Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (7 page)

Joan said of herself, “I am sent to comfort the poor and needy.”

Ethnographers identify shamanic figures as a feature of successful societies. Granted passage to states of consciousness that elude the vast majority of us, they are the repository of our fears and hopes as well as our means of petitioning the divine. Neurotheology has discovered “God spots” in the human brain. Four out of five people experience feelings they identify as rapture when specific areas of their temporal lobes are stimulated by a magnetic field. If the brain is wired for faith in a higher being, it must be that faith conveys an evolutionary advantage.

“The first maker of the gods,” William James wrote, “was fear.”

Among Catholic mystics, Joan is unusual for having left no written account of what Saint Teresa of Avila called the
“orison of union” with the divine, a “sublime summit” from whose vantage she perceived truths otherwise withheld and from which she descended convinced that she had “been in God and God in her.” If, like Saint Teresa, Joan saw in her angel’s hand “a long spear of gold, and at the
iron’s point … a little fire, and if he thrust it into her heart and her very entrails,” leaving her “all on fire with a great love of God,” she never said. If she saw anything like Saint Bridget of Sweden’s vision of the Christ child radiating such an
“ineffable light and splendor, that the sun was not comparable to it,” she said nothing about that either.

Drawing no distinction between angels and saints, Joan characterized what her intimate companions described as religious ecstasy as “comfort,” a strikingly laconic report when compared with the overheated, lushly detailed, and erotically charged revelations of established mystics, validated through clerical channels Joan failed to consult. The sight of the rack only hardened her resolve. “Tear me limb from limb,” she told her captors. “I would rather have you cut my throat than tell you all I know.” Joan’s refusal to part with the details of her most intimate experience, and her insistence that these were hers to withhold, expresses how absolute was her identification with virginity, a state of being unpenetrated and unplundered, the integrity of her body reflecting that of her soul.

Though mystical experience is ineffable, by definition outside mortal language’s power to communicate, it was the custom of the period to narrate visions as if they were fever dreams come true. For Margery Kempe the
“air opened as bright as any lightning” and left her “powerless to keep herself steady because of the unquenchable fire of love which burned very strongly in her soul.” When Julian of Norwich was gravely ill, her body
“dead from the middle downwards,” she found herself plunged in darkness. Then the image of the crucifix began to burn before her blind eyes, her pain vanished, and her body was healed. Her holy “lover” appeared before her, and her vision lingered on the thorns pressed into his head, from which
“the red blood trickl[ed] down … hot and freshly and right plenteously.” Joined to Christ in mystical marriage, Catherine of Siena wrote of drinking the blood that spilled from his wounds. Said to have lived on the Eucharist alone for the last two years of her life, she died at the same age as had her bridegroom, thirty-three.

The preoccupation with blood that characterizes these saints is little different from a vampire’s, an erotic thirst for life’s essence, a thirst that, whether satisfied by God or Satan, dangled immortality. The early-twentieth-century playwright Charles Péguy cannot
help but retroactively infuse Joan with a little private longing.
“The Roman soldier who stuck his spear into your side had what so many of your saints, so many of your martyrs, have not had,” she says to Jesus. “He touched you. He saw you … Blessed are they who drank in the look of your eyes,” she says, where her contemporaries speak of the blood of his wounds.

The promise of revelation, dependably rendered in such fulsome, trenchant detail, made the genre a popular one, sensuous when not outright seductive. Julian of Norwich described the
“malicious semblance” of the devil’s face, as “red like the tilestone when it is new-burnt, with black spots therein like black freckles—fouler than the tilestone. His hair was red as rust, clipped in front, with full locks hanging on the temples.” Devils and imps steal through the visions of the era’s mystics, just as they leer from its artists’ canvases, gleefully tempting the righteous and dragging off the damned.
“Satan, in an abominable shape, appeared on my left hand,” Teresa of Avila wrote. “I looked at his mouth in particular, because he spoke, and it was horrible. A huge flame seemed to issue out of his body, perfectly bright, without any shadow.” But Joan never spoke of the devil. He seems to have had no place in her visions, occupied only by angels.

Still, as Anouilh’s examiner reminds her, when the devil
“comes to snare a soul … he comes with coaxing hands, with eyes that receive you into them like water that drowns you, with naked women’s flesh, transparent, white … beautiful.” Asked if she had the discernment to judge an apparition as either holy or demonic, Joan said she was sure she could distinguish between a real angel of God and a counterfeit. “I believed [in its goodness] very soon and I had the desire to believe it,” she told the examiner; the word “desire” is sometimes translated as “will.”

Frightened or not, Joan was waiting for what had happened to happen again. Not only had the experience continued to unfold in her mind; the visitation was hardly over before it had slipped between her and the life she used to have, and its influence didn’t diminish but increased. She’d beheld a splendor that left mortal life little more than the taste of ashes in her mouth. She didn’t tell her best friend, Hauviette, or her sister, Catherine, what had happened in the garden, not any more than she did the village curé or her kind, pious mother,
who had introduced her to God and taught her to say the Paternoster and the Ave Maria and to recite what is known as the Nicene Creed, as first articulated in 325, when the Roman emperor Constantine I convened the Council of Nicaea. At this first of the twenty-one ecumenical gatherings recognized by the Catholic Church,
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bishops representing all of Christendom stated the basic tenets of the Christian faith:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father, before all worlds, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, being of one substance as the Father, by whom all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Instinctively, Joan protected herself from the critical regard that would follow her sharing such a confidence as her entertaining visits from angels bearing messages from the King of Heaven, and when the voice returned and spoke once more, again she kept it to herself. For all the years that remained to her, “a good seven” of her nineteen, she estimated, Joan’s everyday companions, whose company she chose
before that of mortals and whom she obeyed as she did not any mortal, were invisible and inaudible to everyone but her.

“They often come among the Christian folk and are not seen by any except by me,” she told the examiner.

“Did you see St. Michael and these angels corporeally and in reality?”

“I saw them with my bodily eyes as well as I see you.”

How could she have imagined them, she reasoned, when their voices came to her from outside her own consciousness, when they woke her from sleep to deliver a message? Standing trial, Joan complained that the clamor in the courtroom drowned the angels’ voices out; she couldn’t hear what counsel they offered. Sometimes the prison itself was so loud she couldn’t hear them properly when they spoke to her in her cell.

“Who persuaded you to have angels with their arms, feet, legs, and robes painted on your standard?”

“I had them painted in the manner in which they were painted in churches.”

“Did you yourself ever see them in the manner in which they were painted?” the examiner asked. It was among the questions Joan refused to answer.

Joan’s evasiveness and the inconsistency of her testimony about the angels she heard and saw have drawn centuries of scrutiny and criticism. Vita Sackville-West observed that
“her reluctance to discuss their personal attributes is manifest and consistent.” On February 22, in the course of her second public interrogation, Joan said it was only after three visits that she recognized the angel as Saint Michael. On March 15, by which point the questioning had been moved to her cell, she said she saw him “many times” before she believed it was he. The discrepancy seems insignificant when Joan had established from the outset of the trial that she, and not those who presumed to judge her, would determine which questions she was bound to answer honestly, if at all. Her confidence in her vocation allowed her righteousness enough to warn her persecutors. “If you were well informed about me,” she told them, “you would wish me to be out of your hands. I have done nothing except by revelation.”

As the trial record shows, the longer and harder Joan was pressed
to describe what couldn’t be described, the more details she summoned to characterize a visitation she understood as angelic, in that it conveyed messages from God. The Old Testament term for angel,
mal’ā
k
’ĕlōhîm
, means “messenger of God.” Perhaps a single voice accompanied by a great light evolved into several voices Joan could distinguish from one another, and those in turn conjured beings who had lips with which to speak, crowned heads, and bodies she could see and touch and even smell. It’s typical for visitations like Joan’s to accrue definition and detail with each added encounter. She’d had an experience—thousands of them by the time she traded her mortal life for the eternal company of her angels—that required explanation. Perhaps she didn’t so much invent details as relinquish them slowly. Perhaps she didn’t invent but borrowed unconsciously. Familiar figures, holy and God-sent, angels and saints provided ready vessels in which Joan could safeguard what she didn’t want to forget or deny, rapture so overwhelming and potentially disorienting that it required containment.

“A light came over the sun and was stronger than the sun,” Joan tries to explain in
The Lark
, a light that entered and overcame what she calls “the shadow of me.”

“How did you know it was an angel who spoke?” the examiner asked, the notary noted, and the judges allowed to remain in the trial record.

“By his angels’ speech and tongue,” Joan said.

“Born in the shadow of the church, lulled by the canticle of the bells, fed on legends,” as the historian Jules Michelet described her. “Unawares, the young girl created, so to speak, her own ideas, turned them into realities, made them entities, powers, imparted to them, from the treasure of her virginal life, an existence so splendid, so compelling, that the paltry realities of this world grew faint in comparison.”

Had Saint Michael not been clear as to the meaning of “good,” he told Joan he was sending two female saints to be her daily, sometimes hourly, guides to furnish clear and dramatic role models.

“How do you know one from the other?” the examiner asked Joan.

“By the greeting they give me,” she said. “I also know the saints because they tell me their names.”

Saint Catherine was one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers,
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powerful intercessors around whom cults developed during the plague years, their images displayed in churches and chapels Joan visited as a child. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 282, Catherine was the beautiful daughter of her people’s pagan king, Costus. As a scholar, she penetrated a world largely claimed by men. By fourteen, Catherine had converted to Christianity, consecrated her virginity to her heavenly bridegroom, and become a convincing proselytizer. She left Alexandria for Europe, where she converted Valeria, the wife of the Roman emperor Maxentius, who had Valeria executed for the crime of practicing Christianity. Having removed the impediment that stood between him and the true object of his desire, Maxentius proposed that he and Catherine marry. Catherine, however, refused to accept an earthly bridegroom in Christ’s stead. Maxentius ordered she be tortured, but the wheel meant to break her body fell into a pile of splinters at her touch. Undeterred, Maxentius had her beheaded, successfully.