![]() ![]() Joan is the saint we need in this war over gender because she teaches like that. Doesn’t beauty teach? Poetry? Holiness teaches, especially the kind you can’t figure out. We need something other than proud expertise and loud politics - something we don’t fully comprehend. Which is exactly the saint we need today, an enigmatic one. “I will willingly tell you what I know, but not all.” That’s just part of who she is, that you can’t entirely figure out who she is. A nonbinary Joan is but the latest revision, and relatively tame. “Joan of Arc is ours.” Too many to count have said the same. Saints cannot be secularized,” thundered one French bishop. ![]() ![]() Catholics, eager to keep her, reviled any image but a holy Joan. Voltaire called her an “unfortunate idiot.” Another called her a “hallucinatory theomaniac.” Others, though, have hailed her a champion of freethinkers, an enemy of the Inquisition, even another Luther. Valorized and vilified, claimed and disowned, she’s been exploited by everything from cheap advertising to antisemitism. Since before her death, the French have always fought over her, claiming her for this cause or that, making her into one thing then another. Dreyer claimed he understood her better because he wasn’t French he may have been right. Perhaps of no one has this been truer than Joan. “A saint described is a saint romanticized,” Iris Murdoch said. ![]()
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