Joan Of Arc: A Saint For Our Time

Barely An Adult Woman, Yet God Used Her. It's Documented Better Than You Think

I know, I know. I know. It’s vacation. Sardinia says hey:

But I had to write you because Ross Douthat’s newsletter today hit the sweet spot with me, and I have to share it with you. I used one of my gifts to unlock it for you: it’s about St. Joan of Arc.

He begins with a post from Astral Star Codex in which an anonymous reviewer takes on the literature about the French saint. Excerpts:

Meet Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans. Yes, yes, she defeated an invincible army and is a feminist hero and also one of the national saints of France, fine. More importantly, Joan of Arc is documented! She's a miracle-working saint who has evidence! She might have more evidence than any other non-monarch before the printing press! This is, then, an agnostic’s review of the evidence ^— for Joan of Arc - artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person.

Let’s start with the legend of Joan of Arc: A poor peasant girl in France is chosen by God, goes to fight the English, defeats them in a series of battles while performing random miracles, is captured by them and burned as a witch, The End. Maybe you add the epilogue about how eventually the Church made her a saint. All completely impossible and all guaranteed to be nonsense.

The funny thing is the extent to which it isn't.

Look, I had no idea, no idea at all, how well documented her case is. Now, because I’ve read this essay, I do. Another excerpt, about the moment of her murder through burning at the stake:

As she was hurried down she begged for a cross to hold; an English soldier gave her one, and as soon as Cauchon had declared her a relapsed heretic and handed her over to the secular power they hauled her down to the logs to be burned. For some reason in all the rush they let her make a final speech, — which took half an hour and involved forgiving everyone involved and begging them to forgive her all evils she did them; it’s a wonder the city didn’t riot. Her last words were prayers to the saints and to God, ending with cries of “Jesus!” Once the flames had died down the English swept her ashes into the river, so there wouldn’t be any relics.

She was nineteen. In all the haste of the day, the English had never actually convicted her of any crime.

Shortly afterwards, the executioner — rushed up to a monk, telling him "God help us, we have burned a saint. God help us, we have burned a saint."

History has tended to agree with him.

Astral Star Codex is a rationalist blog, and it seems that the anonymous reviewer is a rationalist too. Here’s what he or she writes towards the conclusion:

First, I learned that she's really, really cool. I talk about "God stretching down His hand to alter history," and I'm really not sure I believe it happened, but Joan feels like a giant middle finger to all the people who talk about history being deterministic. Sometimes you get a Great Woman and then history does something really weird.

I also kind of feel called out by God. "So, you say you're a rationalist? You're dismissing all the historical evidence for miracles as insufficient? You won't consider the evidence for Jesus Christ persuasive due to a mere two eyewitness and five contemporary reports? — You won't believe in anything without evidence more than sufficient to convince a court? Okay, have 115 witnesses to miracles that nobody could avoid recording because they altered the course of European history. Now, what were you saying about how you’re not a Christian because you’re a rationalist?"

Do please read the whole thing. It’s amazing, just amazing.

Now, back to Douthat’s piece. He reflects on what we know from Scripture about God favoring certain nations, even in battle, to accomplish His will. Then he speculates about why God might have favored France by sending a saint to save her against the English (who, Douthat reminds us, were a Christian power, and in those days still Catholic). After listing some of his theories, Douthat concludes:

[T]he last possibility remains open as well:

Because God loves the French in a special way, and they have a cosmic destiny that still waits to be fulfilled.

Please God, yes. There is this matter vexing France and all of Europe, that happened on that very Joan of Arc statue in Paris that I showed above. The desecration occurred earlier this year:

But I think it might be much deeper than that. Remember that piece I wrote about the pilgrimage to Chartres this year, and how bowled over I was by the joyful piety of all those young Catholics (most of them French)?

Julien Faure/The Free Press

Could it be that the Christian revival in Europe that people like me have been praying for for years will be born in France? If so, it will come from the spark lit by those young people, all of whom were around the same age as the Maid of Orléans. Recall that this past Ash Wednesday, churches all over France were full — something that had not happened in decades. I was there right after it happened, and I remember the French buzzing about it. What is God doing? they wondered.

The idea of my next book was born from that Chartres pilgrimage, and from a subsequent visit to the elderly atheist writer Renaud Camus, author of the Great Replacement concept. I have said in this space many times that people who assume, never having read Camus, that he’s nothing but a knotty old racist, are quite wrong. What he’s talking about is the replacement of an ancient culture with another one. Mass migration is only part of the phenomenon. The main part is what he condemns as France’s (and Europe’s) deculturation — that is, the modern phenomenon of collective repudiation and forgetting of its history, its culture, its patrimony. Here is a passage from the first chapter of that new book:

Over tea, I brought up the well-known first line from Charles de Gaulle’s autobiography, in which the great World War II general and savior of his country said, “I have always had a certain idea of France.” What, I put to Camus, is your idea of France?

The sage bristled slightly behind his cottony white beard. “For me, France is not an all an idea. No nation is an idea. There are very important ideas in French culture, but France is not an idea. It is centuries of time. It is landscapes. It is castles. It is paintings – Poussin, Cézanne, Matisse. It is hundreds of things.”

“People in power now have this absurd notion that France is what they call pompously ‘republican values,’” he went on. “If you want to be French, you can simply affirm ‘republican values.’ That is monstrous! It’s as if France began in 1789” – the year of the French Revolution that swept away the ancien regime.

Camus’s point is that a nation’s culture, its identity, indeed its soul, are not found merely in intellectual abstractions. Rather, they are the collection of traditions, art, literature, and artefacts of material culture expressing the experience, over centuries, of a particular people living in a particular place. The old Frenchman, agnostic though he is about religion, is speaking of the sacramentality. That is, he is saying that the transcendent spirit of a people becomes accessible to us through material things, in a process one might call enchantment.

France is also Joan of Arc, saint. France needs her now. France has her, if only they will remember, and pray, and act, as she did, in service to her Lord.

Here’s another bit from the introductory chapter of my book:

The civilizational crisis in Europe today brings to mind this passage from the American novelist Walker Percy, in his book Lost In The Cosmos:

Imagine you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look — it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions — good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide — be a bore?

Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped up on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.

Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?

Explain.

Well. Can you today, knowing what is happening in Europe, look upon the story of Joan of Arc, and the golden statue of the saint standing in martial glory on a pedestal outside the Louvre, and be bored? Can you see Joan of Arc? Can you?

No, God is surely not finished with France yet. The rest of up to the French. Vive la France! Marchons, pèlerins, marchons !