Joan of Arc (20 page)

The three theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity; the four moral virtues are prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Whereas none of her devil's advocates question whether Joan was an admirable and heroic person, they assert again and again that she was imperfect in her practice of the virtues.

Of all those who have tried to understand Joan's life and career, it is only the devil's advocates who have focused in a concerted way on Joan's inconsistencies and erratic behavior. None of them suggests that she is not remarkable, but they note her radical shifts. They bring up several events in her life that they determine as less than saintly. Some of their objections are easy to dismiss. They accuse her of disobedience to her parents in not telling them about her voices; they fault the perfection of her chastity because of her boasting about it and her willingness to undergo physical examinations to verify it. They are worried that so many different men seem to have mentioned, and therefore seen, her breasts. They charge her with intractableness in refusing to answer the judges at her trial, ignoring the fact that this was her judicial right.

More serious for Joan's admirers, they insist that her throwing herself out of a seven-story tower was an act either of attempted suicide or presumption or, at best, a lack of submission to her unjust judges, thereby refusing the example of Jesus. They note that she lied by her own admissionabout the details of an angel bringing the king's crown. They suggest that her voices might have been the result of a hysterical delusion and remark that even correct prophecy isn't indicative of the holiness of the visions. They cite the case of Savonarola.

They question her faith and her fortitude, saying that these were present only when things were going well for her. They understand that she was badly treated by those who condemned her (some of the consultors use this as an argument against proceeding with Joan's case, since it will only air the Church's historical dirty laundry), but they contend that her desire to escape from prison, the complaints with which she received her sentence of death, her tears and dread when she was brought to the stake, although understandable and even poignant in human terms, are evidence that she did not possess saintly fortitude.

They repeatedly assert that because of her stubborn refusal to submit the questions of her voices' validity to the Church fathers who were judging her, she is not a model for the faithful. They question whether she isn't just a military or a nationalist hero. One consultor wonders whether, since France has been such a source of poisonous ideas and so much trouble to the Church, maybe her cause wasn't a good one. Wouldn't the Church, he suggests, have been better off if France had ceased to exist? They say that she is different from the Old Testament heroines—Judith and Esther—with whom she was compared, because their works were a direct preparation for the coming of Christ, whereas hers were only rooted in the fate of one country.

Most importantly, they say that she is not a martyr. They repeat the evidence that she did not want to die, that she in fact tried to prevent her death, particularly by her abjuration. They compare her to the earlier Christian martyrs, who embraced death and wouldn't have lifted a finger to keep it back. They suggest that had they behaved like Joan, we would have no models of perfect martyrdom.

But Pope Pius X and the College of Cardinals wanted Joan; they dismissed any negative evidence. Perhaps the true miracle of Joan's canonization is that the Church, in its desire to create a saint who would bring the wandering sheep back into the fold, who would provide a simple and unassailable enough force to counteract the lure of modern pleasure-seeking and free thought, put aside their narrow standards. They forgot their devotion to obedience and conformity and created a saint who is full of contradictions and imperfections that make, if not a saint, then a great and lovable human being. The devil's advocates, unlike the admiring artists who did their part to ensure for Joan a different kind of immortality, understood her changeability and its implications. In this they honored her complexity with a clear gaze, clearer than many of those who loved her for their own reasons.

Their understanding was silenced, and the Church, like everyone else who was to use Joan for his or her own needs, presented us with another oversimplification. But a look at her in the clear light of her words and actions creates an image not of singleness but of fascinating complexity. She was a virgin, and she died for what she believed, but she does not fit the type of the virgin martyr. Ardent, impatient, boastful, resistant, implacable, she is, like all great saints, a personality of genius. Unlike most of the saints, she defined the Church on her terms, not its own.

But what is signified by the word
saint,
and of what use is such a word to those of us who have ceased to believe in the certifying power of a group of men appointed in the name of the Roman Catholic Church? What category of human activity does the word
saint
still meaningfully describe?

Perhaps we should look first at what associations come with the word both to those for whom it is a living term and to those for whom it is a merely recognizable one, denoting something to which they have no access and in which they may have no interest.

“Saint” connects immediately to “goodness.” But what does goodness mean to us now? Which are the virtues that we prize? Is it possible for us now to prize any virtue, believing (all of us necessarily post-Darwinian if not post-Freudian) that we act as we do from self-interest?

Is our willingness to still keep the word
saint
in our lexicon a crack in the matte wall of one of our important understandings of the world? Does the word create the possibility, glimpsed, and urging a quick discard, of action beyond self-interest? A passionate economy of sheer spending where what needs to be done, what is compelling and desirable, all come together for more than isolated moments in a human life? A way of life lived in a radical present tense in which cost is un-calculated and the future someone else's to regard?

Those who have treasured saints have done so because they provide a dream of accompaniment, a hope of advocacy, a special connection based on something particular: shared traits, a profession, a name, a date of birth. In return for devotion, there is the sense of being singled out by the saint or being part of the saint's small elect. The saint is simultaneously folded into the life of the devoted and worn as a cloak and talisman. She provides inspiration. Above all, she is someone to whom the votary bows.

With all these considerations in mind, what kind of saint could Joan be? Not, perhaps, the patroness of France; rather, the patroness of the vivid life, prized not for military victories but for the gift of passionate action taken against ridiculous odds, for the grace of holding nothing back. She was canonized for the wrong reasons, but her words and actions are stronger than the seal set on her by some men in Rome. She leaves behind her a record that, if looked at closely, hops and leaps, moves not in a smooth glissade, but in a series of fits and starts. Perhaps the most fitting tribute we can give her is to acknowledge that any understanding of her will be partial and that so compelling a figure will constantly demand new visions, new revisions. For she inspires in those whom she compels a response that the word
hero
is too distant properly to serve. She asks to be made our own; she speaks to our need, passionate, beyond or prior perhaps to reason, to feel that we are hers.

But she will not stand still for us.