Jeanne d'Arc: Her Life and Death (Oliphant)
Description
Her Life & Death
by
Mrs. Margaret Oliphant
No other person's life, biography, and death from the Dark Ages has been so recorded in such detail and under sworn testimony, witnessed by her friends and enemies. TGS Publishing will keep as many books and materials in print as possible to keep the tragedy of Joan's hideous, religious, persecution and execution on the minds of modern day readers and researchers.
It seems rather a paradox to point attention to the extraordinary tenacity of this basis of French character, the steady prudence and solidity which in the end always triumph over the light heart and light head, the excitability and often rash and dangerous elan, which are popularly supposed to be the chief distinguishing features of France--at the very moment of beginning such a fairy tale, such a wonderful embodiment of the visionary and ideal, as is the story of Jeanne d'Arc.
Her life and death is certainly one of those hidden mysteries of history that must be kept alive! What was it about Joan of Arc that famous writers, atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and non-Christians alike would come to admire her?
The life and times of Joan of Arc proves to the world several things:
1. That church and state MUST be kept separate.
2. That the church nor the state should have the power of murder and execution.
3. That Christianity is not capable, or worthy, to enforce any laws of religion or state.
4. It is dangerous to be a Christian with differing views from the fundamentalist heirarchy in a church ruled or church influenced state.
5. That the state and church will perform political executions of innocent people with trumped up charges, trumped up evidence, and false testimony of church or state witnesses.
6. That foreign states should never have the right to try prisoners, due to the kangaroo courts that enemy states create for execution of their enemies, and cover up of their own crimes.
7. That church and state WILL TORTURE, even women, to extract lies, false confessions, to falsely justify their intentions of murder.
8. That the world has been robbed of many great minds and people by the church and states violating the above tenets of truth.
Mrs. Oliphant looks on the valor and steadfastness of the faith of Joan of Arc, and writes the story, hoping we learn lessons from the mistakes of history.
Our aim now that no one should be oppressed,
Excerpt from the Introduction:
that every man should have justice as
by the order of nature...
-- Margaret Oliphant
**************
To call it a fairy tale is, however, disrespectful: it is an angelic revelation, a vision made into flesh and blood, the dream of a woman's fancy, more ethereal, more impossible than that of any man--even a poet:--for the man, even in his most uncontrolled imaginations, carries with him a certain practical limitation of what can be--whereas the woman at her highest is absolute, and disregards all bounds of possibility.
The Maid of Orleans, the Virgin of France, is the sole being of her kind who has ever attained full expression in this world. She can neither be classified, as her countrymen love to classify, nor traced to any system of evolution as we all attempt to do nowadays. She is the impossible verified and attained. She is the thing in every race, in every form of humanity, which the dreaming girl, the visionary maid, held in at every turn by innumerable restrictions, her feet bound, her actions restrained, not only by outward force, but by the law of her nature, more effectual still,-- has desired to be.
That voiceless poet, to whom what can be is nothing, but only what should be if miracle could be attained to fulfil her trance and rapture of desire--is held by no conditions, modified by no circumstances; and miracle is all around her, the most credible, the most real of powers, the very air she breathers. Jeanne of France is the very flower of this passion of the imagination.
She is altogether impossible from beginning to end of her, inexplicable, alone, with neither rival nor even second in the one sole ineffable path: yet all true as one of the oaks in her wood, as one of the flowers in her garden, simple, actual, made of the flesh and blood which are common to us all.
And she is all the more real because it is France, impure, the country of light loves and immodest passions, where all that is sensual comes to the surface, and the courtesan is the queen of ignoble fancy, that has brought forth this most perfect embodiment of purity among the nations. This is of itself one of those miracles which captivate the mind and charm the imagination, the living paradox in which the soul delights.
How did she come out of that stolid peasant race, out of that distracted and ignoble age, out of riot and license and the fierce thirst for gain, and failure of every noble faculty? Who can tell? By the grace of God, by the inspiration of heaven, the only origins in which the student of nature, which is over nature, can put any trust.
No evolution, no system of development, can explain Jeanne. There is but one of her and no more in all the astonished world.
380+ pages - 8¼ x 6¾ softcover
