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Debate:Did Joan of Arc truly hear voices? (view source)
Revision as of 00:17, February 19, 2007
, 00:17, February 19, 2007no edit summary
The [[Catholic Church]] believes that she did hear voices. I have read many books and she is one of my favorite saints. Most know her because she fought the British in the [[Hundred Years War]] and her burning at the stake for heresy and witchcraft; condemn to death by [[Pierre Cauchon]] Bishop of Beauvais. He was a very bad bishop as most know and was actually forgiven by Joan and her mother. But i do believe that she did hear voices. --[[User:Will N.|Will N.]] 18:16, 18 February 2007 (EST)
The [[Catholic Church]] believes that she did hear voices. I have read many books and she is one of my favorite saints. Most know her because she fought the British in the [[Hundred Years War]] and her burning at the stake for heresy and witchcraft; condemn to death by [[Pierre Cauchon]] Bishop of Beauvais. He was a very bad bishop as most know and was actually forgiven by Joan and her mother. But i do believe that she did hear voices. --[[User:Will N.|Will N.]] 18:16, 18 February 2007 (EST)
==George Bernard Shaw's take==
For what it's worth:
:Joan's voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation. They have been held to prove that she was mad, that she was a liar and impostor, that she was a sorceress (she was burned for this), and finally that she was a saint. They do not prove any of these things; but the variety of the conclusions reached shew how little our matter-of-fact historians know about other people's minds, or even about their own. ... the seers of visions and the hearers of revelations are not always criminals. The inspirations and intuitions and unconsciously reasoned conclusions of genius sometimes assume similar illusions. Socrates, Luther, Swedenborg, Blake saw visions and heard voices just as Saint Francis and Saint Joan did. If Newton's imagination had been of the same vividly dramatic kind he might have seen the ghost of Pythagoras walk into the orchard and explain why the apples were falling. Such an illusion would have invalidated neither the theory of gravitation nor Newton's general sanity. What is more, the visionary method of making the discovery would not be a whit more miraculous than the normal method. The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would have been locked up. Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which fitted remarkably well into the Copernican version of the observed physical facts of the universe, established Newton's reputation for extraordinary intelligence, and would have done so no matter how fantastically he had arrived at it.
:In the same way Joan must be judged a sane woman in spite of her voices because they never gave her any advice that might not have come to her from her mother wit exactly as gravitation came to Newton....
[[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith]] 19:17, 18 February 2007 (EST)
*[[http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200811h.html Saint Joan], Project Gutenberg of Australia text.