Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint Read Online Free PDF Page A

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