Saint Joan · Scene IV (2/2) (2/2)

| Warwick | Really, Messire John, I had rather you did not, unless you can keep your temper. | | The Chaplain | It is only this. I speak under correction; but The Maid is full of deceit: she pretends to be devout. Her prayers and confessions are endless. How can she be accused of heresy when she neglects no observance of a faithful daughter of The Church? | | Cauchon | Flaming up. A faithful daughter of The Church! The Pope himself at his proudest dare not presume as this woman presumes. She acts as if she herself were The Church. She brings the message of God to Charles; and The Church must stand aside. She will crown him in the cathedral of Rheims: she, not The Church! She sends letters to the king of England giving him God’s command through her to return to his island on pain of God’s vengeance, which she will execute. Let me tell you that the writing of such letters was the practice of the accursed Muhammad, the antichrist. Has she ever in all her utterances said one word of The Church? Never. It is always God and herself. | | Warwick | What can you expect? A beggar on horseback! Her head is turned. | | Cauchon | Who has turned it? The devil. And for a mighty purpose. He is spreading this heresy everywhere. The man Hus, burnt only thirteen years ago at Constance, infected all Bohemia with it. A man named WcLeef, himself an anointed priest, spread the pestilence in England; and to your shame you let him die in his bed. We have such people here in France too: I know the breed. It is cancerous: if it be not cut out, stamped out, burnt out, it will not stop until it has brought the whole body of human society into sin and corruption, into waste and ruin. By it an Arab camel driver drove Christ and His Church out of Jerusalem, and ravaged his way west like a wild beast until at last there stood only the Pyrenees and God’s mercy between France and damnation. Yet what did the camel driver do at the beginning more than this shepherd girl is doing? He had his voices from the angel Gabriel: she has her voices from St. Catherine and St. Margaret and the Blessed Michael. He declared himself the messenger of God, and wrote in God’s name to the kings of the earth. Her letters to them are going forth daily. It is not the Mother of God now to whom we must look for intercession, but to Joan the Maid. What will the world be like when The Church’s accumulated wisdom and knowledge and experience, its councils of learned, venerable pious men, are thrust into the kennel by every ignorant laborer or dairymaid whom the devil can puff up with the monstrous self-conceit of being directly inspired from heaven? It will be a world of blood, of fury, of devastation, of each man striving for his own hand: in the end a world wrecked back into barbarism. For now you have only Muhammad and his dupes, and the Maid and her dupes; but what will it be when every girl thinks herself a Joan and every man a Muhammad? I shudder to the very marrow of my bones when I think of it. I have fought it all my life; and I will fight it to the end. Let all this woman’s sins be forgiven her except only this sin; for it is the sin against the Holy Ghost; and if she does not recant in the dust before the world, and submit herself to the last inch of her soul to her Church, to the fire she shall go if she once falls into my hand. | | Warwick | Unimpressed. You feel strongly about it, naturally. | | Cauchon | Do not you? | | Warwick | I am a soldier, not a churchman. As a pilgrim I saw something of the Muhammadans. They were not so illbred as I had been led to believe. In some respects their conduct compared favorably with ours. | | Cauchon | Displeased. I have noticed this before. Men go to the East to convert the infidels. And the infidels pervert them. The Crusader comes back more than half a Saracen. Not to mention that all Englishmen are born heretics. | | The Chaplain | Englishmen heretics!!! Appealing to Warwick. My lord: must we endure this? His lordship is beside himself. How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms. | | Cauchon | I absolve you, Messire de Stogumber, on the ground of invincible ignorance. The thick air of your country does not breed theologians. | | Warwick | You would not say so if you heard us quarrelling about religion, my lord! I am sorry you think I must be either a heretic or a blockhead because, as a travelled man, I know that the followers of Muhammad profess great respect for our Lord, and are more ready to forgive St. Peter for being a fisherman than your lordship is to forgive Muhammad for being a camel driver. But at least we can proceed in this matter without bigotry. | | Cauchon | When men call the zeal of the Christian Church bigotry I know what to think. | | Warwick | They are only east and west views of the same thing. | | Cauchon | Bitterly ironical. Only east and west! Only!! | | Warwick | Oh, my Lord Bishop, I am not gainsaying you. You will carry The Church with you; but you have to carry the nobles also. To my mind there is a stronger case against The Maid than the one you have so forcibly put. Frankly, I am not afraid of this girl becoming another Muhammad, and superseding The Church by a great heresy. I think you exaggerate that risk. But have you noticed that in these letters of hers, she proposes to all the kings of Europe, as she has already pressed on Charles, a transaction which would wreck the whole social structure of Christendom? | | Cauchon | Wreck The Church. I tell you so. | | Warwick | Whose patience is wearing out. My lord: pray get The Church out of your head for a moment; and remember that there are temporal institutions in the world as well as spiritual ones. I and my peers represent the feudal aristocracy as you represent The Church. We are the temporal power. Well, do you not see how this girl’s idea strikes at us? | | Cauchon | How does her idea strike at you, except as it strikes at all of us, through The Church? | | Warwick | Her idea is that the kings should give their realms to God, and then reign as God’s bailiffs. | | Cauchon | Not interested. Quite sound theologically, my lord. But the king will hardly care, provided he reign. It is an abstract idea: a mere form of words. | | Warwick | By no means. It is a cunning device to supersede the aristocracy, and make the king sole and absolute autocrat. Instead of the king being merely the first among his peers, he becomes their master. That we cannot suffer: we call no man master. Nominally we hold our lands and dignities from the king, because there must be a keystone to the arch of human society; but we hold our lands in our own hands, and defend them with our own swords and those of our own tenants. Now by The Maid’s doctrine the king will take our lands⁠—our lands!⁠—and make them a present to God; and God will then vest them wholly in the king. | | Cauchon | Need you fear that? You are the makers of kings after all. York or Lancaster in England, Lancaster or Valois in France: they reign according to your pleasure. | | Warwick | Yes: but only as long as the people follow their feudal lords, and know the king only as a travelling show, owning nothing but the highway that belongs to everybody. If the people’s thoughts and hearts were turned to the king, and their lords became only the king’s servants in their eyes, the king could break us across his knee one by one; and then what should we be but liveried courtiers in his halls? | | Cauchon | Still you need not fear, my lord. Some men are born kings; and some are born statesmen. The two are seldom the same. Where would the king find counsellors to plan and carry out such a policy for him? | | Warwick | With a not too friendly smile. Perhaps in the Church, my lord. | | Cauchon | With an equally sour smile, shrugs his shoulders, and does not contradict him. | | Warwick | Strike down the barons; and the cardinals will have it all their own way. | | Cauchon | Conciliatory, dropping his polemical tone. My lord: we shall not defeat The Maid if we strike against one another. I know well that there is a Will to Power in the world. I know that while it lasts there will be a struggle between the Emperor and the Pope, between the dukes and the political cardinals, between the barons and the kings. The devil divides us and governs. I see you are no friend to The Church: you are an earl first and last, as I am a churchman first and last. But can we not sink our differences in the face of a common enemy? I see now that what is in your mind is not that this girl has never once mentioned The Church, and thinks only of God and herself, but that she has never once mentioned the peerage, and thinks only of the king and herself. | | Warwick | Quite so. These two ideas of hers are the same idea at bottom. It goes deep, my lord. It is the protest of the individual soul against the interference of priest or peer between the private man and his God. I should call it Protestantism if I had to find a name for it. | | Cauchon | Looking hard at him. You understand it wonderfully well, my lord. Scratch an Englishman, and find a Protestant. | | Warwick | Playing the pink of courtesy. I think you are not entirely void of sympathy with The Maid’s secular heresy, my lord. I leave you to find a name for it. | | Cauchon | You mistake me, my lord. I have no sympathy with her political presumptions. But as a priest I have gained a knowledge of the minds of the common people; and there you will find yet another most dangerous idea. I can express it only by such phrases as France for the French, England for the English, Italy for the Italians, Spain for the Spanish, and so forth. It is sometimes so narrow and bitter in country folk that it surprises me that this country girl can rise above the idea of her village for its villagers. But she can. She does. When she threatens to drive the English from the soil of France she is undoubtedly thinking of the whole extent of country in which French is spoken. To her the French-speaking people are what the Holy Scriptures describe as a nation. Call this side of her heresy Nationalism if you will: I can find you no better name for it. I can only tell you that it is essentially anti-Catholic and antichristian; for the Catholic Church knows only one realm, and that is the realm of Christ’s kingdom. Divide that kingdom into nations, and you dethrone Christ. Dethrone Christ, and who will stand between our throats and the sword? The world will perish in a welter of war. | | Warwick | Well, if you will burn the Protestant, I will burn the Nationalist, though perhaps I shall not carry Messire John with me there. England for the English will appeal to him. | | The Chaplain | Certainly England for the English goes without saying: it is the simple law of nature. But this woman denies to England her legitimate conquests, given her by God because of her peculiar fitness to rule over less civilized races for their own good. I do not understand what your lordships mean by Protestant and Nationalist: you are too learned and subtle for a poor clerk like myself. But I know as a matter of plain common sense that the woman is a rebel; and that is enough for me. She rebels against Nature by wearing man’s clothes, and fighting. She rebels against The Church by usurping the divine authority of the Pope. She rebels against God by her damnable league with Satan and his evil spirits against our army. And all these rebellions are only excuses for her great rebellion against England. That is not to be endured. Let her perish. Let her burn. Let her not infect the whole flock. It is expedient that one woman die for the people. | | Warwick | Rising. My lord: we seem to be agreed. | | Cauchon | Rising also, but in protest. I will not imperil my soul. I will uphold the justice of the Church. I will strive to the utmost for this woman’s salvation. | | Warwick | I am sorry for the poor girl. I hate these severities. I will spare her if I can. | | The Chaplain | Implacably. I would burn her with my own hands. | | Cauchon | Blessing him. Sancta simplicitas! |