Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE — Bookstore recommendation A seventeenth-century Franciscan friar with no exceptional intellectual gifts, repeatedly turned away by religious communities, who eventually became one of the most astonishing mystics in the Church's history: that is the short answer to why readers keep returning to the life of Joseph of Cupertino. Published by TAN Books, this biography traces Joseph's path from a hardscrabble childhood in Apulia through his troubled entry into religious life, his years under Inquisition scrutiny, and the ecstatic prayer experiences that made him simultaneously famous and a pastoral problem for his superiors. The book is addressed to Catholics who want a saint's life that does not domesticate holiness into inspirational anecdote — Joseph's story is too strange and too well-documented for that. It speaks directly to anyone who has felt spiritually inadequate, passed over, or unconventional, and it asks whether God's action in a human life requires any particular talent at all. SECTION TWO — Catholic anthropological reading - **Created — body and soul as a unified locus of grace**: Joseph's levitations are the most discussed feature of his life, but their theological weight lies in what they imply about the body. They are not the soul escaping the body; they are the body being drawn upward by a soul wholly fixed on God. The CCMMP's insistence on the unity of body and soul (Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, ch. 4) finds an extreme but clarifying case here: the body registers and expresses the soul's orientation rather than merely housing it. - **Fallen — intellectual and social poverty as purgative material**: Joseph could not pass the basic theological examinations required for ordination on his first attempts. He was dismissed from one community and barely tolerated in another. The Fallen state in the CCMMP is not only moral disorder; it includes the wounds of weakness, incapacity, and social rejection. Joseph's biography shows these as the specific material that purgative grace works through, not around. - **Redeemed — obedience as participation in Christ's self-offering**: When Inquisition officials ordered Joseph to cease public ministry and live in confinement, he obeyed without recorded complaint over years. Aquinas treats obedience under justice as giving God and legitimate authority their due (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 104); Joseph's compliance reads as precisely that — a willed act of justice rather than mere resignation. - **Justice (devotion and adoration)**: The ecstasies that Joseph could neither summon nor suppress during Mass, at the mention of a holy name, or at the sight of a religious image point to the virtue of adoration operating at a level beyond conscious control. Aquinas distinguishes devotion as the will's prompt movement toward God; in Joseph, this movement apparently overran even voluntary bodily coordination. - **Prudence (docility)**: Joseph submitted to spiritual directors, confessors, and superiors even when their decisions curtailed his ministry or his freedom. Docility as an integral part of prudence — the openness to be guided by those with more experience or authority — is rarely dramatized as vividly as it is in a life where obedience cost the saint his public apostolate for years at a time. SECTION THREE — Conversation with the canon The tradition of ascetical theology represented by Royo Marin[^2] — which holds that souls genuinely oriented toward God are marked by a hunger for doctrine that serves the Church rather than the individual — finds in Joseph of Cupertino an unsettling counter-case: a man with almost no theological formation who nevertheless embodied the Unitive stage more visibly than most trained theologians. This does not contradict Royo Marin's framework so much as remind readers that the stages of perfection are not gatekept by intellectual competence. The parallel with heroic apostolic suffering described by de Guibert[^1] is also worth noting: just as de Guibert traces how the blood-martyrdom of figures like Isaac Jogues crowned years of ordinary, grinding heroism in daily mission life, Joseph's extraordinary ecstasies similarly crowned decades of ordinary, often humiliating faithfulness to religious observance. The extraordinary was built on the pedestrian, and the biography is most useful when read in that sequence. ## References 1. de Guibert, Joseph (n.d.). *The spirituality of the Society of Jesus*. — 'the martyrdom of blood is only the crowning of a more or less long life of heroic suffering in the service of souls' 2. Royo Marin, Antonio (n.d.). *Teologia de la perfeccion cristiana*. — 'souls thirsting for God and spiritual doctrine the better to serve the Church of Christ'
✓ Strengths
- ✓The life of St. Joseph of Cupertino presents the human body as a genuine locus of grace, with his well-documented levitations serving not as theatrical curiosities but as the body participating directly in the soul's orientation toward God — an unusually concrete illustration of the unity of body and soul under the action of the Holy Spirit.
- ✓Joseph's early years of ridicule, rejection from religious communities, and intellectual difficulty make the Fallen state visible without sentimentality: his suffering is not romanticized but shown as the raw material through which purgative grace operates.
- ✓His heroic obedience to superiors who confined him, restricted his public ministry, and subjected him to Inquisition scrutiny models the virtue of obedience not as passive compliance but as an active, chosen participation in Christ's own submission — a concretely Thomistic account of justice rendered to legitimate authority.
- ✓The biography traces a coherent arc from disorder to sanctity through persistent prayer and mortification, giving the reader a narrative map of the Purgative-to-Unitive passage that Groeschel describes in Spiritual Passages — without the reader needing that framework to follow the movement.
- ✓Joseph's complete dependence on divine initiative — he could neither choose nor prevent his ecstasies — foregrounds the theological claim that holiness is received rather than achieved, offering a corrective to voluntarist accounts of virtue formation.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The extraordinary, ecstatic character of Joseph's sanctity carries a risk for general readers: his path may read as a template rather than as a singular charism, subtly undermining the CCMMP premise that ordinary virtue formation through habitual practice is the normal mode of growth for most persons.