The Human Roots of Religious Belief

Picking up from where Chapter Five left off, this chapter examines what it is within de Conte that allows Joan to convince him that this “Machiavellian Princess” is in fact a maid divinely chosen to resurrect the French nation. Focusing on de Conte’s lame attempts at romance, we learn that his dim awareness of his own incompleteness, manifested chiefly in his awareness of his mortality, makes him particularly vulnerable to those figures whose beauty and apparent nobility promise a wholeness for those devoted to them; his flawed opinions about justice are grounded in the hope that the world is divinely ordered towards the human good. With such insights “in hand,” the chapter revisits Joan’s revolutionary project to argue that this would-be founder of modernity is able to succeed as she does because she doesn’t try to impose changes on religious believers from without; she works from the views of religious believers, like de Conte, and effectively transforms those views, redirecting them from their heavenly objects to exclusively earthly goods.