Joseph’s Dreams

Jean-Marie Pirot, known as Arcabas, speaks a bold language of form and colour to narrate this alternate annunciation. The young sleeper on a stone-grey couch evokes Jacob’s pillow of angelic revelation (Genesis 28), but also Job’s ‘evil dreams’ as depicted by William Blake (Job 7:4) and the rocky tomb of resurrection life.

Joseph’s robe, and the blindfold of shadow on his face, are the blue of both sorrow and celestial promise. Confusion about his and Mary's situation restricts Joseph's sight. He sleeps in troubled exhaustion, his face and body turned away from his angelic visitor. Yet precisely this combination of mental distress with ‘upright’ faith incubates revelatory vision. Joseph’s shaded eyes are mirrored and answered in the inverted mask on the angel’s proximate face: a peeled patch across brightness in the shape of a tau cross.

The angel, descending from the realm of light, ‘wears’ radiance like a costume. Tags of flame evoke rushing movement and Psalm 104 as quoted in Hebrews 1:7, ‘he makes his angels winds and his servants flames of fire’. Even angelic beauty and light is a kind of disguise, a formal disclosure of the undisclosable. But what lies beneath? The angel has a body, hands, and feet.

Angels are ‘spirits in the divine service’, their anthropomorphic appearance linked to the glorious humility of their calling to mediate and communicate. Human shape enables interaction with humankind, and prophesies the incarnation. Here, the emergent form of the angel conforms to the curve of Joseph’s body, suggesting that proportionate grace. And perhaps something more: it is Adonai himself who is ‘wrapped in light as with a garment’ (Psalm 104:2).

The rich golds of the close-hovering angel are also already present in the counterpane covering Joseph, the shared tonality suggesting the immediacy and natural intimacy of grace. Bright lines sketch an abstract diamond womb across the two. What has been conceived is a gift with an ideal fit to creation made in God's image, by which humanity can ‘put on’ Christ (Romans 13:14) and bear the weight of glory.

One last detail: the unlit torch, which could just be the source of the shadow across Joseph’s eyes. What will bring the flame? Is it Joseph’s as-yet-ungiven response and obedience, corresponding to our own? That it is carried by the angel suggests that it is not only humanity, but also the invisible creation, whose fullest sight will be unlocked by assent.

This twelfth-century relief comes from a cloister column capital in a Spanish Benedictine monastery. In the Rule of St Benedict, the cloister is described as the workshop of the spiritual art (Chapter 4). Here in pacing meditation and prayer, the invisible work of contemplative closeness is tirelessly pursued.

In the prologue to the Rule, a supine dreamer envisioning angels (in that case Jacob in Genesis 28) is associated with the monastic virtue of humility which underpins the vowed life. Here, the closed mouths of Joseph and his visitor in this relief also speak of its character: the role of silence and the call to attentive hearkening in meditation. The angel’s presence further recalls the Rule’s stress on human action as being entirely in God’s sight, through God’s angels (Chapter 7).

In contrast to a subject matter which suggests spiritual demands meaningful to the meditating monk, the capital’s chiselled red sandstone affirms its crafted materiality. Joseph, and Jesus his son, are described in Matthew's gospel as tekton, a craftsperson (Matthew 13:55; Mark 6:3): work with wood, metal, or stone has all been posited. The depth of the relief, the patterned realizations of drape and texture, the almost reptilian unfolding of the angel’s body in seeming scales of stone, the spiralling curls and grooved beard—all these carry the strong impress of the hand of its medieval worker.

In this artwork, in context, two forms of labour complement one another, as the less visible work of prayer and openness to God is shown in handwork. Joseph is a humble artisan whose decisive actions, as he leads his family in and out of exile, as he supports them by the labour of his hands, make possible the safety of mother and Messiah.

However, as this scriptural story suggests, behind this action lies a spiritual hinterland of humility, vision, and silent dialogue with the divine. In the sculpture action and contemplation, craft and vision come together: the sacred is made solid in the weighty presence of the angel’s hand, balancing his incorporeal body almost like a gymnast on Joseph’s chest. We are invited to consider the balance of ora et labora, the activity of contemplation and the meditation of action.

The possibility of disclosure, represented by the presence of the angel, is taken seriously in a community where labours and duties of every kind open out to the insistent and irresistible word of God.

References

Fry, Timothy, OSB (ed.). 1981. RB 1980: The Rule of St Benedict in Latin and English (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press)

The Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera responds to a dream she had during her own pregnancy across a series of canvases of which this is the largest. A supine, big-bellied form is superimposed on a tree rhythmically batik-printed with abstract leaf shapes. At the dreamer’s feet, rodent-like and spermatozoic purple creatures represent malign forces. At the dreamer’s head (filled with all the colours of the canvas) a more luminously filled angelic outline kneels over and extends its impossibly elongated arms beneath the sleeper.

This is not Joseph’s dream: or is it? Joseph’s dream is at once that of the one human father of God, in history, specific as to time and place. At the same time, as the unique account in Matthew’s Gospel of messianic conception and birth, Joseph’s dream represents a universal threshold of cosmic and metaphysical promise, the fresh heart of any knowledge of God and self.

For Zvavahera—influenced by both her Shona culture and her Pentecostal Christianity—as for Joseph and his scriptural ancestors, dreams are the vehicle through which God speaks. As ‘revelations’, not just consolations, they potentially disclose otherwise unknowable territory of the play of good and evil.

We may see through Zvavahera our passage’s darker aspects. Jesus’s human father Joseph is beleaguered by fear—his troubles, too, swirling around a pregnant body; problems unresolved by taking Mary as his wife. Just as with his namesake Joseph, named in the preceding genealogy, the consequences of his dream, whilst resolving the initial dilemma, lead directly into the unveiling of human evil (Genesis 37). The revelation of God’s coming into the world disturbs its false order in ways which do not simply palliate: it is the news of his passion as well as of cosmic redemption. This conception, enraging regnant powers, will lead to immediate threat to the holy family and their exile to Egypt against the backdrop of child massacre.

However, dreams are also—for the artist—open matrices, inviting her to an artistic and spiritual labour through which she will move into meaning and battle against fear: each painting a potential victory (Garb 2024: 24, 57). Her art records this labour visibly in its transparency to the process of its production: amorphous shapes, loose layers, spatterings of ink, repeated motifs recalling associated repeated motions. So too Joseph’s once-dreamt dream holds within itself a lifetime, and all our lifetimes, of consequence in interpretation and action.

References

Garb, Tamar. 2024. ‘Painting/Printing and the Poetics of Revelation’, in Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa, ed. by Fiona Bradley (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard Gallery).