The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich

[Stone]

IV. THE EARLY LIFE OF ST. JOSEPH

[We here break off Catherine Emmerich’s somewhat disconnected description of the Blessed Virgin’s sojourn in the Temple to give the following accounts of St. Joseph’s youth.]

Among many things which I saw today of the youth of St. Joseph I remember what follows. Joseph, whose father was called Jacob, was the third of six brothers. His parents lived in a large house outside Bethlehem, once the ancestral home of David, whose father Isai or Jesse had owned it. By Joseph’s time there was, however, little remaining of the old building except the main walls. The situation was very airy, and water was abundant there.

I know my way about there better than in our own little village of Flamske. In front of the house was an outer court (as in the houses of ancient Rome), surrounded by a covered colonnade like a cloister. I saw sculptures in this colonnade like the heads of old men. On one side of the court was a fountain under a stone canopy. The water issued from animals’ heads in stone. There were no windows to be seen in the lower storey of the dwelling-house itself, but high up there were circular openings. I saw one door. A broad gallery ran round the upper part of the house, with little towers at each of its four corners, like short, thick pillars, ending in big balls or domes on which little flags were fastened.

Stairs led up through these little towers from below, and from openings in the domes one had a view all round without being seen oneself. There were little towers like this on David’s palace in Jerusalem, and it was from the dome of one of these that he saw Bethsabee at her bath. This gallery ran round a low upper storey with a flat roof on which was another building with another little tower. Joseph and his brothers lived in the upper storey, and their teacher, an aged Jew, lived in the topmost building. They all slept in a circle in one room, in the middle of the storey which was surrounded by the gallery. Their sleeping-places were carpets, rolled up against the wall in the daytime and separated by removable screens. I have often seen them playing up there in their rooms. They had toys in the shape of animals, like little pugs. [Catherine Emmerich uses this word indiscriminately for any creatures she does not know.] I also saw how their teacher gave them all kinds of strange lessons which I did not rightly understand. I saw him making all kinds of figures on the ground with sticks, and the boys had to walk on these figures; then I saw the boys walking on other figures and pushing the sticks apart, placing them differently and rearranging them and making various measurements at the same time. I saw their parents, too; they did not trouble much about their children and had little to do with them. They seemed to me to be neither good nor bad.
Joseph, whom I saw in this vision at about the age of eight, was very different in character from his brothers. He was very gifted and was a very good scholar, but he was simple, quiet, devout, and not at all ambitious. His brothers knocked him about and played all kinds of tricks on him. The boys had separate little gardens, at the entrance of which stood figures like babies in swaddling-clothes on pillars, but sheltered a little (in niches perhaps?). I have often seen figures like these, and there were some on the curtain which hung by the praying-place of St. Anne and also of the Blessed Virgin, but on Mary’s curtain this figure held something in its arms that reminded me of a chalice with something wriggling out of it.

Here in St. Joseph’s house the figures were like babies in swaddling clothes with round faces surrounded by rays. In still earlier times I noticed many figures of this kind, particularly in Jerusalem. They appeared, too, in the Temple decorations. I saw them in Egypt as well, where they sometimes had little caps on their heads. Amongst the figures which Rachel carried off from her father Laban there were some like these, but smaller, as well as other different ones. I have also seen these figures lying in little boxes or baskets in Jewish houses. I think perhaps that they represented the child Moses floating on the Nile, and that the swaddling-bands perhaps symbolized the tightly binding character of the Law. I often used to think that this little figure was for them what the Christ Child is for us.

I saw herbs, bushes, and little trees in the boys’ gardens; and I saw how Joseph’s brothers often went in secret to his garden and trampled or uprooted something in it. They made him very unhappy. I often saw him under the colonnade in the outer court kneeling down with his face to the wall, praying with outstretched arms, and I saw his brothers creep up and kick him. I once saw him kneeling like this, when one of them hit him on the back, and as he did not seem to notice it, he repeated his attack with such violence that poor Joseph fell forward on to the hard stone floor. From this I realized that he was not in a waking condition, but had been in an ecstasy of prayer. When he came to himself, he did not lose his temper or take revenge, but found a hidden corner where he continued his prayer.

I saw some small dwellings built against the outer walls of the house, inhabited by a few middle-aged women. They went about veiled, as I often saw women doing who lived near schools in the country. They seemed to form part of the household, for I often saw them going in and out of the house on various errands. They carried water in, washed and swept, closed the gratings in front of the windows, rolled up the beds against the walls and placed wickerwork screens in front of them. I saw Joseph’s brothers sometimes talking to these maidservants or helping them with their work and joking with them, too. Joseph did not do this; he was serious and solitary. It seemed to me that there were also daughters in the house. The lower living-rooms were arranged rather like those in Anna’s house, but everything was more spacious. Joseph’s parents were not very well satisfied with him; they wanted him to use his talents in some worldly profession, but he had no inclination for that.

He was too simple and unpretentious for them; his only inclination was towards prayer and quiet work at some handicraft. When he was about twelve years old, I often saw him go to the other side of Bethlehem to escape from his brothers’ perpetual teasing. Not far from the future cave of the Nativity there was a little community of pious women belonging to the Essenes, who dwelt in a series of rock-chambers in a hollowed-out part of the hill on which Bethlehem stood. They tended little gardens near their dwellings and taught the children of other Essenes. Little Joseph went to visit these women, and I often used to see him escaping from his brothers’ teasing to go to them and join in their prayers, which they read by the light of a lamp in their cave from a scroll hanging on the wall. I also saw him visiting the caves of which one was afterwards the birthplace of Our Lord. He prayed there quite alone, or made all kinds of little things out of wood; for there was an old carpenter who had his workshop near these Essenes with whom Joseph spent much of his time. He helped him with his work and so little by little learnt his craft. The art of measuring which he had practised at home under his master’s tuition was here of great use to him. His brothers’ hostility at last made it impossible for him to remain any longer in his parents’ house; I saw that a friend from Bethlehem (which was separated from his home by a little stream) gave him clothes in which to disguise himself. In these he left the house at night in order to earn his living in another place by his carpentry. He might have been eighteen to twenty years old at that time. To begin with, I saw him working with a carpenter at Libonah.77 This was the place where he first really learnt his craft. 

His master had his dwelling against some ancient walls which ran from the town along a narrow ledge of hill, like a road leading up to some ruined castle. Several poor people lived in the walls. I saw Joseph making long stakes in a place between high walls with openings above to let in light. These stakes were frames for wicker-screens. His master was a poor man, and made mostly only such common things as these rough wicker-screens. Joseph was very devout, good, and simple-minded, everybody loved him. I saw him helping his master very humbly in all sorts of ways—picking up shavings, collecting wood, and carrying it back on his shoulders. In later days he passed by here with the Blessed Virgin on one of their journeys, and I think he visited his former workshop with her.

His parents thought at first that he had been carried off by robbers; but I saw that he was discovered at last by his brothers and severely taken to task, for they were ashamed of his low way of life. He was, however, too humble to give it up; though he left that place and worked afterwards at Thanath,78 near Megiddo, by a small river called Kishon which runs into the sea. (This place is not far from Apheke,79 the home of the Apostle  Thomas.) Joseph lived here with a well-to-do master, and the carpenter’s work which they did was of a higher quality. Later still I saw him working in Tiberias for a master-carpenter. He might have been as much as thirty-three years old at that time. His parents in Bethlehem had been dead for some time. Two of his brothers still lived in Bethlehem, the others were dispersed. The parental home had passed into other hands, and the whole family had come down in the world very rapidly. Joseph was very devout and prayed fervently for the coming of the Messias. He was just engaged in building beside his dwelling a more retired room for prayer, when an angel appeared to him and told him not to do this, for, as once the patriarch Joseph at about this time had, by God’s will, been made overseer of all the corn of Egypt, so he, the second Joseph, should now be entrusted with the care of the granary of salvation.80 Joseph in his humility did not understand this, and gave himself up to continual prayer, till he received the call to betake himself to Jerusalem to become by divine decree the spouse of the Blessed Virgin. I never saw that he was married before; he was very retiring and avoided women.

[Later in Catherine Emmerich’s visions we shall come across various other allusions to the family history of Joseph and in particular of his brothers. These allusions are, however, too scattered and interwoven in the great mass of her communications for the writer to collect them all together in this place with certainty and clarity. Since, however, an opportunity occurs here unsought, we will mention an elder brother of Joseph’s who lived in Galilee.

[When we were looking up in our diaries the passage where Catherine Emmerich explained on August 24th, 1821, the relationship between Joseph and Joachim (see p. 21), we found a detailed account given by her on the same day (being the feast of St. Bartholomew) of a story from the life of that apostle. This vision had presented itself very vividly to her in connection with a relic of the saint. In the course of it she stated that the father of Bartholomew of Gessur had for some long time frequented the healing waters near Bethulia and had afterwards settled permanently in the region, chiefly on account of his friendship with an elder brother of Joseph. She added:]

He went to a valley near Dabbeseth which was the home of Zadok, a devout man and an elder brother of Joseph. The devout father of Bartholomew had become much attached to him during his sojourn at Bethulia. Zadok had two sons and two daughters, and these children were on friendly terms with the Holy Family. When the twelve-year-old Jesus remained behind in the Temple and his parents missed him, this was one of the families in which they sought for Him. I saw the sons amongst Jesus’ playmates when He was a boy.


77. It appears from various communications of Catherine Emmerich’s about the ministry of Our Lord that the town in which St. Joseph first worked was not the Libnah, which is in the tribe of Judah, some hours to the west of Bethlehem, but Libonah on the south side of Mount Garizim. According to the Book of Judges 21.19, it is to be found north of Silo. (CB)

78. Thanath or Thaanath (see Josue 16.6) lies, according to Eusebius, ten miles to the east of Nablus in the direction of the Jordan, whereas the place here mentioned by Catherine Emmerich must, by her account, lie north-west of Nablus. She must therefore no doubt have meant Thaanach instead of Thaanath, and have been misunderstood by the writer, who at the time had no knowledge whatever of the geography of Palestine and no means of supplying it. Such misunderstanding was all the more likely to occur because Catherine Emmerich when ill or in a state of ecstasy often pronounced the names somewhat unclearly in her lowGerman Munster dialect and sometimes mixed them up. A further convincing proof that she here meant Thaanach may be found in the daily account which she gave in 1823 of the third year of Our Lord’s ministry. She saw in her visions that Jesus taught on the 25th and 26th of the month Sivan in Thaanach, a town of the Levites near Megiddo, and that He visited there the former carpenter’s shop of his foster-father Joseph. (CB)

79. Aphek is about twenty-five miles north of Thaanach. (SB)

80. The same idea is found in St. Bernard’s Homilia 2 super Missus est, recited in the Breviary on St. Joseph’s feast. (SB)