Rediscovering Joan of Arc

As she was being led to the stake to be executed, most of the hostile crowd thought she was a witch. Yet, by the time Joan of Arc had been burned alive on May 30, 1431, many of the onlookers were weeping. Even some of the judges who had condemned her broke down in tears, and one onlooker famously said, “We are lost. It is a saint we have burned.”¹

Almost six centuries later, the life story of this fifteenth-century Frenchwoman continues to be retold in biographies, novels, children’s books, movies, histories, and even journal articles. The famous American writer Mark Twain spent a dozen years researching Joan’s life and wrote a respectful novel about her, even though he was no friend of Christianity or the Catholic Church. Another famous biography was written by Hilaire Belloc, a naturalized English citizen who was born in France and who balanced the perspectives of England and France without ignoring Joan’s Catholicism.

A fascinating life often misunderstood 

For some reason, the story of Joan’s life seems to fascinate non-Catholics in a way that does not happen with the lives of other Catholic saints. Perhaps that’s because the pivotal periods of Joan’s life were not spent in a university, like Thomas Aquinas, or in a convent, like Clare of Assisi, but on a battlefield and in a courtroom.

Over the centuries, Joan has been a powerful symbol of patriotism in France. Some French authors have described her accomplishments in glowing terms, and some are entranced by stories that appear to be mere legends that have evolved over the centuries. Other Frenchmen have written disparagingly and critically about Joan and her legacy.

English speakers continue to write biographies about Joan as well. Some books have been written for people who delight in the intricate details of military campaigns, fifteenth-century history, and the personalities of European nobility. Other books read less like history and more like imaginative fiction.

Put bluntly, the story of Joan’s life seems to act like a Rorschach inkblot test. Our contemporaries interpret the particulars of her life based on the axe they want to grind. For feminists, Joan was a strong leader who was held back by the oppressive patriarchy (translation: she was a feminist). Atheists claim that her reputed visions were really signs of neurosis or that she was merely experiencing adolescent “flights of fancy” when she said God told her to lead an army. Others have implied that Joan possessed some unspecified intersex condition and was actually a male who had the exterior signs of being a female. That implication is, of course, deeply insulting to women because it implies that the only way Joan could have been a successful military leader was that she was, underneath it all, a man.

Perhaps the most humorous passage in all the treatments of Joan occurs in a modern book. The author explained Joan’s fasting as the method she used to “call her angels”. If one does not understand God, angels, saints, fasting, or the Catholic faith, that might be a reasonable way to describe what happened. Catholics, on the other hand, understand that Joan fasted as an act of penance in the hope that God would reveal to her through the voices of her patron saints what she should do next in a difficult situation.

This detail points to an important distinction that Catholics must make about Joan of Arc. The Catholic Church did not choose to canonize her because she was a military leader, but because she was holy. After all, it was a bit controversial for the Church to pursue canonization for someone who led an army in battle, particularly when the soldiers on both sides of that battle were Catholics. Setting aside her military victories, what evidence is there that Joan should be called a saint?

Ordinary beginnings, extraordinary actions

Joan (c. 1412-1431) was born in the village of Domrémy, France. Her father was a peasant farmer, and her mother, Isabelle, was a devout woman. Like her brothers and sister, Joan did not go to school. Instead, she cared for the family’s livestock, and she learned to weave, spin, and sew. According to witnesses, she was an obedient, hardworking, and pious girl.

At the time of Joan’s birth, England and France had been fighting for control over large regions of northern France for seven decades. Simplifying this long conflict greatly, the English kings had enough blood from the French nobility in their bloodlines to give them reasonable claims to these territories, and the French kings were not always strong enough, in military terms and otherwise, to stand up to them. Conquered territories had been in English hands for so long that some feudal French lords had become wealthy and comfortable under English control.

The king of France during Joan’s childhood, Charles VI, was, without question, mentally ill. Obviously, it is difficult to govern a kingdom when one is alternately lucid and psychotic. Another complication to Charles’ ability to reign was his queen. It was commonly known that his wife, Isabeau of Bavaria, had been repeatedly unfaithful to him, and it was unclear which of her twelve children were truly Charles’ heirs.

Ongoing battles for control of France meant that the residents of Domrémy, like many other poor French peasants, lived in constant fear. Joan’s family and neighbors personally knew the reality of hunger and suffering after troops burned their homes and stole their livestock and food. Throughout Joan’s childhood years, peasants in many regions of France were in daily danger of looting, violence, and starvation.

Some say Joan was thirteen years old when her visions began. According to Joan, for at least a year, perhaps longer, the Archangel Michael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch² spoke to Joan and sometimes appeared to her. When she was about sixteen years old, in response to a command from these “voices”, she asked a relative to take her to a nearby garrison of French soldiers. From this point in time and throughout the next few years, Joan made many accurate predictions regarding the future. According to numerous witnesses, she somehow knew about the outcome of battles occurring far away.

Although she had no military training, she seemed to have great insight into military strategy, including how, when, and where to successfully attack a city. She won the heir to the French throne, Charles VII, over to her side by apparently revealing to him in private that she knew his great secret: he was afraid he was not the son of Charles VI because of his mother’s unfaithfulness. Joan told him that he was the true heir and personally crowned him in Reims Cathedral a year later, after many successful battles. The wisdom that Joan possessed seemed remarkable, perhaps even divinely inspired, for an uneducated peasant girl.

Joan’s insightful modern biographer, Sven Stolpe, points out that some of the stories about Joan’s military genius may have been exaggerated. There were, after all, several French lords with a lifetime of practical experience in battle who could have been making the most critical decisions. And there were certainly long periods when Joan was forced to sit and wait for the king and his nobles to graciously agree to call up their soldiers and fight. However, it must be pointed out that those same leaders had regularly lost their battles until Joan showed up.

The peasants of France, demoralized by so many defeats, encouraged one another with a widely known prophecy that France would be “destroyed by one woman and reborn through a virgin from Lorraine.”³ It was easy for ordinary Frenchmen to recognize the woman who had destroyed their country: the voluptuous and adulterous Queen Isabeau. But who was the promised virgin who would help them?

A life of heroic virtue and an unjust death

While it is not possible to be certain how much of Joan’s military acumen was fact or fiction, her personal holiness during this period cannot be doubted. Although she was only an uneducated teenager, she clearly displayed heroic virtue.

Today, she is commonly called Joan of Arc, yet she called herself Joan the Maid (Jeanne d’Arc and Jeanne la Pucelle, respectively, in French), that is, Joan the Virgin. She lived a chaste, holy life in a military camp, surrounded by soldiers who were not angels, and convinced them (well, commanded them) to attend Mass, go to Confession, and get rid of their prostitutes and swearing. She never killed anyone in battle, she wept over the dead bodies of the slain, and she repeatedly intervened to stop her soldiers from killing wounded English soldiers. She bravely entered numerous battles armed only with a banner bearing the names of Jesus and Mary. Her true armor was not the beautiful white armor designed for her by King Charles, but her unshakeable trust that God would help her people regain their land if they would only trust in Him and fight for it.

On May 23, 1430, Joan was captured in battle. She was imprisoned in a castle but initially treated respectfully. On two occasions, she tried to escape, which she considered her patriotic duty, but was caught both times. The English paid a large ransom⁴ to take custody of her, and on January 9, 1431, French supporters of the English crown put Joan on trial as a blasphemer and a witch in the city of Rouen.

Although modern methods of trial and imprisonment are very different from those used six centuries ago, the way Joan was treated was both cruel and unjust by any Christian standard.

Her imprisonment in Rouen was hardly luxurious. Some say Joan was kept in an iron cage, while others say she was merely confined to a small room in a castle. Either way, she was manacled by her ankles to her cell. During her trial, she was kept fettered with tight chains on her neck, hands, and ankles, and she almost died from what appears to have been an attempted poisoning.

One of the charges against Joan was that she scandalously chose to wear men’s clothing. Obviously, pants are a better clothing choice when one is riding a horse in battle, and Joan claimed that her voices had given her permission to do so. But during her imprisonment, she fiercely insisted on wearing men’s clothing and tightly wrapped her clothes around her body. When questioned about this, she repeatedly said that she was doing so to protect herself from the men who were guarding her. The foul-mouthed guards not only constantly insulted her, they repeatedly attempted to sexually assault her. Historians are divided over whether any of them succeeded, but witnesses recorded that they saw her bloodied and disheveled more than once.

In cases involving suspected witchcraft, it would have been reasonable for Joan to be interrogated and face trial with two judges. Instead, Joan was interrogated, privately and publicly, for months by dozens of Church leaders. She was outnumbered 100 to one, yet after long hours of daily attempts to make her contradict herself or misstate Church teaching, her enemies could not claim victory over her statements. Instead, they merely charged her with the same lies they had used before the trial began.

A few of her judges recognized that Joan was innocent and quickly left Rouen. Others were obviously willing to believe that she was a witch because they had, for whatever reason, chosen to side with the English. There were a few men who quietly tried to help Joan, and one of them appears to have suggested to Joan that she ask to be sent to the pope to be judged. When Joan publicly requested this, the leaders of the trial simply ignored her.

Christlike in her suffering

In the end, those men who had become convinced that she was innocent were too afraid of the real man behind the trial, Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, to speak up for Joan. They were willing to let a nineteen-year-old girl die—and be beaten and perhaps raped—to save their own necks. The less said about weak King Charles VII, who owed his crown to Joan and did nothing to free her, the better.

Although Joan changed the course of world history by inspiring Frenchmen to fight for their land, the Church declared her a saint for other reasons. Joan’s behavior during her public life—her courage, charity, faithfulness, forgiveness, prayerfulness, purity, and grace under pressure—are clear signs of holiness, signs of the presence of God in her soul. Ironically, the detailed records that her enemies made of her trial also made it easier for Joan to be publicly rehabilitated in Paris twenty-five years after her death and to be declared a saint five centuries later.

Joan never considered herself a savior and never wanted to become a queen. Until the very end, she thought her role in God’s plan was merely to lead France’s army to victory over the English and be present at the coronation of her king. She probably hoped to live a long life afterwards.

In this way, she demonstrated another of God’s greatest but most misunderstood attributes: simplicity. Joan was a simple girl who obeyed God’s commands, even when they seemed ridiculous and impossible. She did not always understand what He wanted her to do next, but she was always singularly focused on obeying His will.

Sven Stolpe’s biography of Joan makes the startling but reasonable claim that Joan was not just a martyr, but a mystic, even though she didn’t spend her life in a convent or write books about her visions. As Stolpe explains:

The great fault with nearly all previous accounts of Joan’s life is that they have ignored or minimized the fact that her spiritual development was that of a typical mystic. Through hard moral schooling, through listening to the inner voice, and through asceticism, she advances to the supreme sacrifice, martyrdom.

It was during Joan’s final days of imprisonment, when she was completely alone, abandoned, mistreated, and condemned to death, that Joan became most Christlike in her suffering. It is no wonder that the onlookers cried when they watched her die. It is also no wonder that the example of a young woman bravely dying a brutal death should capture the imaginations even of unbelievers. They also admire her passion, but do not know that such love can only come from the heart of God.

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