Grey Eminence
By Aldous Huxley
If asked to give a one-sentence description of this book, I would say: It is the biography of a man who tried to simultaneously embody the philosophies outlined in Machiavelli’s The Prince and Meister Eckhart’s Essential Sermons. Unfortunately for Father Joseph's soul, Machiavellianism seems to have won out.
Huxley looks into the confusing historical anomaly of Father Joseph: A dedicated mystic, obsessed with unifying his soul with the underlying oneness he knows as God, who gives up this practice to act as the foreign minister and head of Secret Service to Cardinal Richelieu, the de-facto French leader during the Thirty Years War. Together, this duo created and prolonged terrible suffering. Their policies led to millions and millions of deaths, mass starvation, and cannibalism, seemingly to gain only a slight bettering of the French standing in Europe.
Transcending the Self, but not the Nation
In Catholic Mysticism, union with God is achieved through the annihilation (their word, not mine) of self—the destruction of the individual ego in favor of the oneness that underlies all life. Huxley believes Father Joseph achieved something like partial transcendence and that this incomplete union, along with years of discipline seem and drive, resulted in boundless energy and a seemingly superhuman ability to focus, all with a demeanor of gentleness and care that won him admiration from his fellow monks.
Huxley believes Father Joseph's fatal flaw was not in failing to annihilate his own ego and ambitions but in failing to do the same for his country. Instead of complete transcendence, his unyielding patriotism created another massive ego, just one level removed from self, that Father Joseph used to justify the atrocities of the Thirty Years War.
Huxley writes that Father Joseph is able to nearly achieve this complete annihilation of self and union with God as a young man. But, Father Joseph believed he lost his connection with God later in life, as he was unable to commit the time to contemplate the suffering of Christ and was forced into continuous Machiavellian and morally loathsome behavior that pushed God away.
As a little kid, Father Joseph would collapse in sadness as he told the story of the crucifixion. He couldn’t bear the Romans' persecution of an innocent man to assure the security of the state. Later on, it seems that father Joseph, for all the seriousness with which he took the crucifixions, fell for the same trap as Pontious Pilate—creating hell on earth in an attempt to maintain stability and power. In the end, Father Joseph considered himself forsaken. He writes that God has left him in the dark after giving him so much light earlier in his life. He calls this distance from God “worse than hell.”
The Ends (do not) Justify the Means
Everything the Capuchin did was done in pursuit of a unified French monarchy. It was through this monarchy that Father Joseph hoped to spread Catholicism through another crusade (which, luckily, never came to fruition).
These evils often stem from an “ends justify the means” attitude. Whenever you can justify atrocities continuously, they seem to come without end. People can use some future goal to deny the obvious reality in front of them. Cardinal Richelieu and Father Joseph could not have predicted the chain of events that followed their actions, and Huxley assures us that, in politics, this is much more the rule than the exception.
He writes, “About politics, one can make only one completely unquestionable generalization, which is that it is quite impossible for statesmen to foresee, for more than a very short time, the results of any course of large-scale political action. Many of them, it is true, justify their actions by pretending to themselves and others that they can see a long way ahead, but the fact remains that they can’t… If hell is paved with good intentions, it is, among other reasons, because of the impossibility of calculating consequences.” If this is true, which I’m coming to believe it is, long-term political decisions should be made on a deontological rather than a utilitarian basis.
Now, my friends roll their eyes when I make comparisons to Star Wars, but I think this one is worthwhile. Father Joseph's story reminds me of Count Dooku’s: a graceful contemplative monk whose journey into politics takes him away from the light. I believe this comparison leads us closer to the antidote, which is shown through Dooku’s padawan Qui-Gon Jinn.
At every turn, Qui-Gon pays no mind to the political, opting only to follow the will of the force (this could be equivalent to following deontological principles for the secular or the ‘Will of God’ for the religious). This does not mean Qui-Gon takes no political actions; quite the contrary. He, like Father Joseph and Count Dooku, acts as a diplomat when needed. But, his intent is never to achieve political power, and any that is gained is only a side effect of the path the force laid out for him. The best political leaders follow Qui-Gon’s model.
Dostoyevsky, Sartre, and God
Father Joseph’s story reminds me of an interaction between two great philosophers: John-Paul Sartre and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In an interview with Lex Fridman, Harvard philosophy professor Sean Kelly lays out each side. Sartre wrote, “If there is no god, then all is permitted,” and Dostoyevsky agrees. He never explicitly says so, but the plots of The Brothers Karamozov and Crime and Punishment take this line of thought a step further.
Both stories seem to concede, “Yes, if there is no god, then all is permitted.” But, Dostoyevsky points out, “Look at our lives, all is not permitted! When you commit terrible acts, such as the murders in each novel (and prologuing the terrible thirty years war), your life becomes unlivable. Therefore, God is real.” Father Joseph seems to have lived out a Dostoyevsky novel on the grandest scale. His contemplation of God brought him to the edge of transcendence, but he chose another path, one where he committed precisely the acts that are not permitted… and he paid the price.