Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (3 page)

When Jean, Duke of Burgundy, was assassinated in 1419 the partisans of Charles VI and his son, the dauphin or rightful heir, were blamed for the murder. For this reason Jean’s son Philip, the new Duke of Burgundy, no longer supported the Valois and gave his allegiance to England. He and those on his side were known as Burgundians, while those loyal to the crown of France were known as the Armagnac party, which took its name from Bernard, count of Armagnac.

That same year Burgundians ravaged Armagnac strongholds and even the modest homes of ordinary pro-Valois citizens. Anticipating possible skirmishes and worse near Domrémy, Joan’s father and another farmer pooled their resources in order to use the Château de l’Île, a modest fort on an island in the Meuse, where they planned to house local families and livestock in the event of pitched battle in the village.

In 1420 Philip of Burgundy threw his support behind the Treaty of Troyes, which gave Charles VI’s daughter to Henry of England to be his wife; the treaty further stipulated that their heir would be king of the single but twofold realm of England and France. This contract effectively annulled the right of Charles’s surviving son—the dauphin, or direct heir to the throne, also called Charles. Among those Burgundians who helped negotiate the treaty to the benefit of the English was a clergyman named Pierre Cauchon, who was rewarded with the bishopric of Beauvais.

Both Henry V and Charles VI died within weeks of one another in 1422, but the war was zealously prosecuted on the English side by Henry’s brother, John of Lancaster, the Duke of Bedford, who was regent for Henry’s son, the infant King Henry VI. Cauchon, all the while, labored on behalf of the English government in France, which was headquartered in Rouen, northwest of Paris in Normandy.

The dauphin was now nominally King Charles VII, but he was uncrowned, and in this state of royal limbo he remained for seven years, in residence at the large castle of Chinon, one hundred fifty miles southwest of Paris. Being uncrowned was not a mere technicality: as long as Charles VII did not travel north to the cathedral of Reims (where French kings had been anointed since 1179), his claim of kingship could be—and was—much contested. At the same time, English forces gained astonishing strength and were prepared to deal once and for all with the dauphin, whose war chest was virtually depleted and whose officers and soldiers were exhausted and ill trained. By 1425 French military discipline was all but nonexistent, and the troops themselves were rapacious and unprincipled: the situation had reached critical mass.

Given these conditions, the Duke of Bedford made elaborate plans for a blockade and occupation at Orléans, a vital commercial town sixty miles south of Paris; that strategy would provide him with access to the dauphin’s refuge at Chinon. As this news spread, the complete collapse of France seemed imminent.

D
OMRÉMY
,
UNDER THE
jurisdiction of the military governor at nearby Vaucouleurs, supported the Valois dynasty of France and was thus staunchly Armagnac, but just across the Meuse—little more than a brook in the countryside—lay the village of Maxey, ardently Burgundian. The larger engagements of the war often had their complement in the petty fights and rivalries of children who were neighbors.

As to Joan’s knowledge of the political and military situation, nothing can be said with certainty. She may have learned something from conversations between her parents and among villagers, but what detail was available is impossible to know. The main issue, however, was clear to everyone: there had been a long and bitter struggle to determine if the English and their Burgundian allies would set the crown of France on the offspring of Henry V, or if the partisans of the Valois would emerge triumphant and France would survive. Just when international consciousness was being seeded all over Europe, the existence of France itself was threatened. Precisely at this time, the ordinariness of Joan’s life was forever altered.

Visions

(1424–1427)

B
y 1424 conditions favorable to the French cause were rapidly deteriorating, as were the prestige and influence of the Roman Church. To this day people sometimes express astonishment that the pope did not intervene in the conflict between England and France or that bishops were not dispatched to sue for peace or that there seemed to be no Church voices speaking against the threat to the very existence of a people. But the moral authority of Rome itself had been seriously compromised by a lust for power and by frank corruption. At such times, remarkable women often arose whose influence benefited both Church and state; Joan would become but one in a tradition of counselors.

During the spring of 1378 Bartolomeo Prignano was elected to the papacy, which he assumed under the name Urban VI. As early as that summer, his previous competence as an administrator was diminished by unmistakable signs of a sinister side to his personality: Pope Urban became so mentally unstable and publicly abusive, even toward those prelates who had elected him, that a number of the French cardinals urged him to abdicate. Without waiting for his reply, they put out the word that Urban had been deposed; later he went so far as to arrange for five of these critics to be tortured and executed.

In October of the same year, the French elected a replacement pope, who took office as Clement VII; Urban, however, remained at his post. So began the Great Western Schism, a forty-year period when at least two men and sometimes three claimed to be pope, each alternately excommunicating the other and accepting money and arms from different European countries in support of their causes. The ecclesiastical chaos was monumental, the demoralization of ordinary Christians pervasive.

Before he completely lost control of himself, Urban VI found his papacy defended by none other than Catherine of Siena, a profoundly mystical character who experienced intense religious visions and turned from an early life of reclusive contemplation to become a vigorous worker for Church unity and reform, nursing the sick and dying during the plague of 1374. She was linked to the Dominican Order as a tertiary, a laywoman living not in a convent but rather in the world, usually at home. Her good works consisted mostly of charitable service to the poor, and her ideals and prayers were inspired by the religious life of Dominican friars.

But Catherine became intensely involved in politics. She wielded, for example, enormous influence on the clergy in northern Italy as well as on the pope in self-imposed Avignon exile. She feared neither prince nor cleric: of the disgraceful conduct of too many clergymen, for example, she wrote candidly, “Bloated with pride, they devour money meant for the poor and spend it on their own pleasures!” At Urban’s personal invitation, she traveled to Rome within days of his election to help shore up support for his cause. But when Catherine was threatened and very nearly assassinated by Urban’s enemies, he sent her no guard and consistently ignored the danger to which she was then exposed on his behalf. Worn out from her habit of extreme penances and a lifetime of excessive fasting and travels, she died in 1380, still in her thirties. Catherine of Siena was canonized in 1461.

The Council of Constance deposed two claimants to the papacy, forced a third to abdicate, and in 1417 installed as pope a layman named Oddo Colonna. He had to be hastily ordained priest and consecrated bishop, after which he took office as Pope Martin V, thus effectively ending the schism. Almost alone among premodern popes, Martin is remembered as a sympathetic friend to the disenfranchised Jews of Europe. He condemned anti-Semitism and strictly forbade the forced baptism of Jewish children, which unfortunately had been practiced in medieval Italy.

During his papacy Martin was preoccupied with the politics of the Roman situation and, lacking reliable or timely reports, had little access to news of conditions elsewhere, especially since the French bishops faced their own internal dilemmas and had to decide whether they were Burgundian or Armagnac; most of them now solidly backed the victorious English. Living in the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth seemed a forgotten ideal for many clergymen, obsessed as they were with shoring up their own wealth against the encroachments of secular princes. In fact, it was often left to devout women like Catherine of Siena to issue calls to reform: she went so far as to reprimand Urban to his face.

Earlier, the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century had also exerted influence far beyond the walls of her nunnery. She wrote letters to Henry II of England, urging him to avoid the company of those who would kill his friend Thomas Becket; alas, her injunction was ignored. She also wrote to Henry’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, comforting her during the times of her husband’s infidelities. In Italy, Angela of Foligno was a spiritual counselor to communities of disaffected Franciscan friars, and Birgitta of Sweden was not afraid to scold churchmen and bishops openly on account of their negligence and moral laxity. From the time of the early Church, history in every era bears the names of countless women who often accomplished what men could not or would not dare.

A
T ABOUT NOON
one summer day in 1424, when she was in her father’s garden, Joan sensed that she was surrounded by a great light. She also heard, as she said later, “a revelation from God by a voice,” which told her to be devout, to pray, to frequent the sacraments, and always to rely on the Lord for help. Although at first very much frightened by the light and the voice (who wouldn’t be?), she was soon consoled by them, and these experiences continued—precisely how often and at what times, she never specified. Nor, for the time being, did she identify the voice or voices; they were simply “of God” or “from God.” In addition, she told no one of these extraordinary experiences.

The third time this happened, Joan knew that she heard the “voice of an angel,” as she put it; in other words, what the voice told her was appropriate to the counsel of the angels, of the heavenly court itself. Over the next three years she was summoned by the voices “to come to the aid of the king of France”; eventually she was also told just how to accomplish that. At first Joan protested that she was only a poor girl who could neither ride a warhorse nor lead men in battle. But she could not for long ignore the directions, and she placed her honor and her faith in God, Who, she was assured, would supply what she lacked.

The voices and the light continued to come to Joan throughout 1425, when Domrémy was raided by Burgundians. However irregularly, these spiritual experiences endured as long as she lived. But until she was on trial, in 1431, she spoke of her experiences only to two confidants, never to her parents or to her parish priest. Part of the reason for her silence must have been fear of rejection, and part was surely the difficulty in putting an ineffable experience into words.

To “see” the angels and the light and to “hear” the voices referred to a kind of sight and hearing that do not necessarily come through the physical senses. Her perception was not intuitive daydreaming or a psychological conviction about something. What mattered for Joan was not the physical sight of spiritual beings or saints, much less a retelling or an embellished account of the sight by her or anyone else. What mattered was that the message came, as she believed, from God. The important thing, in short, was not what she saw or how she saw it, but the inner revelation, the compelling sense that she was purposefully addressed.

Although it happened to Joan on a far more profound (not to say more dramatic) level, the situation was rather like that of someone who “hears” a call when seeing something in art or reading about it in a book: a summons is felt—to a career, perhaps, or to a new commitment. One “sees” and recalls the familiar work of art or the episode in a book but in a new and deeper way and more emphatically, as it is now connected to a sense of personal destiny or purpose. But this is only an analogy of the mystic experience that touched Joan.

Ultimately, she said that God had guided her by means of heavenly visitations from Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch; later she also mentioned that she had seen Gabriel the archangel and a large company of angels. It is critical to recall that the transcripts of her trial are the only source for our knowledge of Joan’s spiritual experience, and it is clear from the texts that her answers to the judges’ questions were ambiguous and often contradictory. But one thing is clear: Joan claimed to hear voices and see visions, and always there was light—“a great deal of light on all sides,” she said. Once she was a prisoner, from 1430, the light was focused on Catherine and Margaret, and she described them as she did Michael—sometimes precisely, at other times hazily.

Reading the trial documents, we sense her frustration in trying to articulate what cannot be fully articulated: “I do not recognize them at once.” Day after day Joan was forced to repeat statements, often out of context, and to add details that were irrelevant or frankly absurd, such as the color of her heavenly visitors’ hair and clothing. Under interrogation by a swarm of judges trying daily to trap her, and exhausted by battles, she was kept in appalling prison cells, denied adequate food, and threatened and humiliated each day; it is not surprising that her responses became confused and often indistinct. But her mystical experiences gave her sufficient confidence that, as the trial notes put it on March 3, “she said she would do better to obey her sovereign Lord God rather than men.”

P
RECISELY BECAUSE OF
her visions, Joan of Arc becomes for very many people an intolerable conundrum, almost or entirely someone who cannot be taken seriously. At the same time, any assessment of the last six years of her life depends to a great extent on her credibility, her maturity, and indeed her sanity. And so summary judgments are often made, based on how one judges her “voices” or how one understands her political significance for France or her place in the religious history of the world.

Most problematic for the skeptics is the matter of the angels and archangels Joan claimed to have seen and heard.

Angels were part of ancient, pre-Semitic iconography, and their images were taken over and presumed in Hebrew, Christian and Islamic theology from the earliest times to the present. Initially, before Hebrew faith was monotheistic, angels resembled their Babylonian and Assyrian counterparts: minor deities or part of a heavenly court. For the Hebrews, “an angel of the Lord” was a way both of avoiding direct mention of the divine name and of indicating divine activity in the affairs of the world; angels occur in the Jewish Scriptures as guides, consolers, and monitors. When they are described as quite distinct beings, not all angels were regarded as good or benevolent, as the book of Job and the Jewish apocryphal literature attest.

Angels were mostly described as attendants in the realm of God, and, because it would have been blasphemous in Judaism to imply the direct apprehension of God by mortals, angels were often depicted as legates or messengers, bearers of inspiration and of divine commands. Indeed, the word
angel
comes from the Greek
angelos,
which translates the Hebrew
mal’ak;
both words mean “messenger.”

Similarly, the annunciation scenes in the New Testament infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke emphasize not these curious beings (who are never described), but rather the astonishing, unbidden divine initiative in bringing John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth into the world. After that, angels are only infrequently mentioned in the Christian Scriptures—at the desert temptation of Jesus, at the agony in Gethsemane, and at the discovery of the Resurrection. They are remarkably absent during his ministry.

Since biblical times the existence of angels as individual spiritual beings has been taken for granted by many people. But however we understand them, it is important to emphasize that angels represent something much more than grotesque, fantastic winged figures and something more powerful than could be conveyed by philosophic discourse. Ancient Greeks had a talent for abstraction and conceptualizing, but Hebrew thought was notable for its particularity. In this regard, angels dramatically represent God’s presence and actions among His people.
*

In the Hebrew Scriptures the archangel Michael is mentioned only in the book of Daniel (second century
B.C
.), where he appears as both a guardian spirit and a personification of the people. In the New Testament his name occurs twice: the letter of Jude points to an obscure reference to Michael in the Assumption of Moses, an apocryphal Jewish work; and the book of Revelation refers to “Michael and his angels battling against the dragon [of sin].” In medieval France Michael the Archangel was the special patron of soldiers fighting against faithless armies: he was always invoked with prayerful songs amid battles. The flags of the dauphin himself were painted with Michael’s image: to fight for the heir to the throne meant to fight on the side of the heavenly choirs.

Michael had been for centuries the patron of the French royal family, and the coastal stronghold of Mont-Saint-Michel represented France’s ancient Christian roots; its abbey and fortress remained loyal to the dauphin. The French locations named for him are too numerous to list: one has only to think of the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris and the colossal baroque statue (a few steps from the Seine, at the Place Saint-Michel) depicting Michael with a sword, vanquishing the dragon of sin—an image drawn from Revelation. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, France kept Saint Michael’s Day (September 29) as a great religious feast and holiday. Such a heroic spiritual figure was known to Joan from childhood, when she lived in the duchy of Bar, whose patron saint was Michael; at least forty-six churches in neighboring dioceses were dedicated to him.

D
EVOTION TO
C
ATHERINE
of Alexandria was widespread in medieval Europe, although she was not mentioned anywhere before the ninth century. During the violent persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Maximinus from 235 to 238, so the legend went, eighteen-year-old Catherine approached the tyrant, condemned his cruelty, and confounded his belief in Roman polytheism by her impressive intellectual discourse. Unable to contradict her logical arguments, Maximinus had her tortured and imprisoned. Catherine, however, was not to be stopped: even in chains she succeeded in converting jailers, other prisoners, and even the emperor’s wife, who came to visit her. Livid with rage, the emperor had Catherine beheaded after more dreadful tortures.