Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint by Donald Spoto Page B

arrived, the waters had returned. But the event was seen, then and later, through the lens of faith: God had acted on behalf of His people through the ordinary patterns of nature. The wonderful aspect was the timing.
    In the Middle Ages there was no sense that some things were “natural” and some were “supernatural.” The world belonged to God, and He managed things to suit His purpose. Faith confirmed that God is always present and active, working in and through His world, however mysteriously and often incomprehensibly. It was no different for the French, who readily regarded their passage across the river as divinely guided. There was no room in their thinking for mere coincidence or accident. The universe and God’s activity in it were considered too mysterious to be predicted or comprehended.
    This apparently small event—large to her countrymen—was but one example of what Joan offered her troops: no worldly compensation but a pointer toward something like a religious vocation. This primary motivation and spiritual atmosphere did not, of course, make things easier for the soldiers; faith is not an anesthetic. Nor did they become saints. They still felt mortal terror, they tried to avoid injury, and they became fiercely angry at the enemy and aimed lethal blows. Was there a difference, then, between the French under Joan and the English under their commanders? There was indeed, and it had to do with the grander purpose of their battle: to save France, which was sacred to them and, they believed, to God.
    What Joan impressed on the men by her faith and her actions, then, had more to do with the things of God than the machinery of war or prevailing politics. For her the struggle against English occupation and the eventual permanent establishment of French sovereignty were matters of justice, and justice was regarded as a major virtue in the Middle Ages. From justice came the origins of chivalry, which was about much more than mere courtesy: it concerned the order of a sovereign society and its place in the economy of God’s plan for the world.

    R ELATIVE TO HER sense of justice was Joan’s repeated reminder to her soldiers that whether they lived or died, their efforts would win them eternal life—their proper reward. This was not presumptuous: it sprang from a confidence that God would not reject those who fought bravely for a just cause. With the threat of danger haunting every step of every day, with the possibility of wounds or the loss of limbs on a battlefield, with the chance of capture and foreign imprisonment, troops had to be constantly encouraged. Can it be said then that hers was a mission of faith? And if it was, precisely how did she manage to inspire faith and to attract loyalty from thousands of men of varying temperaments, characters, attitudes, values, and backgrounds?
    Joan saw justice and the sovereignty of France as indissolubly linked. The result of securing France’s freedom from English imperialism was to be justice in the land, the exclusion of aggressors, and finally peace. In the fifteenth century the only means of securing the first step—legitimate rule—was by and in battle; she simply had no other method available to her. Negotiators could not be summoned with all dispatch; there were no swift means of communication, nor were there safe territories for men to sit down and work out a treaty; and both sides were scattered in disarray. But by letter and in person, she begged the English to depart peacefully before the French took up arms to liberate Orléans.
    Despite the fact that Joan of Arc is most often portrayed with armor and sword, the truth is that she hated bloodshed and longed for peace. She refused to wield her own sword in battle: it was used as a threat to the enemy and, held aloft, as a signal to her soldiers. For her, war was not an exciting, enlivened game of chess. It was real, earnest and dreadful. But it was also a tragic necessity if France were to survive.
    On