Joan of Arc (4 page)

Joan answered all her judges' questions about superstitious or cult practices impatiently, speaking offhandedly about her ring, its powers, and the veneration of the public. She said her ring was a present from her parents. She admitted that she did cure a baby who was presented to her “as black as my cloak,” but she had no interest in claiming that it was her own power that effected the cure, and she reiterated that she discouraged being made a cult figure. Religious life was always connected to action with her; the aspects of it that were merely pious had no place in her imagination.

Certain popular legends, however, served Joan very well in that they made a place in the public mind for someone like her. Many prophecies, from widely diverse sources, were abroad in Joan's time about a maiden who would save France. The earliest is from the Arthurian wizard Merlin, who prophesied that a marvelous maid would come from the
Bois Chesnu,
the ancient wood, to save France. A response to the scandalous behavior of Isabeau of Bavaria, mother of Joan's dauphin, was the prophecy that a virgin would save France after a fallen woman had shamed it. Marie d'Avignon, a woman with a reputation as a prophet, had, some years earlier, foretold the arrival of someone like Joan at the dauphin's court. “She spoke of having had frequent visions concerning the desolation of France. In one of them Marie saw pieces of armor that were brought before her, which frightened her. For she was afraid that she would be forced to put this armor on. But she was told to fear nothing, that it was not she who would have to wear this armor, but a Maid who would come after her who would wear it and deliver the kingdom of France from its enemies.”
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Joan's history becomes somewhat less baffling when one remembers the importance of the prophetic and the mystical in the mind of her time. Whether or not she understood that the
Zeitgeist
was making a place for her, she took the place brilliantly. And some of the most important people who made Joan's way possible were the female mystics of the generations immediately preceding her. Notable among them were Bridget of Sweden (d. 1373) and Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), whose activities in relation to the Great Schism earned her the rank of doctor of the Church. Closer to Joan's home, and her nearer contemporary, was St. Colette of Corbie. She was born in northern France in 1381 and devoted herself to reform of the order of the Poor Clares. There were rumors that she and Joan encountered each other and that she gave Joan the ring inscribed with the words “Jesus Maria,” emblem of the popular cult of the Holy Names. In fact, the women never met.

The assumption of the mantle of prophecy was one of the few ways by which medieval women could speak with public authority, certain of being listened to. Because Joan invoked the words of her supernatural visitors as the authority for her mission, she shares in this tradition. But though Joan was extremely pious and had experienced visions involving angels and saints, both the quality of her visions and the shape of her life mark her as radically different from the mystics who preceded her. The language and imagery of the great mystics is hypersensualized, and hyperspecific in its accumulation of physical detail. It is, however, often short on facts about the realm of action in this world. Joan's descriptions of her visions were cut-and-dried, matter-of-fact. She spoke of “a great light” and a “great Pleasure.” She was—to her later peril when her prophecies were not fulfilled—extremely specific about the plans her voices had for her. During her trial she had to be forced to be concrete about the appearance of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, the angels and the saints who appeared to her and told her what she was to do. Contrast this lack of emphasis on physical detail with the acute focus of, say, the English medieval mystic Margery Kempe, a near contemporary of Joan's, who eroticizes and radically physicalizes her encounter with God.

This is a different imagistic and linguistic universe from Joan's straightforward answer to the judges' questions about St. Michael: “He was in the form of a true and honest man, and as for the clothes and other things, I shall not tell you any more.”
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When asked if he was naked, she replied impatiently, “Do you think that God cannot afford to clothe him,” and when questioned as to whether he had hair, she snapped, “Why should it have been cut off ?”
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Joan's history with an apocalyptic preacher, Brother Richard, reveals her uneasy relationship with the mystical. Richard's themes were the approach of the millennial Antichrist, the vanity of riches, and the perfidy of the Jews. In 1429 he fled Paris, prophesying the coming of great things. On the alert for marvels, his eye was caught by Joan, and he was sent by the people of Troyes to approach her and judge her fitness for their loyalty. At her trial, she gave a brusque version of their first meeting. “When he came to me, as he approached me, he made the sign of the cross, and sprinkled Holy water, and I said to him: 'Approach boldly—I shall not fly away.' ”
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Despite her later flippant account, Joan was taken for a time with Richard, as he shared her devotion to the cult of the Holy Name and encouraged her in her predilection for taking Communion frequently—sometimes as often as three times a day, which would have been heterodox at the time. But they fell out because he attached himself to another female prophet, who irritated Joan in the way that only a female rival can irritate another female. Joan knew herself to be the real thing, and she quickly spotted Catherine de la Rochelle as a fake. Catherine was supposed to have had visions of a white lady who came to her at night. Joan challenged her: She would spend the night beside her, and if the white lady came, she would see her as well. When the white lady never showed up, Joan told Catherine to go back to her husband and her children. We can hear in these words the echo of the professional woman's contempt for the part-timer. After Joan's huffy dismissal of Catherine, her relationship with Brother Richard never recovered.

Although it is easy to distinguish Joan from other mystics or pseudomystics, we should not go too far in this direction and forget that she was, at her core, a person moved by a religious vision. Like everything else about her, the nature of her religious life was mixed; there was a strong sprinkling of the practical and the political about it. There is no doubt, however, that she would have been incapable of doing the sometimes literally incredible things she did if she were not convinced to the depths of her soul that she was inspired by God. She often separated herself from the soldiers for private prayer, from which she would return refreshed and visibly illuminated. She spoke of the delight of the presence of her voices. She insisted that the men under her rise to an acceptable level of morality and piety, and worried that her enemies might die unshriven. She was never without God except in the few moments before and after her abjuration when she saw herself, like Christ in the Garden, abandoned. But for most of her life, she understood herself to be constantly and palpably in the company of the divine. It is this source of companionship that provided her remarkable sureness, her superhuman courage, her faith in her own authority.

Joan's formal religious training was rudimentary; she tells us that she learned her Pater Noster from her mother, and she spoke of no other religious instruction, from the local priest or any other church authority. Her speech is remarkably free of biblical allusion; illiterate, she would have learned what she knew of the Scripture from what she heard at mass. She also made no mention of devotion to the Virgin Mary, although Marian cults were popular during the period in which she lived. She related to Christ as “her lord” but offered no details of personal intimacy and did not focus on His Passion, although Franciscan and Dominican spirituality, with which she would have been familiar, as her mother had gone on pilgrimages with mendicant friars and her confessor was a Dominican, stressed gory physical details of Christ's Passion and death. In her moments of suffering, she did not link herself with the suffering of Jesus. She was loyal to God, as she was loyal to the king: she would be loyal to the Church except that the Church represented by her accusers she defined not as the Church (the Church was the pope in Rome) but as her enemies. Above all, she was loyal to her voices, whose divine source she never doubted.

As historical character, model, or exemplum, Joan would be far more palatable to the post-Enlightenment appetite if she hadn't claimed to hear voices. As it is, her definition of herself is impossible without them, and it is expected, presumably, of any writer about Joan to take a position about them. A comfortable position for our time might be a contemporary version of De Quincey's, who tried to paint Joan's experience in Kate Greenaway colors. “On a fine breezy forenoon, I am audaciously skeptical, but as twilight sets in, my credulity grows steadily, till it becomes equal to anything that could be desired. . . . Fairies are important, even as in a statistical view certain weeds mark poverty in the soil, fairies mark its solitude.”
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Thomas De Quincey was a great lover of Joan, and he was trying to brush away the problems that nineteenth-century Protestants—including, probably, himself—might have with her. In the same way, George Bernard Shaw's assertion that her voices were her own “common sense” makes her acceptable to a skeptical, rational freethinker. But we do her an injustice to think of her experience without honoring the terms in which she thought of it: as a religious one. Joan's voices urged her to do things that common sense would find impossible and that a “fairies-in-the-garden” sensibility would find appalling. They urged her to leave home, to become a soldier, to engage in war, to risk her life and lead men into battle to crown a king. She did this not for personal gain, which never occurred to her, or for fame, which also never entered her mind, but because she believed herself to be called and because not to do so would seem to her a betrayal of everything sacred and precious.

The voices are dear to her: She speaks of her joy in their presence, her sense of bereftness when they leave her. Although her language is far less florid than that of the female mystics, she uses the synesthetic image of light—a combination of sound and vision—that is a commonplace in descriptions of the mystical experience. The experience of her voices happens to her on the deepest level of a creature of flesh, blood, mind, and spirit; the whole of herself is absorbed in the vision that emanates from what she knows to be the source of love and truth and salvation. De Quincey's and Shaw's responses to her voices recall Mary McCarthy's attempt to make Flannery O'Connor's literal belief in the Eucharist acceptable. Helpfully, McCarthy suggested that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist was symbolic. Flannery O'Connor retorted, “If I thought it was symbolic, I'd say the hell with it.”

Far more apt, I believe, is the analysis of Johan Huizinga, whose beautiful and elegant work on the medieval period grants him an unquestionable scholarly authority about the mind of the age. He explains in his essay “Bernard Shaw's Saint” that the reason he didn't include Joan of Arc in his milestone work
The Waning of the Middle Ages
was that he was afraid her vivid presence would overwhelm and overbalance the book. He suggests that Joan's expressing her experience as divinely sent voices was uncommon but not bizarre for the time, that to the contemporary framework of understanding it was no more odd than a twentieth-century person speaking of her unconscious or of outer space or relativity. He vehemently denies that her voices are pathological, and his work has not hesitated in pointing to the pathology of the age in which she lived. Her experience was unusual, he says, but it was not disturbed.

One can hear the impatience in his usually quiet measured voice when he answers the charge of mental imbalance as the source of Joan's voices:

Huizinga's defense of Joan's voices is different from that of the Catholic apologists before and after Joan's canonization, who used Joan's voices as a proof of the justice of the Catholic cause—and the French one. Huizinga was a Dutch Moravian with no particular brief for either Catholicism or French nationalism.

It is interesting to examine how Joan's descriptions of her voices changed during the course of the trial. As the trial went on, pressed by her judges, she became more and more specific about the identity of the voices and their physical appearance. The historian Karen Sullivan believes that this greater specificity was, in fact, a product of the language of the questions that the judges asked, an absorption, as a result of her desperation and exhaustion, of her accusers' terms and a rejection of her own nonclerical, vernacular ones.