Scott Alexander, the noted rationalist blogger, has a feature where guest writers pen book reviews and essays for his site, and this week an anonymous writer reviewed the historical literature on Joan of Arc.
The results resemble past encounters between skeptical authors (Mark Twain is a notable example) and the historical record around the Maid of Orleans: Her story is one of the most extensively documented cases of a miraculous-seeming intervention into secular history, calculated to baffle, fascinate and even charm like almost nothing else in Western history.
Everything in the story sounds like a pious legend confabulated centuries after the fact. A peasant girl with zero political or military experience shows up at a royal court, announces a divine mission and makes a series of prophecies about what God wants for France that she consistently fulfills — a fulfillment that requires not merely some fortunate happenstance, but her taking command of a medieval army and winning an immediate series of victories over an intimidating adversary with Alexandrine or Napoleonic skill.
Then after the mission is accomplished (with some miracles thrown in), some of the prophetic and military capacity seems to be withdrawn and she is captured and dies a martyr’s death — but not before undergoing a religious trial with a bravura performance that likewise looks like the invention of a theologically trained novelist. And through it all she appears to be extraordinarily lovable, displaying piety and kindliness without any of the fanaticism or delusions of personal grandeur that normally shadow people who think they’re supposed to take up arms on God’s behalf.
The review essay considers some of the more persuasive non-supernatural explanations for all these strange events. But the reviewer’s strongest reaction is an understandable one, I think, for any reader who approaches the evidence with an open mind:
I talk about “God stretching down His hand to alter history,” and I’m really not sure I believe it happened, but Joan feels like a giant middle finger to all the people who talk about history being deterministic. Sometimes you get a Great Woman and then history does something really weird.
I also kind of feel called out by God. “So, you say you’re a rationalist? You’re dismissing all the historical evidence for miracles as insufficient? You won’t consider the evidence for Jesus Christ persuasive due to a mere two eyewitness and five contemporary reports? You won’t believe in anything without evidence more than sufficient to convince a court? Okay, have 115 witnesses to miracles that nobody could avoid recording because they altered the course of European history. Now, what were you saying about how you’re not a Christian because you’re a rationalist?”
But if Joan challenges skeptics to explain how a career like hers could be possible without supernatural aid, she also challenges Christians and her other religiously inclined fans to explain why, exactly, God sent her to save France. Indeed, the best skeptic’s argument probably rests there: not in trying to deny the miraculous-seeming record, but in challenging the believer to explain why God wanted or needed these specific events to happen.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that some version of the Catholic theory of miracles is correct. In that case history seems to yield three broad categories of supernatural happenings. First, the “big miracles” of the Old and New Testaments, associated with major events in the history of God’s plan for humanity, from the crossing of the Red Sea to the Resurrection. Second, the signs and wonders associated with the special holiness of specific saints — healings, visions, stigmata, the remarkably well-documented Reformation-era levitations discussed in Carlos Eire’s recent book, “They Flew: A History of the Impossible.” Finally, the miracles and signs and supernatural encounters that happen on a personal level, to ordinary people, as answers to their prayers rather than as manifestations of their sanctity.
The story of Joan of Arc doesn’t fit neatly into any of these categories. The strange events of her life are clearly more than just a personal sign of God’s presence, since all of France is implicated in the drama. They’re also clearly more than just a manifestation of her holiness, since the effect isn’t just to convert people in her orbit to a deeper Christian faith; it’s also to change the outcome of a major war.
But was that military outcome, then, somehow a major event in God’s unfolding plan? One analogue to Joan’s career might be the stories in the Old Testament where God takes an active part in Israel’s military conflicts; another might be Constantine’s vision at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge that supposedly inspired his conversion to Christianity. But in those cases the alleged divine help was being supplied for an obvious spiritual purpose — the survival of God’s chosen people, the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. Whereas in Joan’s case, the divine help turned the tide in a war where both sides were Christian and Roman Catholic, and where the resolution had no major religious consequences. It was a dynastic triumph for the French kings and a national triumph for their people, but it’s not obvious how it was a spiritual one.
So why did God raise up a saint to save the French from defeat? No theory seems all that satisfying, but let’s consider a few candidates.
Because God showed mercy on the French people. A hundred years of war is a lot of war. Undoubtedly a lot of people were praying for relief, and maybe Joan was just the divinely anointed answer to their prayer. Why didn’t God send a similar figure to expedite the Thirty Years’ War or World War I or any other mass-casualty disaster in human history? Well, maybe he did send saints in some of those cases and people didn’t listen to them. (Joan’s miraculous career did require a lot of political cooperation.) Or maybe it’s just the usual divine inscrutability: Just as most sick people who pray for help don’t receive miraculous healing but some people do, most wars don’t end by divine fiat but once in a while (once in 2,000 years?) God puts an obvious finger on the scale.
Because God wanted to teach Christians what a just war looks like. There is no Joan of Arc figure in Christendom’s wars of conquest, no miraculous figure who made the difference in the First Crusade or the Spanish Reconquista or the conquest of the Americas. (The story of Our Lady of Guadalupe involves the divine manifesting itself to the conquered, not to the conquistadores.) Instead, a martial and miraculous saint shows up only in a situation where she’s ending a foreign occupation and vindicating a beleaguered nation against an invader. So the fact that she does appear, armed and militant, suggests that maybe God was teaching a lesson in just war theory — giving the faithful a clear example of a saint-soldier to prove the pacifists wrong, while making sure that her example can be legitimately invoked only in wars waged in self-defense.
Because the Reformation was coming and it was necessary that France remain Catholic. In the timeline where Joan doesn’t appear and the Hundred Years’ War ends with England retaining a strong hold on France, maybe the English Reformation still happens, France as well as England flips to Protestantism, and suddenly you have a Protestant Anglo-French bloc with command of the seas and soon the world. In which case you could suggest that Joan was necessary either because of specific divine protection for Catholicism or, more subtly, because it was important that neither Catholicism nor Protestantism win a final victory in the 17th century, given each side’s un-Christian crimes against the other.
Because modernity was coming and it was necessary that France and England exist as rivals and competing poles. This is essentially an extension of the last argument, in which an Anglo-French balance of power, a persistent dualism between London and Paris, is essential not just to balance Protestants and Catholics but also for the healthy development of the entire modern world. How? Well, maybe by preventing not just one but a whole series of undesirable outcomes: the total victory of one side in the Reformation, the total victory of just one version of the Enlightenment, the total victory of 20th century totalitarianism, even the total victory of the American empire or the total victory of the European Union — who can say?
And since the French part of that story isn’t finished yet, the last possibility remains open as well:
Because God loves the French in a special way, and they have a cosmic destiny that still waits to be fulfilled.
C’est certainement possible!
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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