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.As told for six centuries, this was a dramatic and edifying story, butit turned out to be wildly fictitious, and in 1969 Catherine of Alexan-dria was quietly removed from the Catholic Church s official roll ofVisions 19saints (along with others, such as Christopher and Barbara).The exis-tence of early martyrs is well documented in secular and sacred writ-ings, and the story of Catherine represents a type of heroic Christianduring the first three centuries after Jesus; indeed, she stands for count-less anonymous believers who died for their faith.But as told, the storyis apocryphal.The legend of Catherine was, however, dear to the hearts ofmedieval Christians, who found their own religious truth in accountsof her life and death.Many chapels were dedicated to Catherine inEurope, and statues of her were found throughout France.Joan s sisterwas named Catherine, and a church dedicated to the saint sat in nearbyMaxey.On Saint Catherine s feast day each year, work was prohibitedand families gathered for worship.Set before the devout as a model of Christian heroism, Catherinewas also the subject of many French sermons and poems.She was theprimary patroness of young girls and of students who had to debatelearned colleagues and professors; in other words, Catherine was justthe sort of heroine Joan herself would have taken for model and inter-cessor, a saint whose name and reputation had been close to her sincechildhood and to whom she would naturally turn during the harrowingyear of her imprisonment and interrogation the circumstances whenshe first identified Catherine s among the voices she heard.Margaret of Antioch was equally popular at the time, singled out forspecial devotion in the region where Joan was born and raised.LikeCatherine of Alexandria, Margaret was supposed to have lived at the timeof the early Christian persecutions.When she converted to Christianityand consecrated her virginity to God, she was disowned by her paganfather.A Roman prefect then saw the beautiful teenage Margaret tendingsheep and tried to seduce her.When she refused him, he publiclydenounced her as a Christian, and after numerous tortures she too wasbeheaded.She became the special patroness of falsely accused people, andher statue had a prominent place in Joan s parish church.Margaret was20 J OANprecisely the kind of young, courageous virgin whose fidelity unto deathwould have comforted Joan during her interrogations.Michael, Catherine and Margaret: widely venerated, they were espe-cially close figures in the minds of ordinary Christians in medievalFrance.Joan knew about them; she saw them represented in paintings,stained-glass windows, and statues; and she would have prayed to themin her crises.Some modern scholars dismiss the possibility of a tran-scendent revelation to Joan with this explanation: forced to identify thevoices during her trial, they say, she would naturally have mentionedthose whose stories and images were familiar.But simply because she mentioned these saints late, when she wascompelled to identify the voices, it does not follow that those identitiesoccurred to her only on the spot.Indeed, she had been keeping a deepsilence about them for a number of good reasons.And despite the factthat the  voices seem to be from those whose very existence is dubi-ous, the experience mediated to Joan by these voices was never in doubt,at least to her.F RO M THE H EB R E W prophet Isaiah to the present, each era finds itsown terms to describe what is unknowable, opaque, or mysterious.Once upon a time we described the mentally ill as possessed bydemons.Later they were considered victims of disordered humors.Inboth cases they were ostracized, chained in dungeons, submitted tovarious tortures, regarded as sinners, and simply allowed to expire.Now we often say that such a person is, for example, a paranoid schizo-phrenic with an Oedipus complex, or we study his genetic history andseek to learn the chemical or genealogical sources for the disorder.But scientific labels do not enable us to understand the etiology orsubstance of madness any more than did  demonic possession. Howis it that one can suffer a loss of personality and reason? Even as weVisions 21attach comforting terms that give us a way of dealing with the awful-ness of the plight, we know that scientific and psychological jargonsimply enables us to have a coping mechanism and, we hope, to dealmore compassionately with sufferers.In Joan s case it is tempting to take refuge in psychiatric terminol-ogy, thus reducing her marvelous experiences to meaninglessness.Some have argued that Joan had an inner ear infection producingsounds resembling whispering voices or that an eye affliction couldhave made bright sunlight intolerable and given her the idea that shewas seeing the outlines of forms [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]