Adirondack Daily Enterprise

Inside the Brown line

POSTED:Wed, November 19, 2008 @ 9:04AM

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So last night, over a pitcher of Yuengling and some Red Storm wings (Dan’s latest sauce, and I would recommend it to everybody), Joan of Arc’s name came up. I mentioned that she was crazy. That is what I’ve always heard — she did claim to see visions and hear God talk to her, after all. A friend of mine replied that she wasn’t, that she was a great warrior and that people just said she was crazy because it’s easier to dismiss a strong woman by saying she’s nuts.

So I did a little research. Turns out we were both wrong, but I was wronger. Nobody called Joan crazy until the 20th century, when people started to look for ways to explain her visions, visions that were taken as a a real manifestation of the divine by most people before our skeptical, secular age. And most of the diagnoses proposed don’t sound very plausible. She would’ve had trouble leading armies into battle with tuberculosis, and schizophrenia seems equally unlikely given how well she dealt with the people around her and gained so much support, and the rational mind her trial transcripts show.

But, as I said, nobody called her crazy until the 20th century. It wasn’t misogyny. It was scholars in the 20th century assuming that there’s no such thing as God talking to people so it must be something else. She faced plenty of misogynistic prejudice at the time — the technical legal reason for her execution was that she violated Biblical law by wearing men’s clothes — but the crazy thing isn’t that.

Edit: I just put a bit more thought into it, and here is my unscientific, unfounded explanation. People interpret things through the lenses of their beliefs and preconceptions. If you believe a house is haunted, you think every shadow, creak and bump in the night is a ghost. If you believe in aliens, every weird-looking star is a UFO. And if you believe God has a real, physical presence in your life, then you’re likely to interpret every dream, every coincidence, every odd daydream as a sign from Him. Joan lived in an era where people believed God directly communicated with people like that. She wouldn’t have to be crazy to think God was talking to her.

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