Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture

Joan of Arc: Hero and Saint

She was of the people, and Christian, and saintly. She was most certainly in a sense a woman at arms. One might almost say a warrior. She was unquestionably a very great military leader.—She was a flower of the Christian race and of the French race, a flower of Christendom, a flower of all heroic virtues.—

Whatever may be the powers of the living springs, whatever may be the devices and the perpetual emission and effusion, whatever may be the inexhaustible innovations of grace, at the same time there indubitably exists a certain technique, a certain blessed hierarchic arrangement, as it were professional, a framework and a skeleton almost of the métier, a certain blessed professional hierarchy of heroic virtue and saintliness. There are degrees which are the very degrees of the Throne. To the first degree Joan of Arc possessed in their fullness the virtues of war, which are not small. I mean to say by that, very expressly and very properly, that she entered into the game of war and into the risk of war fully, without any restriction, without any intervention, without any interposition of the part of divine protection. She obeyed, she accomplished a divine mission proper in a human world without having felt a corresponding divine protection [End Page 145] proper. She had received the commandment, she had received the vocation, she had received the mission. She obeyed, she carried out the commandment, she responded to the vocation, she accomplished her mission. She passed to the achievement, to the accomplishment of her mission in the midst of a hard (and tender) humanity, in a world, in a Christendom hard and tender, herself being gentle and firm, strong, gentle, sometimes apparently hard. Apparently harsh. During her whole mission she received assistance of counsel, this we know, through the constantly renewed, constantly present assistance and counsel of her voices. Through this sort of assistance of counsel, almost feudal, perpetually renewed, perpetually present. During her whole mission, and in this I include her captivity, in spite of the few absences that she had to suffer in its course and her death. During her whole mission, which extended into her captivity, she received constant assistance of counsel from her voices and an abundance of graces of which we can have no idea. The day of her death she received a grace which perhaps was never given similarly and to such an extent to any other saint, so that the day of her death already was no longer for her the last day of life on earth but literally, really, already the first day of her eternal life. But after all, with this mission, with this vocation, with all these graces, with all these gifts, with this constant presence of counsel, she never received either the grace, or the gift, or the counsel, or any privilege of being invulnerable. She waged war, exposed to all the accidents of war. She, like everybody else, waged a war like everybody else. Less fortunate than many saints, less fortunate that many prophets even, and than many rulers of the people of Israel, she did not find fighting beside her the angels who assisted her with their counsels, or the saints. Never have the words of Jesus—“thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?”—never have they been so fully accomplished in a saint, and here we meet again with this vocation, this unique election, this unique imitation by which one can say that of all the saints, she it was to whom certainly [End Page 146] it was given that her life and her Passion and her death should most closely imitate the life and the Passion and the death of Jesus.—

Twelve legions of angels. She did not ask for them any more...