ON SAINT JOACHIM, FATHER OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY
SHORTLY BEFORE THE BIRTH OF CHRIST.
HISTORICAL COMMENTARY.
Joachim, Father of the Virgin Mother of God (Saint)
Section I. The commemoration of Saint Joachim inscribed in the Greek and Latin calendars.
[1] Although the censure of Blessed Peter Damian, in his third sermon on the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, reproves the zeal of superfluous curiosity in those who inquire all too unprofitably into what the Evangelist deemed it superfluous to relate -- namely, who the father and who the mother of the most Blessed Mary were -- The names of Mary's holy parents nevertheless the concordant belief of the Fathers of both Churches, who celebrate Joachim and Anna, leads us not to doubt too anxiously whether the names are genuine, or merely adopted from a certain congruity of Hebrew etymology, by which Joachim is interpreted as "the preparation of the Lord" and Anna as "grace," as is found in Fulbert, Bishop of Chartres, in his sermon on the Nativity of the Virgin, which Francis Combefis published after extracting it from a manuscript of Saint Victor, in volume 8 of the Bibliotheca Concionatoria, folio 119. For even if everything that the Greek Fathers drew from a certain spurious booklet concerning the birth of the Virgin -- are held from tradition falsely ascribed to James the Brother of God -- or that the impostor Seleucus fabricated under the very name of the Evangelist Matthew, is of altogether doubtful reliability yet bearing some appearance of truth: how small a matter is it, if at least the very names of the parents of the most holy Mother of God are believed to have been preserved by the tradition of the Church, and if not everything is said to have been invented by those authors?
[2] Under these names, certainly, the encomia of the holy Fathers celebrate them, Veneration among the Greeks on September 9 and the Churches honor them with festive observances. The Eastern Churches indeed venerate both jointly with a solemn Office on September 9 -- not only from the Typikon of Saint Sabas, printed at Venice together with the Menaia, which has been augmented with many new Offices just as the Menaia themselves (whence little or nothing could be established concerning the antiquity of the feast), but also from other more ancient ones, from which such additions are absent. One of these we have transcribed from the manuscript codex of Frederick Lindenbrog; we have learned that another is preserved in Silesia from our Theodorus Moretus. In both, however, the feast of the holy ancestors of God, Joachim and Anna, is ordered to be celebrated on the said day, and the entire order of the sacred liturgy is prescribed in the former. In the printed editions, moreover, the Office, which the Menaia contain at length for the said day, after this verse from the Metrical Calendar has been recited --
"On the ninth, seek the synaxis of the parents of the Mother of God" --
these things are recited. and July 25 "We celebrate this on account of the Nativity of our most holy Lady, the Mother of God: because they became the agents of reconciliation for the salvation bestowed upon the whole world through their most chaste daughter; for otherwise their consummation is known to be celebrated on July 25."
[3] But the Office of that day bears in its title only the dormition of Saint Anna, when the principal celebration concerns Saint Anna as do the Typika we have mentioned; and the name of Saint Joachim seems to be joined to that of his wife, who died on that day, among the sacred canticles only on account of the shared honor of both, while the day of his own death is unknown. For neither does the day now assigned to his veneration among the Latins, March 20, seem to have been chosen for any other reason than to conjoin the feast of the father-in-law with the feast of the son-in-law. Accordingly, the Greeks speak more sparingly of Joachim in July, but more copiously in September, but in September equally of both when all the Odes of the ninth day are directed equally to both spouses, congratulating both on the most desired offspring who, wiping away the vexation of long barrenness, abundantly consoles the old age of the parents. The hymns of this day, like many others, are noted with the acrostic:
"I sing gladly, O all-pure Virgin, of your parents."
But nowhere is the name of the author noted, so that it seems entirely credible that the practice of celebrating the day of the Virgin's nativity in honor of Mary's holy progenitors was not only most ancient in the East, with a most ancient Office but that the Canons themselves were composed either by Saint Sabas himself, the first collector of the Menaia (as Simon Wangnereck, one of our own, demonstrates in the prolegomena to the Marian piety of the Greeks), or by Saints Chariton, Euthymius, or Theoctistus, from whom he himself received most of his material -- since other Canons added afterwards are customarily ascribed to some particular author, and often indeed display the very name after the acrostic, through the initial letters of the final strophes. These saints, moreover, belong to the fourth century of the Christian Era.
[4] The veneration of Saint Joachim among the Latins is not so ancient; for them September 9 is festive under the sole title of the Nativity of Mary, The veneration of Saint Joachim among the Latins is more recent even though in sermons delivered to the people, it was not always without commemoration and commendation of her blessed parents. Polius, soon to be cited more fully, adduces a Roman Breviary printed at Paris in the year 1528, in which the day of Saint Joachim's death is placed on the fifteenth day before the Calends of October. The Venetian edition of the year 1522, however, making no mention of his death, merely notes in the Calendar for that same day that among the Friars Minor the entire Office of Saint Joachim is celebrated under the rite of a lesser double. September 17 Certain augmented manuscripts of Usuard's Martyrology had his name at December 9, as is evident from those which were accepted therefrom and printed at Cologne in the years 1490 and 1521, December 9 the second of which, published under the name of Hermann Greven the Carthusian, frequently cited by us, has these words: "Here is observed the solemn commemoration of Joachim the Patriarch, and March 20 father of the glorious Mother of God, Mary" -- by which we understand Cologne itself, because there in the church of the Holy Maccabees the skull of Saint Joachim is believed to be preserved, as Aegidius Gelenius attests in the Fasti Agrippinenses; and that the Office is celebrated on this day is asserted by James Polius in his history of Saints Joachim and Anna. In the earlier edition of the same Martyrology, however, only these words are read for the said day, December 9: "On the same day, the commemoration of Blessed Joachim the Patriarch, father of the glorious Virgin Mary." But Molanus and Galesinius, and Baronius -- who in this matter followed not so much them as the institution of the Roman Church -- have him on this March 20. For in the Roman Breviary printed at Venice in 1522, there is found for this day an entire proper Office for the Saint under this rubric: with a proper double Office "Pope Julius the Second instituted the feast of the most holy Patriarch Joachim, father of the glorious Virgin Mary and grandfather of our Lord Jesus Christ, to be celebrated henceforth on March 20 under the rite of a greater double." These very same words, as Polius attests, are found in the Parisian edition already cited.
[5] This Julius held the pontificate from the year 503 to 513, and Bartholomew Gavantus testifies that the same Office was thus printed in the Roman Breviary up to the year 550, which Pius V abrogated in his commentary on the rubrics of the Breviary, section 7, chapter 5. He says that Pius V changed it -- he should have said abolished it entirely, for in the Breviary of the year 1572, not only is no Office found, but not even the name of Saint Joachim appears in the Calendar. The nine readings had given offense, along with the hymns and antiphons conforming to them, drawn from apocryphal writings, concerning which Fulbert of Chartres had already spoken long before -- that is, some six hundred years earlier -- on the feast of the Virgin's Nativity: "On this day, it seems that the book which was found written concerning her birth and life ought especially to be recited in the Church -- if the Fathers had not judged it should be numbered among the apocryphal writings. But since it has so seemed good to great and wise men, we, reading certain other things but not foreign ones, shall fulfill the ecclesiastical custom with due offices."
Section II. The homeland and lineage of Saint Joachim.
[6] Setting aside those things judged to be apocryphal, Fulbert of Chartres proceeds to expatiate in praise of the great Virgin coming into this world, Was Saint Joachim from Nazareth but before he arrives at the later encomia following the Nativity and the miracles wrought in Basil and Theophilus, he says: "The most Blessed Virgin was born of a Nazarene father and a Bethlehemite mother" -- taking this very thing from the booklet he had called apocryphal, which other Fathers also at times passed over in silence rather than asserted from any certain evidence. or from Bethlehem? For from the Gospel, when it is read that Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem, his own city, in response to the edict of Caesar Augustus, together with Mary his betrothed wife who was with child, because he was of the house and family of David, it seems to be understood that not only Joseph's but also Mary's own birth was to be referred to Bethlehem -- not through her mother (for that would have been entirely irrelevant) but through her father, who originated from that very place. That he had some possessions there, and indeed that he was not inconsiderably wealthy, some assert --
but on no other foundation than that received from the booklet rejected, as we have seen, by the Church and the holy Fathers -- a booklet fabricating certain tales about Joachim's house at the Probatic Pool in Jerusalem (which we rather believe to have been a rented lodging) and about ample gardens in the vicinity of Nazareth and an abundance of flocks, Was he wealthy? from which we judge we must abstain, especially after we have shown above that Joseph, a poor carpenter, an inhabitant with his wife of a very poor cottage such as is still visited at Loreto, was the full brother of Joachim and Mary's paternal uncle.
[7] But if we must proceed by conjecture and inquire whence the Virgin and the Virgin's spouse, who acknowledged Bethlehem as their own city, Whence came his dwelling at Nazareth obtained a domicile at Nazareth, we would believe it could be said with greater probability that Joachim and Joseph were born into a noble family but one of slender means, and that, having lost even whatever lands they may have had in Judah from their paternal inheritance, they withdrew into Galilee for the purpose of bearing their reduced circumstances more easily, where Joseph began to sustain life by the craft of carpentry, while Joachim, with a small sum that perhaps remained, purchased some sheep -- a venture that did not turn out altogether unsuccessfully for him, so that he was able to acquire for himself both the cottage we have mentioned at Nazareth, and to find a wife from his own or any other tribe -- and more probably from the Levitical tribe, which was dispersed through all the cities of the land of Israel -- namely Anna, whose priestly lineage, like that of her granddaughter Elizabeth, was all the more fitting and his wife Anna? so that the Messiah who was to be born of her daughter, King and Priest forever, might at least in this respect (since he properly had to be a son of David) have priestly ancestors. That she had many sisters and brothers we prefer to believe, rather than to grant that Heli, the parent of the two brothers Joseph and Joachim whom we have mentioned, had many children, from whom were born those who are called in the Gospel the brothers of the Lord and the sisters of his Mother.
For if Heli had had any other children besides the two named, at least males, and sons from these, that absolute necessity of contracting the marriage between Mary and Joseph would not hold: Through her, many became blood relations of Christ a necessity that sheds upon the otherwise most obscure Gospel as much light as we have seen where we treated of Saint Joseph in Section 2 -- since the virgin could have been yielded to another equally near kinsman, namely a younger brother or any nephew from any full brother, who would have had a ready excuse from contracting marriage only when a more advanced age had confirmed a resolution of leading a celibate life.
[8] Joachim was passed over in the genealogy We have also given the reason why Matthew, arranging the genealogy of Christ according to the law and the promise made to the Fathers, makes not Joachim but his brother Joseph the son of Jacob -- who terminates the more prominent branch of the Zorobabelites -- that is, the legal son; and why Luke, wishing to set forth for the Gentiles the genealogy of the same Christ according to the flesh, was content merely to trace the ancestors of his putative father: because the very same persons were also the ancestors of Mary, whom it was commonly known to have married her paternal uncle according to the prescription of the Mosaic law. Nor indeed can it be pleasing, what some maintain, that Joachim and Heli are the same person, and that Joseph is therefore called his son by Luke is he the same as Heli? because he had passed into the family of his father-in-law either by the privilege of adoption or by the right of kinship through marriage. For we find neither examples nor license in the Scriptures or the Law of free adoption from any nation or family whatsoever, such as flourished among the Romans; nor do we dare say that neither Evangelist wove a carnal genealogy of Christ: not Matthew, who frequently departs from it, as has been shown; nor Luke either, because he would immediately err from the very threshold in the opposite sense for us, substituting a son-in-law in place of a son.
[9] Was he the son of Panther? We did not touch upon the singular opinion of Saint John Damascene concerning the genealogy of Joachim and his consanguinity with Joseph, because it was applied to this feast in the last revision of the Office, and could be understood as sufficiently refuted from what was said above concerning Joseph. For as regards Barpanther, the father of Joachim, and his grandfather Panther the son of Levi, from whom also Melchi is said to have been born as the carnal grandfather of Joseph -- this displeases us not so much because it inverts the order of generations (since Luke makes Levi the son of Melchi, not the reverse) as because the consequence would be that the genealogy of Christ according to the flesh was written by neither Evangelist, and that the carnal genealogy of Joseph is substituted for it, which avails no more for Christ (if the latter had a father and grandfather from whom Christ did not proceed carnally) than the genealogy of a stepfather avails for a stepson. Wherefore we agree with Possinus, that was perhaps a family surname who, from the fact that Epiphanius says certain opponents of Christ were accustomed to boast that Christ was the son not of God but of a certain man named Panther, infers that that surname belonged to the family, which had passed down commonly to Joseph and Joachim from their father and grandfather -- so that the great-grandfather Levi did not beget Mathat and Panther separately, but Mathat surnamed Panther, whose son was therefore similarly surnamed Panther or Pantheras; but by others was called Barpanther -- that is, son of Panther -- to distinguish him from his father.
[10] If, however, Panther and Barpanther were to be called different from Mathat and Heli, Were Heli and Jacob uterine brothers? we would prefer to say that these two were the legal progenitors of Joachim and Joseph, inasmuch as their carnal father Heli could have begotten them from the widow of his cousin Barpanther, who had died without children. Nor does it matter that we would thus give Joseph multiple legal fathers in different respects: Panther, inasmuch as Joachim was born as heir in his name; Joachim himself, inasmuch as his only daughter, married according to the law, was entering upon his inheritance; and finally Jacob, by reason of the ancestral blessings and the right to the Davidic kingdom accruing to Joseph through his death, or by that title some father was legally Joachim's as one representing one of Jacob's own ancestors, through whom Joseph became Jacob's heir by the right of closer kinship, according to the principle of the jurists: "the heir of my heir is my heir." This one, however, ought rather to have been named by Matthew than either Joachim or Panther or Barpanther, because these contributed nothing to his purpose, while the former contributed very much. As for what finally concerns the woman who, in the opinion of Damascene, Mathan the Solomonide first had as wife, from whom he begot Jacob the father of Joseph, and whom, after being widowed, Melchi or Mathat the Nathanide afterwards married and begot from her Heli, whose wife Jacob -- the uterine brother of Heli -- was obliged by law to marry after Heli died without children, so that Joseph proceeded legally from Heli but carnally from Jacob: these things, I say, even if no other reason were present, could not be approved by anyone, because they compel those born of the same mother, however different their fathers, to fall under the law -- a law enacted to prevent the confusion of inheritances and therefore binding only brothers from the same father and their posterity -- and thus they imagine the gate, which the Law wished to keep closed, to be thrown wide open and gaping for the mingling of all things.
Section III. The eulogy, sepulcher, and relics of Saint Joachim.
[11] If it is of any importance to someone to see what the Eastern Church seems to have accepted from the writings falsely attributed to Saint James, let him read the excellent orations on the Nativity of the Virgin by the Emperor Leo the Wise and by James in Combefis's edition, The Office restored by Gregory XV in volume 8 of the Bibliotheca Concionatoria, recently extracted from manuscripts. We, passing over those things that rest on so uncertain a foundation, since by the favor of Gregory XV we have, in the year 1620, the restored honor of celebrating the feast with the rite of a double, and an Office approved the following year by the Sacred Congregation of Rites, prefer to excerpt from Andrew of Crete, Archbishop of Jerusalem, a passage on the same subject -- one by no means unsuitable for setting forth the principal virtues of the Virgin's holy parents without risk of reckless assertion.
[12] Joachim was a mild and modest man, nourished in the divine laws, The eulogy of Joachim and Anna from Andrew of Crete who, having lived temperately and clinging steadfastly to God and persevering thus, had grown old without children: though his nature was vigorous, the gift of grace did not correspond to its vigor. But Anna, too, was a lover of God -- temperate and chaste, but barren; devoted to her husband, but lacking children; and while she meditated solely on the honor of the divine law, stung on every side by the goads of barrenness, as is fitting for those who have produced no offspring, she bore it grievously, was sorrowful, and grieved, unable to endure being deprived of children. While Joachim and Anna were thus held in sorrow because offspring, the future heir of their line, was lacking, they had by no means entirely extinguished the spark of hope; and both prayed that offspring be granted to raise up seed for them ... nor did they cease their earnest entreaty before they were made partakers of their desire. And indeed they attained their desire, for the Giver of the gift himself did not dismiss the gift of hope unfulfilled: thus, to those beseeching with plaintive voices and supplicating God, the power that does not delay swiftly came to their aid, and to the one it added strength to bring forth fruit, to the other the power to bear offspring ... and now from barren and withered parents, as from trees flourishing with moisture, a noble fruit, this most immaculate Virgin, sprouted forth for us ... And because she had come forth from a barren mother, from whose womb the ear of immortality emerged, her parents brought her to the temple and offered her to God: in the third year of her age, as the common tradition of the Church holds. From which it is also permissible to surmise what Cedrenus reports -- that the Virgin's parents died when she was eleven years old: Joachim indeed in his eightieth year of life, and Anna in her seventy-ninth. The prolonged barrenness exaggerated by the Fathers renders this sufficiently plausible, rather than Cedrenus's entire narrative, which appears to have been taken from the apocryphal writings.
[13] We would readily be persuaded that Joachim was buried in his ancestors' tombs at Bethlehem, if fortune's goods had made him as conspicuous as his dignity of blood deserved; who were joined in marriage at Nazareth but as this distinction lay hidden in the obscurity of a poor condition, so we are reluctantly induced to believe that he was buried elsewhere than where he breathed forth his blessed spirit and had his domicile. That he had his domicile at Nazareth we infer from the fact that the Nazarenes boasted that the Brothers and Sisters of the Lord were among them; whence it becomes probable that either both or one of Mary's parents was a native of that place. But this is merely probable: for why could not Joachim have brought Anna, who was betrothed to him in Galilee, to Bethlehem or even to Jerusalem, for some reason -- just as Zechariah brought Elizabeth, either the granddaughter or kinswoman of Saint Anna, to the hill country of Judea? With his brother Joseph remaining at Nazareth in his own or a rented dwelling having left Joseph there, they perhaps returned to Judea and practicing his trade -- who therefore brought the Virgin, betrothed to him at Jerusalem, from the temple to the same place -- so that Mary was counted among the Galileans not so much by birth as by long residence, and through Mary, Christ. Certainly it would thus become more credible what the tradition of the Church of Jerusalem holds concerning the birth --
of the Blessed Virgin in her father's house or lodging in that same city. "For there," says Baldenzel in his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a thirteenth-century writer preserved in our Poza, where Mary is said to have been born "the Church of Blessed Anna, grandmother of Christ, quite beautiful, is adjacent to the Probatic Pool, where the Blessed Virgin is said to have been born." In this way there would also be less difficulty with what the universal Church receives and celebrates with an annual feast concerning the presentation and education of the Virgin in the Temple: after which, moreover, it is far more credible that the holy parents wished to remain there, lest they be separated too far from their most beloved daughter.
[14] To this purpose serves the eighth Reading from the Roman Breviary in the above-cited Parisian edition, and Joachim buried together with Anna whose words Polius sets forth in his exegetical work on Saint Anna: "The sacred Joachim, therefore, adorned with most sacred offspring, at length filled with good works, leaving his earthly body on the sixteenth day before the Calends of October" (in the history more correctly the fifteenth) "gave his holy soul to God. His body was honorably buried at Jerusalem by Anna, with whom she afterwards piously chose to be interred as a sign of special love: as the stone tomb of both was once shown, for in their glorious memory, down to nearly these times, a church stood not far from the cloister of the Temple of Solomon. transferred into the house where they had dwelt In the time of Constantine, however, his mother Helena, coming to Jerusalem after the finding of the Lord's Cross, is written to have carried the body of Anna also to Constantinople; but to have left the body of her husband at Jerusalem, where it is venerated with wonderful devotion."
[15] So much for that. However, the most holy spouses were not first buried at Jerusalem but in the Valley of Jehoshaphat near the Garden of Gethsemane, together with the Virgin's spouse Joseph and afterwards the Virgin Mother of God herself, as we learn from Adrichomius, and more clearly from Francis Quaresmius in his Elucidation of the Holy Land, volume 2, book 4, chapter 2, which treats of the church built around the sepulcher of the Blessed Virgin Mary: "On the right side as one enters, after they had rested for some time in the Valley of Jehoshaphat that is, on the eastern side and about the middle of the stairway of 50 steps by which one descends to the sepulcher of the Virgin, there is a chapel in which are two mausoleums constructed in the form of an altar: in one of them, which faces north, the body of Saint Anna, mother of the Mother of God, was once entombed, and in the other, facing east, the body of Saint Joachim, father of the same Virgin. On the other side, opposite this chapel, is another dedicated to Saint Joseph, spouse of the Virgin Mary, where his sepulcher stands in a similar form of an altar. These mausoleums are deprived of their sacred relics; yet the faithful venerate them with sacrifices and prayers, especially on their feast days, because tradition holds that the sacred bodies of those Saints were entombed in them and that they were sanctified by their relics."
[16] Relics of Saint Joachim at Bologna Quaresmius judges that this temple was first erected by the faithful not by Helena the mother of Constantine, but in the time of Bishop Juvenal or shortly before, at the beginning of the fifth century, when the sepulcher of the Virgin was discovered. And thus, since a church had already previously been dedicated in honor of Saint Anna at Jerusalem, Polius judges that the bones of the holy spouses were sought out and transferred hither from the Valley of Jehoshaphat, which Helena then separated. As for the relics of Saint Anna, we shall treat of them elsewhere. Concerning the most holy relics of Joachim, however, there is an opinion that certain parts were transferred elsewhere: for Anthony of Paul Masini affirms that some are found at Bologna at Saint Paul of the Observance, in addition to various celebrated altars and images of the Saint there; and at Cologne at the Holy Maccabees and Gelenius attests that the skull is preserved at Cologne in the Church of the Maccabees. We inquired whether any written records concerning it were found there, and in what condition it was. No written records have yet been found; to the latter part of the question, Gerardus Busch, Licentiate of Sacred Theology and Confessor at the Holy Maccabees, responded on November 14 of the year 1665 in these words: "The skull of Saint Joachim, in the likeness of a human head, is preserved most honorably in the Church of the Holy Maccabees (as I myself have seen and anyone may see), the skull enclosed in silver and surrounded by precious stones" (Father James Kritzradt, one of our own, calls it a coronet of whitish pearls, having himself venerated it on November 25 of the aforesaid year, as he writes). "It is supported by three silver feet artfully made, and the skull itself is offered for viewing through a silver effigy of a head, open above. Below, on a gilded circle, this inscription is found in golden letters: THE HEAD OF SAINT JOACHIM." From the antique form of the letters, such as is customary in old Missals, the same James Kritzradt judged this reliquary to have been made at least two hundred years before; he testified, together with Father Martin Sibenius, that he perceived a sweet fragrance from it.
[17] With these matters thus arranged, let there be added by way of conclusion, a hymn transcribed from the ancient Roman Breviary by Polius, Invocation of the Saint containing a devout invocation of Saint Joachim, in the following words:
O Joachim, father of the supreme maiden, Who bore God with her modesty intact, Advance our complaints to the Lord, And our chaste prayers.
You know by how many savage waves we are tossed here, from the old Roman Breviary Whom the sorrowful sea of the world wearies; You know how many battles Satan and the flesh Attach to us.
Now joined to the sacred hosts above, Indeed surpassing them, you can do all things, if you will: Your grandson Jesus will deny nothing to your merit, Nor will your daughter.
Grant that by your prayer the blessed Godhead May bestow upon us pardon and peace; That, joined together, we may sweetly sing Hymns to him.