mystical marriage, Catherine of Siena wrote of drinking the blood that spilled from his wounds. Said to have lived on the Eucharist alone for the last two years of her life, she died at the same age as had her bridegroom, thirty-three.
The preoccupation with blood that characterizes these saints is little different from a vampire’s, an erotic thirst for life’s essence, a thirst that, whether satisfied by God or Satan, dangled immortality. The early-twentieth-century playwright Charles Péguy cannothelp but retroactively infuse Joan with a little private longing.“The Roman soldier who stuck his spear into your side had what so many of your saints, so many of your martyrs, have not had,” she says to Jesus. “He touched you. He saw you … Blessed are they who drank in the look of your eyes,” she says, where her contemporaries speak of the blood of his wounds.
The promise of revelation, dependably rendered in such fulsome, trenchant detail, made the genre a popular one, sensuous when not outright seductive. Julian of Norwich described the“malicious semblance” of the devil’s face, as “red like the tilestone when it is new-burnt, with black spots therein like black freckles—fouler than the tilestone. His hair was red as rust, clipped in front, with full locks hanging on the temples.” Devils and imps steal through the visions of the era’s mystics, just as they leer from its artists’ canvases, gleefully tempting the righteous and dragging off the damned.“Satan, in an abominable shape, appeared on my left hand,” Teresa of Avila wrote. “I looked at his mouth in particular, because he spoke, and it was horrible. A huge flame seemed to issue out of his body, perfectly bright, without any shadow.” But Joan never spoke of the devil. He seems to have had no place in her visions, occupied only by angels.
Still, as Anouilh’s examiner reminds her, when the devil“comes to snare a soul … he comes with coaxing hands, with eyes that receive you into them like water that drowns you, with naked women’s flesh, transparent, white … beautiful.” Asked if she had the discernment to judge an apparition as either holy or demonic, Joan said she was sure she could distinguish between a real angel of God and a counterfeit. “I believed [in its goodness] very soon and I had the desire to believe it,” she told the examiner; the word “desire” is sometimes translated as “will.”
Frightened or not, Joan was waiting for what had happened to happen again. Not only had the experience continued to unfold in her mind; the visitation was hardly over before it had slipped between her and the life she used to have, and its influence didn’t diminish but increased. She’d beheld a splendor that left mortal life little more than the taste of ashes in her mouth. She didn’t tell her best friend, Hauviette, or her sister, Catherine, what had happened in the garden, not any more than she did the village curé or her kind, pious mother,who had introduced her to God and taught her to say the Paternoster and the Ave Maria and to recite what is known as the Nicene Creed, as first articulated in 325, when the Roman emperor Constantine I convened the Council of Nicaea. At this first of the twenty-one ecumenical gatherings recognized by the Catholic Church, *4 bishops representing all of Christendom stated the basic tenets of the Christian faith:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father, before all worlds, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, being of one substance as the Father, by whom all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On
The preoccupation with blood that characterizes these saints is little different from a vampire’s, an erotic thirst for life’s essence, a thirst that, whether satisfied by God or Satan, dangled immortality. The early-twentieth-century playwright Charles Péguy cannothelp but retroactively infuse Joan with a little private longing.“The Roman soldier who stuck his spear into your side had what so many of your saints, so many of your martyrs, have not had,” she says to Jesus. “He touched you. He saw you … Blessed are they who drank in the look of your eyes,” she says, where her contemporaries speak of the blood of his wounds.
The promise of revelation, dependably rendered in such fulsome, trenchant detail, made the genre a popular one, sensuous when not outright seductive. Julian of Norwich described the“malicious semblance” of the devil’s face, as “red like the tilestone when it is new-burnt, with black spots therein like black freckles—fouler than the tilestone. His hair was red as rust, clipped in front, with full locks hanging on the temples.” Devils and imps steal through the visions of the era’s mystics, just as they leer from its artists’ canvases, gleefully tempting the righteous and dragging off the damned.“Satan, in an abominable shape, appeared on my left hand,” Teresa of Avila wrote. “I looked at his mouth in particular, because he spoke, and it was horrible. A huge flame seemed to issue out of his body, perfectly bright, without any shadow.” But Joan never spoke of the devil. He seems to have had no place in her visions, occupied only by angels.
Still, as Anouilh’s examiner reminds her, when the devil“comes to snare a soul … he comes with coaxing hands, with eyes that receive you into them like water that drowns you, with naked women’s flesh, transparent, white … beautiful.” Asked if she had the discernment to judge an apparition as either holy or demonic, Joan said she was sure she could distinguish between a real angel of God and a counterfeit. “I believed [in its goodness] very soon and I had the desire to believe it,” she told the examiner; the word “desire” is sometimes translated as “will.”
Frightened or not, Joan was waiting for what had happened to happen again. Not only had the experience continued to unfold in her mind; the visitation was hardly over before it had slipped between her and the life she used to have, and its influence didn’t diminish but increased. She’d beheld a splendor that left mortal life little more than the taste of ashes in her mouth. She didn’t tell her best friend, Hauviette, or her sister, Catherine, what had happened in the garden, not any more than she did the village curé or her kind, pious mother,who had introduced her to God and taught her to say the Paternoster and the Ave Maria and to recite what is known as the Nicene Creed, as first articulated in 325, when the Roman emperor Constantine I convened the Council of Nicaea. At this first of the twenty-one ecumenical gatherings recognized by the Catholic Church, *4 bishops representing all of Christendom stated the basic tenets of the Christian faith:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father, before all worlds, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, being of one substance as the Father, by whom all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On
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