Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics

by Aldous Huxley

Two hundred thousand troops were raised,

This convinced crusader was now trying, through the Prince of Transylvania, to negotiate an agreement with the Turks,

To himself and other scrupulous Catholics Father Joseph justified his scheme by arguments similar to those he had used in defence of the Protestant alliances.

A small dose of Turks, he claimed, would prove an antidote, not merely to Hapsburg power, but also (surprisingly enough) to the power of Turkey.

Before they could give any concrete results, the signing of the Peace of Westphalia made the Turkish alliance unnecessary,

This peace treaty, which was finally concluded at Prague in the middle of May 1635, provided a solid and reasonably just basis for a general pacification.

Unfortunately, one week before it was signed, a French herald made his appearance in the Grand’ Place at Brussels and, with elaborate medieval ceremonies, announced that His Most Christian Majesty was now at war with the House of Austria.

In other words, war was to be made in order that the world might be delivered from the Hapsburgs

Both Richelieu and Father Joseph believed that the war would be short and decisive.

was nicely designed to shatter the Austro-Spanish power at a single stroke.

That it failed so lamentably to do so was due to a combination of causes

the high efficiency of the Spanish infantry, which was still (though its commanders made war in a rather old-fashioned wa...

The only considerable result of the campaign of 1635 was the reduction of Alsace to a condition almost worse than that of Pomerania in 1630.

Father Joseph’s policy at Ratisbon bore its fruit in a famine that killed its tens of thousands and transformed many of the survivors into cannibals.

Executed malefactors were cut down from the gibbets to serve as butcher’s meat, and the recently bereaved were forced to guard the cemeteries against ...

Unprotected villages were overrun and looted; the larger towns closed their gates and sent out troops of soldiers to drive them away.

uncounted victims of military outrage –

Then they died; or else, if they met with soldiers from either camp, they were killed – not for what they had, for they possessed nothing; just for fun.

too, the habit of committing atrocities had developed a general taste for atrocities.

With cruelty, as with lust, avarice, gluttony and the love of power, l’appétit vient en mangeant.

Hence the importance of preserving at any cost the unreasoned tradition of civilized conduct, the social ...

Destroy these, and immediately large numbers of men and women discovering within themselves no obvious reasons why they should not behave like devils, do behave like devils, and go on doing so until such time as they physically destroy themselves, or grow weary of the strain and uncertainty of diabolic life, or else, for whatever providential reason, discover deep in their own souls the hidden springs of compassion, the potential goodne...

who contracted a taste for savagery.

Such, then, were the first fruits of Richelieu’s entry into the war.

In the second year of the campaign the well-laid plans of the Cardinal and the Capuchin resulted in the invasion of France and, very nearly, the capture of Paris.

Paris seemed to lie at their mercy.

There was a general panic and, along with terror, a violent uprush of anger against its cause.

All the popular hatred of Richelieu, accumulated during eleven years of a rule that had brought hardship to almost everyone ...

the refusal to ratify the treaty of Ratisbon – a refusal which public opinion attributed not to its real cause, the patriotic conviction that the French monarchy would be best served by war, but to the Cardinal’s personal ambition, to his desire to make himself indispensable by plunging the country into a war which he alone could direct.

Well, he had had his war; and what had happened?

The Spaniards were at Compiègne and in a few days more ...

His nerve failed. He talked of resigning, of going into retirement and leaving others to negotiate a peace with Spain.

Once again, as at La Rochelle, Father Joseph stepped in,

For Richelieu, the friar was a living conduit, through which there flowed into his own soul a power from somewhere beyond the world of time and contingency.

He must go out and show himself to the people;

Paris was saved by a combination of the ardour of its civilian defenders and the incompetence of the invading generals.

The first significant French success did not come until a day or two before Father Joseph’s death,

was not until 1643, when the Cardinal himself was dead, that the war which was to have been so brief and so crushingly decisive really turned in favour of France.

At Rocroi, the Duke of Enghien completely annihilated that veteran army of the Netherlands, which was the keystone of Spanish power.

From that time, the great arch of Hapsburg empire erected by Charles V and Phil...

The Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, put an end to Aust...

and that of the Pyrenees, in 1660, marked the final disintegration of Spain and the rise of F...

For the last years of their lives, Father Joseph and the Cardinal were directing a war which, without being disastrous, was a...

Not only was he the Cardinal’s right hand man; he was also in high favour with the King.

Pious to the point of superstition, Louis XIII felt something akin to awe in the presence of a foreign minister who was also a contemplative, a prophet, and the founder of one of the austerest orders in the whole Catholic Church.

the wiser mystics pay as little attention as possible.

and orthodox Christianity has always tended to overvalue supernormal occurrences, to identify the unusual with the divine, to confound the merely psychic with the spiritual.

Trained as they are to concentrate upon the events of the world of space and time, men of science are peculiarly liable, when they turn religious, to revert to that primitive kind of religion in which ‘miracles’ play an important part.

They are concerned less with the ‘kingdom of heaven within’ than with external ‘signs’,

less with the knowledge of eternity than with pow...