“No want, no effort, no merit, no judgment.”

Glad I didn’t miss this piece Matthew J. Milliner.

On the bottom left of the icon is Joseph, who, traditional Christian orthodoxy and the Church of the East insist had nothing to do with Mary’s pregnancy. Which is to say, his merit is not involved in salvation. Nor is anyone else’s. Because of this he sits to the side, but in this quiet contemplation, the food of the earth springs up nonetheless—that being precisely the image employed in the Jesus Sutras to illustrate the dictum of “no merit.”

The Nativity, Andrei Rublev, 1410, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow