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

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.”

    P RECISELY 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.
    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