The Cult in the Antiochian Church

Since the 1993 glorification, the veneration of St. Joseph of Damascus and the Damascus Martyrs has grown across the Antiochian Church and its worldwide diaspora — in liturgical commemoration, iconography, and the naming of parishes, especially in North America, where the descendants of the 1860 displacement have made St. Joseph a patron. This file describes that cult and its character.

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

A Cult Rooted in the Homeland, Grown in the Diaspora

The veneration of St. Joseph of Damascus is, first, a cult of the Patriarchate of Antioch itself — the Church of Syria and Lebanon honoring its own great modern martyr, in the city of his death, on the feast of 10 July (Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, “St. Joseph of Damascus,” antiochpatriarchate.org). But it has spread most visibly through the Antiochian diaspora, and above all in North America, where it has taken on a special resonance. This is fitting, and not accidental: the Antiochian Orthodox presence in the Americas grew directly out of the emigration of Arab Christians from Ottoman Syria and Lebanon in the decades after the mid-nineteenth-century upheavals — the very displacement of which the 1860 massacres are a defining moment (on that displacement, see Arab Orthodoxy Under Ottoman Rule and St. Raphael of Brooklyn). The diaspora that venerates St. Joseph is, in part, the descendants of the community he died with.

The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America has actively promoted his veneration — publishing his life, keeping his feast, and holding him up as a patron and example, particularly for the clergy (the Archdiocese’s biographical account and liturgical materials, antiochian.org tradition). Parishes and institutions have been dedicated under his name — for example, communities bearing the title “St. Joseph of Damascus” or “St. Joseph the Damascene” in North America (as attested by the existence of such parishes, e.g., St. Joseph Damascene Orthodox Church). In this the cult follows the ordinary pattern by which a newly glorified saint enters the living devotional life of a Church: feast, life, icon, hymnography, and dedication.

Icon and Image

As with all glorified saints, St. Joseph’s veneration is carried in the first place by his icon. He is depicted as an Orthodox priest — vested, bearing the marks of his office and of his martyrdom — often shown with the instruments or the sign of his death, and, in keeping with the heart of his story, associated with the Eucharist he carried to the dying. The icon makes visible what the feast confesses: a priest-martyr of Damascus, the shepherd who died among his flock. (Iconographic depiction follows the standard conventions for a hieromartyr; the specific iconographic program of St. Joseph has developed since 1993 within the Antiochian Church and its diaspora.) On the theology of the icon and its place in Orthodox veneration, see Orthodoxy: Icons and Iconoclasm.

Hymnography and the Feast

The feast of 10 July is kept with proper liturgical texts — the hymnography (troparion, kontakion, and the fuller service) by which the Church sings the memory of St. Joseph and the Damascus Martyrs. These texts, composed for the glorification and its aftermath, are the primary liturgical witness to the saint, and they carry the theological reading of his martyrdom: the priest who bore the Body of Christ into the fire, the shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep, the head of a company of martyrs (on the survivals and the liturgical texts, see His Liturgical and Literary Work). Through them the saint enters the daily and yearly worship of the Antiochian Church, which is where a cult truly lives — not in the archive but in the assembly at prayer (on the liturgical life as the Church’s living memory, see Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar).

The Character of the Veneration

Two features give the cult of St. Joseph its particular character. First, it is collective: it is the veneration not only of one priest but of “Joseph and the Damascus Martyrs,” and so it carries within it the memory of a whole slaughtered community — a corporate martyrdom focused in its priest (see The Companions in Martyrdom). To keep his feast is to remember the thousands.

Second, it is a cult with a strong ethnic and historical resonance for Arab Orthodox Christians. St. Joseph is an Arab saint, an Arabic-speaking priest and scholar of the Arab Church, martyred in the Arab world; and for a diaspora that has often had to explain and defend its identity as Arab and Orthodox at once, he is a figure of self-recognition and pride (on this dimension, see Martyrdom and Arab Christian Identity). This is a real and legitimate feature of the cult, though it carries a corresponding danger — that the martyr be pressed into a merely ethnic or political role, or into an anti-Muslim polemic that his own life and the history of his death both refuse (see Not a Simple Story). The healthiest form of the veneration holds the saint as what the Church glorified him to be: a martyr of Christ, at the head of his martyred people, an Arab Orthodox witness whose fidelity — not whose ethnicity or whose enemies — is the point.

A Living and Growing Cult

Because the glorification is recent — 1993, within living memory — the cult of St. Joseph is still young and still growing. Its shape is not yet fixed as that of an ancient saint’s is; its hymnography, iconography, and dedications are still being multiplied; its place in the wider Orthodox consciousness beyond the Antiochian world is still being established. What is clear is the trajectory: from the wound of 1860, through a century of remembered grief, to the glorification of 1993, to a living veneration carried by the Antiochian Church at home and, especially, in a diaspora that recognizes in St. Joseph the martyr of its own origins. He is, increasingly, one of the recognized New Martyrs of the modern Orthodox Church — and, for the Arab Orthodox, a patron of singular closeness.

See Also

References

  • Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East. “St. Joseph of Damascus.” antiochpatriarchate.org. (The feast and the veneration in the Patriarchate.)
  • Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. “St. Joseph of Damascus.” Biographical account and liturgical materials. (The promotion of the cult in North America; the saint as patron and example.)
  • St. Joseph Damascene Orthodox Church (North American parish under the saint’s patronage). (Evidence of parish dedications under his name.)
  • St. Innocent Monastery. “Hieromartyr Joseph of Damascus (1793–1860).” (The feast of 10 July and its devotional observance.)