Joan of Arc (5 page)

Sullivan notes that the judges were clerics formed by scholastic philosophy, the system of thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, famous for its method of finding truth through relentless dividing and questioning. His discussion of angels includes their movements, their knowledge, their hierarchy, whether they move through intermediate space, whether they know singular facts or only universal ones. She says that the chronicles describing Joan written by lay-peoplewho knew Joan when she was alive don't refer to her voices as being embodied in the persons of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, but merely speak of them as the voice of “God.” In tracing the trial testimony, she finds that Joan refused to specify the nature of her voices for the first three days of the trial. It was only when she was asked “if it was the voice of an angel that spoke to her, or if it was the voice of a saint or God without intermediary, that she responded that it was the voice of St. Catherine and St. Margaret and their faces are crowned with beautiful crowns, very opulent and precious.” Even then, when asked about St. Michael's giving her comfort, she said, “I do not name to you the voice of St. Michael but I speak of a great comfort.”
¹⁰

A charitable interpretation of the judges' insistence on Joan's greater specificity is that it would be more in keeping with mystical tradition and would therefore give them a way of understanding it. A vague “it came from God” left them at sea, sailing uncharted waters. Joan confounded their attempts, however, by answering about her voices inconsistently. Sometimes she refused to answer the judges' questions; sometimes she answered their questions about the voices' identity by referring to her emotional response to the voices. In their summary of Joan's answers to their questions, however, the judges only focused on the answers that were in the terms they wanted: specific mentions of Michael, Catherine, and Margaret. As the trial progressed—it is possible to say, as Joan got more worn down—she spoke increasingly of the archangel Michael and the saints, and by the eleventh day, she had abandoned her vague terms from the beginning of the trial entirely.

Sullivan notes, however, that even if we understand that Joan's providing the judges with names was a result of the unrelenting pressure of their questions, the choice of the identities was hers. The culture of the veneration of saints was flourishing to the point of excess in Joan's time; the authorities of the Church were attempting to curb the endless proliferation of local saints, but their attempts were only beginning to be successful. This is to say that Joan had an enormous cast of characters to choose from if she were attaching specific names and faces to a voice that she initially experienced as an unspecified divine messenger.

Joan's choice of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret could be described as another example of her genius for self-presentation and the creation of highly legible signs. On the other hand, the choices can be read as a natural response typical of any pious girl from the Middle Ages to the present. For the faithful who venerate them, the saints provide both models and protection, and they are invoked for specific reasons connected to the narratives of their lives. Thus, even in our day, believers pray to St. Anthony to help them find lost things, to St. Jude for impossible causes, to St. Lucy, whose eyes were gouged out, for diseases of the eye. In my school, we were told to pray to St. Joseph Cupertino when studying for our exams on the ground that he was a poor student who prayed to be asked only the questions he had studied. This miracle was granted, and he was able to become a priest.

Female saints have an especially important function for young girls, since they provide examples of heroism outside the sphere of the domestic; the simplest girl has access to models who defied authority and made a place for themselves in the larger world. Joan herself has served this function for centuries of pious girls; she made sacred the longings for self-expression in the public world that in all other contexts would have been vilified.

The three saints that Joan invoked are vivid examples of the active, rather than the contemplative, path to sanctity. St. Catherine was the patron saint of philosophers and students; it makes sense that Joan would invoke her when she was up against the learned clerics.

Catherine died in 305. When the Roman emperor Maxentius ordered the execution of Christians, Catherine offered a learned discussion of the faith when she was brought before him. This inflamed him with desire, and he ordered her to marry him. When she refused him on the grounds of preserving her virginity as a bride of Christ only, he devised a machine with wheels to crush her, but the machine was miraculously disabled, leaving the frustrated executioners no choice but to behead her. Marina Warner says that Catherine “stood chiefly for independent thinking, courage, autonomy. She was the saint chosen by young unmarried women in France.”
¹¹

One clear link between Joan and St. Margaret was that Margaret was one of those female saints who entered a monastery in the disguise of a man. Like Catherine, she was also martyred for refusing to marry a pagan, and she, too, was decapitated. Margaret was usually pictured with a sword, as was St. Catherine. All three of Joan's saints were armed, especially Michael, the protective angel of France. Mont-St.-Michel, in Normandy, was the last bastion of French loyalty. Michael was always represented in armor. So the three saints (one doubling as an angel) with whom Joan identified her voices were icons of resistance and might.

Everyone who spoke of Joan mentioned her great religious fervor. And yet she set herself up as superior to the authority of the Church, which gave her access to everything she loved, the Church which was the mystical body of the Christ whom she believed she served. She was devoted to the Eucharist but refused to give up men's clothing in order to receive it.

This does not, however, mark her as irreligious or as a crypto-Protestant. She challenged the followers of the rebel Jan Hus in Bohemia and threatened them with a crusade under her leadership—an example of her almost limitless sense of mission.

How, then, do we understand Joan's religious life? She was untutored theologically, yet was able to contend with the learning of the leaders of the University of Paris, to resist their charge of witchcraft and to maintain the integrity of her position on her voices. She was a loving daughter of the Church whose greatest moments of joy came from its prayer and its sacraments, yet she refused to allow herself this consolation if it meant denying what she knew to be her mission.

It is no easier to understand Joan as a religious figure than as a political or military one. She bursts out of categories, crisscrosses our ideas about her, contradicts the images she has presented about herself. We must make an attempt to place her historically, geographically, sociologically. Doing so may help us understand why what happened was not impossible, but does not explain the extremely unlikely fact that it happened at all. The life of Joan is such a flagrant beating of the odds that no facts sufficiently explain the course of it. She was born during one of the most corrupt, demoralized periods of French history; she is considered a religious and military hero, but she had neither religious nor military training. Her family was undistinguished; it was, if anything, an obstacle she had to overcome. She existed in time and space; she was a product of history and culture and was formed by them. But the Joan who transcended all the norms of where and when she was born must, if we honor her properly, remain, in her essential shape, mysterious.

CHAPTER II

APPROACHING THE THRONE

THE MESSENGERS who came to tell Joan the Word of God were heavenly creatures, but their message was specific and definitely of this world. She was charged by St. Catherine, St. Margaret, and St. Michael with the task of crowning the dauphin king of France. It was the French crown that shimmered always in front of her eyes, and her vision of the head that would wear it may have been blurred by the gold's ancient luster.

The man whom Joan would crown king of France was hardly the proper stuff of a young girl's dreams. As a man, he wasn't worth a hair on Joan's cropped head; as a leader, he was weak, equivocal, and self-serving. Yet it was the idea of crowning Charles that inspired Joan to leave her village and to give her life. This devout girl was moved not by a religious goal, not the simple salvation of her soul, the spreading of the Gospel, the conversion of the heathen Turks, or the recovery of the Holy Land. She didn't want to enter a convent or fast in a desert cave. She didn't want to inspire the unbelieving or the faint of heart. She wanted to crown a king, and the personality of the man whom she wanted to crown was of little importance to her.

Why would a girl who had never traveled more than ten miles from her home, who had never in her lifetime lived in a united France or under an honored monarch, be so fixed on the idea of endowing a wobbling dauphin with authority?

Part of the answer is that the idea of the sacredness of French kingship was probably the stuff of local lore. The image of a divinely bestowed kingship, made manifest by the symbol of the crown, was something that permeated French society. The legend of the sacred oil, carried in the beak of a dove in order to anoint Clovis, first king of the Franks, was readily available to Joan's imagination. Her parish church of Domrémy was dedicated to St. Remy, the patron saint of Rheims, the very place where the sacred oil was housed and the kings of France were anointed. There were local cults devoted to the sacred kingship of Clovis and Louis IX, and prayers were regularly offered to them for the protection of the king, who was seen to be under God's special care. That Joan would have been susceptible to such a religious iconography is evident by her naming St. Michael as one of the three saints who spoke to her in her visions. St. Michael was Charles VII's particular patron, and Charles had sponsored festivals and places of worship to encourage the association of himself with the Warrior Angel.

The symbols connected with the king: the crown and the holy oil, the archangel Michael, and the kingship they represented may have served someone like Joan, who wanted order and clarity and singularity, with an image capable of creating a coherence that would be an alternative to the chaos and disorder that had constituted public life since her birth. But though it was a problem to create the image of a united France—particularly considering the civil war with Burgundy—the image of a single, divinely protected personage was much easier to come by. Certainly a French king would seem a solution to the horror wreaked by his enemies the Burgundians.

Perhaps Joan extended the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend to include the notion that the opponent of my marauder may be my salvation. In any case, after 1428, when the Burgundians invaded Domrémy, Joan's visions changed from the personal to the political; the saints spoke less of her preserving her virginity and more of her saving France. By the winter of 1428, or half a year after the Burgundians destroyed her home, Joan was fixed on the idea of making herself the soldier who would crown the king.

Joan may have imagined that Charles and his court were models of stability and order, but this was not the case. In fact, the entire history of Joan's imagination of Charles, and her relations with him, can be read as the conflict between mythical ideal and reality. The court of Charles VII was financially bankrupt, psychologically debilitated, and politically paralyzed. The butcher of Bourges refused to provide meat for the court on the grounds that he had not been paid, and for the same reason a cobbler refused to deliver slippers that Charles had ordered. Despite the financial realities, Charles felt compelled to keep up the extravagant and overelaborate court life that was a feature of the times, creating an atmosphere of decadent luxury and plunging himself further into debt. Margaret La Touroulde, wife of the king's receiver general, later one of Joan's hostesses, paints a dark picture of the state of Charles's court.

All of Charles's life, beginning with his birth, was lived under a star of disorder and ill governance. He was born in 1403, the eleventh child of his parents. At the time of his birth, two older brothers stood before him in the line of succession. His father was Charles VI of France, and his mother, the German princess Isabeau of Bavaria.

By the time Charles was born, his father had for years been subject to recurrent fits of madness, what in modern terms might be diagnosed as schizophrenia. He had his first attack in 1392, when he lost his mind during a military expedition and killed four attendants. He was sometimes violent and sometimes buffoonish; he suffered from hallucinations, such as believing that he was made of glass and had to carry pieces of iron in his clothing to protect himself. He refused to eat and sleep at regular hours; he allowed himself to become filthy and had to have his linen changed by force. Sometimes he would tremble and cry out that his body was being pricked by a thousand steel points.