Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics

by Aldous Huxley

the object approached was not the imageless Godhead of their direct experience and of their theology.

Not content with affirming that the sun was the centre of the world, he insisted that there were several suns.

To theocentrism he added Jesus-centrism and even Virgincentrism – the contemplation of Christ and his mother in and for themselves.

For Bérulle, as for the earlier mystics, the end and purpose of orison is the annihilation of self through self-abandonment to the divine will.

where the earlier mystics had insisted that adoration should beat upon the imageless cloud which envelops the Godhead, Bérulle advocated ‘adherence’ and finally ‘servitude’ to Christ and even to the Virgin.

The moralist, they pointed out, seeks to become virtuous by strengthening his self-conscious will. His method consists in making a succession of resolutions to demonstrate some particular virtue. The carrying out of these resolutions is virtue in action, and may be expected, in the long run, to establish a habit.

The defect of such a method, as the psychologists of every time and country have pointed out, is that it engages only the superficial levels of the mind and leaves the subconscious more or less unaffected.

But it is from the subconscious that our impulses to action, our cravings and a...

‘We should accomplish our acts of virtue,’ says Bérulle, ‘more through relation and homage to Jesus Christ than out of desire for the same virtue in itself.’

but also because theocentrism produces better ethical results than anthropocentrism and moralism.

is generally Christ and sometimes the Virgin, seldom, as with the true mystic, that imageless Godhead which direct experience reveals as the ultimate reality.

The effects of Bérulle’s more than Copernican revolution were profound, far-reaching and mainly disastrous.

From the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth, mysticism practically disappear...

By substituting Christ and the Virgin for the undifferentiated Godhead of the earlier mystics, Bérulle positively guaranteed that none who followed his devotional practices should ever accede to the highest states of union or enlightenment.

But analytic thinking and imagination are precisely the things which prevent the soul from attaining enlightenment.

Anthropocentric and moralistic, his Spiritual Exercises lie outside the field of mystical literature and make little appeal to persons of mystical temperament.

Brought up on these exercises, the Jesuit theologians were mostly ignorant of the highest mystical states, and, being ignorant of them, denied their very possibility and regarded with suspicion or even actively persecuted those who insisted that such states existed.

The influence of Bérulle and his followers was of a subtler kind; for they revolutioni...

Unlike Loyola, Bérulle did not reject his own...

hence, too, the fatal consequences of his subordination of direct mystical experience to personalistic theology.

But, psychologically, this is impossible.

There cannot be adherence to persons or personal qualities without analysis and imagination;

and where analysis and imagination are active, the mind is unable to receive into...

But it was not a path that would lead to union with ultimate reality.

‘Well, what of it?’ it may be asked. ‘Why shouldn’t it die? What use is it when it’s alive?’

The answer to these questions is that where there is no vision, the people perish;

and that, if those who are the salt of the earth lose their savour, there is nothing to keep that earth disinfected, nothing to preven...

The mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human unive...

A totally unmystical world would be a world totally ...

We are dangerously far advanced into the darkness.

but when warned of the dangers of excess, the need of discretion even in matters of piety, Father Joseph would answer that the Kingdom of Heaven is taken by violence,

seemed to have a definite gift of orison.

had brought to his devotions that obsessive, hallucinatory preoccupation with the sufferings of Calvary which had haunted his mind from earliest childhood.

‘seraphic and crucified love’.

led not infrequently to ecstasy and the seeing of visions.

good opportunity for practising the ‘active annihilation’ of self in the divine will.

Preaching, he tried to remain continuously aware that he in himself was nothing and God, everything;

was not his eloquence, but the word of God finding utterance through him,

give himself up to passive annihilation in an act of mental prayer.

The service to which he was called was that of an evangelist and missionary.

was the art of mental prayer.

the absolute necessity of the mystical approach to God.

‘a man who neglects his duty of orison is blind indeed, not knowing his friends from his enemies. One can never sufficiently regret the loss entailed by this slothful neglect, a loss of the inestimable graces to the soul by conversation with God.’

For a man who regarded uncloistered females as wild beasts and horrific mysteries, the temptation was not too serious;

under the ragged habit and the unkempt beard, he was an aristocrat, consummately well educated and of the most polished address.

nothing could disguise the fact that Father Joseph had been the Baron de Maffliers.

He was ‘one of us’, a member of their caste.

‘his conversation was ravishing, and he treated the nobility with infinite dexterity’.

These convents were like very exclusive country clubs for women.

Of the three monastic vows, that of chastity was observed in them scrupulously; that of obedience, only grudgingly, and that of poverty, not at all.