Quotations from The Gray Eminence by Aldous Huxley,

Pub. Triad, Granada , I982, paperback edn.

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. Pg. 256.

Besides being a moralist, the historian is one who attempts to formulate generalizations about human events. It is only by tracing the relations between acts and their consequences that such generalizations can be made. When they have been made, they are available to politicians, when framing plans of actions. In this way past records of the relation between acts and consequence enter the field of ethics a relevant factors in a situation of choice. And here it may be pointed out that, though it is impossible to foresee the remoter consequences of any given course of action, it is by no means impossible to foresee, in the light of past historical experience, the sort of consequences that are likely in a general way, to follow certain sorts of acts. Thus, from the records of past experience, it seems sufficiently clear that the consequences attendant on a course of action involving such things as large-scale war, violent revolution, unrestrained tyranny and persecution are likely to be bad. Consequently, any politician who embarks on such courses of action cannot plead ignorance as an excuse….

Here it seems worth while to comment briefly on the curious time sense of those who think in political terms. Courses of action are recommended on the ground that, if carried out, they cannot fail to result in a solution to all outstanding problems – a solution either definitive and everlasting, like that which Marx foresaw as the result of the setting up of a classless society….

The first thing we have to remember is that, when theologians speak of the active life as contrasted with that of contemplation, they do not refer to what contemporary, non-theologian writers call by the same name. To us, ‘life of action’ means the sort of life led by movie heroes, business executives, war correspondents cabinet ministers and the like. To the theologians, all these are merely worldly lives, lived more or less unregenerately by people who have done little or nothing to get rid of their Old Adams. What they call active life is the life of good works…….

Most people at the present time probably take for granted the validity of the pragmatist’s contention, that the end of thought is action. In the philosophy Fr. Joseph had studied and made his own, this position is reversed. Here contemplation is the end, and action (in which is included discursive thought) is valuable only as a means to the beatific vision of God. In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘action should be some thing added to the life of prayer, not something taken away from it.’ To the man of the world, this statement is almost totally devoid of meaning. To the contemplative, whose concern is with spiritual religion, with the kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of selves, it seems axiomatic…..

Whenever we undertake any action, Fr. Lallemant insists, we must model ourselves upon God himself, who creates and sustains the world without in any way modifying his essential existence. But we cannot do this unless we learn to practise formal contemplation and a constant awareness of God’s presence. So far as beginners are concerned, even the doing of good works may distract the soul from God. Action is not safe, except for proficients in the art of mental prayer……. It is a matter of experience and observation that actions undertaken by ordinary unregenerate people, sunk in their selfhood and without spiritual insight, seldom do much good. A generation before Lallemant, St. John of the Cross had put the whole matter in a single question and answer. Those who rush headlong into good works without having acquired through contemplation the power to act well – what do they accomplish ? ‘Little more than nothing, and sometimes nothing at all, and sometimes even harm.’ One reason for hell being paved with good intentions has already been mentioned, and to this, the impossibility of foreseeing the consequences of actions, we must now add another, the intrinsically unsatisfactory nature of actions performed by the ordinary run of average and unregenerate men and women. This being so, Lallemant recommends the least possible external activity until such time as, by contemplation and the unremitting practice of the presence, the soul has been trained to give itself completely to God. Those who have traveled only a little way along the road to union, ‘should not go out of themselves for the service of their neighbours, except by way of trial and experiment. We must be like hunting dogs that are still half held upon the leash. When we shall have come by contemplation to possess God, we shall be able to give greater freedom to our zeal.’ External activity causes no interruption in the orison of the proficient; on the contrary, it is a means for bringing them nearer to reality. Those for whom it is not such a means should as far as possible refrain from action….

What is true of good works is true, a fortiori, of merely worldly activity, particularly when it is activity on a large scale, involving the collaboration of great numbers of individuals in every stage of unenlightenment. Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced…. The monastic orders … were living demonstrations of the traditional doctrine of action. This doctrine affirmed that goodness of more than average quantity and quality could be realized only on a small scale, by self-dedicated and specially trained instruction. Fr. Joseph always acted on this same principle. The art of mental prayer was taught by him only to individuals or small groups; the Calvarian rule was given as a way of life to only a very few of the nuns of Fontervrault, the order as a whole being much to large to be capable of realizing that peculiar spiritual good which the reform was intended to produce….

Mystical philosophy can be summed up in a single phrase: ‘The more of the creature, the less of God.’….

This brings us to the heart of that great paradox of politics – the fact that political actions is necessary, and at the same time incapable of satisfying the needs which called it into existence.

Only static and isolated societies, whose way of life is determined by an unquestioned tradition, can dispense with politics. In unstable, unisolated, technologically progressive societies such as ours, large-scale political action is unavoidable. But even when it is well-intentioned (which it very often is not) political action is always foredoomed to a partial, sometimes even a complete self-stultification. The intrinsic nature of the human instruments with which, and the human materials upon which political action must be carried out, is a positive guarantee against the possibility that such actions shall yield the results that were expected from it. This generalization could be illustrated by an indefinite number of instances drawn from history. For example, the results actually achieved by reforms upon which well-intentioned people have placed the most enormous hopes – universal education and public ownership of the means of production. Universal education has proved to be the state’s most effective instrument of universal regimentation and militarisation, and has exposed millions, hitherto immune, to the influence of organize lying and the allurements of incessant, imbecile and debasing distractions. Public ownership of the means of production has been put into effect on a large scale only in Russia, where the results of the reform have been, not the elimination of oppression, but the replacement of one kind of oppression by another – of money power by political and bureaucratic power, of the tyranny of rich men by a tyranny of the police and the party.

For several thousands of years now men have been experimenting with different methods for improving the quality of human instruments and human material. It has been found that a good deal can be done by such strictly humanistic methods as the improvement of the social and economic environment, and the various techniques of character training. Among men and women of a certain type, startling results can be obtained by means of conversion and catharsis. But though these methods are somewhat more effective than those of the purely humanistic variety, they work only erratically and they do not produce the radical and permanent transformation of personality, which must take place, and take place on a very large scale, if political action is ever to produce the beneficial results expected from it. For the radical and permanent transformation of personality only one effective method has been discovered – that of the mystics …. Political reforms cannot be expected to produce much general betterment, unless large numbers of individuals undertake the transformation of their personality by the only known method which really works – that of the contemplatives. Moreover, should the amount of mystical, theocentric leaven in the lump of humanity suffer a significant decrease, politicians may find it impossible to raise the societies they rule even to the very moderate heights realized in the past.

Meanwhile, politicians can do something to create a social environment favourable to contemplatives. Or better to put the matter negatively and say that they can refrain from doing certain things and making certain arrangements which are specially unfavourable….

Totalitarian politicians demand obedience and conformity in every sphere of life, including, of course, the religious. Here, their aim is to use religion as an instrument of social consolidation. For this reason, the only kind of religion they favour is strictly anthropocentric, exclusive and nationalistic….

But a world made safe for totalitarianism is a world, in all probability, made very unsafe for mysticism… And a world made unsafe for mysticism is a world where the only proved method of transforming and personality will be less and less practised, where fewer and fewer people will possess any direct, experiential knowledge of reality to set up against the false doctrine of totalitarian anthropocentrism and the pernicious ideas and practices of nationalistic pseudo-mysticism. In such a world there seems little prospect that any political reform, however well-intentioned, will produce the results expected of it.

The quality of moral behaviour varies in an inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. Individual and small groups do not always and automatically behave well. But at least they can be moral and rational to a degree unattainable by large groups. For as numbers increase, personal relations between members of the group, and between its members and those of other groups become more difficult, and finally for the vast majority of the individuals concerned, impossible…. The art of what may be called ‘goodness politics’, as opposed to power politics, is the art of organizing on a large scale without sacrificing the ethical values which emerge only among individuals and small groups. More specifically, it is the art of combining decentralization of government and industry, local and functional autonomy and smallness of administrative units with enough overall efficiency to guarantee the smooth running of the federated whole…. It still remains true that the methods of goodness politics combined with individual training in theocentric theory and contemplative practice alone provide the means whereby human societies can become a little less unsatisfactory than they have been upto the present.

In a world inhabited by what the theologians call unregenerate, or natural men, church and state can probably never become appreciably better than the best of the states and churches which the past has left us the record. Society can never be greatly improved, until such time as most of its members choose to become theocentric saints. Meanwhile, the few theocentric saints who exist at any given moment are able in some slight measure to qualify and mitigate the poisons which society generates within itself by its political and economic activities. In the gospel phrase, theocentric saints are the salt which preserved the social world from breaking down into irremedial decay.

This antiseptic and antidotal function of the theocentric is performed in a variety of ways. First of all, the mere fact that he exists is profoundly salutary and important. The potentiality of knowledge of, and union with, God is present in all men and women. In most of them, however, it is covered as Eckhart puts it, ‘by thirty or forty skins or hides, like and ox’s or a bear’s, so thick and hard. But beneath all this leather, and in spite of its toughness, the divine more-than-self, which is the quick and principle of our being, remains alive, and can and does respond to the shining manifestations of the same principal in the theocentric saint. The ‘old man dressed all in leather’ meets the new man, who has cusseeded in stripping off the carapace of his thirty or forty ox-hides, and walks through the world a naked soul, no longer opaque to the radiance immanent within him. From this meeting, the old man is likely to come away profoundly impressed by the strangeness of what he has seen, and with the nostalgic sense that the world would be a better place if there were less leather in it. Again and again in the course of history, the meeting with a naked and transluscent spirit, even the reading about such spirits, has sufficed to restrain the leather men who rule over their fellows from using their power to excess. It is respect for theocentric saints that prompts the curious hypocrisy which accompanies and seeks to veil the brutal facts of political action….

The theocentric saint is impressive, not only for what he is, but also for what he does and says. His actions and all his dealings with the world are marked by disinterestedness and serenity, invariable truthfulness and a total absence of fear…. The essence of that authority is that it is purely spiritual and moral, and is associated with none of the ordinary social sanctions of power, position, or wealth.

To be a seer is not the same thing as to be a mere spectator. Once the contemplative has fitted himself to become, in Lallemant’s phrase, ‘a man of much orison’, he can undertake work in the world with no risk of being thereby distracted from his vision of reality, and with fair hope of achieving an appreciable amount of good. As a matter of historical fact, many of the great theocentrics have been men and women of enormous and beneficient activity.

The work of the theocentrics is always marginal, is always started on the smallest scale and, when it expands, the resulting organisation is always subdivided into units sufficiently small to be capable of a shared spiritual experience and of moral and rational conduct.

The first aim of the theocentrics is to make it possible for any one who desires it to share their own experience of ultimate reality. The groups they create are organized primarily for the worship of God for God’s sake. They exist in order to disseminate various methods (not all of equal value) for transforming the ‘natural’ man, and for learning to know the more-than-personal reality immanent within the leathery casing of selfhood…. Many theocentrics, however, … go on to employ their organizations to make a direct attack upon the thorniest of social problems… economic evils,.. those of ignorance.