The Mystery of Joan of Arc

I have been reading Mark Twain’s book (a free online version) about Joan of Arc. As in Connecticut Yankee, Twain presented Joan of Arc as an eyewitness account. According to the legend, Jeanne d’Arc was a sweet and holy little girl in Domremy in eastern France. She seemed to be utterly perfect, as well as beautiful, like Mary Poppins only very humble. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, she became a military heroine. Nobody who knew her, friends or family, could understand why this happened. She claimed that several saints, and the archangel Michael, had told her that she was the one to rescue France from English rule and to crown the Dauphin, the prince, to be the king of France. And somehow, despite numerous setbacks, she got even her opponents to believe and support her and follow her as she went to see the Dauphin. She had no military training, had never killed anything or anyone with a sword or spear. Like most country children, she could ride a horse. She claimed she would, personally, lead the French army to victory over the English.

This photo is from a church in Strasbourg, France.

At that time, the French army was totally demoralized, and simply accepted the English rulership that had been imposed since the battle of Agincourt. To oppose the English would be suicidal, they thought. But Joan convinced them God would support the French victory.

And the French won against the English army that was gathered at Orleans. Joan was only seventeen years old when the Dauphin, now king, made her the general of the French armies. Almost immediately afterwards, her church enemies had her burned at the stake on what the church now considers trumped-up charges. Almost immediately after this, her case was reconsidered and she was sanctified. She is now one of the great legends of history.

Great uncertainty will always remain about what really happened. Alternative interpretations of the Joan of Arc legend have been presented. Some have claimed that she was mentally unstable, which means she imagined the little voices in her head, or that she had Menière’s disease (an affliction of the inner ear) which means she actually heard sounds but they were not voices. James Phillips and colleagues say that all claims of medical or psychiatric disorders of St. Joan are unconvincing. The claim that she was actually not a simple country girl but was a bastard daughter of the previous king does not explain how she could have, despite weakness and youth, led armies to victory. If indeed she did convince the Dauphin that she was his bastard sister, why would he have let her lead the army instead of doing it himself? The claim that she was a witch substitutes one incredible explanation for another.

Maybe she was crazy, and this made her able to speak her message with utter sincerity and without hesitation. The disillusioned French might have been waiting for just such a person to appear on the scene. The human mind is not a logic machine. Under the right conditions—and nobody can predict exactly what these might be—even the best human minds can believe anything. Among the right conditions are that the human brain’s built in bullshit-detector has to get fooled, something that only a truly and sincerely crazy person can do.

I, like thousands of others, will make my pilgrimage to her birthplace Domremy-la-Pucelle (pucelle means virgin) and walk in the garden where she is supposed to have had her first visions. I will wander and wonder. Domremy is only a two and a half hour drive from where I now live, much closer than Paris. I will wait until my grandchildren are a little older and can appreciate history a little better. If I have any new insights at that time, I will let you know.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all—and one I have not heard reported before—is that this story, of the seventeen-year-old girl leading an army to victory, has happened at least twice and possibly three times or more in history. I will complete this thought in a subsequent essay.

As Always, Mark Twain

 

In the previous essay, I tried my hand at humorous creativity to shoot down the idea that a benevolent God is in control of the world. But who was I to think I could do a better job than Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known as Mark Twain?

I looked through a collection of Twain’s unpublished writings. He left as many unpublished scribbled sheets as he did published books, if not more. This demonstrates that the success rate of a genius (assuming that is what he was) is probably below fifty percent. In many cases, I can see that these works were unpublishable. They just did not have the compelling wit of his more famous works. Especially in his declining years, he simply did not work as hard as he could have. Genius is not enough; discipline is necessary.

A recurring theme in his unpublished writings is that, if there is a God, He must be cruel. In his essay Thoughts of God, Twain tried to analyze the twisted thought processes of a God who could create the fly. God’s commission to the fly: “Persecute the sick child; settle upon its eyes, its face, its hands, and gnaw and pester and sting…Settle upon the soldier’s festering wounds in field and hospital and drive him frantic while he also prays…” And the plague victim: “sting, feed upon his ulcers, dabble your feet in his rotten blood, gums them thick with plague germs…” At least with humans there is the hope, or delusion, of life after death, but animals suffer from flies, “…all the kindly animals that labor without fair reward here and perish without hope of it hereafter…”

Twain then attacks the idea that, when humans help one another, they are doing God’s work. Twain could not have known John F. Kennedy would say, “Here on Earth, God’s work must tryly be our own.” Twain just considers human good deeds to be God taking credit for someone else’s good work. The only italicized passage says, “There was never yet a case of suffering or sorrow which God could not relieve.” If it is a sin to withhold help when we can give it, God must be a cosmic sinner.

In another essay, In My Bitterness (written when Twain was still bitter about the death in 1896 of his daughter Olivia (Susy) of meningitis), he wrote, “He gives you a healthy body and you are tricked into thanking Him for it; some day, when He has rotted it with disease and made it a hell of pains, you will know why He did it…He may tear the palpitating heart out of your breast and slap you in the face with it.”

In a story at the end of The Refuge of the Derelicts, Twain writes about the cruelty of the spider sucking the life out of her victims, and even her husband, and then along comes a wasp and lays an egg on the spider. The wasp grub “gnawed a hole in the spider’s abdomen, and began to suck her juices while she moaned and wept…” The wasp grub eats the spider from the inside, leaving it alive until the last miserable moment. The wasp was “radiant with that spiritual joy which is the result of duty done.”

Theodicy is the intellectual discipline of making excuses for God. You would think that it would by now have gone extinct. But humans want to believe, despite all evidence, that God is good. That is certainly what I want to believe, but, as Twain would have said, wanting don’t make it so.

Philosophical Debate of Two Fetuses

I recently became aware, years later than everyone else, about a story that religious people use to “prove” that there can be life after death. It is about two twin fetuses in a womb. One of them is an agnostic, the other a believer, in Life After Birth. The same reasoning used by the two fetuses could be used by us in our discussions of Life After Death. It is a really clever story.

The skeptical fetus says, “What evidence is there for life after birth? We have not seen the outside world, even if there is one, nor has anyone come back into the womb to tell us about it.” The other fetus maintains his/her faith in Life After Birth. The believer insisted that there was such a thing as a “mother.

The conclusion of this story is that just because we cannot see into the afterlife, and just because nobody has come back from it doesn’t prove that there is no such thing as Life After Death. I have no problem admitting that there might be. If the unitary universe theory is true, then it is more than a possibility, but a certainty, even though by this theory we are trapped in our infinitesimal slice of time.

As far as this argument goes, there is nothing wrong with it. But most religious people do not want the rest of us to merely assent to the possibility of life after death. They make claims about the specific content of life after death, and that you ought to believe this content. Things about Heaven and Hell, saints flying amidst clouds, the gates of Heaven, etc. These specific beliefs are unprovable at best and in many cases ridiculous, as Mark Twain showed in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

But fundamentalists take it much further. To illustrate the point, let us continue the story of the two fetuses.

Both fetuses are born, and discover that there is, in fact, Life After Birth. And the Mother somehow knows which fetus was the believer, and which was the skeptic. She holds up the believer, swaddles it in rich clothing, kisses it, and declares that it is the heir of all of her considerable fortune.

Then she turns to the other fetus. “So, little one, you doubted my existence? Here’s what I’m going to do to you. I am going to skewer you and roast you forever over a fire. Your body juices will drip down into the flame, but you will never run out of body juices, because I will continually renew them. You cannot faint, for I will keep you awake. Forever. As punishment for not believing in Life After Birth.

“And if you had believed in Life After Birth, but believed something incorrect about it, it wouldn’t have done you any good. I would still roast you forever in conscious agony.”

“But, how could I have known?” asked the agnostic fetus.

“Your sibling told you,” answered the Mother.

“But how should my sibling have any more credibility than I?”

“Invalid question. Now, let’s get started. Angels, bring me a skewer!”

“But why are you doing this?”

“Because I FREAKING LOVE YOU, that’s why. Now, this is going to hurt as much as possible…”

I could go on, but you get the point. Fundamentalists sometimes use arguments that seem clever, until you start asking questions about them.

I Am Not Afraid to Die

I am not afraid to die, even though I am agnostic about the afterlife, if there is one—about judgment, bliss, suffering, and all the other elements that tradition has accreted onto the afterlife, creating Heaven and Hell.

I am afraid of dying, the process of life coming to an end. If it occurs by gentle decline, I will be okay with it; I am already trembling and weak and have many old-man emergencies. Nobody escapes these things. I just don’t want to die in any of the spectacularly painful and outrageous ways that we hear about on the news literally every day all over the world, whether it is a kid getting shot at school in America or a kid dying of malaria in Africa.

A quiet death at the end of a good life does not bother me. What makes me and almost everyone who thinks about it furious is an untimely death, for example, of a young person (a child, or a soldier, or in a death camp). An example is the Franz Schubert song Death and the Maiden, which he wrote into a quartet. Why should death come to a young woman who has done nothing to deserve suffering? The thought of this made Schubert furious. The Death and the Maiden quartet is one of the few places in Schubert’s music in which his fury makes him totally lose control. Usually he weaves his musical motifs together beautifully, even when the subject is depressing (as many of his songs are). But if you listen to this piece of music you can hear a couple of measures where the musical structure just falls apart into clamor. It was Schubert’s brief excursion into insanity.

I refuse to continue this list of examples. But if the end of my life can be quiet, then I can slip into death. I have no fear of this, for several reasons.

First, I won’t know I’m dead. I won’t be caught in blankets of darkness and silence, but with a conscious mind telling me, oh no, I’m dead, and I have to be aware of being dead forever. Literally nobody believes this. I won’t wake up dead some morning. It’s like the song set to the tune of Irish washerwoman:

McTavish is dead and his brother don’t know it

McTavish is dead and his brother don’t know it

They’re both of them dead, they’re in the same bed

And neither one knows that the other is dead.

If this seems bloody obvious, I merely point out that it is also comforting.

Second, the story has to come to an end sometime. I finished an academic career, and I figured out a lot of things about life during my journey from fundamentalism to agnosticism, and about the world of science. What an exciting journey it has been, from the top of Mt. Whitney to the bottom of Badwater, from the tropical forest to the desert, seeing the large and small wonders of the natural world that most people walk right past without noticing. I have written books in which I have shared my excitement about the world with my readers. But I retired and am preparing for the final phase of my life, primarily as a grandfather. There is no plot if there is no conclusion. I want to draw my life into a conclusion that makes sense and makes sensible all of the things I have thought and experienced, in such a way that I can help other people make sense of their lives.

We all know this. We all know that, as we grow older, certain investments are ridiculous. I take hikes and eat moderately in order to maintain health in my remaining days, for my own comfort but also so that I do not make myself a decrepit nuisance on others who will take care of me. A few years ago a dentist tried to interest me in straightening my lower teeth. Nobody can see them. This might be a sensible investment for someone who is just entering a profession, to put a good face on things, but for a fifty-year-old man, as I was at the time, it is like decorating something that you will soon discard. There is a relief in knowing that old things, such as old bodies, do not need to be maintained in pristine condition

The story has to draw to a conclusion. Can you imagine the tedium of playing harps and singing hymns forever? To explore this idea further, you should read Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

Third, suppose there is an afterlife? There are lots of fundamentalists who think that if you disagree with them on even the tiniest theological point, even from ignorance, you will suffer infintely forever. Yet they also claim that God is love. This is utterly ridiculous. I have chosen to live a life of love. Every day and every year I look back and evaluate myself: Have I made the best use of my opportunities? Have I made life better for other people (maybe not everyone, but most people)? These are not vague thoughts. I keep a very detailed diary, which is separate from my journal. Nobody will ever read them; there are too many millions of words in them. Their main function is to focus my mind on the way I am living, to be consciously happy about the blessings I receive each day, but also to plan ahead. I plan ahead to accomplish things that will make the world better; and if I fail in some of those things, I try to let go of them. As John says in the New Testament, “He who loves is born of God and knows God; he who does not love does not know God.” It’s pretty simple. If there is an afterlife, I am ready for it, by any reasonable standard

I do not want to die before I have finished my work. I may not have a choice in this, but I try to keep my body and mind healthy so that I can finish more books, for example. I do not want an untimely death.

 

In many cases, dying is a tragedy. But timely death is not.