Institutions and the Corruption of Integrity Theme Analysis

In Saint Joan, Shaw takes issue with previous adaptations of the Joan of Arc narrative that situate Joan as the undeniable heroine and her accusers as inarguable villains. To Shaw, such interpretations oversimplify Joan’s story and don’t try to understand the institutional structures that informed Joan’s and her accusers’ ethical frameworks and, subsequently, influenced their actions. Peter Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais and a French ally to the English, for example, condemns Joan and the heresy she commits against the Catholic Church, arguing that he has a religious obligation to save Joan’s soul from damnation. While Cauchon’s spirituality is a major driving force in his condemnation of Joan—and what allows him to see such a condemnation as ethically just—his ties to the Catholic Church and the desire for it to remain in power give his intentions a political aspect, effectively corrupting the integrity of his spiritual reasons for trying Joan. In general, Shaw suggests, authority figures like Cauchon make decisions based on what will enable their institutions to remain in power rather than on the ethical frameworks their institutions promote. People themselves might not be inherently villainous, but their obligation to uphold institutional power allows for the corruption of their ideals.

Initially, Cauchon says that it is his religious obligation that motivates his desire to bring Joan to justice. As a bishop, he has a responsibility to intercede, as believes that the voices Joan hears come not from God but from the devil. (Joan repeatedly insists that she receives messages from God conveyed to her directly through the voices of saints she hears in her head.) Joan’s supposed direct communication with God is problematic for Cauchon because it rejects the idea that one needs the Church’s guidance to hear and understand the word of God—in other words, Joan is prioritizing the word of her voices over the word of the Church. In Scene IV, Cauchon states: “When [the devil] strikes, he strikes at the Catholic Church, whose realm is the whole spiritual world. When he damns, he damns the souls of the entire human race. […] And it is as one of the instruments of that design that I see this girl. She is inspired, but diabolically inspired.” If the devil’s intent is to destroy the Church and “damn[] the souls of the entire human race,” it is ethically just of Cauchon to do everything in his power to stop Joan. Cauchon clearly articulates that his intentions for punishing Joan aren’t inherently cruel. As a Church leader, he considers it his “first duty to seek this girl’s salvation,” and he has no desire to torture Joan unjustly.

Despite Cauchon’s repeated insistence that his first priority is to save Joan’s soul, however, this is not his only motivation for wanting Joan brought to trial—it is most important to Cauchon that the Catholic Church remains strong and in power. In this way, Cauchon’s worldly obligations to the institution of the Church corrupt his spiritual obligations to God. Joan doesn’t believe she needs the Church as an intermediary to connect with God—she hears, understands, and acts on her voices and visions without the Church’s guidance. Joan’s rejection of the clergy threatens the Church’s hold on power, and Cauchon knows he must put her campaign to an end, lest her rebellion spread to the masses. Cauchon perceives Joan as a threat because her personal connection to God diminishes the hold the Church has on Catholics and lessens its institutional power. “What will the world be like when The Church’s accumulated wisdom and knowledge and experience, its councils of learned, venerable pious men, are thrust into the kennel by every ignorant laborer or dairy-maid whom the devil can puff up with monstrous self-conceit of being directly inspired by heaven?” Cauchon asks of Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (a nobleman in charge of England’s military forces). He answers his own question, exclaiming, “It will be a world of blood, fury, of devastation, of each man striving for his own hand: in the end a world wrecked back into barbarism.” From Cauchon’s perspective, without the guidance of the Church, the world will revert to chaos and “barbarism” because it lacks the order and structure institutions provide. In the end, it’s more important to Cauchon to ensure that the Church maintains its hold over the people than it is to save Joan from eternal damnation.

Although Warwick is only peripherally concerned with the heresy of which Cauchon accuses Joan, he extends sympathy toward Cauchon’s condemnation of Joan to advance his own political cause. Warwick’s actions highlight how corruption abounds even outside the Church, as he sacrifices his integrity in order to preserve his political institution. Joan’s demand for a king that answers to God alone threatens Warwick’s position in England’s existing feudal system. For this reason, he sees Joan’s mission as “a cunning device to supersede the aristocracy.” If God (via the King) becomes society’s only ruler, feudal lords like Warwick will lose their power. Although Warwick isn’t completely convinced of Joan’s heresy, he goes along with Cauchon’s charges: “These two ideas of hers are the same idea at bottom,” he allows, “It goes deep, my lord. It is the protest of the individual soul against the interference of priest or peer between the private man and his God.” Cauchon recognizes that if he adjusts his own secular charges to legitimize Cauchon’s religious ones, both men can defeat what they perceive as a threat against their respective institutions. When Warwick asserts that Joan’s “two ideas […] are the same idea at bottom” he acknowledges the tension between the individual and the institution at play in Joan’s revolutionary “ideas” concerning politics and spirituality. In either case, Joan’s philosophies promote the strength of the individual at the expense of larger institutions. Her call for an individual king who answers to God alone threatens the existing feudal system much in the way that her belief in a personal experience with Christianity threatens the power the Catholic Church holds over individuals who have been taught that they need the Church to fully understand God.

Warwick and Cauchon have vastly different reasons for wanting to halt Joan’s crusade—Warwick’s are more political, and Cauchon’s are more spiritual—but they are united in their mutual desire to see that their institutions remain in power. The extent to which either man is willing to compromise his own ethics in order to entertain the conflicting ethics of the other suggests that power and moral integrity are mutually exclusive.