by Donald Spoto
Before he completely lost control of himself, Urban VI found his papacy defended by none other than Catherine of Siena, a profoundly mystical character who experienced intense religious visions and turned from an early life of reclusive contemplation to become a vigorous worker for Church unity and reform, nursing the sick and dying during the plague of 1374. She was linked to the Dominican Order as a tertiary, a laywoman living not in a convent but rather in the world, usually at home. Her good works consisted mostly of charitable service to the poor, and her ideals and prayers were inspired by the religious life of Dominican friars.
But Catherine became intensely involved in politics. She wielded, for example, enormous influence on the clergy in northern Italy as well as on the pope in self-imposed Avignon exile. She feared neither prince nor cleric: of the disgraceful conduct of too many clergymen, for example, she wrote candidly, “Bloated with pride, they devour money meant for the poor and spend it on their own pleasures!” At Urban’s personal invitation, she traveled to Rome within days of his election to help shore up support for his cause. But when Catherine was threatened and very nearly assassinated by Urban’s enemies, he sent her no guard and consistently ignored the danger to which she was then exposed on his behalf. Worn out from her habit of extreme penances and a lifetime of excessive fasting and travels, she died in 1380, still in her thirties. Catherine of Siena was canonized in 1461.
The Council of Constance deposed two claimants to the papacy, forced a third to abdicate, and in 1417 installed as pope a layman named Oddo Colonna. He had to be hastily ordained priest and consecrated bishop, after which he took office as Pope Martin V, thus effectively ending the schism. Almost alone among premodern popes, Martin is remembered as a sympathetic friend to the disenfranchised Jews of Europe. He condemned anti-Semitism and strictly forbade the forced baptism of Jewish children, which unfortunately had been practiced in medieval Italy.
During his papacy Martin was preoccupied with the politics of the Roman situation and, lacking reliable or timely reports, had little access to news of conditions elsewhere, especially since the French bishops faced their own internal dilemmas and had to decide whether they were Burgundian or Armagnac; most of them now solidly backed the victorious English. Living in the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth seemed a forgotten ideal for many clergymen, obsessed as they were with shoring up their own wealth against the encroachments of secular princes. In fact, it was often left to devout women like Catherine of Siena to issue calls to reform: she went so far as to reprimand Urban to his face.
Earlier, the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century had also exerted influence far beyond the walls of her nunnery. She wrote letters to Henry II of England, urging him to avoid the company of those who would kill his friend Thomas Becket; alas, her injunction was ignored. She also wrote to Henry’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, comforting her during the times of her husband’s infidelities. In Italy, Angela of Foligno was a spiritual counselor to communities of disaffected Franciscan friars, and Birgitta of Sweden was not afraid to scold churchmen and bishops openly on account of their negligence and moral laxity. From the time of the early Church, history in every era bears the names of countless women who often accomplished what men could not or would not dare.
AT ABOUT NOON one summer day in 1424, when she was in her father’s garden, Joan sensed that she was surrounded by a great light. She also heard, as she said later, “a revelation from God by a voice,” which told her to be devout, to pray, to frequent the sacraments, and always to rely on the Lord for help. Although at first very much frightened by the light and the voice (who wouldn’t be?), she was soon consoled by them, and these experiences continued—precisely how often and at what times, she never specified. Nor, for the time being, did she identify the voice or voices; they were simply “of God” or “from God.” In addition, she told no one of these extraordinary experiences.
The third time this happened, Joan knew that she heard the “voice of an angel,” as she put it; in other words, what the voice told her was appropriate to the counsel of the angels, of the heavenly court itself. Over the next three years she was summoned by the voices “to come to the aid of the king of France”; eventually she was also told just how to accomplish that. At first Joan protested that she was only a poor girl who could neither ride a warhorse nor lead men in battle. But she could not for long ignore the directions, and she placed her honor and her faith in God, Who, she was assured, would supply what she lacked.
The voices and the light continued to come to Joan throughout 1425, when Domrémy was raided by Burgundians. However irregularly, these spiritual experiences endured as long as she lived. But until she was on trial, in 1431, she spoke of her experiences only to two confidants, never to her parents or to her parish priest. Part of the reason for her silence must have been fear of rejection, and part was surely the difficulty in putting an ineffable experience into words.
To “see” the angels and the light and to “hear” the voices referred to a kind of sight and hearing that do not necessarily come through the physical senses. Her perception was not intuitive daydreaming or a psychological conviction about something. What mattered for Joan was not the physical sight of spiritual beings or saints, much less a retelling or an embellished account of the sight by her or anyone else. What mattered was that the message came, as she believed, from God. The important thing, in short, was not what she saw or how she saw it, but the inner revelation, the compelling sense that she was purposefully addressed.
Although it happened to Joan on a far more profound (not to say more dramatic) level, the situation was rather like that of someone who “hears” a call when seeing something in art or reading about it in a book: a summons is felt—to a career, perhaps, or to a new commitment. One “sees” and recalls the familiar work of art or the episode in a book but in a new and deeper way and more emphatically, as it is now connected to a sense of personal destiny or purpose. But this is only an analogy of the mystic experience that touched Joan.
Ultimately, she said that God had guided her by means of heavenly visitations from Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch; later she also mentioned that she had seen Gabriel the archangel and a large company of angels. It is critical to recall that the transcripts of her trial are the only source for our knowledge of Joan’s spiritual experience, and it is clear from the texts that her answers to the judges’ questions were ambiguous and often contradictory. But one thing is clear: Joan claimed to hear voices and see visions, and always there was light—“a great deal of light on all sides,” she said. Once she was a prisoner, from 1430, the light was focused on Catherine and Margaret, and she described them as she did Michael—sometimes precisely, at other times hazily.
Reading the trial documents, we sense her frustration in trying to articulate what cannot be fully articulated: “I do not recognize them at once.” Day after day Joan was forced to repeat statements, often out of context, and to add details that were irrelevant or frankly absurd, such as the color of her heavenly visitors’ hair and clothing. Under interrogation by a swarm of judges trying daily to trap her, and exhausted by battles, she was kept in appalling prison cells, denied adequate food, and threatened and humiliated each day; it is not surprising that her responses became confused and often indistinct. But her mystical experiences gave her sufficient confidence that, as the trial notes put it on March 3, “she said she would do better to obey her sovereign Lord God rather than men.”
PRECISELY BECAUSE OF her visions, Joan of Arc becomes for very many people an intolerable conundrum, almost or entirely someone who cannot be taken seriously. At the same time, any assessment of the last six years of her life depends to a great extent on her credibility, her maturity, and indeed her sanity. And so summary judgments are often made, based on how one judges her “voices” or how one understands her political significance for France or her place in the religious history of the world.
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p; Most problematic for the skeptics is the matter of the angels and archangels Joan claimed to have seen and heard.
Angels were part of ancient, pre-Semitic iconography, and their images were taken over and presumed in Hebrew, Christian and Islamic theology from the earliest times to the present. Initially, before Hebrew faith was monotheistic, angels resembled their Babylonian and Assyrian counterparts: minor deities or part of a heavenly court. For the Hebrews, “an angel of the Lord” was a way both of avoiding direct mention of the divine name and of indicating divine activity in the affairs of the world; angels occur in the Jewish Scriptures as guides, consolers, and monitors. When they are described as quite distinct beings, not all angels were regarded as good or benevolent, as the book of Job and the Jewish apocryphal literature attest.
Angels were mostly described as attendants in the realm of God, and, because it would have been blasphemous in Judaism to imply the direct apprehension of God by mortals, angels were often depicted as legates or messengers, bearers of inspiration and of divine commands. Indeed, the word angel comes from the Greek angelos, which translates the Hebrew mal’ak; both words mean “messenger.”
Similarly, the annunciation scenes in the New Testament infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke emphasize not these curious beings (who are never described), but rather the astonishing, unbidden divine initiative in bringing John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth into the world. After that, angels are only infrequently mentioned in the Christian Scriptures—at the desert temptation of Jesus, at the agony in Gethsemane, and at the discovery of the Resurrection. They are remarkably absent during his ministry.
Since biblical times the existence of angels as individual spiritual beings has been taken for granted by many people. But however we understand them, it is important to emphasize that angels represent something much more than grotesque, fantastic winged figures and something more powerful than could be conveyed by philosophic discourse. Ancient Greeks had a talent for abstraction and conceptualizing, but Hebrew thought was notable for its particularity. In this regard, angels dramatically represent God’s presence and actions among His people.*
In the Hebrew Scriptures the archangel Michael is mentioned only in the book of Daniel (second century B.C.), where he appears as both a guardian spirit and a personification of the people. In the New Testament his name occurs twice: the letter of Jude points to an obscure reference to Michael in the Assumption of Moses, an apocryphal Jewish work; and the book of Revelation refers to “Michael and his angels battling against the dragon [of sin].” In medieval France Michael the Archangel was the special patron of soldiers fighting against faithless armies: he was always invoked with prayerful songs amid battles. The flags of the dauphin himself were painted with Michael’s image: to fight for the heir to the throne meant to fight on the side of the heavenly choirs.
Michael had been for centuries the patron of the French royal family, and the coastal stronghold of Mont-Saint-Michel represented France’s ancient Christian roots; its abbey and fortress remained loyal to the dauphin. The French locations named for him are too numerous to list: one has only to think of the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris and the colossal baroque statue (a few steps from the Seine, at the Place Saint-Michel) depicting Michael with a sword, vanquishing the dragon of sin—an image drawn from Revelation. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, France kept Saint Michael’s Day (September 29) as a great religious feast and holiday. Such a heroic spiritual figure was known to Joan from childhood, when she lived in the duchy of Bar, whose patron saint was Michael; at least forty-six churches in neighboring dioceses were dedicated to him.
DEVOTION TO CATHERINE of Alexandria was widespread in medieval Europe, although she was not mentioned anywhere before the ninth century. During the violent persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Maximinus from 235 to 238, so the legend went, eighteen-year-old Catherine approached the tyrant, condemned his cruelty, and confounded his belief in Roman polytheism by her impressive intellectual discourse. Unable to contradict her logical arguments, Maximinus had her tortured and imprisoned. Catherine, however, was not to be stopped: even in chains she succeeded in converting jailers, other prisoners, and even the emperor’s wife, who came to visit her. Livid with rage, the emperor had Catherine beheaded after more dreadful tortures.
As told for six centuries, this was a dramatic and edifying story, but it turned out to be wildly fictitious, and in 1969 Catherine of Alexandria was quietly removed from the Catholic Church’s official roll of saints (along with others, such as Christopher and Barbara). The existence of early martyrs is well documented in secular and sacred writings, and the story of Catherine represents a type of heroic Christian during the first three centuries after Jesus; indeed, she stands for countless anonymous believers who died for their faith. But as told, the story is apocryphal.
The legend of Catherine was, however, dear to the hearts of medieval Christians, who found their own religious truth in accounts of her life and death. Many chapels were dedicated to Catherine in Europe, and statues of her were found throughout France. Joan’s sister was named Catherine, and a church dedicated to the saint sat in nearby Maxey. On Saint Catherine’s feast day each year, work was prohibited and families gathered for worship.
Set before the devout as a model of Christian heroism, Catherine was also the subject of many French sermons and poems. She was the primary patroness of young girls and of students who had to debate learned colleagues and professors; in other words, Catherine was just the sort of heroine Joan herself would have taken for model and intercessor, a saint whose name and reputation had been close to her since childhood and to whom she would naturally turn during the harrowing year of her imprisonment and interrogation—the circumstances when she first identified Catherine’s among the voices she heard.
Margaret of Antioch was equally popular at the time, singled out for special devotion in the region where Joan was born and raised. Like Catherine of Alexandria, Margaret was supposed to have lived at the time of the early Christian persecutions. When she converted to Christianity and consecrated her virginity to God, she was disowned by her pagan father. A Roman prefect then saw the beautiful teenage Margaret tending sheep and tried to seduce her. When she refused him, he publicly denounced her as a Christian, and after numerous tortures she too was beheaded. She became the special patroness of falsely accused people, and her statue had a prominent place in Joan’s parish church. Margaret was precisely the kind of young, courageous virgin whose fidelity unto death would have comforted Joan during her interrogations.
Michael, Catherine and Margaret: widely venerated, they were especially close figures in the minds of ordinary Christians in medieval France. Joan knew about them; she saw them represented in paintings, stained-glass windows, and statues; and she would have prayed to them in her crises. Some modern scholars dismiss the possibility of a transcendent revelation to Joan with this explanation: forced to identify the voices during her trial, they say, she would naturally have mentioned those whose stories and images were familiar.
But simply because she mentioned these saints late, when she was compelled to identify the voices, it does not follow that those identities occurred to her only on the spot. Indeed, she had been keeping a deep silence about them for a number of good reasons. And despite the fact that the “voices” seem to be from those whose very existence is dubious, the experience mediated to Joan by these voices was never in doubt, at least to her.
FROM THE HEBREW prophet Isaiah to the present, each era finds its own terms to describe what is unknowable, opaque, or mysterious. Once upon a time we described the mentally ill as possessed by demons. Later they were considered victims of disordered humors. In both cases they were ostracized, chained in dungeons, submitted to various tortures, regarded as sinners, and simply allowed to expire. Now we often say that such a person is, for example, a paranoid schizophrenic with an Oedipus complex, or we study his genetic history and seek to learn the chemical or genealogical
sources for the disorder.
But scientific labels do not enable us to understand the etiology or substance of madness any more than did “demonic possession.” How is it that one can suffer a loss of personality and reason? Even as we attach comforting terms that give us a way of dealing with the awfulness of the plight, we know that scientific and psychological jargon simply enables us to have a coping mechanism and, we hope, to deal more compassionately with sufferers.
In Joan’s case it is tempting to take refuge in psychiatric terminology, thus reducing her marvelous experiences to meaninglessness. Some have argued that Joan had an inner ear infection producing sounds resembling whispering voices or that an eye affliction could have made bright sunlight intolerable and given her the idea that she was seeing the outlines of forms. But this explanation runs afoul of the fact that she rode horses, was upright in battle, and made stunning logistic decisions in broad daylight. Still others are convinced that the girl was a victim of benign autosuggestion, of hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. But Joan’s consequent actions reveal a wholeness of perception and integrity of purpose not found among the mentally unstable.
Apart from the fact that a mystical experience cannot be either proved or disproved, the deeper problem, if she was merely a deluded country girl, is to account for everything in Joan’s life from the summer of 1424 to her death. She did not claim her voices and visions in order to cast herself as saintly or virtuous. In fact, as we have seen, she mentioned her experiences only to two confidants in the years before her trial, and then she was hesitant to discuss the matter at all; true mystics are always reluctant to talk about themselves. Joan pointed not to herself but to the cause and the challenge to which, she believed, God summoned her and the French people: the salvation of the nation.