Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics

by Aldous Huxley

The road trodden by those bare horny feet of his led immediately to the Rome of Urban VIII.

Gautama Buddha.

The nineteenth century could tolerate only false, ersatz mysticism – the nature-mysticism of Wordsworth; the sublimated sexual mysticism of Whitman; the nationality-mysticisms of all the patriotic poets and philosophers of every race and culture,

but better a blind alley than the headlong descent, by way of the mysticisms of nationality and humanity, to war, revolution and universal tyranny.

In The Cloud a number of different methods for dealing with distractions are described.

fixing the unstable mind by means of what the Indians call a mantra

the method of repression and inattention;

the distraction perishes of inanition.

distractions make their assault in such force that they cannot be defeated or avoided by any of the foregoing methods.

In this case, says our author, it is best to yield to them, to allow them to swarm over the m...

in the higher stages of contemplation, all thoughts and feelings, even the holiest, must be counted as distractions,

and egotism is nothing but the root of evil, the settled propensity to sin.

Like the idea of God, the idea of sin must not be analysed by the contemplative.

Men commit evil and suffer misery, because they are separate egos, caught in time.

All mystics are agreed that knowledge of ultimate reality comes only to those who have killed out the Old Adam and conformed the personal will to the will of God;

he was primarily concerned with a technique for the daily and continuous losing of one’s personal life in order to gain divine life, for eliminating the personal will in order to make room for the will of God.

How do we know which acts are in accord with God’s will and which are not?

Father Benet says nothing whatever about a whole class of acts which, so far as their earthly consequences are concerned, are more important than any others:

I mean, those acts which the individual performs, not for his own sake, but on behalf and for the advantage of some social organization, such as a nation, a church, a political party, a religious order, a business concern, a family.

Father Benet chose to ignore them.

If Father Joseph deviated from the way of perfection into power politics, the fault must be attributed in part, at least, to his upbringing.

Benet of Canfield never discussed the relationship between political action on the one hand and, on the other, the unitive life, the doing of the will of God.

It is the same with the higher psychology. Its experiences are continuous and direct; but they cannot be described or theorized about, and the conditions of their realization cannot be taught, except in terms of a hierarchy of analytical names.

all too common and absolutely fatal mistake of ‘making things the signs of words’,

The essential will of God is that the soul should become united with God’s essence.

In this union the soul is passive, God alone active.

First, it may be too fervent, in which case the soul is not peaceful enough to receive God.

Second, the soul may retain a subtle image of what is in itself imageless, the essence of God.

Thirdly, the soul may conceive of God as being somewhere else than ‘in its own ground’, ‘at t...

Emotionality and images can be st...

the soul has become fit for the consciousness of God ...

The second approach to the doing of God’s essential will is through Annihilation, which is the final, consummating stage of the long-draw...

Passive annihilation occurs when God actually makes himself present to us in contemplation.

Active annihilation is the being dead to the world while working in the world, the dwelling inwardly in eternity while outwardly operating in time.

active annihilation is the higher and more pe...

But the more the man exists, the less God exists within him.

a kind of continuous, effortless awareness of God,

that shrinking from outward works, into which so many spirituals fall, out of a fear of being distracted from their contemplation of God.

This shrinking, he insists, defeats its own object and is in fact the final and greatest obstacle to perfection.

Moreover, introversion implies extraversion, the attitude of the average sensual man who regards outward things as fully real and worthy of being treated as ends in themselves.

the experience of living simultaneously in time and eternity, among men and in God;

the peace and bliss, here in this earthly life, of the beatific vision.

The state to which Father Benet gave the name of active annihilation has been described, not only by Christian mystics, but also by the contemplatives of other faiths – by ...

Father Benet’s real reasons for teaching that the practice of the passion should be continued at every stage of the contemplative life were doubtless the following:

first, he himself was strongly attracted to acts of personal devotion;

second, he was a Franciscan, and Franciscan devotion has always been especially co...

and, thirdly, he felt (as many theologians before and after his day have felt) that the empirical mysticism of the Dionysians was, in its higher stages at ...

The thesis which Rahab serves to justify is that contemplation of the passion is more pleasing to God than contemplation of the divinity.

‘One should not leave the passion to contemplate the divinity, but one should continue both simultaneously.’

‘The whole difficulty of this simple regard comes from the contradiction which seems to prevent the human reason from being able to contemplate in one simple regard God and man, body and spirit.’