The Heart of St. Joan of Arc
Joan’s heart became a phenomenological gateway between Heaven and earth.
The temporal mind cannot know the timeless unless the timeless has some type of relationship with the temporal. Edith Stein points out that there is no way that a finite mind can know the timeless immediately, without this relationship. There are two ways that this relationship can occur - through an analogous representation or through an effect the timeless has on the temporal.[1]
The Dove and Rose is both in the sense that the temporal Kingdom of Catholic and Royal France represents not an end in itself but an analogous type of the timeless Kingdom of God and therefore gives a representation to our senses by which we are able to know the timeless. Secondly, The Dove and Rose also is founded through an event, specifically, the event of St. Joan of Arc and her mission to free France for the King of Heaven Who her voices informed her was the true King of France. St. Joan demonstrates to us a true relationship between Heaven and earth through the significant event of her life and mission. Jesus Christ is the true King of France while the earthly King is His steward and lieutenant.[2] Here we have the key to our most important need for the heart of St. Joan of Arc. It is through her heart that the timeless was manifested analogously in the temporal. Joan’s heart became a phenomenological gateway between Heaven and earth by the Divine Will.
Through Joan’s mission on earth, we have an effect of significant meaning. Through Joan’s prophetic voice, we have an analogous Intellectual Viewing (Stein, op. cit.)) relating the temporal Kingdom of France to the timeless, thus allowing us to know the timeless that otherwise we would not know. Joan’s phenomenology becomes our own. The structure of objects in the temporal flow of her mental life becomes visible to us through the simple symbolic structure of her words, actions, and images which reveal what is holy to those striving for holiness, for example, the images she chose for her military standard. We come to know God’s Kingdom through Joan, the timeless through the temporal. Her mission is “divine” though temporal, as we might define through the Dionysian theology of symbolism.
Such is the very purpose of this image-language: to conceal what is holy from the profaning images of the throng and to unveil it for those who are striving for holiness and have freed themselves from childish thinking and have acquired the spiritual sensitivity needed to behold simple truths.[3]
Through the heart of St. Joan of Arc, and through no other, we have The Dove and Rose, a relationship of the eternal with the temporal. Her special calling was to be the relationship’s effect, as well as the prophet who reveals to us the necessary analogous relationship that we might relate to the timeless Kingdom of God. Joan leads us to a phenomenologically transcendent discovery. Objective reality, the Kingdom of God, becomes subjectively real universally and transcendently to us through St. Joan of Arc’s phenomenology. Here we have the essential nature of our need to unite ourselves to Jesus and Our Lady the Virgin Mary through the heart of St. Joan of Arc. It is to Joan’s heart that Jesus Christ willed this mission.
[1] Op. cit. The Science of The Dove and Rose and The Counsels of the Heart.
[2] Pernoud and Clin, Joan of Arc - Her Story, 23. “Gentle dauphin, I am Joan the Maid, and the King of Heaven commands that through me you be anointed and crowned in the city of Reims as a lieutenant of the King of Heaven who is King of France.”
[3] Stein, Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 8), 118.