In three poems written on the eve of World War I, French poet Charles Péguy (1873–1914) employed the character of Jeanne d'Arc to express dissatisfaction with doctrines of judgment and damnation, exemplified for Péguy in Dante's Divine Comedy. Péguy believed Christianity's dominant eschatological traditions promoted bourgeois individualism and apathy in the face of suffering. Péguy's rejection of these doctrines illustrates a paradoxical strategy of using Jeanne as an advocate in this struggle against expectation of a wrathful divine judgment. With help from theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988), I explain how contemporary Christians can appropriate Péguy's eschatological alternative.
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