Joan Of Arc: Roman Catholic Saint

Joan of Arc is a Roman Catholic Saint, and is considered a heroine for France. At the mere age of 13, Joan was spoken to by a voice, which is believed to be God, and is encouraged to join the French army to fight against England. In doing so, she won many battles for the French, but was soon met with a trial, in which she was essentially accused of being a mystic, and not performing in the proper way of a woman in relation to how she dressed. It is here that I must question, what exactly is performing like a proper woman? It is a question that I constantly thought of when reading about her life, but I also thought about how her life could so easily translate into our modern society. In this essay, I will examine Joan’s life, and answer the
It is this interpretation that permits her to be considered a Saint, but during the course of her interrogation, she has quite a few human moments, moments that allow us to question her saintliness. Sullivan fully exposes these moments by exposing the severe conditions under which she was interrogated. At first, Joan stood by her statements that she heard God’s voice, and that she was called upon by God to fight in the war, but under the influence of the clerics, she slowly changed her story. She first began to move “from speaking of God to speaking of a voice,” yet she did not name any “individual heavenly figures” (Sullivan 26). Initially she affirmed that “she came on the part of God,” but after a while she proclaimed her contact with God “without stressing the political purpose of that contact,” and that this shift of political purpose of a mystical experience to just the mythical experience “reflected the gradual shift from references to God to references to the voices” (Sullivan 26). It is understood that no matter what Joan said, she was doubted and ultimately she confessed that the voices were of saints or angels. Sullivan uses Pierre Duparc’s hypothesis that Joan was under pressure to say this because “they probably found themselves disconcerted in front of a mysticism, inspired by God, without handle on it” (Sullivan 27). On the other hand, Larissa Juliet Taylor believes “she played for time to formulate her responses,” and that in all likelihood, “she was making up her answers as she went along” (Taylor 25). Regardless, this is a very human moment that we all know so well. The human moment of not knowing what to say or think in a moment of pressure, which feeds into the popular saying “fake it until you make it”. However, it is unsure if Joan was faking this, but she was under pressure to produce an acceptable response to the judges, and at first she stood her ground on her beliefs, but