The
study of children and childhood in late antiquity is a bourgeoning
field. Studies to this point have focused primarily on socio-cultural
conditions surrounding children in early Christianity or Late
Antiquity generally, such as the education of children, children in
relation to violence, liturgical practice, play, the child-parent
relationship, abortion, infanticide, etc. (e.g. Clark (1994); Leyerle
(1997); Bakke (2005); Horn and Martens, (2009); Horn and Phenix
(2009)). This paper seeks to contribute to this fascinating area of
research by exploring the spirituality of children (an important
contemporary issue in theology and religious studies, psychology and
anthropology which has not yet taken root in late antiquity studies)
and how it functions in early Latin Christian perspectives on
conversion and spiritual life, in other words, on becoming and being
Christian.
Early
Christians relied often upon the words of Jesus in Matthew 18.3
(‘unless you are converted and become like little children, you
will not enter the kingdom of God’) as a model for Christian
conversion and holiness: Being Christian is about becoming like a
little child, so that Leo could write: ‘Christ loves infancy,
master of humility, rule of innocence, model of gentleness’ (Sermo
8.3).
Predominantly, the metaphor of childhood is interpreted morally, to
promote a return of the Christian to the child’s outward existence
of ‘innocence’. The child’s lack of concern for status, wealth,
and, perhaps most often, sexual lust (e.g. Tert. De
mon. 8) is
held up as an exemplum of Christian virtue. However, there are texts
which imply that the image of the child went beyond a passive outward
example of the virtuous life. For Hilary of Poitiers, this return to
childhood involves a resemblance, image, or vision of the humility of
Christ himself (speciem
humilitatis dominicae),
and this speciem
is a
return to the very nature of childhood (In
Matth. 18.1:
reuersos
in naturam puerorom).
There is a sense here in which the spirituality of children, the
child’s natural relation to God, and not only moral innocence of
humility, is the goal of the Christian life. This paper will explore
this primarily through investigating the role of the vox
infantis in
Christian conversion and identity formation. There are critical
points in the lives of some early Christians, such as Augustine’s
conversion and the consecration of both Ambrose and Martin of Tours
as bishops, in which the voice of a child is accepted as the voice of
God itself. The authority given to the voice of the child over the
Christian and how these Christians are seen to manifest the journey
of return to childhood in obedience to it, teach us something about
the role the childhood metaphor of Jesus played in early Latin
Christianity. To follow the voice of the child is to follow God’s
own voice and, particularly with the christological connection
mentioned above (what François Bovon (1999) has called ‘christology
of the child’), this perhaps demonstrates that, from the
perspective of these texts, in order for one to be Christian she must
‘convert and become like a child’ because God himself is
childlike.
