She forces us to think
Not everything is swallowed up by the earth.
- Antonio Machado
A sixty-five-foot tall Cross of Lorraine, a symbol of French patriotism during World War II, marks the place where Saint Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. Photos by Sydni Sterling.
A moment comes in the 1928 silent, subtitled film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, when Joan, on trial for heresy and a host of other things, is asked if she considers herself to be in a state of grace.
If the answer is yes, the 19-year-old future saint, without benefit of legal counsel, would admit to harboring a sinner’s presumption. If the answer is no, well then, she is nobody special, and certainly not one chosen by God to drive the English from French soil to end what came to be called the Hundred Years War.
The trap has been set. Her interlocutors wait for an answer. An anguished Joan sidesteps the trap: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God keep me.”
The film, directed by Carl Theodore Dryer — spare as a Japanese Noh play, immersive as a nightmare from which we cannot awake — is an undisputed masterpiece. And the enigmatic Jeanne Falconetti, as Joan, delivered one of the greatest screen performances of all time.
Dryer collapses the trial, held in the Rouen Castle, from several months to one day, culminating in Joan’s burning at the stake on May 30, 1431.
Minutes of the trial, recorded in Latin, have come down to us, and are available in English online. In Dryer’s 110-minute film, Joan, harried by rapid-fire questions and accusations from multiple angles, is portrayed as a sparrow in a hailstorm — pure victim.
It is here, we might think, that we are close to the real Joan; Joan in the flesh, and in her own words, surrounded by a tribunal of aggressive, hatchet-faced men.
The real Joan was more elusive.
Trial records show her to be whip-smart, plucky, and even, at times, impertinent, while exhibiting the courage and stubborn clarity of mind that enabled a teen-aged girl to lead an army against a foreign invader.
Sympathetic to the English, the French churchmen who interrogated her fixated on Joan’s masculine clothing. When asked if those in authority on the French side ever requested that she abandon her male garb, Joan replied: “That has nothing to do with your case.”
So many histories and biographies, painstakingly constructed from impeccable research, erudition, even empathy, swirl around a cloud of unknowing. “What we know about people keeps us from knowing them,” wrote Christian Bobin in his slender, powerful book, The Secret of Francis of Assisi: A Meditation, a sentence that appeals to our moral imagination and sense of humility.
Joan, like Francis, is often the recipient of our projections, especially in matters of faith. That Joan heard voices, which launched her mission to save France, is grist for psychiatry and neurology. That she “cross-dressed” (a term first employed only in the Victorian era), means she might have been lesbian or trans — never mind that Joan operated in a dangerous universe of men, on the battlefield and in prison, and was described as attractive. In the eyes of a certain kind of blood and soil nationalist, Joan’s deep faith and martial leadership make her a paradigm for civilizational renewal. And repression. At a more rarified level, not a few academics like to speak of human beings and religious faith as mere “social constructs.” Never mind free will.
“O my God, we have burned a saint,” cried the secretary to the King of England as the flames consumed Joan at the stake, an exclamation that flies straight to the point.
Joan’s life was played out on the stage of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) between England and France. Before nation-state borders had hardened, the French king died without a male heir in 1328; seven years later the English invaded France, supported by their Burgundian allies, to lay claim to the French throne.
At her trial, Joan, born of peasant stock in Domrémy, two-hundred miles east of Paris, recalled the moment in 1424 that changed her life: “I was in my thirteenth year when God sent a voice to guide me. At first, I was very much frightened. The voice came towards the hour of noon, in summer, in my father’s garden. I had fasted the preceding day. I heard the voice on my right hand, in the direction of the church. I seldom hear it without (seeing) a light.”
The voice told Joan, according to a contemporary in whom she may have confided, that she had been chosen to drive the English from French soil, restore the kingdom of France and enable Charles VII to be crowned king at Reims.
Later, Joan identified three voices and apparitions that visited her: the Archangel Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine. At her trial, Joan said she wept each time they left her.
Science has plenty to say about “auditory hallucinations.” Schizophrenia is the usual suspect, though stress and trauma are often cited as triggers. History tells us this much: spiritual faith also has a proper place in the constellations of possible causes. Those who have reported hearing voices include Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Augustine, Saint Francis of Assisi, let alone Saint Paul and Mary Mother of God. Emily Dickinson summed up the situation nicely:
Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much sense – the starkest Madness –
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain-
Imprisoned, Joan was handled, at times, with chains.
Guided by the saintly voices, Joan ventured to the nearest French loyalist forces and asked the captain there to let her join the effort to liberate France; her outreach, not surprisingly, was rebuffed. She tried again the next year. This time the captain changed his mind.
We can’t know what alchemy of the moment brought this about. One tries to imagine the teen-ager’s power of persuasion, and the captain’s receptivity, but these things are beyond us.
Wearing men’s clothes, escorted by a half-dozen soldiers through enemy-held territory, Joan embarked on an eleven-day journey to reach Chinon in the Loire Valley to meet with Charles. After some hesitation, he agreed to a meeting.
An idealized bust of Joan of Arc inside the modern church named after her next to the spot where she was martyred.
Joan informed him she wanted to join the battle, that the English would be defeated at Orléans, and she would see to it that he would be crowned at Reims, the traditional place for the investiture of French kings. After being questioned by ecclesiastical authorities, followed by a three-week stay at Poitiers where prominent theologians further questioned her, Joan was judged to have passed muster.
Again, a miracle in itself, enacted a light-year beyond the basic materials of human creation — sperm, egg, zygote, embryo and mathematical odds. The facts of her life are so well-known we are in danger of taking them for granted, as if Joan’s life was just another story from the past.
“She forces us to think,” Vita Sackville-West wrote in her engrossing 1936 biography, Saint Joan of Arc. At the end of her book, Sackville-West, no religious believer, considers what we are to make of Joan’s life.
She wonders about that which “no scientific explanation has as yet been able to account for: the belief in what we conveniently call the supernatural. I believe it so profoundly as to quarrel with the expressions super-natural or extra-natural. For me there is only one comprehensive, stupendous unity of which we apprehend but the smallest segment. My readings into Joan of Arc have done nothing but increase my belief in the existence of that unity, and also the belief that certain persons are in touch with, or, shall we say, receptive” to that unity.
Joan’s leadership drove the English from Orléans and won future victories, which she had predicted. On July 17, 1429, Charles VII was crowned at Reims Cathedral, with Joan standing near the altar, already a hero to the French people.
Joan was wounded in the unsuccessful attempt to retake Paris, followed by a series of setbacks on other battlefields before she fell into Burgundian hands.
A niche for Joan of Arc in her namesake church.
Photos by Sydni Sterling.
On the morning of her execution, Joan made her confession, took holy communion, and was led to the ancient market square, Place du Vieux-Marché, where she was given over to the English and their French collaborators. Some ten-thousand people had gathered, along with one-thousand English soldiers. A crucifix was held high so that she could see it through the flames. As the flames rose, she called out Jesus’s name, over and over. An English soldier saw a white dove fly out from the flames. Joan’s ashes were tossed into the Seine.
Two decades later the forces of Charles VII drove the English from France. In 1456 a new tribunal cleared Joan of heresy and in 1920 she was canonized.
Today the location of Joan’s martyrdom in Place du Vieux-Marché is marked by a garden, Le Bûcher de Jeanne d'Arc, and its sixty-five-feet tall Cross of Lorraine, which soars above the Church of Saint Joan of Arc.
The church, designed by Louis Arretche and completed in 1979, is striking: the roof resembles an overturned longship; its sweeping curves also suggest flame. The interior is sleek and bright, with a balance of pine, concrete, brick and glass, evoking a Scandinavian feel. The effect, unlike the amniotic gloaming of France’s Gothic cathedrals, is to step into a space of heightened awareness.
Stained-glass windows, depicting events in the life of Jesus and the stories of selected saints, date from the Renaissance. They were taken from the Church of Saint-Vincent of Rouen, whose windows were placed in safekeeping before Allied bombs fell on the city, and Saint-Vincent, in May 1944.
In this historic river port of half-timbered buildings and beautiful old churches, the modern Church of Saint Joan of Arc is fittingly audacious. Occasional grumbles surface on the internet about the inauspicious setting of the cross, garden, and church being so integrated into Rouen’s lively market square. As you approach the scene, it’s true: there’s no architectural drum-roll, no marble plaza, no impressive fountain.
Maybe being impressed is far from the point.
Place du Vieux-Marché is where a young peasant woman who became a saint was burned at the stake. What we find there might be enough to leave us alone with our own thoughts.
Or prayers.
