The primary reason Joan’s accusers perceive her as a threat is because her relationship to religion requires no temporal, institutional intermediaries. In other words, she can understand God and religion on her own, without the Church’s supervising guidance. While such a liberated, personal experience of Christianity would later be espoused by Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, the fifteenth-century Catholic Church of Joan’s world kept a close hold on its members and maintained that it is only through the guidance and surveillance of religious authorities that individuals may truly know and understand God. Shaw expands Joan’s unceasing quest to understand and act on truths that she arrives at on her own to make a larger case for humanity’s inherent drive toward knowledge and a personal, subjective experience of the world and religion, in particular.
Throughout the play, Joan reinforces that she doesn’t want the Church to determine how she should relate to God. Instead, she desires to establish an unmediated connection to God founded on her own, unique principles. Of Joan’s personal piety, Cauchon proclaims: “A faithful daughter of the Church! The Pope himself at his proudest dare not presume as this woman presumes. She acts as if she herself were the Church. She brings the message of God to Charles; and the Church must stand aside.” The reason that Joan’s stance toward religion is so threatening to the Church is that it invites others to also go against the establishment. Cauchon’s fears are well founded: the growing presence of Protestantism shows that Joan isn’t the only one who craves religious and intellectual agency: “We have such people here in France too: I know the breed,” says Cauchon, adding, “It is cancerous: if it be not cut out, stamped out, burnt out, it will not stop until it has brought the whole body of human society into sin and corruption, into waste and ruin.” Cauchon’s comparison of Protestantism to cancer is extreme, but it shows that he acknowledges humanity’s instinctual hunger for urge toward self-actualization and a direct engagement with the world—the fact that Protestantism must be “cut out, stamped out, burnt out” in order to be quelled shows the intensity of humanity’s hunger for personal knowledge.
Symbolically, Joan’s voices represent her adamance to possess and act on her own self-realized truths. In the preface to Saint Joan, Shaw writes: “There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure.” While Shaw’s statement is more poetically resonant than it is psychologically accurate, it presents a compelling lens through which to interpret Joan’s voices. Joan seems to indirectly or unconsciously admit that the voices she hears are the manifestation of her own subjective thoughts. This is evident in her tendency refer to the saints’ voices possessively, calling them “my” voices. By calling the voices her own, Joan assumes ownership of them and the ideas that they convey. During her trial, when Cauchon asks Joan whether she considers the Church or herself to be the ultimate judge of reality, she responds decisively: “What other judgment can I judge but my own?” Joan’s response blurs the lines between the Saints’ voices and her own internal judgment.
Like the institution of the Church, Joan’s voices act as a mediating force through which one may arrive at truths and judge the reality of the world around them. The key difference between the Church and Joan’s voices, however, is that while the Church is an external force that administers truth to its followers by force, Joan’s mediating voices come from within, and allow her to make conscious, voluntary assessments of truth. In this way, Joan’s decision to submit to the judgment of her voices over the judgment of the Church—despite the fact that she is ultimately burned at the stake for it—represents the intensity of her desire for personal knowledge and a free, direct engagement with the world.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Quest for Personal Knowledge ThemeTracker
The Quest for Personal Knowledge Quotes in Saint Joan
“We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!”
ROBERT. How do you mean? voices?
JOAN. I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.
ROBERT. They come from your imagination.
JOAN. Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.
“Minding your own business is like minding your own body: it’s the shortest way to make yourself sick.”
“I will not look back to see whether anyone is following me.”
DUNOIS. I, God forgive me, am a little in love with war myself, the ugly devil! I am like a man with two wives. Do you want to be like a woman with two husbands?
JOAN. [matter-of-fact] I will never take a husband. A man in Toul took action against me for breach of promise; but I never promised him. I am a soldier: I do not want to be thought of as a woman. I will not dress as a woman. I do not care for the things women care for. They dream of lovers, and money. I dream of leading a charge, and of placing the big guns.
“When he strikes, he strikes at the Catholic Church, whose realm is the whole spiritual world. When he damns, he damns the souls of the entire human race. Against that dreadful design The Church stands ever on guard. And it is as one of the instruments of that design that I see this girl. She is inspired, but diabolically inspired.”
“You great lords are too prone to treat The Church as a mere political convenience.”
“She acts as if she herself were The Church. She brings the message of God to Charles; and The Church must stand aside. She will crown him in the cathedral of Rheims: she, not The Church! She sends letters to the king of England giving him God’s command through her to return to his island on pain of God’s vengeance, which she will execute. […] Has she ever in all her utterances said one word of The Church? Never. It is always God and herself.”
“My lord: we shall not defeat The Maid if we strive against one another. […] The devil divides us and governs. I see you are no friend to The Church: you are an earl first and last, as I am a churchman first and last. But can we not sink our differences in the face of a common enemy?”
“Well, I have to find reasons for you, because you do not believe in my voices. But the voices come first; and I find the reasons after: whatever you may choose to believe.”
“You came clothed with the virtue of humility; and because God blessed your enterprises accordingly, you have stained yourself with the sin of pride. The old Greek tragedy is rising among us. It is the chastisement of hubris.”
“You must not fall into the common error of mistaking these simpletons for liars and hypocrites. They believe honestly and sincerely that their diabolical inspiration is divine. Therefore you must be on guard against your natural compassion. […] You are going to see before you a young girl, pious and chaste; for I must tell you, gentlemen, that the things said of her by our English friends are supported by no evidence, whilst there is abundant testimony that her excesses have been excesses of religion and charity and not of worldliness and wantonness. This girl is not one of those whose hard features are the sign of hard hearts, and whose brazen looks and lewd demeanor condemn them before they are accused. The devilish pride that has led her into her present peril had left no mark on her countenance. Strange as it may seem to you, it has even left no mark on her character outside those special matters in which she is proud; so that you will see a diabolical pride and a natural humility seated side by side in the selfsame soul.”
“What other judgment can I judge by but my own?”
“There is great wisdom in the simplicity of a beast, let me tell you; and sometimes great foolishness in the wisdom of scholars.”
“But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep me from everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times. I could do without my warhorse; I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind.”
“One gets used to it. Habit is everything. I am accustomed to the fire; it is soon over.”
“I was always a rough one: a regular soldier. I might almost as well have been a man. Pity I wasn’t: I should not have bothered you all so much then.”
“It is the memory and the salvation that sanctify the cross, not the cross that sanctifies the memory and the salvation.”
“The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic. Spare them.”
“O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?”
