Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics

by Aldous Huxley

It was an act on his part of quite extraor...

Events were to justify Richelieu in taking the risks he did.

Queen-Mother lost her self-control and began to scream at him, like a fishwife.

Her vulgarity was her undoing.

The seventeenth-century absolute monarch was a sacred person, in whose presence all, even his closest intimates, were expected to behave with the restraint of a stoi...

His mother’s proletarian outburst was an insult to t...

Marie was left in the exultant illusion that she had triumphed.

she was skilfully manoeuvred by the Cardinal into making an irretrievable mistake; she fled the country.

Richelieu bore him no grudge for having exceeded his instructions.

Father Joseph insisted that French policy should be directed to the systematic exploitation of time as the deadliest of all weapons in the Bourbons’ armoury.

on offering French protection to the Electors, on condition that all, Protestant and Catholic alike, should band themselves together in a specifically German, anti-Spanish bloc, independent of the Emperor.

if the King of France were to act as mediator, the Electors could feel certain of reaching a final settlement favourable to themselves.

the Electors would be driven back into the Emperor’s camp through fear of Gustavus.

Every effort towards an early peace within the Empire and between the Emperor and his foreign enemies must therefore be uncovered and promptly scotched.

His Most Christian Majesty could avert the catastrophe of an early peace by offering to become a peace-maker.

can spin out matters indefinitely,

and retard the coming of peace in Germany until such time as we can be sure of the security of a general pacification’ – a general pacification, of course, favourable to Bourbon interests.

like Kepler, who had ridden all the way from Silesia to ask for the arrears of his salary as Imperial Mathematician, they quietly died and were stowed away in one of the churchyards of Ratisbon.

Very many had died, and those who survived were eating grass and roots – yes, and young children and the sick and even the newly buried dead.

This seems to have been one of the first occasions, during the Thirty Years’ War, when public attention was called to the enforced cannibalism which was to become so horrifyingly common in Germany of those disastrous years.

but in the imperial, electoral and episcopal banqueting halls, the grand old German custom of gorging and swilling was never abrogated.

And yet here he was, pursuing, patiently and with consummate skill, a policy which could only increase the sufferings of the poor he had promised to serve.

With full knowledge of what had already happened in Pomerania, he continued to advocate a course of action that must positively guarantee the spread of cannibalism to other provinces.

First, no doubt, and all the time, he reminded himself that, in working for France, he was doing God’s external will.

followed that France was divine, that those who worked for French greatness were God’s instruments, and that the means they employed could not but be in accord with God’s will.

Satan baited his hook with the noblest temptations: patriotic dut...

But a man cannot serve two masters, God is jealous and the consequences of idolatry are disastrous.

‘holy indifference’.

The earliest literary reference to ‘holy indifference’ occurs in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna assures Arjuna that it is right for him to slaughter his enemies, provided always that he does so in a spirit of non-attachment.

But for some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication.

The truth is, of course, that non-attachment can be practised only in regard to actions intrinsically good or ethically neutral. In spite of anything that Krishna or anyone else may say, bad actions are unannihilatable.

They are unannihilatable because, as a matter of brute psychological fact, they enhance the separate, personal ego of those who perform them.

he was able to discover a kind of cosmic and metaphysical justification for his schemes in the thought that what seemed bad from a merely human viewpoint might really and actually be good.

God, the avenger, might have his reasons for wishing to destroy large numbers of Central Europeans.

it was manifest that God, the avenger, did desire their destruction.

But it most certainly does not follow that, because in this sense, a war may be described as the will of God, the individual who labours to prolong it is doing God’s will.

As a matter of historical fact, those whose religious life is centred upon the sufferings of a divine Saviour have not been pre-eminently compassionate, have not been more careful than all others to avoid the infliction of pain.

The motives actuating anti-Semites, crusaders, inquisitors and other Christian persecutors have been many and various; but among them there has almost invariably figured a desire to take vengeance, in some entirely symbolic and Pickwickian way, for the wrong committed on Calvary.

Therefore (so runs the implied argument) we can make war, exploit the poor, enslave the coloured races, and all without the smallest qualm of conscience;

for our victims are illustrating the great principle of vicarious suffering and, so far from wronging them, we are actually doing them a service by making it possible for them to ‘suffer and die, that others (by a happy coincidence, ourselves) may live and be happy and well’.

did everything in his power to prolong a war which had already caused the death of hundreds of thousands of his fellow-creatures and was reducing the survivors to cannibalism.

consisted of soup, followed by ‘only one dish of butcher’s meat, without ragout or roast.’

Such claustral simplicity of diet profoundly impressed his contemporaries, who were astonished that a man in his position should-content himself with so little.

Throughout the Middle Ages and long after, almost to our own day, a man who drank no wine and lived on a vegetarian or low meat diet was regarded...

If our ancestors suffered and felt virtuous under a lenten regimen, which many now regard as ample and delicious, it was because of the faith that was in them.

Father Joseph had no money of his own and received no salary.

The bed to which Father Joseph finally retired was a thin hard mattress, laid on planks.

Penitential scourgings kept the broad back and shoulders almost permanently covered with unhealed wounds, and the first contact with the mattress, as he lay down, must always have been acutely painful.

but actually to rejoice in them; for they were pains imposed and endured for the greater glory of God and the salvation of his soul.

This imaginary Father Joseph, who is the prototype of the ridiculously villainous figure bearing his name in Vigny’s Cinq Mars, is just a bore, whereas the real Father Joseph moves through history as the most fascinating of enigmas.