Wow, that was long. And interesting in the bits I read/scanned. But I must have missed somewhere what the essay is a "review" of. I thought maybe it would end up being about Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc but no. Or perhaps review in this case means historical summary.
Except that one asshole who "reviewed" The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe by saying "It's good. Read it." Wasted a perfectly good slot on the Book Review series last year.
If it is Scott, then he is has deliberately changed his style a bit, inserting 98 footnotes is not usual for him. I am also not sure that the author is enthusiastic about exactly the things Scott would be enthusiastic about. I would expect Scott to care more about the psychiatric side of things and less about breastplates, personally.
Also, if this is indeed Scott, I must conclude that he possesses a time-turner.
The writing was overall enjoyable, but there were a few needlessly complicated sentences and the occasional forgotten word. Nothing major in relation to the length of the essay, but I found it noticable, and less careful than Scott's.
I think I have a pretty good guess as to who wrote this, and I don't think it's Scott. But they're both quite engaging writers on a sentence-by-sentence basis, in a way that's not common even among people who make the finals.
I am nitpicking, but I am from Newcastle so Bede is one of my local saints. Bede was born in 672 and Cuthbert died in 687. Cuthbert lived and died in Lindisfarne, about 60 miles up the coast from where Bede was in Jarrow. At the very least, Bede knew people who had met and talked to Cuthbert, he did not need a book written twenty years later. I think that this illustrates that you do not need distance or time to create fantastic stories about heroes.
Artillery would have been a fairly novel aspect of European warfare at the time, wouldn't it? If so, there wasn't yet a large body of hard-won practical knowledge that one had to internalize just to get to the level of the average artillery strategist. That's exactly the sort of environment where one would expect a gifted but untutored novice to excel. It doesn't look very miraculous.
It indeed was fairly novel. During the second phase of the Hundred Year's war, France was the first European country to make a mass use of artillery, notably under the command of Jean Bureau which was a key figure of this phase of the conflict.
Depends on what you mean by "novel". Cannons were used in European warfare since at least the 14th century. They were notably present during the Siege of Marienburg in 1410, before Joan was even born. The issue was more that the metalworking technology of the day was too primitive to contain the pressure needed to use cannons like artillery. They were more akin to large shotguns that were loaded with arrows or shrapnel, although larger bombard cannons used in sieges did develop around this time period. Most famously at the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
>That's exactly the sort of environment where one would expect a gifted but untutored novice to excel.
Is it? If nobody knows how to use cannons, then it seems more miraculous to me that a random peasant girl knew how to use them. After all, it would make it even more unlikely that somebody trained her on the side, since there are less people who know how to do it available.
The key word here is "untutored". I'm assuming that nobody taught her on the side.
Let me explain another way: if nobody knows how to use cannons, then a random person without any teaching is as likely to be the best as anyone else (and if they're unusually clever, even more likely). That only becomes unlikely as the body of knowledge around the use of cannons builds, and the level of skill among cannoneers rises.
Another illustrative example: imagine that chess had just been invented a week ago. The first major tournament has just been held, and there's another in one week. Take a gifted youngster who's never studied the game but is otherwise very smart and interested. They may have decent odds of being able to win the next major tournament, just by thinking about the game and coming up with new ideas! This is because there is still lots of low-hanging strategic fruit that hasn't been thought of and countered yet. But 500 years later, all that fruit is gone - people tried all those strategies, won some games with them, then other people figured out how to counter those strategies, etc. So our gifted youngster gets crushed in their first tournament, because now they're playing against Magnus Carlsen. The top is much higher than it used to be, and you can't get there just by being clever anymore. You have to study the game's strategies at length to have a chance.
That's how I would explain Joan of Arc's success with artillery: because nobody really knew what they were doing yet, and because she was unusually clever and motivated, she was able to come up with a lot of good ideas that nobody had thought of yet. Because when it came to artillery, nobody had thought of much at all, yet.
So, I'm a big fan of this review, and I understand that the author doesn't contend actual divine intervention on her behalf, but presents documentation of a life which is, in conventional terms, pretty hard to explain.
But I'd like to note that some of this becomes, I think, more explicable, with the context that Jean didn't actually need extraordinary abilities of military command to achieve success above the baseline that the French forces were experiencing before her. The French nobility at the time were extremely fractious and jockeying for power, and battles at the time were often terribly coordinated, with different nobles failing to use the forces under their control cooperatively, because they were all aiming for their own glory more than collective success.
I'm afraid that I can't cite a specific source, because this comes from some book I read over a decade ago, whose title I can't remember, but it documented some firsthand accounts of Jean's participation in some battles at the time, where various nobles were all in disagreement about when to attack. Jean deployed her own forces into battle at a time that the various leaders generally considered stupid and reckless, but they felt forced to send their own forces in after her to salvage the situation, and although the timing was bad, they thereby achieved better coordination than they would have without a schelling point to rally around.
Jean definitely achieved greater success than other leaders at the time, but it seems that her contemporaries did not hold any kind of unanimous consensus that she was actually competent at what she was doing; it seems that some of them saw her as reckless and constantly needing to be bailed out of the consequences of her own poor judgment. I don't know any firsthand sources that address whether she was actually skilled in martial disciplines like the use of the sword or lance, and I have spent some time looking; I think it's likely that she wasn't actually particularly skilled in these areas either, but as a military leader, she didn't particularly need to be, and any attributions of her being exceptionally skilled were likely confabulations after the fact.
There's still plenty left over about Jean's life afterwards which is strange and exceptional, but I think it would be a mistake to imagine that it takes decades for a person to become shrouded in rumor, and for stories about them to become more grounded in legend than true recollection.
I believe that there are several martial disciplines that she could have learned on the farm, without much in the way of teaching. Horsemanship, in particular, was learnable on a farm, in that the same horses were used for heavy cavalry as for pulling a plough. And she'd have learned it better bareback than in a saddle. Lance, too, is about aim -- it's not something you really need to have a partner to learn.
"Horsemanship, in particular, was learnable on a farm, in that the same horses were used for heavy cavalry as for pulling a plough."
This is absolutely not true. Warhorses were specially bred for aggression and speed, and were a prized and expensive possession of the nobility. Plough horses needed to be docile and have long term endurance, which selected for rather different traits. Maybe you could learn to ride a horse in the general sense as a 15th century French peasant, but it certainly would not be the same as riding a warhorse into battle with full kit.
I don't think you were breeding warhorses for aggression. You'd breed them for "steadiness" and ability to be turned while using "no hands."
Still point taken -- there are different horses. I'm still going to maintain that any of the heavier breeds are in general less "flighty" than Arabians, and not bred to be high-strung.
Aggression was important, because a horse is naturally averse to charging into a mass of other people/animals. We know that warhorses were indeed aggressive due to accounts of them generally being temperamental and on occasion a hazard even to their own handlers.
I saw you mentioned Shire horses in another comment, but I think you had it backwards. The European Destrier, or great horse, was often used as a warhorse before the widespread adoption of gunpowder. After this, mobility became more important than brute strength and most cavalry transitioned to lighter horse. Possibly modern draft breeds like the Shire are descendants of the old great horse after it no longer had a place on the battlefield; but this is disputed due to the various physical differences between martial and draft horses.
Lindybeige had a recent video about how horses were trained to charge masses of pikemen though a few months of conditioning them not to associate that with danger (by having a "dummy" group of people who all move out of the way): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zviMg5Bkt8g.
If that's historically accurate – it sounds plausible to me – aggression wouldn't be as important as mass and trainability.
And about being "temperamental" hazards to their trainers, that fits with them being skittish, easily frightened and hurting people while panicking, quite the opposite of being aggressive.
Specifically, they tended to bite or kick people. Which would be handy if you were surrounded by a bunch of hostile infantry. On charging into pikes, that one is pretty contentious. I know Brett Deveraux wrote a piece in support of the "that didn't actually happen" camp.
This discussion is reminding me of a favorite scene from The Dark Tower series: Roland of Gilead, on horseback, charging at an army of his foes holding the reins in his teeth, one huge revolver in each hand, shooting both at once.
Sigh. Sure, Stephen King is where you go to find historical accuracy. And someone can surf Los Angeles (Let's cite Niven while we're at it, another person not known for "historical accuracy" so much as "it looks cool.")
You're not providing the proper stimulus with "reins in your teeth" so it's equivalent to "dropped reins" -- which is what normal people train their horses to do, if they're ever expecting to not be using their reins (Western riding does this a lot, being used for roping and other farm labor).
I'd be extremely surprised if that was the case. Remember, most deliberate breeding organizations weren't started until the 1800s (thoroughbreds with their 1791 stud book were one of the first). France had a few royal studs in the 1300s at least (La Feuillie, Saint-Rome, and Breuil), but at least one of those had shut down by 1400 and I'm not seeing anything about the others then. The oldest stud farm I know had a notable impact was the Royal Stables of Cordoba, and that wasn't built until 1570.
Remember also that modern conceptions of both historical plow horse and historical war horses are highly inaccurate - for instance both are generally pictured as being a similar size to modern draft horses or at least Friesians, but actually the very largest few horses were about the size of modern warmbloods and many would today be considered ponies. See https://phys.org/news/2022-01-medieval-warhorses-surprisingly-small-stature.html
The Romans certainly had horse breeders that were capable of artificially selecting based on traits. It's believed that at least some of these lines persisted through the Merovingians (Franks). To what extent deliberate horse breeding in France existed between the time of Charlemagne and Joan of Arc, I'm not sure. It's also difficult because medieval sources refer to horses by their role rather than breed.
That would be because there were no breeds, in the modern sense, at least not in France. There were landraces, and royal stud farms could sometimes have some influence over the local landrace, but within a given region a role is the closest you're going to get.
And sure, horse breeders have been artificially selecting traits since the Bronze Age (grug like red horse because pretty: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5102060/ ) But breeding for personality is tricky even nowadays. The Bedouin managed it for their war mares by carefully memorizing their lineages (let's not question how those notes would transfer when a horse is stolen), but most other horse breeders were less organized. I'm still pretty skeptical about it for this region and time period.
> (let's not question how those notes would transfer when a horse is stolen)
Any formal request for a stolen horse to be returned would surely include unambiguous description of the exact horse in question, and there'd be no reason not to recite lineages as part of that.
I think this is the missing part of the argument. Her military results are outstanding, but her strategy seems to be very heavy on “throw the whole army at them” shock tactics. Taking from the build-up, I don’t understand what she was doing to not get shredded by longbows. All this requires extreme piety, charisma and self belief but not much else. Tends towards mad as opposed to faking it.
As for military skills, she’s got a month to learn to wear armour and control a warhorse, which is doable. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that she’s storming in like Master Chief and killing 500 Englishmen single-handedly. Not dying is notable but not out of distribution.
The predictions seem pretty “eh.” The wind one was cool, ignoring that it’s not technically a prediction, but it’s the sort of “darndest thing” story you get all the time, as is the cannonball. The grand scale predictions are run of the mill for charismatic leaders, and the fact she was the 1 in 50 where it paid off is why we’re talking about her.
The trial skills are a matter of taste. They remind me of all Jesus’ irritating non-answers in the gospel, and of my broader experience of having to cross-examine grandiose buffoons; they’re not heresy because she doesn’t say all that much beyond not doubting the pope and only reporting what the voices told her.
Overall, it looks like impressive results attributable to conviction and charisma resulting from insanity.
> Taking from the build-up, I don’t understand what she was doing to not get shredded by longbows.
Archers are light infantry, who are typically vulnerable to heavy cavalry (knights), who despite what the above post said were known to put armor on their horses (although I don't know if that was commonly the case in this conflict). If horses have to charge through a muddy field (as at Agincourt), that does much to negate their advantage. It should be noted that the English continued to rely on knights in their wars (including civil wars) rather than thinking they could just rely on longbows to negate them. Getting spearmen (heavy infantry) to stand in place against a horse charge actually undermined the dominance of knights, but it was hard to do that in the medieval era and it took a long time before Swiss pikemen emerged as able to do it reliably.
What's fun for me about this is I used to be an agnostic secular humanist semi-rationalist (postrat?) who became a Mutazili Muslim (the most rationalist type of Muslim) and I have a model of divine guidance in history involving a series of persons like this and God tilting various political factions based on how less wrong they were about divine justice and theology.
So this checks out.
Little things like the cannonball dodge are how miracles work. I've experienced a few of these such as an accidental trade on the day of my son's birth based on some risk-management orders I forget to cancel that knocked me into a massive long (the orders were to unwind funding arbitrage positions, long/short big size to earn a few basis points over time) and I paid for my house with that, then became more religious.
I think Islam is more correct than Christianity but Muslims cheesed it up so much that Protestants who were slightly less corrupt got the edge but now that the US is fully supporting mass starvation the ball may well slide into China's court despite them being atheist, that's how Less Wrong divine favor works. Humans are very bad and God doesn't have a lot to work with in terms of optimizations. A reformed Muslim confederation of nations could also get a lot more power or a gaggle of loosely assorted "network state" parties if the Muslims don't figure it out (and let's be honest we're not sending our best).
The artillery question is really the uh... smoking gun for the Joan investigation. One thing you learn contemplating theology is to not quibble over direct vs. proxy concepts of divinity, sure God is One, above all etc. but when it comes down to free will vs. determinism, divine agents vs. divine acts, just go with the flow you can sharpshoot all combinations into an attribution bias if you're faithful enough. One thing you learn from studying hadith, gospels etc. is that indeed history is a major wikipedia edit tournament in the making for hundreds of years without a meta-data record of edits, psuedo-epigripha and such, and it's more egregious the further back you go in history but doesn't much improve. Which is why the Qur'an being widely considered by non-believing academics to be historically intact from the 600s is so exceptional - one might say miraculously so - you can't really say that about much documentation until perhaps before WWI, perhaps the 1850s, maybe 1600s kinda.
The attempts to do revisionism on the Gaza Genocide have been noted and have largely failed because people who are actively starving or semi-starving are posting live video on Twitter from their phones and these things mirror onto new media. I saw some pro-genocide account posting about how the NYTimes is anti-semetic because their photo of a near-death starving child didn't diclose he has cerebral pasly, - not correlated to starvation! - the only thing that can reverse this trend of well-documented live history would be AI deepfakes saturating fog of war once again.
"Walter not everything has to do with the Gazan genocide?"
"Well it has something to do with it"
"No Walter!"
"Dude the supreme court has roundly rejected prior restraint!"
> "The attempts to do revisionism on the Gaza Genocide have been noted and have largely failed because people who are actively starving or semi-starving are posting live video on Twitter from their phones"
Some of these pics are obviously fake, unless extremely rubenesque mothers taking videos of their skeletal offspring doesn't raise any red flags for you.
tl;dr the penultimate phase of starvation before autophagyian and then death is fat liquidation, so an adult woman with a hormonal tendency to accumualte fat reserves foremost among the demographics of our species is going to be emaciated later than her young child who has far less accumulated reserves.
Oh, okay, so I assume we have photographic evidence for 200-pound jewish mothers waddling around the yard in Auschwitz while their daughters were reduced to emaciated husks, because they were fasting on slightly different timelines. Suuuuure.
By the way, if the Israelis were planning a genocide and thought they could get away with it, why not just turn off the water supply on day one?
I'm not intimately familiar with the causes of death which were most typical at different concentration camps, but life-threatening malnutrition was clearly a problem for a lot of jewish inmates in the death-camp system more broadly. My point is that I don't think there's any historical precedent for a population afflicted by mass starvation where you see chubby mothers and skeletal children.
The thing is, there is a plausible case that Gaza actually *will* enter a state of famine in the not-so-distant future, but left-wing reporting on the topic has been so consistently hysterical, retarded and partisan that it's hard to take the pro-Palestine camp seriously at this point.
The Israelis aren't planning a genocide. It would be more accurate to say the Israeli establishment is in a state of political quagmire, with the result that they have no overarching plan at all. This is bad, but it's a different problem.
I know this is not the same, but what we have testimonies for is fat women being killed off upon arrival at camp - and being used basically as kindling in crematoria (which were highly efficient machines, designed by German engineers, and kept going by workmen who were instructed to save on fuel). Burning humans is exothermic; all the precious coal goes into getting things started, and desiccating the corpses enough so that the reaction will keep going - and people with lots of subcutaneous fat are great for that.
Women who were not killed on arrival were those who were fit for hard physical labor, and hence, by definition, not very overweight. Yes, it did not take all that long for them to be emaciated and for the great majority of them to die.
"why not just turn off the water supply on day one?"
Are you serious? They did exactly that. On day one.
I mean at the start of the war, don't know the exact day.
It was not enough to exterminate Gaza, because much of the water used by Gaza is local. However, Gazans need energy to purify it.
Leading Israeli strategist Giora Eiland proposed at the start of the war that Israel blockade both water and energy/fuel, so that Gazans be forced to consume dirty water, which would cause epidemics and thus a humanitarian crisis, which would benefit Israel. Minister Smotrich tweeted approvingly a piece by Eiland making that case.
Israel did exactly all those thing. No water, no energy, no food and no medicine enters Gaza. They declared as much at the start of the war, but soon after they were forced to allow aid trucks due to international pressure, then this year with Trump in power they went back to total blockade, and as far as I can tell there's still no water, energy, or medicine entering Gaza, and only an insufficient amount of food due to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distributing deliberately insufficient amounts of food.
Gazans are drinking dirty, salty, unhealthy water.
(The following is a cut and paste from that site. You can go there and download the audio of the interview in Hebrew.)
“Israel, as I understand, closed the water supply to Gaza,” said Eiland in a Hebrew-language interview. “But there are many wells in Gaza, which contain water which they treat locally, since originally they contain salt. If the energy shortage in Gaza makes it so that they stop pumping out water, that’s good. Otherwise we have to attack these water treatment plants in order to create a situation of thirst and hunger in Gaza, and I would say, forewarn of an unprecedented economical and humanitarian crisis.”
The interviewer pushed back. “Giora, I want to check that I understand correctly. You are saying—get the residents of Gaza into thirst, into hunger. These are the terms you are using?”
“You understood correctly,” he said.
(My note: the issue is not just salt. It's contamination form a variety of sources, which seeps into the aquifer. Salt is in the aquifer water only in moderate amount. If the issue were salt, consumption of such water couldn't possibly cause the epidemics that Eiland himself says he hopes for).
> "If the energy shortage in Gaza makes it so that they stop pumping out water, that’s good. Otherwise we have to attack these water treatment plants"
You're not refuting my point here at all. It would have been trivial for Israel to bomb the wells and water treatment facilities and cut off all other imports of food, water, fuel and energy. The result would presumably have been hundreds of thousands of dead Gazans in a matter of weeks (unless Hamas were forced to surrender and/or the population revolted against them, which might have been the other desired outcome. I can't read Eiland's piece, but Smotrich, in any case, is the not the whole of the Israeli government. I do know the Israelis went to considerable lengths to repair the strip's infrastructure when damaged.)
It would also have been trivial to *not* issue weeks of advance warning for civilians to evacuate northern Gaza before the initial bombing campaign, or issue warnings of any description for civilians to evacuate combat zones, or to not risk ground troops at all and continue exclusively with aerial bombardments. It seems pretty obvious to me that if the Israelis wanted there to be 2 million dead Gazans, there would be 2 million dead Gazans.
If you want to argue that the Israelis are only restrained by international pressure, go ahead (although I think that's debatable.) My original remark was pushing back against this preposterous notion that Israel somehow has the ability and willingness to commit genocide in broad daylight and also get away with it. If the ZOG has to answer to the international community, then the ZOG is not a real thing.
This also doesn't change anything I said about the claims of mass starvation in the Gaza strip. If it were happening, there would be emaciated corpses of all ages stacked in the street, and hundreds of thousands dead, as you can actually see in Yemen or Sudan. This is not something we have photo evidence for in Gaza.
It's more recent than the two other abrahamic religions, so it's better documented how it was made up. It tends to be more radical and less rationalist in general. It's not prevalent in the west so you don't get family or social pressure to belong.
Thanks for the comment, I'm actually really interested in hearing more backstory of a rationalist convert to Islam!
Somewhat related, I recall a review last year of a book about a former ISIS fighter who became a UK spy (while remaining muslim). As I recall, the pivotal moment for him was going in person to research various hadiths, and finding that what was _actually_ in them vs what was _claimed_ to be in them varied quite a bit. The review author talked about being impressed that people whom we normally think of as unreachable zealots could, in fact, be persuaded by evidence. The reviewer suggested that one thing the world greatly needs is:
"Authenticity of the various hadiths: much more than you wanted to know"
I realize I'm out on a limb here, but what you've written so far implies you might be an excellent candidate for such a project...
That’s a very interesting perspective. However, I see at least one inconsistency.
According to your worldview, God should have favored the Roman Empire when it massively converted to Christianity. After all, early Christianity was much closer to the true God than Roman paganism.
Yet, Christianity, at least indirectly, led to the fall of the Roman Empire. How do you explain that?
Regardless of what happens to Roman Empire, for some reason Christianity spreads far and wide to northern and western Europe. It can be noted that some of barbarians that sack Rome have themselves converted to Christianity (and even of the Arian Christianity which is said to have purer monotheism). I haven't looked closely if there are more contradictions and epicycles involved, but at least it's not as simple as that.
Most barbarians were also Christians, not sure whether a Muslim would have strong opinions on why Allah would prefer Catholics to Arians (who would convert to Catholicism shortly thereafter anyway).
Alas, I'd be curious why you assert with such confidence that Christianity contributed to the demise of the empire. Afaik, the most traditional explanations simply start from false facts, and the more sophisticated ones are fallacious (eg it's true that many rich Roman families bid their fortunes on ecclesiastic careers rather than civil or military ones, but that was because the state was already rotting. It's reverse causality.).
"people who are actively starving or semi-starving are posting live video on Twitter from their phones"
Could you link to a picture or video of someone in Gaza, without a congenital disease, not an Israeli hostage, who one can see from the picture or video to be starving? I have been unable to find such an image. So has the world media apparently, given how they keep publishing pictures of kids with congenital diseases.
I didn't have to work hard to find them. They've all been posted in the last 5 days on the same Substack account ("Laith”) (but in some cases the link I give is to the source that must have been used by “Laith”). All I had to do is scroll a little. I could find lots and lots more very easily, just by scrolling a bit more, or by looking into the many other pro-Palestine corners of the internet where there is a constant, overwhelming flood of images of starving Gazans. I can’t stress enough how easy it is to find lots and lots more.
It’s a flood of images that started relatively recently, coincidentally about a couple months after the Israelis declared the total blockade of aid. Throughout the previous year the Palestinians were already saying that Israel was trying to limit the food entering Gaza, but images of starvation like this were not there yet (at least not in such abundance). Had it been possible for the Palestinians to show us such images back then, we would have seen them. But we see them only now. This suggests that this state of thing is a direct consequence of Israel’s relatively recent complete blockade policy.
Note, by the way, that the “Gaza humanitarian foundation” is not actually trying to feed Gaza. They themselves will tell us how much food they distribute. Perhaps they count on people being bad with numbers because it’s obviously not enough, not by a long shot. The purpose of the GHF is to pretend they’re not starving Gaza while they starve Gaza.
It’s no surprise that babies and children starve before their parents do. Babies and children starve faster. I hear that one reason babies starve is that their mothers aren’t eating enough to produce milk, and Israel won’t let baby formula enter Gaza.
Do any of these children have “congenital diseases?” Beats me. How would I know. But if diseases are particularly deadly in Gaza it’s because Israel won’t let medicine enter the Strip. Recently Israel posted this to prove that images of starvation are fake:
But why did that man wither and die? Because his diabetes was “untreated”, and why was it untreated? If he needed insulin he couldn’t get any because Israel won't let insulin enter Gaza. On top of having bombed all hospitals.
"I think Islam is more correct than Christianity but Muslims cheesed it up so much that Protestants who were slightly less corrupt got the edge"
"cheese it up"
"to cheese up"
Of all the untranslatable words in the English language, the most mysterious to me are the verb "to cheese", the adjective "cheesy", the noun "cheese" when it doesn't refer to food, and now that I hear it for the first time "to cheese up".
I would be sincerely grateful if you or anyone else explained to this ignorant foreigner the meaning of that sentence, and hopefully the mysterious broader meaning of "cheese", "to cheese" and "cheesy".
Without looking at a slang dictionary I'd say it translates to "fake and dumb". I used "cheesy" just last night about parts of an otherwise good movie that didn't have a good fight director / choreographer, so the action sequences broke my immersion in the film.
I have no idea where it came from. Maybe there's a relationship to (utterly fake, and arguably dumb) "American Cheese (food products)"? Makes superficial sense, so I'll roll with it.
Anyway. Cheesy can be fun! I mean, *Point Break* (along with just about everything else in Patrick Swayze's oeuvre) is pure cheese, but, like, I dare you not to enjoy it. Similarly, Tex-mex queso dip is pure American Cheese (food product), but you're guaranteed to eat too much of a good one. The appeal, however, is surface-level: not based on any sophisticated or enduring (aesthetic or otherwise) principles - except insofar as hot guys doing dumb shit and specific ratios of salt and fat are reliably and respectively brain- and tongue-tickling.
Anyway, that's how I'd interpret his comment: Muslims added dumb fake shit (I don't know what - ask him) that appeals to the lowest common denominator, but lowers overall theological quality.
France is mostly cursed because of the French. I like how they finessed getting the English to kill her so they could blame them and act like she was their amazing girl. The Monty Python skit always comes to mind when I think of the French.
If you read the literature on auditory hallucinations, Joan's symptoms match nearly perfectly. I think it's nearly beyond dispute that she was in fact hearing voices and not just faking it for fame/credibility.
Of course, what we call auditory hallucinations could in this case actually be the voices of saints (please don't tell your neighborhood schizophrenic about this).
Here's my theory of what was going on, offered as one thought among many:
1) Joan of Arc was extremely intelligent. Like Von Neumann level or higher, though focused in rather different directions.
2) My model of intelligence is that what it mainly represents is learning rate. High intelligence means fast, intuitive learning. People who are intelligent make better predictions because they know more things. Not necessarily in a way fully available to conscious processing, but more in the way that an LLM "knows" things it was trained on and the right prompt can elicit those things.
3) Consciousness is very flexible. We tend to think in terms of a "homunculus" that drives our behavior but this is an illusion. People who believe in spirit possession can easily be possessed, which doesn't mean actual supernatural entities, but rather an altered state of consciousness in which the mind reinterprets how decisions are being made to attribute them to an external spirit instead of an internal homunculus (both equally fictional).
4) Joan of Arc, a naturally pious peasant girl living in late medieval france, ended up adopting a frame that all of her intelligent insights came from an external source: God. This made a lot of sense to everyone (including her) because the types of thoughts her brain was generating seemed wildly implausible to be coming from a random peasant girl.
5) Her high learning rate included physical tasks like riding, lancing, etc. Some people are just really good at this. They can see you do something once or twice and immediately copy it almost perfectly. She didn't need to be trained at this explicitly because she was spending a fair amount of time around military people so she just naturally absorbed it all. It also helped that this fit within her "chosen by god" frame. Without that frame in place her unconscious mind might have blocked her from getting too good at things she wasn't supposed to be good at (I expect this happens all the time in all sorts of cultural contexts. Often, "training" exists to create a social context for learning that isn't necessarily that difficult once you convince the learning part of your brain that it's supposed to care about this stuff).
6) She also got very good at theology for similar reasons. Think of her almost like a rogue superintelligence picking up on clues nobody else would even realize are there. Not necessarily in a conscious way, but as a constant background task. When challenged on theological matters, she knew enough theology to triangulate the rest, at least enough of it that it was difficult to catch her slipping up. Notably it helps that she can dodge lots of questions by saying God told her what to do directly.
I already brought this up in my own comment a while ago, but I don't think the primary source material substantiates the idea that Jean was actually especially competent at skills like riding, swordsmanship, lancing, etc, but these sorts of skills weren't particularly material to her success as a commander, and it's easy for people to confabulate stories about them after the fact, when she's already famous as a miraculously successful leader. Some people are notably physically gifted and quick to pick up athletic skills, although I don't think this correlates particularly well with cognitive intelligence, but I don't think we have to suppose that Jean was to make sense of her story.
I also don't think she necessarily needed much expertise in theology. All accounts agree that she was notably charismatic, and it's probable that she was quite good at reading people, assessing intent, etc. I don't think I'm by any means exceptional at reading people, but reading through the questions that she was supposedly asked in her interrogation, before reading her answers, I could intuit the sort of answers they were trying to get out of her, and think of ways out of them similar to the ones she offered, just given the context that they were hostile interrogators asking her leading questions trying to catch her in some sort of heresy, and thinking "Assuming that this question is intended to lead me into admitting heresy, what might that heresy entail, and how would I avoid that?" I'm not operating under stress or strict time pressure, but I also didn't have any nonverbal cues from the interrogators to draw on. All in all, I don't think this is a particularly hard feat to explain given ordinary human abilities.
We ALSO don't need to say that she didn't know horseback riding before she was 15. Or, perhaps, lance-holding. Riding is something perfectly practiceable on a farm (heavy horse at the time being both used for battle and for farmwork, I believe -- citing Shire horses as your prototype, though you'd have had a french breed), and one might say she'd have been better learning to ride bareback than with a heavy saddle. Lances, not so much, but much much more likely than swordsmanship (which pretty much requires a partner in order to learn how to counter/defend, and attack weaknesses).
Come to think, swordsmanship on the ground is a "long term learning project" -- how is it on a horse? If you're coming up against pikes, you turn around, but on a horse against footmen, you're above them. Is that significantly easier to learn? I'd wager so.
Re: her swordsmanship skills, from another comment
> As for military skills, she’s got a month to learn to wear armour and control a warhorse, which is doable. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that she’s storming in like Master Chief and killing 500 Englishmen single-handedly. Not dying is notable but not out of distribution.
Most people bow to interrogation. It's why you're advised not to speak to the FBI or the police under any circumstances without legal counsel. Anything you say can and will be used against you.
That said, a particularly smart child could pull off "don't say yes to heresy." A particularly coached adult (like one that's been through a few "extreme" exorcisms, as opposed to the minor exorcism that occurs every Easter Sunday) could do so as well, I believe. [Not that I have the book-learning to know what a "standard" exorcism of the time would have been like.]
Here's one I thought Joan had a very theologically sophisticated answer to when reading quotes from her trial: "Do you know whether or not you are in God's grace?" Try to answer it yourself, avoiding heresy.
ROT13 of Joan's own answer, along with an explanation: Vs V nz abg, znl Tbq chg zr gurer; naq vs V nz, znl Tbq fb xrrc zr. V fubhyq or gur fnqqrfg perngher va gur jbeyq vs V xarj V jrer abg va Uvf tenpr.
Wbna pnaabg fnl "Lrf," nf Pngubyvp qbpgevar ubyqf gung ab bar pna xabj gung gurl ner va n fgngr bs tenpr. Guvf vf abg n gevivny znggre; Cebgrfgnagf bayl n uhaqerq be fb lrnef yngre uryq qvssreragyl, fbzr rira fhttrfgvat gung vs lbh *qvqa'g* xabj lbh jrer va n fgngr bs tenpr, gung vaqvpngrq n qrsvpvrapl va lbhe snvgu.
Wbna tvirf gur pbeerpg Pngubyvp nafjre. Ubcr gung lbh ner va n fgngr bs tenpr, ohg qb abg cerfhzr. Abgr gung ure nafjre urer vf qvssrerag sebz ure nffhenapr gung, riraghnyyl, fur jvyy ernpu fnyingvba. Gur qvfgvapgvba orgjrra "orvat riraghnyyl qrfgvarq sbe fnyingvba" naq "orvat va n fgngr bs tenpr" vf n gurbybtvpnyyl fbcuvfgvpngrq bar, ohg Wbna vf noyr gb anivtngr vg cresrpgyl pbeerpgyl, ol Pngubyvp gurbybtvpny fgnaqneqf.Vs V nz abg, znl Tbq chg zr gurer; naq vs V nz, znl Tbq fb xrrc zr. V fubhyq or gur fnqqrfg perngher va gur jbeyq vs V xarj V jrer abg va Uvf tenpr.
Wbna pnaabg fnl "Lrf," nf Pngubyvp qbpgevar ubyqf gung ab bar pna xabj gung gurl ner va n fgngr bs tenpr. Guvf vf abg n gevivny znggre; Cebgrfgnagf bayl n uhaqerq be fb lrnef yngre uryq qvssreragyl, fbzr rira fhttrfgvat gung vs lbh *qvqa'g* xabj lbh jrer va n fgngr bs tenpr, gung vaqvpngrq n qrsvpvrapl va lbhe snvgu.
Wbna tvirf gur pbeerpg Pngubyvp nafjre. Ubcr gung lbh ner va n fgngr bs tenpr, ohg qb abg cerfhzr. Abgr gung ure nafjre urer vf qvssrerag sebz ure nffhenapr gung, riraghnyyl, fur jvyy ernpu fnyingvba, dhbgrq va gur negvpyr. Gur qvfgvapgvba orgjrra "orvat riraghnyyl qrfgvarq sbe fnyingvba" naq "orvat va n fgngr bs tenpr" vf n irkvat bar, ohg Wbna vf noyr gb anivtngr vg cresrpgyl pbeerpgyl, ol Pngubyvp gurbybtvpny fgnaqneqf. V guvax guvf vfa'g n fznyy srng, naq fhttrfgf fur npghnyyl unq fvtavsvpnag gurbybtvpny yrneavat.
I'll note that as an atheist with not all that much Catholic theology knowledge, I guessed the correct answer immediately, and think most intelligent people would get it right.
So, my answer before reading the decoded text; I can't be sure that I don't remember Jean's answer in some part, but I read the review several weeks ago when it was still among the contenders, and didn't reread my way through it when it was posted as a finalist.
In her place, I would say that I do not know if I am in God's grace, but I hope that if I do as he asks of me, he will be satisfied with my efforts.
My reasoning: If they're asking me this, it's probably because saying "yes" is a trap, while saying "no" suggests I believe I'm acting against the will of God. Claiming certain knowledge that I'm in God's grace could be taken as prideful or presumptuous. However, giving an uncertain but hopeful answer seems to satisfy the attitude that they expect of any faithful laity. Given my contention of being a person who directly hears the voice of God, this seems like a minimally objectionable answer.
Checking the text for a refresher on the answer she actually gave, this seems pretty close to her answer. Note that this doesn't require any particular knowledge of Catholic theology on my part, just a basic understanding of their motives in asking the question.
To both you and Alexander: yes, I think getting the correct answer here as a third party isn't hard. What's surprising, I think, is that the same woman says this as affirms outright that she is destined for Paradise as her voices told her. By your strategy, why doesn't she just say "Well, I certainly hope so," when asked if she believes she's assured of her destination in Paradise? Joan doesn't say that---she just outright says "yes, my voices revealed this to me, and so I believe it"---so it seems like she's applying a more complicated strategy to answer these questions than yours.
Second, again, there are in fact some sects of Christianity, like Protestantism (maybe just magisterial Protestantism? I'm a magisterial Protestant, and don't know if the radical Reformation took a different tack here), where saying that you do not know whether you are in a state of grace or not is the bad answer, and the expected answer is "Yes, I know I am in a state of grace." Even nowadays assurance is really emphasized in some Protestant sects as something that believers have to aim at. Now, Joan was not a Protestant, of course. But this is just to say, there's not a single obvious correct answer that an intelligent person who knows just the basics of Christianity would come to.
My point though is that it doesn't particularly matter if there are other sects of Christianity, and an intelligent person cannot intuit a priori what theology any particular sect would come to based on first principles. Jean doesn't have to intuit her answers based on first principles, she can tailor her answers to the sect of the people interrogating her, based on the sorts of leading questions they're asking her. The people who're actually judging her are also the ones providing cues of what the correct sorts of answers to give are.
I think that Jean almost certainly did genuinely hear voices, so I think her strategy could likely be accounted for through a process of "Honestly report the contents of what the voices have told me as long as it seems safe to do so, wherever necessary give answers that avoid traps where my interrogators appear to be trying to lead me into admissions of heresy."
At least, that's what I'd do if I were in Jean's place, assuming I was receiving auditory hallucinations that I genuinely interpreted as divine guidance, but they didn't actually hand me correct answers to all their questions.
I agree with you about military skills. The reviewer, I think, explains her military success in section 2.3. “Joan's troops would neither charge nor rout without orders,” is not a high bar (at least not the first part). What made her extraordinary is that she was able to in effect lead the army without being given official command of it. In an alternative universe where the the French king had the ability to place his best commander in charge of the military, there would have been no role for Joan of Arc.
The review provides evidence of other military skills, for example the Duke d'Alencon and Marguerite La Touroulde both praise her skill with the lance, but I suspect that this is some combination of her skill exceeding the low expectations for a teenage girl and of people attributing to her the skill level that would normally be associated with her level of military accomplishment.
One thought I haven't seen explicitly: it's possible that a member of the Trial of Condemnation was repulsed by the kangooroo-ness of it all, and was feeding her info about what kinds of question she was likely to be asked (possibly with safe answers). I have zero evidence for this suspicion, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time something similar had happened
3) is helped by poor performance on the marshmallow test. when you are literally a different person than last week's you... yeah, "demonic possession" seems about as plausible as any other explanation for "I didn't do nuttin" (which, if you score poorly enough on the marshmallow test, is kinda true. Yesterday's you did that).
The overall war reminds me of a few other situations from history, like the mid Roman Empire and Song dynasty China. Where you've got a great power that is far more powerful than any of its immediate neighbors, ruled by a single monarch who is in theory "all powerful" but in practice sharply limited by lack of information and fragmented loyalty. So they end up being much more concerned with the threat of a coup d'etat or civil war than with foreign invasion, and deliberately weaken the military to keep the peace. And you see an example of that here where they lost more from Burgundy switching sides than they did from any battle.
This all works well during ordinary times. Even if they lose a minor border war it's no real concern to the monarch and most of his people, who are safe behind many layers of fortifications. The enemy will eventually sign peace for a minor amount of money, or just fragment themselves and go home.
It doesn't work well when you're suddenly confronted with a force that is extremely well organized and intent on taking everything, like the Jin/Mongols against the Song, or in this case the highly centralized and professional army of the Edwards. Then suddenly all your numbers count for nothing, because all your troops are routing in a panic that cascades.
In that situation, where "you" are the young Dauphin, what you need isn't necessarily a brilliant general. In fact that might make things worse, since the brilliant general might just take over for themselves, like Julius Caesar orAn Lushan did. What you want is someone fanatically loyal who can also inspire the troops to be loyal.
Joan seems perfect for that, a fanatic to both king and God. God is conveniently far away in the aether, not a political threat, but makes a great rallying call for everyone, and can inspire the soldiers to fight to the death. Her open, fanatical loyalty to the king inspires others and makes all the other nobles look selfish. So they all kind of follow along behind her, mumbling the right platitudes and getting their soldiers to actually fight in an organized way for once, instead of everyone looking out for themselves. And once you do that, they naturally win the war, since they had a huge advantage in both numbers and most forms of equipment. Along the way she was saying great rallying calls like "we shall surely in the war soon," as if they were prophecies, and then it all gets turned into a miracle after she died.
I don't know, I'm not an expert or religious. But that's my take on it.
This reminds me of Robert E. Lee, in that he was trying to uplift morale via battles (and failed in such a fundamental way that it is difficult to see even a counterfactual of the South winning... and staying together. They'd have been reabsorbed into the Union after fracture, of course).
maybe in some ways, but I don't think that's a good analogue. Politics and morale are important in any war, but the 19th century south was just way more modern than medieval France. They had railroads, newspapers, telegraphs, and a much more cohesive sense of being part of a nation (or at least a state). The medieval people could easily just see themselves as loyal to their local noble, with the king as this far distant figure that they'd never even seen a picture of, who seemed to just extract taxes while providing no useful services.
I imagine the Dauphin meeting random French peasants would be more like King Arthur meeting the peasants in Monty Python ("Who are you? King of the who? I didn't vote for you!")
Hmm, I wasn't trying to argue that he was a genius, just a reasonably sharp guy who understood the predicament he was in. He was "king" in name only, surrounded by nobles who cared more about their own personal gain than the kingdom of France. He needed someone who was loyal to him and could convince others to also be loyal.
Going for Rheims to crown himself king in the traditional way might not make much military sense, but it might have been very politically important to demonstrate his legitimacy as king.
Again, not an expert. But my understanding is that:
For *most* of their rule, they held out quite easily against the Mongols, because they were the Celestial Empire of the Middle Kingdom with Gunpowder and Great Walls and many many people, while the Mongols were just some stinking barbarians on the outskirts... much cheaper to pay them off than to run the risk of funding a standing army.
Until the very end, when they completely forgot that they needed to actually make a real army, and got overran by the Jin (Manchurians), and then the Mongols noticed the chaos and took over from the Jin. It's more of a story of late imperial decadence than the Mongols being invulnerable.
Yeah I was just thinking of the Northern Song in my comment, who really went to great lengths to weaken their military and then got completely routed by the Jin invasion. After they lost half their territory to become Southern Song, they started to take the military more seriously and suddenly it got better, which again makes me think of France in the hundred years war.
(The link goes directly to the play, skipping Shaw's long-winded preface. I will note that the play does its best to smooth over the rough edges of the characters, especially the English, who are characterized as thinking they're doing the right thing as they burn her -- naturally -- but what a play!)
I had missed this review when they were released earlier, and as a Catholic convert enjoyed it mightily (despite growing up playing the Britons in AOEII and loving longbowmen).
Fun read. Though the structure of "saint vs schizophrenic" kind of left me cold since the answer comes down to your belief about whether an interventionist god exists or not rather than anything to do with Joan specifically, except as one of a million pieces of evidence to be considered in making that larger philosophical judgement.
Not really. This is a better argument for Clown World (where god arbitrarily changes the rules in order to test various social/society level experiments). We get ONE Joan d'Arc. Experiment OVER. Never repeated.
That's just a minor variant on the saint / god exists side of things, not like anyone has any viable speculation on what kind of actions a god would take if one were real anyway.
Not really. any argument for god that has the principle of parsimony on its side, has a rather scientific bent. "viable speculation" is a lot easier when you realize that we're probably in the "cheap knock-off" version of the simulation -- that one's far more likely to have to pay for itself.
A long and challenging review. I do have two spots that I could not understand in the end though.
>afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell, but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
"But through the decision of his regent" ...what? Is that an incomplete sentence, or is "but" used in the sense of "except", meaning Phillip the Bold would decide whether or not Charles VI would shatter like glass?
>Footnote 48: Score: First-principles theories of how a rational religion ought to work, 0; the intercession of the saints, 1.
Sorry, I thought it was the nested footnote formatting that was confusing.
Charlemagne is generally not considered a saint by the Church. I read that as a criticism of this ad hoc/folk canonization that nevertheless seems to have empowered him to intercede in working miracles.
It's a long complicated sentence- the part that confused you references back to before the part you quoted. Basically France acted in Burgundy's interests not because of the King's choices, but because the Duke of Burgundy was ruling France as the King's regent. The part about shattering like glass is a contained sub-clause explaining why the King was not the one making the decisions.
There were also perfectly servicable ways to convey the same information through a less complex sentence, or two if need be. I want to grapple with the content, not so much its presentation.
That first part really should have been in parentheses, not commas.
>The Kingdom of France had done this not by the will of the King of France*... ...but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
*(Charles VI, Philip the Fortunate's grandson, who at that time was seriously mentally ill and who the year before his regency started had murdered several people in a paranoid fit and afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell)
Footnote 48: If you were introduced to the idea of an all powerful god who answers prayers as an alien, you would assume that you would pray to God to achieve your objective. In Catholic belief, the saints are assigned particular causes, and you can choose to pray to a saint, who intercedes on your behalf with God: St Anthony helps find things that are lost, St Christopher protects travellers, St Jude is for lost causes, (there are thousands more).
From an outsider's perspective this could be confusing - what's the purpose of the saint here? That's my reading of the footnote at least.
Formatting cleanup. God's the one with all the power, but is also picky about all kinds of stuff, most of which you couldn't reasonably know, much less get correct on your own: personal hygiene, the grand arc of history, obscure heresies, etc.
Saints, having been human, might be more willing to puzzle out nuances of what you directly asked for vs. what you meant, rather than tossing it straight in the circular file over some petty error, then - like a lawyer, ambassador, or high-level programming language - use the technical knowledge of their particular specialized purview to ask for some version of it which is more likely to be compatible with God's overall plan.
Same basic pattern as they'd be facing from worldly kingdoms. The king's got the power, at least in theory, but if you go straight to him, he's not likely to have much patience for some peasant who doesn't understand the current political situation, barely even speaks the same language. Approaching some lower-level courtier with responsibilities relevant to your specific request might often be the better strategy.
As I understand it, the new covenant did away with a lot of the hygiene stuff, and the legal nitpicking. The Catholic god is omniscient - he knows what is in your heart and what are your intentions. If he does not grant them, it is because he is also all knowing, and He means to bring about the best of all possible worlds.
This means that He also knows what you ask the saints, so it's unclear how the saints intervene meaningfully. (How omniscience interacts with free will was one of the main philosophical questions of the Middle Ages.)
I also dispute all the saints 'have been human' - St Michael, for example, was and is an archangel. I would guess that God is sometimes understood as being so overwhelming that an intermediary is necessary - but still, it's a logical puzzle that I've never been satisfied with.
> the new covenant did away with a lot of the hygiene stuff, and the legal nitpicking
As potential disqualifications from participation in said covenant, sure, but presumably they're still things God cares about on an aesthetic level, which might influence His decisions on marginal issues.
> I also dispute all the saints 'have been human'
I did not say that. It's sufficient if only some known subset were, or are otherwise more approachable than the big boss.
> (How omniscience interacts with free will was one of the main philosophical questions of the Middle Ages.)
The question is ill-formed. Both concepts are internally contradictory, once you dig into the math of information theory and self-reference while insisting on absolutes, and banging them against each other just sheds sparks. Practical version that non-philosophers actually lived by is "you are responsible for your own decisions, hiding details from the ultimate judge is not a feasible option." Keeps the mindset in a healthy, productive range near the middle of the expected monkeysphere social hierarchy.
If God's not "omniscient," then you get people at the top thinking they've found the Ring of Gyges and misbehaving accordingly. If He doesn't "respect free will" then people at the bottom start acting like ant mills, or puppets with tangled strings. Neither extreme is conducive to societal survival.
In the last analysis, I don't think omniscience is really compatible with free will, at all. (And since free will obviously exists, that means that omniscience in the strict sense can't be true).
It depends. If you are approaching from the scientific world view and just want to know if the source can be trusted, then indeed this is enough to know that the source can not be fully trusted.
If you want to know if miracles are real, and reject any story which contains a miracle as obviously false, then you are begging the question.
I think something along this lines was discussed on an OT this Monday.
Perhaps you were a bit blindsided by the dry delivery of a joke. Yes, all the preceding stuff about milk and doves is a rather bigger counterpoint than the source not having been around to witness all that personally.
Great review! Normally my eyes would glaze over on a piece this long, but in this case I was fascinated all the way to the end.
Also: ah, yes, the English longbow. Amazing how nobody else at the time thought of making bows that could outrange everyone else's and then actually requiring the commons to train in their usage. If we'd required every mid-20th Century man of able body to maintain a sniper rifle and practice regularly in its use, we'd probably still have the Empire.
Really the English just appropriated it from the Welsh. And it clearly wasn't a good enough system in isolation to protect the Welsh from being conquered.
Pretty sure if you looked over at Russia/Poland, you'd discover a very different model of feudalism. (bows, for example, were proper knightly gear, as opposed to Western Europe).
Siberians trained women and children. They weren't using "longbows" but compound bows. Compound bows can have more draw force than longbows, and did at the time of the Mongols. Afterwards, one assume they were adopted by the current tribes.
Arguably the point of firearms is that you *don't* need to practice constantly from childhood to be good with them, you can have your citizens do something more useful and then put them through a few months of boot camp when you need a soldier. (And modern war is probably not going to be settled by individual marksmanship skill, anyway.)
I do think we should teach kids the NATO alphabet, though. You can use it to spell things out over the phone instead of doing that "A as in Apple, D as in Dog, M as in Mancy" nonsense. It's a practical life skill!
People generally overestimate the amount of training you need to use a bow. The state-mandated "constant practice from childhood" for English longbowmen was one afternoon a week.
A couple hours per week still adds up to thousands over a few years. Lot of it is for building up specific muscles, anyway, and too-frequent practice can actually be counterproductive for that, making self-injury more likely than progress.
It certainly doesn't add up to "practice constantly from childhood", though, plus a lot of that practice would be about maintaining abilities you've already acquired.
I've found, most of the times I've double-checked Devereaux's sources, they straight up just didn't say what he claimedthey said. Often, they weren't even talking about the topic he claimed they were talking about. So whilst ACOUP is fun to read, I'd not trust any claims therein without fact checking them myself.
I'm not sure about the soundness of the atheistic argument.
Joan wasn't performing miracles, she simply seems to be that way because she's the one who shows up when you sort the world by who appears to be performing miracles.
A reductio ad absurdum could look like: Einstein wasn't actually smart, he's just who shows up when you sorting the world by who appeared to be smart.
> Einstein wasn't actually smart, he's just who shows up when you sorting the world by who appeared to be smart.
AFAIK some historians do hold that view. That is, yes, Einstein was of course very smart, but he wasn't the uniquely smartest man in human history (in fact, he had plenty of colleagues like Heisenberg who were arguably just as smart as he was). Perhaps the discovery of the Theory of Relativity (not the mention the Photoelectric Effect) was more or less inevitable. Someone would've done it eventually (or perhaps several different people), and in fact quite soon; Einstein was just the one who got there first.
Einstein wasn't very smart. He did like to make funny faces, and was very convenient for the CIA. (Tom Lehrer, on the other hand, was extremely inconvenient for the CIA, as was his song pointing out one of the famous people in Operation Paperclip).
General theory of relativity was inspired, I'll admit, but Einstein was notably inflexible and couldn't take a world that refuted his priors.
Einstein had a string of important ideas in 1905: he explained the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion and got to special relativity first. Those are standard parts of physics now, but were all breakthroughs at the time. That's the work of a highly intelligent man.
He didn't make breakthroughs of this type in his later years, but many prize-winning physicists don't continue at the same level after their big breakthrough.
Photoelectric effect and Brownian motion were "easy, low hanging fruit" (that is to say, someone would have gotten there, eventually). Photoelectric effect was widely held as "not worth a nobel prize" but... that doesn't make it not a breakthrough.
I'm not a huge Einstein fan, but the way this is covered in the popular press gets under my skin. The photoelectric effect didn't line up with classical electromagnetism, as developed by Maxwell. He couldn't explain it, neither could Kelvin/Thompson or Planck or any of the other household names that were working in the period 1880-1900. Likewise, Brownian motion was an unexplained observation which had been known for almost a century - these were not trivial or straightforward observations, except in comparison to general relativity.
People also point out that plenty others were on the verge of discovering special relativity, including Minkowski and Hilbert. But they didn't - Einstein appeared out of nowhere and proposed solutions to three major problems in physics, which weren't particularly closely related, with explanations that stand more or less unchanged to this day.
Explaining the photoelectric effect alone would not have made Einstein a household name. Claiming it was low-hanging fruit suggests anyone could have done it. That sounds to me like the physics equivalent of a guy in a pub claiming he could take a bear in a fight.
General relativity didn't make Einstein a household name. The CIA did that, after Tom Lehrer viciously skewered Operation Paperclip.
"Anyone could have done it" is ... kinda the default state for things. Most discoveries are "stood on the shoulder of giants". Besides, when you don't have a pattern of scientists being assassinated, it becomes difficult to prove when a discovery was "unlikely" (and when you do, you need to distinguish between the "brave" and the "stupid").
Consider that our standard for what "miracles" look like in the modern conception is essentially "apparently purposeful coincidences." We could be living in a world where people regularly part seas, cure amputees, raise the dead, split the earth to swallow their enemies, etc., but these sorts of things appear to occur in inverse proportion to how well documented the events in question are. But if "apparently purposeful coincidences" is our standard for what miracles look like, it's more or less inevitable that some events will appear miraculous just as a result of rolling the dice enough times.
Some events do seem suspiciously improbable (although I don't think Jean's story is *as* improbable as it appears, I've already left a couple comments in this thread discussing some reasons,) but if we suppose that God really did intervene through her, it suggests a God with rather odd priorities, since he was apparently concerned enough to make sure that the English didn't conquer the French, but has allowed countless other conquests, genocides, and other tragedies throughout history, without any apparently consistent concern for the moral character of the participants, or their alignment with the Christian religion.
What can look very purposeful when looked at in isolation, when we see one particular person or side getting what they want against apparently great odds, may look a lot less purposeful as we broaden our view and see that there isn't a consistent directionality to all the coincidence. There are diabolus ex machinas throughout history just as much as deus ex machinas, and the righteous or the Christian, let alone some specific brand of Christian, don't appear to be consistently favored.
I actually looked up the correct plurals while writing up my post, but I decided on balance that using them was more likely to be an impediment to clarity.
If someone claimed to have had a particular key to a widely-used pseudorandom number algorithm revealed to them in a dream, which yielded the previous ten jackpot combinations for a particular state lottery, more than one of which they'd collected money from, and published said key so it could be checked independently,
but then the lottery commissioner was sacked on corruption charges, and the new commissioner completely overhauled the lotto's official RNG and security,
eventually having some sort of psychological meltdown on live TV when the new system kept producing the same numbers as that deterministic algorithm predicted...
I think this is my favorite review so far, well done !
One thing I've learned from it (perhaps erroneously) is the sheer extent to which Medieval warfare and politics were based on "vibes". People like Machiavelli and Bismarck are often credited with inventing realpolitik, but until now I don't think I've been able to fully appreciate what that means. It means that people must have really and truly, in their heart of hearts, based critically important geopolitical decisions on their loyalty to their liege lord, or the line of descent of an heir, or on omens and portents like the color of the sparrow outside their window last Tuesday. This wasn't a callous post-hoc rationalization made up to justify an unpopular decision (at least, not always), but the accurate description of the flow of their conscious thought. Thus situations like "the King died and thus the army immediately fell apart" were not merely more common then than they are now, but in fact routine.
Which might explain (at least in part) how Joan of Arc was able to accomplish all those miracles. It sounds like the French had every ingredient they needed to defeat the English: manpower, materiel, terrain, supplies, even military training (maybe). What they utterly lacked was coordination, and perhaps morale. All of that military power was useless when it just sat there bickering endlessly with itself. Enter Joan of Arc, who could establish a command structure and inspire overwhelming morale advantage at the same time. Perhaps it was already virtually impossible for the French to lose the war given their overwhelming advantage in resources, as long as all of those resources were brought to bear on the enemy; and all it took was a charismatic leader who got them to do something, *anything*, and to do it with total and unyielding commitment. Even an less-than-brilliant general can win a war when all the advantages are on her side, and all she needs to do is push over the first domino.
And I think this disorganization might have been fractal (to an extent). The government was disordered; the generals were disordered; their captains and their sergeants and all the way down to the common infantryman, all were in disorder. Which might also explain Joan's amazing feats of military prowess. We don't have a record (unless I'm mistaken ?) of her ever personally defeating scores of enemies with her lance or hitting a remote target with her cannon. Rather, she lead teams of lancers and artillerists to actually do their jobs for once in their lives -- the jobs which they have been trained for. In a world of vibes, such sudden competence must have looked miraculous indeed.
People started wars because one guy thought it would be funny to pantz another guy (China). When you understand "realpolitik" understand that you're dealing with 15 year olds, a good deal of the time. And 15 year olds often do things because they want to impress a girl... Or think it would be funny to make someone else look bad.
It's not quite that simple. At the time the idea of nations or states of people hadn't really developed yet. Most places in medieval Europe were the personal possession of a monarch. You can see how people didn't have loyalty to France or Burgundy, but to the King of France or Duke of Burgundy. When nations operate on such a personal level and at the whims of a single figure, politics can seem more like a soap opera.
Similarly armies were usually the sole creations of monarchs, cobbled together from a fraction of their kingdom's levies and also mercenaries. The idea of a professional army serving a nation hadn't really developed yet either. So when the King died, the army often lost a reason to fight (this generally being to claim land for the King's person), and also their reason for being paid.
This is pretty close to my own model of what happened. She wasn't especially good at anything, except maybe persuasion. It's just that the French royal court were *that bad*.
TBH I don't see why basing important geopolitical decisions on loyalty to your liege lord or the line of descent of an heir is any more inherently strange than basing them on popular opinion or on abstractions like self-determination or international law.
I think you can render anything as "an abstraction" if you tried hard enough. Laws in general are ultimately abstractions (to some extent), and so are notions like "prosperity" or "quality of life" or "not being enslaved by the English". That said, going to war because your liege lord made a drunken boast at that one party that one time seems inherently more suboptimal as compared to going to war because you believe doing so will allow you to preserve your ability to administer your own nation -- despite the fact that both of those causes are abstractions to some extent.
How many veterans do you know? What fraction of them administer your nation?
For the drunken lord, of course, the war makes sense - if I don't make good on my pre commitments, I can't credibly make more in the future. For the people actually administering modern nations, the logic is similar; while Iraq resisted the US invasion because Saddam Hussein wanted to keep administering a nation, the invasion was at least in part because he didn't (couldn't) comply with the US demand to dismantle his WMDs (which he didn't have) and at that point Bush couldn't back down without looking either weak or foolish.
Um, are you trying to get me to defend the Iraq war ? No thanks. Stupidity is stupid no matter when it happens; but today, at least it is not the norm.
I'd be surprised if you could find even one medieval war fought solely because of a lord's drunken boast, much less enough to show that such thing was "the norm".
> It means that people must have really and truly, in their heart of hearts, based critically important geopolitical decisions on their loyalty to their liege lord, or the line of descent of an heir, or on omens and portents like the color of the sparrow outside their window last Tuesday.
I enjoyed reading the review although it was a bit on the long side, as I am regularly confused on how much the story of Joan of Arc is based on myth or reality.
However I think it gives a poor account of the course of the hundred year wars until Orleans. The review is confusing in making it sound like Agincourt (1415) took place right after Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), while 6 decades are separating those.
Moreover it gives the impression that the french were constantly being defeated until the arrival of Joan of Arc. Actually between 1364 and 1380 french regained the upper side and conquered back most of the territory, under the command of Du Guesclin, with a strategy of putting cities controlled by the british under siege methodically one after the other. Then there was a long break as both countries suffered internal unrest, and the war restarted in 1415 as the english profited of the french division between Armagnacs and Bourguinons.
Edit: Thank you EngineOfCreation for spotting the typo on the date of Agincourt, now it's corrected.
It's really rather interesting how the course of the war seemed to depend more on the state of infighting within each of the two sides, more than any brilliant strategies or anything like that.
Reading about Joan of Arc I am reminded a little of Greta Thunberg. A slightly weird teenaged girl gets elevated to the status of a leader/figurehead of some larger movement, presumably by more sophisticated actors working behind the scenes, and presumably because the symbolic purity of a young girl plays much better than some old bearded dude.
Is this a pattern that has occurred elsewhere in history, or just a two-off?
I think the Sybils in Rome made some convenient prophesies and boosted morale. Not very close, but maybe you could see that as part of this pattern if you squint?
In the mid 19th c the Xhosa nation killed their cattle and burned their corn, leading to massive famine and state collapse, and subsequent colonization, because a 15 year old prophetess had told them that if they did that, the gods would descend from the heavens and drive the British and Boers into the sea. Unfortunately, it didn't work out (she apparently went to her grave standing by her guns, and claiming that the prophecy had failed because some recalcitrant cheaters had let their crops and cattle live, displeasing the gods).
while it's sad that the prophecy failed, it's also a fascinating example of how charismatic teenage girls seem to be able to project a surprising amount of soft power, across cultures and across historical eras.
That's a great take that hadn't occurred to me, thank you! Both also had few wins after the first big event that catapulted them to fame: for Greta Thunberg it was the weekly Friday "school strikes for climate", not that they did much; for Joan of Arc it was taking Rheims. Now granted, the latter required a lot more competency, but perhaps not an inhuman amount.
I don't think we should assume Greta or Joan are being put up to anything by adults - they're just unusually high agency and intelligence girls, who knows how to make effective use of their stereotyped innocence.
I don't think the idea was that they were put up to things they don't believe deeply in the way you're suggesting. It's more that you could have one young girl declaring that you need to stop using oil or the seas will rise and drown your children, another saying you need to mark your doorways with lamb's blood or the Angel of Death will kill your firstborn, and yet another saying something else equally plausible, and the "sophisticated actors" will make sure only one of them gets elevated to become a prominent voice in the media ecosystem.
Yeah, you get it. The English were so furious about "how the hell is this bitch doing this to us? it must be evil pacts with the Devil!" that they wanted her burned at the stake. Even Shakespeare writes propaganda about this because they are still so butt-hurt about it a hundred and sixty years later.
"A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I read Voltaire's "La Pucelle," a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of Joan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny. I had not thought of it again for years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began to turn over the leaves of the new "Jeanne d'Arc," by that great and graceful writer, Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tender sympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a noble tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant girl through the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan, and even respectful to her religion. And being myself a furious admirer of Joan the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come to the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire's.
When a man of Voltaire's school has to explode a saint or a great religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or a common human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a saint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular fussy little literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc, though it was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was not specially Voltaire's nature. But M. France read M. France's nature into Joan of Arc--all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned anywhere; Renan's "Vie de Jesus." It has just the same general intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the loudest blasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a brave man to attack; but there are some things too big for a man to patronise.
...It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of M. Anatole France in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible to his somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore dismiss it and her to fairyland with Jack and the Beanstalk. He tries to invent a real story, for which he can find no real evidence. He produces a scientific explanation which is quite destitute of any scientific proof. It is as if I (being entirely ignorant of botany and chemistry) said that the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and argon got into the subsidiary ducts of the corolla. To take the most obvious example, the principal character in M. France's story is a person who never existed at all. All Joan's wisdom and energy, it seems, came from a certain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest trace in all the multitudinous records of her life. The only foundation I can find for this fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a peasant girl could not possibly have any ideas of her own. It is very hard for a freethinker to remain democratic. The writer seems altogether to forget what is meant by the moral atmosphere of a community. To say that Joan must have learnt her vision of a virgin overthrowing evil from a priest, is like saying that some modern girl in London, pitying the poor, must have learnt it from a Labour Member. She would learn it where the Labour Member learnt it--in the whole state of our society."
Thank you for this review, which I greatly enjoyed (as I hope you can tell).
Okay, I also have to quote from "Là-Bas" by J.K. Huysman:
"What was the conduct of Gilles de Rais toward Jeanne d'Arc? We have no certain knowledge. M. Vallet de Viriville, without proof, accuses him of treachery. M. l'abbé Bossard, on the contrary, claims—and alleges plausible reasons for entertaining the opinion—that he was loyal to her and watched over her devotedly.
"What is certain is that Gilles's soul became saturated with mystical ideas. His whole history proves it.
"He was constantly in association with this extraordinary maid whose adventures seemed to attest the possibility of divine intervention in earthly affairs. He witnessed the miracle of a peasant girl dominating a court of ruffians and bandits and arousing a cowardly king who was on the point of flight. He witnessed the incredible episode of a virgin bringing back to the fold such black rams as La Hire, Xaintrailles, Beaumanoir, Chabannes, Dunois, and Gaucourt, and washing their old fleeces whiter than snow. Undoubtedly Gilles also, under her shepherding, docilely cropped the white grass of the gospel, took communion the morning of a battle, and revered Jeanne as a saint.
"He saw the Maid fulfil all her promises. She raised the siege of Orléans, had the king consecrated at Rheims, and then declared that her mission was accomplished and asked as a boon that she be permitted to return home.
"Now I should say that as a result of such an association Gilles's mysticism began to soar. Henceforth we have to deal with a man who is half-freebooter, half-monk. Moreover—"
"Pardon the interruption, but I am not so sure that Jeanne d'Arc's intervention was a good thing for France."
"Why not?"
"I will explain. You know that the defenders of Charles were for the most part Mediterranean cut-throats, ferocious pillagers, execrated by the very people they came to protect. The Hundred Years' War, in effect, was a war of the South against the North. England at that epoch had not got over the Conquest and was Norman in blood, language, and tradition. Suppose Jeanne d'Arc had stayed with her mother and stuck to her knitting. Charles VII would have been dispossessed and the war would have come to an end. The Plantagenets would have reigned over England and France, which, in primeval times before the Channel existed, formed one territory occupied by one race, as you know. Thus there would have been a single united and powerful kingdom of the North, reaching as far as the province of Languedoc and embracing peoples whose tastes, instincts, and customs were alike. On the other hand, the coronation of a Valois at Rheims created a heterogeneous and preposterous France, separating homogeneous elements, uniting the most incompatible nationalities, races the most hostile to each other, and identifying us—inseparably, alas!—with those stained-skinned, varnished-eyed munchers of chocolate and raveners of garlic, who are not Frenchmen at all, but Spaniards and Italians. In a word, if it hadn't been for Jeanne d'Arc, France would not now belong to that line of histrionic, forensic, perfidious chatterboxes, the precious Latin race—Devil take it!"
Durtal raised his eyebrows.
"My, my," he said, laughing. "Your remarks prove to me that you are interested in 'our own, our native land.' I should never have suspected it of you."
"Of course you wouldn't," said Des Hermies, relighting his cigarette. "As has so often been said, 'My own, my native land is wherever I happen to feel at home.' Now I don't feel at home except with the people of the North. But I interrupted you. Let's get back to the subject. What were you saying?"
"I forget. Oh, yes. I was saying that the Maid had completed her task. Now we are confronted by a question to which there is seemingly no answer. What did Gilles do when she was captured, how did he feel about her death? We cannot tell. We know that he was lurking in the vicinity of Rouen at the time of the trial, but it is too much to conclude from that, like certain of his biographies, that he was plotting her rescue.
"At any rate, after losing track of him completely, we find that he has shut himself in at his castle of Tiffauges.
"He is no longer the rough soldier, the uncouth fighting-man. At the time when the misdeeds are about to begin, the artist and man of letters develop in Gilles and, taking complete possession of him, incite him, under the impulsion of a perverted mysticism, to the most sophisticated of cruelties, the most delicate of crimes.
..."But all this," said Des Hermies, "does not explain how, from a man of piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar into a violator of little children, a 'ripper' of boys and girls."
"I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality. To be precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic. He witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown. Association with Jeanne d'Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step. In the Beyond all things touch. He carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy. He was guided and controlled by that troop of sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges."
"You think, then, that the Maid of Orleans was really responsible for his career of evil?"
"To a certain point. Consider. She roused an impetuous soul, ready for anything, as well for orgies of saintliness as for ecstasies of crime.
"There was no transition between the two phases of his being. The moment Jeanne was dead he fell into the hands of sorcerers who were the most learned of scoundrels and the most unscrupulous of scholars. These men who frequented the château de Tiffauges were fervent Latinists, marvellous conversationalists, possessors of forgotten arcana, guardians of world-old secrets. Gilles was evidently more fitted to live with them than with men like Dunois and La Hire. These magicians, whom all the biographers agree to represent—wrongly, I think—as vulgar parasites and base knaves, were, as I view them, the patricians of intellect of the fifteenth century. Not having found places in the Church, where they would certainly have accepted no position beneath that of cardinal or pope, they could, in those troubled times of ignorance, but take refuge in the patronage of a great lord like Gilles. And Gilles was, indeed, the only one at that epoch who was intelligent enough and educated enough to understand them."
I don't get the whole last bit about claiming there's some big mystery here. Of course someone who's a charismatic national hero is going to have people tell all sorts of implausible stories about how great she was, especially twenty years after her heroic death. The details don't seem particularly beyond what I'd expect people to say about their cool local hero (who actually performed at about the background level for an unusually charismatic young woman).
Joan was both an extraordinary person in her intelligence, boldness and fanaticism and benefited from the low expectations people had of village girls. No miracle there.
Why can't she be a very gifted (140 IQ?) peasant girl with mild to moderate schizotypal mania and/or scrupulosity OCD who spends all her time learning about religion from her local priest and has a great reputation in her village and develops strong charisma. Then she shows up and after proving how incredible she is at boosting morale and motivating troops, slowly but surely the military leaders around her realize how useful she can be, and start saying things like "oh wow everyone we have a saint and a genius on our side!" which inevitably drastically improves military outcomes, since most pre-modern battle outcomes are decided heavily by morale. None of her predictions are impressive beyond her being convinced she'd win and see the kind crowned and happening to be right, which was in fact downstream of her confidence and devotion being so inspiring.
You can mix her being an intelligent and mild lunatic with the people around her choosing to see her as even more competent than she was because she was so inspiring, without requiring it to be full lies on their part or for her to be a raving madwoman incapable of inspiring others.
This is also my preferred explanation. She’s undeniably brilliant, charismatic, insanely confident, and those together sometimes lead to incredible victory, especially if she wins once or twice and everyone decides she’s inspired by god and decides to do what the bold and brilliant military genius thinks they should. If she’d lost we’d never have heard of her. It’s amazing and awe-inspiring, but I don’t think it has to be divine.
I agree. What's striking reading Wikipedia is her apparent *lack* of military skill. It seems like she was just a big morale-boosting mascot and that did the trick.
Right. Well, I rather dislike it when we laypeople wildly hazard IQ guesses (a psychologist friend told me that someone with a master's but not a PhD in psychologist can lose his license for administering an IQ test) but, since we are at this game: 140 IQ is not that high, but, if she was 140 IQ *according to today's standards*, 6 centuries' of Flynn effect worth ago, then that explains many things. Combine that with great perceptiveness, dedication and charisma, and...
More seriously: this was (sorry, medievalists) a waning world in the cusp of great change; the ruling paradigms in war, collective identity, and plenty else had exhausted themselves. In that figure, individuals of great ability can change history by being qualitatively ahead of their time. Sometimes they are immediately recognizable as modern. Joan is a slightly less obvious case, to us, because we associate modernity with secularism, but then the Reformation, a hundred years later, wasn't a secular movement either.
Agreed on all points, and in particular I probably should have said "~3 or more standard deviations above the mean intelligence."
I further think it's likely the men around Joan would have expected essentially zero military ability from a teenage peasant girl, and any level of competence, even if she were just a quick learner who asked insightful questions, probably could have impressed them.
The testimonies quoted in the OP are pretty clear that Joan *wasn't* generally brilliant. People weren't amazed at her intellect, they were amazed that this seemingly ordinary peasant girl was so good at war-related skills.
Agreed. You need look no further than George Floyd to understand the degree to which reality will be bent to accommodate political expediency. The vilest cretin can be cast as a saint if there's sufficient motivation to do so.
The maiden commands her own particular kind of respect. Men cannot look to her as just another man giving orders, even if she's clad as one. Maybe she reminds them of their daughters, or their dear sisters. Of course, she had to be clad as a, to put it politically correctly, Person of War - so, in effect, a man, with his war accoutrements, even as a bannerma- I mean, bannermaid - in order to command respect in the military context. Anyway, by having everyone focus on her, she gives everyone a sense of shared purpose. And, perhaps, while she makes calls, competent people do advise her.
Though in insisting on getting the king crowned at France's Scone, well, that was putting aside military pragmatism for symboloprophetic imperative. Some things are more important than doing things by the book. The tactics are the tactics, but the maiden is the soul of the enterprise, and her story needs to work - indeed, it has sort of done for France what King Arthur does for England, maybe? And it's telling that both "legends" are Christian. But I am much more satisfied with Joan's historicity (and the preponderance of truthiness in it - you know, direct is-ness applicableness, if such a thing can even be truly said to be) than I am of other legendary figures, but FWIW I'm on the JHC was a thing team, not necessarily by those initials in a legal sense, and not necessarily capital Charlie either. It seems like he must have been a wise guy, in a sardonic sense at a bare minimum, but you need like ancient astronauts theories or theism (which have a dearth of falsifiability, which is a problem in reasontopia) to explain stuff like loaves and fishes, if you take it to be literally true. Like I'm not sure Penn and Teller could actually fill people up with the appearance of a bare severality of loaf and fish done with literal smoke and mirrors or something. But I think something like a precocious kid arguing with clerics is quite plausible, and I think I read somewhere that there was a Jewish historian that reported some rabble rouser or other dying on the cross. But Jesus Christ, Inc. is so much bigger than that now, especially taking the whole dang Club Jesus as a singularity.
(Footnote: It has had many schisms, and can hardly be all said to be the same religion, except in a share of memetic antecedence and concordance. Of course, many sects think of themselves as Universal, or Catholic. Or the Greek Orthodox are carrying on the True and Honest Roman Christian Tradition or something.)
Wow, an amazing review. I learned more about J of A than I ever had before. I actually have a feel for who she was and what she was like.
As for the miracle thing, well, I think the answer is obvious. Clearly, a time traveler went back, implanted a mic in her ear, and was advising her the entire time.
How much of a complexity penalty does that explanation get?
She does have a rather prominent role in the one RPG which made a serious effort at incorporating Novikov-consistent time travel as a central element of the play experience. https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/mors-rattus/continuum-roleplaying-in-the-yet/ According to the fictional history therein, "spanners" will start becoming public knowledge over the course of the 2030s, so I guess we'll find out.
I'd just like to add that the English army under King Edward was not composed *only* of professional soldiers, but also of knights and their retinues. One of these, the 11th Earl of Warwick, was instrumental in 1346 in enabling the English troops to land at La Hogue. He attacked 100 French soldiers who were trying to stop the landing with his squire and six archers, killing 60 enemy soldiers and forcing the rest to flee.
We don't see many miraculous "saints" like her in the more modern era of better record keeping. Similarly, it has been quipped that there are fewer sightings of Bigfoot & UFOs by civilians in this era of widespeared digital cameras.
I really liked this essay. But the talk about her tactical brilliance made me a little curious about what Joan was actually concretely doing with the army. A lot of the discussion of her military campaign reads like "Joan's allies suggested strategy A, which was a complex and cautious plan which would definitely not win the war, and Joan instead suggested strategy B, a balls-out direct assault that would win a great victory if they were very lucky and lose the whole war if they weren't. And they were miraculously lucky."
So like, when you say that Joan of Arc was a miraculous prodigy at commanding an army, do you mean she demonstrated some specific facet of generalship, like when she's setting up for a battle she recognizes good terrain or a good place to set up cannons, or do you mean she kept going all-in on simple and direct strategies that kept working because she had the manic charisma to get the whole army behind her on them?
(Side note: You mention at the start that the English were actually heavily outnumbered, but kept winning because they had a professional, well-motivated army. Were they still outnumbered by Joan's time? Joan's religious discipline seems like it might have served a similar purpose.)
I'm especially curious about what she did with artillery, since you spend a while talking about how it's a uniquely technical branch of the military. But if you're a general rather than an artillery officer, do you actually need to know those fiddly details? Did Joan figure out something really cool to do with the newly introduced cannons, or did she just tell her artillerymen "God requires you to flatten this next fortification" and let the people who know the business get to work? Like, one of those two sounds a bit more miraculous than the other.
Interestingly, the wikipedia article makes it sound a lot like "Joan suggests a reckless immediate attack and gets overruled by the people who actually know what they're doing, while still benefiting from her massive morale bonus."
Generals were normally in charge of positioning artillery before the battle, so even if they didn't need to know the technical details of how to aim and operate the devices, they did need to know how to position them to get the maximum impact (widest field of fire, least dead ground, etc.).
I guess I'll be the downer and say I wasn't a super fan of this one. As I read I just wished more and more to instead go listen to the episodes of The Rest is History covering Agincourt and the later episodes covering Joan of Arc (actually I'll go download the Joan ones now). By the time I got to the "value add" of the review being the deliberation of the evidence, I was tired of it, and when it came to the fictional debate I gave up. Someone do tell me if that part is particularly worthy of reading and I'll come back to it, but I'm just not feeling it right now.
Edit: apparently I hallucinated the existence of Joan of Arc episodes, shame.
I agree in principle - I enjoyed it as a summary of Joan's life, but I'm still not sure what the review wants to tell me. I don't see much miraculous things here that can't be explained away, apart from the fact that her life was so well documented by primary witnesses (which is really mind-blowing for a medieval commoner girl)
Only an ACX review could relate the story of St. Catherine and present as the first piece of evidence that it is, in fact, fiction that an untrained teenager outdebated a roomful of philosophers.
Why do reviewers feel the need to be funny? It is possible to write an entertaining, even a gripping, review without being supercilious. Otherwise, good.
Anything's possible, but being funny, if you can pull it off which most people can't, makes it way, way easier. And there are a lot of good writers in this contest so there's no sense leaving any advantage on the table.
> Yes! The Armagnacs are crooks. Charles VII is a pretty terrible king. The knight who was her bodyguard was planning to rape her on the road! Sure, the English suck, but everyone in this entire story sucks. If you want to say that God cares more about religion than morality, that doesn't even help. Everyone here's a Catholic, they're just really bad at it. How can you possibly come up with a predictive model of God that predicts this?
I’m an agnostic, but my limited understanding of Christian theology is that this sort of thing—God intervening on behalf of the obviously undeserving—happens *all the time*. The most prominent example is, of course, Jesus dying “for our sins”. Another is that, AAUI the Jewish people were supposedly chosen not because they are special or better in any way, but specifically because they are *not*; God choosing them anyway testifies to His glory, because He makes the difference, not us mortals.
If the atheistic perspective is true, and Joan was just at the right tail end of the normal distribution of "people whose lives are evidence of divine intervention," then one would expect to see quite a few "almost-Joans" who looked promising but didn't quite make the cut. I wonder what the base rate of people claiming to have prophetic visions was in 15th-century France. The buried-treasure-extorting prophetess lady is certainly evidence that there were at least some.
Long story short: it's 1097 and the Christian forces of the First Crusade are in a tight spot: trapped in a city of Antioch, very far from any help and besieged by the Muslim forces. A humble French dude starts receiving visions, hears Saint Andrew telling him to do things. He goes to the priest, but the priest tells him to calm down, doesn't believe a word of it. Peter does not calm down. He goes around talking with enough passion that eventually some people start believing him.
Miraculously, Peter manages to dig out the Holy Lance of Longinus of all things, exactly where Saint Andrew told he would. Even more people start believing Peter, including some Crusader lords. At the moment their situation is desperate enough that nobody really bothers to go after Peter very much, because it seems like very soon each and everyone of them will be dead at the hands of the Turks. However, inspired by the miraculous lance, the Christians manage to pull off an amazing victory and defeat much larger Muslim forces.
Peter's status goes up, but now the anti-Peter faction also starts taking him more seriously. Some lords believe he is a real deal, while others are worried about some nobody bossing people around because apparently the saints told him to. Peter decides to silence the skeptics: he is going to prove his holiness by walking through the fires and remaining unharmed.
It's a little unclear what happens after he tries the fire thing. The skeptical crusaders claimed that Peter tried to walk through fire and quickly and predictably got burned to death, while Peter's supporters maintained that he remained remarkably fine (maybe got burned just a little bit), but then died soon afterwards for totally unrelated reasons. What the truth was, we may never know. You will notice though that Peter Bartholomew isn't referred to as Saint Peter, because he isn't.
Joan of Arc led from the front in battles, carrying her white banner. She was wounded at least once in combat.
I'm not familiar with another female military leader since then who led from the front in historic battles between Great Powers.
There appear to have been several in ancient history, such as Artemisia I of Hallicarnasus, who led her five ships in the naval battle of Salamis against the Greeks.
ChatGPT tells me that Matilda of Tuscany led from the front in medieval battles, but I don't see that in Wikipedia.
"The Welsh longbow had made it to England under the first Edward; it’s a simple weapon, cheap to make, useful for hunting, and if you get good with it you can put a 37-inch arrow through chainmail"
Wait, isn't this massively overstated? Any bow is "useful for hunting" and putting it through chainmail depends more on how close you are and how good the chainmail is, rather than skill. But making it was quite complex. Here's what Wikipedia says:
"The traditional way of making a longbow requires drying the yew wood for 1 to 2 years, then slowly working it into shape, with the entire process taking up to four years. The bow stave is shaped to have a D cross-section. The outer "back" of sapwood, approximately flat, follows the natural growth rings; modern bowyers often thin the sapwood, while in the Mary Rose bows the back of the bow was the natural surface of the wood, only the bark is removed. The inner side ("belly") of the bow stave consists of rounded heartwood. The heartwood resists compression and the outer sapwood performs better in tension. This combination in a single piece of wood (a self bow) forms a natural "laminate", somewhat similar in effect to the construction of a composite bow. Longbows last a long time if protected with a water-resistant coating, traditionally of "wax, resin and fine tallow".
The trade of yew wood to England for longbows was such that it depleted the stocks of yew over a huge area... In 1568, despite a request from Saxony, no royal monopoly was granted because there was no yew to cut, and the next year Bavaria and Austria similarly failed to produce enough yew to justify a royal monopoly."
So it was a deceptively complex weapon, and very dependent on this one special type of wood that was cut almost to extinction during this period.
Interestingly, there is a source from c. 1200 that specifies the Welsh longbows were made not from yew but elm. This is about 80 years before the English conquer Wales and incorporate their longbow archers, and 150 years before the battle of Crecy.
> 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. Yet his theory of gravitation is not so impressive a mental feat as his astounding chronology, which establishes him as the king of mental conjurors, but a Bedlamite king whose authority no one now accepts. On the subject of the eleventh horn of the beast seen by the prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan, because his imagination was not dramatic but mathematical and therefore extraordinarily susceptible to numbers: indeed if all his works were lost except his chronology we should say that he was as mad as a hatter. As it is, who dares diagnose Newton as a madman?
I began writing my novel of Joan of Arc (https://www.JoanNovel.com) when I was a Christian, but I was an atheist by the time I finished it (due to external development and not to anything about the writing of the book itself), and I'm a pretty militant atheist now. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the book is unambiguously supernatural -- my narrator, for example, is one of her Voices, so there are no games played about whether they were real -- I have no wish to recant a word I wrote, such was Joan's charisma. Her biggest miracle was not any one of her miracles, but her self.
However, the three hypotheses provided at the end are merely symptomatic of thinking that has unfortunately remained inside the box.
If we think outside the box, couldn’t we imagine, for example, that extraterrestrials—a civilization more advanced than ours—are monitoring humans, sporadically intervening here and there to influence the course of history whenever their forecasts predict catastrophic outcomes?
We could hypothesize, for instance, that the voices Joan of Arc heard were actually a technology deployed by this advanced civilization, identifying Joan as a disruptive agent capable of altering the future.
Perhaps they utilize something akin to psychohistory, predicting that if the English had won, it would lead to fascism twice as severe as Nazism some 500 years later, or something along those lines.
Does this seem irrational? Perhaps. But is it more irrational than believing that Catholic Christians are correct in their sacred texts and that, by sheer coincidence, their god intervened precisely at that historical moment while ignoring what Christians and non-Christians were doing throughout the rest of history?
Of course, this is just one hypothesis among many. There are numerous other possibilities involving interventions from different or superior entities that do not necessarily imply divine intervention.
I'm not saying I believe in either scenario, btw, but which one is truly more rational?
But why would the extrateristrials intervene to stop the medieval English from conquering the medieval French? why would they care at all? And why would that sort of extraterrestrial help seem to stop just when humans develop the technology to make reliable records of it?
That a God exists, and that it is *exactly* the God described by Catholics, among all religions?
That an intelligent civilization had time to develop during the 13.79 billion years that preceded the appearance of human beings, and had time to spread throughout our galaxy, for example with small probes equipped with an ASI, one of whose functions is to ensure that they intervene in the destiny of intelligent species in the most minimalist way possible, to ensure that they do not destroy themselves?
I'd say "different" rather than "extra." Which is simpler depends on assumptions about the nature of underlying reality that aren't amenable to empirical testing.
If they were using psychohistory they’d never base their entire plan on predicting the actions of a single precocious teenage girl, what a contrivance that would be!
I was making a little joke about the ending of Second Foundation there.
I don't believe in an interventionist deity myself, just a prime mover. As between the hypotheses, I'd believe we were in a simulation before believing that an alien civilization was manipulating us. Under the natural laws that appear to operate in our world, discovering an intelligent species on another planet before it sends radio signals and then going there to intervene is absurd for reasons of time and energy that no mere technological advance erases. Both choices are superior intelligences, but unlike advanced aliens who are still operating in a natural material universe, the simulation builder could in fact set up a world where some specific sectarian dogma turns out to be true and only one little part of the globe matters and the natural rules of the "game engine" can be suspended to produce miraculous wind changes for narrative purposes. That's all close enough to being God for our purposes, so yeah I gotta say God is more plausible than aliens.
Seems like we're allowed to guess who wrote these, so I'll register my prediction that this is probably (~50% chance) Ozy from Thing of Things, and if not, there's a solid chance it's a Thing of Things reader. The topics fit (it's a blog with an ongoing section called weird people of history, many of whom are religious), it's funny in an irreverent way, and there's a random fan-fiction term thrown in for no apparent reason ("fix-fic", idk what this is but Google tells me it's fanfiction jargon). Also they are capable of very long, footnote-y posts, and never seem to have written about Joan of Arc before as far as I can tell?
A fix-fic is a fanfic written with the intent of "fixing" some sort of canon tragedy, often because your favorite character got a raw deal and you want to write a story where they end up happy. (In this case, someone wanted Joan to get the victory in Paris she clearly deserved.)
The term is used insultingly here, but in fandom it can be positive or negative depending on how much you like what canon did to the characters.
Surely an interesting part of this is that the voices stop - she doesn't keep claiming divine inspiration in order to maintain status, and if mentally ill, she is randomly healed?
This reminds me of Carlos Eire's book "They Flew". It's a discussion of clusters of miracles in early modern Europe (mostly) and specifically within the Catholic world, focusing especially on levitation and bilocation. The gist there is broadly similar to this review of Joan of Arc. The miracles of these saints were well recorded, though not as well as we'd like. People close to their time already were somewhat skeptical of these miracles, and add to that the whole newly developed bureaucracy of verifying miracles and confirming saints in the Catholic church, the body of evidence is confusing indeed.
In the epilogue of that book, Eire summarizes a few typical attitudes to these historical instances of miracles:
"The oldest approach is the original one, which comes from within the phenomenon and is also its wellspring, so to speak: the perspective of faith. From this perspective, God’s supernatural agency—or the devil’s preternatural one—can make the impossible possible. Another approach is that of purely materialist empirical science, which excludes the existence of supernatural or preternatural agency and has traditionally denied the possibility of anything it deems naturally impossible. This perspective is now hegemonic in Western culture. A third approach is that taken by the Catholic Church a fter the Council of Trent, which involves employing medical and scientific knowledge in the investigation of miracle claims. This perspective is still an essential component of the Catholic Church’s take on impossible phenomena, especially in its canonization process and in its approach to all miracle claims.
A fourth and relatively more recent approach is that taken by social scientists and other scholars influenced by social science. This approach, which ignores the metaphysical issue of the supernatural altogether, focuses on the social matrix in which impossible miracles occur and has multiple perspectives. Overall, such studies tend to be functionalist; that is, their analysis is guided by the theory that all aspects of society serve a pragmatic purpose or role and can best be understood in the context of the needs and goals they fulfill for the social organism in question."
which I think cuts up the "models" a bit differently from this review, and I sort of wish section 3.3 was written with a cast conforming more to Eire's analysis, simply because I imagine that would be a more fun read.
Unfortunately Eire's book concludes on a pretty confusing introduction of a "post-secular" approach to miracles, which I won't try to summarize here because I'm not sure I understood it.
In the end this whole business reminds me of Scott's discussion of parapsychology in "The Control Group Is Out of Control". Like, the process of inquiry twists itself into an ouroboros of scientific evidence where we loop back to "in my opinion" again. It's unsatisfying, but what can you do.
(Also, I slightly suspect this review is by the winner of 2023's book review contest. For starters, this one is also massively long. The tone and the use of dialogue near the end to sum up the points are also reminiscent of that review.)
The debate reminds me a lot of Scott's post about Mormonism as a control group for religious narratives. Joseph Smith is conveniently even better documented, living so close to the present day.
Very good review, but I was mostly taken away by the end of the first few paragraphs. How I wish we still had powers of mythmaking that strong today!
I've always felt that myth creation is a natural instinct, like religiosity, in people, and that you cannot disown it, merely accept and shape the instinct.
Perhaps those who don't belief in their religiosity practice religion better, I'm not sure; but I'd imagine mythmakers who believe in the concept's utility will create better myths. Perhaps safer or more usable ones.
The use of artillery is not especially technical in this period - you need some people with know-how to maintain and fire the guns, but none of the mathematical principles behind arcs of fire etc are understood until the 18th century. Seems perfectly plausible someone smart could intuit good artillery placement.
What a gem of a review. Up there with the best of Scott's writing.
I knew next to nothing about Joan of Arc, but I have read something of the history from Edward I to Henry V, mostly in Ian Mortimer's biographies. Everything in part 1 matched what I'd learnt elsewhere except the reference to scutage. Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/scutage claims scutage had become obselete by the 14th century, so in my defence it wasn't relevant to the Hundred Years' War, and in our reviewer's defence it was relevant to Edward I's Scottish wars. Overall I think this is evidence for our reviewer's accuracy.
1. Very well written and interesting throughout. I am surprised, but it is my favorite, for now! Some experts here claim to have an inkling who the author is - not(!) Scott - and I will read more of him/her when we know; Scott's review of Alexander-the-Great seems alluded to, too.
2. As a very minor theologian, I am disappointed to read the footnote about the gospels: "I’m presently inclined to believe Mark and John are eyewitnesses, but that we also have the Synoptics as a unit drawing on the plausibly-eyewitness author of Q, as well as Josephus and Paul's letters." - One may(!) grant Mark and Q (and bonus-points for knowing Q!), but "John"?! Sorry, back to "historical Jesus 101" (yes in 421 one learns there may be useful information even in John, still ...). Which kinda de-values a lot of the "Saint" talk - the author is way too eager to consider divine intervention.
I would be grateful for a bit of expansion on your point 2, and in fact on the footnote to which it refers. Both are too terse and allusive for me to follow, though I have the feeling they would be interesting if I could.
ok, so there are the 4 gospels - Mark, Matthew, Luke, John - and endless discussions: Are the authors eye-witnesses, when were they written down, who was first. The majority opinion for the last 50+ years is: Mark is the oldest text (oldest texts ending 16:8, the last few verses added centuries later), written down maybe a generation after Jesus BUT arguably (just) before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The others written down after the fall, John by far the latest (100+ years after Jesus). Math and Luke share a lot of Jesus' speeches (sermon on the mount, sermon on the plain et al), thus we assume a common source: "Q" - they both "q"uote (probably differing "editions", surely edited by them) - which may have been notes of authentic teachings of the historical Jesus. https://www.logos.com/grow/nook-the-sermon-on-the-plain/
My comment's point is: Considering John (!!!) an eyewitness is ... a sign the author is very much outside the mainstream of theological/historical-critical discussion - and likely has been reading the Joan accounts also with a heavy bias/rose-colored glasses. Sure, there are books arguing for whatever. Erich von Däniken wrote books, too - paper is patient. MY priors remain: Aztecs were not alien astronauts / John is no eyewitness / Joan was not sent by God to kill the English.
It's really interesting for me to read your comment, since my intellectual framework cuts in *exactly* the opposite direction from yours. I'm quite certain that John was an eyewitness (not sure about Mark or Matthew, but the case for John being an eyewitness seems extremely strong to me). The fact that the author of this review, whoever he is, accepts eyewitness authorship of John is a positive sign to me, since it suggests that he's willing to break with historico-critical scholarship (which I have a....dim view of), to break with metaphysical naturalism, and to at least take seriously both the reliability of tradition and the existence of miracles.
I'd say the reasons I'm convinced that John was written by an eyewitness, and was written early, boil down to:
1) The author seems to be completely unaware of the fall of Jerusalem, even though he mentions other examples of fulfilled prophecy, e.g. the death of Peter. That seems to me to point, strongly, to a date after Peter's death but before the fall of Jerusalem.
2) the author is aware of details (like the existence of the Pool of Bethesda) that would have been hard to come by after the city fell, and moreover, he speaks about the Pool of Bethesda *in the present tense*, as though it still exists at the time of writing.
3) there are Syriac traditions that place the authorship sometime in the 60s as well, as opposed to the Western tradition that places it in the 90s.
4) John's wealth of detail, including about matters of no particular significance (catching 153 fish, for example, or Jesus writing in the sand) seem to me to point strongly to it being the work of someone who was actually there on the scene, as opposed to a writer embellishing things for theological reasons.
5) the text itself, at numerous places, claims to be the work of an eyewitness, and that eyewitness authorship is certified by the community that oversaw the finalization of the book.
6) probably most importantly, early tradition ascribes the work to John, and i don't think there's much in the way of early tradition to the contrary. when it comes to authorship, I'm certainly going to weigh the opinion of early church tradition- which was closer to the events, shaped by a similr culture, and wasn't contaminated by metaphysical naturalism- more strongly than the opinion of 20th century theologians working in the tradition of historical criticism.
(plus, if you are trying to assess whether Christianity is true or not, and to be clear, i don't think it completely is, then you should at least take seriously the Christian argument, which is that the church is guided by the Holy Spirit and presumably therefore would have been able to correctly discern who the author of John's Gospel was).
I'd be interested to know what convinces you that John's gospel was *not* written by an eyewitness, and that it was written late (i.e. in the 90s or 100s rather than in the 60s?) Because all the arguments I've seen to the contrary (like "John refers to the expulsion of Christians from synagogues, and we have a document to that effect from 90 AD, so it must have been written after 90 AD") strike me as....remarkably weak.
For the record, I'm not a Christian currently, though i have been in the past. I don't think you need to be a Christian to accept John's Gospel as a true *historical* account, though I disagree with much of the theology contained therein, just like you don't need to be a Christian to believe that Joan of Arc performed miracles either. (The miracle that I've heard testimony from at the shortest remove, and that I'm most *personally* convinced of the truth of, isn't a Christian miracle at all).
John contains more advanced philosophy (Jesus is the Logos) that dates it to a later period of Hellenistic revival. The Stoicist concept of the Logos gained renewed interest and a parallel non-Christian trinity concept was even developed.
There are elements of this in 1st century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, but my understanding is that his Logos is more like God’s power manifesting through angels or prophets because he believes the divine power must be and remain outside the world. The concepts have clearly been further developed by the time of John, more in the direction of Neoplatonic philosophy circa 200 (that it nevertheless is assumed to predate based on the earliest known manuscript fragments and other people referencing it with the other gospels by 180.)
Thanks for helping out :) - indeed my shortest answer would also be: just read that opening. Far too elaborate a theology for Galilean fishermen. - Or even better: read Scott's post about how (not) to look for truth - "epistemic helplessness" - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
As said, I am a very minor theologian ;) , there are libraries about it and if a position is regarded by all the big and medium experts as trashy, I feel very fine ignoring it.
What I would like to add here, that I find the surprisingly widespread view very wrong and very surprising that people think nations and nationalism weren't invented yet and wars were just the private business of kings etc. Some elements of it are true, in the sense that it was more a war between two dynasties, and some French lord sided with the English dynasty. Still, if you was a peasant in the French dynasty loyal regions, an invading English army in your village was very, very bad news to you. And this did create some sense of nationalism, that the invading army is a "them" (who treat you terribly) and then army of your own country our king is "us" in the sense that they don't and maybe try to protect you and so on.
Excellent read, I have been thinking quite heavily on this since reading.
Indeed, I specifically have been chewing on how the Saint explanation (which, as a WEIRD person, I am trained to find least likely) could tie in with some of the recent thinking in philosophy of mind.
When I took philosophy in college, David Chalmers was a regular name to appear in texts. However it seems that in the time since I was in college, he has developed a new prong in his approach to the hard problem of consciousness:
To be clear, these would all be varieties of the dualistic position "mental and physical are separate, but physical objects have an innate capacity for mental attributes." I found it quite shocking that this is actually a persuasive approach to the problem. Indeed, the logic is somewhat hard to dispute except for some counterintuitive results (for example, a "Constitutive" version where smaller mental events make up greater mental events is necessary to make the logic jel, but everyone involved feels this might be silly). While this approach has persuasive logic behind it, it also *breaks the closed nature of the physical world.* Regardless ...
If we were to assume this position to be true, it could tie in in interesting ways here. If we accept that mental phenomena being an intrinsic part of the material world is a good explanation for the existence of consciousness, it seems to me that the ability of someone like Joan to seemingly receive advice from angels becomes *slightly* less confusing.
Of course, if this were true and we lived in a Dualistic universe, individual cases like Joan's would be just a small tip of a rather large iceberg (and one where we may never see the depths below the water!).
lesson taken after reading this whole thing: when you're henry v, just get the dauphine charles strangled instead of getting her mother to swear he's not the heir.
Karl Gallagher is absolutely correct. I'm Stephen W. Richey. I'm the author of the serious scholarly book _Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint_. (Be aware that there are two other books with the exact same title as mine.) On pages 91-92 of my book, I explain how I think Jehanne acquired her skill at placing artillery. I summarize my findings in my book as follows here: Gunpowder artillery was the component of late Medieval armies that was growing the fastest in size, sophistication, and lethality. The master gunners of the day were of common birth, not nobility. The established male noble aristocratic commanders of the army may have resented these commoners encroaching on their monopoly of military leadership. As a commoner herself, and as an ingenious pragmatist who was more concerned with what worked than with social class distinctions, Jehanne may have been able to establish a working rapport with the gunners more easily than her noble co-commanders. As a fast and intuitive learner, she may have picked up from the gunners how best to deploy the guns for battle even if she did not master the technical minutiae of casting iron or mixing the ingredients of gunpowder.
I'm delighted to hear there's scholarly work aligned with my offhand joke. Joan's ability to move information across class boundaries could have been a superpower.
>Thiband d’Armagnac or de Termes, Knight, bailiff of Chartres: "Except in matters of war, she was simple and innocent...
>[The Duke d'Alencon, French nobleman and general]: "In everything that she did, apart from the conduct of the war, Joan was young and simple...
>[Marguerite La Touroulde, Joan's landlady at Chinon] "And from all that I know of her she was absolutely ignorant except in the matter of arms...
A lot the arguments that "Well, Joan was obviously a genius, hence she was able go learn warfare so quickly" seem to be skipping over these parts of the testimony. If contemporaries are to be believed, Joan *wasn't* a briliant prodigy, at least not in general. Now, maybe those testimonies are underestimating Joan's brilliance, and the reason she didn't show amazing talent in other fields was simply that there was no need for her to learn them, but that needs to be argued for. It's bad historical practice to assume something that is, at least apparently, directly contradicted by the primary sources.
In your 3rd explanatory option, that she was manic, you said that this doesn’t correlate with intelligence. Another option is that she had a schizotype personality but not schizophrenic. Those personality types have a clustering of traits including a strong spiritual belief, hearing voices or experiencing spirits, fluid intelligence, and a strong belief in a mission. She fits that pretty well imo.
She’s only a “completely untaught theology genius” if you assume theology can only be taught in school. Joan was an exceptionally intelligent person with ample opportunity to sharpen her wit through arguing against those who thought she was a fraud or sorcerer, and ample opportunity to talk theology with her confessors and with the highest-level clergy in the land. It’s not at all surprising that an intelligent person obsessed with religion would learn some stuff about what their church thought about theology.
The visions of later Catholic seers (19th and 20th century), most notably St Bernadette of Lourdes, were often considered reliable because an ignorant girl could not have known enough about theology to surprise a priest questioning her. But growing up surrounded by Christianity, they might have known what the priest wanted to hear. Dealing with the adversity of sceptical clerical authorities is in any case a part of being a successful reformer or visionary, and therefore a common theme in hagiographies.
NYT's Ross Douthat about "Five theories about Joan of Arc’s miraculous-seeming care" starting:
"Scott Alexander, the noted rationalist blogger, has a feature where guest writers pen book reviews and essays for his site, and this week an anonymous writer reviewed the historical literature on Joan of Arc." Ross asks the obvious question: Why would God interfere here? -And gives 5 possible answers. Fun. Ending: "And since the French part of that story isn’t finished yet, the last possibility remains open as well: Because God loves the French in a special way, and they have a cosmic destiny that still waits to be fulfilled. C’est certainement possible!"
It was a fascinating summary of what we know of Jeanne d'Arc, but why the need to explain her phenomenon? Trying to pigeonhole her into a rationalist just-so story reduces her importance and uniqueness. We should just admit that we don't have enough information after six centuries to truly understand her.
I enjoyed this review a lot, but your footnote 95 has gone wrong, in way which makes me doubt your ability to assess sources.
Neither Mark's nor John's gospel identifies its author by name. Conventionally the authors are referred to as Mark and John respectively, but both names are common and there's no good reason to identify them with other biblical figures with those names.
The gospel of Mark does not claim to be an eye-witness account and is not written from the perspective of an eye-witness. There is simply no reason to think it is an eye-witness account.
John 21:24 claims that the author is the Beloved Disciple (never named in the gospel), who clearly would have been an eye-witness, but John 21 is a later addition. On internal evidence alone, it was written after the Beloved Disciple's death. The original ending is John 20:31. John 1-20 gives no hint that it is an eye-witness account. People writing eye-witness accounts in the first century would make it clear they *were* eye-witness accounts, in the same way that people do now. The most likely position is that the Fourth Gospel was written based on the teachings of the Beloved Disciple, but not actually by him.
Paul *does* claim to have personally met Jesus, in that he encountered the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. It is clear both from Paul's letters and from Acts that Paul was not an eye-witness to Jesus's earthly ministry, and on Paul's own account he had very little contact with those who were eye-witnesses.
Q is not an account at all, but a collection of sayings. There is no reason to think it was collated by by an eye-witness.
Josephus on any view does not say much about Jesus's life. The most extensive reference is the Testimonium Flavianum, which is widely agreed to be inauthentic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus#The_Testimonium_Flavianum. But even if it were authentic, it would only show that Josephus believed the stories of Jesus's resurrection.
That many people, soon after Jesus's death, believed that he had risen from the dead, is clear enough, and that requires some explanation. As a general principle, the answer to "Why do people believe X?" cannot be "Because X is true;" both true and false claims must be believed on some evidence. I have a theory about this, but it would be too much a tangent here.
I'm sorry, but where do you see 'internal evidence' in John 21 that the chapter was written after John's death? It seems clear to me that it was written while he was still alive (hence why they seem to take some pains to point out that he will probably die eventually), and represents the community around him signing off / verifying that he was the author of the gospel.
That is, specifically:
"23 Then went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?
24 This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true."
I read those verses differently. Anybody who writes an account of anything necessarily includes some details and excludes others, and in the case of John's gospel, John 21:25 specifically says so. So we should ask ourselves why the writer would mention this particular rumour. There were surely many rumours around at the time (clear enough from the New Testament itself, but also the writings of the apostolic fathers and their pagan contemporaries). The obvious explanation is that there had been a widely believed prophecy that the Beloved Disciple would live until the Parousia, but this had been falsified by the Beloved Disciple's death, so the writer needs to explain away the prophecy as having been based on a misunderstanding of Jesus's words.
This I think is a straightforward application of Bayesian principles, but it is also a consensus view among New Testatment scholars. I realise that saying "read a book" is obnoxious, but given the amount that has been written on the authorship of John's gospel, it does seem slightly absurd to rehash the argument in ACX comments. If you have some interest in the question, then I think you would likely enjoy reading a commentary. More or less any commentary written this century would cover it, although as it happens I am in the middle of reading of David Ford's 'The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary', which I would recommend.
Got here from the NYT review. This essay was so thoughtful that it's somewhat changed my opinion on the whole rationalist movement. Great to read, and I'll be sure to stick around if the rest of the content on this blog is just as good.
Loved this review - and while scrolling by would love to welcome you as well.
I've benefited from being here quite a bit over the years, mostly in ways that are orthogonal to the LW Project writ large - friends, humility, appreciation of the other, the ability to listen etc. Wishing only the very best :)
Per the review, "Between the time of the battles of Crecy and of Poiters, Philip the Fortunate had given the rich duchy of Burgundy in fief to his faithful son Philip the Bold". But according to Wikipedia and Britannica, Philip the Bold was the son of John II, so the grandson of Philip the Fortunate. Also per those two sources, PtB became Duke of Burgundy in 1363, so not between Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356).
I wish, just as a fan, that the author had given a long footnote to Twain who was mentioned in passing, because of course America's greatest author, himself a noted skeptic as the author of Letters from the Earth, What is Man?, The Diaries of Adam and Eve, Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, etc.--that same genius read the trial records in French, & wrote of his novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc that, "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others need no preparation and got none."
And Twain devoted a beautiful essay, Saint Joan of Arc, to just the topic of this review, writing in that essay:
'In Joan of Arc at the age of sixteen there was no promise of a romance. She lived in a dull little village on the frontiers of civilization: she had been nowhere and had seen nothing; she knew none but simple shepherd folk; she had never seen a person of note; she hardly knew what a soldier looked like; she had never ridden a horse, nor had a warlike weapon in her hand; she could neither read nor write: she could spin and sew; she knew her catechism and her prayers and the fabulous histories of the saints, and this was all her learning. That was Joan at sixteen. What did she know of law? of evidence? of courts? of the attorney’s trade? of legal procedure? Nothing. Less than nothing. Thus exhaustively equipped with ignorance, she went before the court at Toul to contest a false charge of breach of promise of marriage; she conducted her cause herself, without any one’s help or advice or any one’s friendly sympathy, and won it. She called no witnesses of her own, but vanquished the prosecution by using with deadly effectiveness its own testimony. The astonished judge threw the case out of court, and spoke of her as “this marvelous child.”
She went to the veteran Commandant of Vaucouleurs and demanded an escort of soldiers, saying she must march to the help of the King of France, since she was commissioned of God to win back his lost kingdom for him and set the crown upon his head. The Commandant said, “What, you? You are only a child.” And he advised that she be taken back to her village and have her ears boxed. But she said she must obey God, and would come again, and again, and yet again, and finally she would get the soldiers. She said truly. In time he yielded, after months of delay and refusal, and gave her the soldiers; and took off his sword and gave her that, and said, “Go—and let come what may.” She made her long and perilous journey through the enemy’s country, and spoke with the King, and convinced him. Then she was summoned before the University of Poitiers to prove that she was commissioned of God and not of Satan, and daily during three weeks she sat before that learned congress unafraid, and capably answered their deep questions out of her ignorant but able head and her simple and honest heart; and again she won her case, and with it the wondering admiration of all that august company.
And now, aged seventeen, she was made Commander-in-Chief, with a prince of the royal house and the veteran generals of France for subordinates; and at the head of the first army she had ever seen, she marched to Orleans, carried the commanding fortresses of the enemy by storm in three desperate assaults, and in ten days raised a siege which had defied the might of France for seven months...
She is the Wonder of the Ages. And when we consider her origin, her early circumstances, her sex, and that she did all the things upon which her renown rests while she was still a young girl, we recognize that while our race continues she will be also the Riddle of the Ages. When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training which it received while it grew the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encouragement it gathered from self-recognition and recognition from the outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came...
We can understand how she could be born with military genius, with leonine courage, with incomparable fortitude, with a mind which was in several particulars a prodigy—a mind which included among its specialties the lawyer’s gift of detecting traps laid by the adversary in cunning and treacherous arrangements of seemingly innocent words, the orator’s gift of eloquence, the advocate’s gift of presenting a case in clear and compact form, the judge’s gift of sorting and weighing evidence, and finally, something recognizable as more than a mere trace of the statesman’s gift of understanding a political situation and how to make profitable use of such opportunities as it offers; we can comprehend how she could be born with these great qualities, but we cannot comprehend how they became immediately usable and effective without the developing forces of a sympathetic atmosphere and the training which comes of teaching, study practice—years of practice—and the crowning and perfecting help of a thousand mistakes. We can understand how the possibilities of the future perfect peach are all lying hid in the humble bitter-almond, but we cannot conceive of the peach springing directly from the almond without the intervening long seasons of patient cultivation and development. Out of a cattle-pasturing peasant village lost in the remotenesses of an unvisited wilderness and atrophied with ages of stupefaction and ignorance we cannot see a Joan of Arc issue equipped to the last detail for her amazing career and hope to be able to explain the riddle of it, labor at it as we may.
It is beyond us. All the rules fail in this girl’s case. In the world’s history she stands alone—quite alone. Others have been great in their first public exhibitions of generalship, valor, legal talent, diplomacy, fortitude; but always their previous years and associations had been in a larger or smaller degree a preparation for these things. There have been no exceptions to the rule. But Joan was competent in a law case at sixteen without ever having seen a law-book or a court-house before; she had no training in soldiership and no associations with it, yet she was a competent general in her first campaign; she was brave in her first battle, yet her courage had had no education—not even the education which a boy’s courage gets from never-ceasing reminders that it is not permissible in a boy to be a coward, but only in a girl; friendless, alone, ignorant, in the blossom of her youth, she sat week after week, a prisoner in chains, before her assemblage of judges, enemies hunting her to her death, the ablest minds in France, and answered them out of an untaught wisdom which overmatched their learning, baffled their tricks and treacheries with a native sagacity which compelled their wonder, and scored every day a victory against these incredible odds and camped unchallenged on the field. In the history of the human intellect, untrained, inexperienced, and using only its birthright equipment of untried capacities, there is nothing which approaches this. Joan of Arc stands alone, and must continue to stand alone, by reason of the unfellowed fact that in the things wherein she was great she was so without shade or suggestion of help from preparatory teaching, practice, environment, or experience. There is no one to compare her with, none to measure her by; for all others among the illustrious grew toward their high place in an atmosphere and surroundings which discovered their gift to them and nourished it and promoted it, intentionally or unconsciously. There have been other young generals, but they were not girls; young generals, but they had been soldiers before they were generals; she began as a general; she commanded the first army she ever saw; she led it from victory to victory, and never lost a battle with it; there have been young commanders-in-chief, but none so young as she: she is the only soldier in history who has held the supreme command of a nation’s armies at the age of seventeen...
Taking into account, as I have suggested before, all the circumstances—her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquests in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life—she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.'
This is too long by about 200%, but I did enjoy being reminded why the teaching of French history in French schools largely skips over the politicking of the Hundred Years' War - not just because the "French" kept losing to the English, but mostly because it's completely incomprehensible. Even to modern-day historians who kept up with the plot so we can read about it, one feels like asking: why did you bother?
One minor point in defense of the non-Catholic Christians: If you accept that Joan was sent by God to save France, then it's very telling that she died before getting the chance to subdue the Hussites as she so plainly wanted to do. It would seem that either God was ambivalent toward the heresy, or even protected it so that it would eventually lead to a reaction against the Papacy.
Reading this review and the comments on it leave me dumbfounded. First, the unshakeable faith of so many of you that everything is rationally explainable makes me scratch my head. Don’t Gödel and Heisenberg at least mildly shake up your faith? But I guess when you are a true believer, it’s hard to look at the evidence. On the flip side, there is a a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of G-d by many non-believers (as well as many believers). G-d is here defined at as some super-human being that intervenes in human events. The crux of this simplistic understanding of “G-d” leads to a false framing of the hypothesis: Joan of Arc “proves” G-d’s existence by his “miraculous” interventions in this war which gives this teenage girl her uncanny ability. So then the choice becomes “believe in G-d” and then you have to explain why in this specific war G-d comes down on the side of the Dauphin or don’t believe in G-d and then you have to explain her uncanny ability.
Besides being simplistic, this is not the way most people actually experience G-d. G-d is not a being or an object, but an experience, akin to love. People don’t debate whether or not we need to believe love exists or not—you just experience it. The experience of G-d entails a connection to something greater and more powerful than ourselves. “Belief” in a specific set of ideas about G-d as an object is as besides the point as trying to define love.
In this view, there is no doubt at all that Joan of Arc had an experiential connection called G-d. She is far from the first and far from the last. And while she was undoubtedly an extraordinary person, her G-d experience, allowed her to achieve truly extraordinary things. Again she is neither the first nor the last for whom this was true. Hence there is no need to explain G-d’s “intervention” in this war. Joan and her saintly connection to G-d was what led to the success of the French. There is no need for further explanation, even though fundamentally it still doesn’t really explain anything. And that’s ok, we don’t know everything and can’t explain everything, and knowing we don’t know everything and can’t explain everything is a very fundamental part of the G-d experience.
And just like you understand the power of love when you see it’s amazing effects on yourself or people you know, the story of Joan should make you understand the power of the experience of G-d. This should encourage you to open yourself up to experiencing it yourself. This doesn’t require you to be a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist or a Muslim or adopt some shamanistic religion. Those are all just alternative paths to opening up to that experience. G-d isn’t a being who cares about this human or that human or this religion or that religion. G-d is an experience that can and often does make us better people (just like love for that matter) although sometimes it drags us down (ibid).
isn’t it at all relevant to you that Joan is a *Catholic* saint and the idea that God is not a being is alien to the point of self-contradiction to a religion whose *central claim* is that God became not only a being but a *specific human* in a specific time and place? You start by laughing at the rationalists and then also casually dismiss all theists; who exactly are you even with, here?
Well it should be obvious I am *not* a Christian and actually most theists aren’t either, so I am not “casually” dismissing “all” theists. It is the case that Catholicism, in order to win over the Roman pagan world, adopted its idea of G-d as a big man in the sky (literally) as opposed to the many alternative “heresies” out there. And undoubtedly the obsession with the “existence of G-d” issue is mostly due to Christianity. Still I can say without a doubt there are devout Christians (particularly in the mystical traditions) who are totally focused on their experience of G-d rather on questions of who or what G-d is.
It is tautologically constitutive of theism that a theist believes God is a being (or the gods are several beings), as everyone knows is true of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and all the famous pagan religious systems, which together account for essentially all the people in history one would ever have called a theist. Certainly there are mystics who don't attend to questions of theology, but it is flatly self-contradictory to attempt to talk about a Christian who doesn't believe God is a being. I don't think it'll be worth responding to you any more, though; the idea that Catholicism got the "big man in the sky" from *paganism* is so comically uninformed--and from someone who literally affects the Jewish avoidance of writing out the name of God--that I can't see how you could possibly be serious.
Using big words like :”tautologically constitutive” does not make your argument more compelling or effective. Nor does calling someone unserious instead of engaging in the argument. Theism is just a label which associates “being” as connected to something or things greater than us puny humans. Beyond that simple statement there is no consensus whatsoever what the words “G-d”, “God”, “gods” or “being” actually mean. My personal view on the specifics of G-d’s “nature” has a fancy name too: “panentheism” but that is irrelevant to the point I was trying to make: the exact nature of “G-d” is not relevant, its the experience of G-d that matters. As for my view of the origin of the “big man in the sky” theory, surely you won’t dismiss the idea of “the hypostatic unity of the person of Christ in his two natures, divine and human” has pagan roots. It certainly didn’t come from the beliefs of the Jews…
Certainly I’ll dismiss it. It was introduced by men who hated paganism with a hatred that has never been equaled again, who indeed invented the concept of paganism to have a label for the thing they were in the process of destroying forever.
These same church fathers were also the ones who were instrumental in shaping the term “Judaism” for the exact same reason they shaped the term paganism. In fact, one can argue they hated the Jews—the Christ-killers—far more, and tried to destroy Jews, their practices and culture. Their hatred never abated even though in the end they compromised (just like they did with polytheists) and “merely” pushed Jews to a situation of utter humiliation and despair.
Yet from the beginning they adopted wholesale huge chunks of Jewish ideas, obviously since Jesus and the apostles, and most early Christians were all Jews. There is no contradiction between hating something you are strongly connected to, while at the same time incorporating aspects of the thing you hate.. To attribute consistency and rationality to humans is part of what I criticized in my post. The same is equally true with Roman polytheism.
And as for your claim this hatred has never “been equaled again,” well it certainly took intense hatred of the polytheists for the Taliban to blow up those ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan
These same church fathers were also the ones who were instrumental in shaping the term “Judaism” for the exact same reason they shaped the term paganism. In fact, one can argue they hated the Jews—the Christ-killers—far more, and tried to destroy Jews, their practices and culture. Their hatred never abated even though in the end they compromised (just like they did with polytheists) and “merely” pushed Jews to a situation of utter humiliation and despair.
Yet from the beginning they adopted wholesale huge chunks of Jewish ideas, obviously since Jesus and the apostles, and most early Christians were all Jews. There is no contradiction between hating something you are strongly connected to, while at the same time incorporating aspects of the thing you hate.. To attribute consistency and rationality to humans is part of what I criticized in my post. The same is equally true with Roman polytheism.
And as for your claim this hatred has never “been equaled again,” well it certainly took intense hatred of the polytheists for the Taliban to blow up those ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan
First, this is too long. Delete part 1 because it's irrelevant. Delete part 3.3 because it's distracting fictional dialogue.
Second, the footnote gore. Delete all of them.
Third, the blockquotes shift from random unnamed people saying things to a narrator from a god's eye point of view saying things to cringe poetry. Delete most of them.
Fourth, there is proper noun introduction everywhere. This spam makes it very hard to keep track of what is going on because you're overloaded with names of random things. Condense most of this by just referring to French and English shit.
Overall this triggered me more than the Alpha School review.
Coming into this as a Catholic, I obviously agree most with Basilica. This is because, naturally, I think the Catholic model fits with all the evidence, and I have independent reasons for being Catholic. I buy the metaphysical arguments of Thomism as I understand them, and I agree with the Catholic interpretation of the Bible that imply Church and Papal authority. All that being said, I think you are quite correct in not being completely swayed to Catholicism, or theism more generally, because of St. Joan's example. Sure, you have to advance some difficult or even impossible to prove theories to explain her, but nothing you propose to explain her seems beyond the bounds of reason to me. So well done again for being fair and reasonable.
I would be very interested in someone in Rationalist circles grappling with theistic metaphysical arguments as presented by Feser or other such modern writers. Has this been done before?
Wow, that was long. And interesting in the bits I read/scanned. But I must have missed somewhere what the essay is a "review" of. I thought maybe it would end up being about Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc but no. Or perhaps review in this case means historical summary.
It’s a review of the evidence for Joan of Arc
“This is, then, an agnostic’s review of the evidence for Joan of Arc - artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person.”
Then it wasn't Deiseach?!
All of the "reviews" I've read so far are actually essays.
It's a regular Amateur Philosophy Club in here!
I thought it was a given that all the review contests are basically essay contests by another name.
I think this follows this site's announced series of Not-A-Book Reviews, after the blogger realised there are things to be reviewed other than books.
Guess I missed that episode, thanks.
Most people didn't write reviews. I'm pretty sure a good many of these "reviews" are essays that people wrote in some other context.
Except that one asshole who "reviewed" The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe by saying "It's good. Read it." Wasted a perfectly good slot on the Book Review series last year.
the on on the alzheimers paper was absolutly a rievew. and I think some of the other ones can also fairly be called reviews.
By some definitions every piece of non-fiction writing is a review. We could call your present comment a review of my comment, for instance.
Good writing, with above-average similarity to Scott's own.
If it is Scott, then he is has deliberately changed his style a bit, inserting 98 footnotes is not usual for him. I am also not sure that the author is enthusiastic about exactly the things Scott would be enthusiastic about. I would expect Scott to care more about the psychiatric side of things and less about breastplates, personally.
Also, if this is indeed Scott, I must conclude that he possesses a time-turner.
But yes, the writing was great.
The writing was overall enjoyable, but there were a few needlessly complicated sentences and the occasional forgotten word. Nothing major in relation to the length of the essay, but I found it noticable, and less careful than Scott's.
I think I have a pretty good guess as to who wrote this, and I don't think it's Scott. But they're both quite engaging writers on a sentence-by-sentence basis, in a way that's not common even among people who make the finals.
Yes, this author is good at the "microhumor" just like Scott.
But Scott would have written more concisely, e.g. skipping many of the details of French politics prior to Joan.
I think I know who it is (not Scott!) But yes, excellent writer.
I am nitpicking, but I am from Newcastle so Bede is one of my local saints. Bede was born in 672 and Cuthbert died in 687. Cuthbert lived and died in Lindisfarne, about 60 miles up the coast from where Bede was in Jarrow. At the very least, Bede knew people who had met and talked to Cuthbert, he did not need a book written twenty years later. I think that this illustrates that you do not need distance or time to create fantastic stories about heroes.
Artillery would have been a fairly novel aspect of European warfare at the time, wouldn't it? If so, there wasn't yet a large body of hard-won practical knowledge that one had to internalize just to get to the level of the average artillery strategist. That's exactly the sort of environment where one would expect a gifted but untutored novice to excel. It doesn't look very miraculous.
It indeed was fairly novel. During the second phase of the Hundred Year's war, France was the first European country to make a mass use of artillery, notably under the command of Jean Bureau which was a key figure of this phase of the conflict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bureau
Depends on what you mean by "novel". Cannons were used in European warfare since at least the 14th century. They were notably present during the Siege of Marienburg in 1410, before Joan was even born. The issue was more that the metalworking technology of the day was too primitive to contain the pressure needed to use cannons like artillery. They were more akin to large shotguns that were loaded with arrows or shrapnel, although larger bombard cannons used in sieges did develop around this time period. Most famously at the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
>That's exactly the sort of environment where one would expect a gifted but untutored novice to excel.
Is it? If nobody knows how to use cannons, then it seems more miraculous to me that a random peasant girl knew how to use them. After all, it would make it even more unlikely that somebody trained her on the side, since there are less people who know how to do it available.
The key word here is "untutored". I'm assuming that nobody taught her on the side.
Let me explain another way: if nobody knows how to use cannons, then a random person without any teaching is as likely to be the best as anyone else (and if they're unusually clever, even more likely). That only becomes unlikely as the body of knowledge around the use of cannons builds, and the level of skill among cannoneers rises.
Another illustrative example: imagine that chess had just been invented a week ago. The first major tournament has just been held, and there's another in one week. Take a gifted youngster who's never studied the game but is otherwise very smart and interested. They may have decent odds of being able to win the next major tournament, just by thinking about the game and coming up with new ideas! This is because there is still lots of low-hanging strategic fruit that hasn't been thought of and countered yet. But 500 years later, all that fruit is gone - people tried all those strategies, won some games with them, then other people figured out how to counter those strategies, etc. So our gifted youngster gets crushed in their first tournament, because now they're playing against Magnus Carlsen. The top is much higher than it used to be, and you can't get there just by being clever anymore. You have to study the game's strategies at length to have a chance.
That's how I would explain Joan of Arc's success with artillery: because nobody really knew what they were doing yet, and because she was unusually clever and motivated, she was able to come up with a lot of good ideas that nobody had thought of yet. Because when it came to artillery, nobody had thought of much at all, yet.
So, I'm a big fan of this review, and I understand that the author doesn't contend actual divine intervention on her behalf, but presents documentation of a life which is, in conventional terms, pretty hard to explain.
But I'd like to note that some of this becomes, I think, more explicable, with the context that Jean didn't actually need extraordinary abilities of military command to achieve success above the baseline that the French forces were experiencing before her. The French nobility at the time were extremely fractious and jockeying for power, and battles at the time were often terribly coordinated, with different nobles failing to use the forces under their control cooperatively, because they were all aiming for their own glory more than collective success.
I'm afraid that I can't cite a specific source, because this comes from some book I read over a decade ago, whose title I can't remember, but it documented some firsthand accounts of Jean's participation in some battles at the time, where various nobles were all in disagreement about when to attack. Jean deployed her own forces into battle at a time that the various leaders generally considered stupid and reckless, but they felt forced to send their own forces in after her to salvage the situation, and although the timing was bad, they thereby achieved better coordination than they would have without a schelling point to rally around.
Jean definitely achieved greater success than other leaders at the time, but it seems that her contemporaries did not hold any kind of unanimous consensus that she was actually competent at what she was doing; it seems that some of them saw her as reckless and constantly needing to be bailed out of the consequences of her own poor judgment. I don't know any firsthand sources that address whether she was actually skilled in martial disciplines like the use of the sword or lance, and I have spent some time looking; I think it's likely that she wasn't actually particularly skilled in these areas either, but as a military leader, she didn't particularly need to be, and any attributions of her being exceptionally skilled were likely confabulations after the fact.
There's still plenty left over about Jean's life afterwards which is strange and exceptional, but I think it would be a mistake to imagine that it takes decades for a person to become shrouded in rumor, and for stories about them to become more grounded in legend than true recollection.
I believe that there are several martial disciplines that she could have learned on the farm, without much in the way of teaching. Horsemanship, in particular, was learnable on a farm, in that the same horses were used for heavy cavalry as for pulling a plough. And she'd have learned it better bareback than in a saddle. Lance, too, is about aim -- it's not something you really need to have a partner to learn.
"Horsemanship, in particular, was learnable on a farm, in that the same horses were used for heavy cavalry as for pulling a plough."
This is absolutely not true. Warhorses were specially bred for aggression and speed, and were a prized and expensive possession of the nobility. Plough horses needed to be docile and have long term endurance, which selected for rather different traits. Maybe you could learn to ride a horse in the general sense as a 15th century French peasant, but it certainly would not be the same as riding a warhorse into battle with full kit.
I don't think you were breeding warhorses for aggression. You'd breed them for "steadiness" and ability to be turned while using "no hands."
Still point taken -- there are different horses. I'm still going to maintain that any of the heavier breeds are in general less "flighty" than Arabians, and not bred to be high-strung.
Aggression was important, because a horse is naturally averse to charging into a mass of other people/animals. We know that warhorses were indeed aggressive due to accounts of them generally being temperamental and on occasion a hazard even to their own handlers.
I saw you mentioned Shire horses in another comment, but I think you had it backwards. The European Destrier, or great horse, was often used as a warhorse before the widespread adoption of gunpowder. After this, mobility became more important than brute strength and most cavalry transitioned to lighter horse. Possibly modern draft breeds like the Shire are descendants of the old great horse after it no longer had a place on the battlefield; but this is disputed due to the various physical differences between martial and draft horses.
Lindybeige had a recent video about how horses were trained to charge masses of pikemen though a few months of conditioning them not to associate that with danger (by having a "dummy" group of people who all move out of the way): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zviMg5Bkt8g.
If that's historically accurate – it sounds plausible to me – aggression wouldn't be as important as mass and trainability.
And about being "temperamental" hazards to their trainers, that fits with them being skittish, easily frightened and hurting people while panicking, quite the opposite of being aggressive.
Specifically, they tended to bite or kick people. Which would be handy if you were surrounded by a bunch of hostile infantry. On charging into pikes, that one is pretty contentious. I know Brett Deveraux wrote a piece in support of the "that didn't actually happen" camp.
Yes, cavalry that charges formed pikemen get skewered. You have to break the formation first.
Charging them sometimes works, since a formation of charging cavalry is really scary to stand in front of. But it's a game of chicken.
Cavalry however are really good at killing people running away, since they move faster.
This discussion is reminding me of a favorite scene from The Dark Tower series: Roland of Gilead, on horseback, charging at an army of his foes holding the reins in his teeth, one huge revolver in each hand, shooting both at once.
Sigh. Sure, Stephen King is where you go to find historical accuracy. And someone can surf Los Angeles (Let's cite Niven while we're at it, another person not known for "historical accuracy" so much as "it looks cool.")
You're not providing the proper stimulus with "reins in your teeth" so it's equivalent to "dropped reins" -- which is what normal people train their horses to do, if they're ever expecting to not be using their reins (Western riding does this a lot, being used for roping and other farm labor).
Sorry, I meant to post about a scene from Goodnight, Moon, but suffered some slippage.
I'd be extremely surprised if that was the case. Remember, most deliberate breeding organizations weren't started until the 1800s (thoroughbreds with their 1791 stud book were one of the first). France had a few royal studs in the 1300s at least (La Feuillie, Saint-Rome, and Breuil), but at least one of those had shut down by 1400 and I'm not seeing anything about the others then. The oldest stud farm I know had a notable impact was the Royal Stables of Cordoba, and that wasn't built until 1570.
Remember also that modern conceptions of both historical plow horse and historical war horses are highly inaccurate - for instance both are generally pictured as being a similar size to modern draft horses or at least Friesians, but actually the very largest few horses were about the size of modern warmbloods and many would today be considered ponies. See https://phys.org/news/2022-01-medieval-warhorses-surprisingly-small-stature.html
The Romans certainly had horse breeders that were capable of artificially selecting based on traits. It's believed that at least some of these lines persisted through the Merovingians (Franks). To what extent deliberate horse breeding in France existed between the time of Charlemagne and Joan of Arc, I'm not sure. It's also difficult because medieval sources refer to horses by their role rather than breed.
That would be because there were no breeds, in the modern sense, at least not in France. There were landraces, and royal stud farms could sometimes have some influence over the local landrace, but within a given region a role is the closest you're going to get.
And sure, horse breeders have been artificially selecting traits since the Bronze Age (grug like red horse because pretty: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5102060/ ) But breeding for personality is tricky even nowadays. The Bedouin managed it for their war mares by carefully memorizing their lineages (let's not question how those notes would transfer when a horse is stolen), but most other horse breeders were less organized. I'm still pretty skeptical about it for this region and time period.
(BTW your comment also lead me to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440320301217 which was a fun read, so thank you for that)
> (let's not question how those notes would transfer when a horse is stolen)
Any formal request for a stolen horse to be returned would surely include unambiguous description of the exact horse in question, and there'd be no reason not to recite lineages as part of that.
Aw, I posted something similar in my own comment, but you beat me to it !
I think this is the missing part of the argument. Her military results are outstanding, but her strategy seems to be very heavy on “throw the whole army at them” shock tactics. Taking from the build-up, I don’t understand what she was doing to not get shredded by longbows. All this requires extreme piety, charisma and self belief but not much else. Tends towards mad as opposed to faking it.
As for military skills, she’s got a month to learn to wear armour and control a warhorse, which is doable. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that she’s storming in like Master Chief and killing 500 Englishmen single-handedly. Not dying is notable but not out of distribution.
The predictions seem pretty “eh.” The wind one was cool, ignoring that it’s not technically a prediction, but it’s the sort of “darndest thing” story you get all the time, as is the cannonball. The grand scale predictions are run of the mill for charismatic leaders, and the fact she was the 1 in 50 where it paid off is why we’re talking about her.
The trial skills are a matter of taste. They remind me of all Jesus’ irritating non-answers in the gospel, and of my broader experience of having to cross-examine grandiose buffoons; they’re not heresy because she doesn’t say all that much beyond not doubting the pope and only reporting what the voices told her.
Overall, it looks like impressive results attributable to conviction and charisma resulting from insanity.
> Taking from the build-up, I don’t understand what she was doing to not get shredded by longbows.
Archers are light infantry, who are typically vulnerable to heavy cavalry (knights), who despite what the above post said were known to put armor on their horses (although I don't know if that was commonly the case in this conflict). If horses have to charge through a muddy field (as at Agincourt), that does much to negate their advantage. It should be noted that the English continued to rely on knights in their wars (including civil wars) rather than thinking they could just rely on longbows to negate them. Getting spearmen (heavy infantry) to stand in place against a horse charge actually undermined the dominance of knights, but it was hard to do that in the medieval era and it took a long time before Swiss pikemen emerged as able to do it reliably.
Obligatory ACOUP on the limitations of archery: https://acoup.blog/2025/05/02/collections-why-archers-didnt-volley-fire/
What's fun for me about this is I used to be an agnostic secular humanist semi-rationalist (postrat?) who became a Mutazili Muslim (the most rationalist type of Muslim) and I have a model of divine guidance in history involving a series of persons like this and God tilting various political factions based on how less wrong they were about divine justice and theology.
So this checks out.
Little things like the cannonball dodge are how miracles work. I've experienced a few of these such as an accidental trade on the day of my son's birth based on some risk-management orders I forget to cancel that knocked me into a massive long (the orders were to unwind funding arbitrage positions, long/short big size to earn a few basis points over time) and I paid for my house with that, then became more religious.
I think Islam is more correct than Christianity but Muslims cheesed it up so much that Protestants who were slightly less corrupt got the edge but now that the US is fully supporting mass starvation the ball may well slide into China's court despite them being atheist, that's how Less Wrong divine favor works. Humans are very bad and God doesn't have a lot to work with in terms of optimizations. A reformed Muslim confederation of nations could also get a lot more power or a gaggle of loosely assorted "network state" parties if the Muslims don't figure it out (and let's be honest we're not sending our best).
The artillery question is really the uh... smoking gun for the Joan investigation. One thing you learn contemplating theology is to not quibble over direct vs. proxy concepts of divinity, sure God is One, above all etc. but when it comes down to free will vs. determinism, divine agents vs. divine acts, just go with the flow you can sharpshoot all combinations into an attribution bias if you're faithful enough. One thing you learn from studying hadith, gospels etc. is that indeed history is a major wikipedia edit tournament in the making for hundreds of years without a meta-data record of edits, psuedo-epigripha and such, and it's more egregious the further back you go in history but doesn't much improve. Which is why the Qur'an being widely considered by non-believing academics to be historically intact from the 600s is so exceptional - one might say miraculously so - you can't really say that about much documentation until perhaps before WWI, perhaps the 1850s, maybe 1600s kinda.
The attempts to do revisionism on the Gaza Genocide have been noted and have largely failed because people who are actively starving or semi-starving are posting live video on Twitter from their phones and these things mirror onto new media. I saw some pro-genocide account posting about how the NYTimes is anti-semetic because their photo of a near-death starving child didn't diclose he has cerebral pasly, - not correlated to starvation! - the only thing that can reverse this trend of well-documented live history would be AI deepfakes saturating fog of war once again.
"Walter not everything has to do with the Gazan genocide?"
"Well it has something to do with it"
"No Walter!"
"Dude the supreme court has roundly rejected prior restraint!"
"Walter this is not a first amendment thing."
"Shomer Shabbos..."
"Walter..."
"Shomer f'ing Shabbos!"
Good day to do you.
> "The attempts to do revisionism on the Gaza Genocide have been noted and have largely failed because people who are actively starving or semi-starving are posting live video on Twitter from their phones"
Some of these pics are obviously fake, unless extremely rubenesque mothers taking videos of their skeletal offspring doesn't raise any red flags for you.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/29/g-s1-79830/gaza-starvation-death-malnutrition
tl;dr the penultimate phase of starvation before autophagyian and then death is fat liquidation, so an adult woman with a hormonal tendency to accumualte fat reserves foremost among the demographics of our species is going to be emaciated later than her young child who has far less accumulated reserves.
Modern day holocaust denial is very strange.
Oh, okay, so I assume we have photographic evidence for 200-pound jewish mothers waddling around the yard in Auschwitz while their daughters were reduced to emaciated husks, because they were fasting on slightly different timelines. Suuuuure.
By the way, if the Israelis were planning a genocide and thought they could get away with it, why not just turn off the water supply on day one?
I'm probably shouldn't touch this, but it's my understanding the women and children at auschwitz weren't killed by starvation...
I'm not intimately familiar with the causes of death which were most typical at different concentration camps, but life-threatening malnutrition was clearly a problem for a lot of jewish inmates in the death-camp system more broadly. My point is that I don't think there's any historical precedent for a population afflicted by mass starvation where you see chubby mothers and skeletal children.
The thing is, there is a plausible case that Gaza actually *will* enter a state of famine in the not-so-distant future, but left-wing reporting on the topic has been so consistently hysterical, retarded and partisan that it's hard to take the pro-Palestine camp seriously at this point.
https://scottkahn.substack.com/p/will-there-be-a-famine-in-gaza
https://nonzionism.com/p/israel-is-a-borderline-failed-state
The Israelis aren't planning a genocide. It would be more accurate to say the Israeli establishment is in a state of political quagmire, with the result that they have no overarching plan at all. This is bad, but it's a different problem.
I know this is not the same, but what we have testimonies for is fat women being killed off upon arrival at camp - and being used basically as kindling in crematoria (which were highly efficient machines, designed by German engineers, and kept going by workmen who were instructed to save on fuel). Burning humans is exothermic; all the precious coal goes into getting things started, and desiccating the corpses enough so that the reaction will keep going - and people with lots of subcutaneous fat are great for that.
Women who were not killed on arrival were those who were fit for hard physical labor, and hence, by definition, not very overweight. Yes, it did not take all that long for them to be emaciated and for the great majority of them to die.
Overweight adults are much more common now than 80 years ago. Most adults back then did not start out with the fat reserves they now do.
"why not just turn off the water supply on day one?"
Are you serious? They did exactly that. On day one.
I mean at the start of the war, don't know the exact day.
It was not enough to exterminate Gaza, because much of the water used by Gaza is local. However, Gazans need energy to purify it.
Leading Israeli strategist Giora Eiland proposed at the start of the war that Israel blockade both water and energy/fuel, so that Gazans be forced to consume dirty water, which would cause epidemics and thus a humanitarian crisis, which would benefit Israel. Minister Smotrich tweeted approvingly a piece by Eiland making that case.
https://x.com/bezalelsm/status/1726198721946480911
Israel did exactly all those thing. No water, no energy, no food and no medicine enters Gaza. They declared as much at the start of the war, but soon after they were forced to allow aid trucks due to international pressure, then this year with Trump in power they went back to total blockade, and as far as I can tell there's still no water, energy, or medicine entering Gaza, and only an insufficient amount of food due to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distributing deliberately insufficient amounts of food.
Gazans are drinking dirty, salty, unhealthy water.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/idf-canada-well-rachel-corrie-rafah-water
(The following is a cut and paste from that site. You can go there and download the audio of the interview in Hebrew.)
“Israel, as I understand, closed the water supply to Gaza,” said Eiland in a Hebrew-language interview. “But there are many wells in Gaza, which contain water which they treat locally, since originally they contain salt. If the energy shortage in Gaza makes it so that they stop pumping out water, that’s good. Otherwise we have to attack these water treatment plants in order to create a situation of thirst and hunger in Gaza, and I would say, forewarn of an unprecedented economical and humanitarian crisis.”
The interviewer pushed back. “Giora, I want to check that I understand correctly. You are saying—get the residents of Gaza into thirst, into hunger. These are the terms you are using?”
“You understood correctly,” he said.
(My note: the issue is not just salt. It's contamination form a variety of sources, which seeps into the aquifer. Salt is in the aquifer water only in moderate amount. If the issue were salt, consumption of such water couldn't possibly cause the epidemics that Eiland himself says he hopes for).
> "If the energy shortage in Gaza makes it so that they stop pumping out water, that’s good. Otherwise we have to attack these water treatment plants"
You're not refuting my point here at all. It would have been trivial for Israel to bomb the wells and water treatment facilities and cut off all other imports of food, water, fuel and energy. The result would presumably have been hundreds of thousands of dead Gazans in a matter of weeks (unless Hamas were forced to surrender and/or the population revolted against them, which might have been the other desired outcome. I can't read Eiland's piece, but Smotrich, in any case, is the not the whole of the Israeli government. I do know the Israelis went to considerable lengths to repair the strip's infrastructure when damaged.)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-israel-worked-to-renew-gazas-water-supply-amid-the-war-with-help-from-locals/
It would also have been trivial to *not* issue weeks of advance warning for civilians to evacuate northern Gaza before the initial bombing campaign, or issue warnings of any description for civilians to evacuate combat zones, or to not risk ground troops at all and continue exclusively with aerial bombardments. It seems pretty obvious to me that if the Israelis wanted there to be 2 million dead Gazans, there would be 2 million dead Gazans.
If you want to argue that the Israelis are only restrained by international pressure, go ahead (although I think that's debatable.) My original remark was pushing back against this preposterous notion that Israel somehow has the ability and willingness to commit genocide in broad daylight and also get away with it. If the ZOG has to answer to the international community, then the ZOG is not a real thing.
This also doesn't change anything I said about the claims of mass starvation in the Gaza strip. If it were happening, there would be emaciated corpses of all ages stacked in the street, and hundreds of thousands dead, as you can actually see in Yemen or Sudan. This is not something we have photo evidence for in Gaza.
I can't read Hebrew either, I use machine translation.
Have you written anywhere on why you became muslim? It sounds so impossible to me to be religious in general, but muslim specially, that I'm curious.
I'm an atheist myself, but does it really seem that impossible to you to be religious?
It's clearly happening around the world. It's impossible to justify it in a rational way.
Maybe that means there's something you're missing.
Consider through which means you get the evidence on which to "be rational". I don't think it's necessarily as grounded as we think.
I'm very much ok with declaring that we know almost nothing. Taking in religion is moving in the opposing direction of that.
Why Muslim specifically, if you don’t mind me asking to elaborate?
It's more recent than the two other abrahamic religions, so it's better documented how it was made up. It tends to be more radical and less rationalist in general. It's not prevalent in the west so you don't get family or social pressure to belong.
Thanks for the comment, I'm actually really interested in hearing more backstory of a rationalist convert to Islam!
Somewhat related, I recall a review last year of a book about a former ISIS fighter who became a UK spy (while remaining muslim). As I recall, the pivotal moment for him was going in person to research various hadiths, and finding that what was _actually_ in them vs what was _claimed_ to be in them varied quite a bit. The review author talked about being impressed that people whom we normally think of as unreachable zealots could, in fact, be persuaded by evidence. The reviewer suggested that one thing the world greatly needs is:
"Authenticity of the various hadiths: much more than you wanted to know"
I realize I'm out on a limb here, but what you've written so far implies you might be an excellent candidate for such a project...
You're thinking of Nine Lives by Aimen Dean. al-Qaeda, not ISIS.
Ah, that sounds right, thank you!
> the ball may well slide into China's court despite them being atheist, that's how Less Wrong divine favor works
China is not only ruled by the officially atheist communist party, they also put Muslim Uighurs in re-education camps.
Did you have a family background in Islam before converting, or was this something you found later in life?
That’s a very interesting perspective. However, I see at least one inconsistency.
According to your worldview, God should have favored the Roman Empire when it massively converted to Christianity. After all, early Christianity was much closer to the true God than Roman paganism.
Yet, Christianity, at least indirectly, led to the fall of the Roman Empire. How do you explain that?
Regardless of what happens to Roman Empire, for some reason Christianity spreads far and wide to northern and western Europe. It can be noted that some of barbarians that sack Rome have themselves converted to Christianity (and even of the Arian Christianity which is said to have purer monotheism). I haven't looked closely if there are more contradictions and epicycles involved, but at least it's not as simple as that.
Most barbarians were also Christians, not sure whether a Muslim would have strong opinions on why Allah would prefer Catholics to Arians (who would convert to Catholicism shortly thereafter anyway).
Alas, I'd be curious why you assert with such confidence that Christianity contributed to the demise of the empire. Afaik, the most traditional explanations simply start from false facts, and the more sophisticated ones are fallacious (eg it's true that many rich Roman families bid their fortunes on ecclesiastic careers rather than civil or military ones, but that was because the state was already rotting. It's reverse causality.).
"people who are actively starving or semi-starving are posting live video on Twitter from their phones"
Could you link to a picture or video of someone in Gaza, without a congenital disease, not an Israeli hostage, who one can see from the picture or video to be starving? I have been unable to find such an image. So has the world media apparently, given how they keep publishing pictures of kids with congenital diseases.
Here are a few videos of starving Gazans.
https://substack.com/@handala1948/note/c-141844145
https://substack.com/@palestinewillbefree/note/c-142356197
https://substack.com/@handala1948/note/c-138039625
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DM2bXEgI1ec/?igsh=ZTZsbGYxc210bXdu
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-uEaJ3ZnSqs
https://substack.com/@handala1948/note/c-142812709
I didn't have to work hard to find them. They've all been posted in the last 5 days on the same Substack account ("Laith”) (but in some cases the link I give is to the source that must have been used by “Laith”). All I had to do is scroll a little. I could find lots and lots more very easily, just by scrolling a bit more, or by looking into the many other pro-Palestine corners of the internet where there is a constant, overwhelming flood of images of starving Gazans. I can’t stress enough how easy it is to find lots and lots more.
It’s a flood of images that started relatively recently, coincidentally about a couple months after the Israelis declared the total blockade of aid. Throughout the previous year the Palestinians were already saying that Israel was trying to limit the food entering Gaza, but images of starvation like this were not there yet (at least not in such abundance). Had it been possible for the Palestinians to show us such images back then, we would have seen them. But we see them only now. This suggests that this state of thing is a direct consequence of Israel’s relatively recent complete blockade policy.
Note, by the way, that the “Gaza humanitarian foundation” is not actually trying to feed Gaza. They themselves will tell us how much food they distribute. Perhaps they count on people being bad with numbers because it’s obviously not enough, not by a long shot. The purpose of the GHF is to pretend they’re not starving Gaza while they starve Gaza.
It’s no surprise that babies and children starve before their parents do. Babies and children starve faster. I hear that one reason babies starve is that their mothers aren’t eating enough to produce milk, and Israel won’t let baby formula enter Gaza.
Do any of these children have “congenital diseases?” Beats me. How would I know. But if diseases are particularly deadly in Gaza it’s because Israel won’t let medicine enter the Strip. Recently Israel posted this to prove that images of starvation are fake:
https://x.com/IsraelMFA/status/1950259454198337796
But why did that man wither and die? Because his diabetes was “untreated”, and why was it untreated? If he needed insulin he couldn’t get any because Israel won't let insulin enter Gaza. On top of having bombed all hospitals.
If you don't mind me asking, did you convert to Islam pre or post October 7th and the ensuing events in Gaza?
"I think Islam is more correct than Christianity but Muslims cheesed it up so much that Protestants who were slightly less corrupt got the edge"
"cheese it up"
"to cheese up"
Of all the untranslatable words in the English language, the most mysterious to me are the verb "to cheese", the adjective "cheesy", the noun "cheese" when it doesn't refer to food, and now that I hear it for the first time "to cheese up".
I would be sincerely grateful if you or anyone else explained to this ignorant foreigner the meaning of that sentence, and hopefully the mysterious broader meaning of "cheese", "to cheese" and "cheesy".
Without looking at a slang dictionary I'd say it translates to "fake and dumb". I used "cheesy" just last night about parts of an otherwise good movie that didn't have a good fight director / choreographer, so the action sequences broke my immersion in the film.
I have no idea where it came from. Maybe there's a relationship to (utterly fake, and arguably dumb) "American Cheese (food products)"? Makes superficial sense, so I'll roll with it.
Anyway. Cheesy can be fun! I mean, *Point Break* (along with just about everything else in Patrick Swayze's oeuvre) is pure cheese, but, like, I dare you not to enjoy it. Similarly, Tex-mex queso dip is pure American Cheese (food product), but you're guaranteed to eat too much of a good one. The appeal, however, is surface-level: not based on any sophisticated or enduring (aesthetic or otherwise) principles - except insofar as hot guys doing dumb shit and specific ratios of salt and fat are reliably and respectively brain- and tongue-tickling.
Anyway, that's how I'd interpret his comment: Muslims added dumb fake shit (I don't know what - ask him) that appeals to the lowest common denominator, but lowers overall theological quality.
Humans are very bad and so God doesn't have much optimization power to work with.
Then why did He make humans so bad? Seems like a convenient copout. Or do you think we're completely blank slates and choose to be bad ourselves?
France is mostly cursed because of the French. I like how they finessed getting the English to kill her so they could blame them and act like she was their amazing girl. The Monty Python skit always comes to mind when I think of the French.
I really loved this essay.
If you read the literature on auditory hallucinations, Joan's symptoms match nearly perfectly. I think it's nearly beyond dispute that she was in fact hearing voices and not just faking it for fame/credibility.
Of course, what we call auditory hallucinations could in this case actually be the voices of saints (please don't tell your neighborhood schizophrenic about this).
Here's my theory of what was going on, offered as one thought among many:
1) Joan of Arc was extremely intelligent. Like Von Neumann level or higher, though focused in rather different directions.
2) My model of intelligence is that what it mainly represents is learning rate. High intelligence means fast, intuitive learning. People who are intelligent make better predictions because they know more things. Not necessarily in a way fully available to conscious processing, but more in the way that an LLM "knows" things it was trained on and the right prompt can elicit those things.
3) Consciousness is very flexible. We tend to think in terms of a "homunculus" that drives our behavior but this is an illusion. People who believe in spirit possession can easily be possessed, which doesn't mean actual supernatural entities, but rather an altered state of consciousness in which the mind reinterprets how decisions are being made to attribute them to an external spirit instead of an internal homunculus (both equally fictional).
4) Joan of Arc, a naturally pious peasant girl living in late medieval france, ended up adopting a frame that all of her intelligent insights came from an external source: God. This made a lot of sense to everyone (including her) because the types of thoughts her brain was generating seemed wildly implausible to be coming from a random peasant girl.
5) Her high learning rate included physical tasks like riding, lancing, etc. Some people are just really good at this. They can see you do something once or twice and immediately copy it almost perfectly. She didn't need to be trained at this explicitly because she was spending a fair amount of time around military people so she just naturally absorbed it all. It also helped that this fit within her "chosen by god" frame. Without that frame in place her unconscious mind might have blocked her from getting too good at things she wasn't supposed to be good at (I expect this happens all the time in all sorts of cultural contexts. Often, "training" exists to create a social context for learning that isn't necessarily that difficult once you convince the learning part of your brain that it's supposed to care about this stuff).
6) She also got very good at theology for similar reasons. Think of her almost like a rogue superintelligence picking up on clues nobody else would even realize are there. Not necessarily in a conscious way, but as a constant background task. When challenged on theological matters, she knew enough theology to triangulate the rest, at least enough of it that it was difficult to catch her slipping up. Notably it helps that she can dodge lots of questions by saying God told her what to do directly.
I already brought this up in my own comment a while ago, but I don't think the primary source material substantiates the idea that Jean was actually especially competent at skills like riding, swordsmanship, lancing, etc, but these sorts of skills weren't particularly material to her success as a commander, and it's easy for people to confabulate stories about them after the fact, when she's already famous as a miraculously successful leader. Some people are notably physically gifted and quick to pick up athletic skills, although I don't think this correlates particularly well with cognitive intelligence, but I don't think we have to suppose that Jean was to make sense of her story.
I also don't think she necessarily needed much expertise in theology. All accounts agree that she was notably charismatic, and it's probable that she was quite good at reading people, assessing intent, etc. I don't think I'm by any means exceptional at reading people, but reading through the questions that she was supposedly asked in her interrogation, before reading her answers, I could intuit the sort of answers they were trying to get out of her, and think of ways out of them similar to the ones she offered, just given the context that they were hostile interrogators asking her leading questions trying to catch her in some sort of heresy, and thinking "Assuming that this question is intended to lead me into admitting heresy, what might that heresy entail, and how would I avoid that?" I'm not operating under stress or strict time pressure, but I also didn't have any nonverbal cues from the interrogators to draw on. All in all, I don't think this is a particularly hard feat to explain given ordinary human abilities.
We ALSO don't need to say that she didn't know horseback riding before she was 15. Or, perhaps, lance-holding. Riding is something perfectly practiceable on a farm (heavy horse at the time being both used for battle and for farmwork, I believe -- citing Shire horses as your prototype, though you'd have had a french breed), and one might say she'd have been better learning to ride bareback than with a heavy saddle. Lances, not so much, but much much more likely than swordsmanship (which pretty much requires a partner in order to learn how to counter/defend, and attack weaknesses).
Come to think, swordsmanship on the ground is a "long term learning project" -- how is it on a horse? If you're coming up against pikes, you turn around, but on a horse against footmen, you're above them. Is that significantly easier to learn? I'd wager so.
Re: her swordsmanship skills, from another comment
> As for military skills, she’s got a month to learn to wear armour and control a warhorse, which is doable. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that she’s storming in like Master Chief and killing 500 Englishmen single-handedly. Not dying is notable but not out of distribution.
Most people bow to interrogation. It's why you're advised not to speak to the FBI or the police under any circumstances without legal counsel. Anything you say can and will be used against you.
That said, a particularly smart child could pull off "don't say yes to heresy." A particularly coached adult (like one that's been through a few "extreme" exorcisms, as opposed to the minor exorcism that occurs every Easter Sunday) could do so as well, I believe. [Not that I have the book-learning to know what a "standard" exorcism of the time would have been like.]
Here's one I thought Joan had a very theologically sophisticated answer to when reading quotes from her trial: "Do you know whether or not you are in God's grace?" Try to answer it yourself, avoiding heresy.
ROT13 of Joan's own answer, along with an explanation: Vs V nz abg, znl Tbq chg zr gurer; naq vs V nz, znl Tbq fb xrrc zr. V fubhyq or gur fnqqrfg perngher va gur jbeyq vs V xarj V jrer abg va Uvf tenpr.
Wbna pnaabg fnl "Lrf," nf Pngubyvp qbpgevar ubyqf gung ab bar pna xabj gung gurl ner va n fgngr bs tenpr. Guvf vf abg n gevivny znggre; Cebgrfgnagf bayl n uhaqerq be fb lrnef yngre uryq qvssreragyl, fbzr rira fhttrfgvat gung vs lbh *qvqa'g* xabj lbh jrer va n fgngr bs tenpr, gung vaqvpngrq n qrsvpvrapl va lbhe snvgu.
Wbna tvirf gur pbeerpg Pngubyvp nafjre. Ubcr gung lbh ner va n fgngr bs tenpr, ohg qb abg cerfhzr. Abgr gung ure nafjre urer vf qvssrerag sebz ure nffhenapr gung, riraghnyyl, fur jvyy ernpu fnyingvba. Gur qvfgvapgvba orgjrra "orvat riraghnyyl qrfgvarq sbe fnyingvba" naq "orvat va n fgngr bs tenpr" vf n gurbybtvpnyyl fbcuvfgvpngrq bar, ohg Wbna vf noyr gb anivtngr vg cresrpgyl pbeerpgyl, ol Pngubyvp gurbybtvpny fgnaqneqf.Vs V nz abg, znl Tbq chg zr gurer; naq vs V nz, znl Tbq fb xrrc zr. V fubhyq or gur fnqqrfg perngher va gur jbeyq vs V xarj V jrer abg va Uvf tenpr.
Wbna pnaabg fnl "Lrf," nf Pngubyvp qbpgevar ubyqf gung ab bar pna xabj gung gurl ner va n fgngr bs tenpr. Guvf vf abg n gevivny znggre; Cebgrfgnagf bayl n uhaqerq be fb lrnef yngre uryq qvssreragyl, fbzr rira fhttrfgvat gung vs lbh *qvqa'g* xabj lbh jrer va n fgngr bs tenpr, gung vaqvpngrq n qrsvpvrapl va lbhe snvgu.
Wbna tvirf gur pbeerpg Pngubyvp nafjre. Ubcr gung lbh ner va n fgngr bs tenpr, ohg qb abg cerfhzr. Abgr gung ure nafjre urer vf qvssrerag sebz ure nffhenapr gung, riraghnyyl, fur jvyy ernpu fnyingvba, dhbgrq va gur negvpyr. Gur qvfgvapgvba orgjrra "orvat riraghnyyl qrfgvarq sbe fnyingvba" naq "orvat va n fgngr bs tenpr" vf n irkvat bar, ohg Wbna vf noyr gb anivtngr vg cresrpgyl pbeerpgyl, ol Pngubyvp gurbybtvpny fgnaqneqf. V guvax guvf vfa'g n fznyy srng, naq fhttrfgf fur npghnyyl unq fvtavsvpnag gurbybtvpny yrneavat.
I'll note that as an atheist with not all that much Catholic theology knowledge, I guessed the correct answer immediately, and think most intelligent people would get it right.
So, my answer before reading the decoded text; I can't be sure that I don't remember Jean's answer in some part, but I read the review several weeks ago when it was still among the contenders, and didn't reread my way through it when it was posted as a finalist.
In her place, I would say that I do not know if I am in God's grace, but I hope that if I do as he asks of me, he will be satisfied with my efforts.
My reasoning: If they're asking me this, it's probably because saying "yes" is a trap, while saying "no" suggests I believe I'm acting against the will of God. Claiming certain knowledge that I'm in God's grace could be taken as prideful or presumptuous. However, giving an uncertain but hopeful answer seems to satisfy the attitude that they expect of any faithful laity. Given my contention of being a person who directly hears the voice of God, this seems like a minimally objectionable answer.
Checking the text for a refresher on the answer she actually gave, this seems pretty close to her answer. Note that this doesn't require any particular knowledge of Catholic theology on my part, just a basic understanding of their motives in asking the question.
To both you and Alexander: yes, I think getting the correct answer here as a third party isn't hard. What's surprising, I think, is that the same woman says this as affirms outright that she is destined for Paradise as her voices told her. By your strategy, why doesn't she just say "Well, I certainly hope so," when asked if she believes she's assured of her destination in Paradise? Joan doesn't say that---she just outright says "yes, my voices revealed this to me, and so I believe it"---so it seems like she's applying a more complicated strategy to answer these questions than yours.
Second, again, there are in fact some sects of Christianity, like Protestantism (maybe just magisterial Protestantism? I'm a magisterial Protestant, and don't know if the radical Reformation took a different tack here), where saying that you do not know whether you are in a state of grace or not is the bad answer, and the expected answer is "Yes, I know I am in a state of grace." Even nowadays assurance is really emphasized in some Protestant sects as something that believers have to aim at. Now, Joan was not a Protestant, of course. But this is just to say, there's not a single obvious correct answer that an intelligent person who knows just the basics of Christianity would come to.
My point though is that it doesn't particularly matter if there are other sects of Christianity, and an intelligent person cannot intuit a priori what theology any particular sect would come to based on first principles. Jean doesn't have to intuit her answers based on first principles, she can tailor her answers to the sect of the people interrogating her, based on the sorts of leading questions they're asking her. The people who're actually judging her are also the ones providing cues of what the correct sorts of answers to give are.
I think that Jean almost certainly did genuinely hear voices, so I think her strategy could likely be accounted for through a process of "Honestly report the contents of what the voices have told me as long as it seems safe to do so, wherever necessary give answers that avoid traps where my interrogators appear to be trying to lead me into admissions of heresy."
At least, that's what I'd do if I were in Jean's place, assuming I was receiving auditory hallucinations that I genuinely interpreted as divine guidance, but they didn't actually hand me correct answers to all their questions.
I agree with you about military skills. The reviewer, I think, explains her military success in section 2.3. “Joan's troops would neither charge nor rout without orders,” is not a high bar (at least not the first part). What made her extraordinary is that she was able to in effect lead the army without being given official command of it. In an alternative universe where the the French king had the ability to place his best commander in charge of the military, there would have been no role for Joan of Arc.
The review provides evidence of other military skills, for example the Duke d'Alencon and Marguerite La Touroulde both praise her skill with the lance, but I suspect that this is some combination of her skill exceeding the low expectations for a teenage girl and of people attributing to her the skill level that would normally be associated with her level of military accomplishment.
One thought I haven't seen explicitly: it's possible that a member of the Trial of Condemnation was repulsed by the kangooroo-ness of it all, and was feeding her info about what kinds of question she was likely to be asked (possibly with safe answers). I have zero evidence for this suspicion, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time something similar had happened
3) is helped by poor performance on the marshmallow test. when you are literally a different person than last week's you... yeah, "demonic possession" seems about as plausible as any other explanation for "I didn't do nuttin" (which, if you score poorly enough on the marshmallow test, is kinda true. Yesterday's you did that).
The relatively recent examples of John Nash and Srinivasa Ramanujan make this explanation even more plausible.
The overall war reminds me of a few other situations from history, like the mid Roman Empire and Song dynasty China. Where you've got a great power that is far more powerful than any of its immediate neighbors, ruled by a single monarch who is in theory "all powerful" but in practice sharply limited by lack of information and fragmented loyalty. So they end up being much more concerned with the threat of a coup d'etat or civil war than with foreign invasion, and deliberately weaken the military to keep the peace. And you see an example of that here where they lost more from Burgundy switching sides than they did from any battle.
This all works well during ordinary times. Even if they lose a minor border war it's no real concern to the monarch and most of his people, who are safe behind many layers of fortifications. The enemy will eventually sign peace for a minor amount of money, or just fragment themselves and go home.
It doesn't work well when you're suddenly confronted with a force that is extremely well organized and intent on taking everything, like the Jin/Mongols against the Song, or in this case the highly centralized and professional army of the Edwards. Then suddenly all your numbers count for nothing, because all your troops are routing in a panic that cascades.
In that situation, where "you" are the young Dauphin, what you need isn't necessarily a brilliant general. In fact that might make things worse, since the brilliant general might just take over for themselves, like Julius Caesar orAn Lushan did. What you want is someone fanatically loyal who can also inspire the troops to be loyal.
Joan seems perfect for that, a fanatic to both king and God. God is conveniently far away in the aether, not a political threat, but makes a great rallying call for everyone, and can inspire the soldiers to fight to the death. Her open, fanatical loyalty to the king inspires others and makes all the other nobles look selfish. So they all kind of follow along behind her, mumbling the right platitudes and getting their soldiers to actually fight in an organized way for once, instead of everyone looking out for themselves. And once you do that, they naturally win the war, since they had a huge advantage in both numbers and most forms of equipment. Along the way she was saying great rallying calls like "we shall surely in the war soon," as if they were prophecies, and then it all gets turned into a miracle after she died.
I don't know, I'm not an expert or religious. But that's my take on it.
This reminds me of Robert E. Lee, in that he was trying to uplift morale via battles (and failed in such a fundamental way that it is difficult to see even a counterfactual of the South winning... and staying together. They'd have been reabsorbed into the Union after fracture, of course).
maybe in some ways, but I don't think that's a good analogue. Politics and morale are important in any war, but the 19th century south was just way more modern than medieval France. They had railroads, newspapers, telegraphs, and a much more cohesive sense of being part of a nation (or at least a state). The medieval people could easily just see themselves as loyal to their local noble, with the king as this far distant figure that they'd never even seen a picture of, who seemed to just extract taxes while providing no useful services.
I imagine the Dauphin meeting random French peasants would be more like King Arthur meeting the peasants in Monty Python ("Who are you? King of the who? I didn't vote for you!")
So you are hypothesizing that the Dauphin was some sort of hidden political genius? Huh, I don't anyone else has come up with that one. Kudos.
Hmm, I wasn't trying to argue that he was a genius, just a reasonably sharp guy who understood the predicament he was in. He was "king" in name only, surrounded by nobles who cared more about their own personal gain than the kingdom of France. He needed someone who was loyal to him and could convince others to also be loyal.
Going for Rheims to crown himself king in the traditional way might not make much military sense, but it might have been very politically important to demonstrate his legitimacy as king.
I guess the question then is whose idea it was.
The Song dynasty was actually fairly competent and held out against the fricking Mongols for far longer than most others who tried.
Again, not an expert. But my understanding is that:
For *most* of their rule, they held out quite easily against the Mongols, because they were the Celestial Empire of the Middle Kingdom with Gunpowder and Great Walls and many many people, while the Mongols were just some stinking barbarians on the outskirts... much cheaper to pay them off than to run the risk of funding a standing army.
Until the very end, when they completely forgot that they needed to actually make a real army, and got overran by the Jin (Manchurians), and then the Mongols noticed the chaos and took over from the Jin. It's more of a story of late imperial decadence than the Mongols being invulnerable.
Any discussion on the topic of Song military prowess should probably include the division into Northern and Southern Song.
Tonio Andrande's book 'The Gunpowder Age' is great in general, and has some interesting bits about the Song, too.
Yeah I was just thinking of the Northern Song in my comment, who really went to great lengths to weaken their military and then got completely routed by the Jin invasion. After they lost half their territory to become Southern Song, they started to take the military more seriously and suddenly it got better, which again makes me think of France in the hundred years war.
I note with approval the mention of Shaw. His play, Saint Joan, was excellent, and I recommend anyone with free time to read it: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200811h.html#C01
(The link goes directly to the play, skipping Shaw's long-winded preface. I will note that the play does its best to smooth over the rough edges of the characters, especially the English, who are characterized as thinking they're doing the right thing as they burn her -- naturally -- but what a play!)
I'm partial to Schiller. In particular, I love the great "… the gods themselves contend in vain" line (which I first learnt from Asimov's book).
I had missed this review when they were released earlier, and as a Catholic convert enjoyed it mightily (despite growing up playing the Britons in AOEII and loving longbowmen).
This was fab. Completely fascinating. Thank you.
Fun read. Though the structure of "saint vs schizophrenic" kind of left me cold since the answer comes down to your belief about whether an interventionist god exists or not rather than anything to do with Joan specifically, except as one of a million pieces of evidence to be considered in making that larger philosophical judgement.
Not really. This is a better argument for Clown World (where god arbitrarily changes the rules in order to test various social/society level experiments). We get ONE Joan d'Arc. Experiment OVER. Never repeated.
That's just a minor variant on the saint / god exists side of things, not like anyone has any viable speculation on what kind of actions a god would take if one were real anyway.
Not really. any argument for god that has the principle of parsimony on its side, has a rather scientific bent. "viable speculation" is a lot easier when you realize that we're probably in the "cheap knock-off" version of the simulation -- that one's far more likely to have to pay for itself.
This is an excellent review.
Agreed !
A long and challenging review. I do have two spots that I could not understand in the end though.
>afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell, but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
"But through the decision of his regent" ...what? Is that an incomplete sentence, or is "but" used in the sense of "except", meaning Phillip the Bold would decide whether or not Charles VI would shatter like glass?
>Footnote 48: Score: First-principles theories of how a rational religion ought to work, 0; the intercession of the saints, 1.
Someone explain to small brain like mine?
That was a sub-footnote about "Saint Charlemagne."
Technically correct, though I got that far myself. Got any more in-depth explanation what that sub-footnote means?
Sorry, I thought it was the nested footnote formatting that was confusing.
Charlemagne is generally not considered a saint by the Church. I read that as a criticism of this ad hoc/folk canonization that nevertheless seems to have empowered him to intercede in working miracles.
Makes sense, thanks.
> "But through the decision of his regent"
It's a long complicated sentence- the part that confused you references back to before the part you quoted. Basically France acted in Burgundy's interests not because of the King's choices, but because the Duke of Burgundy was ruling France as the King's regent. The part about shattering like glass is a contained sub-clause explaining why the King was not the one making the decisions.
Okay thanks. That is indeed a terribly written sentence then.
'Twas a perfectly serviceably phrased _complex_ sentence; for practice with such, Poe is useful training.
There were also perfectly servicable ways to convey the same information through a less complex sentence, or two if need be. I want to grapple with the content, not so much its presentation.
That first part really should have been in parentheses, not commas.
>The Kingdom of France had done this not by the will of the King of France*... ...but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
*(Charles VI, Philip the Fortunate's grandson, who at that time was seriously mentally ill and who the year before his regency started had murdered several people in a paranoid fit and afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell)
Footnote 48: If you were introduced to the idea of an all powerful god who answers prayers as an alien, you would assume that you would pray to God to achieve your objective. In Catholic belief, the saints are assigned particular causes, and you can choose to pray to a saint, who intercedes on your behalf with God: St Anthony helps find things that are lost, St Christopher protects travellers, St Jude is for lost causes, (there are thousands more).
From an outsider's perspective this could be confusing - what's the purpose of the saint here? That's my reading of the footnote at least.
> what's the purpose of the saint here?
Formatting cleanup. God's the one with all the power, but is also picky about all kinds of stuff, most of which you couldn't reasonably know, much less get correct on your own: personal hygiene, the grand arc of history, obscure heresies, etc.
Saints, having been human, might be more willing to puzzle out nuances of what you directly asked for vs. what you meant, rather than tossing it straight in the circular file over some petty error, then - like a lawyer, ambassador, or high-level programming language - use the technical knowledge of their particular specialized purview to ask for some version of it which is more likely to be compatible with God's overall plan.
Same basic pattern as they'd be facing from worldly kingdoms. The king's got the power, at least in theory, but if you go straight to him, he's not likely to have much patience for some peasant who doesn't understand the current political situation, barely even speaks the same language. Approaching some lower-level courtier with responsibilities relevant to your specific request might often be the better strategy.
As I understand it, the new covenant did away with a lot of the hygiene stuff, and the legal nitpicking. The Catholic god is omniscient - he knows what is in your heart and what are your intentions. If he does not grant them, it is because he is also all knowing, and He means to bring about the best of all possible worlds.
This means that He also knows what you ask the saints, so it's unclear how the saints intervene meaningfully. (How omniscience interacts with free will was one of the main philosophical questions of the Middle Ages.)
I also dispute all the saints 'have been human' - St Michael, for example, was and is an archangel. I would guess that God is sometimes understood as being so overwhelming that an intermediary is necessary - but still, it's a logical puzzle that I've never been satisfied with.
> the new covenant did away with a lot of the hygiene stuff, and the legal nitpicking
As potential disqualifications from participation in said covenant, sure, but presumably they're still things God cares about on an aesthetic level, which might influence His decisions on marginal issues.
> I also dispute all the saints 'have been human'
I did not say that. It's sufficient if only some known subset were, or are otherwise more approachable than the big boss.
> (How omniscience interacts with free will was one of the main philosophical questions of the Middle Ages.)
The question is ill-formed. Both concepts are internally contradictory, once you dig into the math of information theory and self-reference while insisting on absolutes, and banging them against each other just sheds sparks. Practical version that non-philosophers actually lived by is "you are responsible for your own decisions, hiding details from the ultimate judge is not a feasible option." Keeps the mindset in a healthy, productive range near the middle of the expected monkeysphere social hierarchy.
If God's not "omniscient," then you get people at the top thinking they've found the Ring of Gyges and misbehaving accordingly. If He doesn't "respect free will" then people at the bottom start acting like ant mills, or puppets with tangled strings. Neither extreme is conducive to societal survival.
In the last analysis, I don't think omniscience is really compatible with free will, at all. (And since free will obviously exists, that means that omniscience in the strict sense can't be true).
"Our oldest source is six hundred years after the events it chronicles and therefore should not remotely be trusted as fact."
I thought that the milk flowing from her veins would have been enough to characterize it as false, independently from how the source was obtained.
It depends. If you are approaching from the scientific world view and just want to know if the source can be trusted, then indeed this is enough to know that the source can not be fully trusted.
If you want to know if miracles are real, and reject any story which contains a miracle as obviously false, then you are begging the question.
I think something along this lines was discussed on an OT this Monday.
Perhaps you were a bit blindsided by the dry delivery of a joke. Yes, all the preceding stuff about milk and doves is a rather bigger counterpoint than the source not having been around to witness all that personally.
I assumed that part was being sarcastic.
bravo for this... I kept needing to do other things, but found myself getting sucked in by the writing
Great review! Normally my eyes would glaze over on a piece this long, but in this case I was fascinated all the way to the end.
Also: ah, yes, the English longbow. Amazing how nobody else at the time thought of making bows that could outrange everyone else's and then actually requiring the commons to train in their usage. If we'd required every mid-20th Century man of able body to maintain a sniper rifle and practice regularly in its use, we'd probably still have the Empire.
Really the English just appropriated it from the Welsh. And it clearly wasn't a good enough system in isolation to protect the Welsh from being conquered.
Pretty sure if you looked over at Russia/Poland, you'd discover a very different model of feudalism. (bows, for example, were proper knightly gear, as opposed to Western Europe).
Siberians trained women and children. They weren't using "longbows" but compound bows. Compound bows can have more draw force than longbows, and did at the time of the Mongols. Afterwards, one assume they were adopted by the current tribes.
Arguably the point of firearms is that you *don't* need to practice constantly from childhood to be good with them, you can have your citizens do something more useful and then put them through a few months of boot camp when you need a soldier. (And modern war is probably not going to be settled by individual marksmanship skill, anyway.)
I do think we should teach kids the NATO alphabet, though. You can use it to spell things out over the phone instead of doing that "A as in Apple, D as in Dog, M as in Mancy" nonsense. It's a practical life skill!
People generally overestimate the amount of training you need to use a bow. The state-mandated "constant practice from childhood" for English longbowmen was one afternoon a week.
A couple hours per week still adds up to thousands over a few years. Lot of it is for building up specific muscles, anyway, and too-frequent practice can actually be counterproductive for that, making self-injury more likely than progress.
It certainly doesn't add up to "practice constantly from childhood", though, plus a lot of that practice would be about maintaining abilities you've already acquired.
Obligatory ACOUP on the limitations of archery: https://acoup.blog/2025/05/02/collections-why-archers-didnt-volley-fire/
I've found, most of the times I've double-checked Devereaux's sources, they straight up just didn't say what he claimedthey said. Often, they weren't even talking about the topic he claimed they were talking about. So whilst ACOUP is fun to read, I'd not trust any claims therein without fact checking them myself.
I'm not sure about the soundness of the atheistic argument.
Joan wasn't performing miracles, she simply seems to be that way because she's the one who shows up when you sort the world by who appears to be performing miracles.
A reductio ad absurdum could look like: Einstein wasn't actually smart, he's just who shows up when you sorting the world by who appeared to be smart.
> Einstein wasn't actually smart, he's just who shows up when you sorting the world by who appeared to be smart.
AFAIK some historians do hold that view. That is, yes, Einstein was of course very smart, but he wasn't the uniquely smartest man in human history (in fact, he had plenty of colleagues like Heisenberg who were arguably just as smart as he was). Perhaps the discovery of the Theory of Relativity (not the mention the Photoelectric Effect) was more or less inevitable. Someone would've done it eventually (or perhaps several different people), and in fact quite soon; Einstein was just the one who got there first.
Einstein wasn't very smart. He did like to make funny faces, and was very convenient for the CIA. (Tom Lehrer, on the other hand, was extremely inconvenient for the CIA, as was his song pointing out one of the famous people in Operation Paperclip).
General theory of relativity was inspired, I'll admit, but Einstein was notably inflexible and couldn't take a world that refuted his priors.
> Tom Lehrer, on the other hand, was extremely inconvenient for the CIA, as was his song pointing out one of the famous people in Operation Paperclip
Ah I knew it! That explains why he died.
Einstein had a string of important ideas in 1905: he explained the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion and got to special relativity first. Those are standard parts of physics now, but were all breakthroughs at the time. That's the work of a highly intelligent man.
He didn't make breakthroughs of this type in his later years, but many prize-winning physicists don't continue at the same level after their big breakthrough.
Photoelectric effect and Brownian motion were "easy, low hanging fruit" (that is to say, someone would have gotten there, eventually). Photoelectric effect was widely held as "not worth a nobel prize" but... that doesn't make it not a breakthrough.
I'm not a huge Einstein fan, but the way this is covered in the popular press gets under my skin. The photoelectric effect didn't line up with classical electromagnetism, as developed by Maxwell. He couldn't explain it, neither could Kelvin/Thompson or Planck or any of the other household names that were working in the period 1880-1900. Likewise, Brownian motion was an unexplained observation which had been known for almost a century - these were not trivial or straightforward observations, except in comparison to general relativity.
People also point out that plenty others were on the verge of discovering special relativity, including Minkowski and Hilbert. But they didn't - Einstein appeared out of nowhere and proposed solutions to three major problems in physics, which weren't particularly closely related, with explanations that stand more or less unchanged to this day.
Explaining the photoelectric effect alone would not have made Einstein a household name. Claiming it was low-hanging fruit suggests anyone could have done it. That sounds to me like the physics equivalent of a guy in a pub claiming he could take a bear in a fight.
General relativity didn't make Einstein a household name. The CIA did that, after Tom Lehrer viciously skewered Operation Paperclip.
"Anyone could have done it" is ... kinda the default state for things. Most discoveries are "stood on the shoulder of giants". Besides, when you don't have a pattern of scientists being assassinated, it becomes difficult to prove when a discovery was "unlikely" (and when you do, you need to distinguish between the "brave" and the "stupid").
Special Relativity might have been inevitable around that point, General Relativity is another story.
Consider that our standard for what "miracles" look like in the modern conception is essentially "apparently purposeful coincidences." We could be living in a world where people regularly part seas, cure amputees, raise the dead, split the earth to swallow their enemies, etc., but these sorts of things appear to occur in inverse proportion to how well documented the events in question are. But if "apparently purposeful coincidences" is our standard for what miracles look like, it's more or less inevitable that some events will appear miraculous just as a result of rolling the dice enough times.
Some events do seem suspiciously improbable (although I don't think Jean's story is *as* improbable as it appears, I've already left a couple comments in this thread discussing some reasons,) but if we suppose that God really did intervene through her, it suggests a God with rather odd priorities, since he was apparently concerned enough to make sure that the English didn't conquer the French, but has allowed countless other conquests, genocides, and other tragedies throughout history, without any apparently consistent concern for the moral character of the participants, or their alignment with the Christian religion.
What can look very purposeful when looked at in isolation, when we see one particular person or side getting what they want against apparently great odds, may look a lot less purposeful as we broaden our view and see that there isn't a consistent directionality to all the coincidence. There are diabolus ex machinas throughout history just as much as deus ex machinas, and the righteous or the Christian, let alone some specific brand of Christian, don't appear to be consistently favored.
> diabolus ex machinas
diaboli ex machina (and dii ex machina).
I actually looked up the correct plurals while writing up my post, but I decided on balance that using them was more likely to be an impediment to clarity.
Booo! :)
I read that to be saying essentially not to hail as a prophet someone who wins the lottery after dreaming the winning numbers.
If someone claimed to have had a particular key to a widely-used pseudorandom number algorithm revealed to them in a dream, which yielded the previous ten jackpot combinations for a particular state lottery, more than one of which they'd collected money from, and published said key so it could be checked independently,
but then the lottery commissioner was sacked on corruption charges, and the new commissioner completely overhauled the lotto's official RNG and security,
eventually having some sort of psychological meltdown on live TV when the new system kept producing the same numbers as that deterministic algorithm predicted...
...well, that would be rather more convincing.
I think this is my favorite review so far, well done !
One thing I've learned from it (perhaps erroneously) is the sheer extent to which Medieval warfare and politics were based on "vibes". People like Machiavelli and Bismarck are often credited with inventing realpolitik, but until now I don't think I've been able to fully appreciate what that means. It means that people must have really and truly, in their heart of hearts, based critically important geopolitical decisions on their loyalty to their liege lord, or the line of descent of an heir, or on omens and portents like the color of the sparrow outside their window last Tuesday. This wasn't a callous post-hoc rationalization made up to justify an unpopular decision (at least, not always), but the accurate description of the flow of their conscious thought. Thus situations like "the King died and thus the army immediately fell apart" were not merely more common then than they are now, but in fact routine.
Which might explain (at least in part) how Joan of Arc was able to accomplish all those miracles. It sounds like the French had every ingredient they needed to defeat the English: manpower, materiel, terrain, supplies, even military training (maybe). What they utterly lacked was coordination, and perhaps morale. All of that military power was useless when it just sat there bickering endlessly with itself. Enter Joan of Arc, who could establish a command structure and inspire overwhelming morale advantage at the same time. Perhaps it was already virtually impossible for the French to lose the war given their overwhelming advantage in resources, as long as all of those resources were brought to bear on the enemy; and all it took was a charismatic leader who got them to do something, *anything*, and to do it with total and unyielding commitment. Even an less-than-brilliant general can win a war when all the advantages are on her side, and all she needs to do is push over the first domino.
And I think this disorganization might have been fractal (to an extent). The government was disordered; the generals were disordered; their captains and their sergeants and all the way down to the common infantryman, all were in disorder. Which might also explain Joan's amazing feats of military prowess. We don't have a record (unless I'm mistaken ?) of her ever personally defeating scores of enemies with her lance or hitting a remote target with her cannon. Rather, she lead teams of lancers and artillerists to actually do their jobs for once in their lives -- the jobs which they have been trained for. In a world of vibes, such sudden competence must have looked miraculous indeed.
People started wars because one guy thought it would be funny to pantz another guy (China). When you understand "realpolitik" understand that you're dealing with 15 year olds, a good deal of the time. And 15 year olds often do things because they want to impress a girl... Or think it would be funny to make someone else look bad.
It's not quite that simple. At the time the idea of nations or states of people hadn't really developed yet. Most places in medieval Europe were the personal possession of a monarch. You can see how people didn't have loyalty to France or Burgundy, but to the King of France or Duke of Burgundy. When nations operate on such a personal level and at the whims of a single figure, politics can seem more like a soap opera.
Similarly armies were usually the sole creations of monarchs, cobbled together from a fraction of their kingdom's levies and also mercenaries. The idea of a professional army serving a nation hadn't really developed yet either. So when the King died, the army often lost a reason to fight (this generally being to claim land for the King's person), and also their reason for being paid.
This is pretty close to my own model of what happened. She wasn't especially good at anything, except maybe persuasion. It's just that the French royal court were *that bad*.
TBH I don't see why basing important geopolitical decisions on loyalty to your liege lord or the line of descent of an heir is any more inherently strange than basing them on popular opinion or on abstractions like self-determination or international law.
I think you can render anything as "an abstraction" if you tried hard enough. Laws in general are ultimately abstractions (to some extent), and so are notions like "prosperity" or "quality of life" or "not being enslaved by the English". That said, going to war because your liege lord made a drunken boast at that one party that one time seems inherently more suboptimal as compared to going to war because you believe doing so will allow you to preserve your ability to administer your own nation -- despite the fact that both of those causes are abstractions to some extent.
How many veterans do you know? What fraction of them administer your nation?
For the drunken lord, of course, the war makes sense - if I don't make good on my pre commitments, I can't credibly make more in the future. For the people actually administering modern nations, the logic is similar; while Iraq resisted the US invasion because Saddam Hussein wanted to keep administering a nation, the invasion was at least in part because he didn't (couldn't) comply with the US demand to dismantle his WMDs (which he didn't have) and at that point Bush couldn't back down without looking either weak or foolish.
Um, are you trying to get me to defend the Iraq war ? No thanks. Stupidity is stupid no matter when it happens; but today, at least it is not the norm.
I'd be surprised if you could find even one medieval war fought solely because of a lord's drunken boast, much less enough to show that such thing was "the norm".
> It means that people must have really and truly, in their heart of hearts, based critically important geopolitical decisions on their loyalty to their liege lord, or the line of descent of an heir, or on omens and portents like the color of the sparrow outside their window last Tuesday.
ACOUP wrote about that here: https://acoup.blog/2019/06/04/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-ii/
People in the past generally believed their own religion.
I enjoyed reading the review although it was a bit on the long side, as I am regularly confused on how much the story of Joan of Arc is based on myth or reality.
However I think it gives a poor account of the course of the hundred year wars until Orleans. The review is confusing in making it sound like Agincourt (1415) took place right after Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), while 6 decades are separating those.
Moreover it gives the impression that the french were constantly being defeated until the arrival of Joan of Arc. Actually between 1364 and 1380 french regained the upper side and conquered back most of the territory, under the command of Du Guesclin, with a strategy of putting cities controlled by the british under siege methodically one after the other. Then there was a long break as both countries suffered internal unrest, and the war restarted in 1415 as the english profited of the french division between Armagnacs and Bourguinons.
Edit: Thank you EngineOfCreation for spotting the typo on the date of Agincourt, now it's corrected.
>Agincourt (14515) took place right after Crecy (1346) and Poitiers, (1356) while 6 decades are separating those.
My math is a bit rusty, but that looks like a separation of more than 13 millenia. Your point is qualitatively still valid though!
It's really rather interesting how the course of the war seemed to depend more on the state of infighting within each of the two sides, more than any brilliant strategies or anything like that.
Reading about Joan of Arc I am reminded a little of Greta Thunberg. A slightly weird teenaged girl gets elevated to the status of a leader/figurehead of some larger movement, presumably by more sophisticated actors working behind the scenes, and presumably because the symbolic purity of a young girl plays much better than some old bearded dude.
Is this a pattern that has occurred elsewhere in history, or just a two-off?
I think the Sybils in Rome made some convenient prophesies and boosted morale. Not very close, but maybe you could see that as part of this pattern if you squint?
In the mid 19th c the Xhosa nation killed their cattle and burned their corn, leading to massive famine and state collapse, and subsequent colonization, because a 15 year old prophetess had told them that if they did that, the gods would descend from the heavens and drive the British and Boers into the sea. Unfortunately, it didn't work out (she apparently went to her grave standing by her guns, and claiming that the prophecy had failed because some recalcitrant cheaters had let their crops and cattle live, displeasing the gods).
while it's sad that the prophecy failed, it's also a fascinating example of how charismatic teenage girls seem to be able to project a surprising amount of soft power, across cultures and across historical eras.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse
That's a great take that hadn't occurred to me, thank you! Both also had few wins after the first big event that catapulted them to fame: for Greta Thunberg it was the weekly Friday "school strikes for climate", not that they did much; for Joan of Arc it was taking Rheims. Now granted, the latter required a lot more competency, but perhaps not an inhuman amount.
I don't think we should assume Greta or Joan are being put up to anything by adults - they're just unusually high agency and intelligence girls, who knows how to make effective use of their stereotyped innocence.
I don't think the idea was that they were put up to things they don't believe deeply in the way you're suggesting. It's more that you could have one young girl declaring that you need to stop using oil or the seas will rise and drown your children, another saying you need to mark your doorways with lamb's blood or the Angel of Death will kill your firstborn, and yet another saying something else equally plausible, and the "sophisticated actors" will make sure only one of them gets elevated to become a prominent voice in the media ecosystem.
I think it's way easier to do this in the internet era than in the Middle Ages.
Yeah, you get it. The English were so furious about "how the hell is this bitch doing this to us? it must be evil pacts with the Devil!" that they wanted her burned at the stake. Even Shakespeare writes propaganda about this because they are still so butt-hurt about it a hundred and sixty years later.
And now! time for a Chesterton quote!
https://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/all-things-considered/33/
"A considerable time ago (at far too early an age, in fact) I read Voltaire's "La Pucelle," a savage sarcasm on the traditional purity of Joan of Arc, very dirty, and very funny. I had not thought of it again for years, but it came back into my mind this morning because I began to turn over the leaves of the new "Jeanne d'Arc," by that great and graceful writer, Anatole France. It is written in a tone of tender sympathy, and a sort of sad reverence; it never loses touch with a noble tact and courtesy, like that of a gentleman escorting a peasant girl through the modern crowd. It is invariably respectful to Joan, and even respectful to her religion. And being myself a furious admirer of Joan the Maid, I have reflectively compared the two methods, and I come to the conclusion that I prefer Voltaire's.
When a man of Voltaire's school has to explode a saint or a great religious hero, he says that such a person is a common human fool, or a common human fraud. But when a man like Anatole France has to explode a saint, he explains a saint as somebody belonging to his particular fussy little literary set. Voltaire read human nature into Joan of Arc, though it was only the brutal part of human nature. At least it was not specially Voltaire's nature. But M. France read M. France's nature into Joan of Arc--all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned anywhere; Renan's "Vie de Jesus." It has just the same general intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, I should be the loudest blasphemer in Hyde Park. Nothing ought to be too big for a brave man to attack; but there are some things too big for a man to patronise.
...It is no exaggeration to say that this is the manner of M. Anatole France in dealing with Joan of Arc. Because her miracle is incredible to his somewhat old-fashioned materialism, he does not therefore dismiss it and her to fairyland with Jack and the Beanstalk. He tries to invent a real story, for which he can find no real evidence. He produces a scientific explanation which is quite destitute of any scientific proof. It is as if I (being entirely ignorant of botany and chemistry) said that the beanstalk grew to the sky because nitrogen and argon got into the subsidiary ducts of the corolla. To take the most obvious example, the principal character in M. France's story is a person who never existed at all. All Joan's wisdom and energy, it seems, came from a certain priest, of whom there is not the tiniest trace in all the multitudinous records of her life. The only foundation I can find for this fancy is the highly undemocratic idea that a peasant girl could not possibly have any ideas of her own. It is very hard for a freethinker to remain democratic. The writer seems altogether to forget what is meant by the moral atmosphere of a community. To say that Joan must have learnt her vision of a virgin overthrowing evil from a priest, is like saying that some modern girl in London, pitying the poor, must have learnt it from a Labour Member. She would learn it where the Labour Member learnt it--in the whole state of our society."
Thank you for this review, which I greatly enjoyed (as I hope you can tell).
Okay, I also have to quote from "Là-Bas" by J.K. Huysman:
"What was the conduct of Gilles de Rais toward Jeanne d'Arc? We have no certain knowledge. M. Vallet de Viriville, without proof, accuses him of treachery. M. l'abbé Bossard, on the contrary, claims—and alleges plausible reasons for entertaining the opinion—that he was loyal to her and watched over her devotedly.
"What is certain is that Gilles's soul became saturated with mystical ideas. His whole history proves it.
"He was constantly in association with this extraordinary maid whose adventures seemed to attest the possibility of divine intervention in earthly affairs. He witnessed the miracle of a peasant girl dominating a court of ruffians and bandits and arousing a cowardly king who was on the point of flight. He witnessed the incredible episode of a virgin bringing back to the fold such black rams as La Hire, Xaintrailles, Beaumanoir, Chabannes, Dunois, and Gaucourt, and washing their old fleeces whiter than snow. Undoubtedly Gilles also, under her shepherding, docilely cropped the white grass of the gospel, took communion the morning of a battle, and revered Jeanne as a saint.
"He saw the Maid fulfil all her promises. She raised the siege of Orléans, had the king consecrated at Rheims, and then declared that her mission was accomplished and asked as a boon that she be permitted to return home.
"Now I should say that as a result of such an association Gilles's mysticism began to soar. Henceforth we have to deal with a man who is half-freebooter, half-monk. Moreover—"
"Pardon the interruption, but I am not so sure that Jeanne d'Arc's intervention was a good thing for France."
"Why not?"
"I will explain. You know that the defenders of Charles were for the most part Mediterranean cut-throats, ferocious pillagers, execrated by the very people they came to protect. The Hundred Years' War, in effect, was a war of the South against the North. England at that epoch had not got over the Conquest and was Norman in blood, language, and tradition. Suppose Jeanne d'Arc had stayed with her mother and stuck to her knitting. Charles VII would have been dispossessed and the war would have come to an end. The Plantagenets would have reigned over England and France, which, in primeval times before the Channel existed, formed one territory occupied by one race, as you know. Thus there would have been a single united and powerful kingdom of the North, reaching as far as the province of Languedoc and embracing peoples whose tastes, instincts, and customs were alike. On the other hand, the coronation of a Valois at Rheims created a heterogeneous and preposterous France, separating homogeneous elements, uniting the most incompatible nationalities, races the most hostile to each other, and identifying us—inseparably, alas!—with those stained-skinned, varnished-eyed munchers of chocolate and raveners of garlic, who are not Frenchmen at all, but Spaniards and Italians. In a word, if it hadn't been for Jeanne d'Arc, France would not now belong to that line of histrionic, forensic, perfidious chatterboxes, the precious Latin race—Devil take it!"
Durtal raised his eyebrows.
"My, my," he said, laughing. "Your remarks prove to me that you are interested in 'our own, our native land.' I should never have suspected it of you."
"Of course you wouldn't," said Des Hermies, relighting his cigarette. "As has so often been said, 'My own, my native land is wherever I happen to feel at home.' Now I don't feel at home except with the people of the North. But I interrupted you. Let's get back to the subject. What were you saying?"
"I forget. Oh, yes. I was saying that the Maid had completed her task. Now we are confronted by a question to which there is seemingly no answer. What did Gilles do when she was captured, how did he feel about her death? We cannot tell. We know that he was lurking in the vicinity of Rouen at the time of the trial, but it is too much to conclude from that, like certain of his biographies, that he was plotting her rescue.
"At any rate, after losing track of him completely, we find that he has shut himself in at his castle of Tiffauges.
"He is no longer the rough soldier, the uncouth fighting-man. At the time when the misdeeds are about to begin, the artist and man of letters develop in Gilles and, taking complete possession of him, incite him, under the impulsion of a perverted mysticism, to the most sophisticated of cruelties, the most delicate of crimes.
..."But all this," said Des Hermies, "does not explain how, from a man of piety, he was suddenly changed into a Satanist, from a placid scholar into a violator of little children, a 'ripper' of boys and girls."
"I have already told you that there are no documents to bind together the two parts of this life so strangely divided, but in what I have been narrating you can pick out some of the threads of the duality. To be precise, this man, as I have just had you observe, was a true mystic. He witnessed the most extraordinary events which history has ever shown. Association with Jeanne d'Arc certainly stimulated his desires for the divine. Now from lofty Mysticism to base Satanism there is but one step. In the Beyond all things touch. He carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy. He was guided and controlled by that troop of sacrilegious priests, transmuters of metals, and evokers of demons, by whom he was surrounded at Tiffauges."
"You think, then, that the Maid of Orleans was really responsible for his career of evil?"
"To a certain point. Consider. She roused an impetuous soul, ready for anything, as well for orgies of saintliness as for ecstasies of crime.
"There was no transition between the two phases of his being. The moment Jeanne was dead he fell into the hands of sorcerers who were the most learned of scoundrels and the most unscrupulous of scholars. These men who frequented the château de Tiffauges were fervent Latinists, marvellous conversationalists, possessors of forgotten arcana, guardians of world-old secrets. Gilles was evidently more fitted to live with them than with men like Dunois and La Hire. These magicians, whom all the biographers agree to represent—wrongly, I think—as vulgar parasites and base knaves, were, as I view them, the patricians of intellect of the fifteenth century. Not having found places in the Church, where they would certainly have accepted no position beneath that of cardinal or pope, they could, in those troubled times of ignorance, but take refuge in the patronage of a great lord like Gilles. And Gilles was, indeed, the only one at that epoch who was intelligent enough and educated enough to understand them."
I don't get the whole last bit about claiming there's some big mystery here. Of course someone who's a charismatic national hero is going to have people tell all sorts of implausible stories about how great she was, especially twenty years after her heroic death. The details don't seem particularly beyond what I'd expect people to say about their cool local hero (who actually performed at about the background level for an unusually charismatic young woman).
Joan was both an extraordinary person in her intelligence, boldness and fanaticism and benefited from the low expectations people had of village girls. No miracle there.
Why can't she be a very gifted (140 IQ?) peasant girl with mild to moderate schizotypal mania and/or scrupulosity OCD who spends all her time learning about religion from her local priest and has a great reputation in her village and develops strong charisma. Then she shows up and after proving how incredible she is at boosting morale and motivating troops, slowly but surely the military leaders around her realize how useful she can be, and start saying things like "oh wow everyone we have a saint and a genius on our side!" which inevitably drastically improves military outcomes, since most pre-modern battle outcomes are decided heavily by morale. None of her predictions are impressive beyond her being convinced she'd win and see the kind crowned and happening to be right, which was in fact downstream of her confidence and devotion being so inspiring.
You can mix her being an intelligent and mild lunatic with the people around her choosing to see her as even more competent than she was because she was so inspiring, without requiring it to be full lies on their part or for her to be a raving madwoman incapable of inspiring others.
This is also my preferred explanation. She’s undeniably brilliant, charismatic, insanely confident, and those together sometimes lead to incredible victory, especially if she wins once or twice and everyone decides she’s inspired by god and decides to do what the bold and brilliant military genius thinks they should. If she’d lost we’d never have heard of her. It’s amazing and awe-inspiring, but I don’t think it has to be divine.
I agree. What's striking reading Wikipedia is her apparent *lack* of military skill. It seems like she was just a big morale-boosting mascot and that did the trick.
Right. Well, I rather dislike it when we laypeople wildly hazard IQ guesses (a psychologist friend told me that someone with a master's but not a PhD in psychologist can lose his license for administering an IQ test) but, since we are at this game: 140 IQ is not that high, but, if she was 140 IQ *according to today's standards*, 6 centuries' of Flynn effect worth ago, then that explains many things. Combine that with great perceptiveness, dedication and charisma, and...
More seriously: this was (sorry, medievalists) a waning world in the cusp of great change; the ruling paradigms in war, collective identity, and plenty else had exhausted themselves. In that figure, individuals of great ability can change history by being qualitatively ahead of their time. Sometimes they are immediately recognizable as modern. Joan is a slightly less obvious case, to us, because we associate modernity with secularism, but then the Reformation, a hundred years later, wasn't a secular movement either.
Agreed on all points, and in particular I probably should have said "~3 or more standard deviations above the mean intelligence."
I further think it's likely the men around Joan would have expected essentially zero military ability from a teenage peasant girl, and any level of competence, even if she were just a quick learner who asked insightful questions, probably could have impressed them.
The testimonies quoted in the OP are pretty clear that Joan *wasn't* generally brilliant. People weren't amazed at her intellect, they were amazed that this seemingly ordinary peasant girl was so good at war-related skills.
Agreed. You need look no further than George Floyd to understand the degree to which reality will be bent to accommodate political expediency. The vilest cretin can be cast as a saint if there's sufficient motivation to do so.
The maiden commands her own particular kind of respect. Men cannot look to her as just another man giving orders, even if she's clad as one. Maybe she reminds them of their daughters, or their dear sisters. Of course, she had to be clad as a, to put it politically correctly, Person of War - so, in effect, a man, with his war accoutrements, even as a bannerma- I mean, bannermaid - in order to command respect in the military context. Anyway, by having everyone focus on her, she gives everyone a sense of shared purpose. And, perhaps, while she makes calls, competent people do advise her.
Though in insisting on getting the king crowned at France's Scone, well, that was putting aside military pragmatism for symboloprophetic imperative. Some things are more important than doing things by the book. The tactics are the tactics, but the maiden is the soul of the enterprise, and her story needs to work - indeed, it has sort of done for France what King Arthur does for England, maybe? And it's telling that both "legends" are Christian. But I am much more satisfied with Joan's historicity (and the preponderance of truthiness in it - you know, direct is-ness applicableness, if such a thing can even be truly said to be) than I am of other legendary figures, but FWIW I'm on the JHC was a thing team, not necessarily by those initials in a legal sense, and not necessarily capital Charlie either. It seems like he must have been a wise guy, in a sardonic sense at a bare minimum, but you need like ancient astronauts theories or theism (which have a dearth of falsifiability, which is a problem in reasontopia) to explain stuff like loaves and fishes, if you take it to be literally true. Like I'm not sure Penn and Teller could actually fill people up with the appearance of a bare severality of loaf and fish done with literal smoke and mirrors or something. But I think something like a precocious kid arguing with clerics is quite plausible, and I think I read somewhere that there was a Jewish historian that reported some rabble rouser or other dying on the cross. But Jesus Christ, Inc. is so much bigger than that now, especially taking the whole dang Club Jesus as a singularity.
(Footnote: It has had many schisms, and can hardly be all said to be the same religion, except in a share of memetic antecedence and concordance. Of course, many sects think of themselves as Universal, or Catholic. Or the Greek Orthodox are carrying on the True and Honest Roman Christian Tradition or something.)
Wow, an amazing review. I learned more about J of A than I ever had before. I actually have a feel for who she was and what she was like.
As for the miracle thing, well, I think the answer is obvious. Clearly, a time traveler went back, implanted a mic in her ear, and was advising her the entire time.
How much of a complexity penalty does that explanation get?
She does have a rather prominent role in the one RPG which made a serious effort at incorporating Novikov-consistent time travel as a central element of the play experience. https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/mors-rattus/continuum-roleplaying-in-the-yet/ According to the fictional history therein, "spanners" will start becoming public knowledge over the course of the 2030s, so I guess we'll find out.
I'd just like to add that the English army under King Edward was not composed *only* of professional soldiers, but also of knights and their retinues. One of these, the 11th Earl of Warwick, was instrumental in 1346 in enabling the English troops to land at La Hogue. He attacked 100 French soldiers who were trying to stop the landing with his squire and six archers, killing 60 enemy soldiers and forcing the rest to flee.
That sounds crazy! How is that possible?
Have the six archers bring at least ten arrows each, and don't miss.
> took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell
Greg Cochran claimed the same thing of the top Greek general during their war with Turkey after WW1 https://x.com/gcochran99/status/1631852711632334849 Doing some further digging on Wikipedia backs him up for this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgios_Hatzianestis and the condition had a wiki article as well.
> It’s happened before. It can happen again.
We don't see many miraculous "saints" like her in the more modern era of better record keeping. Similarly, it has been quipped that there are fewer sightings of Bigfoot & UFOs by civilians in this era of widespeared digital cameras.
I really liked this essay. But the talk about her tactical brilliance made me a little curious about what Joan was actually concretely doing with the army. A lot of the discussion of her military campaign reads like "Joan's allies suggested strategy A, which was a complex and cautious plan which would definitely not win the war, and Joan instead suggested strategy B, a balls-out direct assault that would win a great victory if they were very lucky and lose the whole war if they weren't. And they were miraculously lucky."
So like, when you say that Joan of Arc was a miraculous prodigy at commanding an army, do you mean she demonstrated some specific facet of generalship, like when she's setting up for a battle she recognizes good terrain or a good place to set up cannons, or do you mean she kept going all-in on simple and direct strategies that kept working because she had the manic charisma to get the whole army behind her on them?
(Side note: You mention at the start that the English were actually heavily outnumbered, but kept winning because they had a professional, well-motivated army. Were they still outnumbered by Joan's time? Joan's religious discipline seems like it might have served a similar purpose.)
I'm especially curious about what she did with artillery, since you spend a while talking about how it's a uniquely technical branch of the military. But if you're a general rather than an artillery officer, do you actually need to know those fiddly details? Did Joan figure out something really cool to do with the newly introduced cannons, or did she just tell her artillerymen "God requires you to flatten this next fortification" and let the people who know the business get to work? Like, one of those two sounds a bit more miraculous than the other.
Interestingly, the wikipedia article makes it sound a lot like "Joan suggests a reckless immediate attack and gets overruled by the people who actually know what they're doing, while still benefiting from her massive morale bonus."
Generals were normally in charge of positioning artillery before the battle, so even if they didn't need to know the technical details of how to aim and operate the devices, they did need to know how to position them to get the maximum impact (widest field of fire, least dead ground, etc.).
I liked this one a lot.
I guess I'll be the downer and say I wasn't a super fan of this one. As I read I just wished more and more to instead go listen to the episodes of The Rest is History covering Agincourt and the later episodes covering Joan of Arc (actually I'll go download the Joan ones now). By the time I got to the "value add" of the review being the deliberation of the evidence, I was tired of it, and when it came to the fictional debate I gave up. Someone do tell me if that part is particularly worthy of reading and I'll come back to it, but I'm just not feeling it right now.
Edit: apparently I hallucinated the existence of Joan of Arc episodes, shame.
I agree in principle - I enjoyed it as a summary of Joan's life, but I'm still not sure what the review wants to tell me. I don't see much miraculous things here that can't be explained away, apart from the fact that her life was so well documented by primary witnesses (which is really mind-blowing for a medieval commoner girl)
This one was so informative and well-written - and I loved the dialogue inserted towards the end. My favourite so far this year.
Only an ACX review could relate the story of St. Catherine and present as the first piece of evidence that it is, in fact, fiction that an untrained teenager outdebated a roomful of philosophers.
Why do reviewers feel the need to be funny? It is possible to write an entertaining, even a gripping, review without being supercilious. Otherwise, good.
Anything's possible, but being funny, if you can pull it off which most people can't, makes it way, way easier. And there are a lot of good writers in this contest so there's no sense leaving any advantage on the table.
> Yes! The Armagnacs are crooks. Charles VII is a pretty terrible king. The knight who was her bodyguard was planning to rape her on the road! Sure, the English suck, but everyone in this entire story sucks. If you want to say that God cares more about religion than morality, that doesn't even help. Everyone here's a Catholic, they're just really bad at it. How can you possibly come up with a predictive model of God that predicts this?
I’m an agnostic, but my limited understanding of Christian theology is that this sort of thing—God intervening on behalf of the obviously undeserving—happens *all the time*. The most prominent example is, of course, Jesus dying “for our sins”. Another is that, AAUI the Jewish people were supposedly chosen not because they are special or better in any way, but specifically because they are *not*; God choosing them anyway testifies to His glory, because He makes the difference, not us mortals.
If the atheistic perspective is true, and Joan was just at the right tail end of the normal distribution of "people whose lives are evidence of divine intervention," then one would expect to see quite a few "almost-Joans" who looked promising but didn't quite make the cut. I wonder what the base rate of people claiming to have prophetic visions was in 15th-century France. The buried-treasure-extorting prophetess lady is certainly evidence that there were at least some.
One not-quite-Joan that comes to mind: Peter Bartholomew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bartholomew
Long story short: it's 1097 and the Christian forces of the First Crusade are in a tight spot: trapped in a city of Antioch, very far from any help and besieged by the Muslim forces. A humble French dude starts receiving visions, hears Saint Andrew telling him to do things. He goes to the priest, but the priest tells him to calm down, doesn't believe a word of it. Peter does not calm down. He goes around talking with enough passion that eventually some people start believing him.
Miraculously, Peter manages to dig out the Holy Lance of Longinus of all things, exactly where Saint Andrew told he would. Even more people start believing Peter, including some Crusader lords. At the moment their situation is desperate enough that nobody really bothers to go after Peter very much, because it seems like very soon each and everyone of them will be dead at the hands of the Turks. However, inspired by the miraculous lance, the Christians manage to pull off an amazing victory and defeat much larger Muslim forces.
Peter's status goes up, but now the anti-Peter faction also starts taking him more seriously. Some lords believe he is a real deal, while others are worried about some nobody bossing people around because apparently the saints told him to. Peter decides to silence the skeptics: he is going to prove his holiness by walking through the fires and remaining unharmed.
It's a little unclear what happens after he tries the fire thing. The skeptical crusaders claimed that Peter tried to walk through fire and quickly and predictably got burned to death, while Peter's supporters maintained that he remained remarkably fine (maybe got burned just a little bit), but then died soon afterwards for totally unrelated reasons. What the truth was, we may never know. You will notice though that Peter Bartholomew isn't referred to as Saint Peter, because he isn't.
Joan of Arc led from the front in battles, carrying her white banner. She was wounded at least once in combat.
I'm not familiar with another female military leader since then who led from the front in historic battles between Great Powers.
There appear to have been several in ancient history, such as Artemisia I of Hallicarnasus, who led her five ships in the naval battle of Salamis against the Greeks.
ChatGPT tells me that Matilda of Tuscany led from the front in medieval battles, but I don't see that in Wikipedia.
My favorite of the reviews so far.
"The Welsh longbow had made it to England under the first Edward; it’s a simple weapon, cheap to make, useful for hunting, and if you get good with it you can put a 37-inch arrow through chainmail"
Wait, isn't this massively overstated? Any bow is "useful for hunting" and putting it through chainmail depends more on how close you are and how good the chainmail is, rather than skill. But making it was quite complex. Here's what Wikipedia says:
"The traditional way of making a longbow requires drying the yew wood for 1 to 2 years, then slowly working it into shape, with the entire process taking up to four years. The bow stave is shaped to have a D cross-section. The outer "back" of sapwood, approximately flat, follows the natural growth rings; modern bowyers often thin the sapwood, while in the Mary Rose bows the back of the bow was the natural surface of the wood, only the bark is removed. The inner side ("belly") of the bow stave consists of rounded heartwood. The heartwood resists compression and the outer sapwood performs better in tension. This combination in a single piece of wood (a self bow) forms a natural "laminate", somewhat similar in effect to the construction of a composite bow. Longbows last a long time if protected with a water-resistant coating, traditionally of "wax, resin and fine tallow".
The trade of yew wood to England for longbows was such that it depleted the stocks of yew over a huge area... In 1568, despite a request from Saxony, no royal monopoly was granted because there was no yew to cut, and the next year Bavaria and Austria similarly failed to produce enough yew to justify a royal monopoly."
So it was a deceptively complex weapon, and very dependent on this one special type of wood that was cut almost to extinction during this period.
Interestingly, there is a source from c. 1200 that specifies the Welsh longbows were made not from yew but elm. This is about 80 years before the English conquer Wales and incorporate their longbow archers, and 150 years before the battle of Crecy.
"an arms race to develop better armor" made me laugh.
Yeah. It reminded me of the old joke about someone who claims to be "a chocoholic, but for wine".
> 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. Yet his theory of gravitation is not so impressive a mental feat as his astounding chronology, which establishes him as the king of mental conjurors, but a Bedlamite king whose authority no one now accepts. On the subject of the eleventh horn of the beast seen by the prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan, because his imagination was not dramatic but mathematical and therefore extraordinarily susceptible to numbers: indeed if all his works were lost except his chronology we should say that he was as mad as a hatter. As it is, who dares diagnose Newton as a madman?
- George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Saint Joan
I began writing my novel of Joan of Arc (https://www.JoanNovel.com) when I was a Christian, but I was an atheist by the time I finished it (due to external development and not to anything about the writing of the book itself), and I'm a pretty militant atheist now. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the book is unambiguously supernatural -- my narrator, for example, is one of her Voices, so there are no games played about whether they were real -- I have no wish to recant a word I wrote, such was Joan's charisma. Her biggest miracle was not any one of her miracles, but her self.
Mark Twain
Super minor nitpick:
> (Charles VI, Philip the Fortunate's grandson)
... should be great-grandson, right?
Philip IV -> Jean II -> Charles V -> Charles IV
Excellent article.
However, the three hypotheses provided at the end are merely symptomatic of thinking that has unfortunately remained inside the box.
If we think outside the box, couldn’t we imagine, for example, that extraterrestrials—a civilization more advanced than ours—are monitoring humans, sporadically intervening here and there to influence the course of history whenever their forecasts predict catastrophic outcomes?
We could hypothesize, for instance, that the voices Joan of Arc heard were actually a technology deployed by this advanced civilization, identifying Joan as a disruptive agent capable of altering the future.
Perhaps they utilize something akin to psychohistory, predicting that if the English had won, it would lead to fascism twice as severe as Nazism some 500 years later, or something along those lines.
Does this seem irrational? Perhaps. But is it more irrational than believing that Catholic Christians are correct in their sacred texts and that, by sheer coincidence, their god intervened precisely at that historical moment while ignoring what Christians and non-Christians were doing throughout the rest of history?
Of course, this is just one hypothesis among many. There are numerous other possibilities involving interventions from different or superior entities that do not necessarily imply divine intervention.
I'm not saying I believe in either scenario, btw, but which one is truly more rational?
But why would the extrateristrials intervene to stop the medieval English from conquering the medieval French? why would they care at all? And why would that sort of extraterrestrial help seem to stop just when humans develop the technology to make reliable records of it?
Yes, and you can ask the exact same questions for God. That’s my point.
Aliens are basically just the god theory with extra epicycles.
What is the most minimalist hypothesis?
That a God exists, and that it is *exactly* the God described by Catholics, among all religions?
That an intelligent civilization had time to develop during the 13.79 billion years that preceded the appearance of human beings, and had time to spread throughout our galaxy, for example with small probes equipped with an ASI, one of whose functions is to ensure that they intervene in the destiny of intelligent species in the most minimalist way possible, to ensure that they do not destroy themselves?
I'd say "different" rather than "extra." Which is simpler depends on assumptions about the nature of underlying reality that aren't amenable to empirical testing.
Good point.
If they were using psychohistory they’d never base their entire plan on predicting the actions of a single precocious teenage girl, what a contrivance that would be!
Yes, and you can make the exact same point for God. That’s my point.
I was making a little joke about the ending of Second Foundation there.
I don't believe in an interventionist deity myself, just a prime mover. As between the hypotheses, I'd believe we were in a simulation before believing that an alien civilization was manipulating us. Under the natural laws that appear to operate in our world, discovering an intelligent species on another planet before it sends radio signals and then going there to intervene is absurd for reasons of time and energy that no mere technological advance erases. Both choices are superior intelligences, but unlike advanced aliens who are still operating in a natural material universe, the simulation builder could in fact set up a world where some specific sectarian dogma turns out to be true and only one little part of the globe matters and the natural rules of the "game engine" can be suspended to produce miraculous wind changes for narrative purposes. That's all close enough to being God for our purposes, so yeah I gotta say God is more plausible than aliens.
Seems like we're allowed to guess who wrote these, so I'll register my prediction that this is probably (~50% chance) Ozy from Thing of Things, and if not, there's a solid chance it's a Thing of Things reader. The topics fit (it's a blog with an ongoing section called weird people of history, many of whom are religious), it's funny in an irreverent way, and there's a random fan-fiction term thrown in for no apparent reason ("fix-fic", idk what this is but Google tells me it's fanfiction jargon). Also they are capable of very long, footnote-y posts, and never seem to have written about Joan of Arc before as far as I can tell?
A fix-fic is a fanfic written with the intent of "fixing" some sort of canon tragedy, often because your favorite character got a raw deal and you want to write a story where they end up happy. (In this case, someone wanted Joan to get the victory in Paris she clearly deserved.)
The term is used insultingly here, but in fandom it can be positive or negative depending on how much you like what canon did to the characters.
The person who I suspect wrote this is not Ozy, but I think they do read Thing of Things.
Surely an interesting part of this is that the voices stop - she doesn't keep claiming divine inspiration in order to maintain status, and if mentally ill, she is randomly healed?
This reminds me of Carlos Eire's book "They Flew". It's a discussion of clusters of miracles in early modern Europe (mostly) and specifically within the Catholic world, focusing especially on levitation and bilocation. The gist there is broadly similar to this review of Joan of Arc. The miracles of these saints were well recorded, though not as well as we'd like. People close to their time already were somewhat skeptical of these miracles, and add to that the whole newly developed bureaucracy of verifying miracles and confirming saints in the Catholic church, the body of evidence is confusing indeed.
In the epilogue of that book, Eire summarizes a few typical attitudes to these historical instances of miracles:
"The oldest approach is the original one, which comes from within the phenomenon and is also its wellspring, so to speak: the perspective of faith. From this perspective, God’s supernatural agency—or the devil’s preternatural one—can make the impossible possible. Another approach is that of purely materialist empirical science, which excludes the existence of supernatural or preternatural agency and has traditionally denied the possibility of anything it deems naturally impossible. This perspective is now hegemonic in Western culture. A third approach is that taken by the Catholic Church a fter the Council of Trent, which involves employing medical and scientific knowledge in the investigation of miracle claims. This perspective is still an essential component of the Catholic Church’s take on impossible phenomena, especially in its canonization process and in its approach to all miracle claims.
A fourth and relatively more recent approach is that taken by social scientists and other scholars influenced by social science. This approach, which ignores the metaphysical issue of the supernatural altogether, focuses on the social matrix in which impossible miracles occur and has multiple perspectives. Overall, such studies tend to be functionalist; that is, their analysis is guided by the theory that all aspects of society serve a pragmatic purpose or role and can best be understood in the context of the needs and goals they fulfill for the social organism in question."
which I think cuts up the "models" a bit differently from this review, and I sort of wish section 3.3 was written with a cast conforming more to Eire's analysis, simply because I imagine that would be a more fun read.
Unfortunately Eire's book concludes on a pretty confusing introduction of a "post-secular" approach to miracles, which I won't try to summarize here because I'm not sure I understood it.
In the end this whole business reminds me of Scott's discussion of parapsychology in "The Control Group Is Out of Control". Like, the process of inquiry twists itself into an ouroboros of scientific evidence where we loop back to "in my opinion" again. It's unsatisfying, but what can you do.
(Also, I slightly suspect this review is by the winner of 2023's book review contest. For starters, this one is also massively long. The tone and the use of dialogue near the end to sum up the points are also reminiscent of that review.)
Just a note that Henry V died a few months before Charles the Mad! You have it opposite. But great article!
Very long but really cool.
Anthropic Argument for an independent France.
Wow, this is my new favorite in the contest.
The debate reminds me a lot of Scott's post about Mormonism as a control group for religious narratives. Joseph Smith is conveniently even better documented, living so close to the present day.
Very good review, but I was mostly taken away by the end of the first few paragraphs. How I wish we still had powers of mythmaking that strong today!
I've always felt that myth creation is a natural instinct, like religiosity, in people, and that you cannot disown it, merely accept and shape the instinct.
Perhaps those who don't belief in their religiosity practice religion better, I'm not sure; but I'd imagine mythmakers who believe in the concept's utility will create better myths. Perhaps safer or more usable ones.
The use of artillery is not especially technical in this period - you need some people with know-how to maintain and fire the guns, but none of the mathematical principles behind arcs of fire etc are understood until the 18th century. Seems perfectly plausible someone smart could intuit good artillery placement.
This looks like a Mrs PSmith review.
This is not my guess.
What a gem of a review. Up there with the best of Scott's writing.
I knew next to nothing about Joan of Arc, but I have read something of the history from Edward I to Henry V, mostly in Ian Mortimer's biographies. Everything in part 1 matched what I'd learnt elsewhere except the reference to scutage. Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/scutage claims scutage had become obselete by the 14th century, so in my defence it wasn't relevant to the Hundred Years' War, and in our reviewer's defence it was relevant to Edward I's Scottish wars. Overall I think this is evidence for our reviewer's accuracy.
Footnote 41 - this was Hussites strategy so he apparently heard of that.
1. Very well written and interesting throughout. I am surprised, but it is my favorite, for now! Some experts here claim to have an inkling who the author is - not(!) Scott - and I will read more of him/her when we know; Scott's review of Alexander-the-Great seems alluded to, too.
2. As a very minor theologian, I am disappointed to read the footnote about the gospels: "I’m presently inclined to believe Mark and John are eyewitnesses, but that we also have the Synoptics as a unit drawing on the plausibly-eyewitness author of Q, as well as Josephus and Paul's letters." - One may(!) grant Mark and Q (and bonus-points for knowing Q!), but "John"?! Sorry, back to "historical Jesus 101" (yes in 421 one learns there may be useful information even in John, still ...). Which kinda de-values a lot of the "Saint" talk - the author is way too eager to consider divine intervention.
I would be grateful for a bit of expansion on your point 2, and in fact on the footnote to which it refers. Both are too terse and allusive for me to follow, though I have the feeling they would be interesting if I could.
ok, so there are the 4 gospels - Mark, Matthew, Luke, John - and endless discussions: Are the authors eye-witnesses, when were they written down, who was first. The majority opinion for the last 50+ years is: Mark is the oldest text (oldest texts ending 16:8, the last few verses added centuries later), written down maybe a generation after Jesus BUT arguably (just) before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The others written down after the fall, John by far the latest (100+ years after Jesus). Math and Luke share a lot of Jesus' speeches (sermon on the mount, sermon on the plain et al), thus we assume a common source: "Q" - they both "q"uote (probably differing "editions", surely edited by them) - which may have been notes of authentic teachings of the historical Jesus. https://www.logos.com/grow/nook-the-sermon-on-the-plain/
The discussions fill libraries, wikipedia a good first place to get some idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark
My comment's point is: Considering John (!!!) an eyewitness is ... a sign the author is very much outside the mainstream of theological/historical-critical discussion - and likely has been reading the Joan accounts also with a heavy bias/rose-colored glasses. Sure, there are books arguing for whatever. Erich von Däniken wrote books, too - paper is patient. MY priors remain: Aztecs were not alien astronauts / John is no eyewitness / Joan was not sent by God to kill the English.
Got it, thanks.
It's really interesting for me to read your comment, since my intellectual framework cuts in *exactly* the opposite direction from yours. I'm quite certain that John was an eyewitness (not sure about Mark or Matthew, but the case for John being an eyewitness seems extremely strong to me). The fact that the author of this review, whoever he is, accepts eyewitness authorship of John is a positive sign to me, since it suggests that he's willing to break with historico-critical scholarship (which I have a....dim view of), to break with metaphysical naturalism, and to at least take seriously both the reliability of tradition and the existence of miracles.
I'd say the reasons I'm convinced that John was written by an eyewitness, and was written early, boil down to:
1) The author seems to be completely unaware of the fall of Jerusalem, even though he mentions other examples of fulfilled prophecy, e.g. the death of Peter. That seems to me to point, strongly, to a date after Peter's death but before the fall of Jerusalem.
2) the author is aware of details (like the existence of the Pool of Bethesda) that would have been hard to come by after the city fell, and moreover, he speaks about the Pool of Bethesda *in the present tense*, as though it still exists at the time of writing.
3) there are Syriac traditions that place the authorship sometime in the 60s as well, as opposed to the Western tradition that places it in the 90s.
4) John's wealth of detail, including about matters of no particular significance (catching 153 fish, for example, or Jesus writing in the sand) seem to me to point strongly to it being the work of someone who was actually there on the scene, as opposed to a writer embellishing things for theological reasons.
5) the text itself, at numerous places, claims to be the work of an eyewitness, and that eyewitness authorship is certified by the community that oversaw the finalization of the book.
6) probably most importantly, early tradition ascribes the work to John, and i don't think there's much in the way of early tradition to the contrary. when it comes to authorship, I'm certainly going to weigh the opinion of early church tradition- which was closer to the events, shaped by a similr culture, and wasn't contaminated by metaphysical naturalism- more strongly than the opinion of 20th century theologians working in the tradition of historical criticism.
(plus, if you are trying to assess whether Christianity is true or not, and to be clear, i don't think it completely is, then you should at least take seriously the Christian argument, which is that the church is guided by the Holy Spirit and presumably therefore would have been able to correctly discern who the author of John's Gospel was).
I'd be interested to know what convinces you that John's gospel was *not* written by an eyewitness, and that it was written late (i.e. in the 90s or 100s rather than in the 60s?) Because all the arguments I've seen to the contrary (like "John refers to the expulsion of Christians from synagogues, and we have a document to that effect from 90 AD, so it must have been written after 90 AD") strike me as....remarkably weak.
For the record, I'm not a Christian currently, though i have been in the past. I don't think you need to be a Christian to accept John's Gospel as a true *historical* account, though I disagree with much of the theology contained therein, just like you don't need to be a Christian to believe that Joan of Arc performed miracles either. (The miracle that I've heard testimony from at the shortest remove, and that I'm most *personally* convinced of the truth of, isn't a Christian miracle at all).
John contains more advanced philosophy (Jesus is the Logos) that dates it to a later period of Hellenistic revival. The Stoicist concept of the Logos gained renewed interest and a parallel non-Christian trinity concept was even developed.
There are elements of this in 1st century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, but my understanding is that his Logos is more like God’s power manifesting through angels or prophets because he believes the divine power must be and remain outside the world. The concepts have clearly been further developed by the time of John, more in the direction of Neoplatonic philosophy circa 200 (that it nevertheless is assumed to predate based on the earliest known manuscript fragments and other people referencing it with the other gospels by 180.)
Thanks for helping out :) - indeed my shortest answer would also be: just read that opening. Far too elaborate a theology for Galilean fishermen. - Or even better: read Scott's post about how (not) to look for truth - "epistemic helplessness" - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
As said, I am a very minor theologian ;) , there are libraries about it and if a position is regarded by all the big and medium experts as trashy, I feel very fine ignoring it.
What I would like to add here, that I find the surprisingly widespread view very wrong and very surprising that people think nations and nationalism weren't invented yet and wars were just the private business of kings etc. Some elements of it are true, in the sense that it was more a war between two dynasties, and some French lord sided with the English dynasty. Still, if you was a peasant in the French dynasty loyal regions, an invading English army in your village was very, very bad news to you. And this did create some sense of nationalism, that the invading army is a "them" (who treat you terribly) and then army of your own country our king is "us" in the sense that they don't and maybe try to protect you and so on.
This was great. A subject which I am very pleased to know more about, but would never have picked up a history book to research.
This is Scott recreating the magazine. And not a moment too soon. The old media has died, and we are starving for high quality new media.
i'm less than a paragraph in but this is the first of the reviews that i read that i thought "sounds like scott, i wonder if this is him"
Excellent read, I have been thinking quite heavily on this since reading.
Indeed, I specifically have been chewing on how the Saint explanation (which, as a WEIRD person, I am trained to find least likely) could tie in with some of the recent thinking in philosophy of mind.
When I took philosophy in college, David Chalmers was a regular name to appear in texts. However it seems that in the time since I was in college, he has developed a new prong in his approach to the hard problem of consciousness:
Panpsychism/proto-panpsychism/pan-experientialism.
To be clear, these would all be varieties of the dualistic position "mental and physical are separate, but physical objects have an innate capacity for mental attributes." I found it quite shocking that this is actually a persuasive approach to the problem. Indeed, the logic is somewhat hard to dispute except for some counterintuitive results (for example, a "Constitutive" version where smaller mental events make up greater mental events is necessary to make the logic jel, but everyone involved feels this might be silly). While this approach has persuasive logic behind it, it also *breaks the closed nature of the physical world.* Regardless ...
If we were to assume this position to be true, it could tie in in interesting ways here. If we accept that mental phenomena being an intrinsic part of the material world is a good explanation for the existence of consciousness, it seems to me that the ability of someone like Joan to seemingly receive advice from angels becomes *slightly* less confusing.
Of course, if this were true and we lived in a Dualistic universe, individual cases like Joan's would be just a small tip of a rather large iceberg (and one where we may never see the depths below the water!).
PS link to the Chalmers paper https://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf
lesson taken after reading this whole thing: when you're henry v, just get the dauphine charles strangled instead of getting her mother to swear he's not the heir.
From my military experience, I can easily see Joan becoming an expert on artillery, in the eyes of the aristocrats.
Noble commander: "Oh, Maid of Orleans, where should I site my artillery?"
Joan: "I shall pray for guidance."
Joan wanders off to where some commoners are doing maintenance on their cannon. "Hey, where's the best place to put these things in the battle?"
Peasant turned artillerist: "Let us put the cannon on that hill and we'll butcher the English dogs."
Joan returns to HQ tent. "Put the cannon on that hill."
Nobles: "Such divine wisdom."
Karl Gallagher is absolutely correct. I'm Stephen W. Richey. I'm the author of the serious scholarly book _Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint_. (Be aware that there are two other books with the exact same title as mine.) On pages 91-92 of my book, I explain how I think Jehanne acquired her skill at placing artillery. I summarize my findings in my book as follows here: Gunpowder artillery was the component of late Medieval armies that was growing the fastest in size, sophistication, and lethality. The master gunners of the day were of common birth, not nobility. The established male noble aristocratic commanders of the army may have resented these commoners encroaching on their monopoly of military leadership. As a commoner herself, and as an ingenious pragmatist who was more concerned with what worked than with social class distinctions, Jehanne may have been able to establish a working rapport with the gunners more easily than her noble co-commanders. As a fast and intuitive learner, she may have picked up from the gunners how best to deploy the guns for battle even if she did not master the technical minutiae of casting iron or mixing the ingredients of gunpowder.
I'm delighted to hear there's scholarly work aligned with my offhand joke. Joan's ability to move information across class boundaries could have been a superpower.
You nailed it!
>Thiband d’Armagnac or de Termes, Knight, bailiff of Chartres: "Except in matters of war, she was simple and innocent...
>[The Duke d'Alencon, French nobleman and general]: "In everything that she did, apart from the conduct of the war, Joan was young and simple...
>[Marguerite La Touroulde, Joan's landlady at Chinon] "And from all that I know of her she was absolutely ignorant except in the matter of arms...
A lot the arguments that "Well, Joan was obviously a genius, hence she was able go learn warfare so quickly" seem to be skipping over these parts of the testimony. If contemporaries are to be believed, Joan *wasn't* a briliant prodigy, at least not in general. Now, maybe those testimonies are underestimating Joan's brilliance, and the reason she didn't show amazing talent in other fields was simply that there was no need for her to learn them, but that needs to be argued for. It's bad historical practice to assume something that is, at least apparently, directly contradicted by the primary sources.
Despite the considerable length this was my favourite of the reviews so far - very engaging writing style.
This is the very best essay I have read in a long, long time
In your 3rd explanatory option, that she was manic, you said that this doesn’t correlate with intelligence. Another option is that she had a schizotype personality but not schizophrenic. Those personality types have a clustering of traits including a strong spiritual belief, hearing voices or experiencing spirits, fluid intelligence, and a strong belief in a mission. She fits that pretty well imo.
She’s only a “completely untaught theology genius” if you assume theology can only be taught in school. Joan was an exceptionally intelligent person with ample opportunity to sharpen her wit through arguing against those who thought she was a fraud or sorcerer, and ample opportunity to talk theology with her confessors and with the highest-level clergy in the land. It’s not at all surprising that an intelligent person obsessed with religion would learn some stuff about what their church thought about theology.
The visions of later Catholic seers (19th and 20th century), most notably St Bernadette of Lourdes, were often considered reliable because an ignorant girl could not have known enough about theology to surprise a priest questioning her. But growing up surrounded by Christianity, they might have known what the priest wanted to hear. Dealing with the adversity of sceptical clerical authorities is in any case a part of being a successful reformer or visionary, and therefore a common theme in hagiographies.
NYT's Ross Douthat about "Five theories about Joan of Arc’s miraculous-seeming care" starting:
"Scott Alexander, the noted rationalist blogger, has a feature where guest writers pen book reviews and essays for his site, and this week an anonymous writer reviewed the historical literature on Joan of Arc." Ross asks the obvious question: Why would God interfere here? -And gives 5 possible answers. Fun. Ending: "And since the French part of that story isn’t finished yet, the last possibility remains open as well: Because God loves the French in a special way, and they have a cosmic destiny that still waits to be fulfilled. C’est certainement possible!"
It was a fascinating summary of what we know of Jeanne d'Arc, but why the need to explain her phenomenon? Trying to pigeonhole her into a rationalist just-so story reduces her importance and uniqueness. We should just admit that we don't have enough information after six centuries to truly understand her.
I enjoyed this review a lot, but your footnote 95 has gone wrong, in way which makes me doubt your ability to assess sources.
Neither Mark's nor John's gospel identifies its author by name. Conventionally the authors are referred to as Mark and John respectively, but both names are common and there's no good reason to identify them with other biblical figures with those names.
The gospel of Mark does not claim to be an eye-witness account and is not written from the perspective of an eye-witness. There is simply no reason to think it is an eye-witness account.
John 21:24 claims that the author is the Beloved Disciple (never named in the gospel), who clearly would have been an eye-witness, but John 21 is a later addition. On internal evidence alone, it was written after the Beloved Disciple's death. The original ending is John 20:31. John 1-20 gives no hint that it is an eye-witness account. People writing eye-witness accounts in the first century would make it clear they *were* eye-witness accounts, in the same way that people do now. The most likely position is that the Fourth Gospel was written based on the teachings of the Beloved Disciple, but not actually by him.
Paul *does* claim to have personally met Jesus, in that he encountered the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. It is clear both from Paul's letters and from Acts that Paul was not an eye-witness to Jesus's earthly ministry, and on Paul's own account he had very little contact with those who were eye-witnesses.
Q is not an account at all, but a collection of sayings. There is no reason to think it was collated by by an eye-witness.
Josephus on any view does not say much about Jesus's life. The most extensive reference is the Testimonium Flavianum, which is widely agreed to be inauthentic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus#The_Testimonium_Flavianum. But even if it were authentic, it would only show that Josephus believed the stories of Jesus's resurrection.
That many people, soon after Jesus's death, believed that he had risen from the dead, is clear enough, and that requires some explanation. As a general principle, the answer to "Why do people believe X?" cannot be "Because X is true;" both true and false claims must be believed on some evidence. I have a theory about this, but it would be too much a tangent here.
I'm sorry, but where do you see 'internal evidence' in John 21 that the chapter was written after John's death? It seems clear to me that it was written while he was still alive (hence why they seem to take some pains to point out that he will probably die eventually), and represents the community around him signing off / verifying that he was the author of the gospel.
That is, specifically:
"23 Then went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?
24 This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true."
I read those verses differently. Anybody who writes an account of anything necessarily includes some details and excludes others, and in the case of John's gospel, John 21:25 specifically says so. So we should ask ourselves why the writer would mention this particular rumour. There were surely many rumours around at the time (clear enough from the New Testament itself, but also the writings of the apostolic fathers and their pagan contemporaries). The obvious explanation is that there had been a widely believed prophecy that the Beloved Disciple would live until the Parousia, but this had been falsified by the Beloved Disciple's death, so the writer needs to explain away the prophecy as having been based on a misunderstanding of Jesus's words.
This I think is a straightforward application of Bayesian principles, but it is also a consensus view among New Testatment scholars. I realise that saying "read a book" is obnoxious, but given the amount that has been written on the authorship of John's gospel, it does seem slightly absurd to rehash the argument in ACX comments. If you have some interest in the question, then I think you would likely enjoy reading a commentary. More or less any commentary written this century would cover it, although as it happens I am in the middle of reading of David Ford's 'The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary', which I would recommend.
Got here from the NYT review. This essay was so thoughtful that it's somewhat changed my opinion on the whole rationalist movement. Great to read, and I'll be sure to stick around if the rest of the content on this blog is just as good.
Welcome!
Loved this review - and while scrolling by would love to welcome you as well.
I've benefited from being here quite a bit over the years, mostly in ways that are orthogonal to the LW Project writ large - friends, humility, appreciation of the other, the ability to listen etc. Wishing only the very best :)
Per the review, "Between the time of the battles of Crecy and of Poiters, Philip the Fortunate had given the rich duchy of Burgundy in fief to his faithful son Philip the Bold". But according to Wikipedia and Britannica, Philip the Bold was the son of John II, so the grandson of Philip the Fortunate. Also per those two sources, PtB became Duke of Burgundy in 1363, so not between Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356).
Why do the gods need a "reason" to intervene on behalf of France in the 100 Years' War?
A lovely review.
I wish, just as a fan, that the author had given a long footnote to Twain who was mentioned in passing, because of course America's greatest author, himself a noted skeptic as the author of Letters from the Earth, What is Man?, The Diaries of Adam and Eve, Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, etc.--that same genius read the trial records in French, & wrote of his novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc that, "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others need no preparation and got none."
And Twain devoted a beautiful essay, Saint Joan of Arc, to just the topic of this review, writing in that essay:
'In Joan of Arc at the age of sixteen there was no promise of a romance. She lived in a dull little village on the frontiers of civilization: she had been nowhere and had seen nothing; she knew none but simple shepherd folk; she had never seen a person of note; she hardly knew what a soldier looked like; she had never ridden a horse, nor had a warlike weapon in her hand; she could neither read nor write: she could spin and sew; she knew her catechism and her prayers and the fabulous histories of the saints, and this was all her learning. That was Joan at sixteen. What did she know of law? of evidence? of courts? of the attorney’s trade? of legal procedure? Nothing. Less than nothing. Thus exhaustively equipped with ignorance, she went before the court at Toul to contest a false charge of breach of promise of marriage; she conducted her cause herself, without any one’s help or advice or any one’s friendly sympathy, and won it. She called no witnesses of her own, but vanquished the prosecution by using with deadly effectiveness its own testimony. The astonished judge threw the case out of court, and spoke of her as “this marvelous child.”
She went to the veteran Commandant of Vaucouleurs and demanded an escort of soldiers, saying she must march to the help of the King of France, since she was commissioned of God to win back his lost kingdom for him and set the crown upon his head. The Commandant said, “What, you? You are only a child.” And he advised that she be taken back to her village and have her ears boxed. But she said she must obey God, and would come again, and again, and yet again, and finally she would get the soldiers. She said truly. In time he yielded, after months of delay and refusal, and gave her the soldiers; and took off his sword and gave her that, and said, “Go—and let come what may.” She made her long and perilous journey through the enemy’s country, and spoke with the King, and convinced him. Then she was summoned before the University of Poitiers to prove that she was commissioned of God and not of Satan, and daily during three weeks she sat before that learned congress unafraid, and capably answered their deep questions out of her ignorant but able head and her simple and honest heart; and again she won her case, and with it the wondering admiration of all that august company.
And now, aged seventeen, she was made Commander-in-Chief, with a prince of the royal house and the veteran generals of France for subordinates; and at the head of the first army she had ever seen, she marched to Orleans, carried the commanding fortresses of the enemy by storm in three desperate assaults, and in ten days raised a siege which had defied the might of France for seven months...
She is the Wonder of the Ages. And when we consider her origin, her early circumstances, her sex, and that she did all the things upon which her renown rests while she was still a young girl, we recognize that while our race continues she will be also the Riddle of the Ages. When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training which it received while it grew the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encouragement it gathered from self-recognition and recognition from the outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came...
We can understand how she could be born with military genius, with leonine courage, with incomparable fortitude, with a mind which was in several particulars a prodigy—a mind which included among its specialties the lawyer’s gift of detecting traps laid by the adversary in cunning and treacherous arrangements of seemingly innocent words, the orator’s gift of eloquence, the advocate’s gift of presenting a case in clear and compact form, the judge’s gift of sorting and weighing evidence, and finally, something recognizable as more than a mere trace of the statesman’s gift of understanding a political situation and how to make profitable use of such opportunities as it offers; we can comprehend how she could be born with these great qualities, but we cannot comprehend how they became immediately usable and effective without the developing forces of a sympathetic atmosphere and the training which comes of teaching, study practice—years of practice—and the crowning and perfecting help of a thousand mistakes. We can understand how the possibilities of the future perfect peach are all lying hid in the humble bitter-almond, but we cannot conceive of the peach springing directly from the almond without the intervening long seasons of patient cultivation and development. Out of a cattle-pasturing peasant village lost in the remotenesses of an unvisited wilderness and atrophied with ages of stupefaction and ignorance we cannot see a Joan of Arc issue equipped to the last detail for her amazing career and hope to be able to explain the riddle of it, labor at it as we may.
It is beyond us. All the rules fail in this girl’s case. In the world’s history she stands alone—quite alone. Others have been great in their first public exhibitions of generalship, valor, legal talent, diplomacy, fortitude; but always their previous years and associations had been in a larger or smaller degree a preparation for these things. There have been no exceptions to the rule. But Joan was competent in a law case at sixteen without ever having seen a law-book or a court-house before; she had no training in soldiership and no associations with it, yet she was a competent general in her first campaign; she was brave in her first battle, yet her courage had had no education—not even the education which a boy’s courage gets from never-ceasing reminders that it is not permissible in a boy to be a coward, but only in a girl; friendless, alone, ignorant, in the blossom of her youth, she sat week after week, a prisoner in chains, before her assemblage of judges, enemies hunting her to her death, the ablest minds in France, and answered them out of an untaught wisdom which overmatched their learning, baffled their tricks and treacheries with a native sagacity which compelled their wonder, and scored every day a victory against these incredible odds and camped unchallenged on the field. In the history of the human intellect, untrained, inexperienced, and using only its birthright equipment of untried capacities, there is nothing which approaches this. Joan of Arc stands alone, and must continue to stand alone, by reason of the unfellowed fact that in the things wherein she was great she was so without shade or suggestion of help from preparatory teaching, practice, environment, or experience. There is no one to compare her with, none to measure her by; for all others among the illustrious grew toward their high place in an atmosphere and surroundings which discovered their gift to them and nourished it and promoted it, intentionally or unconsciously. There have been other young generals, but they were not girls; young generals, but they had been soldiers before they were generals; she began as a general; she commanded the first army she ever saw; she led it from victory to victory, and never lost a battle with it; there have been young commanders-in-chief, but none so young as she: she is the only soldier in history who has held the supreme command of a nation’s armies at the age of seventeen...
Taking into account, as I have suggested before, all the circumstances—her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquests in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life—she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.'
This is too long by about 200%, but I did enjoy being reminded why the teaching of French history in French schools largely skips over the politicking of the Hundred Years' War - not just because the "French" kept losing to the English, but mostly because it's completely incomprehensible. Even to modern-day historians who kept up with the plot so we can read about it, one feels like asking: why did you bother?
One minor point in defense of the non-Catholic Christians: If you accept that Joan was sent by God to save France, then it's very telling that she died before getting the chance to subdue the Hussites as she so plainly wanted to do. It would seem that either God was ambivalent toward the heresy, or even protected it so that it would eventually lead to a reaction against the Papacy.
I dunno, the Hussites sure did get pretty subdued.
Reading this review and the comments on it leave me dumbfounded. First, the unshakeable faith of so many of you that everything is rationally explainable makes me scratch my head. Don’t Gödel and Heisenberg at least mildly shake up your faith? But I guess when you are a true believer, it’s hard to look at the evidence. On the flip side, there is a a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of G-d by many non-believers (as well as many believers). G-d is here defined at as some super-human being that intervenes in human events. The crux of this simplistic understanding of “G-d” leads to a false framing of the hypothesis: Joan of Arc “proves” G-d’s existence by his “miraculous” interventions in this war which gives this teenage girl her uncanny ability. So then the choice becomes “believe in G-d” and then you have to explain why in this specific war G-d comes down on the side of the Dauphin or don’t believe in G-d and then you have to explain her uncanny ability.
Besides being simplistic, this is not the way most people actually experience G-d. G-d is not a being or an object, but an experience, akin to love. People don’t debate whether or not we need to believe love exists or not—you just experience it. The experience of G-d entails a connection to something greater and more powerful than ourselves. “Belief” in a specific set of ideas about G-d as an object is as besides the point as trying to define love.
In this view, there is no doubt at all that Joan of Arc had an experiential connection called G-d. She is far from the first and far from the last. And while she was undoubtedly an extraordinary person, her G-d experience, allowed her to achieve truly extraordinary things. Again she is neither the first nor the last for whom this was true. Hence there is no need to explain G-d’s “intervention” in this war. Joan and her saintly connection to G-d was what led to the success of the French. There is no need for further explanation, even though fundamentally it still doesn’t really explain anything. And that’s ok, we don’t know everything and can’t explain everything, and knowing we don’t know everything and can’t explain everything is a very fundamental part of the G-d experience.
And just like you understand the power of love when you see it’s amazing effects on yourself or people you know, the story of Joan should make you understand the power of the experience of G-d. This should encourage you to open yourself up to experiencing it yourself. This doesn’t require you to be a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist or a Muslim or adopt some shamanistic religion. Those are all just alternative paths to opening up to that experience. G-d isn’t a being who cares about this human or that human or this religion or that religion. G-d is an experience that can and often does make us better people (just like love for that matter) although sometimes it drags us down (ibid).
isn’t it at all relevant to you that Joan is a *Catholic* saint and the idea that God is not a being is alien to the point of self-contradiction to a religion whose *central claim* is that God became not only a being but a *specific human* in a specific time and place? You start by laughing at the rationalists and then also casually dismiss all theists; who exactly are you even with, here?
Well it should be obvious I am *not* a Christian and actually most theists aren’t either, so I am not “casually” dismissing “all” theists. It is the case that Catholicism, in order to win over the Roman pagan world, adopted its idea of G-d as a big man in the sky (literally) as opposed to the many alternative “heresies” out there. And undoubtedly the obsession with the “existence of G-d” issue is mostly due to Christianity. Still I can say without a doubt there are devout Christians (particularly in the mystical traditions) who are totally focused on their experience of G-d rather on questions of who or what G-d is.
It is tautologically constitutive of theism that a theist believes God is a being (or the gods are several beings), as everyone knows is true of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and all the famous pagan religious systems, which together account for essentially all the people in history one would ever have called a theist. Certainly there are mystics who don't attend to questions of theology, but it is flatly self-contradictory to attempt to talk about a Christian who doesn't believe God is a being. I don't think it'll be worth responding to you any more, though; the idea that Catholicism got the "big man in the sky" from *paganism* is so comically uninformed--and from someone who literally affects the Jewish avoidance of writing out the name of God--that I can't see how you could possibly be serious.
Using big words like :”tautologically constitutive” does not make your argument more compelling or effective. Nor does calling someone unserious instead of engaging in the argument. Theism is just a label which associates “being” as connected to something or things greater than us puny humans. Beyond that simple statement there is no consensus whatsoever what the words “G-d”, “God”, “gods” or “being” actually mean. My personal view on the specifics of G-d’s “nature” has a fancy name too: “panentheism” but that is irrelevant to the point I was trying to make: the exact nature of “G-d” is not relevant, its the experience of G-d that matters. As for my view of the origin of the “big man in the sky” theory, surely you won’t dismiss the idea of “the hypostatic unity of the person of Christ in his two natures, divine and human” has pagan roots. It certainly didn’t come from the beliefs of the Jews…
Certainly I’ll dismiss it. It was introduced by men who hated paganism with a hatred that has never been equaled again, who indeed invented the concept of paganism to have a label for the thing they were in the process of destroying forever.
These same church fathers were also the ones who were instrumental in shaping the term “Judaism” for the exact same reason they shaped the term paganism. In fact, one can argue they hated the Jews—the Christ-killers—far more, and tried to destroy Jews, their practices and culture. Their hatred never abated even though in the end they compromised (just like they did with polytheists) and “merely” pushed Jews to a situation of utter humiliation and despair.
Yet from the beginning they adopted wholesale huge chunks of Jewish ideas, obviously since Jesus and the apostles, and most early Christians were all Jews. There is no contradiction between hating something you are strongly connected to, while at the same time incorporating aspects of the thing you hate.. To attribute consistency and rationality to humans is part of what I criticized in my post. The same is equally true with Roman polytheism.
And as for your claim this hatred has never “been equaled again,” well it certainly took intense hatred of the polytheists for the Taliban to blow up those ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan
Magnificent, thanks so much for writing this.
These same church fathers were also the ones who were instrumental in shaping the term “Judaism” for the exact same reason they shaped the term paganism. In fact, one can argue they hated the Jews—the Christ-killers—far more, and tried to destroy Jews, their practices and culture. Their hatred never abated even though in the end they compromised (just like they did with polytheists) and “merely” pushed Jews to a situation of utter humiliation and despair.
Yet from the beginning they adopted wholesale huge chunks of Jewish ideas, obviously since Jesus and the apostles, and most early Christians were all Jews. There is no contradiction between hating something you are strongly connected to, while at the same time incorporating aspects of the thing you hate.. To attribute consistency and rationality to humans is part of what I criticized in my post. The same is equally true with Roman polytheism.
And as for your claim this hatred has never “been equaled again,” well it certainly took intense hatred of the polytheists for the Taliban to blow up those ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan
First, this is too long. Delete part 1 because it's irrelevant. Delete part 3.3 because it's distracting fictional dialogue.
Second, the footnote gore. Delete all of them.
Third, the blockquotes shift from random unnamed people saying things to a narrator from a god's eye point of view saying things to cringe poetry. Delete most of them.
Fourth, there is proper noun introduction everywhere. This spam makes it very hard to keep track of what is going on because you're overloaded with names of random things. Condense most of this by just referring to French and English shit.
Overall this triggered me more than the Alpha School review.
A very good article.
Coming into this as a Catholic, I obviously agree most with Basilica. This is because, naturally, I think the Catholic model fits with all the evidence, and I have independent reasons for being Catholic. I buy the metaphysical arguments of Thomism as I understand them, and I agree with the Catholic interpretation of the Bible that imply Church and Papal authority. All that being said, I think you are quite correct in not being completely swayed to Catholicism, or theism more generally, because of St. Joan's example. Sure, you have to advance some difficult or even impossible to prove theories to explain her, but nothing you propose to explain her seems beyond the bounds of reason to me. So well done again for being fair and reasonable.
I would be very interested in someone in Rationalist circles grappling with theistic metaphysical arguments as presented by Feser or other such modern writers. Has this been done before?