On Relics and Joan of Arc

I'm rereading one of my favorite books, Mark Twain's "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc".   How I love this book.  It was Twain's favorite of his own works, and very rightly so.  It is the most personal of his books, the closest to his heart.  Twain writes in the first person, taking on the persona of "the Sieur Louis De Conte", one of Joan's childhood friends who is with her as her scribe throughout her endeavors.  It is obvious to me that Twain has inserted himself into the story as this loyal and loving friend, signing his name "SLC", which are the same initials as his own (Samuel Langhorne Clemens).  Joan is dear and intimate to him.  She is not merely a subject.  As such, he brings the peasant girl to such vivid life... he understands Joan, from the inside out.  He has such a sense of her faith, her convictions, that I assumed he must be a believer himself.  A quick google search showed that, outwardly at least, Mark Twain was very critical and resistant to formalized religion.  But in Joan, his muse... he understood.  It rings with every word, every vivid description.  There's no way he could portray her as he does without comprehending in very sharp detail her true inspiration; her true motivation wasn't France (in the larger picture)… it was God.

I am horrified by the modern representations of Joan as some kind of proto-lesbian feminist schizophrenic.  That wasn't who she was.  That is modern people stealing her history to apply it to their own causes, and it makes me sick every time I see it.  Twain, though, captures her as I know she was, because her testimony during her trial shows it, and it rings so true.    Twain describes Joan as a study of contradictions - a small girl with a powerful purpose; humble but undeterred and confident.  Bashful but brazen.  Gentle, and yet a fierce warrior.  Honest to a fault, and yet cunning.  Uneducated and illiterate, but brilliant.  It is seeing the tenderness and meekness of who she is at her core that we can see the work of God in her.   That fascinates me.  And seems wholly accurate and true.

As I'm reading this portrait of Joan, I'm drawn to know more about her.  I wonder about the actual words she spoke, recorded in her trial transcript.  I wonder where her sword is, her helmet, her armor.  Given that she was burned to death (except her heart and her intestines, and possibly one fragment of bone that did not burn), and her ashes thrown in to the Rhine, there is no grave site to visit.  But there is this desire to see, to touch, to be in the same place, to know that she is true, to know what she was like, what her world was.  There's this desire to have something tangible to link our time to hers, to link across the ages something concrete. In Joan's case, tragically, the French Revolutionists largely destroyed the artifacts that had been saved and treasured for centuries, in their anti-religion zeal.  But my desire to see such things remains, and I realize that for all of Christian history, this has been the case.  It is why we have relics.

Christianity, more than any other world religion, is TANGIBLE.  It is CONCRETE, because Jesus was tangible and concrete.  God came down to earth as someone we could see, and touch, and hear.  A man that we could break bread with, and left his mark upon the planet, in verifiable ways.  God gave us our senses, created us to experience reality through seeing and hearing and tasting and smelling and feeling.  And then He came to us, in time and space, so that we could interact with Him in just the way He created us to be.  God is pure spirit, but for US, He came as a child, who grew to a man.  And for those generations who got to be in His presence, how did they pass on this experience?  Not just with words in a book, as important as those are.  But also with concrete things.  "Here, child.  These were the nails.  This was his cross.  This is where he was buried.  These were the cloths that He was buried in.  See, remember, and believe."  Just as a family heirloom gets handed down from generation to generation, so did these tangible bits of the greatest story ever told.  And as the story continues into the present day, as the work of salvation takes fruit in Christ's bride the Church, those palpable things provide the illustrations.   They are the perceptible bridges that link us to our own heritage.  They ground us in time, place, reality.  And that is a powerful, powerful gift.

Relics seem to be a very Catholic phenomenon, and at times rather morbid or superstitious.  But truly understanding human nature, it can be seen why we crave them, why we need them.

On Sin

"Thus sin renders the soul miserable, weak and torpid, inconstant in doing good, cowardly in resisting temptation, slothful in the observance of God's commandments. It deprives her of true liberty and of that sovereignty which she should never resign; it makes her a slave to the world, the flesh, and the devil; it subjects her to a harder and more wretched servitude than that of the unhappy Israelites in Egypt or Babylon. Sin so dulls and stupefies the spiritual senses of man that he is deaf to God's voice and inspirations; blind to the dreadful calamities which threaten him; insensible to the sweet odor of virtue and the example of the saints; incapable of tasting how sweet the Lord is, or feeling the touch of His benign hand in the benefits which should be a constant incitement to his greater love. Moreover, sin destroys the peace and joy of a good conscience, takes away the soul's fervor, and leaves her an object abominable in the eyes of God and His saints. The grace of justification delivers us from all these miseries. For God, in His infinite mercy, is not content with effacing our sins and restoring us to His favor; He delivers us from the evils sin has brought upon us, and renews the interior man in his former strength and beauty. Thus He heals our wounds, breaks our bonds, moderates the violence of our passions, restores with true liberty the supernatural beauty of the soul, reestablishes us in the peace and joy of a good conscience, reanimates our interior senses, inspires us with ardor for good and a salutary hatred of sin, makes us strong and constant in resisting evil, and thus enriches us with an abundance of good works. In fine, He so perfectly renews the inner man with all his faculties that the Apostle calls those who are thus justified new men and new creatures."

— Venerable Louis Of Grenada

More on the Incarnation, by St. Bernard of Clairvaux

"And so the idea of peace came down to do the work of peace: The Word was made flesh and even now dwells among us. It is by faith that he dwells in our hearts, in our memory, our intellect and penetrates even into our imagination. What concept could man have of God if he did not first fashion an image of him in his heart? By nature incomprehensible and inaccessible, he was invisible and unthinkable, but now he wished to be understood, to be seen and thought of. But how, you ask, was this done? He lay in a manger and rested on a virgin’s breast, preached on a mountain, and spent the night in prayer. He hung on a cross, grew pale in death, and roamed free among the dead and ruled over those in hell. He rose again on the third day, and showed the apostles the wounds of the nails, the signs of victory; and finally in their presence he ascended to the sanctuary of heaven. How can we not contemplate this story in truth, piety and holiness?"

Augustine on Genesis

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. 

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

 If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

 Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].”

― Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol 2

On Incarnation

"Now man need not hide from God as Adam did; for He can be seen through Christ's human nature. Christ did not gain one perfection more by becoming man, nor did He lose anything of what He possessed as God. There was the Almightiness of God in the movement of His arm, the infinite love of God in the beatings of His human heart and the Unmeasured Compassion of God to sinners in His eyes. God was now manifest in the flesh; this is what is called the Incarnation. The whole range of the Divine attributes of power and goodness, justice, love, beauty, were in Him. And when Our Divine Lord acted and spoke, God in His perfect nature became manifest to those who saw Him and heard Him and touched Him. As He told Philip later on: Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father [John 14:9]."

Venerable Fulton Sheen

St. Patrick’s Breastplate

I bind unto myself today The strong Name of the Trinity, By invocation of the same, The Three in One and One in Three.  I bind this day to me for ever. By power of faith, Christ's incarnation; His baptism in the Jordan river; His death on Cross for my salvation; His bursting from the spicèd tomb; His riding up the heavenly way; His coming at the day of doom;* I bind unto myself today.  I bind unto myself the power Of the great love of the cherubim; The sweet 'well done' in judgment hour, The service of the seraphim, Confessors' faith, Apostles' word, The Patriarchs' prayers, the Prophets' scrolls, All good deeds done unto the Lord, And purity of virgin souls.  I bind unto myself today The virtues of the starlit heaven, The glorious sun's life-giving ray, The whiteness of the moon at even, The flashing of the lightning free, The whirling wind's tempestuous shocks, The stable earth, the deep salt sea, Around the old eternal rocks.  I bind unto myself today The power of God to hold and lead, His eye to watch, His might to stay, His ear to hearken to my need. The wisdom of my God to teach, His hand to guide, His shield to ward, The word of God to give me speech, His heavenly host to be my guard.  Against the demon snares of sin, The vice that gives temptation force, The natural lusts that war within, The hostile men that mar my course; Or few or many, far or nigh, In every place and in all hours, Against their fierce hostility, I bind to me these holy powers.  Against all Satan's spells and wiles, Against false words of heresy, Against the knowledge that defiles, Against the heart's idolatry, Against the wizard's evil craft, Against the death wound and the burning, The choking wave and the poisoned shaft, Protect me, Christ, till Thy returning.  Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me. Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.  I bind unto myself the Name, The strong Name of the Trinity; By invocation of the same. The Three in One, and One in Three, Of Whom all nature hath creation, Eternal Father, Spirit, Word: Praise to the Lord of my salvation, Salvation is of Christ the Lord. 

On Fear

"For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!' it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him."

Romans 8:15-1

"When one has nothing more to lose, the heart is inaccessible to fear."

— St. Théodore Guérin

Chuckle of the Day.

It is said that Friedrich Nietzsche once challenged God, "I too can create a man." God replied to Nietzsche, "Go ahead and try." Nietzsche took a fistful of dust and began to mold it. God said, "Disqualified. Get your own dust."

-- J. Budziszewski, Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law