Saint Joan : $b A chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogueShaw, Bernard
HistoryHistory
Saint Joan : $b A chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue
Shaw, Bernard
Christian women saints -- Drama; France -- History -- Charles VII, 1422-1461 -- Drama; Joan, of Arc, Saint, 1412-1431 -- Drama
All the popular religions in the world are made apprehensible by an
array of legendary personages, with an Almighty Father, and sometimes a
mother and divine child, as the central figures. These are presented to
the mind’s eye in childhood; and the result is a hallucination which
persists strongly throughout life when it has been well impressed. Thus
all the thinking of the hallucinated adult about the fountain of
inspiration which is continually flowing in the universe, or about the
promptings of virtue and the revulsions of shame: in short, about
aspiration and conscience, both of which forces are matters of fact more
obvious than electro-magnetism, is thinking in terms of the celestial
vision. And when in the case of exceptionally imaginative persons,
especially those practising certain appropriate austerities, the
hallucination extends from the mind’s eye to the body’s, the visionary
sees Krishna or the Buddha or the Blessed Virgin or St Catherine as the
case may be.
The Modern Education which Joan escaped.
It is important to everyone nowadays to understand this, because modern
science is making short work of the hallucinations without regard to the
vital importance of the things they symbolize. If Joan were reborn today
she would be sent, first to a convent school in which she would be
mildly taught to connect inspiration and conscience with St Catherine
and St Michael exactly as she was in the fifteenth century, and then
finished up with a very energetic training in the gospel of Saints Louis
Pasteur and Paul Bert, who would tell her (possibly in visions but more
probably in pamphlets) not to be a superstitious little fool, and to
empty out St Catherine and the rest of the Catholic hagiology as an
obsolete iconography of exploded myths. It would be rubbed into her that
Galileo was a martyr, and his persecutors incorrigible ignoramuses, and
that St Teresa’s hormones had gone astray and left her incurably
hyperpituitary or hyperadrenal or hysteroid or epileptoid or anything
but asteroid. She would have been convinced by precept and experiment
that baptism and receiving the body of her Lord were contemptible
superstitions, and that vaccination and vivisection were enlightened
practices. Behind her new Saints Louis and Paul there would be not only
Science purifying Religion and being purified by it, but hypochondria,
melancholia, cowardice, stupidity, cruelty, muckraking curiosity,
knowledge without wisdom, and everything that the eternal soul in Nature
loathes, instead of the virtues of which St Catherine was the figure
head. As to the new rites, which would be the saner Joan? the one who
carried little children to be baptized of water and the spirit, or the
one who sent the police to force their parents to have the most
villainous racial poison we know thrust into their veins? the one who
told them the story of the angel and Mary, or the one who questioned
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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