the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Instinctively, Joan protected herself from the critical regard that would follow her sharing such a confidence as her entertaining visits from angels bearing messages from the King of Heaven, and when the voice returned and spoke once more, again she kept it to herself. For all the years that remained to her, “a good seven” of her nineteen, she estimated, Joan’s everyday companions, whose company she chosebefore that of mortals and whom she obeyed as she did not any mortal, were invisible and inaudible to everyone but her.
“They often come among the Christian folk and are not seen by any except by me,” she told the examiner.
“Did you see St. Michael and these angels corporeally and in reality?”
“I saw them with my bodily eyes as well as I see you.”
How could she have imagined them, she reasoned, when their voices came to her from outside her own consciousness, when they woke her from sleep to deliver a message? Standing trial, Joan complained that the clamor in the courtroom drowned the angels’ voices out; she couldn’t hear what counsel they offered. Sometimes the prison itself was so loud she couldn’t hear them properly when they spoke to her in her cell.
“Who persuaded you to have angels with their arms, feet, legs, and robes painted on your standard?”
“I had them painted in the manner in which they were painted in churches.”
“Did you yourself ever see them in the manner in which they were painted?” the examiner asked. It was among the questions Joan refused to answer.
Joan’s evasiveness and the inconsistency of her testimony about the angels she heard and saw have drawn centuries of scrutiny and criticism. Vita Sackville-West observed that“her reluctance to discuss their personal attributes is manifest and consistent.” On February 22, in the course of her second public interrogation, Joan said it was only after three visits that she recognized the angel as Saint Michael. On March 15, by which point the questioning had been moved to her cell, she said she saw him “many times” before she believed it was he. The discrepancy seems insignificant when Joan had established from the outset of the trial that she, and not those who presumed to judge her, would determine which questions she was bound to answer honestly, if at all. Her confidence in her vocation allowed her righteousness enough to warn her persecutors. “If you were well informed about me,” she told them, “you would wish me to be out of your hands. I have done nothing except by revelation.”
As the trial record shows, the longer and harder Joan was pressedto describe what couldn’t be described, the more details she summoned to characterize a visitation she understood as angelic, in that it conveyed messages from God. The Old Testament term for angel, mal’ā k ’ĕlōhîm , means “messenger of God.” Perhaps a single voice accompanied by a great light evolved into several voices Joan could distinguish from one another, and those in turn conjured beings who had lips with which to speak, crowned heads, and bodies she could see and touch and even smell. It’s typical for visitations like Joan’s to accrue definition and detail with each added encounter. She’d had an experience—thousands of them by the time she traded her mortal life for the eternal company of her angels—that required explanation.
Instinctively, Joan protected herself from the critical regard that would follow her sharing such a confidence as her entertaining visits from angels bearing messages from the King of Heaven, and when the voice returned and spoke once more, again she kept it to herself. For all the years that remained to her, “a good seven” of her nineteen, she estimated, Joan’s everyday companions, whose company she chosebefore that of mortals and whom she obeyed as she did not any mortal, were invisible and inaudible to everyone but her.
“They often come among the Christian folk and are not seen by any except by me,” she told the examiner.
“Did you see St. Michael and these angels corporeally and in reality?”
“I saw them with my bodily eyes as well as I see you.”
How could she have imagined them, she reasoned, when their voices came to her from outside her own consciousness, when they woke her from sleep to deliver a message? Standing trial, Joan complained that the clamor in the courtroom drowned the angels’ voices out; she couldn’t hear what counsel they offered. Sometimes the prison itself was so loud she couldn’t hear them properly when they spoke to her in her cell.
“Who persuaded you to have angels with their arms, feet, legs, and robes painted on your standard?”
“I had them painted in the manner in which they were painted in churches.”
“Did you yourself ever see them in the manner in which they were painted?” the examiner asked. It was among the questions Joan refused to answer.
Joan’s evasiveness and the inconsistency of her testimony about the angels she heard and saw have drawn centuries of scrutiny and criticism. Vita Sackville-West observed that“her reluctance to discuss their personal attributes is manifest and consistent.” On February 22, in the course of her second public interrogation, Joan said it was only after three visits that she recognized the angel as Saint Michael. On March 15, by which point the questioning had been moved to her cell, she said she saw him “many times” before she believed it was he. The discrepancy seems insignificant when Joan had established from the outset of the trial that she, and not those who presumed to judge her, would determine which questions she was bound to answer honestly, if at all. Her confidence in her vocation allowed her righteousness enough to warn her persecutors. “If you were well informed about me,” she told them, “you would wish me to be out of your hands. I have done nothing except by revelation.”
As the trial record shows, the longer and harder Joan was pressedto describe what couldn’t be described, the more details she summoned to characterize a visitation she understood as angelic, in that it conveyed messages from God. The Old Testament term for angel, mal’ā k ’ĕlōhîm , means “messenger of God.” Perhaps a single voice accompanied by a great light evolved into several voices Joan could distinguish from one another, and those in turn conjured beings who had lips with which to speak, crowned heads, and bodies she could see and touch and even smell. It’s typical for visitations like Joan’s to accrue definition and detail with each added encounter. She’d had an experience—thousands of them by the time she traded her mortal life for the eternal company of her angels—that required explanation.
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