(A talk given to the Knights of Our Lady, 19 October 2002. By Stratford Caldecott. Do not reproduce)
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 Custos2.
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,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.
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....
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
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 Thérèse of Lisieux. back
8 - C. Péguy,
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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