Saint Joan -- and Violence

 Saint Joan and Violence

Saturday, July 22, 2023

 

The cold reading group did Shaw’s Saint Joan recently. 

 

I first read Saint Joan in about 1962, when I was 11. My dad was taking a remote English class, and I read along. 

 

The play commented on some thoughts I’d been having. I grew up with stories of gunfighters on radio and television, and so with the ideal of (occasionally) killing bad people. My parents had both been supporters of United States involvement in World War II. My dad had a desk job in the army, but was willing to go where-ever they sent him, to do what was necessary. So, I was, in a general and fantastical way, pro-violence.

 

About age 10, I realized that violence in war is generally directed at quite good people – civilians, draftees, children. The bad people are usually well protected. At the same time, it became clear to me that the progress of wars could not have a good outcome. Each war provoked the next, the weapons got bigger, and the controls on them got looser. Humanity was not going to win by getting better at war, and participating in a war was the opposite of “being part of the solution,” whatever the patriotic folks said.

 

I tried on the identity -   “selective killer” - an assassin, with a carefully curated ‘better dead’ list. But I got quite a clear idea of what I would become if I went that route, and I didn’t want to become that.

 

I think I was attracted to Christianity – exemplified by St. Gertrude’s Catholic Church in Forest City – by the idea that these were the only people talking about a way out of otherwise unsolvable problems – a way out of war, and a way out of death. Whatever the odds might be, any way out beat no way out. So I was genuinely interested in what Christianity might have to offer. 

 

Joan presented a problem. The Catholics had made her a saint, although her enthusiastic participation in war conflicted starkly – to my mind – with the explicit pacifism of the gospels. I wasn’t quite satisfied with my parish priest’s very sensible advice that canonization is always only about the purity of someone’s intentions, not about the content of their beliefs.  There were too many ways that the Catholic Church supported the military establishment – Catholic military academies, Catholic chaplains, Catholic participation in patriotic events. 

 

St. Joan presented a conflicted figure for me, someone I admired for following her personal visions even as I questioned the content of those visions. Her way of understanding war made it possible for a soldier to decently and whole-heartedly participate (and save his soul) and I was pretty sure that was impossible. 

 

Encountering St. Joan again now, 60 years later, I relive the old perplexities. Shaw pictures Joan at that juncture in history at which war ceased to be a lucrative, rule governed game played by rich, well armored people (the ransom game), becoming instead a game of kill or be killed involving lots of very vulnerable and very enthusiastic ordinary people, without many rules at all. Indeed, it seems that he sees her genius as, in part, inventing the possibility of a really bloody and enthusiastic war, and, along with that, the rationale for such a war, “God is on our side.” So, Joan is, in Shaw’s play, at the beginning of the process that I was identifying as hopeless and futile: she invents nations (defined by language) and then invents a way of thinking about killing that justifies total investment. She also re-invents kings by divine right, capable of raising the revenues and armies for a substantial war.  And, she invents a way to certainty – a relationship with God -- that bypasses criticism, compromise, and amelioration altogether. In his play, she becomes one of the most powerful and dangerous people in history, the inventor of the basic ideas that ensure endless and accelerating conflict.

 

Is Shaw reflecting on history (and expressing some of his own reservations) when he has the inquisitor say: “Heresy at first seems innocent and even laudable; but it ends in such a monstrous horror of unnatural wickedness that the most tender-hearted among you, if you saw it at work as I have seen it, would clamor against the mercy of the Church in dealing with it.”

 

Was Joan that powerful, that original? Did Shaw think she was? I don’t know. I am guessing he made her stand for something he wanted to talk about. What was he thinking, and how was he intervening, intellectually, writing this a few years after the end of the World War I, explicitly commenting on Joan’s recent canonization? That is a topic for research, and maybe another post.

 

What I want to hold on to is the odd way that a piece of literature can remain relevant to a person over 60 years and can preserve a line of questioning.