Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning. National service is in the news. The Conservatives’ election pledge proposing a community or military training scheme has excited a range of opinions, though debate has tended to focus on practicalities, rather than on the ethics of service itself. What does that even mean? One person who knew about service was Joan of Arc, put to death on this day in 1431, at the age of just 19. Cynics may say her fate lends proof to the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished. But there’s an alternative, positive lesson to be taken from the life too. Joan of Arc was a peasant girl who heard the voices of Sts. Michael, Catherine, and Margaret. She believed God was calling her to liberate France from the English. And improbably, she did just that, returning to the battlefield even after suffering a serious wound from an arrow. Religious visions are no longer commonly accepted; modern scholars prefer psychological explanations. Divine command is reframed as delusion, hallucination. As it happens, Joan of Arc’s visions were what in the end led to her death – not on the battlefield, but in a religious court that declared them to be false, even demonic, and so had her burned at the stake. The court was politically motivated, and its arguments weak, if not absurd. Her blasphemy was said to be clear from the fact that she wore men’s clothes, trousers and all… Joan of Arc is today the patron saint of France – as might be expected from one who had performed such national service, giving the English a good drubbing. Less predictably, she is an exemplar saint beyond national boundaries: for all soldiers, including captives, as well as for women who’ve served in the Volunteer Emergency Service rather than the military. Looking back almost 600 hundred years, it can be hard to resist the tendency to think of medieval religious visionaries as credulous rather than courageous. But even the most sceptical observer must allow that Joan of Arc lived and died very bravely – for something in which she sincerely believed, and for something that was beyond her self-interest. We can, in that sense, read her life as a general call to heroic service. More than this: her life reminds us that the highest form of service transcends even the defining categories of nations and religious institutions. That she was in the end effectively killed by her own is not only a tragic irony, but the defining moral of her life of service.