The art essay of the month
Saint Joseph and the Christ Child (c. 1600) by El Greco (1541–1614)
“I took for my advocate and lord the glorious Saint Joseph and commended myself earnestly to him,” says Saint Teresa of Ávila (?? 1582) in her autobiography. But she did not think devotion to Saint Joseph was a private grace given to her alone: “If anyone cannot find a master to teach him how to pray, let him take this glorious saint as his master and he will not go astray.”
Saint Joseph emerges
During and after Teresa’s lifetime, public devotion to Saint Joseph experienced its most dramatic period of growth in all of Christian history. Writers, painters, mystics, and Christians of all walks of life found themselves newly drawn to Saint Joseph, fueled in part by the Council of Trent’s emphasis on the Scriptures as the basis for devotion to the saints and on sacred images as a means of encounter with them, and in part by the personal experience of Saint Joseph’s paternal love in the writings of mystics like Teresa. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the Church could keep silent about the “silent saint” no longer.
In the year 1597, the expatriate Greek painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos (known as El Greco) received a commission to paint a chapel dedicated to Saint Joseph in Toledo, Spain, intended for the use of Teresa of Ávila’s Discalced Carmelites. El Greco created memorable images of Saint Martin of Tours, the Virgin and Child, and the Coronation of the Virgin as framing paintings for the altar’s reredos, but the central image that still dominates the altarpiece is a greater-than-life-size image of Saint Joseph. In preparation, El Greco made a complete small-format study of the image (reproduced here), which today can be found tucked away in the sacristy of Toledo’s magnificent cathedral.
Saint Joseph among us
El Greco’s image harnesses the energy of the universal Church’s new devotion to Saint Joseph and makes it breathtakingly particular and concrete. El Greco presents Joseph as a young father with a dark brown beard and hair just beginning to thin, with corded laborer’s muscles apparent in his neck, arms, and legs. One arm reaches down to return Jesus’ embrace and the other holds a crooked staff, marking him as a pilgrim on a journey—or is it a shepherd at home? His bare feet are poised for action, his right foot pressing into the dirt of the path while his left heel lifts in preparation for the step that will take him directly into the viewer’s presence. Down in the deep background is another sign of how close Joseph is to the viewer: the hilltop skyline of Toledo itself forms the setting for the encounter. This is not Saint Joseph as an abstract ideal, or as seen from afar: he is here, a real father whose real love for Jesus comes to be where we are, and invites us to share in it.
Saint Joseph through Jesus’ eyes
Jesus’ bright red garment naturally draws the viewer’s eyes, as does the disarmingly intimate and childlike arm that Jesus stretches up to throw around Joseph’s waist. But it’s Jesus’ eyes that tell us what we’re seeing: turned unexpectedly toward the viewer even though his pose suggests they should be returning Joseph’s gaze, his eyes reveal that we are looking at Saint Joseph from Christ’s perspective.
Amazingly, El Greco manages to convey in a single image both the real human gaze of the boy Jesus and the true divine sight of the Eternal Word.
El Greco’s characteristically elongated bodies here serve to emphasize Joseph’s height, allowing the viewer to see him towering over Jesus, just as many people’s childhood memories exaggerate their own father’s height and the size of his embrace, however diminutive the real man may have been. At the same time, the viewer sees the heavens revolving around Saint Joseph in a pure burst of celestial sight. Far from being mere observers, the angels physically surround Saint Joseph, circling around his head in gravity-defying whorls while spilling out visible manifestations of his glories: a lily for his chaste virginity, roses for heavenly splendor, the laurel-leaf crown of imperishable glory (cf. 1 Cor 9:25).
Behold your father
Speaking from the Cross, Jesus hands the Virgin Mary to the Church as the universal Mother of the Church and the mother in faith of every individual believer. El Greco’s image has Jesus offer Saint Joseph to the Church and to each Christian in a similar way, but rather than speaking as the triumphant king from the throne of the Cross, he speaks as a humble child, who as the Son of God nonetheless chooses to need the strength, dedication, and tenderness of a father on earth. In his own time, El Greco’s image offered a much-needed insight into Saint Joseph as a real father, whose perfect chastity was the wellspring for his paternal charity. In our time of increasing fatherlessness, El Greco offers us an even more fundamental insight: that the fatherhood of Saint Joseph is a perpetual witness to the holiness of fatherhood and its place in the life of every Christian, regardless of what the father they have known was like.
A child who has a loving father naturally imagines the whole universe rotating around the solid pillar of his father’s love; in one wild, exhilarating glimpse, El Greco shows this childhood fantasy coming true in the person of Saint Joseph, who receives his fatherhood from the Eternal Son and so lives on earth as the father of the one whom earth and sea and sky adore—and our father as well.
Father Gabriel Toretta, o.p.
Dominican priest of the Province of Saint Joseph and doctoral student at the University of Chicago, where he studies the history of the theology of beauty in the Carolingian era.
Saint Joseph and the Christ Child (c. 1600), El Greco (1541–1614), Toledo Cathedral (sacristy), Toledo, Spain. © Bridgeman Images.
Art commentaries
The Annunciation of the Lord
by Pierre-Marie Dumont
The editorial of the month
by Father Sebastian White, o.p.
Ten days into this month we will hear at Mass the parable of the wicked tenants, who at vintage time refuse the landowner his produce, going so far as to beat up and kill his servants and, finally, his son and heir.
While I am no biblical scholar, the story is plainly an allegory for the chief priests’ and pharisees’ own failure to welcome the Son of God and to yield the fruit of true righteousness—they knew that he was speaking about them, we are told—leading to the expansion of the kingdom of God to include the Gentiles (cf. Rom 11:11).
Be that as it may, we cannot conveniently restrict the parable to its historical context. Are we not all fundamentally tenants or stewards of what God has given to us? Our very existence is a gift, a loan, from the Creator. What do you possess that you have not received? Saint Paul asks in 1 Corinthians 4. The Lord is God, he made us, we belong to him, sings Psalm 100. He justly expects from us the fruit of a life of faith and charity.
Sadly, as the Catechism points out, “sin sets itself against God’s love for us and turns our hearts away from it…. It is disobedience, a revolt against God through the will to become like gods (Gen 3:5).” And indeed this is the great irony the parable masterfully exposes: the adolescent rebelliousness of humanity against God, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) and who is in fact all loving, out of some illusion that if we wrest ourselves free of dependence upon him we may find happiness on our own terms.
The loving landowner
Notice that the parable begins by describing the landowner’s initiative: he planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a tower. Far from being an aloof investor, this man is the prime mover, personally involved right from the get-go, making sure the vineyard is fully equipped before leasing it out.
Additionally, there is nothing that suggests the landowner expected from the tenants an unjust amount. Thus, they had nothing to complain about—they are tenants, not slaves. Had the landowner forcefully dragged them away from their homes and from better jobs, had he given them an unworkable plot and no tools, then those men would have had every right to be angry. On the contrary, they had everything they needed. And as the parable makes clear, the landowner can lease his vineyard to other tenants. These men are not the only available farmers. They have been chosen.
Recall, too, that the landowner immediately leaves on a journey. So he is not an overbearing or mean boss. The tenants can arise each morning with the ennobling conviction that the landowner trusts them and has endowed them with freedom. And, as I like to imagine, surely they were free to sample the product every now and then (purely in the interest of quality control, of course).
Foolishly, the men still refuse the landowner what is rightfully his. They want to steal the inheritance, to claim it as their own possession, even though they are already sharing in it—albeit in a subordinate manner—as tenants.
What this means for us
“The tenants do not want to have a master,” Pope Benedict XVI once said, calling them “a mirror of ourselves. We men and women, to whom creation is as it were entrusted for its management, have usurped it. We ourselves want to dominate it in the first person and by ourselves. We want unlimited possession of the world and of our own lives. God is in our way.” Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, in his masterful commentary on Matthew, explains how such a tendency does not always mean an outright denial of God. “Few, if any of us,” he says, “would actually take Jesus, cast him out of the vineyard, and kill him. But we have far subtler ways of banishing God from the center of our hearts so that we can no longer be burned and transformed by the Fire of Mercy.”
How easy it is, I have to admit, to try to protect myself against a radical and comprehensive docility to God and his plan, to limit what God is allowed to ask from me. “We must eventually come face to face honestly with the great either/or of faith,” Leiva-Merikakis continues: “either I allow God full sway with my person and all my faculties, interests, passions, and intentions, or the presence of God in my life and the very thought of God and faith become the greatest nuisance and irritant imaginable.”
From rejection to cornerstone
“From the Son’s death springs life,” Pope Benedict went on to say. “A new building is raised, a new vineyard. He who at Cana changed water into wine has transformed his Blood into the wine of true love and thus transforms the wine into his Blood. In the Upper Room he anticipated his death and transformed it into the gift of himself in an act of radical love. His Blood is a gift, it is love, and consequently it is the true wine that the Creator was expecting. In this way, Christ himself became the vine, and this vine always bears good fruit: the presence of his love for us which is indestructible.”
In the end, the precious fruit of love and obedience that the tenants refuse to offer—that we refuse in sin—is found in the shed blood of the Son himself. The rejection and crucifixion of God’s own beloved Son, which manifests in full the “happy fault” the Church sings of in the Easter Exsultet, has won for us the grace to become for all eternity heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ (Rom 8:17).
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