Saint Joan : $b A chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue — John Shaqi
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
them as to their experiences of the Edipus complex? the one to whom the
consecrated wafer was the very body of the virtue that was her
salvation, or the one who looked forward to a precise and convenient
regulation of her health and her desires by a nicely calculated diet of
thyroid extract, adrenalin, thymin, pituitrin, and insulin, with
pick-me-ups of hormone stimulants, the blood being first carefully
fortified with antibodies against all possible infections by
inoculations of infected bacteria and serum from infected animals, and
against old age by surgical extirpation of the reproductive ducts or
weekly doses of monkey gland?
It is true that behind all these quackeries there is a certain body of
genuine scientific physiology. But was there any the less a certain body
of genuine psychology behind St Catherine and the Holy Ghost? And which
is the healthier mind? the saintly mind or the monkey gland mind? Does
not the present cry of Back to the Middle Ages, which has been
incubating ever since the pre-Raphaelite movement began, mean that it is
no longer our Academy pictures that are intolerable, but our credulities
that have not the excuse of being superstitions, our cruelties that have
not the excuse of barbarism, our persecutions that have not the excuse
of religious faith, our shameless substitution of successful swindlers
and scoundrels and quacks for saints as objects of worship, and our
deafness and blindness to the calls and visions of the inexorable power
that made us, and will destroy us if we disregard it? To Joan and her
contemporaries we should appear as a drove of Gadarene swine, possessed
by all the unclean spirits cast out by the faith and civilization of the
Middle Ages, running violently down a steep place into a hell of high
explosives. For us to set up our condition as a standard of sanity, and
declare Joan mad because she never condescended to it, is to prove that
we are not only lost but irredeemable. Let us then once for all drop all
nonsense about Joan being cracked, and accept her as at least as sane as
Florence Nightingale, who also combined a very simple iconography of
religious belief with a mind so exceptionally powerful that it kept her
in continual trouble with the medical and military panjandrums of her
time.
Failures of the Voices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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