Joan of Arc

by Timothy Wilson-Smith

  Sadly for her, she did not agree with her accusers.

  Her voices made Joan a test case. What her case tested was, first, the discernment of spirits, and, secondly, the nature and the validity of private visions. In fact the two matters were related, for if someone was a saint, his or her visions were probably authentic. Joan’s accusers were sure that she was evil, so they knew that when she claimed to be a visionary, she was a liar.

  In modern clinical experience, schizophrenics are often deluded and hallucinate: they see, hear, touch, smell people present only in their imaginations. Joan may or may not have hallucinated, but in no other way did she behave like a schizophrenic. The evidence of her behaviour provided by the records of her original trial and the accounts of her given twenty-five years later when that trial’s verdict was nullified suggest that she was a young woman who was remarkably sane. She could think clearly, express herself coherently, act decisively.

  There is an older view of her, that she may have been an hysteric. Germaine Greer has pointed out in The Female Eunuch that hysteria is a condition that had often been regarded as peculiarly feminine; and at a time when the Church was considering Joan’s possible canonisation and secular writers like her biographer Anatole France thought that she was deluded, it was natural to wonder if she showed the symptoms of hysteria. Both the clerics and a secular doctor consulted by France agreed, however, she did not.2

  Another possible explanation is offered by Edward Lucie-Smith, in his scholarly, elegant and modern biography of Joan. He seems to apply a principle derived from a late medieval philosopher – Occam’s razor. According to William of Occam, an English philosophical theologian of the early fourteenth century, if a simple explanation for a phenomenon will do, there is no need to look for a more complex one. Lucie-Smith applies this idea by preferring a natural to a supernatural explanation of events: Joan’s visions operated, he believes, as a means of helping her to resolve conflicts in her family by leaving home. This is comforting for one who believes in a Freudian view of human life – and Lucie-Smith also talks about her unconscious incestuous desires for her father and younger brother – but it will not do because it misuses Occam’s razor. On the existing evidence the visions involved religion, not sex, and there is no reason to say they must have had a sexual meaning, unless, which cannot be proved, all experience is ultimately sexual. Lucie-Smith assumes what he tries to demonstrate.

  Medieval theologians were more subtle. They began with the Bible, knowing that the Bible mentions certain rare experiences, such as St Paul’s conversion on the way to Damascus, when he was blinded and talked to a voice nobody could see, and his tale of being rapt into the third heaven where he was told mysteries that the soul cannot relate. Various accounts in the gospels of the risen Jesus, whom Paul also ‘saw’ (but much later) imply that a ‘risen’ body has properties that before death it does not have: it appears or disappears suddenly, it can be recognised or not be recognised by those who know the person. Belief in the risen Christ was what the Christians preached, and Christians, according to St Paul, look forward to their own resurrection. Along with certain distinctive views, Christians inherited much then current in Jewish thinking. Pharisees too believed in a form of life after death and many Jews believed in the activity of angels. In St Matthew’s Gospel angels give Joseph and the wise men good advice in sleep. In St Luke’s Gospel the angel Gabriel ‘appears’ to Mary while she is awake. The early texts puzzled the theologians. They tried to understand how such events could happen. They assumed that visions could occur, they assumed that the dead in heaven could contact the living, they assumed that angels could act in human lives. To deny the possibility of such events would be to deny the faith, but that a particular vision was God-given, that a particular saint in heaven had visited a particular man or woman on earth, that a particular angel had helped a particular man or woman, that was a different matter. Each case should be examined on its merits. If an event is possible but rare, then the sensible habit is a sceptical habit.

  The greatest of the Latin church ‘fathers’ or early theologians, St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, distinguished certain kinds of vision: they could be corporeal, imaginative or intellectual. The seer can ‘see’ a person, as Bernadette seemed to see the Virgin Mary, in much the way in which the Apostles ‘saw’ Jesus after he had risen from the dead. The seer can ‘imagine’ the presence of a saint; and it may be in this way that Joan ‘saw’ her voices. Finally, the seer can ‘see’ a truth. St Thomas Aquinas is said to have stopped composing his summary of theology, or Summa Theologica, on 6 December 1273, when after a long ecstasy during Mass he confessed, ‘I can do no more. Such secrets have been revealed to me that all I have written now appears to be of little value.’ In heaven, mercifully, there will be no theological textbooks; the truth will be apparent.

  It does not follow from this that people claiming to have had visions have had them. Claimants may be bogus, may be self-deceiving, even evil; indeed it is reasonable to assume that a vision is incredible if it is not perverse to deny it. The men who judged Joan harshly at Rouen in 1431 were confident that they knew a fraud when they came across one; and such a fraud, they thought, was the young lady in front of them. As lawyers who were also theologically trained, they had learnt to make certain distinctions that Joan, with no equivalent education, would have made with difficulty. They had repeatedly asked her to describe the look of her voices – their faces, hair, limbs, clothes, crowns – and the sound of the voices (low, gentle and French speaking) and their smell (she mentioned their perfume). They also asked whether she saw St Michael with his scales, the way in which he was normally depicted in a scene of the Last Judgement. They were seeking to confirm the shrewd guess that she must have envisaged her voices in ways in which it was easy to imagine them. St Michael, being by definition incorporeal, could not hold an actual pair of scales, but that was a naturally human way to imagine him, for how else could there be religious art?

  The judges could have made a point of trying to find out why she was singled out by Sts Margaret of Antioch and Catherine of Alexandria and why among the angels the one who mattered to her was St Michael. Her visions merely transfigured her ordinary experience, for how could a devout girl in Domremy not know of the two female saints and a patriotic girl from Domremy not know of St Michael? The style of the statue of St Margaret still in Domremy today suggests that it had only recently been placed in the church. Just across the river at Maxey, St Catherine, the patroness of her older sister, was patroness of the village. Both saints were celebrated in the church’s martyrology as virgin martyrs, noble young women who had died to remain pure. As such they evidently appealed to a young woman who was sure that she had a similar vocation. Joan had refused to accept her parents’ plans that she should marry, and when she had been sued by the disappointed suitor for breach of promise of marriage, she won her case.

  Her chief counsellor was St Michael. In the late Old Testament Book of Daniel, St Michael is ‘Michael the prince’ who will overcome Persian resistance to Israelite longings to leave Babylon and return to the Holy Land. In the New Testament, Michael appears in books that took over the apocalyptic traditions of Daniel. The tiny Book of Jude refers to a fight between Michael the archangel and the devil over the body of Moses; and this fighting role is made universal in the last book of the Bible, where during war in heaven Michael and his angels fight against the dragon and his angels. Early Christian writers developed the hints implicit in these passages, so that St Michael was said to be the unnamed angel who had blocked the route of the prophet Balaam and who had routed the army of Sennacherib, the Assyrian king.

  With his scriptural pedigree St Michael naturally became a popular saint in the West, as warlike barbarians were converted to Christianity. When pagan shrines on mountain tops and hill tops, home to devils, were pulled down, they were replaced by shrines dedicated to St Michael – as at Monte Gargano in Apulia, and the Tor at Glastonbury and Mont-St-Michel on the borders of
Normandy. It was of St Michael au péril de la mer that the dying Roland, count of the Breton marches, thinks in the Chanson that bears his name, and in Portugal to commemorate a victory over the Moors, the monastery of Alcobaça was made home of the order of St Michael’s Wings. During the Hundred Years War, Mont-St-Michel acquired a special renown in France as a symbol of national resistance, for, though surrounded by the English, the rock had never surrendered; it was fitting that Louis XI, son of Joan’s king, should make the island monastery the centre of his new order of chivalry, the order of St Michael. Joan was devoted to an angel who had been a crusader and had also fought for France.

  If Sts Margaret and Catherine exemplified heroic virginity, from St Michael she could learn the virtues of a warrior for God. What was startling is what they said: she must go to ‘France’ to raise the siege of Orléans, to help the Dauphin Charles recover his kingdom, to drive the English from France. To this end she must go to the Dauphin far away in Chinon; and she must dress as a man.

  One saint Joan did not mention. As a child her life had revolved round St Rémi, to whom Domremy’s parish church was dedicated. In his Latin name of Remigius he was the Bishop of Reims who persuaded Clovis, pagan King of the Franks, to be baptised a Christian, consecrated and crowned as a Christian king. By Joan’s day the Franks had gone, as centuries before Francia became France, but the rite of St Remigius was still performed. Joan never spoke of St Rémi, but her voices told her to take Charles to St Rémi’s cathedral; her most triumphant moment occurred not on any battle-field or at any siege, but at Reims beside the high altar, beneath the glorious Gothic arches that reach up to the heavens. But first she must be God’s special, female knight.

  Other country children have shown confidence in voices or visions, but Joan was unlike Bernadette Soubirous or the three children of Fatima, who proclaimed religious doctrines (in the first case) or foretold apocalyptic events (in the second). Her mission, she held, meant changing the map of political France, giving the people back to their king, making the land once more his kingdom. Her thoughts and actions were dominated by a unique brand of religious politics. She lived for this mission and she would die for it.

  PART ONE

  The Maid in Life and Death

  ONE

  A Prophetess to the Rescue

  England and France had been rivals for many years when, in Holy Week 1429, Joan of Arc wrote to Henry VI, child king of England and France, informing him that she was sent by God to tell him to leave France and return home. The letter was also sent to William de la Pole, Count of Suffolk, Sir John Talbot and Thomas, Lord Scales, lieutenants of the Duke of Bedford, ‘who calls himself Regent of the King of France for the King of England’ (Bedford, Regent of English France, was Henry’s older uncle). Joan also addressed the soldiers besieging Orléans, among whom she singles out the feared English archers.

  As an illiterate girl, Joan dictated her letters. How many letters in all were sent cannot be known, but about twenty are referred to in various documents, of which this letter to the English is the first complete letter to survive. It survived because it must have so incensed the recipients that it was kept and cited as evidence against Joan at her trial in Rouen. Her tone is peremptory and arrogant. The King of England must render account to the King of Heaven and return the keys of the cities he has seized. If he does not, as ‘commander of the military’, she will force his men to flee; and if they do not obey, ‘the Maid’ (Joan) will have them all killed. She is sent by the King of Heaven ‘to take you out of France’. ‘The King of Heaven has sent her so much power that you will not be able to harm her or her brave army.’1

  Those before Orléans must go: ‘you have no rights in France from God, the King of Heaven, and the Son of the Virgin Mary’, for God has given France to Charles, the rightful heir; and he will soon enter Paris ‘in a grand company’. Lieutenants of the Duke of Bedford, who ‘calls himself Regent of the King of France for the King of England, make a response, if you wish to make peace over the city of Orléans!’ As for the Duke, ‘the Maid asks you not to make her destroy you’. ‘If you come to terms, you . . . can join her company, in which the French will perform the greatest feat ever done in the name of Christianity.’2

  Holy women on a mission are apt to be curt. Fifty years earlier, St Catherine of Siena had bullied Pope Gregory XI into going back to Rome; and when the move led to a schism in the Church, with one pope in Avignon and another in Rome, Catherine did not hesitate to maintain that the true pope was Gregory’s successor in Rome, Urban VI. There were two important differences between Catherine and Joan, however. First, Catherine spoke persuasively in a melodious Tuscan Italian, whereas Joan probably never went beyond the stage of managing to write her own name, Jehanne. Second, Catherine fought for true authority in the Catholic Church, whereas Joan claimed to know the true authority in one Christian state. In 1415, shortly after Joan was born, the schism in the Church was ended at the Council of Constance, but there were doubts about the relative authority of popes and Church councils; and Joan was not sure who was the true pope. What mattered to Joan was her insistence that Henry VI was a usurper, with no rights over the lands God designed for his uncle Charles, whom his enemies had demoted to the King of Bourges; and that she, to whom she referred dispassionately as ‘the Maid’ (in French la pucelle), was to restore to Charles his undivided kingdom.

  The writing of the letter was the culminating episode in a story that had begun some ten months earlier. In May 1428 Joan had gone to see Robert de Baudricourt, châtelain, or castellan, of the local castle of Vaucouleurs, to order him to take her to Charles. Twice he demurred, until at last, after her repeated calls that he must do what her voices demanded, he obeyed. But, even though she was admitted to the court at Chinon and she identified Charles when he pretended to hide, Charles asked the theologians of the loyal University of Poitiers to question her, before he trusted her. As the University of Paris, most prestigious of all French universities, was under Anglo-Burgundian control, this was the most prudent act he could perform. After this, her first ‘trial’, Joan sent her letter to the King of England.

  No details of the Poitiers conversations are known; and more attention has been given by historians, playwrights and film-makers to her first meeting with Charles in Chinon. How was she able to identify him? What did she say to him in private? This encounter may have given Charles confidence in her, but it seems it was the interrogations at Poitiers that gave her confidence in herself. The university theologians found no wrong in her, but only ‘humility, virginity, devotion, honesty, simplicity’. Everyone she met took an interest in her virginity. It is also obvious that she was direct, but the hectoring manner that suffuses her letter to Henry VI was not evident to the first group of clerics who pressed her closely on her mission. What worried Seguin Seguin, a Dominican friar who was dean of the Faculty of Poitiers, was that there was as yet no sign of her divine calling. ‘God,’ he claimed, ‘did not want her to be believed unless something appeared on account of which it seemed to them that she was to be believed.’3 It was not enough that she asserted that God had sent her nor that soldiers – he could have meant Robert de Baudricourt – believed her assertions.

  A contemporary German inquisitor wrote that ‘there was lately in France, within the last ten years, a maid of whom I have already spoken, named Joan, for her prophetic spirit and for the power of her miracles.’4 When she prophesied, Joan emphasised her role as la pucelle, the Maid, as much as on the rights of Charles the Dauphin to be King of France. The word ‘la pucelle’ is hard to translate, for although it means a girl on the threshold of adulthood, it does not have precisely the sense of our word ‘nubile’. Over and over again Joan emphasised that she was a virgin, and every time her virginity was examined she was intact. To some commentators, from Voltaire to the present day, her obsession seems morbid. It places her, however, in a tradition that goes back to the beginnings of Christianity, for what distinguished the Christians from other Jewish
sects, including even the Essenes of Qumran, was the value they placed on celibacy. Jesus himself was not married, his mother was said to be a virgin and of the Apostles only St Peter was known to be a married man. Even though most Christians married, even though the unmarried St Paul saw married love as an appropriate image of the love between Christ and his Church, celibacy had from the early days of Christianity a certain prestige among Christians. By Joan’s time, celibacy, long cherished as a monastic ideal, had become a clerical one. While in the Eastern Church only bishops had to be monks, in the West the law prescribed that all priests should be celibate.

  From the early thirteenth century, as urban society became more developed, there was a move to carry the faith to lay people in the towns, and this was carried out by the new ‘orders’ of friars, who took vows of chastity as well as of poverty and obedience. In Joan’s day, in addition to the parish clergy there were still monks, but the storm troopers of the Church were the friars. Among their numbers were the best-trained, the most eloquent, the most admired and the most traduced of clerics. Free from working in the government of the Church, they could devote themselves to individualistic projects, such as teaching and writing – they dominated the universities – or to preaching to lay people and giving direction to their spiritual lives.

  At this time, male monks or friars far outnumbered women religious, who followed slightly modified versions of male rules, but from 1300 women became more prominent and played an increasingly individualistic role in the spiritual affairs of the Church. At the age of seven St Catherine of Siena consecrated her virginity to Christ; aged sixteen she joined the Dominican third order – friars made up the first order and nuns the second – and thus was attached to a religious order while still a lay person. In her twenties, after receiving a series of visions, she began her spectacular public career. In the Netherlands, lay women lived together in béguinages free of vows, free to keep their property, free to leave and marry, but at least temporarily virginal, while they taught or did light manual labour or devoted themselves to prayer. Slightly further north, in Norwich, a woman who may have been a Benedictine nun, Dame Julian, lived as a recluse in an anchorage, a small house set in a churchyard, devoting herself to prayer and later, after experiencing a number of visions, to dictating her story. She claimed to be illiterate, which probably means that her Latin was not up to much, but she was well read in texts she needed to know, such as some of St Catherine’s letters and some modern English clerical writings.