The saints

Saint Joan of Arc

Virgin and Martyr · Feast day May 30 · About 1412 to 1431 · France · Also known as Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans

Saint Joan of Arc was a peasant girl who, believing herself called by God through visions of the saints, led the armies of France to stunning victories in the Hundred Years War, only to be captured, tried by a hostile court, and burned at the stake at nineteen. Condemned as a heretic and later declared wholly innocent, she is the patron of France and one of the most extraordinary young figures in all of history.

What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?Romans 8:31 (KJV)

A peasant girl in a broken kingdom

Joan was born about the year 1412 in the village of Domremy in eastern France, the daughter of a farmer of modest means, and she came into a world torn apart by the long, ruinous conflict between France and England known to history as the Hundred Years War. By the time of her birth much of northern France, including Paris, was in English hands or held by their Burgundian allies, the rightful heir to the French throne was uncrowned and losing heart, and whole provinces had been laid waste by decades of war, plunder, and lawlessness. Joan grew up in the shadow of all this, in a devout and hardworking family, an ordinary, pious peasant girl who could neither read nor write, who spun wool, tended the animals, and prayed.

She was known in her village for her unusual piety and kindness, giving up her own bed to travelers and going often to church and to confession, an ordinary good girl in an extraordinary time. Nothing about her promised the destiny that would seize her. Her whole world was the fields, the church, and the family of her village, and had the times been peaceful she would almost certainly have lived and died there unknown. But she was about thirteen when, by her own steady account, heaven broke into that quiet life and never left her in peace again.

The voices and the impossible call

When she was about thirteen, Joan began to hear voices and to see visions, which she believed with unshakable certainty to be the archangel Michael and the saints Catherine and Margaret, sent from God. At first they simply counseled her to be good and to go often to church, but over the following years they grew insistent and specific, calling her to a mission that was, on its face, utterly impossible for a teenage peasant girl: to go to the aid of France, to break the siege of the city of Orleans, and to lead the uncrowned heir, the Dauphin Charles, to be anointed and crowned king in the cathedral of Reims, deep in enemy-held territory.

For a long time she told no one, overwhelmed by a call so far beyond anything her station allowed. But the voices would not relent, and France was sinking toward final defeat. At about the age of sixteen or seventeen, convinced that God himself commanded it, Joan left home and, with astonishing determination, made her way to a local commander and, after being turned away, persuaded him at last to give her an escort to the Dauphin. She traveled across dangerous, war-torn country in men's clothing for safety, and came at length before the uncrowned king himself, telling him plainly that she had been sent by God to raise the siege of Orleans and to see him crowned. That a peasant girl should claim such a thing was absurd, and yet there was something in her transparent conviction, and in details she seemed to know that she could not have known, that gave the desperate court pause and won her a hearing.

The Maid of Orleans

After she was examined by clergy who could find no fault in her, Joan was given armor, a horse, and a banner, and a place with the army marching to relieve the besieged city of Orleans, and what followed astonished France and all of Europe. She rode into Orleans, and within a matter of days the long, grinding siege that had defied the French for months was broken and the city was free, a reversal so sudden and so complete that it seemed to friend and foe alike a sign from heaven. Joan carried a banner into battle rather than a sword, insisting that she had come to lead and to inspire rather than to kill, and she is recorded weeping over the dead and dying of both armies and urging enemy soldiers to leave and be spared.

Her presence utterly transformed the demoralized French soldiers, who had grown used to defeat and now followed this teenage girl into battle after battle and won. Within a few short months she had cleared the road to the cathedral city of Reims, the traditional and sacred place of French coronation, though it lay deep in contested and hostile territory, and there she stood beside the Dauphin as he was anointed and crowned King Charles the Seventh of France, her banner held at his side, her promise kept to the letter. A peasant girl of about seventeen had turned the tide of a war that had ground on for three generations, and she had done it with no training, no rank, and no explanation but the one she gave to everyone who asked: that she did only what God, through her voices, had sent her to do.

Capture and betrayal

Joan's swift and dazzling triumphs made her powerful enemies and aroused deep jealousy, and after the coronation her fortunes turned. Her attempt to retake Paris failed, and the king and his court, now more interested in negotiation than in war, gave her less and less support. In the spring of 1430, in a skirmish outside the town of Compiegne, Joan was pulled down from her horse and captured by Burgundian soldiers allied with the English. The king she had crowned and served, for reasons of politics and perhaps of fear, made no serious effort to ransom or rescue her, and she was left to her fate.

The Burgundians sold her to the English, who were absolutely determined to destroy her, not merely to kill her but to discredit everything she stood for. She had humiliated them in the field and inspired the French by claiming the authority of heaven, and so they resolved to have her condemned by a church court as a heretic and a witch, to brand the girl who had beaten them as a servant of the devil rather than of God, and so to poison the victories she had won. She was handed over to an ecclesiastical court presided over by a French bishop wholly in the English interest, to be tried for her life on charges of heresy, witchcraft, and the wearing of men's clothing.

The rigged trial and the shrewd girl

The trial that followed at Rouen was a travesty of justice, conducted by Joan's enemies with a predetermined verdict, designed from the start to secure her death and her disgrace. She was held in a secular military prison rather than a church one, chained, guarded by hostile soldiers, denied any counsel or advocate, and worn down by relentless questioning before rooms full of learned and hostile theologians determined to trap her. And yet the surviving record of the trial, one of the most remarkable documents of the Middle Ages, shows an unlettered teenage girl holding her own against all of them with a simple shrewdness, dignity, and courage that has amazed readers ever since.

When her judges tried to trap her with a subtle theological question, asking whether she knew herself to be in the grace of God, a question that would condemn her out of her own mouth whichever way she answered, since to say yes was presumption and to say no was self-condemnation, Joan gave an answer of such wisdom that it silenced the court: If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God keep me there. Again and again she cut through their traps with plain good sense and unbreakable faith, insisting throughout that her voices came from God and refusing to betray or deny what she believed she had been shown, even as the pressure and the threats mounted toward their inevitable end.

The fire and the vindication

Worn down at last by long imprisonment, illness, and the threat of the flames, Joan for a single moment faltered and signed a paper of recantation, agreeing to submit and to give up men's clothing, and her sentence was commuted to imprisonment. But within days she took it all back, resuming men's dress and declaring that she would rather die than deny the voices she believed came from God, that God had sent her and that everything she had done had been at his command. That sealed her fate as a relapsed heretic. On the thirtieth of May, 1431, she was led out to the marketplace of Rouen and burned alive, a girl of about nineteen, asking for a cross to hold before her eyes and crying out the name of Jesus again and again as the flames rose around her. It is recorded that even some of her English enemies wept at the sight, and that one of them cried aloud that they were lost, for they had burned a saint. Her ashes were thrown into the river Seine so that no relic of her would remain to be honored.

But the story did not end in the fire at Rouen. About twenty-five years later, after the French had finally driven the English from the land, a new trial was called, at the request of Joan's aged mother and with the authority of the pope, to re-examine the case. It heard witnesses from her village, her companions in arms, and the surviving judges, found the original trial to have been corrupt, unjust, and procedurally false from beginning to end, and declared Joan entirely innocent, a faithful daughter of the church who had been wrongly and wickedly condemned. Nearly five centuries later, in 1920, the church declared her a saint. The peasant girl who had been burned as a heretic became the honored patron of the very nation she had saved, canonized by the very church whose corrupt court had put her to death.

Why Joan still matters

Joan of Arc stands for the astonishing things that God can accomplish through the young, the poor, and the seemingly powerless, and for the courage to obey a holy conviction even when the full weight of church and state stands arrayed against it. Her enemies commanded every worldly power, armies, wealth, learned judges, and the machinery of a rigged court, and she had nothing on her side but her faith and her voices, and yet it is her name, and not theirs, that the world remembers now with honor and love. If God be for us, the apostle Paul wrote, who can be against us, and Joan, who lost her cause, her freedom, and her life, and was completely vindicated in the end, is one of history's most vivid answers to that ancient question.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

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