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Theology of the Heart- the Saints |
The
Chivalry of Saint Joseph
Stratford Caldecott
"The first knight to serve the Queen of Heaven"1
The Gospels, of course, tell us very little explicitly about Mary's
husband. According to Matthew 1:19, he was a "just man" high
praise in the Jewish tradition. He seems to have lived as a
carpenter and craftsman (although some have said that the Aramaic
word for "carpenter" can also mean "wise man"). He was not wealthy,
at any rate, because he took to the Temple the two pigeons that were
the offering of the poor (Luke 2:24). He was clearly a man of
prayer, responsive to the will of God; and this will was revealed to
him sometimes in dreams.
There is a sense in which Joseph is more hidden, more silent and
more obscure even than Our Lady. No Father of the Church ever
preached a homily on St Joseph, and apart from in seventh-century
Egypt there was no feast dedicated to him throughout the first
Christian millennium. Treatises on him only begin to appear from
around 1500. Thereafter, devotion to Joseph becomes more common
(with St Teresa of Avila in particular). But by that time a
divergence had developed between Eastern and Western Christendom.
Apocryphal writings such as the Protoevangelium had presented Joseph
as an old man, a widower, as the time of his marriage to Mary. The
Eastern writers tended to follow this tradition, which made it
easier to explain Mary's perpetual virginity. As a result, they
tended to portray Joseph as a "guardian" rather than a true
"husband" of Mary. In the West, however, while St Jerome and St
Augustine regarded Joseph as a virgin, Augustine in addition
developed a strong argument in defence of the reality of his
marriage to Mary, which became the basis for the Western tradition
on St Joseph. This is cited approvingly by Pope John Paul II in his
important 1989 Letter, Redemptoris Custos 2.
Pope John Paul points out that, although Joseph was not the physical
father of Jesus, he was in Jewish terms the true legal father, and
therefore no mere "foster father" or "guardian" of the Holy Child
(let alone "stepfather"). Joseph's doubts in Matthew 1:19-20 revolve
around this very question of whether he has the right to be his
father in the sense of giving the Child his name: the Angel assures
him that this is indeed his role according to God's own plan that
he must complete the formalities of his marriage to Mary and name
the Child Jesus. It is through him that God wishes Jesus to
experience the relationship of son to father in a Jewish family.
Of course, for us to call Joseph "Father of God" (as we call Mary
"Mother of God") would invite misunderstanding, and the Church has
always shied away from doing so. Andrew Doze, in a splendid book
about this saint (Discovering St Joseph, St Paul Publications,
1993), names him delicately the "Shadow of the Father". More than a
shadow, perhaps, he is a living icon of divine Fatherhood. At what
stage the child Jesus was able to make the distinction in his own
(human) mind between this visible father and the invisible Father
that he himself came to earth to represent, we cannot say. Certainly
by the age of twelve (Luke 2:50). Perhaps he was always aware of the
difference as one who venerates an icon is aware that the image is
not the reality, however well and faithfully it leads one to
contemplate the sacred Archetype.
This, then, is the saint whom the Church has identified as her
supreme Patron and defender because he was the Protector of Jesus
and Mary, and was united to them in a bond of love perfected in the
image of the Holy Trinity (Redemptoris Custos, 19). God is not the
God of the dead but of the living, and the saints live more
intensely after death than before. Their role on earth gives just an
indication of their mission in heaven. If Joseph protected the
"hidden life" of his Son in the obscurity of Nazareth, even more
does he protect the life of Jesus in the bosom of his family the
Church. Nothing in the earthly history of Jesus is wasted, but the
whole of his existence is raised up to heaven through the
Resurrection. His earthly father, too, is lifted up. This justifies
us in praying to him, and also in trying to understand the mystery
he represents for us.
I want to approach this mystery under two main "headings", if you
like. The first heading is Joseph as "Protector of the Inner Life"
and thus of the Blessed Virgin who contains and nourishes that life
in us. This will lead us on to some consideration of the
spirituality of St Joseph. Under the second main heading I will
consider in more detail the whole concept of St Joseph's "Chivalry",
and how it applies in today's world.
Protector of the Inner Life
In Byzantine icons of the Nativity, Joseph is shown sitting
dejectedly in a corner, looking up at an old man that tradition
seems to identify with the Tempter, while the Mother of God looks
down and across to her spouse with compassionate eyes. Perhaps, as
some interpretations have it, Joseph is being tempted to doubt the
Incarnation of God. Personally I doubt it3. I see him rather as the
patron of those who must pass through the dark night of the soul,
and the dry lands of feelingless prayer. No doubt he was tired and
confused after the long journey, the refusal of hospitality at the
Inn, the anxiety about the birth in such seemingly inauspicious
circumstances. It must have seemed to him that he had already and
spectacularly failed in his duty towards Mary. If he was tempted, it
may have been to despair of himself, in the natural depression that
comes with exhaustion.
This interpretation is supported, albeit subtly, by the associated
iconographic tradition. Joseph's posture in the icons of the
Nativity recalls that of Elijah the Prophet, who, having pronounced
a drought on the land of King Ahab and himself taken refuge at the
brook Cherith, is about to be fed by the raven (1 Kings 17:1-6).
This is sometimes conflated with the moment he despaired of himself
and pleaded to the Lord to take away his life (19:4-6). ["Elijah
went into the wilderness, a day's journey, and sitting under a furze
bush wished he were dead. 'Lord,' he said, 'I have had enough. Take
my life; I am no better than my ancestors.' Then he lay down and
went to sleep. But an angel touched him and said, 'Get up and eat.'
He looked around, and there at his head was a scone baked on hot
stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down
again. But the angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched
him and said, 'Get up and eat, or the journey will be too long for
you.' So he got up and ate and drank, and strengthened by that food
he walked for forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb,
the mountain of God."]
In the icons that portray Elijah the food the raven is bringing
looks suspiciously like a Host, and certainly there is a Eucharistic
reference here. On both occasions the miraculous food reminds us of
the manna brought by angels with which God fed the rebellious sons
of Israel in the desert of Sinai, and the Lectionary links this
reading to a verse of Psalm 33: "Taste and see that the Lord is
good." Elijah recalls the story of Moses; now in the icons of the
Nativity Joseph recalls Elijah. And above him in the cleft of the
rock (there is no stable in the Byzantine icon), we see the Child
who is the Bread of Life. Thus as we kneel before Jesus in the
Blessed Sacrament, we may imagine that the Joseph of this icon
stands invisibly behind us, his hands on our shoulders, leading us
in prayer. All our worries and distractions were his, too; and he
has overcome them long before.
The connection between Elijah and Joseph is, I think, a deep one.
Elijah is traditionally regarded as the founder of that school of
desert contemplation known as the Carmelite Order. St Teresa of
Avila (reformer of the Carmelites and Doctor of the Church)
described St Joseph as her supreme guide in the life of prayer. The
long and still developing tradition of Joseph as patron and master
of the interior life is described in the book by Andrew Doze already
referred to. The prayers of silent faith, of simple adoration, of
intercession, are Joseph's special care. As one to whom God's will
is revealed in dreams of the night, Joseph can be considered the
master of the life of the soul and our guide to the depths of the
unconscious mind. Another great Carmelite Doctor of the Church, John
of the Cross, at the end of his life when he was prior in Grenada,
remarked of Joseph: "I did not understand him well enough, but that
will change." Doze, who reports this comment, believes that St John
had all along been expounding the spirituality of St Joseph without
realizing it. It is nothing less than the spirituality of the Dark
Night, which he calls the "art of entering into Joseph's home in
Nazareth".
It may also be called a spirituality of childhood. Scripture tells
us that in Christ there is neither male nor female. But this
transcendence of gender takes place not in ghostly abstraction from
biology (as our technological, post-Cartesian culture would suggest)
but rather through the "androgyny" of spiritual childhood, which is
the foundation for a rediscovery of true masculinity as it is of
true femininity. The true image of man, whether male or female, is
in the Son. Joseph must learn from this Child to become a "shadow"
of the Father. For the most fatherly of men is he who achieves in
maturity and the fullness of his strength an ability to love
commensurate with the infinite dependence of his child. For a child
is little enough to be lifted up, and a father must be strong for
his sake. Thus every human father learns to play the role of
representing the heavenly Father to his own child, and it is in that
role that he finds his mission and identity.
It is also a Marian spirituality. At all times, Mary is present as
intermediary for her husband, for she is the one who brings Jesus
into the world and gives him to Joseph. The most Marian of saints,
Joseph is the one through whom a man may come close to the Virgin,
learn from her, centering himself on Jesus like her. Yet he is not
passive in this relationship. Joseph is dedicated utterly to the
protection of the Woman and the Child, in a chaste love that is
prepared to defend the honour of his Lady to the bloody end of
martyrdom. He protects her not only from Herod, but from the wagging
tongues of gossip by sheltering her as his wife. Here, as I think it
is St Ambrose who suggests, he is imaging the heavenly Father, for
in his own supreme courtesy God would rather men doubted his own
Fatherhood in relation to Jesus than the chastity of Mary.
Father Doze writes as follows. "How can one make someone understand
realities which, in fact, are very simple and very real? The mystery
of Christ immediately comes through Joseph and Mary as the mystery
of human existence unfolds itself in space and time. These truths
reveal themselves only through experience. Contrary to what one
might think, there is nothing intellectual about them. It is a
matter of experiencing time with Jesus as an act of obedience to the
Father and, for that, one must let oneself be begotten by the Spirit
'in the shadow of the holy marriage.' Mary makes us become attentive
to the reality of which she has the secret and Joseph creates these
conditions of peace, of detachment, of faith in Christ and most
especially of patience, absolutely necessary for the action of
God."4
The spirituality of Nazareth, the spirituality of childhood, a
Marian spirituality and we may add that Joseph's spirituality is
also a spirituality of the desert, as I have already hinted with
reference to Elijah. In other words, the spiritual path of St Joseph
is definable in terms of the three counsels of perfection: poverty,
chastity and obedience (which when formally taken as vows determine
the "religious" state of life).5 The Catholic Catechism tells us
that all Christians are called to live the spirit of these counsels
in order to emancipate themselves from dependence on earthly things,
and to be able to contemplate and follow God more closely. As
exemplified in a saint such as Joseph, this emancipation involves an
interior and threefold freedom from attachment to possessions,
passions and self-will. It is not attained without ascetic struggle,
above all by Christ's defeat of the three corresponding temptations
in the wilderness, which opens up what are effectively the three
dimensions of receptivity in the (fallen) human spirit: that is, the
three subjective dispositions towards the life of grace, which is
then able to be infused as virtue. Thus the three counsels may be
linked to the three theological or infused virtues: obedience to
Faith, chastity to Love and poverty to Hope (and thereby also, one
might add, at the risk of complicating things unnecessarily, to the
three great acts of almsgiving, prayer and fasting).6
Perhaps that was all a bit too condensed! All I am really saying is
that it is open for all of us to be purified of resentment, regret,
fear and anxiety. In every second it is possible to be at some
level aware of the sustaining presence and love of God. For how
can we resent even a deliberate act directed against us if we are
truly living in the moment, on total dependence upon the God who
creates us in that moment? The Desert Fathers describe this
awareness, rather than the mastery of some elaborate system of ideas
such as the Gnostic hierarchies and initiations as "true
knowledge"; a knowledge that is achieved by the pure in heart, the
simple, the truly poor. "It is impossible to forgive someone else's
offenses whole-heartedly without true knowledge; for this knowledge
shows to every man that what befalls him belongs to himself" (St
Mark the Ascetic).
Christian morality is rooted in the universal call to holiness. St
Joseph is a model of this life of perfection, expressed not in a
formalized monastic setting or even in the literal desert but in the
hurly-burly of family life. The same type of holiness may be
described as a life of what the Jesuit spiritual director
Jean-Pierre de Caussade terms "abandonment to divine Providence"7.
For while God speaks "to all men in general by the great events in
history", he speaks "to each of us individually through what happens
to us moment by moment". It is not necessary to possess a
theological analysis of virtue in order to be holy: in fact, the
opposite is more likely to be the case. "In the same way as our
thoughts and words are transmitted by air, so are God's conveyed by
all we are given to do and suffer." Nothing could be simpler, or
more appropriate for the relationship of God and man. Simply living
each moment in the service of God and Our Lady, as St Joseph must
have done, is the essence of poverty, chastity and obedience.
St Joseph and Chivalry
In the rest of this talk, I want to show that Joseph's spirituality
is a form of Christian chivalry. But what is "chivalry"? In Second
Spring 2, Father Mark Elvins describes it as well as anyone: "the
magnanimity of noble blood, deference to women, protection of the
weak, refinement in manners and courage in battle".
It was the ideal of chivalry that softened the harsh face of warfare
in the Middle Ages. In the person of St Francis of Assisi, himself
much influenced by the chivalric romances he heard from the French
and Italian troubadours, this ideal became entirely spiritualized.
Francis aspired to become a Knight of the Round Table in service of
his Lady, Dame Poverty. Just as the bloody sacrifice of the Old
Testament gave way to the bloodless sacrifice of the Mass, so
gradually within Christendom the feudal service of Lord and devotion
to his Lady gave way to the inner consecration of the triple
religious vow, and the violence of war gave way in the saints to the
violence of asceticism, by which men lay hands on the Kingdom of
God.
G.K. Chesterton, that most chivalrous of modern men, in his Short
History of England, writes: "Chivalry might be called the baptism of
Feudalism. It was an attempt to bring the justice and even the logic
of the Catholic creed into a military system which already existed;
to turn its discipline into an initiation and its inequalities into
a hierarchy. To the comparative grace of the new period belongs, of
course, that considerable cultus of the dignity of women, to which
the word 'chivalry' is often narrowed, or perhaps exalted. This was
a revolt against one of the worst gaps in the more polished
civilization of the Saracens. The Moslems naturally suffered from
the older Oriental sentiment about women; and were, of course,
without the special inspiration given by the cult of the Virgin."
(Chesterton's remark about the Moslems, by the way, is perhaps not
quite fair. Quite apart from the well-known fact of Muslim respect
for the Virgin Mary, chivalry itself is associated with Saracens
such as Saladin as much as it is with, say, Richard the Lionheart.
It may even be, as Father Elvins suggests, that the development of
chivalry in the West owed a great deal to the influence of the
Islamic tradition, which had from the beginning been obliged to
blend military conduct with stern moral discipline.)
Nevertheless, the first and truest "Universal Knight", the mirror of
chivalry and of all the courtesy that belongs with it and manifests
it in everyday life, is found much earlier than Christendom, and
earlier than the birth of Islam. It is found in Joseph of Nazareth.
In him the ideal appears in all its spiritual glory, long before it
is partially and imperfectly rediscovered by the Crusaders. In
Joseph justice is combined with tenderness, strength and
decisiveness with flexibility and openness to the will of God. He is
an adventurer, too, like the "questing knights" of later legend.
For, as Charles Peguy writes in Clio 1,
"There is only one adventurer in the world, as can be seen very
clearly in the modern world, the father of a family. Even the most
desperate adventurers are nothing compared with him.... Everything
is against him. Savagely organized against him. Everything turns and
combines against him. Men, events, the events of society, the
automatic play of economic laws. And, in short, everything else.
Everything is against the father of a family, the pater familias;
and consequently against the family. He alone is literally 'engaged'
in the world, in the age. He alone is an adventurer."8
In his study of chivalry, which is a commentary on the work of
Reinhold Schneider, Hans Urs von Balthasar explains that "the
collapse of the old form" that of the ancien regime with its
armies and its fortresses, its kings and barons and serfs, "has
reduced chivalry to that spirit from which all form and culture are
continually generated anew"9. It has been reduced, we might say, to
the spirit of St Joseph, which transcends any worldly distinction of
class or wealth or earthly strength, and is the spirit of obedience
to God above all the spirit of service. This is the true nobility,
the nobility that culminates in that supreme kingship which stoops
to wash the feet of its disciples, and which refuses to let a sword
be drawn in its own defence though it could summon twelve legions of
angels. It is what in this world is utterly opposed to the
"bourgeois spirit" of counting the cost and judging by appearances.
This kind of nobility of spirit will never die, for it is this
nobility that is manifest in the dedication and integrity of priests
and religious, of workers and parents, in the spirit of the
Christian life.
In fact Balthasar identifies the "form of chivalry" with the spirit
of the counsels itself. "No doubt," he writes,"the new knight of
Christ will no longer bind on the secular sword, and he will
scarcely get himself a visible expression that could stand
comparison to Marienburg10. Compared with the struggle of the
knights of old, his will be a hidden, a spiritualized struggle in
the world. Nevertheless, he will distinguish himself from the world
not only through the spirit but also through the form, since the
Catholic Church is a visible Church as are the forms of her states
of life: the religious state cannot be invisible, any more than
marriage or the priesthood. Only in this way will the cross between
Church and world be constructed in all its harshness for the new
knight precisely that cross that Reinhold Schneider glimpsed, the
cross before which the man of little faith cries out:
'Impossibility!'"11
The romance of chivalry achieved its highest literary expression in
the Middle Ages under the patronage of Queen Eleanor, the wife of
Henry II, in the courts of Aquitaine, Provence, Normandy and
England. The legendary King Arthur of Britain was set up against
Charlemagne as the great model of the perfect king, in order to
foster the political ambitions of Henry's new Angevin empire at the
end of the twelfth century. The moral ambiguity of the tales
reflected the strange, almost mystical eroticism of Provencal
culture and the cult of love that was prevalent among the
troubadours. Here, too, a job of Christianizing needed to be done,
and the Cistercians achieved it with their Quest of the Holy Grail.
The seeds were there already. It is the Queen of Heaven, not Eleanor
of Aquitaine nor Guinevere, whom the medieval knight ultimately
sought to serve, despite the pagan elements also present in the
tradition. It was devotion to the Madonna and Child that had
converted the warrior code of the converted barbarians into the
medieval code of chivalry. And the Quest motif is a part of this
tradition. The Cistercian version of the tale makes explicit what
was already implicit in the earlier versions, that the Grail Quest
is a journey within Christianity from outward observance to the
inner meaning of that observance, until heaven itself can be seen by
the pure of heart, within the Chalice of the Holy Blood.
Von Eschenbach is another who succeeded in embodying Christian
wisdom within the new vernacular literature.
"The knight, as Wolfram von Eschenbach saw him [Balthasar writes],
is sent into the world in order to resist injustice and to preserve
justice; but he can do this only by serving that which is holy, the
hidden Grail and the order that radiates out from this. Such a
chivalry means responsibility, which was of course exercised under
specific conditions of property by those who found their orientation
here in the world and in history; but even if this kind of property
no longer exists, the mission of the knight still remains: there
must always be men who serve that which is holy in this world
without reservation and without salary, caring for the week, the
persecuted and the insulted, renewing the authority of law and
fighting against injustice. The knight exists for the sake of
everyone: that is his proper position in the world."
"In Wolfram's hands," writes Friedrich Heer, "the adventures, the
journeyings and joustings of the heroes of romance are elevated to
the grandeur of baroque: here is a canvas which depicts the progress
of man on his great pilgrimage into the depths and abysses of his
own soul. Defeat must follow defeat if victory is to be achieved.
Victory can be won only in the soul of the individual. He who in
this way overcomes self-deception, false pride, factitious fears and
the delusion of self-confidence, will be granted the vision of the
Godhead, the 'unending Trinity', as a deep mystery of power, love
and spirit."12
It is to the Holy Grail, and what it represents, that we will now
turn, for it will bring us back to Joseph. But not just to one
Joseph, for there are several. Often, it seems, the names we find in
Scripture are clues to their purpose and mission. Those who share a
name may even share a mission, or what is said about one may
illuminate the other. So it is in this case. More of that in a
moment.
What is the Grail? It was supposed to have been the cup of the Last
Supper and the first Mass, sanctified by a few drops of the Lord's
blood caught as he hung upon the Cross. (Medieval iconography often
shows an angel holding the chalice to his pierced side.) It is that
which contains the Holy Blood of Christ. It does not take much sense
of symbolism to recognize that we are here dealing with, among other
things, a symbolic image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose cult was
reaching full maturity at this time, partly under the influence of
St Bernard. It is, after all, Our Lady who is the true "Spiritual
Vessel" that contains the precious Body and Blood of the Lord for
nine months after the Annunciation, and spiritually thereafter.
By the way, have you noticed how, the more one tries to think about
the Virgin Mary, the more one finds oneself reciting a Litany?
Mirror of justice,
Seat of wisdom,
Cause of our joy,
Spiritual vessel,
Vessel of honour,
Singular vessel of devotion,
Mystical rose,
Tower of David,
Tower of ivory,
House of gold,
Ark of the Covenant,
Gate of heaven,
Morning star....
Our Lady is the incandescent Bride of the Spirit, source of the
world's purity, a pillar of fire in the wilderness, "Living Symbol
and Beginning of the world in the process of purification", a
Burning Bush "embraced by the flame of the Holy Spirit". These last
expressions are taken from the Russian writer, Pavel Florensky.
"Just as the Spirit is the beauty of the Absolute," he says, "so the
Mother of God is the Beauty of the Creaturely", "the glory of the
world", "most beautiful flower of earth", the "Bearer of Sophia"13.
And if the Grail is "really" Mary, she is in the keeping and under
the protection of Joseph.
The other Joseph in the Gospels who according to tradition has a
special relationship to the chalice of the Lord's Blood is Joseph of
Arimathea. Actually, in the Gospels themselves he is linked neither
to the cup nor to the womb of Mary, but rather to the tomb in which
the body of Jesus is laid to rest, and where the hidden work of the
Resurrection is performed. But symbolically speaking the sealed tomb
is, of course, also equivalent to the virginal "womb" from which
Jesus is born, or in this case re-born, and several of the Church
fathers have delighted in the parallel. This may help to explain
why, in legend, this other St Joseph becomes the keeper of the Holy
Grail, which he is said to have taken, after the Lord's Ascension,
to England. Interestingly, both St Josephs are portrayed with a
flowering staff, for according to the apocryphal story Mary's Joseph
was chosen by this sign to be her husband, while Joseph of Arimathea
planted his in the fertile ground of Glastonbury Hill, on the Isle
of Avalon. Both, of course, are wise men blessed with gentleness and
entrusted with the world's greatest treasure. Thus the later Joseph
leads us to the feet of the earlier.
I cannot resist pointing out that there is a third Joseph in Holy
Scripture. This is the Patriarch Joseph, son of Jacob who was called
Israel. (Mary's Joseph, by the way, was also the son of a Jacob,
according to Matthew 1:16.) Several of the Church Fathers remarked
on the fact that the Old Testament Joseph is portrayed as a man of
dreams from his earliest days: it was his dreams that got him into
trouble with his brothers, and rescued him from prison. They
remarked also that he was sent by God's providence into Egypt as
was the later Joseph to prepare a refuge for the sons of Israel.
He was the keeper of the King's household, the man who administered
the Pharaoh's treasuries and storehouses of grain, and shared them
with the twelve tribes. (Later, in the Exodus, his bones will
accompany the people to the Land of Promise alongside the Ark of the
Covenant.) In the words of St Bernard, "The Patriarch saved up corn
not for himself but for all the people; St Joseph received the
living Bread from heaven for himself and for the whole world."
There is even a chalice in the story! (See Genesis 44:2, 4, 12, 16.)
Jewish legend, elaborating the story somewhat, identifies this as
Joseph's silver "divining cup" that is, the magic cup in which he
can read the past and future. It is the symbol of the magical powers
he has acquired in Egypt (or, we might say, of the supernatural gift
he has received from God). According to Genesis, Joseph orders this
chalice to be hidden in the sack of corn he has given to his
youngest brother, and uses its discovery to bring about in the
oldest brother a gesture of self-sacrifice leading to authentic
reconciliation; that is, in order to bring about repentance for the
primordial sin the brothers had committed against Joseph in their
youth.
Is it mere coincidence that Joseph's cup is an instrument of
reconciliation, and the chalice of the Mass much more so, being
consecrated with precisely these words: "This is the cup of my
blood... It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be
forgiven"? Here is surely one of those subterranean secrets of type
and antitype, beyond the reach of scholarship, that testify to the
organic coherence of Scripture and tradition..
Does this Joseph, too, reveal something of the stature of Mary's
Joseph, pointing in the providence of divine inspiration towards the
one whom God entrusted with the precious Vessel containing his own
Son? I will leave you with this question.
My conclusion is brief. It seems to me that if we are to experience
a "new springtime of faith" in the third Christian millennium, we
need to rediscover our mission as Christians called to holiness, and
to learn the true "Chivalry of the Gospel" from the man God sent to
find and guard the Holy Grail that was his own Mother.
Most beloved father, dispel the evil of falsehood and sin...
Graciously assist us from heaven in our struggle with the powers of
darkness... and just as once you saved the Child Jesus from mortal
danger, so now defend God's holy Church from the snares of her
enemies and from all adversity. Pope Leo XIII
Notes
1 - A talk given to the Knights of Our Lady, 19 October 2002. The
phrase in the subtitle is from the Rule of the Order of the Knights
of Our Lady, ch. XVII. See www.theotokos.org.uk/pages/knights/knights.html.
back
2 - On all of this, see Joseph T Lienhard SJ, St Joseph in Early
Christianity: Devotion and Theology (Philadelphia: St Joseph's
University Press, 1999), p.3. The Church generally treats an
unconsummated marriage as incomplete, and potentially as grounds for
annulment. Augustine argues that the marriage bond is constituted by
the act of consent rather than the act of intercourse. In any case,
the seal on the marriage is the child, which comes about in the
normal course of events through intercourse, and in this case by
miraculous intervention. back
3 - I am supported in my doubts by no less a biblical scholar than
Ignace de le Potterie SJ, who in his fine book Mary in the Mystery
of the Covenant (Alba House, 1992, ch. 2) explains the ambiguity in
the Greek texts of the Annunciation to Joseph in the light of modern
scholarship. He argues that not only did Joseph know from the first
(presumably because Mary would have told him) that his wife was with
child "of the Holy Spirit" and not through human agency, but that he
never considered "divorcing" her, as the common translation says.
When the angel appeared to him in a dream he was simply considering
how to separate himself from her, or how to send her away secretly,
precisely because of the holy fear inspired in him by the great
mystery taking place in her. He was not trying to avoid "exposing
her publicly" (as an adulteress), but rather to avoid "unveiling her
mystery". back
4 - Andrew Doze, Saint Joseph: Shadow of the Father (New York: Alba
House, 1992), pp. 133-4. back
5 - See Matt. 19:21 and The Catechism of the Catholic Church, n.
915. back
6 - These points were expanded in my "Theological Dimensions of
Human Liberation", Communio 22 (Summer 1995), pp. 225-41. back
7 - J-P. de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence (New York:
Doubleday Image, 1975). The same dynamic underlies the so-called "Litte
Way" of the nineteenth-century mystic St Thιrθse of Lisieux. back
8 - C. Pιguy, Temporal and Eternal, trans. Alexander Dru (New York:
Harper & Bros, 1958), p. 108. H.U. von Balthasar, Tragedy Under
Grace: Reinhold Schneider on the Experience of the West (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press/Communio, 1997), p. 256. back
9 - We have seen the dangers of that kind of fantasy in Nazi
Germany. Today, one hopes, the warrior of God would not use force
except in defence. back
10 - See H.U. von Balthasar, Tragedy Under Grace: Reinhold Schneider
on the Experience of the West (San Francisco: Ignatius Press/Communio,
1997), "Marienburg-Knighthood", p. 255. back
11 - F. Heer, The Medieval World (Weidenfeld, 1961), p. 196. back
12 - P. Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in
Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton
University Press, 1997), pp. 256-7. back
13 - Cited in John Paul II, Redemptoris Custos (31). back
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