP, 5:5937, emphasis mine. 55. Entry of 1849, JP, 6:6348. Cf. 9 March 1846, JP, 5:5887; n.d., 1846, JP, 5:5888; 16 March 1846, JP, 5:5891; n.d., 1848, JP, 6:6160; n.d., 1847, as translated in ‘Corsair’ Affair, pp. 222–3 (not included in JP); n.d., 1848, JP, 5:6105.



224

56. As quoted from Kierkegaard’s journal by Lowrie, Short Life, p. 181. 57. Søren Kierkegaard, Prefaces. Writing Sampler, ed. and tr. Todd W. Nichol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) pp. 86–7; and n.d., 1846, JP, 2:1162. Cf. Kierkegaard, Point of View, p. 65. 58. N.d., 1846, JP, 5:5894. See also Lowrie, Short Life, pp. 184–5. 59. Discussed in Chapter 3 above. 60. N.d., 1848, JP, 1:270. Cf. Kierkegaard, Practice, pp. 176–8. For further discussion see Eric J. Ziolkowski, ‘A Picture Not Worth a Thousand Words: Kierkegaard, Christ, and the Child’, in Religious Studies and Theology 17 (1999): 4–19. 61. Kierkegaard, Practice, p. 177. 62. As reported by Theodor W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968) pp. 50–1; cited by Lesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography (New York: Picador, 1996) p. 130. 63. See William Woodin Rowe, ‘The Child as Religious Ideal’, in his Dostoevsky: Child and Man in His Works (New York: New York University Press, 1968) pp. 119–38. Cf. V.I. Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky (New York: Noonday, 1952) p. 95; Arturo Serrano-Plaja, ‘Magic’ Realism in Cervantes: ‘Don Quixote’ as Seen through ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘The Idiot’, tr. Robert S. Rudder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) p. 34; Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964) p. 150; Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis, Language, and Style of Dostoevsky’s Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981) p. 62. 64. See Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Constance Garnett, rev. and ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976) 6.3, p. 298. All references are to this edition, by book and chapter, followed by pages when necessary. 65. See F.M. Dostoevsky, The Diary of a Writer, tr. Boris Brasol (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985) esp. pp. 166–82. See also Edward Wasiolek (ed. and tr.), Introduction to Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) pp. 6–7. 66. See Dostoevsky, ‘The Future Novel’ (1876), Diary, p. 160; cf. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for ‘A Raw Youth’, ed. Edward Wasiolek, tr. Victor Terras (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969) p. 25; Dostoevsky, Notebooks for ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, pp. 22–3. See also Terras, Karamazov Companion, pp. 5, 8, 12, 62–3, 337n. 1, 343n. 64, 344n. 68. 67. Terras, Karamazov Companion, p. 12; see also 62–3. 68. Karamazov Companion, p. 196n.60. 69. See Hélène Iswolsky, Christ in Russia: The History, Tradition, and Life of the Russian Church (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1960) p. 152. Cf. G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, 2 vols, 2nd printing with corrections (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) 1:15, 357. 70. Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction, p. 150. 71. Ivan tells of an oppressor who throws a child to the hounds, which, in Ivan’s words, ‘catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes!’ (Brothers, 5.4, p. 224; see also pp. 225–6). 72. See Dostoevsky, Notebooks for ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, pp. 186–7, and also Wasiolek’s comments on p. 183. 73. Quoted from the English summary version of Cesare Lombroso’s Uomo Delinquente by his daughter Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man, according to the Classifications of Cesare Lombroso (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911) p. 130. 74. Carlo Collodi (Carlo Lorenzini), The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet, tr. Nicholas J. Perella (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) pp. 345, 365, 377.



Notes 225

226


7 Twentieth-Century Antitypes 1. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton, 1904) 1:325. 2. For example, William Byron Forbush, The Boy Problem (1901), 6th edn, rewritten (New York: Westminster, 1907) pp. 49–51; J. Adams Puffer, The Boy and His Gang (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912); Samuel W. Hartwell, Fifty-five ‘Bad’ Boys (New York: Knopf, 1931); Lewis Yarblonsky, The Violent Gang (New York: Macmillan, 1962); D.J. West, The Young Offender (New York: International Universities Press, 1967). 3. See W. Tasker Witham, The Adolescent in the American Novel, 1920–1960 (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964) pp. 86–95. 4. See Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood. The Individual and Society: A Study of the Theme in English Literature, rev. edn (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967) pp. 280–302. 5. See Freud, Totem and Taboo, esp. essay 4, sec. 5 (SE, 13:140–6); Moses and Monotheism, pt 1, sec. D (SE, 23:81–6). 6. Quoted from conversation by Djuna Barnes, ‘James Joyce’, Vanity Fair 18, no. 2 (April 1922): 65, 104; here 65. 7. References are to the newly established ‘original’ text, James Joyce, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, 3 vols, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Garland, 1984). 8. See our discussion of the Vaticinia in Chapter 1. Cf. Robert Martin Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962) p. 125; Weldon Thornton, Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961) p. 48; Don Gifford, with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses, 2nd edn, rev. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) p. 50, note to 3.113–14. Both Adams and Thornton misquote the phrase from the Vaticinia. To retrace the sequence of minor alterations in Joyce’s appropriation of the phrase, from his novel’s original manuscript through the various printed versions, see James Joyce, Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, 2 vols (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975) 1:5 ( Joyce’s handwritten page number); Ulysses: The Manuscript and First Printings Compared, ed. Clive Driver (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975) p. 40; and the relevant annotation in Gabler’s edition of Ulysses, 1:80; 3:1731. 9. William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce (1959; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978) p. 149. 10. See Adams, Surface, p. 125; Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, p. 49. 11. See ch. 23 of James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer; new edn by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (New York: New Directions, 1944) pp. 176–7; ‘The Tables of the Law’, in W.B. Yeats, Early Poems and Stories (New York: Macmillan, 1925) pp. 506–7. 12. See Adams, Surface, p. 126. 13. Ibid., pp. 126, 143.



On the relationship between Pinocchio and Cuore, see Perella’s introductory essay, pp. 10–16. 75. Perella, in his introductory essay to Collodi, Pinocchio, p. 37. See Collodi’s own essay (cited by Perella, p. 38) ‘Il ragazzo di strada’, in Tutto Collodi per i piccoli e per i grandi, ed. Pietro Pancrazi (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1948) pp. 607–18. 76. Reproduced in the Perella translation, p. 303.

14. See ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ (1901), in James Joyce, Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959) p. 69; cited by Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, p. 49. 15. See Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, pp. 49–50; Yeats, Early Poems and Stories, p. 509. 16. Cf. the textual note to chapter 80, line 16 of Ulysses, ed. Gabler, 3:1731. The phrase ‘him me’ in Joyce’s manuscript was altered to ‘him now’ in the Little Review printing, but restored to ‘him me’ in later printed editions. 17. Adams, Surface, pp. 125–6. 18. On Klein’s obsession with Joyce and Ulysses, see Usher Caplan, Like One That Dreamed: A Portrait of A.M. Klein (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1982) pp. 52–4, 88, 103, 154–7, 218; Leon Edel, ‘The Klein–Joyce Enigma’, Journal of Canadian Studies 19 (1984): 27–33; Usher Caplan, Introduction to A.M. Klein, Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Caplan and M.W. Steinberg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987) pp. xv, xvii–xix; Zailig Pollock (ed.), Introduction to A.M. Klein, Complete Poems, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) 1:xxiii. Klein’s three published exegetical essays of 1949, 1950, and 1951 on the novel’s first two chapters and on the chapter known as ‘The Oxen of the Sun’ are reprinted in his Literary Essays, pp. 289–366. 19. See Klein, ‘Elijah’, Complete Poems, 1:202. A picture of boys laughing at the seemingly crazy prophet accompanies the reprint of this poem in A.M. Klein, Doctor Dwarf and Other Poems for Children (Kingston, Ont.: Quarry Press, 1990) n.p. The Gabler edition of Ulysses contains 14 explicit allusions to Elijah, and several implicit ones. 20. Klein, Complete Poems, 1:280–1. 21. Caplan, Introduction to Klein, Literary Essays, p. xiii. 22. ‘The Bible as Literature’ (1941), in Klein, Literary Essays, p. 126. Cf. ‘Annotation on Shapiro’s Essay on Rime’ (1946), in ibid., pp. 172–3. 23. Quoted in A.M. Klein, ‘Of Hebrew Humor’ (1935), in Literary Essays, p. 99; and his ‘The Bible as Literature’, p. 129. 24. ‘The Bible as Literature’, p. 129. 25. Quoted from the unexpurgated typescript version, Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (New York: Ace/Putnam, 1991) p. 320. In the first edition (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961), for which the press had required drastic cuts, this passage remained essentially the same (see p. 259), although such phrases and words as ‘personally interceded’ and ‘small’, which stress God’s implication in the slaying and the diminutiveness of the victims, were deleted. 26. Spanish and English texts both quoted from Heberto Padilla, Legacies: Selected Poems, bilingual edn, tr. Alastair Reid and Andrew Hurley (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982) pp. 28–9. Quotations are from this edition. 27. Bruce Penner, The Bears of Elisha: Percussion Duo, Ensemble Series (Ft Lauderdale, FL: Music for Percussion, Inc., 1980). 28. David Hugh Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) p. 169, s.v. ‘Francis of Assisi’. 29. Paul Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, tr. Louise Seymour Houghton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920) p. xxxiii. 30. A note to this passage in the Houghton translation (Life of St. Francis, p. 59n.1) mistakenly cites Celano’s First Life as Sabatier’s source, ignoring the absence of children in Celano’s account of Francis’s assault. 31. In addition to the examples cited later of Ignacio Larrañaga and Johannes Jørgensen, see Omer Englebert, Saint Francis of Assisi: A Biography, 2nd English edn, tr. Eve Marie Cooper, rev. by Ignatius Brady and Raphael Brown (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press,



Notes 227

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.


1965) p. 76; Julien Green, God’s Fool: The Life and Times of Francis of Assisi, tr. Peter Heinegg (San Francisco: Harper, 1987) p. 78. Arnaldo Fortini vividly depicts the same scene without specifying whether children were involved (Francis of Assisi, tr. Helen Moak [New York: Crossroad, 1981] pp. 219–20). Ignacio Larrañaga, Brother Francis of Assisi, tr. Jennie M. Ibarra (Sherbrooke, Quebec: Médiaspaul, 1994) p. 73. Helen Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on his Letters, tr. Amy Mims (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968) p. 412. Nikos Kazantzakis, Prologue, Saint Francis: A Novel, tr. Peter A. Bien (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962) n.p. Kazantzakis claims to have composed this novel under the guidance of the spirits of St Francis and Albert Schweitzer, ‘the Saint Francis of our era’ (ibid., prefatory dedication). See Kazantzakis, Epilogue to J. Pierhal, Albert Schweitzer: Das Leben eines guten Menschen (Munich: Kindler Verlag, 1955) pp. 349–50; quoted by H. Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, p. 536. See Johannes Joergensen, Saint François d’Assise, tr. [from Danish] Teodor de Wyzewa (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1979) pp. 58–9. Kazantzakis, Saint Francis, pp. 79–80. Quoted by H. Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, p. 520. In Chapter 4 we discussed Celano’s image of Pietro rushing upon Francis ‘like a wolf upon a sheep’, and the inverse relationship of that image to 2 Kgs 2.24b. The same simile is invoked by Englebert, Saint Francis of Assisi, p. 76; Green, God’s Fool, pp. 78–9. Cf. Joergensen, Saint François d’Assise, p. 59. William Lyon Phelps, Human Nature in the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923) p. 187. IB, 3:197, ‘exposition’ by Raymond Calkins; Theodore H. Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (New York: Harper & Row, 1969) p. 517. F.W. Farrar, The Second Book of Kings (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894) p. 27. Cf. Cyrus H. Gordon and Gary A. Rendsburg, The Bible and the Ancient Near East, 4th edn (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997) p. 229. See his letter of 23 February 1913 in Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, tr. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken, 1973) p. 202; and in Frederick R. Karl, Franz Kafka: Representative Man (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991) p. 343. Letter of 12 July 1922 from Planá nad Luzanici to Max Brod, in Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, tr. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977) p. 338. Letter of late July 1922 from Planá to Brod, in ibid., p. 346. Karl, Franz Kafka, p. 710. See also pp. 698, 724. See his letter of 9 November 1903 from Prague to Oskar Pollak, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, p. 10; noted by Karl, Franz Kafka, pp. 170, 172. Reinhard Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982) pp. 36 (quoted), 234n.13. Like Kuhn’s perspective, the one I am about to offer departs radically from the received tendency to perceive in Kafka ‘the romantic ideal [das romantische Urbild] of the child’ (KafkaHandbuch, 2 vols, ed. Hartmut Binder [Stuttgart: Kröner, 1979] 2:255, s.v. ‘Die Erzählungen’, by James Rolleston). See Franz Kafka, The Castle, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) ch. 1, pp. 11–15; ch. 2, p. 21; ch. 6, p. 90; etc. Kuhn, Corruption, p. 37.



228

50. Der Prozess, 3rd edn (ch. 2), in Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Schriften (New York: Schocken, 1946–) 1:45; as rendered in Franz Kafka, The Trial, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, rev. E.M. Butler (3rd printing, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) p. 39. 51. Kuhn, Corruption, pp. 39, 40. 52. Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, tr. Hilda Rosner (New York: New Directions, 1951) p. 41. 53. Mircea Eliade, Bengal Nights, tr. Catherine Spencer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) p. 151. 54. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, tr. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Random House, 1948) p. 37. 55. See Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird, 2nd edn, expanded (New York: Grove Press, 1976) pp. 7–8. 56. Regarding the peasants depicted in this novel, Jerzy Kosinski commented: ‘They were not surprised by the persecution of Jews and Gypsies, since they were taught by their fathers – who in turn had been taught by theirs – that Jews deserved no pity because they had killed the Son of God and hence, by the virtue of this very fact, God himself is hostile to them and is preparing for them a terrible though just punishment’ (Notes of the Author on ‘The Painted Bird’, 3rd edn [New York: ScientiaFactum, 1967] p. 23). Cf. Michael Kaniecki, ‘Love Songs For the SS’, in The 1997 Pushcart Prize XXI, An Annual Small Press Reader: Best of the Small Presses, ed. Bill Henderson (Wainscott, NJ: Pushcart Press, 1996) p. 545. 57. On this textual device, see Kosinski, Notes, 17–18. 58. Elie Wiesel, The Town Beyond the Wall, tr. Stephen Becker (New York: Schocken, 1982) p. 5. 59. See Chapter 1, pp. 24–6 above. 60. Shusaku Endo, Silence, tr. William Johnston (New York: Taplinger, 1980) pp. 149–50. 61. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, tr. Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon, 1971) pp. 101, 103. 62. R.M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) pp. 213–14. 63. The allusion is made by the British naval officer who finds and rescues the boys in the end. Upon realizing that their conduct has fallen far short of what might have been expected from ‘a pack of British boys’, he remarks ironically: ‘Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island’ (William Golding, Lord of the Flies, ed. James R. Baker and Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr, Casebook Edition [New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964] ch. 12, p. 186). See the interview ‘The Meaning of It All’, in ibid., p. 201, for Golding’s own comments on his novel’s connection with The Coral Island. 64. Albert Lamorisse, The Red Balloon (book), English translation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957) n.p. The movie was produced by Films Montouris. 65. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abr. edn (New York: Macmillan, 1922) p. 64. 66. See P3, 5.116; ‘Lines and Squares’, in A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1924) p. 12. 67. ‘Don’t Cry, Darling, It’s Blood All Right’, in Ogden Nash, Verses from 1929 On (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959) p. 37. 68. Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, tr. John Nathan (New York: Berkley Publishing, 1971) pp. 132–3. 69. Produced by Martin Poll, starring Sarah Miles and Kris Kristofferson.



Notes 229


70. Libretto, p. 20, included in the stereo recording Lizzie Borden: A Family Portrait in Three Acts, performed by the New York City Opera (DST-6455/56/57 [1966]). I am indebted to David Sider for calling my attention to this opera. 71. As noted by Arnold R. Brown, Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter (Nashville, TN: Routledge Hill, 1991) p. 12. 72. Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (New York: Random House, 1988) p. 34. 73. Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, p. 130. 74. Lars von Trier, Breaking the Waves (screenplay), tr. Jonathan Syndenham (London: Faber, 1996) p. 115. Film produced by ZENTROPA ApS, Copenhagen.

Conclusion 1. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, tr. from 6th edn by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933) p. 50. 2. ‘AC’, p. 397. 3. Hereafter the title Peter Pan is used to refer collectively to P1 (Barrie’s novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens [1906, comprised of chapters from his novel The Little White Bird, 1902]), P2 (his play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up [première 1904, developed out of The Little White Bird ]), and P3 (his novel Peter and Wendy [1911, adapted from the play]). For the editions used hereafter, see our list of ‘Abbreviations’, s.v. P1, P2, P3. 4. ‘AC’, p. 398. 5. Romano Guardini, The Lord, tr. Elinor Castendyk Briefs (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1954; renewed 1996) p. 308. 6. ‘EI’, p. 471. 7. Entry of 1846, JP, 2:1162. 8. Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 11 vols, 2nd rev. edn, ed. Michael Buchberger (Freiburg: Herder, 1957–61) 6:149, s.v. ‘Kind’, by J. Blinzler; cited by S. Légasse, Jésus et l’enfant: ‘Enfants’, ‘petits’ et ‘simples’ dans la tradition synoptique (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1969) p. 282. 9. The Lord, p. 309. 10. David Gutmann, ‘The Paternal Imperative’, The American Scholar 67 (1998): 118. 11. The Lord, pp. 311–12. 12. Cf. Gospel of Thomas 101, 105 (ANT, p. 146). 13. As noted by Joachim Wach, ‘Master and Disciple: Two Religio-Sociological Studies,’ in his Essays in the History of Religions, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa and Gregory D. Alles (New York: Macmillan, 1988) pp. 1–32; see 20. 14. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. Repetition, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) p. 72. Cf. JP, 1:367. 15. Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) p. 260. 16. Catechism of the Catholic Church (Mahway, NJ: Paulist Press, 1994) no. 2232; see also no. 2233. 17. See Ian P. Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 18. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Marriage and Single Life,’ The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) p. 25. Cf. Bacon’s ‘Of Parents and Children’: ‘The Noblest workes, and Foundations, have proceeded from Childlesse Men’ (Essays, p. 23).



230

19. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) p. 69. 20. Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters, tr. Marion Wiesel (1972; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993) p. 44. 21. Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way: Studies by Various Persons, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) p. 404. 22. ‘EI’, p. 471. 23. Neil Postman (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982). 24. Marie Winn (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 25. David Elkind (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1981). 26. Marietta Stanton (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990). 27. James Dobson and Gary L. Bauer (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1990). 28. Quoted by Bernard Weinraub, ‘Fun for the Whole Family: Movies for Children, and Their Parents, are far from “Pollyanna” ’, New York Times, 22 July 1997, pp. C9–10; here C10. 29. Guardini, The Lord, p. 309. 30. ‘AC’, p. 404. 31. ‘EI’, p. 510. 32. The Cult of Childhood (London: Warburg Institute, 1966) p. 60. 33. James E. Gordon, ‘Demonic Children’, New York Times Book Review, 11 September 1977, pp. 3, 52. 34. Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Killer Kids’, The New York Review, 6 November 1997, pp. 17–20; here 20. 35. William March, The Bad Seed (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1997) p. 174. 36. Doris Lessing, Conversations, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1994) p. 176; quoted by Oates, ‘Killer Kids’, p. 19. 37. Quoted from the note to Jeremiah 31.15 in the RSV, Oxford edn (1973) p. 954. 38. As noted by William Wells Newell, Games and Songs of American Children (New York: Harper, 1884) no. 61, pp. 126, 236. 39. Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959; repr. 1967) p. 54. 40. John Amos Comenius, The School of Infancy, ed. Ernest M. Eller (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956) p. 90; Thomas Arnold, Sermons, 3 vols (London: J.G. & F. Rivington, 1832–4) 2:52–3 (sermon 5); see also 2:74–9 (sermon 8). 41. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932; 1960) p. xii. 42. Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909) p. 112. 43. Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet, tr. Nicholas J. Perella (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) p. 367. 44. Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Return of Peter Pan’ (1992), introductory essay to The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) p. 12. 45. This famous phrase is the subtitle of P2, whose closing stage direction has Peter Pan playing on his pipes ‘till we wake up’ (act 5, sc. 2, p. 94) confirms that the whole story was ‘our’, that is, the adults’, dream. 46. Andrew O’Hagan, ‘Introduction to the American Edition’, The Missing (1995; 1st American edn, New York: New Press, 1997) pp. xv–xvi. 47. See Marie-Louise von Franz, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 2nd edn (Santa Monica, CA: Sigo Press, 1981).



Notes 231

232



48. Perella, Pinocchio, p. 56. 49. See J.H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology, tr. H.F. Croes (New York: Norton, 1961; 1983) esp. ch. 2. 50. Paul Hazard, Books, Children, and Men, 4th edn, tr. Marguerite Mitchell (Boston: Horn Book, 1960) p. 109. Hazard’s statement is qualified by Perella in his introductory essay to Collodi, Pinocchio, p. 13n. 10.


Except where otherwise indicated, or where a back-slash occurs, all citations of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books, and the New Testament are by the chapter-and-verse numbers in the RSV. Where two numerical citations are separated by a slash, the one before the slash refers to the Vulgate, and the one after it, to the RSV. Citations of the Apocryphal New Testament are by the numbers in the Elliott edition (see p. xv above). Hebrew Scriptures Genesis 1.26–27 2–3 9 9.3 9.21–25 13.11 19.8 22.1–19 22.5, 12 26.1–22 32.22 (:32.23 in Hebrew Bible) 32.23 37.30 37.33 41.12 42.37 49.27

104 29 xi 104 105 54 96 150 22 118 45 118 118 183 118 22 91

11.1–3 15.36 21.4–7 21.6 23.1, 14, 29 Deuteronomy 7.10 18.19 21.18–21 28.15–68 32.24 32.42

37, 183 183 47, 54 23 23 22 180

Leviticus 7.24 13.42 17.15 20.9 24.10–16 26.22

180 16 180 23 17, 18 183

Numbers 11.1

36

17 17, 18 23 17 105 53

Joshua 7.25

25

Judges 12.6

17

Ruth 1.5

Exodus 1.15–22 12.29 20.5 21.15 21.17 22.29 22.31

17 25 17 36–7, 105 24

118

1 Samuel (1 Kings in LXX and Vulg.) 15.33 131 16.11 15 17.34 19 2 Samuel (2 Kings in LXX and Vulg.) 6.6–8 19 16.5, 13 61 18.9–18 119 1 Kings (3 Kings in LXX and Vulg.) 90 3.7 15 12.28–29 24 13.7–30 17 13.24, 26 196n.95 17 197n.116

233



Biblical Index

Biblical Index

1 Kings – continued 17.4 17.17–24 19.10 19.19 19.20–21 20.33–43 21.13 21.17–29

196n.95 183 90 93 93 17 25 17

2 Kings (4 Kings in LXX and Vulg.) 52, 90 1.2, 3, 6, 16 163 1.2–17 17 1.8 16 1.9–16 18 1.10 18, 117 1.12 18 1.13–14 117 2 197n.116 2.1–18 14 2.2–3 91 2.9 96 2.9–10 140 2.11 16, 93, 217n.36 2.11–12 108 2.13 90, 93 2.14 20 2.15 17, 90 2.15–22 109 2.17 90 2.19–22 20, 23 2.23 7–8, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, 24, 25–26, 27, 51, 56, 62, 65, 70, 71, 90, 96, 103, 109, 130, 142, 147, 149, 199n.154, 201n.6, 217n.36 2.23–24 xi, xii, 6, 10, 12–28, 29, 35, 36–55, 57, 66, 87, 89, 95, 102–106, 108, 117–31, 139–42, 145–52, 159, 160, 163–64, 169, 170, 177, 186, 217n.33 2.23–25 12, 194n.57 2.24 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 23, 38, 51, 91, 112, 128, 130, 131, 149, 201n.6 2.25 12, 14 4.8–37 38 4.32–37 183 5.1–27 38 5.10–14 199n.154 5.20–27 17 5.27 18 9.11 46, 90

10.14 13.14 17.25–26 2 Chronicles 13.7 24.21 36.16 Job 1.18–19 14.4 19.18 21.8 25.4 30.9

17 16 196n.95

118 25 21

183 21 17 198n.144 110 70

Psalms 1 103 1.1 103 8.3/8.1–2 57 17.43/18.42 58, 89 21/22 64, 92 21.8/22.7 55 21.14/22.13 95 21.17/22.16 67, 71 36/37.9, 11, 27 45 41/42 201n.12 43/44 201n.12 44/45 39, 40–41, 202n.14 45/46 201n.12 46/47 41, 42, 201nn.12–13, 202n.14, 202n.17, 202nn.19–20 47/48 201n.12 51/52 201n.12 68.13/69.12 70 79.14/80.13 49 83/84 41, 201nn.12–13, 202nn.14–16, 202nn.19–20 84/85 41, 201nn.12–15 109 103–104 112.1/113.1 57 127.3 175 128.3 180 128.3–4 175 Proverbs 17.12 19.29 23.13–14 28.15


19, 119 55 22 91


234

Ecclesiastes 7.9/7.8

91

Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs 4.2 Isaiah 1.2 1.4 3.4 3.4–5 3.24 8.18 11.6 22.12 31.15 (:38.15 in LX) 44.3 57.4 63.1–6 65.20 65.25 Jeremiah 2.30 5.6 15.3 15.17 29.26 31.15

Hosea 9.7 13.7–8 13.8

92 57 55 137, 162, 170 23, 29 96 57 84, 91, 118 96 184 198n.144 104 71 51, 203n.39 91 92, 103, 184 48 91 196n.95 103 90 231n.37

Lamentations 3.10–11 3.14 Ezekiel 4.14 14.15–21 22.27 39.17–20

42

92 55, 70 92 180 196n.95 91 196n.95

90 183 19, 119

Amos 5.18–19 5.19

14 19

Habakkuk 1.8

91

Zephaniah 3.3

91

Zechariah 3.2 8.5 9.11 13.3

103 7 79 22

Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books Wisdom of Solomon 11.18/11.17

92

Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach 13.21/13.17 30.12

92 35

2 Maccabees 15.25

70

New Testament Matthew 2.16 2.17–18 3.12 4.22 5.10 5.10–12 5.12 5.44 6.2 7.15 8.3 10.16 10.25 10.35–36 10.37 10.38 11.25 12.24 12.46–50 16.14 18.1–5 18.2 18.2–3 18.3 18.5 18.6

7, 56 183 184 22 178 95 91 22, 92, 95 103 70 92 54 92 163 178 178 178 84 163 178 93 176, 201n.6 41 40 1, 7, 31, 134, 224n.36 177 128, 130, 134



Biblical Index 235

Biblical Index

Matthew – continued 18.10 19.12 19.13 19.13–15 19.14 19.29 23.37 27.22–23 27.27–29 27.27–31 27.33 27.39–40 27.40, 42 27.41 27.54

130 179 179 175, 201n.6 31, 41, 116, 134–35 178 22 42 55 203n.44 38 40 103 56 64

Mark 1.20 3.22 3.31–35 9.33–37 9.35–37 9.37 10.13 10.13–16 10.14 10.14–15 10.15 14.65 15.13 15.16–17 15.16–20 15.22 15.39 16.16

7, 56 178 163 178 201n.6 176 177 179 175, 201n.6 134 31 1 203n.44 42 55 203n.44 38 64 106

Luke 1.17 2.41–52 2.42–49 2.51 4.25–26 5.11 6.22–23 7.11–17 8.19–21 9.8 9.46–48 9.48 9.58 10.3

140 31 178 178 183 178 91 183 78 93 176, 201n.6 177 56 92

11.15, 18–19 12.52–53 14.26 14.27 14.33 16.10 18.15 18.15–17 18.16 18.16–17 18.17 18.29–30 23.6–12 23.11 23.21 23.27 23.28 23.28–29 23.28–31 23.34

163 178 178 178 178 129 179 175, 201n.6 134 31 1 178 203n.44 203n.44 42 56, 58 56, 113 73 58 42

John 2.4 7.35 8.6, 8 8.59 10.12 16.5 19.1–3 19.2 19.6 19.17 Acts of the Apostles 2.38 5.1–6 7.52 7.58–60 8.1 13.10 20.29 23.3

178 104 34 58, 89 92 50 203n.44 55 42 38

105 48 22 25 22 182 92 103

Romans 5.12–21 7.9

32 32

1 Corinthians 1.18–29 11.7 13.10

87 29 32



236

1 Corinthians – continued 13.11 32, 128, 134, 224n.36 13.12 224n.36 14.20 32, 39, 41, 45, 175 15.45–47 32 Ephesians 2.2 5.6 6.1–3, 4 6.16

40, 182 182 89 89

Colossians 3.6

1 John 3.10

182

Revelation 7.2 11.2 13.5

96 17 17, 96

Apocryphal New Testament

22

1 Timothy 1.20

45

James 3.9 3.15

31 37

182

1 Thessalonians 2.14–15

Hebrews 2.13 9.14 11.37 13.12

1 Peter 2.2 5.8

57 79 25 51

200n.170 96

Infancy Gospel of Thomas 3.1–4.2 9.1–2

200n.180 31

Gospel of Pseudo–Matthew 26 and 29

31 200n.180

Gospel of Peter 2.5 3.7–9 3.8

204n.52 203n.44–204 204n.52

Acts of Pilate, in Gospel of Nicodemus 1.3 63 Acts of John 56


101 219.73


Biblical Index 237

Aaron, 21 Abel, 26, 44, 45 Abenner, 84 Abrabanel, Isaac ben Judah, 24 Abraham, 26, 44, 45 Adam (first man), 186 as adult, 31 associated with childhood, 125, 132 fall of, 33, 62 fallen nature of, 84, 86 sinfulness of, 11, 87, 105, 110 sons of, 33 transgression of, 132 as 20-year-old, 29 as type of Christ, 32 Abrams, M.H., 222n.2 Adams, Robert Martin, 226n.8 adolescence as ‘the criminal age’, 145 Peter Damian’s vision during, 51 Adorno, Theodor W., 225n.61 Aegidius, 53–4 Aertsen, Pieter, 69, 212n.168 Aggadah, 23 aggadic interpretation, 37 aggadic rabbis, 119 Aggsbach Altar, see Breu, Jörg Agrippa von Nettesheim, 7 Ahab, 13 Ahaziah, 18 Ahl, Diane Cole, 218n.65 Ainger, Alfred, 222n.7 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey: The Story of a Bad Boy, 131 Alemán, Mateo: Guzmán de Alfarache, 106–7 Alexander the Great, 28, 138 Alice in Wonderland, 185 Allegoriae in Vetus Testamentum, 204n.46 Allegory of Poverty (fresco), 98 Alphandéry, Paul, 215n.11 Altichiero, 64, 65, 66, 75 Altschuler, David: Mezudat David, 24 Ambrose, St, 38 Ambrosius (son of Hans Holbein the Elder), 68

Anabaptists, 106 Ananias, 48 Andrea da Firenze, 63, 64 angelic being (as child), 99 Angelo Clareno, 27 Angelomus, 50, 51, 53 Anselm of Canterbury, St, 58 Applebone, Peter, 190n.44 Apt, Ulrich, 75 Arendt, Hannah, 74 Ariès, Philippe, xv, 66, 77, 80, 99–100, 107, 125, 176 criticisms of, 100 ‘discovery of childhood’, 102, 106 ‘idea of childhood’, 8, 100, 102, 114, 181 Aristotle, 28, 30, 32, 115 Arnold, Thomas, 1, 128–9, 131, 184, 188 Arnt, Master, 71 Aron, Robert, 200n.175 Arsenal Bible, 60 Artemis, 19 Arthur (legendary king), 87 Ascent of the Cross (scene from Christ’s Passion), 48–50, 52 in art, 60–1, 70 Ascension (Gospel scene), 49–51 Auerbach, Erich, 15 Augustine, St, 44, 45, 48, 55, 57, 86, 115, 117, 118, 121 Against Faustus the Manichaean, 38–9, 41, 49 attitude toward children, 32–5, 42, 84, 85, 102, 110–11, 116, 125, 127, 131, 138, 153, 175 led to conversion by child’s chant, 111 City of God, 35, 49 Confessions, xv, 32–4, 109–11, 132, 177 Expositions on Psalms, 39–43, 201n.10 figurative exegetical method of, 46 on infant baptism, 105 on tale of Elisha’s mockery, 38–43, 47 The Trinity, 34–5 his vision of the Christ Child, 34 see also fruit–stealing motif Avanzi, Jacopo, 75 238



General Index

Baal priests/prophets of, 12, 15 culture of, 92 see also Beelzebub Bachelard, Gaston, 172 Bachofen, J.J., 196n.105 Bacon, Francis, 179 Baegert, Derick, 74, 208n.79 Bähr, Karl Christian Wilhelm Felix, 191n.2 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 107, 141 Bakker, James (Jim), 20 Bakker, Tammy Faye, 20 Bakó, Zsuzsanna, 214n.200 Balak, 24 Balavariani, 84 Baldass, Ludwig von, 207n.63 Ballantyne, Robert Michael: The Coral Island, 164 baptism of infants, 105–6 ‘the remission of sins’, 105 fate of children who lack, 32 Bardi Saint Francis Master Dossal (Bardi Dossal), 97 Bardon, Geoffrey, xiii, 191n.55 Bardy, Gustave, 202n.28 Baring, Anne, 195n.104 Baring–Gould, S., 215n.3 Barlaam and Ioasaph, 83–4 Barna da Siena, 64 Barnes, Djuna, 226n.6 Barnes, Timothy David, 201n.4 Barnett, George L., 222n.4 Barré, H., 205n.12 Barrie, J.M.: Peter Pan (P1, P2, P3), xvii, 176, 185–8 see also lost boys, the; Neverland; Peter Pan Barth, Karl, 175 Bartholomew of Pisa, 217n.44 Bearing of the Cross (scene from Christ’s Passion: aka Procession to Calvary, Road to Calvary, Via Dolorosa, Way of the Cross), 11, 56, 58, 59, 113, 159, 187 in art, 60–6, 69, 70–3, 74, 76–81, 137, 221n.45 evoked in Breaking the Waves (von Trier), 173 see also Bruegel, Pieter Beelzebub, 163–4

Beer, Cecilia, 208n.75 Beeson, Jack, 167 Beichner, Paul E., 204n.49 Benedict XI, Pope, 27 Benozzo Gozzoli, 98–9 Benzinger, Immanuel, 194n.55 Berg, Jan Hendrick van den, 188 Bergen, Wesley, 18, 19 Bernard of Clairvaux, St, 56–7, 70 Bernardone, Francesco, see Francis of Assisi, St Bernardone, Pietro (father of St Francis), 88, 90, 91–2, 93, 95, 97–8, 153–4 Bethel boys motif (or type), xii, 184 approximated in Parzival (Wolfram), 87 compared to fruit–stealing motif, 33–4, 132 defined and delineated, xi, 6–7, 33 and humour, 143–4 Lucianic version of, 143 non–Western examples of, 10–11 obstinacy of, 188 opposed to Christ’s exaltation of children, 176–7 perpetuation and persistence of, 175–6 pertinence to modern social sciences, 142 manifest in: Bengal Nights (Eliade), 157 Breaking the Waves (von Trier), 173–4 The Brother’s Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 139–42 the Christian West, 83–4 Confessions (Augustine), 33–4, 132 the Corsair affair (crisis in Kierkegaard’s life), 135–8 Doctor Faustus (Mann), 157–8 Don Quixote of La Mancha (Cervantes), 108–9 eastern Christian hagiography, 82–3 Franciscan iconography, 96–9 Francis’s legends and biographies, 87–96, 152–4 The Glass Licentiate (Cervantes), 111–13 ‘The Golden Pot’ (Hoffmann), 132 ‘“Guilty”/”Not Guilty?”’ (Kierkegaard), 133 Lizzie Borden (Elmslie and Beeson), 167–8 The Memoirs of a Survivor (D. Lessing), 168–72 Nietzsche’s life, 138



General Index 239

General Index

Bethel boys motif – continued The Painted Bird (Kosinski), 158–61 Passion iconography and art, 59–81, 84 Pinocchio (Collodi), 143–4 The Red Balloon (Lamorisse), 164 The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (Mishima), 166–7 Shakespeare’s plays, 112–14 Siddhartha (Hesse), 157 Silence (Endo), 162–3 the tale of Carabas (told by Philo), 30–1 The Town Beyond the Wall (Wiesel), 161–2 The Trial (Kafka), 156 see also Elisha’s mockery Bett, Henry, 199n.157 Bible moralisée, ix, 60 Biblia pauperum, ix, 54–5, 60, 62, 205n.25 Rotulus Seragliensis No. 52 (Istanbul), 206n.44, 217n.33 Bierce, Ambrose, 7 Blake, William Songs of Experience, 125 Songs of Innocence, 125 Blatty, William Peter: The Exorcist, 182 Bles, Herri met de, 76–7, 211n.137 Blinzler, J., 177 Bly, Robert, 4–5 Boas, George, 4, 7, 182 Bodenheimer, F.S., 196n.107 Böll, Heinrich: The Clown, 9 Bonaventure, St: Major Life and Minor Life of St Francis, 94–5, 97, 101, 108, 152, 153 Book of Mormon, The, 197n.127 Borden, Lizzie, 167–8 see also Elmslie, Kenward Boswell, James, 221n.36 Bottigheimer, Ruth, 127–8 The Bible for Children (BC) of, xv ‘boy accursed for a hundred years, the’, 51 Boyd, Robert T., 192n. 6 ‘Boyhood deeds of Finn’ (Macgnimartha Finn), 85–6 boyhood myths, 185–6, 187–8 boys (also schoolboys), 37–8, 187 as ‘angels of God’, 139, 185 associated with the devil, 184 distinguised from girls, 5, 8–9 of the Middle East, 21, 155 identity of Elisha’s mockers as, 15–16

irreverence of, 165 as ‘merciless race’, 139, 141, 185 peer pressure among, 184 and religion, 1 violence of, 4–6, 8, 166 see also Bethel boys motif; boyhood myths; Elisha’s mockery; gangs of youths; juvenile delinquency; lost boys; ragazzo di strada Breaking the Waves, see von Trier Breu, Jörg, 71, 211n.137 Aggsbach Altar, 63, 72–3, 74 Brichto, Herbert Chanan, 192n.7 broken homes, see families, breakdown of Brown, Arnold R., 230n.71 Brown, Peter, 200n.188 Brown, Robert, 196n.106 Bruegel, Pieter Children’s Games, 77, 78 Procession to Calvary, 77–9, 104 Protestant sympathy of, 213n.183 Buber, Martin, 16 Buddha, the (Siddha- rtha Gautama), 1, 157 Bukovics, E. de, 214n.204 Bulger, James, 5 Bundel, Willem van den, 120 Bunyan, John, 74, 78, 122 Burney, Charles Fox, 195n.65 Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh, 145 Butler’s Lives of the Saints, 215n.4 Byron, William, 220n.19 Caccini, Giovanni: Phalaris and the Bull of Perillus, 75–6 Caesarius, St, 45–9, 50, 52, 57, 82, 202n.32 Caiaphas, 71 Cain, 78 Cairns, Ed, 190n.35 Calkins, Raymond, 192n.21, 228n.40 Calvin, John on games and pastimes, 78 on infant baptism, 105–6 Calvinists, 112 on games and pastimes, 78 in Breaking the Waves (von Trier), 173 see also Geneva Bible Campbell, Joseph, 2 Caplan, Usher, 227n.18 Carabas (‘Marin’), 30–1 Carlino, Lewis John, 167



240

Carmina Burana, 63 carnival, 107 practice of mock–kingship, 31 Cashford, Jules, 196n.104 Cassel, Paul, 199n.164 Cassian, John, see John Cassian, St Cassian of Imola, St, 82 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 179 Catherine of Siena, St, 75 Cats, Jacob (aka vader Cats): Kinder–Spel, 77–8 Cavallini, Pietro, 61, 70 Caxton, William, 34 Cazelles, Raymond, 207n.55 Celano, Thomas de, on children, 86 First Life and Second Life of St. Francis (FL, SL), xvi, xvii, 86, 88–96, 100, 216n.31, 217n.44 Legenda ad usum chori, 93, 94 Century of the Child, 4, 144 Cervantes, Miguel de, 102, 107, 114, 137, 151, 161 The Dog’s Colloquy, 109–11 Don Quixote of La Mancha, 108–9, 111–12, 184 Exemplary Stories, 109, 111 The Glass Licenciate, 111–13, 161, 184 see also Don Quixote; Tomás Rodaja Chamberlain, Lesley, 225n.62 Chelazzi Dini, Giulietta, 206n.47 Chiara, Giuseppe, 162 Childhood Cult, see Cult of Childhood childlessness, 179–80, 230n.18 children’s Bibles, 79, 119, 121, 122, 127–8 see also Bottigheimer, Ruth Children’s Crusade, 6, 84 Children’s Games, see Bruegel, Pieter ‘Children’s Lake’ (Loch Macraide), 85 Christ (Jesus, the Man of Sorrows), 11, 42–3, 92, 96, 98, 124, 125, 129, 137, 138, 172, 184 accused of childishness, 34 anti–familial stance of, 178–9 identified with Elisha, ix, 11, 13, 35, 38, 42, 48–9, 55, 56–62, 65–6, 70–1, 75, 89, 92, 121, 158, 163 Beatitudes, 91 blessing of children by, 7, 114, 115, 134–5, 179, 201n.6 boyhood of (‘lost years’), 29–30 cursing by, 103

exaltation and love of children, 37–8, 40, 84, 116, 163, 175 inseparable with the Old Testament, 36 Guardini on, 176–77 mockery of, 56, 60, 62, 103–4, 121, 203 miraculous birth of, 1 as puer, 84 as run–away child, 178 Sermon on the Mount, 22 Spirit of, 13 summoning of children by, 134, 171, 175, 176, 178–9 as vengeful, 53 in the Winepress (iconographic motif), 71 see also Ascension; Ascent of the Cross; Bearing of the Cross; Crowning with Thorns; Crucifixion; Departure from the Praetorium; Ecce homo; Christ Child; Elisha’s mockery; Flagellation of Christ; Lamentation; Nailing to the Cross; Passion of Christ; Resurrection; Trial before Herod; Trial before Pilate Christ Child (Holy Infant), 7 in art, 66, 97, 99 envisioned by Augustine, 34 as killer, 31 Christian, William A., Jr, 220n.18 Christopher, St, 65 Christopher Robin (character of A.A. Milne), 165 Chrysostom, John, St, 43, 100 Clarke, Adam, 13, 15 Claudius of Turin, 50 Cogan, Mordechai, 193n.36 Cole, Penny J., 204n.51 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 125 Collodi, Carlo, 186 The Adventures of Pinocchio, 142–4, 145, 185, 187 see also Pinocchio Column of Trajan (Rome), 206n.45 Comay, Joan, 192n.21 Comenius, Johannes Amos, 115, 184, 219n.7 Comte, Auguste, 3 concentration camps, 161–2, 170 Constable, Thomas L., 193n.30 Conway, Martin, 209n.109 Cook, Frederic Charles, 193n.37



General Index 241

General Index

Corswant, W., 197n.128 Courreau, Jean, 202n.33 Coveney, Peter, 222n.3, 226n.4 Coventry, Thomas, 126–7 Cranach, Lucas, 75 Crossan, John Dominic, 203n.43 Crouch, Nathaniel, 129, 131 Youths Divine Pastime, 122–3 Crowning with Thorns (scene from Christ’s Passion), 187 in art, 54, 60, 67, 72, 210n.116, 210n.129, Plate 2 Crucifixion (Christ on Calvary), 11, 38–43, 49, 52, 56–7, 183, 187 in art, 60–1, 62, 63, 64–5, 66, 67, 70, 74–5, 78–9, 80, 81, 214n.204 child’s reaction to a picture of, 137–8 ‘populous Calvary’, 60 see also Ascent of the Cross Crusoe, Robinson (character of Daniel Defoe), 179–80 Culley, Robert C., 193n.23, 195n.77 Cult of Childhood, 4, 6–7 backlash against, 181 Cuzin, Jean–Pierre, 211n.136 Cyprian, St, 105 ‘Cyprian’s Supper’, 26–7 Cyprus, 65 Dante Alighieri, 26–7, 85 Commedia (including the Inferno), 26, 27 Darmstadt Passion altar, 64 lyden ende die passie ons Heren Jhesu Christi, Dat, 209n.112 ‘daughters of Jerusalem’, 56, 58, 73, 113, 183 David, 44, 61 David, Gerard, 73 d’Avranches, Henry (Henricus Abrincensis), 88 Legenda versifica of, 93 De Amicis, Edmondo: Cuore, 142 Deissmann, Adolf, 206n.44, 217n.33 Deist, F., 197n.111 De laudibus sancte crucis, 59–60 Delevoy, Robert L., 213n.178 Del Lungo, Isidoro, 199n.161 DeMause, Lloyd, xvi, 4, 219n.68 De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae, 46, 202n.30

Democritus, 28 Departure from the Praetorium (scene from Christ’s Passion), 187 in art, 63 Deposition (scene from Christ’s Passion), 187 in art, 62 Derbes, Anne, 205n.29, 217n.44 Desbonnets, Théophile, 216n.28, 218n.50 Deuteronomistic doctrines and views, 17–18, 22–3, 90, 161 Devil, the (Satan), 45, 79, 129 children of, 182 ‘the Evil One’, 108, 109 psychology of, 14 Dialogus beatae Mariae et Anselmi de passione Domine, 58, 59, 215n.6 Dickens, Charles, 127 Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, A, 223n.9 Didron, Adolphe Napoléon, 205n.21 Dilday, Russell H., 191n.5 Dillenberger, John, 214n.194 Dobson, James (and Gary L. Bauer): Children At Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids, 181, 231n.27 Donaueschingen altar, see Holbein, Hans the Elder Don Juan, 179–80 Don Quixote, 133, 137, 161, 163, 179–80, 187 boys’ tormenting of, 108–9, 111–12 ‘Passion’ of, 108 see also Cervantes, Miguel de Dorothy (character of Frank Baum), 185 Dossi, Dosso, 75 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 151, 184 and children, 138–9 The Brothers Karamazov, 138–42, 143 The Diary of a Writer, 8, 138 The Idiot, 138 A Raw Youth, 139 Drake, Maurice, 215n.5 Duerr, Hans Peter, 85 Durantini, Mary Frances, 213n.185 Dürer, Albrecht, 68, 71, 72, 74, 210n.116 Large Passion, 67 Dvor aák, Max, 210n.127 dwarves, 63, 207n.57



242

Ecce homo (scene from Christ’s Passion), 187 in art, 67–70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80–1, 208n.79, 210n.125 Edel, Leon, 227n.18 Ehrlich, Arnold B., 192n.17 Ekserdjian, David, 212n.163 ‘Elfenalter’, 68 Eliade, Mircea, 2, 7, 156–7, 215n.12 Bengal Nights, 157, 158 Elijah, 16, 18, 21, 31, 43, 45, 51, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 108, 109, 117, 118, 127, 139–40, 183, 194n.57, 197n.116, 217n.36 in art, 227 see also Klein, A.M. Eliot, George, 127 Elisha (var. Eliseus, Helisaeus, Heliseus), passim Elisha’s mockery (biblical tale), xi–xiii, 11, 6, 33–4, Plates 2, 3, 6 in art, 59–60, 120–1, 131, 217n.33 carnival and grotesque elements in, 107 compared with St Francis’s abuse, 87–96, 152–4 deadly consequence of, 180, 187 elaborated upon in the Septuagint, 24–6 Freudian perspective on, 145 imagined aftermath of, 120–1, 151, Plate 7 Lucianic embellishment upon, 161 musical composition inspired by, 151 popularity of, 102 typologically linked with Christ’s Passion, 22, 38–62, 65–6, 70–1, 75, 89, 121, 163 medieval popular view of, 53–5 interpreted or retold by: T. Arnold, 128–29, 131 Augustine, 38–43, 47 N. Crouch (in Youths Divine Pastime), 122–3 Erasmus, 102–3 N. Fontaine, 121 Greek Church fathers, 43–5 T. Fuller, 117–18 J. Hall, 117 Jowett, 131 C.S. Lewis, 14 Luther, 103–5 modern biblical scholars, 12–21 M. Poole, 117, 118–19

post–Augustianian Latin Church fathers, 45–53 rabbinic (Talmudic) thinkers, 23–4 Ruskin, 130–1 Tertullian, 36–8, 43, 44, 47, 48, 52, 201n.6 Thomas Aquinas, 26–7 I. Watts (Divine Songs), 123–4 literary pertinence to: ‘Baldhead Elisha’(Klein), 148–50 Christopher Robin (character of Milne), 165 Christ with children (Gospel scene), 176–81 the Commedia (Dante), 26–7 ‘Cyprian’s Supper’, 26–7 Don Quixote of La Mancha (Cervantes), 108–9 The Glass Licenciate (Cervantes), 111–13 The Golden Bough (Frazer), 164–5 The Lord of the Flies (Golding), 163–4 ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’ (Lamb), 126–7 Peter Pan (Barrie), 186–8 a poem by Ogden Nash, 165–6 ‘A sidewalk café’ (Padilla), 151–2 Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein), 150–1 Ulysses (Joyce), 146–8 Vaticinia de summis pontificibus, 27–8, 146 see also Bethel boys motif Elkind, David: The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, 181, 231n.25 Elliot, Robert C., 196n.87, 216n.17 Elmslie, Kenward: Lizzie Borden (opera), 167–8, 173 Endo, Shusaku: Silence, 162–3 Endter, Wolffgang: Kurfürstenbibel, 214n.196 Engebrechtsz. (abbrev. of Engebrechtszoon; var. Engelbrechtsz.), Cornelis, 67, 69 Englebert, Omer, 216n.25, 227n.31 Entry into Jerusalem (Gospel scene: aka Palm Sunday): in art, 62–3, 76, 109, 221n.45 dramatized in Carmina Burana, 63 Epicurus, 28 Erasmus, Desiderus, 102–3 Lucubrationes, 102 Praise of Folly, 103



General Index 243

General Index

Erikson, Erik, 3 Esau, 26 Eschenbach, Wolfram von, see Wolfram von Eschenbach Euripedes, 28 Euthymius the Athonite (aka the Enlightener), St, 215n.8 Eve (first woman), 110, 186 Mary as, 61 Eyck, Jan van, 64, 72 Fairchild, Robert, 190n.33 Falkenburg, Reindert L., 210n.128 families, breakdown of (broken homes), x, xi, 8, 181 Farmer, David Hugh, 227n.28 Farrar, Frederic William, 192n.8, 228n.41 Faulkner, William, 181 Faust, 179–80 Faustus of Milevis, 38–9, 53, 150 see also Augustine Féchín, St, 84–5 Fedotov, George P., 215n.10 Fenian legend, 85 Field, Frederick, 198n.142 Fielding, Henry: ‘Apology for the Clergy’, 124 Fiedler, Leslie, 9, 10, 176, 182, 185 ‘The Eye of Innocence’ (‘EI’), xvi, 181 on the ‘good bad boy’, 131 Finn, see ‘Boyhood deeds of Finn’ Flagellation of Christ (scene from the Passion): in art 210 Fontaine, Nicolas, 122 L’Histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament, 121 ‘fools for Christ’s sake’ (saloi), 83 Forbush, William Byron, 226n.2 Forcione, Alban, 109 Forsyth, Ilene H., 100, 220n.21 Fortini, Arnaldo, 216n.31, 228n.31 Fournier, Paul, 215n.11 Franciscan Order, see Order of Friars Minor Francis of Assisi, St (Francesco Bernardone, il poverello), 58, 84, 87–99, 100, 107, 137, 140, 151, 163, 187, 217n.44 abuse and derision of, 61, 94–9, 112, 152–4 compared to Christ, 88, 108–9

compared to the mocked Elisha, 88–96, 99, 108–9 iconography of, 61, 81, 84, 96–7 liturgical legends of, 93–4 modern biographies of, 152–4 wed to Lady Poverty, 98 see also Bernardone, Pietro; Bonaventure, St; Celano, Thomas de; Legenda trium sociorum; Order of Friars Minor; Pica; Renunciation of Worldly Goods, St Francis’s Franits, Wayne E., 219n.68, 221n.32 Franken, Frans, II, 208n.79 Frankfurt altar, see Holbein, Hans the Elder Franz, Marie–Louise von: Puer Aeternus, 188, 231n.47 Frazer, James George, 7, 164–5 Freud, Sigmund, 2–3, 7, 146 The Future of an Illusion, 2 theory of infantile sexuality, 145 Totem and Taboo, 3 Fricke, Klaus Dietrich, 195n.65 Friedländer, Max J., xvi, 212n.161, 213n.182, 214n.188 Fröbel, Friedrich, 176 Froissart, Jean, 184 Frueauf, Rueland, 75 fruit–stealing motif in the Confessions (Augustine), 33–4, 132, 184 in Demian (Hesse), 132 in ‘The Golden Pot’ (Hoffmann), 132 compared to Bethel boys motif, 33–4, 132 Fuller, Thomas, 117–18, 119 Gabler, Hans Walter, 226n.7 Gadamer, Hans–Georg, 7 gangs of youths, 145 in East Europe, 158 Elisha’s mockers as example of, 107 in The Memoirs of a Survivor (D. Lessing), 168–72 in early Ireland (fíana), 85–6 pícaro not associated with, 107 see also Bethel boys motif Garboli, Cesare, 212n.163 Gaster, Theodore H., 192n.21, 228n.40 Gavelle, Émile, 211n.137 Geneva Bible (Calvinist), 15 Geneviève, St, 130



244

Gennep, Arnold van: Les Rites de passage, 1 Germain of Auxerre, St, 130 Gerson, Horst, 209n.99 Gibson, Michael, 213n.177 Gifford, Don, 226n.8 Gilgamesh, 187 Gimbutas, Marija, 196n.105 Ginzberg, Louis, 197n.125 Giotto, ix, 61, 97, 99, Plate 5 Giovanni di Paolo, 63 Pecci Altarpiece, 207n.53 girls distinguished from boys, 5, 8–9 female childhood, 185 Glassner, Barry, 190n.28 Goffen, Rona, 99, 218n.47, 218n.55 Goldberg, Cary, 190n.25 Golding, William, 169, 182 Lord of the Flies, 8, 163–4, 166, 168 Goode, Erica, x Goodwin, Jan, 190n.35 Goppelt, Leonhard, 195n.76 Gordon, Cyrus H., 228n.41 Gordon, James, 231n.33 Gorissen, Friedrich, 64, 207n.67 Görtschacher, Urban, 208n.79 Gray, John, 194n.47 Great Mother archetype, 19 Green, Julien, 228n.31 Gregory of Rimini (‘torturer of children’), 85 Gregory of Tours, St, 82 Gregory XIII, Pope, 82 Grenaille, François de L’honneste fille, 114 L’honneste garçon, 114 Grintz, Yehoshua M., 197n.113 Guardini, Romano, 176–7, 180 Guido II (bishop of Assisi), 93, 97 Gumperts Bible, 60 Gunkel, Hermann, 14 Gutmann, David, 190n.30, 230n.10 Habig, Marion, 216n.27, 218n.50 Haidt, John Valentine, 78 Halevi, Judah, 29 Hall, G. Stanley: Adolescence, 145 Hall, Joseph, Bishop, 120 Contemplations, 117 Ham, 54 Hanson, R.P.C., 201n.3

Harris, Ryan, 6 Harrison, Jefferson C., 212n.167 Hart–Davies, D.E., 194n.50 Hartwell, Samuel W., 226n.2 Hastings, James, 194n.51 Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 2 Hawley, Jack Stratton, 191n.54 Hazard, Paul, 188 Heemskerck, Marten van, 76 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 125 Heine, Heinrich, 136 Heinlein, Robert A.: Stranger in a Strange Land, 150–1 Held, Julius, 212n.168 Henry, Avril, 204nn.53–4, 205n.25, 217n.33 Henry d’Avranches, see d’Avranches, Henry Hentschel, Georg, 193n.34 Heraclitus, 7 Herbst, Hans, 211n.137 Herder Dictionary of Symbols, The, 7 Hermann, Johannes, 195n.70 Hermann, Placid, 216n.23 Herod Agrippa I, 30, 31 Herod Antipas, 203n.44 Herod Philip, 30 Herod the Great, 183 Heschel, Abraham J., 216n.32 Hesiod, 196n.106 Hesse, Hermann, 156–7 Demian, 132 Siddhartha, 157 Hesychius, 24 Hildebert, 52 Hillman, James, 175, 181 ‘Abandoning the Child’ (‘AC’), xv Hippolytus of Rome, 190n.39 Hitchcock’s New and Complete Analysis of the Holy Bible, 218n.206 Hobbes, Thomas on children, 116 The Citizen, 115–16 Leviathan, 115 Hobbs, T. Raymond, 195n.62 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus: ‘The Golden Pot’, 132 Holbein, Hans the Elder, 72 Donaueschingen altar, 67–8 Frankfurt altar, 67–8 Kaisheim/Munich High Altar, 67–8, 71 Hollstein, F.W.H., 213n.171



General Index 245

General Index

Holmes, Urban Tignor, Jr, 216n.20 Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost), 47, 48, 52 homo religiosus, 1 Honeycut, Roy L., Jr, 192n.8 Honorius Augustodunensis, 50, 53 Hooke, Samuel Henry, 197n.114 Hopkins, Keith, 200n.194 Horne, Thomas Hartwell, 12, 15, 18 Hosokawa, Ryuichiro, 190n.34 Hrabanus Maurus, 26, 50, 51, 53, 84 Hubmaier, Balthasar, 106 Hübner, Johann: Zweimal zwei und fünfzig auserlesene biblische Historien aus dem Alten und Neuen Testamente, 121–2 Huckleberry Finn, 9, 185 as ‘good bad boy’, 131 see also Twain, Mark Hugh of Saint–Victor, 50, 53 Hughes, Richard, 182 A High Wind in Jamaica, 164 Huizinga, Johann, 7 notion of homo ludens, 11 Humbert of Romans: Legenda liturgica antiqua Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum, 94 infant baptism, see baptism Infant Jesus, see Christ Child Infant Notre Dame: in art, 99 Irenaeus, St, 29 Isaac, 44, 45, 121 binding (aqedah) of, 22 Isidore, St, 49–50, 52, 53, 203n.37 Iswolsky, Hélène, 225n.69 Ivanov, Vyacheslav I., 225n.62 Jackson, F.J. Foakes, 191n.5 Jacquemart de Hesdin: Très Belles Heures de Jean de France, Duc de Berry, 63 Jakobs, Alan, 223 James, Henry, 127 James, M.R., 205n.26 James, William: The Varieties of Religious Experience, 2, 3–4 Janson, H.W., 206n.45 Jefferies, Richard, 127 Jellicoe, Sidney, 198n.142 Jeremiah: in legend, 21 Jeroboam, 24 Jerome, St, 49, 103 biblical translation by, 25–6 Jesus, see Christ

Jews, the (Israelites), 30, 36, 45, 47–9, 51, 52, 55, 57, 84, 103–5, 114, 132, 180–1 scapegoating of, 35, 39–43 Joachim of Fiore, 27, 84, 146–7, 148 See also Vaticinia de summis pontificibus Joest von Kalkar, Jan, 69 John, St, 62 John Cassian, St: Conferences, 100–1 John of Damascus, St, 215n.8 Johnson, A.R., 217n.32 Johnson, Samuel, 116 John the Baptist, St, 22 John the Deacon, 26 Jones, Gwilym H., 195n.62 Jones, William Henry Samuel, 199n.166 Jørgensen, Johannes, 153 Joseph, St (husband of Mary), 178, 200n.181 Joseph of Arimathea, St, 80 Jowett, Benjamin, 128 ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, 131 Joyce, James, 150 Dubliners, 147 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 147 Stephen Hero, 146–7 Ulysses, 146–8 Jung, Carl Gustav, 2 Jungians, 19, 188 Jupan, Ludwig (aka Meister Loedewich), 71 Justin Martyr, St, 43 juvenile delinquency, 21, 145, 197n.123 in early Ireland, 216n.22 see also boys; Elisha’s mockery; Bethel boys motif Kafka, Franz The Castle, 156 ‘Children on a Country Road’, 155 Das Kind und die Stadt, 155 paedophobia of, 155 The Trial, 156 Kafka–Handbuch, 228n.47 Kaftal, George, 218n.54 Kaisheim/Munich altar, see Holbein, Hans the Elder Kalkar: Altarpiece of the Passion, 71, 72 Kaniecki, Michael, 229n.56 Kant, Immanuel, 136 Karl, Frederick R., 228n.42 Karlsruhe Passion altar, 67, 73, 76



246

General Index 247

Kuhn, Reinhard, 155–6, 219n.68 La Fontaine, Jean de, 115 La Hyre (La Hire), Laurent de, ix, 75 The Death of the Children of Bethel, 120–1, 151, Plate 7 Laib, Conrad, 65 Lamb, Charles, 125–8, 148, 150 childhood of, 126–7 Essays of Elia, 126 ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’, 126–7 ‘Parental Recollections’, 222n.6 Lamentation (scene from Christ’s Passion): in art, 74 Lamorisse, Albert: The Red Balloon, 164, 172 Landersdorfer, Simon, 194n.60 Landow, George P., 223n.13 Larrañaga, Ignacio, 153 Layard, Ernest, 1, 4 Lazarillo de Tormes, 106–7 Leeuw, Gerardus van der, 2 Légasse, S., 197n.124, 230n.8 Legenda trium sociorum, 216n.28 León Bible, 59, 60 Leontius, 83 Lessing, Doris The Fifth Child, 182–3 The Memoirs of a Survivor, 168–72 Levenson, Jon D., 197n.128 Levin, Ira: Rosemary’s Baby, 182 Lewis, C.S.: The Screwtape Letters, 14 Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 230n.8 Lieb, Norbert, 209n.89 Life Application Bible, The, 20 Limbourg brothers (Pol, Hennequin, and Herman): Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 63, 72, 73 Lindblom, J., 194n.62 Lippo Memmi, 64 Little Prince, the, 10, 186, 188 as myth of puerile individualism, 185 Lombard, Lambert, 69 Lombroso, Cesare, 145 L’uomo delinquente, 142 Long, Burke O., 193n.23 Longinus (soldier at Christ’s Crucifixion), 64 lost boys, the (characters in Barrie’s Peter Pan), 10, 186–7 Lot (biblical character), 96



Katzheimer, Wolfgang: Würzburg Altar, 67, 71 Kazantzakis, Helen, 228n.33 Kazantzakis, Nikos: Saint Francis, 153–4 Kendrick, Walter, 221n.29 Kerényi, Károly, 2 Kerouac, Jack: as ‘good bad boy’, 131 Key, Ellen, 4 Kierkegaard, Søren, 139, 151, 174, 176, 187 attitude towards childhood, 133–5 childhood of, 132 and the Corsair affair, 135–8 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 134 Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 224n.36 Either/Or, 133 Fear and Trembling, 7 ‘“Guilty”/“Not Guilty?”’ (aka Quidam’s diary), 133 journals of, xvi, 134 ‘Letter to the Reader’, 133 The Point of View, 223n.28 Practice in Christianity, 134, 137 Prefaces, 225n.57 Repetition, 133 Stages on Life’s Way, 133, 134 tormented by children, 136–8 pseudonyms of: Anti–Climacus, 134, 137, 138, 178 Constantine Constantius, 133 Frater Taciturnus, 133, 181 Johannes Climacus, 1, 134 Johannes de Silentio, 178 Judge William (ethicist), 133, 179–80 Kimhi, David ben Joseph, see Radak Kinnear, Karen L., 190 Kipling, Rudyard, 185, 186 Kittel, Rudolf, 195n.62 Klein, A.M. (Abraham Moses) ‘Elijah’ (poem), 148 ‘Baldhead Elisha’ (poem), 148–50 Kleinschmidt, Beda, 218n.55 Klostermann, August, 194n.44 Koch, Robert Alan, 62, 76, 206n.46, 212n.166 Korah (Core), sons of, 39, 41 Kosinski, Jerzy Notes of the Author of ‘The Painted Bird’, 229n.56 The Painted Bird, 158–61, 164 Kraków: wood panel depiction of Elisha’s mockery, 120, Plate 6 Krishna, 10

General Index

Lower Church of San Francesco (Assisi), 97–8 Lowrie, Walter, 223n.27 Lucas, E.V., 222n.5 Lucas van Leyden, 67, 69, 72, 74, 79 Lucian, see Septuagint Lukács, Georg, 111 Lumby, J. Rawson, 193n.31 Luther, Martin, 15, 102–5, 121 Commentary on Psalm 109, 103 Lectures on Genesis, 104–5 see also Luther Bibel Lutherans, 105, 174 Luther Bibel (Luther’s German Bible), 15, 79 LXX, see Septuagint Lyman, Richard B., 200n.185 Macalister, A., 194n.55 Madonna and Child (Virgin and Child), 79, 100 Malbim (Meier Loeb ben Jehiel Michael), 24 Manichean heresy, 52 Manicheans (Manichaeans), 26, 46, 47 Mann, Thomas: Doctor Faustus, 157–8, 161 March, William: The Bad Seed, 182 Marcion, 36, 37, 53, 150 see also Tertullian Marcionites, 26 heresy of, 52 Marcus, David, 192n.13, 197n.123, 216n.17 Marcus, Ivan G., 219n.70 Marijnissen, Roger H., 77, 209n.112, 213n.176 Mark, St, bishop of Arethusa, 82 Marrow, James H., xvi, 61, 62, 70, 207n.59, 210n.128 Martindale, Andrew, 62–3, 206n.47 Martini, Simone, see Simone Martini Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 160 Mary (the Virgin), 58, 62, 74 disowned by Jesus, 178 left son–less by Crucifixion, 183 maternal clinging of, 178 as mother of the church, 61 mourning, 65 as new Eve, 61 swooning of, 61, 79 see also Madonna and Child

Mary Magdalene, 173 master of Cologne: ‘Large Calvary’, 64, 68 Master of Delft, 69, 70, 74 Master of Liesborn, 211n.140 Master of Pulkau, 68 Master of Schöppingen Schöppingen alterpiece, 70 Soester Altar, 70 Master of the Darmstadt Passion altar, 64 Master of the Jünteler Epitaph, 66, 70 Master of Veronica, 65 Matheney, M. Pierce, Jr, 192n.8 Mauchline, J., 192n.21 Maximinus, 24 Mazzanti, Enrico, 143 McCone, Kim R., 216n.22 McKendrick, Malveena, 220n.19 McKillop, Alan D., 222n.4 Meckenem, Israhel van, 208n.79, 211n.137 Meditatio pauperis in solitudine, 96, 98 Meiss, Millard, 207n.52 Meister des Münsterer Nikolaustodes, 75 Meister Loedewich, see Jupan, Ludwig Melanchthon, Philip: Melanchthonian editors, 105 Mellini, Gian Lorenzo, 207n.63 Memling, Hans, 71 Menander, 28 Menz, Cäsar, 206n.41 Merian, Matthäus, 79 Icones biblicae, 78, 119–20 Messner, Richard G., 13 Methodists, 128 Michelangelo, 29 Miedzian, Myriam, 190n.36 Million Man’s March, the, 5 Milne, A.A. ‘Lines and Squares’, 165, 229n.66 Winnie the Pooh, 165 Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 163 Mishima, Yukio: The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, 166–7, 187 ‘mispers’, 187 Molière, 102 Monroy, Juan Antonio, 220n.17 Montaigne, 7, 114 Montgomery, James A., 194n.62 Morin, Germain, 202n.34 Morrison, Blake, 5 Moses, 20, 21



248

General Index 249

Naaman, 38 Nabakov, Vladimir, 181 Nagy, Joseph Falaky, 216n.22 Nailing to the Cross (scene from Christ’s Passion), 187 in art, 61, 73–4 naked child (art motif), 99 Namerari Tjapaltjarri, Mick, 191n.55 Napoleon, 138 Narcissus, 120, 121 Nash, Ogden, 9, 11, 164–5 Neff, Amy, 59, 61, 62, 206n.39 Nelson, Richard D., 192n.14 Nero, 29 Neumann, Erich, 196n.105 Neverland (in Barrie’s Peter Pan), 10, 165, 184, 185–8 Newell, William Wells, 231n.38 New Jerusalem Bible, The, 15 Nicholas III, Pope, 27, 199n.161 Nicolò di Tuldo, 75 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 185 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 138 Niobe, 120 Noah, 26, 54, 105, Plate 2 North Saxon master, 68 Novalis, 125 Oates, Joyce Carol, 182 O’Hagan, Andrew, 231n.46 Old Martha (character of Wiesel), 161–2, 187 Oostsanen, Jacob Cornelisz. van, 210n.116 Opie, Iona, 191n.52 Opie, Peter, 191n.52 Order of Friars Minor (Franciscan Order), 93, 94, 95, 96 Spiritual and Conventual factions of, 99

Origen, 24, 37, 49, 203n.36 Hexepla, 24 Orsini, Giovanni Gaetano, 27 Orsini polyptych, see Simone Martini Otto, Rudolf, 18 The Idea of the Holy, 3 Pacino di Bonaguida, 97 Padilla, Heberto: ‘A sidewalk café’ (poem), 151–2 Pafford, J.H.P., 222n.58 Palm Sunday, see Entry into Jerusalem Panofsky, Erwin, 208n.85 parents, 175, 179 Adam and Eve as first, 110 afraid of children, 176 Cain’s disobedience of his, 78 corruptive influence of, 86–7 of Elisha’s mockers, xi, 20, 43, 46–7 Jesus’ relationship with his, 178 as obstacles to child’s progress towards Jesus, 178 Passion of Christ (Stations of the Cross), 50, 52, 104 presence of children during, 11, 56–81, 84, 120, 136, 137, 187 typologically linked with Elish’s mockery, 22, 38–62, 65–6, 70–1, 75, 89, 121, 163 see also Ascent of the Cross; Bearing of the Cross; Christ; Crowning with Thorns; Crucifixion; Departure from the Praetorium; Deposition; Ecce homo; Elisha’s mockery; Flagellation of Christ; Lamentation; Nailing to the Cross; Trial before Herod; Trial before Pilate Pattison, Robert, 127 Paul, St (Saul), 22, 26, 45, 87, 89, 100, 175 on children, 31–2, 40 on giving up childish ways, 32, 134 Peake, Arthur S., 191n.5 Pelikan, Jaroslav, xv, 219nn.5–6 Penner, Bruce: The Bears of Elisha (musical score), 151 Perella, Nicholas J., 225–6n.74 Peter, St, 48 Peter Damian, 50–1, 53, 55 Peter Pan, 9–10, 165, 166, 185–8 as myth of puerile individualism, 185 Peter Riga: Aurora, 53–4



Mostaert, Jan, 68–9, 70, 74 Mowgli (character of Kipling), 9, 186, 187–8 as myth of puerile individualism, 185 Muhammad, the Prophet, 22 Muller, Norman E., 210n.128, 213nn.172–3 Multscher, Hans, ix, 65, 66, 70, 72, 74, 81 Wursach Altar, 65, Plate 4 Munkácsy, Mihály, 80–1 Mürken, Axel Hinrich, 206n.51 mystery drama, 68

General Index

Pharaoh, 37 Phelps, William Lyon, 228n.39 Philip, Lotte Brand, 207n.65 Phillips, Angela, 4 Philo of Alexandria, 28, 30, 115 Philopatris, 198n.152 Pica (St Francis’s mother), 93, 97 pícaro (literary type), 102, 106–7 compared with Elisha’s mockers, 107 Pickering, Frederick P., 206n.41 Pictor Carmine, 60 Pied Piper of Hameln, 170, 179 Pierhal, J., 228n.34 Pietersz., Pieter, 69 Pilate, Pontius, 52, 63, 68, 71, 72, 203n.44, 210n.129 Pinocchio, 9, 186, 188 as myth of puerile individualism, 185 see also Collodi, Carlo Pisano, Giovanni, 60 Pisano, Nicola, 79 Pisa Pulpit, 60 Siena Pulpit, 60 Planctus Mariae, 58–9 Plato, 28 Laws, 175 Lysis, 175 Meno, 175 Republic, 175, 176 Plon, Eugene, 214n.199 Pollock, Zailig, 227n.18 Polzin, Robert, 195n.81 Pontius Pilate, see Pilate, Pontius Poole, Matthew, 117, 118–19 Poole, Roger, 135–6 Pope, Marvin H., 195n.68 Pope–Hennessy, John, 211n.136 Postman, Neil: The Disappearance of Childhood, 181, 231n.23 poverello, il, see Francis of Assisi, St Princeton University Index of Christian Art, The, 205n.19 Procession to Calvary, see Bearing of the Cross; Bruegel, Pieter Procopius of Gaza, 43–5, 82 Promise Keepers, the, 5 Prosper of Aquitaine, St, 45 Prudentius, 82 Prus, Bolescaw: ‘The Sins of Childhood’, 8 Pseudo–Bede, 58, 203n.37 Puffer, J. Adams, 226n.2 Puritans, 122

Qur’an, 197n.127 Rachel (biblical character), 184 Radak (David ben Joseph Kimhi), 23 ragazzo di strada (street kid), 143 see also boys Rahlfs, Alfred, 25, 198nn.142, 147 Rank, Otto, 2 Raphael, 71 see also Spasimo di Sicilia, Lo Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac), 23 Ratgeb, Jerg, 67, 210n.125 Redondo, Augustin, 220n.18 Reeves, Marjorie, 199n.158 Rehm, Martin, 195n.62 Renan, Ernest, 150 Life of Jesus, 80 Reni, Guido, 75 Reno, Janet (U.S. Attorney General), 5 Renunciation of Worldly Goods, St Francis’s, 66, 71, 93 in art, 96–9, Plate 5 Responses (Responsiones ad orthodoxos de quibusdam necessariis quaestionibus), 43–4 Resurrection, 49, 183 Revell Bible Dictionary, The, 193n.28 Rhea (mother of Zeus), 19, 196n.106 Rich, Frank, 191n.45 riote du monde, La, 85 Road to Calvary, see Bearing of the Cross Robels, Hella, 210n.127 Robinson, Bernard P., 194n.60 Robinson, J., 195n.62 Rofé, Alexander, 197n.130 Roger of Salisbury, 54 Rohde, F., 205n.16, 209n.94 Rolland, Kayla, x Roman friezes, 62 Roman Martyrology, The, 215n.3 Romantics (Romanticism), 125 attitude toward childhood, 131, 132, 138, 176, 228n.47 Rosasco, Betsy J., 210n.128, 213nn.172–3 Rose, Jacqueline, 185 Rosenberg, A.J., 197n.132 Rosenberg, Jakob, 212n.161 Rosenberg, Pierre, 212n.163, 221n.49 Rosenzweig, Franz, 16 Rossier, H.L., 192n.11 Roth, Elisabeth, 205n.12



250

Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 115, 125, 131, 176 Émile, 116–17 Rowe, William Woodin, 225n.63 Rowlands, John, 211n.137 Rugby (British school), 1, 128, 130 Rule of St Benedict, 84 REmi, Jalkluddln, 10–11 Rupert of Deutz, 50, 51–2, 53, 55, 57 Ruskin, John, 128, 129–31 Sabatier, Paul, 155 Life of St. Francis, 152–3 Sachs, Hans, 78 Saint–Exupéry, Antoine de, 185, 186 Salvini, Roberto, 206n.38 Samson, 26 Šanda, A., 194n.60 Sandberg–Valvalà, Evelyn, 205n.31 Satan, see Devil Saul, see Paul, St Saxl, Fritz, 206n.45 Schäuffelein, Hans, 210n.123, 210n.125 Schechter, Harold, 190n.32 Schellenberg, Johann Rudolf, 80 60 biblische Geschichten des neüen Testaments, 80 Schiller, Friedrich, 125 Schiller, Gertrude, 61, 64–5, 209n.96, 214n.196 Iconography in Christian Art (ICA), xvi Schinkelaltar (St Mary, Lübeck), 74, 208n.79 Schmitt, Hans–Christoph, 193n.38 Schnack, Jutta, 208n.79 Schochet, Elijah Judah, 196n.95 Schongauer, Martin, 71–2, 76 Schöppingen altarpiece, see Master of Schöppingen Schultz, James A., 191n.53, 216n.18 Screech, M.A., 56 Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (LFC), xvi Second Crusade, 56 Seneca, 28–9, 46, 86 Septuagint (LXX), 20, 38, 184, 201n.6 Lucian’s (aka Lucianic or Antiochian) recension of, 24, 25, 62, 65, 83, 113, 142, 143, 143, 161 Origen’s edition (Hexapla) of, 24 Theodotion’s revision of, 24–5, 44, 46 See also Theodotion

Serck, Luc, 213n.171 Serrano–Plaja, Arturo, 225n.63 Seuse (Suso), Heinrich: Das Minnebüchlein, 59 Shakespeare, William, 102, 107, 151 Coriolanus, 113 1 Henry IV, 114 2 Henry IV, 114 King Lear, 114 The Merchant of Venice, 113–14 Much Ado About Nothing, 114 Richard III, 114 The Winter’s Tale, 114 Shimei (biblical character), 61 Shunammite’s child, the (biblical character), 38, 183 ‘sibling society’, 4–5 Siddha-rtha Gautama, see Buddha, the Silverius, St, Pope, 27 Simeon, St, 83, 140 Simone Martini, 64, 74, 207n.56 Orsini Polyptych, 62–3 Simon of Cyrene, 73 Simons, Menno, 106 Sixth Seal of the Apocalypse, 96 Skinner, John, 194n.55 Slaughter of the Innocents, 7, 183–4 in art, 121 Slotki, Israel Wolf, 191n.5 Smart, Alastair, 218n.55 Smith, Joseph, Jr, 22 Snaith, Norman H., 192n.21 Snyder, James, 209n.105 Socrates, 136, 176 Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi), 75 Sodom and Gomorrah, 36, 55 Soester Altar, see Master of Schöppingen soul, the as child, 99 ‘contrary states of’, 125 Spasimo di Sicilia, Lo (Raphael), 72, 73 replicas of, 73 Speculam humanae salvationis, 55 Speyer, Julian, 94 Vita S. Francisci, 93 Spock, Benjamin, 115 Stade, Bernhard, 194n.61, 198n.148 Stange, Alfred, xv, 209n.89 Stanton, Marietta: Our Children Are Dying, 181, 231n.26 Starbuck, Edwin Diller, 2 Steiner, George, 8



General Index 251

General Index

Stek, J.H., 192n.8 Stephen, St, 22, 25 Stokes, Margaret, 205n.21 Storch, Levin, 209n.96 Strigel, Bernhardin, 71 Summerfield, Geoffrey, 222n.60 Supplicationes variae, 60–1 Suso, see Seuse, Heinrich Swabian master, 67 Swaggart, Jimmy Lee, 20 Swift, Jonathan, 147 Székely, András, 214n.200 Taddeo Gaddi, 98 Tadmor, Hayim, 193n.36 Talmud, 15, 23–4, 26, 118 ‘temple–boys’, 65, 208n.75 Terras, Victor, 139, 225n.63 Tertullian, 36–8, 43, 44, 47, 48, 52, 201n.6 Against Marcion, 36 Theodore Prodromus, 45 Theodotion, 128, 182 Septuagint revision of, 24–5, 44, 46 Thode, Henry, 218nn.54, 65 Thomas Aquinas, St, 26–7 Thornton, Weldon, 226n.8 Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 80, 137 Tindall, William York, 226n.9 Titus and Vespasian, 49, 51, 53, 54, 60, Plate 3 Tom, W., 194n.44 Tomás Rodaja (character of Cervantes: aka ‘glass man’), 111–13, 137, 161, 163 ‘torturer of children’, see Gregory of Rimini Traherne, Thomas, 125 Très Belles Heures de Jean de France, Duc de Berry, see Jacquemart de Hesdin Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, see Limbourg brothers Trial before Herod (scene from Christ’s Passion): in art, 60 Trial before Pilate (scene from Christ’s Passion): in art, 80–1 Twain, Mark (pseud. of Samuel Clemens), 127 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 131, 185 See also Huckleberry Finn United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child, 8

Upper Church of San Francesco (Assisi), 97–8 Varet, Alexandre–Louis: De l’éducation chrétienne des enfants, 114 Vaticinia de summis pontificibus (attrib. to Joachim of Fiore), 27–8, 146 Vaughn, Henry, 125 Veronica, 67 Vespasian, see Titus and Vespasian Via Dolorosa, see Bearing of the Cross Victorians tastes in art, 129 notions on education, 129 sympathy for children, 130 Virgil (Vergil), 35, 85 Vita beate virginis Marie et Salvatoris rhythmica, 58 Virgin, the, see Mary von Trier, Lars, 172–4 Breaking the Waves, ix, 173–4, Plate 8 Voragine, Jocabus de, 84, 99, 100–1 The Golden Legend (GL), xvi, 34, 218n.49 Vor Frue Kirke (Copenhagen), 137, 214n.199 Vorreux, Damien, 217n.43 Vos, Dirk de, 210n.128 Vos, Howard F., 193n.28 Wach, Joachim, 230n.13 Walafrid (Walahfrid) Strabo, 50, 51, 53 Walker, Barbara G., 196n.106 Walsh, Jerome T., 197n.116 Ware, Timothy (Kallistos), 215n.10 Warner, Marina, 5 Warrangkula Tjupurrula, Johnny (‘Johnny W.’), xiii Man and Naughty Boys’ Water Dreaming, 10, Plate 1 Wasiolek, Edward, 141, 225n.63 Watt, Ian, 179, 185–6 Watts, Isaac, 129, 131 Divine Songs, 123–4, 127 Way of the Cross, see Bearing of the Cross Weber, Max, 217n.32 Weinraub, Bernard, 231n.28 Wenham, John W., 14 West, D.J., 226n.2 Wiesel, Elie, 231n.20 The Town Beyond the Wall, 161–2, 170 Willis, Fred C., 212n.168



252

General Index 253

Wydytz, Hans, 79, 208n.79 Yarblonsky, Lewis, 226n.2 Yeats, William Butler, 147 Zakovitch, Yair, 194n.46 Zeus, 19, 196n.106 Zinzendorf, Count von, 78 Ziolkowski, Eric, 200n.178, 220n.20, 224n.41, 225n.60 Ziolkowski, Jan M., 198n.153 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 223n.26 Zwingli, Ulrich, 105–6



Winn, Marie: Children Without Childhood, 181, 231n.24 Wiseman, Donald J., 193n.33 Witham, W. Tasker, 226n.3 Wixom, William D., 214n.195 Wolfram von Eschenbach: Parzival, 87 Wolgemut, Michael, 208n.79, 210n.125 Wordsworth, Christopher, 13 Wordsworth, William, 125 Wursach Altar, see Multscher, Hans Würthwein, Ernst, 193n.36 Würzburg Altar, see Katzheimer, Wolfgang Wycliffe, John: Bible of, 46–7

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