‘I speak, of course, of Joan of Arc.
‘I must be excused for dwelling on this signal example; for I believe that only now, with the comprehension which we are gradually gaining of the possibility of an impulse from the mind’s deeper strata which is so far from madness that it is wiser than our sanity itself – only now, I repeat, can be understand aright that familiar story’ (the italics are mine). ‘We need not,’ he says, in conclusion, ‘assume that the voices which she heard were the off spring of any mind but her own, any more than we need assume that the figures in which her brave and pious impulses sometimes took external form were veritable saints’ – a conclusion with which Jeanne herself would certainly and most vehemently have disagreed. But it must be remembered that he is taking the purely scientific, not the religious, point of view.
The gist of Myers’ remarks, it is interesting to note, is that neither in the case of Socrates nor of Jeanne was there any trace of madness or hysteria. (Incidentally, in speaking of Socrates, he excludes all possibility of epilepsy.) He insists, also, on the fact that both Socrates and Jeanne, however different in their intellectual attainments, were persons of robust physical constitution. Their genius he admits, but, in his view, genius represents the supreme and ideal sanity rather than the derangement of a hysterical or over-excitable mind. Genius, to him, is the ready uprising of the subconscious into the realm of the conscious, and may take many forms of expression; thus, he has no hesitation in including such phenomena as the ‘lightning calculator’ or ‘arithmetical prodigy, generally of tender years,fn4 capable of performing in his head and ahnost instantaneously, problems for which ordinary workers would require pencil and paper and a much longer time – problems which, in some cases, indeed, the ordinary student has no means whatever of solving, but which the calculating boy unriddles with ease and exactness’ ;fn5 or examples such as that of Sir John Herschel, who was attended by visions taking the form of geometrical patterns, both by daylight and in darkness. It is implicit in all that Myers has to say on the subject that he regards all such manifestations as analogous to, and therefore comparable with, the experiences which, in their different ways, guided Socrates and Saint Joan in the conduct of their lives. There is no hint of any supernatural or religious guidance. There is no suggestion of a diseased or hallucinatory brain. There is nothing but the suggestion that all such controversial problems may eventually be explained by the cold reason of greater psychological knowledge; the suggestion only that no mysterious agency is ever at work, other than the still unexplored or half-explored question of the dividing line between our conscious and our subconscious selves. Myers’ approach, in fact, restricts itself purely to the scientific. The religious or super-natural element does not affect it at all.
In this, he finds support from Sir Francis Galton.fn6 Galton is not talking specifically about Jeanne d’Arc, but he has certain observations to make which may throw some light on the insoluble problem of Jeanne’s voices, visions, and their nature. He, like Myers, lays stress on the belief that the visionary faculty is by no means necessarily associated with a disordered mind. ‘The visionary tendency,’ he says, ‘is much more common among sane people than is generally suspected’; and again, ‘the familiar hallucinations of the insane are to be met with far more frequently than is commonly supposed, among people … in good working health.’ He quotes several examples drawn from his personal knowledge: a near relative of his own, for instance, ‘saw phantasmagoria very frequently, yet was eminently sane, and of such good constitution that her faculties were hardly impaired until near her death at ninety,’ and ‘another lady, apparently in vigorous health ;µid belonging to a vigorous family,’ told him tliat during some past months she had been plagued by voices. The words were at first simple nonsense; then the word ‘pray’ was frequently repeated. He instances, also, the case of Goethe, who, as a force of intellect, may surely stand not ingloriously in comparison with Socrates, and who, as is well known, could at will evoke the image of a rose ‘which would not keep its shape steady for a moment, but unfolded from within, throwing out a succession of petals mostly red but sometimes green, and … continued to do so without change in its brightness … so long as he cared to watch it.’
All these instances, picked almost at random, suggest something very unexplained and odd in the workings of the human mind. What connexion, we may ask, can possibly exist between the short-cut of the lightning calculator, the precocity of Mozart, the schemes of Capablanca, the geometrical patterns of Herschel, the rose of Goethe, the dæmon of Socrates, and the voices of Jeanne d’Arc? What connexion, we may ask again, exists between such mundane warlike admonitions as were received by Jeanne and such admonitions as were received by, say, Bernadette of Lourdes – Bernadette, another peasant child of thirteen, going out to gather sticks for the fire, and being confronted by an apparition whom she, during a fortnight, was able to identify as the Virgin Mary, and under whose directions she discovered a spring so miraculous as still to draw thousands of pilgrims from all parts of Europe yearly in hopes of a cure? What binding thread links all these mysteries together? We cannot answer the question. We are, at present, working only on the data provided by analysis: the synthesis, so far, escapes us.
Therefore perhaps it is better to leave speculation, and to return to the sober scientific line of approach. It is concrete to read, when we are thinking specifically of Jeanne d’ Arc, such phrases as these from Galton: ‘The power of visualising is higher in the female sex than in the male’; or, ‘The French appear to possess the visualising faculty in a high degree.’ Yet, somehow, these phrases do not help us far towards the real heart of the matter. We are still left wondering where the truth really lies. They may prove useful as sign-posts, but still there is nothing to tell us that two major roads do not run side by side.
The possible existence of a third road towards the explanation is based on physiological reasoning; physiological, with its reactions on the psychological. Andrew Lang, putting it delicately, suggests that Jeanne, when she first heard her voices, was ‘at a critical age, when, as I understand, female children are occasionally subject to illusions.’fn7 Putting it more frankly, he means that the arrival of her voices coincided with the onset of puberty. Yet another writer, more outspoken, suggests that in Jeanne’s case puberty, with its usual symptoms, never arrived at all, but that the voices arrived instead, at the corresponding age, as a kind of sublimation of the ordinary physical processes of nature – an argument based on the very insufficient and indirect testimony of certain witnesses who averred that, to their knowledge, Jeanne had never suffered from the usual infinnity of women. This theory he supplements by suggesting that her vow of virginity was the outcome of her first realisation of her disability – in other words, ‘we can put the idea of virginity into thejargon of psycho-analysis by saying that Jeanne had well-marked repression of the sex-complex.’fn8 Unfortunately for this ingenious theory, its foundation is of the slightest. It arises from a paragraph in the evidence of Jean d’ Aulon, which, although not veiled in what Gibbon calls the obscurity of a learned language, we will at least leave untranslated from the original French: Dit encores plus qu’il à oy dire à plusieurs femmes, qui ladicte Pucelle ont veue par plusieurs foiz nue, et sceu de ses secretz, que oncques n’avoit en la secretz maladie des femmes et que jamais nul n’en peut riens co gnoistre ou appercevoir parses habillemens, ne aultrement.fn9
This testimony, to my mind, means nothing at all, except that Jeanne with exceptional modesty kept her private life to herself both in her speech and in her habits. It means no more than the rather naïf comment of another contemporary, Simon Charles, that, when she was on horseback in armour, she never dismounted for the purposes of nature, and that all the men-at-arms greatly wondered at the length of time she was able to remain in the saddle.fn10 Simon Charles obviously under-estimated the remarkable continence of women, as opposed to the lavish incontinence of men to which his quotidian experience was better accustomed. We mus
t also take into consideration the fact that Jeanne was always sparing of both her meat and drink. The comments of her companions in arms provide ample testimony as to her frugality.
Still, there are certain physio-psychological aspects which cannot be ignored. We cannot, for instance, afford to neglect a comparison between Jeanne and some other ‘saints.’ We cannot afford to omit the notice of certain essential differences between them. It should be observed, in the first place, that Jeanne was neither an ecstatic, nor a mystic, nor in any sense of the word a ‘hysterical’ person. We can find no signs in her of any exaggeration of feelings or temperament. Neither ecstasy nor despondency affected her unduly. She was neither disproportionately lifted up nor disproportionately cast down. True, at Poitiers she was gay with hope; but even at Melun when her voices grew gloomy with prognostication of imminent failure, she suffered no extreme blackness of despair. Throughout all her strange experiences she preserved a remarkably constant level. The darker passages of the soul seem never to have affected her life at all. If she suffered them, she left no record. Her faith was never, at any moment, eclipsed. Quite on the contrary, she was an essentially practical person, and the only unusual element in her life appears in the voices which commanded her to go into France, turn out the English, and crown the Dauphin. Apart from that, she was a very ordinary girl, and remained a very ordinary girl throughout. Her first character never changed at all, from the moment she left Domremy to the moment she was lashed to the stake at Rouen. Her replies to her judges at Rouen prove her to have remained always just what she was – a shrewd, suspicious, straightforward, roughly humorous peasant, with the only difference between herself and her kind, that God had intervened between herself and her cart-horses with His dictates.
In this, she differs in a remark-worthy manner from her fellow-saints. She never, for instance, used such conventional expressions as ‘my heavenly Spouse,’ or ‘my Betrothed,’ as are common to most women of mystical inclination. I think that possibly she had no need thus to sublimate her earthly desires in this pseudo-sexual fashion, since she found her outlet in her ardent devotion to the Dauphin and to the cause of France. She is the least sentimental of saints, and the most practical – which perhaps explains why you will always find a fresh bunch of humble flowers laid before the image, of say, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux in any village church in France, whereas you will seldom find a similar bunch laid at the feet of Jeanne d’Arc. The roses and mignonette are not for her; only the laurels and the bays. She is a hard, not a soft saint. There is nothing of the poetic quality in her, as in Saint Francis. She is too heroic and bracing to appeal intimately to the average mind. She makes he mistake of being always something over life-size; something which, however much she may command admiration and respect, can never be loved in quite the same personal way as the more human saints. Heroism may command the tributes of the populace, but sentimentality wins its heart. Jeanne never makes any appeal to sentimentality at all.
Even in her sainthood she remains severe and strict. As a little girl, she confided in no one. As an adolescent, she was determined, impatient, and frequently rough-tongued. Her piety is unquestioned, but her manners not always of the best. As Father Martindale has observed: ‘Saints retain all the human nature that is in them, all their personal, temperamental, hereditary, educational, characteristics.… They retain their tendency to gentleness or to imperiosity, to sense of humour or to sense of sublimity (or to both), to timidity or to audacity, as much as anyone else does; if they are vividly intelligent men, they do not become dolts; if they are very simple men, they do not become philosophers.’fn11 One cannot read the life of Saint Joan without recognising the truth of these words as applied to her. From beginning to end, she is all of a piece.
III
The physiological road of approach really holds very little interest, especially in view of the insufficiency of the evidence. We are still left undecided as to the central nature of the problem: Did heavenly voices really converse with her, or did she draw solely on what we should loosely call her imagination, but what psychologists like Myers might prefer more technically to call her subliminal self?
We can only attempt some kind of an answer to the question by reflecting for a moment on the nature of the voices and visions. In the first place we may note that she declared them always to have been accompanied by a light – which is, I understand, a manifestation commonly claimed by those who are privileged to see visions. In the second place we may also note that she insisted very strongly on the fact of having apprehended them with the bodily senses – she ‘saw them with her bodily eyes,’ i.e. not only in her imagination; touched their limbs. felt their wannth, heard their voices, and smelt their agreeable odour. But, although Jeanne herselfstuck consistently to this point, the sceptic is at liberty to dismiss it, if he wishes, as part of her general delusion. There is nothing absolutely conclusive in personal assertions which cannot be corroborated by independent evidence. On the other hand there is the very curious fact that she sometimes disobeyed her heavenly orders. If this be true, and if we disregard Mr Lang’s theory (see Chapter 12, here, footnote) that she only loyally said she had disobeyed them, in order to forestall any suspicion that her voices could ever have been at fault, we shall find it very hard to agree with the view that her voices only said what she wanted them to say, i.e. that they were no more than the expression of her own desires, and consequently of purely subjective origin. The arguments thus fall now in favour of subjective suggestion, and now in favour of a truly objective experience. It is most confusing. On the subjective side, it must be admitted that her few reluctant descriptions of the saints and their appearance conformed precisely to what might have been expected of a peasant’s idea of celestial beings. On the subjective side, again, comes a point which I have never elsewhere seen mentioned: Why did Saint Michael continually, and Saint Gabriel occasionally, appear to her? In pursuance of the theory that certain favoured persons may be visited by the spirits of the dead, it may be argued that Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, her two other familiars, might in fact have returned to earth in order to speak with her; but such an argument can in no way apply to Gabriel and Michael. Great archangels as Jeanne believed them to be, they remain the symbolic inventions of the human imagination: it is never claimed for them that they ever enjoyed a mortal existence. How, then, could the embodied semblance of these two mighty fictions have revisited an earth they had never inhabited as men? There is only one possible conclusion here: that Jeanne did indeed clothe them with mortal shape in her imagination, put crowns on their heads and wings on their shoulders – clothe them, in fact, in the very semblance she had been taught to expect of angels.
On the other hand, however, we have to remember that the first revelations came to her quite unexpectedly, to her surprise, alarm, and, indeed, consternation. They came unsought, and began by baffling her completely. Judging by her own account, there is no reason to suppose even that they were the outcome of some romantic serial story such as imaginative children love to tell themselves when alone. Many a child might have pictured itself, probably under another name, as the saviour of France; but Jeanne’s instant rejection of the first warlike orders (‘I said I was a poor girl, who did not know how to ride or how to conduct war’) seems almost designed on purpose to enable us to dismiss this hypothesis. Besides, the voices began with no dramatic command; they began by telling her to be a good girl – surely a rather sober recommendation to be invented, even subconsciously, by a child avid for tales of adventure and derring-do?
It would seem, then, as though these strange menifestations were indeed imposed upon her from the outside, without any preparation or intention of her own. They happened, as it were, accidentally, and again we are left to wonder why. Certainly, she appears to have been an intensely pious child, and we know that she had been given religious instruction by that upright woman her mother, but was she any more conspicuously pious than many other girls of the same age and circumstances i
n the same century? Thousands of ignorant unlettered girls of her day must have been equally and blindly pious; possibly equally virtuous; equally well informed as to the miseries of a war-ravaged France, even better informed if they chanced to live in the war-areas instead of at Domremy, which was relatively out of the way. But why the choice should have fallen upon Jeanne, who possessed no especial qualifications for her tremendous mission, remains a mystery which it seems impossible rationally to resolve.
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