Joan of Arc and her commentators.

Joan of Arc is one of the great figures of France, who rises up in History as an immense problem and, at the same time, as a living protest against incredulity. It is worthy of note that in this age of scepticism, it is the most obstinate adversaries of the marvelous who strive to exalt the memory of this almost legendary heroine; obliged to analyze this life full of mysteries, they find themselves constrained to recognize the existence of facts that the laws of matter, by themselves, could not explain, because if those facts are removed, Joan of Arc is no more than a courageous woman, of whom many are to be seen. It is probably not without a reason of opportunity that public attention is called to this subject at the present moment. It is a means like any other of opening a path for new ideas. Joan of Arc is neither a problem nor a mystery for Spiritists. She is an eminent example of almost all the mediumistic faculties, whose effects, like a host of other phenomena, are explained by the principles of the doctrine, without there being any need to seek their cause in the supernatural. She is the brilliant confirmation of Spiritism, of which she was one of the most eminent precursors, not by her teachings, but by the facts, as much as by her virtues, which in her denote a superior Spirit.

We propose to make a special study in this regard, as soon as our work permits us. While awaiting that, it is not useless to know the manner in which her faculties are viewed by the commentators.

The following article is taken from the Propagateur of Lille, of August 17, 1867.

“Our readers certainly remember that this year, on the occasion of the anniversary celebration of the lifting of the siege of Orléans, the Abbé Freppel asked, with humble and generous courage, for the canonization of our Joan of Arc. Today we read in the Bibliothèque de l’École de Chartres an excellent article by Mr. Natalis de Wailly, member of the Academy of Inscriptions, which, with respect to the Jeanne d’Arc - Google books, by Mr. Wallon, gives its conclusions and those of true science on the supernatural history of her who was, at the same time, a heroine of the Church and of France. The arguments of Mr. de Wailly are well suited to encourage the hopes of Abbé Freppel and our own. — Léon Gautier (Monde).”

“There are not many historical figures who have been, more than Joan of Arc, the object of contradiction from contemporaries and from posterity. There are none, however, whose life is more simple nor better known.

“Emerging suddenly from obscurity, she appears on the scene only to play a marvelous role, which soon draws the attention of all. She is a young woman who knows only how to spin and sew, who claims to be sent by God to vanquish the enemies of France. At first she has only a small number of devoted partisans, who believe her word; the clever ones distrust her and create obstacles for her: they yield, at last, and Joan of Arc was able to win the victories she had predicted. Soon she drags as far as Reims an incredulous and ungrateful king, who betrays her at the moment when she prepares to take Paris, who abandons her when she falls prisoner into the hands of the English, and who does not even try to protest and proclaim her innocence, when she is about to expire for him. On the day of her death, there were not only enemies who declared her an apostate, an idolater, immodest, or faithful friends who venerated her as a saint; there were also ingrates who forgot her, not to mention the indifferent, who did not concern themselves with her, and clever people who boasted of never having believed in her mission, or of having little believed in it. “All these contradictions, in the midst of which Joan of Arc had to live and die, outlived her and accompanied her through the centuries. Between the shameful poem of Voltaire n and the eloquent history of Mr. Wallon, the most diverse opinions have been produced; and if all today agree in respecting this great memory, it may be said that beneath the common admiration profound disagreements are still concealed. Indeed, whoever reads or writes the history of Joan of Arc sees rising up before him a problem that modern criticism does not like to encounter, but which imposes itself there as a necessity. This problem is the supernatural character that manifests itself in the whole of that extraordinary life, and more especially in certain particular facts. “Yes, the question of the miracle inevitably presents itself in the life of Joan of Arc; it has embarrassed more than one writer and has often provoked strange responses. Mr. Wallon thought, with reason, that the first duty of a historian of Joan of Arc was not to evade this difficulty: he approaches it head-on, and explains it by the miraculous intervention of God. I shall try to show that this solution is perfectly in conformity with the rules of historical criticism.

“The metaphysical proofs upon which the possibility of the miracle may rest escape or displease certain minds; but History does not have to make those proofs. Its mission is not to establish theories, but to ascertain facts and to record all those that appear as certain. That a miraculous or inexplicable fact must be verified with more attention, no one will contest; consequently that same fact, verified more attentively than the others, acquires, in a certain way, a greater degree of certainty. To reason otherwise is to violate all the rules of criticism and to transfer to History the prejudices of metaphysics. There is no argument against the possibility of the miracle that dispenses with the examination of the historical proofs of a miraculous fact, and its admission, when capable of producing conviction in a man of good sense and good faith. Later one will have the right to seek for that fact an explanation that satisfies this or that scientific system; but, above all, and whatever may happen, the existence of the fact must be recognized, when it rests upon proofs that satisfy the rules of historical criticism. “Are there or are there not facts of this nature in the history of Joan of Arc? This question was discussed and debated by a savant who preceded Mr. Wallon, and in this manner acquired an incontestable authority. If I here cite Mr. Quicherat, in preference to Mr. Wallon, it is not only because the one, before the other, ascertained the facts that I wish to recall; it is, also, because he set out to establish them without claiming to explain them, so that his criticism, independent of all preconceived system, limited itself to establishing premises, whose conclusions he did not even wish to foresee.

“It is clear, he says, that the curious will want to go further and to reason about a cause, whose effects it will not suffice them to admire: Theologians, psychologists, physiologists, I have no solution to indicate to you; let them find, if they can, each from his own point of view, the elements of an appreciation that defies all contradictors. The only thing I feel capable of doing in the direction in which such research is conducted is to present, in its most precise form, the particularities of the life of Joan of Arc that seem to leave the circle of human faculties.

“The most important particularity, the one that dominates all the others, is the fact of voices that she heard several times a day, that addressed her or answered her, whose inflections she distinguished, referring them above all to Saint Michael, to Saint Catherine and to Saint Margaret. At the same time a vivid light manifested itself, in which she perceived the figure of her interlocutors. “I see them with the eyes of my body, she said to her judges, as well as I see you.” Yes, she maintained with unshakable firmness that God counseled her through the intermediary of the saints and the angels. For one instant she contradicted herself; she faltered before the fear of the torment; but she wept over her weakness and confessed it publicly; her last cry in the flames was that her voices had not deceived her and that her revelations were from God. One must, then, conclude with Mr. Quicherat that “on this point the most severe criticism has no suspicions to raise against her good faith.” Once the fact is ascertained, how have certain savants explained it? In two ways: either by madness, or by simple hallucination. What does Mr. Quicherat say to this? That he foresees great perils for those who would wish to classify the facts of the Maid among pathological cases. “But, he adds, whether Science finds therein its explanation or not, it will be no less necessary to admit the visions and, as I am going to make seen, strange perceptions of the spirit, resulting from those visions.

“What are those strange perceptions of the spirit? They are revelations that permitted Joan: sometimes to know the most secret thoughts of certain persons, sometimes to perceive objects beyond the reach of the senses, sometimes to discern and announce the future.

“Mr. Quicherat cites for each of these three kinds of revelations “an example resting upon bases so solid that one cannot, he says, reject it without rejecting the very foundation of History.”

“In the first place, Joan revealed to Charles VII a secret known only by God and by him, the only means she had of compelling the belief of this distrustful prince.

“Then, finding herself in Tours, she discerned that there was, between Loches and Chinon, in the church of Saint Catherine of Fierbois, buried at a certain depth, near the altar, a rusted sword marked with five crosses. The sword was found and later her accusers imputed to her having known, by hearsay, that this weapon was there or that she herself had placed it there.

“I feel, said Mr. Quicherat in this regard, how strong such an interpretation will appear in a time like ours; on the contrary, how weak the fragments of interrogation that I place in opposition to it; but when one has before one’s eyes the entire trial, and when one sees in what manner the accused lays her conscience bare, then it is her testimony that is strong, and the interpretation of the arguers that is weak.

“I leave, at last, Mr. Quicherat himself to recount one of the predictions of Joan of Arc:

“In one of her first conversations with Charles VII, she announced to him that, when the deliverance of Orléans was being effected, she would be wounded, but without being put out of the combat; her two saints had told her so and the event proved to her that they had not deceived her. She confesses this in her fourth interrogation. We would be reduced to this testimony, which scepticism, without putting her good faith in doubt, could impute her statement to an illusion of memory; but what demonstrates that she effectively predicted her wound is that she received it on May 7, 1429, and that on the preceding April 12, a Flemish ambassador, who was in France, wrote to the government of Brabant a letter in which not only the prophecy was recounted, but the manner in which it would be realized. Joan had her shoulder pierced by a crossbow arrow, in the assault on the fort of Tourelles, and the Flemish envoy had written: She is to be wounded by an arrow in a combat before Orléans, but will not die. This passage of his letter was consigned in the registers of the Chamber of accounts of Brussels. “One of the savants whose opinion I recalled a little while ago he who makes of Joan of Arc one who hallucinated rather than one who was mad does not contest her predictions and attributes them to a kind of sensitive impressionability, to an irradiation of the nervous force, whose laws are not yet known.

“Are they quite certain that those laws exist and that they must never be known? As long as they are not, is it not better to confess one’s ignorance frankly than to propose such explanations? Is every hypothesis good when it is a matter of denying the action of Providence, and does incredulity dispense with any reasoning? Should one not say that, since the origin of times, the immense majority of men have agreed in believing in the existence of a personal God who, after having created the world, directs it and manifests himself when it pleases him, by extraordinary signs? If they silenced their pride for an instant, would they not hear this concert of all races and of all generations? What is marvelous is that one can have so robust a faith in oneself when one speaks in the name of a science that is the most uncertain and the most variable of all, of a science whose adepts never cease to contradict themselves, whose systems die and are reborn like fashion, without experience ever having been able to ruin them or to establish definitively a single one of them. I would say with much pleasure to those doctors in pathology: If you find diseases like that of Joan of Arc, take care not to cure them; work hard, rather, that they may become contagious. “Better inspired, Mr. Wallon did not claim to know Joan of Arc better than she herself. Placed in the presence of the most sincere of witnesses, he listened to her attentively and gave her his entire confidence. That mixture of good sense and elevation, of simplicity and grandeur, that superhuman courage, heightened still by short failings of nature, did not appear to him as symptoms of madness or of hallucination, but as spectacular signs of heroism and of sanctity. There, and not elsewhere, was good criticism; thence it comes that, seeking the truth, he also found eloquence and surpassed all who had preceded him in that path. He deserves to be placed at the head of those writers, of whom Mr. Quicherat said excellently: “They restored Joan as entire as they could, and the more they endeavored to reproduce her originality, the more they found the secret of her grandeur.

“Mr. Quicherat will find it quite natural that I take his words to characterize a success, to which he contributed more than anyone; because, if it did not suit him to write, himself, the history of Joan of Arc, henceforth it is impossible to undertake it without recurring to his works. Mr. Wallon, in particular, drew immense profit from them, having almost never anything to modify, neither in the texts gathered by the editor, nor in his conclusions. However, he did not accept them without scrutiny. It is thus that he points out an involuntary omission, of which a writer availed himself, one who inclines toward the hallucination rather than toward the inspiration of Joan of Arc. One reads on page 216 of the Trial (volume I), that Joan of Arc was fasting on the day when, for the first time, she heard the voice of the angel, but that she had not fasted on the previous day. On page 52, on the contrary, Mr. Quicherat had printed: et ipsa Johanna jejunaverat die proecedenti. Suppressing on page 216 the negation that is lacking on page 52, one had two consecutive fasts, which seemed a sufficient cause of hallucination. The manuscript does not lend itself to this hypothesis; Mr. Wallon ascertained that the habitual exactitude of Mr. Quicherat is here found at fault, and that one must read, on page 52, non jejunaverat. “The only discordance somewhat grave that I perceive between the two authors is when they appreciate the defects of form noted in the trial. Mr. Quicherat maintains that Pierre Cauchon was too skillful to commit illegalities, and Mr. Wallon judges him too impassioned to have been able to restrain himself. I am not in a position to decide this question; I will only make it noted that, at bottom, it has little importance, because, on the one side and the other, they are in agreement as to the iniquity of the judge and the innocence of the victim.

“I find Mr. Wallon affirming with Mr. Quicherat, contrary to an opinion already old, and which still preserves partisans, that once Charles VII was consecrated at Reims, Joan of Arc had not yet accomplished all her mission, inasmuch as she herself had announced herself as having, in addition, to expel the English. I deliberately leave aside the deliverance of the duke of Orléans, because it is a point on which her declarations are not so explicit. But concerning the expulsion of the English, one has the very letter that she addressed to them on March 22, 1429: “I have come here by God, the king of heaven, body for body, to expel you from all of France.” Her short failings can do nothing against this authentic text, confirmed by her on many occasions, until she consecrated it upon the stake, by a supreme protest. Thus, I do not know why the doubt persists, above all in the minds of those who believe in the inspiration of Joan of Arc. How can they know her mission, except through her? and why refuse her here the belief that they grant her elsewhere? “They will say that she failed; therefore, she did not have a mission from God to undertake it. Such was, indeed, the sad thought that took hold of minds, when they learned she was a prisoner of the English. But the pious Gerson, some months before dying, and in the one following the deliverance of Orléans, had in a certain way foreseen the reverses after the victory, not as a disapproval of Joan of Arc, but as a punishment for the ingrates whom she came to defend. He wrote on May 14, 1529:

“Even though – may God not permit it! – she had deceived herself in her hope and in ours, from that one should not conclude that what she did comes from the malignant spirit and not from God; but rather attribute the fault to our ingratitude and to the just judgment of God, although secret… because God, without changing his opinion, changes the sentence according to merits.

“Here again Mr. Wallon made good criticism: he does not divide the testimonies of Joan of Arc; he accepts them all and proclaims them sincere, even when they do not appear to be prophetic. I add that he justifies them fully, showing that, if she had the mission to expel the English, she did not promise to execute everything by herself, but that she began the work and predicted its conclusion. Mr. Wallon felt this well. It is not to understand Joan of Arc to glorify her in her triumphs in order to renounce her in her passion.

“Above all we, who know the outcome of that marvelous drama, we who know that the English were indeed expelled from the kingdom and the crown of Reims consolidated on the head of Charles VII, must believe, with Mr. Wallon, that God never ceased to inspire her, whose grandeur it pleased him to consecrate by the trial, and her sanctity by martyrdom.” — N. de Wailly.

Our correspondent of Antwerp, who saw fit to send us the article above, joined the note that follows, derived from his personal researches on the trial of Joan of Arc:

“Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, and an inquisitor named Lemaire, assisted by sixty assessors, were the judges of Joan. Her trial was conducted according to the mysterious and barbarous forms of the Inquisition, which had sworn her ruin. She wished that the decision of the judgment be delegated to the pope and to the Council of Basel, but the bishop opposed it. A priest, L’Oyseleur, deceived her, abusing the confession, and gave her disastrous counsels. By dint of intrigues of every sort, she was condemned in 1431 to be burned alive, “as a liar, pernicious, deceiver of the people, soothsayer, blasphemer of God, unbelieving in the faith of Jesus Christ, vain, idolater, cruel, dissolute, invoker of devils, schismatic and heretic.” “In 1546 pope Calixtus III had pronounced, by an ecclesiastical commission, the rehabilitation of Joan and, by a solemn sentence, it was declared that Joan died a martyr for the defense of her religion, of her homeland and of her king. The pope even wished to canonize her, but his courage did not go so far.

“Pierre Cauchon died suddenly, in 1443, shaving his beard. He was excommunicated; his body was disinterred and thrown onto a dunghill.”

[1] [Oeuvres de Voltaire: La Pucelle - Google Books.]