Joan of Arc hears voices
The teenage girl who changed France
Jeanne d'Arc is about thirteen years old, standing in her father's garden in the village of Domrémy in eastern France, when she first hears the voice.
She will later describe it as coming from the direction of a light, accompanied by the presence of Saint Michael, and then of Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret. The voices tell her, over the next several years, that she has been chosen: she must go to the Dauphin, the uncrowned king of France, and tell him that God has sent her to drive out the English and restore the French crown.
France in 1425 is a nation losing a hundred-year war. The English control Paris and most of the north. The Dauphin Charles holds a court in the south that most observers expect to collapse. The situation is, by ordinary political and military analysis, hopeless.
Joan is a peasant girl who cannot read. She has never held a weapon. She is seventeen years old when she finally gets her audience with the Dauphin.
She tells him things about himself — private things, things no one else knows — that convince him she is what she claims to be. He gives her armor and an army.
She relieves the siege of Orléans in nine days. She wins several battles. She leads the Dauphin to Reims and stands beside him at his coronation.
The English capture her in 1430. The French do not ransom her.
“I am not afraid. I was born to do this.”
— Joan of Arc, attributed, c. 1429 AD
“Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, she judged Israel at that time.”
Joan of Arc is one of the most improbable figures in the history of the church and Western civilization — a teenage peasant girl who heard voices, led armies, and turned the course of a hundred-year war before being captured and burned at nineteen.
The voices she heard may have been mystical experience. They may have been something else. The historical debate continues. What is not debatable is what she did with what she heard: she got up, left her village, and went.
I am not afraid. I was born to do this.
She was seventeen. She had no training, no position, no credentials, no reason to expect anyone to listen to her.
God has consistently chosen people who have nothing to recommend them to the world and everything to recommend them to the task.
Joan was seventeen with no training, no credentials, no reason to be heard. The calling that felt too large for her was too large for her — and she went anyway, and the armies followed.
The largeness is not evidence against it. It is evidence of whose it is.