Chapter 2: Be Aware of Your Strength
You trust in God. But you have insufficient trust in yourself.
Since early childhood, you were told that we should trust in God, not in ourselves. But if God trusts you, is it right that you do not trust yourself? If God rejoices in the talents he gave you, should you not do the same?
In trusting your talents, you are trusting God, who gave them to you.
I was confident in my talents. Everyone who knew me agreed that I was tall and beautiful, strong and at the same time profoundly feminine. I had a soft voice and spoke in a way admired by others. I was sensitive and did not hide my tears. I liked to laugh and make others laugh. I had a proud look and a joyous face. I took care over my appearance when necessary. I had a religious soul in a robust, magnificent, and healthy body. I was conscious of all of these gifts, of all of these qualities of body and spirit.
I wanted to live life to the fullest. I wanted to scale the heights of my humanity and realize my greatest potential. Listen to what Sir Winston Churchill said about me, “Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years.”
In recognizing our talents, we give thanks to God, who created us. Refusing to recognize our talents is not humility but ingratitude. Recognizing our talents, increasing them, and using them well is the virtue of magnanimity, the virtue of the great.
And I, who was a child before God, never ceased multiplying the gifts I had received. I was great, tremendous, and magnanimous. This magnanimity stimulated hope in me, rendering it engaging, exalting, and intoxicating. It impelled me to action. Before the task at hand, my heart swelled, my soul found its impetus, and my body rose above all difficulties.
I trusted in God, but I also trusted in myself. My human hope was commensurate with the superhuman, supernatural hope, which God placed in my soul the day I was baptized.
I expected everything of God as if I could do nothing myself, and I expected everything of myself as if God did not exist. I was a child before God, but a giant before men.
With me, the immensity of the human was not swallowed up by the immensity of grace.
Recall what G. K. Chesterton wrote about me:
Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path and went down it like a thunderbolt . . . . Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other.
I was violent like a thunderbolt.
Mounting a horse and leading armies did not make me a “superwoman.” I was not a Hollywood creation. In battle, I never killed anyone; I used only my standard. I was not a would-be man. What did make me a “superwoman” was that I developed my feminine nature to the fullest.
I was so much a woman that Voltaire, vexed, was moved to tears of hatred. This horrid man saw me as the incarnation of Christian humanism, the one which exposed the inconsistency of all his theories. Daughters of men, who are also daughters of God, horrify the enemies of Jesus Christ. They are too beautiful to pass unnoticed. I was truly beautiful. In my beauty, Voltaire became aware of his ugliness and he wrote a pamphlet—The Maid of Orleans—in which he devoted eight thousand verses to attacking my honor.
Schiller came to my defense. “O Virgin, mockery has dragged you through the muck . . . . But have no fear, there still exist beautiful souls enflamed by greatness.” But it was above all the poet Aleksandr Pushkin, who came to my aid and restored my honor. Several hours before his death in Saint Petersburg in 1837, he wrote these words in what turned out to be his final work:
There is no subject in modern history more moving and more poetic than the life and death of the heroine of Orléans. What did Voltaire, this worthy representative of the French people, do with it? Just once in his life it was given to him to be a poet and this is how he used his inspiration! With his satanic breath he fans the dying flames amidst the ashes of the stake, and like a drunken savage he dances around his miserable bonfire. Like the Roman executioners of long ago, he adds insults to the mortal suffering of the Virgin . . . . Everyone in France enthusiastically received this book in which contempt for everything held sacred by man and the citizen reaches the heights of cynicism. What a sad century! What a sad people.
What a gentleman, this Russian! At the moment of his death—he died in a duel—I asked God to grant him the grace of repentance, and he did. I owed him that.
This is what I wanted to tell you today. Be aware of your talents. Multiply them. Live at full tilt. May your humility not be pusillanimity! May your humility never deviate from your magnanimity! Develop your human potential to the point of exhaustion, and do not be afraid of humanists spewing hatred.
This is an excerpt from the title Coached by Joan of Arc by Alex Havard.
