Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics

by Aldous Huxley

the vicarious indulgence of passions suppressed so far as he personally was concerned, in the satisfactions associated with the performance of mainly unpleasant duties, in the strengthening and sustaining sense that he was accomplishing God’s will.

In his own eyes, he was always the homme de bien selon Dieu; for he could always (or at least so it seemed to him at the beginning of his political career) ‘annihilate’ the questionable things he did for his country by dedicating them all to God.

‘holy indifference’,

In temperament, the two men differed profoundly.

Father Joseph, as we have seen, was simultaneously Ezéchiely and Tenebroso-Cavernoso.

Richelieu exhibited no smallest trace of the Hebrew prophet. He had no enthusiasm, only a ...

everything he did was planned and calculated for the sole purpose of bringing, not indeed the greatest happiness to the greatest number, but the greatest advantage to Armand Du Ples...

In a word, he was exclusively Tenebroso-Cavernoso – but a Tenebroso-Cavernoso, we must always remember, strangely mitigated by ill-...

Richelieu himself is known to have been the victim of fits of morbid depression and occasional explosions of rage, almost epileptic in their violence.

the arrogant, self-deified genius was doomed, by a stroke of beautifully poetic justice, to be convinced that he was less than human. In his spells of mental aberration, the cardinal imagined himself to be a horse.

He did it with the efficiency which is possible only to those who possess, as well as the highest intellectual abilities, an extraordinary strength and fixity of resolution.

only a tiny minority are capable of combining strength of will with unwavering continuity.

Lucifer is the highest mythological incarnation of this intense personal will, and the great men who have embodied it upon the stage of history participate, to some extent, in his satanic strength and magnificence.

Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon,

not saints, but petty Lucifers,

Great Men have invariably failed to ‘deliver the goods’;

but because we admire their qualities and envy their success, we continue to believe in them and to submit to their power.

The Saints are even more willing to help than the Great Men; but the advice they give is apt to seem depressing to men and women who want to enjoy the pleasures of indolence.

‘God,’ say the Saints, ‘helps those who help themselves’;

But we don’t want to have to help ourselves; we want to be helped, to have somebody who will...

So we turn back again to the incarnations of th...

Richelieu was one of the great incarnations of the personal will.

never relaxed inflexibility of purpose

stamp his impress so profoundly upon the his...

when Richelieu showed signs of weakening, the friar revived his courage and,

‘I have lost my support,’ Richelieu kept repeating after his friend’s death, ‘I have lost my support.’

In the language of the mystics, ‘Perfection’ is the state of total and continuous self-abnegation in Reality

‘I live, yet not I, but God lives in me.’

The will of the self-abnegated person is relaxed and effortless, because it is not his own will, but a great river of force flowing through him from a sea of subliminal consciousness that lies open in its turn to the ocean of reality.

he wields the authority of a power infinitely greater than himself, and of which he is merely the instrument.

What struck them, as I have already noted, was the gentleness and humility with which he exercised his powers.

he knew how to punish without arousing resentment, how to administer rebukes in which he personally was not involved, except as the channel through which a force, recognizably divine, was flowing.

Enough of the Old Adam remained in him to succumb to those extremely subtle temptations prepared by his attendant Satan.

simultaneously serve God and the Cardinal, he became a politician.

His policies (as we can now see clearly enough) did not produce the results they were intended to produce;

and the quality of his spiritual life (as he himself perceived before he died) progressively deteriorated.

Spiritual exercises need not necessarily be associated with God;

a man can, if he so chooses, make himself one-pointed for one-pointedness’ sake, or for the sake of his nation, his party, his sect, or even the devil.

spiritual exercises are a device for tapping, canalizing and directing the sources of the will belo...

subli...

Richelieu seems to have relied entirely on the upper levels of the conscious, personal will.

Father Joseph was able to give him the strength he needed.

to unify France under an omnipotent monarchy;

to break the power of the Hapsburgs and to exalt the Bourbons in their place.

The possibility of defeating Spain and Austria depended, obviously, on the previous accomp...

Divided, France was weak. Hampered by his chronically rebellious nobles and by the Protestants, who formed a state within the state, the king was powerless to ...

immediate suppression of feudal privilege and Huguenot power.

by bluff, by endless negotiation, by juggling the balance of power, by subsidizing governments already at war with Spain or Austria.

Spain and Austria must be humbled into submission to French leadership.

Father Joseph had become as determinedly an enemy of the Hapsburgs as Richelieu himself.