The Passion of Joan of Arc portrays the trial and execution of a 19 year old girl for her heresy. The judges claimed that the devil, not God, was the source of her voices. Her punishment was being burned alive. As a result of watching the film, are you more or less sympathetic to religion? Does the film have a spiritual message or does it condemn spirituality? What is it trying to tell us about religious faith and how?
Or, alternatively, are their other religious films you have seen that do a better or worse job than this film?
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I have to admit, I didn't really think about this when we were watching the film, but in hindsight, I guess it made me less sympathetic to the religion. They burned a teenage girl at the stake because she didn’t believe what they wanted her to believe. They didn’t even try to educate her, they just told her that what she thought was wrong. They tried to force her to sign something that she couldn't read, which leads to her lying (I know she lied partly because she was afraid of dying but the scary religious people didn’t help). A religion should not make you lie, it should promote truth, forgiveness, and hope and I don’t know, good things, not death and punishment.
ReplyDeleteI think the film condemns spirituality, in a sense. Joan was killed because she had a ‘connection’ to God, but the old men in the church are trying to achieve what she has. They are being hypocrites, spirituality is only okay if you are part of the church, if you just a random person, you are killed!
I wasn’t raised with religion, and I think thats why I didn't focus on the religion in the film. I separated the religion from the actions of the religious people, i just saw them as the old men who thought they knew everything.
After watching the film I was definitely less sympathetic towards religion. Personally, I dislike the whole concept and practice of organized religion and especially when politics is mixed in as well. I agree with Kelsey that the clergymen felt what she believed in direct opposition to their beliefs. The politics involved is blatantly obvious, the clergymen do not care she had a vision of God, but they were more concerned with the fact she claimed God told her to lead the French to victory. Remember, the time of Joan of Arc was before Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation and the image of the church was the almighty figure all must obey. However, because the church had an incredible amount of power, it also had an incredible amount of corruption. The hypocrisy behind their motives is evident. They are acting against the true motives of religion, which is to find a spiritual connection with God. However, there is ambiguity, because the English clergymen are not condemning spirituality entirely, just spirituality that does not agree with their teachings. They did not kill her because she had a connection to God, they killer her, like many religious martyr figures before her, because her views did not conform to theirs. Her outcry of French victory in the Hundred Years War, obviously rattled many church figures in Britain and threatened their power. Therefore, motivated purely by politics and the ongoing war they had to silence her in any way. Obviously they could not outright execute her because she had not done anything wrong, so they had to claim that she was a heretic who was taking orders from the devil in order to justify their political motives. This is always the worst case scenario, when state and religion are mixed, so that religion be abused, corrupted and manipulated for political means and gains.
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