The Holiness of Saint Joan of Arc.

By Etienne Robo
London Catholic Truth Society No. B399.


St Joan stands alone in history. Many women have found sanctity in the cloister, some have shown bravery in battle, but no other ever trained herself to holiness in a soldier's camp, and surely no female saint ever died at the stake condemned by an ecclesiastical tribunal as a witch and a heretic.

Her story is incredible, but true: it rests on the most abundant and clear evidence.{ This booklet is based throughout on a critical reading of the original sources, not on second-hand evidence.} She was a peasant girl of no importance and before she was eighteen her intervention had already changed the course of European history for centuries to come. When she died at nineteen, thanks to her, the French had become conscious of being a nation, England had lost all hopes of ever being a Continental power, and Burgundy, the arbiter of the destinies of France, was soon again to be her vassal.

We cannot explain this by a mere recital of the diplomatic and military history of the times. The hand of God clearly appeared in these events. Joan of Arc was the tool He chose to accomplish His work: she is the explanation of the miraculous reversal of the fortunes of France which followed her appearance on the stage of history; but she was a saint first, and, therefore, in this little pamphlet you must expect to find more about Joan the woman and the saint than about Joan the warrior. Were it not for her trust and faith in God, and for her inflexible resolve "to serve God first" she would in time, like her friends, Mengette and Hauviette, have married some poor labourer and lived and died in some obscure hamlet of Lorraine.

Childhood

She was born in January 1412 in the little village of Domremy on the borders of Lorraine. The house where she spent her childhood, the church where she made her first communion still exist, not very much altered. They still show to the visitors, at the back of the living-room, another one, very small and dark, which is said to have been hers. Its tiny and deep window opens towards the church across the road, so that when Joan said her prayers she could almost feel that she was kneeling before the altar. In the church — still in use after more than five (nearly six) centuries — is the grey stone baptismal font over which she was held by half-a-dozen Godparents when Jean Minet, the parish priest, baptized her. Against one of the columns you see the statue of St Margaret which she decked often with wreaths of flowers.

Hers was a Christian home. Her father, Jacquot d'Arc, and Isabel his wife were described by their neighbours at the second trial as "good Catholics", "true Catholics". He was a small farmer who owned his house, and forty acres of good land. Joan's three brothers helped their father on the farm — 24 acres were under the plough — while Joan helped her mother at home. We cannot exaggerate the influence of that good woman on the formation of the heart and mind of her daughter, and on her religious development. "My mother", said Joan to her judges at Rouen, "taught me Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo and no one besides my mother taught me my beliefs." Isabel d'Arc could not read or write: neither could St Joan, yet how well the one taught, how well the other learnt. We have only to read the minutes of the trial to perceive at once that the religion of our saint was not one of conventional practices, of interested and almost superstitious devotions, but one that went down to the essentials: Obedience to God, horror of sin (I should be the saddest of women if I thought myself to be in mortal sin), the practice of prayer, a great love for the Mass, and for our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, frequent confession and communion.

The religious teaching given by Isabel to her daughter seems to have been very thorough. The answers of St Joan to her judges on the subject of grace or the workings of God's Providence amongst men are astonishing, not in their wording and conciseness alone, but in the theological knowledge they imply. The judges asked her: "Are you in a state of grace, Joan?"

"If I am not, God put me there", she replied; "if I am, please God so keep me."

To an examiner at Poitiers who suggested that "if God wills to save France it is not necessary to have soldiers", she answered: "In God's name the soldiers will fight and God will give the victory". "Act and God will act, work and He will work" is a saying of hers which expresses the same idea. Unlettered as she was, Isabel could serve as a model to many a Catholic mother who boasts of a good education but cannot teach her children their religion.

She taught Joan to work as well as to pray. In a busy season she would help in the field with hay-making and harvesting, handling pitchfork and sickle like everyone else; often she would watch the sheep; when they heard enemy soldiers were approaching, she would even drive the cattle to safety; but usually she was to be found working with her mother at home. She was fond of work and when as a girl of seventeen she was in the king's service and following the movements of the royal court from one town to another and lodging with important ladies, she did not sit there, her hands in her lap, content to listen to their frivolous conversations. "She was never idle", said one of them later on. And if nothing else offered, there was always a distaff and spindle handy for her ready fingers. Did she not boast once to her judges that as for spinning and sewing she was ready to compete with any woman in Rouen!

Jacquot, her father, cannot have given the same attention to his daughter's education as Isabel, but his stern attitude towards evil must have impressed her deeply. Having dreamt one night that she had gone away with the king's soldiers as a camp-follower, he spoke next day very strongly on the subject. "If she ever wanted to do such a thing, you should drown her first", he said to his sons. "If you did not, I would drown her myself, with my own hands." And he meant it. This little episode throws a vivid light on the home in which Joan spent the first seventeen years of her life.

At her trial, the judges plied her with questions concerning her childhood and even her amusements, and thanks to this circumstance we are indebted for some precise details. The little children of Domremy used to go picnicking in the neighbouring woods and there danced and sang and made garlands of flowers. St Joan sang willingly but was not very fond of dancing and often, we are told, leaving the others to their games, she went aside "to talk to God", as she explained. If she happened to be in the fields when the church bells rang, then she would stop work and kneel and pray. Her companions passed remarks about her frequent visits to the church, and this, said Hauviette, one of her girl friends, made her bashful. Some thirty years later these boys and girls who had played with her came forward and recorded their early impressions of Joan as they had known her, child and young maid at Domremy. Her youthful piety was no affectation: she was perfectly natural and acted as she believed. The same witnesses describe her as being quiet and reserved, almost to the point of shyness. They all insist that she was simple; by this they meant that she did not give herself airs, she was unaffected in speech and manners, sincere and transparent. The French simple conveys all these meanings. Her prodigious popularity did not change her in this respect. The Duke of Alencon, her hostess at Bourges and others repeat the same words when they speak of her: "Except in affairs of war, she was a very simple young girl". They agree she was cheerful, but of a silent disposition (moult simple et peu parlant) and, commenting on this, add that when she spoke it was always with great sense.

Her kindness, her charity towards the poor were also remarkable. One Simon Musnier declared: "She liked to take care of the sick. I know this for certain. When I was a child and I was ill it was she who nursed me." Another witness tells us that she had known Joan to give her own bed to some poor homeless woman and to spend the night herself by the hearth in the next room. This was what Christian charity meant to her.

The Voices

She was about thirteen when, for the first time, she heard the Voice which summoned her to the rescue of France. She tells her judges that on this occasion she was overcome with fear. The Voice came to her towards noon. It was summer time; she was in her father's garden. She heard the Voice on her right, and afterwards she seldom heard it without a light which came from the same side and was usually very brilliant. After she had heard the Voice three times, she understood it came from God and knew it was Michael the Archangel, the protector of France, who came to her and with him the hosts of heaven. The Voice admonished her "to govern herself well and to go to church often", and from the beginning she was told that she must "go to France".{ N.B. — Vaucouleurs (with Domremy) was an outpost of France deep in enemy territory.}

One year, and yet another, passed, the visions went on: the commands became more pressing. St Margaret and St Catherine now appeared to her frequently, their heads richly crowned, their voices gentle, soft and low. Once or twice a week they urged her to leave her home to go and seek the king, and tell him of her mission: that God Himself was sending her to give help to the kingdom and lead the Dauphin to Rheims for his coronation. Joan, afraid, trembling, dared tell no one for a time. It was all so strange; it sounded so impossible! How could this be, she thought, seeing that "she was a poor maid, knowing nothing of riding or fighting"?

We cannot doubt that to St Joan these visions were intensely real: she saw, heard, touched, embraced them. "I saw them", she says to her judges, "with the eyes of my body as plainly as I see you, and when they left me I cried, for I wanted them to take me with them." {Private examination held in the prison on March 17th, in the afternoon.}

Are we to take this literally? Let us at once say that the visions and revelations of which we read in the lives of saints can never command the assent of Catholic faith, and cannot be part of the Christian revelation. Let us say also that if we believe in a spiritual world co-existing with the visible one, we cannot affirm that spirits have no means of communicating with us, either by direct action of mind on mind, or by causing the brain to originate such pictures, sounds or sensations as are usually produced by an external cause. We are not for a moment suggesting that St Margaret or St Michael or St Catherine assumed in fact a human body in order to manifest themselves to St Joan; nor do we care very much for the theory that these visions were a pure figment of her imagination. After all, these visions did change for many years the course of history for three nations and, in whatever manner they came, we may be allowed to think they were designed by God as the means for Him to influence and direct human affairs.

She had reached her sixteenth year when she knew the time had come for a decision and that she must obey her heavenly counsellors, for they were God's messengers and their commands His commands. "The great pity of the kingdom of France" was always present to her mind. All her life she had heard tales of battles, burnings and lootings. Once she had to take flight with all the inhabitants of Domremy and on their return they had found the little village burnt down by the Burgundians. When in October 1428, the news came that Salisbury with an English army was under the walls of Orleans, she could not wait any longer: "time was pressing upon her", she said, "as on a woman when her day is near".

At last, towards the middle of December, {It is generally accepted that Joan left Domremy and went to Vaucouleurs twice, in May and in December. This raises endless difficulties. We are convinced that the notary who translated into Latin the deposition of Poulengy made a mistake and that the Maid left her home once only and never returned. It all rests on one word: ascension instead of naissance;} she left her home never to return and went to her uncle Laxart, ostensibly to attend his wife in her trouble, but really to be near Vaucouleurs, interview the governor, Robert de Baudricourt, and obtain from him leave to go to Chinon. At first she was rudely rebuffed by the captain, but nothing could discourage her: she knew she was the bearer of God's commands. After six weeks with her uncle at Little Bury she went to stay with some friends in the town of Vaucouleurs and, at last, impressed by her conviction, her persistence, and her personality, as everyone was who came near her, Baudricourt gave her permission to start and granted her an escort of two willing young noblemen and their four servants. Before her final departure, she went to see the Duke of Lorraine at Nancy, perhaps to obtain a safe conduct out of his lands and through enemy territory. On her way to Nancy she paid a visit to the celebrated shrine of St Nicolas du Port, the patron saint of travellers.

The Mission Fulfilled

We may perhaps, before proceeding any further, review briefly the desperate situation of France at that moment. For nearly ninety years an interminable war between France and England had been dragging on, and since Agincourt (1415) the French had only met with defeat and had lost heart. Famine, inflation, pestilence, civil war had added to the misery of their unfortunate country. The King — or rather the Dauphin, since the coronation had not yet taken place — had no money, no soldiers, no allies. His own mother had declared him illegitimate and his kingdom had shrunk to a few provinces south of the Loire.

The English held Normandy, Picardy, Paris in the north, as well as Guyenne and Aquitaine in the south. Burgundy, their ally, stretched from Flanders to Savoy, from the Rhine to the Loire. When Orleans was threatened, the situation of the French king became dangerous in the extreme, for its capture would have opened the roads to the south. Fortunately for him, both England and Burgundy, bent as they were on the dismemberment of France, disagreed about the disposal of the booty: both wanted Paris, both wanted Orleans. Bear this in mind; it is the key to the obstinate and futile French diplomacy of appeasement from 1423 onwards, and the key also to the otherwise inexplicable discarding of Joan, by the Court after the Coronation.