BOOKS
2'63
Thirty Years War· and the preparation of France for the tyrannical
nationalism of Louis XIV, Father Joseph became one of the forgers of
"the long chain of crime and madness which binds the present world to
its past." As a biography the book is an only partly successful product
of Huxley's now rather flaccid and uncritical intellectualism. But it is
not meant to be primarily a biography. It is a piece of propaganda for
the religious mysticism which Huxley and Gerald Heard have transplanted
from the quagmires of British pacifism to the propitious atmosphere of
Southern California. Heard's eight or nine volumes on the subject consti·
tute the official historiography and teleology of the sect. Huxley, since the
appearance of
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936),
has functioned largely as a pub–
licist for the new religion. In this latest book, the life and character of
Father Joseph symbolize what Huxley and Heard take to be the dilemma
of civilized man.
Gerald Heard believes that the wars and revolutions of modern times
are the result o£ a profound human neurosis. The human psyche, a har·
mony of altruism and mystical social affection in the primeval Golden
A3e, has been "fissured"; the human being has become self-conscious and
"individualized" and, consequently, evil. The individualized part of the
psyche, says Heard, is responsible for the barbarity of our civilization.
We are told, however, that the religious mystics (the Buddhists, the Tao–
i~ts,
the Christian mystics, the Quakers) have learned how to lead man–
kind back to the original harmonious psyche. The mystics have discovered
the therapeutical technique of contemplation, which is the process of self–
annihilation, the merging of self-consciousness into Ultimate Reality, and
the merging of the individual will into the "Essential Will."
Huxley's Father Joseph symbolizes the fissured psyche of mankind
in general. On the one hand he is the heir of the vaguely orientalized
tradition of Christian mysticism. He has learned the method of self-anni–
hilation and the affective reunion with God. He carries on the pacific
philanthropy of the dedicated saint. But on the other hand he is the indi–
vidualized man of action, the cynical manipulator who bribed the Swedish
Protestants to fight the German Protestants and who was otherwise instru–
mental in furthering the war which killed one-third of the population of
Germany. Father Joseph, to put it mildly, is a split personality.
The absurdity of this purely psychoanalytic explanation of history
and human behavior becomes apparent when Huxley· ascribes Father
Joseph's anti-social conduct to a flaw in the technique of mysticism by the
time it had come down to the early seventeenth century. Father Joseph
has hallucinations of Christ on the cross in his moments of mystic trance
(which seem, by the way, to border on a state of catalepsy) . But since
the purpose of the mystic experience is the annihilation not only of the
self but also of all worldly imagery, Father Joseph's reunion with Ulti–
mate Reality is never completely accomplished. In other words, Father
Joseph's psyche remains "fissured," and
he
remains both a benevolent
mystic and an immoral politician.
The lesson of
Grey Eminence
is that Father Joseph should have re-
