DESPERATELY SEEKING JOAN - Woman behind the hype - Joan of Arc

Commonweal, March 10, 2000 by Mary Gordon

It was an irony not unregarded by the devil's advocates charged with disproving Joan's qualifications for sanctity. This was only one of the problems with Joan as a saint that they addressed, and it is difficult not to sympathize with their reservations. In examining Joan's history of resistance to her clerical judges, they raised the question of whether this constituted a model of faithful obedience, whether, in presenting her for emulation by the faithful, the church was backing the wrong horse, or filly.

It is important to understand what is in the mind of the church when it names someone a saint and in this context to explore the differences between a saint and a hero. The church's criteria for sainthood are based on a person's having lived an exceptional, in fact unimpeachable, life of virtue. The emphasis is placed upon the three theological and four moral virtues; it is assumed that the candidate would have kept the Ten Commandments of Moses and the six commandments of the church- the latter having to do with questions of fidelity to worship. Keeping the commandments is only paying membership dues in the club of potential salvation; it implies only the minimum compliance (however rare that might be in reality), not the distinction that sainthood implies.

The three theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity; the four moral are prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Whereas none of her devil's advocates questioned whether Joan was an admirable person, they asserted again and again that she was imperfect in the practice of the virtues. One of the devil's advocates, Jean Baptist Lugari, said of her: "Even though she was a most noble heroine, even though she was pious and endowed with the most impeccable morals, still her virtues do not seem to be such as to make her worthy of being proposed by a decree of the Holy See an exemplar to be imitated by the Christian faithful."

Of all those who have tried to understand Joan's life and career, it is only the devil's advocates who have focused in a concerted way on Joan's inconsistencies and erratic behavior. None of them suggests that she is not remarkable, but they note her radical shifts. They bring up several events in her life which they determine to be less than saintly. Some of their objections are easy to dismiss. They accuse her of disobedience to her parents in not telling them about her voices; they fault the perfection of her chastity because of her boasting about it and her willingness to undergo physical examinations to verify it. They are worried that so many different men seem to have mentioned, and therefore seen, her breasts. They charge her with intractableness in refusing to answer the judges at her trial, ignoring the fact that this was her judicial right.

More serious for Joan's admirers, they insist, that her throwing herself out of a seven-story tower was an act either of attempted suicide, or presumption, or at best, a lack of submission to her unjust judges, thereby refusing the example of Jesus. They note that she lied by her own admission about the details of an angel bringing the king's crown. They suggest that her voices might have been the result of a hysterical delusion, and remark that even correct prophecy isn't indicative of the holiness of the visions: They cite the case of Savonarola.