The Companions in Martyrdom

St. Joseph’s glorification was the glorification of “Joseph and his Companions” — the Damascus Martyrs, the many Orthodox Christians, largely laypeople and mostly unnamed, killed in the July 1860 massacre. This file describes the collective commemoration: who the companions were, why they are mostly anonymous, and how the Church came to venerate them together.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab New-Martyr of the Patriarchate of Antioch)

“Joseph and His Companions”

When the Holy Synod of Antioch glorified St. Joseph in 1993, it glorified him not as a solitary hieromartyr but as the head of a company. The formula the Patriarchate uses is precise: St. Joseph and his Companions — “the other New Martyrs (numbering two thousand five hundred men plus women and children)” — were glorified together (Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, “St. Joseph of Damascus,” antiochpatriarchate.org). The commemoration is thus, in its own self-understanding, collective: it honors the whole body of the Orthodox faithful of Damascus who were killed in the massacre of July 1860, with Joseph, the priest who died ministering to them, standing at their head as their representative and their pastor.

This collective form matters for understanding what the feast is. It is not primarily the feast of one great man; it is the feast of a slaughtered community, focused and named in its priest. The Damascus Martyrs are the thousands of ordinary Orthodox Christians — men, women, and children of the Christian quarter — who died for no other reason than that they were Christians, in a mob’s assault on their faith and their homes (on the events, see The Damascus Massacre, July 1860). Joseph is their icon; they are the reality he represents.

Mostly Unnamed

The companions are, for the most part, anonymous — and this anonymity is itself part of the character of the commemoration and must be reported honestly. Unlike the martyrs of the early Church, whose acta often preserve individual names and dialogues, the Damascus Martyrs of 1860 are known chiefly as a number and a body rather than as a roll of named individuals. The Antiochian tradition gives the aggregate — commonly the figure of about 2,500 killed in Damascus, “plus women and children” — rather than a list of names (Patriarchate of Antioch, “St. Joseph of Damascus”; on the casualty range, see the disputed note in The Damascus Massacre, July 1860).

There are reasons for this. The massacre killed a great many people in a few chaotic days; whole families and households perished together; the record-keeping capacity of the community was itself destroyed along with its churches and quarter; and the survivors were scattered as refugees. The result is that the Church remembers the martyrs collectively — as the faithful of Damascus who died in 1860 — rather than through a preserved catalogue of individual martyric acts. A few names of clergy and prominent laity survive in the accounts of the massacre and in Antiochian memory, but the great majority are known only to God (this is the ordinary situation of mass-martyrdom commemorations; cf. the collective New-Martyr commemorations elsewhere in the Orthodox world, and Martyrdom and Arab Christian Identity).

The anonymity is not a defect in the commemoration but part of its truth. The feast confesses that a whole people suffered, and it does not pretend to a precision about individuals that the catastrophe destroyed. In venerating “Joseph and his Companions,” the Church venerates both the one whose witness is remembered in detail and the thousands whose witness is remembered only as a body — and holds them together as a single martyrdom.

How the Church Gathered Them

The path from the massacre of 1860 to the glorification of 1993 is the story of how the Church gathered this scattered, largely anonymous suffering into a single act of veneration. For more than a century the memory of the Damascus Martyrs lived in the Antiochian community as a wound and a witness — the great catastrophe of the nineteenth-century Church of Antioch, remembered in the community’s own historical consciousness (on the transmission of the memory, see Attestation and Sources and The Cult in the Antiochian Church). St. Joseph, the priest whose death was remembered in the fullest and most vivid form, became the natural focus of that memory: the named and knowable martyr through whom the whole body could be venerated.

In 1993 the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Antioch formalized this long veneration, glorifying St. Joseph and the Damascus Martyrs together and appointing their feast on 10 July, the day of the martyrdom (Patriarchate of Antioch, “St. Joseph of Damascus”; see Glorification 1993). The glorification thus did what the Church’s glorifications characteristically do: it did not manufacture a cult but ratified one, receiving into the calendar a martyrdom the community had long carried in its memory (on the theology of ecclesial reception in glorification, see St. Xenia: Methodology). The many became one commemoration; the anonymous were gathered under the name of their priest; and the Church of Antioch confessed that the faithful of Damascus who died in 1860 died as martyrs of Christ.

A Company, Not a Single Hero

It is worth resisting a natural distortion. Because Joseph is the named and vividly remembered figure, it is easy to read the commemoration as the story of one heroic priest, with the “companions” as a background. The Church’s own formula resists this. The martyrs of Damascus are the point; Joseph is their priest and their representative. To venerate him rightly is to venerate them — the whole slaughtered community of the Christian quarter — and to hold before oneself not a single act of individual heroism but the corporate martyrdom of a people who died confessing Christ (see Martyrdom and Arab Christian Identity). This corporate character is the distinctive note of the Damascus commemoration, and it is why the feast is rightly called that of “St. Joseph of Damascus and the Damascus Martyrs.”

See Also

References

  • Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East. “St. Joseph of Damascus.” antiochpatriarchate.org. (The glorification of “St. Joseph and his Companions”; the figure of ~2,500 New Martyrs “plus women and children”; the 10 July feast.)
  • Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. “St. Joseph of Damascus.” Biographical account. (The martyrdom and the community that suffered with him.)
  • Fawaz, Leila Tarazi. An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994. (The scale and character of the killing and the destruction of the community’s record-keeping and quarter.)