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Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination

Sara Ritchey

ESSAYS

Spiritus 8 (2008): 64–82 © 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

In the Sister Book of Engelthal, a convent chronicle written by Christina Ebner in the fourteenth century, we read of a young nun of the community, Alheit of Trochau. The chronicle reports that one day, while strolling through the cloister garden, Alheit approached every tree in the garden, threw her arms around their trunks, and proclaimed, “Each tree is our Lord Jesus Christ!”1 Al-heit’s arboreal embraces were entirely physical and, more to the point, tactile. She did not stumble across trees in illuminations or embrace them in visions. She wrapped her arms around real trees. Though her sisters may have observed her hugging trees, Alheit knew that she was wrapping her arms around Christ. Although unusual in her ability to experience the presence of Christ through actual, physical trees, Alheit was not, in fact, alone in regarding a tree to be Christ. There are numerous other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century examples of spiritually-minded Christian women and men encountering Christ in various trees located in texts, on walls, in visions, in gardens, using trees to achieve the experience of Christ’s presence. Why did trees occupy such a central place in the religious imagination of the late Middle Ages? In this essay, I will consider how Alheit and her contemporaries made arboreal metaphors for imagin-ing Christ—a process I refer to as “Spiritual arborescence”—and what such metaphor-making suggests more generally about the religious imagination as a place for sustaining the presence of God.2

“Spiritual arborescence” is a term I use to indicate both the proliferation of late medieval Christian devotional imagery connected with trees and the spiritual practices associated with such tree imagery. More particularly, it is the process of conjuring Christ in the imagination through contemplation of the structure of a tree. Late medieval Christians engaged Christ through the image of trees in part to help them address serious questions about their relation to God. Caroline Bynum puts the question this way: “How—if matter signifies change and change signifies decay—can God inhere in matter? Yet an incar-nate God must so inhere. How—if Christ has gone away with resurrection and ascension—do Christians find him present here on earth? Yet without some presence, some access, there is no point to devotion.”3 According to the texts and images discussed in this essay, these questions could be addressed at least

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in part by imagining trees. After all, it was on a tree that God had become in-carnate and entered into matter; and thus a tree guaranteed the doctrine of the incarnation of the transcendent. Also, it was on a tree that the God-man died, providing new life for humanity; a tree thus also guaranteed the doctrine of salvation. Spiritual arborescence was a process of “pictur[ing] in your imagina-tion a tree” so that, just as trees had once brought Christ into the world and made that world perfectible through the instrument of his death, so trees with cultivation could continue to thrive and make God’s presence palpable.

Tree imagery was pervasive in the Middle Ages. Hermits and ascetic monks sought solace and spiritual testing among the uncultivated trees of the dwindling thirteenth-century wilderness.4 Instructional manuscripts were filled with schematic arboreal flourishes that diagramed for mnemonic ease the long lists of virtues and vices, the beatitudes, books of the bible, or other such use-ful facts that preachers and penitents were invited to remember.5 The use of trees for model-making appears in medieval texts ranging from Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias to the elaborately designed folios of the Carthusian-transcribed Desert of Religion.6 What distinguishes the trees used in the process of spiri-tual arborescence is the focus on the body of Christ. Although the association of trees with Christ through the medium of the cross goes back as far as the first epistle of Peter—“he bore our sins on his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24); nevertheless, trees take on new meanings in late medieval Christian spirituality. In this essay I shall focus my attention on two late medieval arboreal models that emphatically express these new meanings.

The first model is an adaptation of the Tree of Jesse, which I refer to as the “tree of incarnation.” The tree of incarnation first appears in the literature of Christian spiritual instruction designed for twelfth-century female religious communities.7 The women of these communities used the communally-modi-fied Jesse Tree as a mirror reflection of their own spiritual work in bringing forth Christ and making him present in the world. In an act of collective imagining, the image of the tree of incarnation enabled these women to believe and act as if their community was united in the diversity of creation within the singularity of the body of God. It is in this sense that the tree of incarnation is principally a communal model, one that demonstrates how the religious com-munity is united together in one another in God. In the branches of the tree of incarnation, Alheit would see that the multiplicity of the individual members of her religious community, through persistent prayer and discipline, comes to equal one identity.

The second tree that I shall discuss here—the “tree of crucifixion”—was designed as a contemplative tool for imagining events in the life, death and resurrection of Christ and for appreciating how these events altered the order of creation. In this model, meditation on branches signifying Christ’s embodi-

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ment and earthly life encourages an imaginative mimesis, whereby the practi-tioner is conformed to Christ. This tree helped to foreground Christ’s human sacrifice as the one thing that accomplished the altered status of creation, the one event that gave objects in the material world hope for correspondence to divinity, hope of transformation into God’s image.8 The tree of crucifixion, in contrast to the tree of incarnation, was primarily an individual contemplative model and goad to compassionate conformity to Christ. As I see it, these two arboreal models speak of a newly developing dialectic between communal and individual spiritual practice. The tree of incarnation enabled meditants to imagine a communal unity in Christ, while the tree of crucifixion offered late medieval Christians a means of individual perfection; the personal relation-ship and union with Christ was only attainable through the discipline of the religious community, and the religious community was only a center of grace if each individual sought a personal conformity to Christ by conjuring him through these tree models in the imagination.

TREE OF INCARNATION

The visual motif of trees carrying, sprouting or otherwise birthing human bodies in the literature of Christian spiritual instruction first appears around the twelfth century, where it is firmly embedded in the imagery of the Tree of Jesse. The idea and iconography of the Jesse Tree developed from the prophecy of Isaiah 11:1–2: “A shoot shall come out from the stem of Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his roots and the spirit of the Lord shall rest on him.” A long exegetical tradition beginning with Tertullian in the third century had inter-preted this prophecy as foretelling the birth of Christ from the Virgin Mary.9 But the figurative image of the Tree of Jesse only emerged as an iconographic trope in the twelfth century, when it began to convey additional meanings, including the notion that the discipline of the religious community could be the very location of grace.10 Take, as an example, a Dominican adaptation where Dominic anchors a vinous tree that culminates in the fruit of Mary and Christ, guarantors of the grace surging through the branches of his Order (Figure One). There is a plea for communal harmony in this image; when we pray together in communitas, it seems to say, Christ and Mary are made manifest, incarnated through the branches of this tree. Their presence is the product of collective imagining and serves to reinforce and to deepen the experience of community as a divine place, a place that can inspire grace.

Manifesting Christ through a heightened sense of religious community ap-pears to be the primary mission of the opening folio of the Mirror for Virgins (Speculum virginum, c. 1140 CE), a twelfth-century treatise written in the form of a dialogue between a spiritual advisor and his female disciple.11 In the first lines of the treatise we encounter the advisor, Peregrinus, urging his pupil,

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Genealogical Tree of the Dominican Order, Schreiber no. 1776. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Theodora, and through her the other sisters of the community to “seek what is invisible.” What is invisible? Principally, the transcendent, immaterial God. Through this treatise, God will be made visible. How is this possible? Peregri-nus explains that the virgin who looks into the text in order to find God will see staring back at her a flower.12 Why, queries Theodora, would God make himself into “so trivial a thing” as a flower? She demands, “Say then what this flower is!” The flower is the resplendent bud crowning the Tree of Jesse. God created this tree “as an example to humanity, to be used. . . . [The] flower-ing creature is witness of the perfect creator; while you hasten to him seeking your beginning, you imitate his order in the manner of a creature in its normal course.”13 “His order” is God’s order; our order is that of creation, but the tree is the very device to bring the two orders together in the imagination.

How could a tree do such a thing? On the opening illustration of the Mir-ror, we see next to Mary the word virga, branch. She is the branch in which God and human are inextricably mingled (Figure Two). In her arms she bears the words of Ecclesiasticus, “like the terebinth tree I extend my branches” (Ecclus. 24:22). Christ appears above her as the flos, the flower. At the top left, Isaiah holds a book on which his prophecy appears, the origin of the Tree of Jesse. On the right, Zachary’s book reads, “and new wine shall make the wom-en flourish” (Zach. 9:17). The community of virgins is being invited to locate itself in this image or, more precisely, in the tree. For this reason, six virgins appear above David, wine streaming over their heads, flowing from vials that Christ himself empties. The relationship between the individual viewer and the tree viewed is one of integration; members of the community will see there that they are part of the tree. As virgae, branches on this tree, as well as virgines, virgin bodies, Peregrinus informs them, “you too, with Mary, will give birth spiritually to the Son of God.”14 That is, through their assembled prayers as a community, they too will make Christ present; they too are branches on this tree that is made to perform the task of arborescence, of making more branch-es, of continuing the intermingling of human and divine.

This image compares to one found in the Garden of Delights (Hortus deliciarum, 1176–1196 CE), a twelfth-century encyclopedia of Scripture and theology produced by Herrad, the abbess of Hohenburg (Figure Three).15 Here we see God the Father—God as Creator—at the bottom of the illustration; the text explains that God has planted the root of this tree in God’s land and now tends it to perfection. The women of Hohenbourg lurk in the upper left hand corner; their presence signifies that they are part of that tree; they are part of the being—the perfectable flesh—that God imparted when He planted that tree. The tree sprouts from a diminutive mountain reminiscent of the location of Hohenbourg on Mount Saint Odile, perhaps a clue into how Herrad imag-ined her community’s relationship to Christ. A second set of images further

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elaborates upon this imagined community: on the left we see Christ present at the monastery’s foundation, standing at the top of the mountain at the front of the convent church; on the right, the assembled community of the present-day (which would have been c. 1175–1191) gazes up at Christ across the distance of time so as to establish a relationship with Him, the eternal being that intrud-ed into time, and the present.16 The construction of the image, signified by the profusion of trees on the bottom register, suggests that the garden in which the nuns reside is the garden of salvation. The living Christ dwells among them.

The images contained in the Mirror of Virgins and the Garden of Delights communicate something crucial about the nuns’ immediate world: this com-munity, this place, these prayers. Here, the images seem to say that you can recreate the world in a sanctified manner, you can re-enchant fallen creation. This is a soteriological process that involves bringing each of the members of the monastery into communion—with Christ and with one another. It is a pro-cess that must take place within the religious community; indeed, the images suggest that this process of transformation is the entire purpose of the religious community—prayer in communitas transforms the world. The religious com-munity, through its prayer and its rich imaginative work, makes Christ present here and now in the world.

The members of the community use the trees to awaken and deepen their sense of being part of a whole; each one experiences herself as a virga, a branch in which individual and community, incarnation and transcendence, are inseparable. The sisters used these trees to perform the imaginative work of transcending the individual self and subsuming themselves into a composite body that they shared with one another and with Christ. How was it possible that the created world could participate in the being of the creator? This inter-mingling of human and divine would happen in the same way that a cutting from one species of tree can be grafted onto the stock of another and sprout a wholly fused plant. Because, as Catherine of Siena noted, God “planted the vine of His only-begotten son in the earth of your humanity so that you, the branches, could be joined to it and bear fruit.”17 These women, through their assembled prayers, bore fruit and flowers daily; they effected the generation of Christ, the flos.

TREE OF CRUCIFIXION

The tree of crucifixion was represented in medieval arboreal legends of sal-vation as the instrument that reversed original sin so that, just as the fall of humanity was occasioned by the tree of the Fall, so human redemption was secured by the tree of Crucifixion.18 Already in the second century, Irenaeus had connected the Edenic Tree to the wood of the cross on which Christ died, so that the latter would redeem the suffering and sin unleashed by the con-

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Cisterian Library Zwettl, Austria, Codex 180, fol. 3r, Speculum Virginum, Tree of Jesse.

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Tree of Jesse, “Hortus Delicarum” from “Hortus Delicarum: The Garden of Delights (1977). Reproduced courtesy of Aristide D. Caratzas, Publisher.

sumed fruit of the forbidden tree. 19 Shortly thereafter, Ambrose of Milan could identify the body of Christ with the wood of His cross: “By wood we began to hunger until wood took his own flesh for food. The same Lord joined flesh and wood in Christ so that the old hunger might pass away and the grace of life might be restored.”20 In the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon poem, “The Dream of the Rood,” Christ’s body is fully fused into and identified with the tree so that when the tree is felled and hacked, it experiences the passion. The tree itself is pierced with nails, “bedewed with blood,” so the tree shares the experience of Christ’s flesh, wood and flesh being the two materials receptive of the tormen-tors’ nails.21

The trees of the fall and of the crucifixion were further linked together through elaborate legends of the wood that composed the true cross. In one of the earliest versions of the legend, an angel places a seed from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil into the mouth of the dying Adam. After Adam’s burial, that seed then sprouts into a tree at Calvary where, before becoming the wood of the cross, it forwards Christian providential history by first serv-ing as a panel in Noah’s ark, the rod of Moses, a beam in Solomon’s temple

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“Gladbach Missal (c. 1140), Minster Archive. Cod.I, fol. 2v.” from “Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse” by Watson, Arthur (1934). By permission of Oxford University Press.

and a plank in Joseph’s workshop.22 The beginning and ending points of this legend—the seed provided by the fallen Adam and the tree that crucified Christ—appear in a twelfth-century missal from Mönchengladbach, the first such graphic rendering of its kind (Figure Four). In stories and images such as this, we can see the importance attached by medieval Christians to the mate-rial of Christ’s death. The reasoning behind this concern was as follows: the wood of the tree on which Christ died must be supremely marked and specially arborescent because Christ’s death marked the whole of creation and rendered it sacrosanct.

The tree of crucifixion served to cancel out or overcome the tree of the fall. But for Christians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it did something more than simply annul an earlier Old Testament typology; it helped to create a sense of shared being. The tree of crucifixion not only freed the world from sin, it guaranteed a world in which humans could be mirror-reflections of God. First, God gave us ourselves in creation, then gave us God’s self in incarnation, and, finally, gave us ourselves again, our true restored selves, in crucifixion. This was the reality imagined in the branches of the tree of crucifixion—the reality of a shared flesh.

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Clare of Assisi represents a case wherein we can glimpse how Christians may have used the image of the tree simultaneously as both an individual and communal conceptual device for achieving conformity to Christ. Consumed by her struggle to forge a specifically Franciscan communal identity and anticipat-ing her imminent death, Clare wrote to her spiritual sister Agnes of Prague, urging her to pray through the tree of the cross, “to contemplate the inef-fable love with which Christ was willing to suffer on the tree of the cross.”23 Clare exhorts Agnes to contemplate Christ’s suffering, poverty and humility as a stimulus to personal contact with God. Although the emphasis on the individual experience of union with God distinguishes Clare’s tree from those celebratory trees of birth upheld in the Mirror for Virgins and the Garden of Delights, hers appears nonetheless to bear the influence of those earlier texts. Like the trees of incarnation, this one bears the quality of communal reflection. Clare urges Agnes to look closely into the “mirror suspended on the wood of the cross.”24 This is the “mirror of Christ” into which she should “look upon each day . . . and continually study [her] face within it.”25 The theme of tree-as-mirror, as we saw in the Mirror for Virgins, is reiterated here.26 As Bernard McGinn has explained, “Clare insisted on the reciprocal nature of gazing into the mirror. By attentive contemplation of the Christ-mirror, the sisters of San Damiano [Clare’s community] come to be established as . . . a mirror for oth-ers.”27 A mirror brings one face-to-face. Therefore through the mirror of the tree, each individual member of the community conforms herself to Christ in a mimesis of being, face-to-face with Him. Through the branches of this mirror, they achieve contact with Christ. “With one voice and one spirit,” they make Christ manifest and perpetuate the cycle of transforming the world in His im-age.

By 1305, there was just such an arboreal prayer-device housed in the Poor Clare convent at Monticelli. I refer to Pacino di Buonaguido’s panel painting of Christ hanging from a tree on which blossom forty-seven host-like medallions encasing miniatures of scriptural scenes that narrate his life, death and resur-rection (Figure Five). In addition to scenes from the life, death and resurrection of Christ, present in the image complex are Francis and Clare, kneeling before the tree-crucifix in supplication. Francis holds a scroll bearing the words of Paul, “But God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14), thus identifying this tree with the instrument of Christ’s death. Additionally, Ezekiel (Ezek. 47:12) and Daniel (Dan. 4:10) hold scrolls opened to arboreal references from their scriptural books. The profusion of scriptural trees in this image is entirely intentional. As Gerhart Ladner has stated in reference to the anthology of biblical trees, there is a metonymical relationship here. Read together, these trees unite the historical and metahis-torical work of salvation; they draw together two worlds so that the material

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is analogous to the divine as a result of Christ’s saving work on the tree of crucifixion.28 The trees act as stimuli to individual spectators, beckoning them to share in the experience of Christ’s passion, to be imaginatively Christ by bearing His suffering that initiated the alteration of the world.

Buonaguido’s image is a direct rendering of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio’s 1259 treatise, the Tree of Life (Lignum vitae). Bonaventure was the Master General of the Franciscan Order who made a concerted effort to preserve the communal identity of the Order in the face of growing fracture. Bonaventure’s Tree of Life should be considered within the context of his efforts as com-munal protection. Bonaventure circulated the Tree of Life as a contemplative tool for individual use, one that would ultimately strengthen the coherence of the order at a time when mounting tensions between conventual and spiritual Franciscans threatened its unity. Through the treatise, Bonaventure suggests that Franciscans not imitate their founder in his material conditions of ab-solute poverty, but in his spiritual condition of perfect contemplation. The structure of the text itself takes the form of a tree. Each branch, being each chapter, builds meditatively on Scriptural episodes relating to events in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Bonaventure urges his reader to “picture in your imagination a tree” so that the contemplative process is the mental making of a tree; the tree is a cognitive map for conjuring Christ and conforming the individual self to Him.29 “Picture in your imagination a tree” is an invitation to share in experience of the being of the God-man. Doing so allows the individ-ual to make meaning out of alienation from divinity. Following the branches of Christ’s trials in the order of creation enables the individual to see Christ as the source that renders humans analogous to God and to achieve degrees of likeness to Him.

We can see this urge for conformity to Christ—for a means of bringing God closer to humanity—in the multiple treatises that designed Francis’s life as a tree mirroring the details of Christ’s life and death; treatises that incre-mentally narrow the distance between God and humanity. This process was already beginning with Ubertino of Casale’s (1259–1330) Tree of the Crucified Life of Jesus Christ (Arbor vitae crucifixae Jesu Christi), which outlines the branches of congruence between Francis and Christ, how in their poverty, their prophecy, their authority, and their death they were conformed.30 Arnald of Sarrant’s 1365 The Kinship of Saint Francis (De cognatione S. Francisci) simi-larly delineates copious equivalences between the two men ranging from the mundane (both had twelve original disciples) to the miraculous (holy angels announced the birth of both men).31 Likewise, Bartolomeo of Pisa’s 1385 Book of Conformities (Liber de Conformitate) is a compendium of legends, visions and anecdotes equating events from the life of Francis to those in the life of Christ.32 The end result is demonstrated through the branches of a tree through

Albero della vita. Pacino di Bunoaguida. Florence, Galleria dell’ Academia. © Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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which Francis mirrors Christ. Here, form conveys meaning. The Book of Con-formities was not a preacher’s manual, nor was the tree contained within it a mnemonic device for use in Franciscan homiletics. The Book of Conformities was a dense spiritual proof-text. The tree was proof of Francis’s conformity to Christ, proof that humans were His very mirror-image. Note that the body of the tree becomes the surrogate for the bodies of Christ and Francis. No longer is Christ hanging from the cross of the tree; He is the tree, as is Francis; as, it was hoped, will be the others who follow them. Imagined and real are inex-tricably fused in a mimesis so profound, so intense, so real, that the “I” of the meditant becomes the “You” of the meditated. The end result, the transfor-mation that takes place in this exchange, is a bonding, an assimilation of the meditant with the meditated.33

Others, like Henry Suso, perpetuated this model. Suso, the fourteenth-cen-tury Dominican mystic and preacher, co-authored a spiritual auto-hagiography in which he attested to his devotional practice of erecting real arbors under which to pray though, pointing to the object held in his imagination while praying under them, he added, “among all the beautiful branches that ever grew he could find none more like to a lovely may-bough than the delightful bough of the holy cross.”34 Suso’s physical erecting of real branches made his imagined experience of Christ all the more manifest. The tree also found a home in Carthusian circles where passion poetry evoked the tree of crucifixion to encourage empathetic spiritual identification with and conformity to Christ. Christ and the Christocentric world that His incarnation and crucifixion had announced were, by this point, completely identifiable through a tree. There-fore, when one such as the Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena sought Him, she knew He would appear to her “under the figure of a tree.”35

SPIRITUAL ARBORESCENCE: PICTURING TREES IN THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION

What does this remarkable pattern of devotion to Christ through trees—both imagined and actual—tell us about the late medieval Christian imagination? The appearance of trees among figures such as Alheit, Herrad, Bonaventure, and Ubertino indicates abiding concerns about human access to the divine and the need for some assurance that such access was possible, that prayer and contemplation were efficacious, and that the objects of the material world, in-cluding humans, could one day enjoy perfection in God. The examples of spiri-tual arborescence that I have examined in this essay reveal how late medieval Christians invited trees into their imaginations in order to mediate and deepen the experience of community, to make possible the experience of union with God, and to fuse material and immaterial, time and eternity, metaphor and literal. The women and men discussed in this essay used the tree of incarnation

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and the tree of crucifixion dynamically in order to sustain in their imaginations the pictured goal of their devotion—a proper communion with God and their communities.

In the model of the tree of incarnation, the women of Engelthal and other such religious communities used trees to represent the ideal union of indi-vidual and community in Christ, to affirm that this was a place where Christ could reside. Recall that the opening folio of the Mirror of Virgins (Figure Two) portrays an arboreal model whereby, sustained through the branches of the tree, all human persons participate in the being of one another and in the tree as a single organism. There is mutual participation, shared being, in each other and in Christ.36 As such, the whole structure ensures the passage of bodies from time into timelessness, signified by Christ and the Holy Spirit rain-ing onto Him, then flowing out as wine onto the heads and shoulders of the virgins. Each leaf-medallion helps to sustain the branch that carries it, while each branch furnishes nourishment to the common trunk for the support of the whole. Each being, as part of the whole, prolongs the process of incarna-tion, continuing to generate Christ on earth first by making Him present in the imagination and then by making Him real by living in community with His presence. It is Christ’s presence, after all, that guarantees the being of the whole, despite its growth, its change, its falling branches, and its bark of dead matter. The image and the text in which it is embedded work to show the reader/viewer how an eternal God could be in mutating imperfect earthly mat-ter present in time with us. It locates access to the divine in that very changing material, in the tree of incarnation.

The second tree, the tree of crucifixion, worked to emphasize the possibil-ity, once present, to conform the self to holy matter. If Christ’s death on the cross brought the promise of salvation to the fallen earth, then the tree from which that cross was constructed must have been marked. How else could it have been the vehicle for restoring to the created world the potential to return the self to God’s original intended image? The tree of crucifixion—inspiring contemplation on the events of Christ’s life, death and resurrection—served as a model for conforming oneself to that very image, to sacred matter, like Christ. Christ marked the tree of crucifixion when He died on it, sacrificing Himself for the whole of creation. He thereby sacralized the tree, making it an eternally arborescent structure, the branches of which were capable of leading the mind and the body of the meditant into conformity with Him.

Trees of incarnation and crucifixion appeared in illuminations, on walls, or in visions as conceptual structures. And yet, Alheit did not embrace these models but real trees. How do we account for this transference, this slippage between the literal and the metaphorical model based upon it? Why do we make religious metaphors out of material reality, and how do they change

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our relationship to that reality? This is indeed one of the great mysteries of creation and its relationship to God. 37 This is the mystery of how the imagina-tion makes the world more real, more concrete, by bringing inside what was heretofore outside the self; it introduces into the interior of the religious mind the world that lies outside it, and represents that world within. The world outside—tactile, sensate, material—pours into the imagination and takes root in metaphors, which in turn create bridges back into the world. There are certainly more cases like Alheit’s in which real plant matter plays a crucial role in late medieval Christian spirituality. As noted earlier, Henry Suso was said to have constructed an elaborate series of May boughs under which he carried out his prayer regimen in honor of the supreme bough, the branch that bore Christ.38 A nun of Adelhausen, Metze communicated ecstatically with Christ from Nones to Vespers while perched under a tree in her cloister garden.39 Did Francis, whose mellifluous lines in praise of flowers and fruit—“Praise be yours, my Lord, through sister Earth, our mother, who feeds us in her sover-eignty and produces various fruits and colored herbs and flowers”—actually pray and preach to, or as he insists, through a literal harvest, as we read he did among birds?40 Surely, like Alheit, it was their experience of the actual elements of creation that made their imaginative experience of the presence of the creator all the more sweet, all the more real, and all the more concretely expressed.

Late Medieval Christianity was rife with concerns about the efficacy of hu-man approaches to and communion with the divine. How, the faithful mused, can we access grace communally and individually? How can we be certain that prayer and contemplation achieve the aim of contact with the divine? How can we reconcile our individual, embodied selves with an immaterial, non-discur-sive Holy Being? The examples of spiritual arborescence that I examined reveal how some late Medieval Christians addressed these concerns. Spiritual arbores-cence provided its practitioners with a sense of assurance that through material creation, though subject to change, could retain its God-given identity through change, and time. At the same time, it provided a crucial means of access to the divine through that same creation. Alheit’s experience of Christ in the trees of her cloister garden reflects this conviction and serves as an important reminder of the capacity of the Christian religious imagination to kindle a sense of God’s presence in the world. Conjuring the presence of God requires the imagination as well as the sensation of the material world. How we apprehend that world, what metaphors we choose to give its objects meaning, matters tremendously because the religious imagination can transform the literal and material world. Trees, for a moment, promised this.

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NOTES 1. Karl Schröder, ed., Der Nonne von Engelthal Büchlein von der Genaden Uberlast

(Tübingen: Lierarische Verein, 1871), 14: “Da ist mir reht sam ieder baum unser herre Jesus Christi sei.”

2. I offer special thanks to Douglas Burton-Christie, Rachel Fulton, Alison Frazier, John Troutman, and my three anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and patient guidance through many drafts of this essay.

3. Caroline Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 7.

4. See Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Jacques Le Goff, “Wilderness in the Medieval West,” in The Medieval Imagination trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 47–59. On deforestation during the period see Michael Williams, Deforest-ing the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

5. Adolph Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art: From Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Rainer Jehl, “Die Geschichte des Lasterschemas unde seiner Funktion,” Franzis-kanische Studien 64 (1982): 261–359; Jennifer O’Reilly Studies in the Iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1988); Anna Esmeijer, Divina Quaternitas: A Preliminary Study in the Method and Application of Visual Ex-egesis (Assen: Gorcum, 1978); on didactic trees in late medieval poetry see Sarah Kay’s new study, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), especially pages 19–41.

6. On trees in Hildegard’s oeuvre, see Heinrich Schippers, Hildegard of Bingen: Healing and the Nature of the Cosmos, trans. John Broadwin (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Weiner Publications, 1997); and Gabrielle Lautenschlager, “Viriditas: Ein Begriff und seine Be-deutung,” in Hildegard von Binden: Prophetin durch die Zeiten: zum 900. Geburtsdag, ed. Edeltraud Forster (Freiburg: Herder, 1997), 224–237. On the Desert of Religion and its arboreal iconography see Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devo-tion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), and W. Hübner, “The Desert of Religion” in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 126 (1911): 56–74.

7. For further information on communal adaptations of the Jesse tree see Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Famille et Parenté dans l’Occident medieval,” in Les ten-dences actuelles de l’histoire du moyen âge en France et en Allemagne (Paris: Otto Gerhard Oexle, 2002); and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “The Genesis of the Family Tree,” I Tatti Studies (1991): 105–131; and for the Benedictine “tree” in the Sherborne Missal, see Julian Luxford, The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries 1300–1540: A Patronage History (New York: Boydell Press, 2005). I thank Julian Luxford for his help locating images.

8. The tree of life as a category has multiple subsets that include this one, but here I limit myself to the exploration of one particular strand of meaning. Similarly, the tree of the cross is inclusive of the tree of crucifixion, but here I must isolate a rather specific case in order to emphasize the presence of Christ’s body.

9. Tertullian, Treatise on the Incarnation, trans. Ernest Evans (London: S.P.C.K., 1956).10. Margot Fassler, “Mary’s Nativity, Fulbert of Chartres, and the Stirps Jesse: Liturgical In-

novation circa 1000 and its Afterlife,” Speculum 75 (2000): 389–434.11. The identity of the author of the Speculum is uncertain, though many have suggested

that he was Conrad, a monk of Hirsau. On the authorship of the Speculum virginum see Jutta Seyfarth, “The Speculum virginum: The Testimony of the Manuscripts,” in

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Listen, Daughter: The ‘Speculum virginum’ and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Constant Mews (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 41–48.

12. On the trees in the various manuscripts of the Speculum virginum see Arthur Watson, “The Speculum virginum with Special Reference to the Trees of Jesse,” Speculum (Octo-ber, 1928): 445–469.

13. Speculum virginum, ed. Jutta Seyfarth CCCM 5 (Belgium: Brepols,1990): I.371–79: “Equidem florida creatura perfecti creatoris testimonium est, ad quem dum properas querendo principium tuum, ordinem imitaris quodammodo creature per cursum legiti-mum.”

14. Seyfarth ed., Speculum virginum, V.10–11: “Hanc virginum principem, tu virgo Christi, quantam possible est, imitare et cum Maria fillum dei videberis spiritualiter parturire.”

15. Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus Deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Chris-tine Bischoff, and Michael Curschmann (London: The Warburg Institute, 1979). On the production of the Hortus and what it tells us about the intellectual lives of elite women in the twelfth century, see Fiona Griffiths, Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

16. Here I intentionally evoke Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, as I believe that the Hortus deliciarum as well as the Speculum virginum represent ideal guidelines for religious community. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).

17. From Catherine of Siena’s (1347–1380) Dialogo, translated into English in the fifteenth century for the Bridgettine nuns of Syon Abbey. The Orcherd of Syon, Phyllis Hodgson and Gabrielle Liegey, ed. (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1966), 64–65: “I am !at tilyer which haue plauntid a verry vyne of my sone in !e ground of poure humanyte, !at !e whiche ben !e braunchis ioyned wi! !e vyne mowe brynge for! fruyt.” See also Catherine of Siena, Il Libro, ed. D. Umberto Meat-tini (Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1969); Suzanne Noffke, trans. The Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). See also Thomas Luongo’s The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

18. According to legends of the “tree of the fall,” a dying Adam sent his son Seth to the gates of Eden to seek the oil of mercy. At the gates, Seth observed a single withered tree with a serpent coiled at its base; at the top of the tree sat a tiny child—the savior that would come. An angel then gave Seth three seeds from the fruit that his parents had eaten. From these seeds would grow the tree of the cross that would take Christ’s life and thereby reverse the woe brought by the tree of the fall. See Simon Schama, Land-scape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1996); Romuald Bauerreis, Arbor Vitae: Der Lebensbaum und seine Verwendung in Liturgie, Kunst, unf Braucthum des Abendlan-des (Munich: Neuer Filser Verlag, 1938); P. M. Bourke, “The Treatment of Myth and Legend in the Windows of St. Neot’s, Cornwall,” Folklore vol. 97, no. 1 (1986): 63–69.

19. Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus Haeresus V.xvi.2 in Contre les hérésies Livre V. Sources chrétiennes. eds. Adelin Rousseau, Louis Doutreleau, and Charles Mercer (Paris, Edi-tions du Cerf: 1969).

20. Ambrose, Explanatio Psalmi 35 ch. 3 in Explanatio psalmorum XII. Corpus scripto-rum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, v. 64. ed. Michael Petschenig (Vindobonae, Tempsky: 1919), 51: “Per lignu, coepimus esurire, quod caro suum accepitalimentum. Ideo domi-nus in Christo inuxit et lignum, ut fames antiqua cessaret, vitae gratia redderetur.”

21. Dream of the Rood, ed. Michael Swanton (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996).22. Honorius Augustodunensis, “De inventione Sacre Crucis” in his Speculum ecclesiae, PL

172, cols. 941C–948. On the proliferation of legends of the true cross see Esther Quinn, The Quest of Seth for the Oil of Life (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1962); Adolfo Mussafia, “Sulla leggenda del legno della Croce,” in Sitzungsberichte der kaiserl

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Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna: 1860); Franz Kampers, Mittelalterliche Sagen vom Paradiese und vom Holze des kreuzes Christi in ihren vornehmsten quellen un in ihren hervortstechendsten typen (Kölm: J.P. Bachem, 1897); Joseph Sauer, Symbolik des Kirchengebäudes (Frieburg: Herder, 1924).

23. Epistola ad Sanctam Agnetem de Praga in Fontes Franciscani, ed. Enrico Menestò and Stefano Brufani (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1955), letter IV, 2279–84: “Contemplare ineffabilem caritatem, qua pati voluit in crucis stipite et in eodem mori omni mortis ge-nere turipiori.” On Clare’s relationship with Agnes and their struggle for papal approval of a Franciscan rule for women, see Joan Mueller, The Privilege of Poverty: Clare of Assisi, Agnes of Prague, and the Struggle for a Franciscan Rule for Women (University Park: Penn State Press, 2006).

24. Menesto, ed., Epistola ad Sanctam: “Unde ipsum speculum, in lingo cruces positum.”25. Menesto, ed., Epistola ad Sanctam: “hoc speculum quotidie intuere, or regina, sponsa

Jesu Christi, et in eo faciem tuam iugiter speculare.”26. The motif of the mirror (speculum) was common in medieval Christian spiritual

literature, especially among the Cistercians, where Christ is the mirror into which the meditant gazes in order to perceive a truth in relation to God. Here we see an extension of the metaphor to include Christ and the community as they are reflected in the model of a tree. On this genre see Margot Schmidt, “Miroir” in Dictionnaire de spritualité ascétique et mystique doctrine et histoire, ed. Marcel Viller et al. (Paris: Beauchesne) 10:1290–1303; Ritamary Bradley, “Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Medieval Literature,” Speculum 29 (1954): 100–115; Einar Már Jónsson, Le Miroir: naissance d’un genre littéraire (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1989); and Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vols. II and III (New York: Crossroads, 1991, 1998).

27. McGinn, The Presence of God, vol. III, 69.28. Gerhart Ladner, “Medieval and Modern Understanding of Symbolism: A Comparison,”

Speculum 54 (1979): 223–256. 29. Bonaventure, “Lignum vitae” Opera omnia, vol. 8 (Quaracchi, 1882–1902), 68; trans.

Ewert Cousins as “The Tree of Life” in Bonaventure (New York: Paulist Press, 1978): “Describe igitur in spiritu menits tuae arborem quondam . . . ” It is possible that Bo-naventure adapted the idea of devotion to the tree from Clare’s documented practice, where the mirror of the tree was reflected in three surfaces that showed Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. See Ann Astell, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), chapter 4, for an excel-lent reading of the structure of Bonaventure’s vita of Francis.

30. Ubertino of Casale, Arbor vitae crucifixa Jesu Christi, ed. Charles T. Davis (Torino: Bot-tega D’Erasmo, 1961).

31. Arnaldi de Serranno, De cognatione sancti Francisci, ed. F. Delorme in Miscellanea Franciscana 42 (1942) 103–131.

32. Bartolomeo de Pisa, Liber de Conformitate Vitae Beati Francisci ad Vitam Domini Iesu, Liber I, Analecta Franciscana vols. 4–5 (1906–1912).

33. On this process of empathetic identification see Karl Morrison, I am You: The Herme-neutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

34. Das Leben des seligen Heinrich Seuse, ed. George Hoffman (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Ver-lag, 1966); translated in part by Frank Tobin as Henry Suso: The Exemplar with Two German Sermons (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 83: “Unter all den schönen Zweigen die je gewachsen waren, konnte ernichts dem schönen Mai Ähnlicheres finden als den herrlichen Querbalken des heiligen Kreuzes, der mehr Gnaden und Tugenden erblühen lässt und alle schöne Zier, als je ein Maibaum hervorgebracht.” On the pictorial scheme accompanying Suso’s writings see Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998).

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35. Hodgson, ed., Orcherd of Syon, 96.36. Ladner, “Medieval and Modern Understanding of Symbolism,” 248–252. This sense of

arboreal meditation as proffering shared being contrasts with Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism of the tree as a structure for human cognition that “has made us suffer too much” on account of its grounding in hierarchical principles. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Mas-sumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988). Another criticism of the tree as mental model is a product called “Personal Brain™,” which seeks to store information on computers “the way you actually think about it.” See www.thebrain.com. What both Deleuze and Guat-tari and the makers of the Personal Brain overlook is that the “oneness,” to borrow Sarah Kay’s vocabulary, achieved in arboreal contemplation is not a hierarchic journey to a grounded principle. It is a method that resolves oneself in multiplicity, a constant proliferation.

37. For advice about religious metaphor (in addition to many years of inspired and thought-ful theories about religious practice), I would like to thank Rachel Fulton.

38. On Suso see Hoffman, ed., Das Leben, 82–83. 39. “Die Chronik der Anna von Munzingen: Nach der ältesten Abschrift mit Einleitung und

Beilagen,” in Freibürger Diözesan Archiv 13 (1880): 129–236.40. Francis of Assisi, “Canticle of Creatures” (1225 CE) in Brian Tierney, The Middle Ages,

Volume One: Sources of Medieval History, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1992), 65.2: “Laudato si, mi signore, per sora nostra matre terra,/ laquale ne sustenta et gov-erna,/ et produce diverse fructi con coloriti flori et herba.”