Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics

by Aldous Huxley

was shared by no less a person th...

As an Italian prince, the Pope had very good reasons to fear th...

A too-sweeping victory in Germany would make the Emperor and the King of Spain the undispute...

La Rochelle,

would cry no longer for the destruction of the Turk, but for the humiliation of the Hapsburgs.

Every human being is an individual slice of history, unique and unrepeatable; but the majority of such slices belong to one or other of a number of familiar and recognizable classes.

This is not the case with exceptional individuals.

united Europe would utterly destroy the Turk and, by this war to end war, inaugurate a golden age of universal peace – under the leadership of France.

But apply the same process to Paradise Lost, discount the style, strip away the ornaments, reduce the poem to its naked subject-matter, and you have something only a little less absurd.

Were these strangely materialistic accounts of life in heaven regarded by their authors as being as completely fabulous as that pathetic tale of young Prince Syphilis, which Fracastoro had composed a hundred years before?

were probably conceived by Titian, Father Joseph and Milton as being something more than merely fantastic.

The fact is, of course, that human beings find no difficulty at all in entertaining, successively or even at the same moment, convictions which are totally incompatible one with another.

Indeed, such self-contradiction is the normal and natural condition of man.

Complete consistency comes only with complete one-pointedness, complete absorption in ultimate reality.

for though Catholicism survived in the West, it had been reduced by war, indifference and worldliness to most abject and unedifying condition.

His success was spectacular.

the Huguenots who flocked in thousands to see the unfamiliar rites, to hear the liturgical chanting and the sermons.

Impressed as much by the austerity of the missionaries’ lives as by the eloquence of their preaching, many returned, and considerable numbers were finally converted.

Louis XIII respected the Capuchin’s political judgment and was impressed by his burning eloquence, his mysterious accounts of visions and revelations vouchsafed either to himself or to his Calvarians.

But the Queen cared intensely for herself, and she believed without doubt or question in the physical reality of hell.

Thanks to a certain kind of intellectual ‘progress’, the rulers of the modern world no longer believe that they will be tortured everlastingly, if they are wicked.

The eschatological sanction, which was one of the principal weapons in the hands of the prophets of past times, has disappeared.

This would not matter, if moral had kept pace with intell...

But it has not. Twentieth-century rulers behave just as vilely and ruthlessly as did rulers in the sev...

But unlike their predecessors, they do not lie awake at nights wondering w...

If Marie de Medicis had enjoyed the advantages of a modern education, Father Joseph would have thundered in vain, a...

Richelieu demanded a cardinal’s hat.

Meanwhile the bishop had become too important to be trifled with.

The go-between who actually arranged the marriage was Father Joseph. We cannot doubt that he believed himself to be doing what his master had called the Exterior Will of God.

The fate of the domestic crusade hung in the balance.

he spoke ‘like the prophets of the Old Testament’

the king set out on the crusade.

Like Richelieu, Father Joseph did not believe in dragooning the Huguenots into conformity.

‘Forced religion,’ he declared, ‘is no longer religion.’

Military action against the Huguenots was to be taken not because they were Protestants, but because of their claim to constitute a quasi-indep...

There were plenty of Catholics who would have liked to see the Protestants more harshly treated.

Thanks to Richelieu, the shrewd, conservative statesman, thanks, too, to Father Joseph, the ardent evangelist and the missionary, a more tolerant policy prevailed.

The result was that, after their political defeat, the Huguenots remained a loyal minority of us...

Louis XIV’s persecution of them, in the latter part of the century, was without political or economic excuse; it was an act of what is called ‘high idealism’, in...

the Constable forestalled his imminent fall from the king’s good graces by catching typhoid and, in the last days of 1621, miserably dying.

For though Richelieu was by far the ablest man in French public life, the king was reluctant to make use of him.

the Cardinal’s mere physical presence was extremely repugnant to Louis.

this invalid priest, whose ordinary restraint of manner concealed nervous abnormalities at least as considerable, in their own way, as his own.

he knew he was slow-witted and ignorant, pathologically moody and vacillating.

The Cardinal’s prodigious abilities and the almost superhuman quality of his undeviating will were felt by the younger man as a kind of standing reproach and at the same time as a menace to his personal independence.

Besides disgusting and shaming, the Cardinal actually frightened him.

the fact remained that he was an incomparable politician, and to all appearances the only man capable of solving his country’s most urgent problems.

Louis XIII took his duties as a king very seriously;

the fact that he overcame his personal distaste for Richelieu and that he contrived to repress it through all the eighteen years of their association bears w...

and he begged the Capuchin to come at once to Paris, where there was important work for him to do.