No less important were the triumphs he could buy with money-the palaces, the attendants, the plate, the libraries, the great banquets, the gorgeous masques for which bishops acted as choreographers, and the audience consisted of queens and princes, great nobles and ambassadors. The passion for wealth was born and bred in him, and grew with every satisfaction it received. His speech before the States-General in 1614 contains a passage which his subsequent behaviour was to render exquisitely comic. Expatiating on the desirability of employing priests in the affairs of state, he declared that the clergy ‘are freer than other men from the private interests which so often harm the public. Observing celibacy, they have nothing to survive them but their souls, and these do not accumulate earthly treasures.’
By 1630 the speaker was in receipt of an income of fifteen hundred thousand livres from the accumulation of ecclesiastical benefices alone. His salaries, perquisites and miscellaneous pickings amounted to four or five millions more. Of the grand total, he spent upon himself four million livres (the annual subsidy given by France to her Swedish allies was less than a million), and he put aside at the end of each year enough to make it possible for him to leave to his nephews and nieces an estate valued in the scores of millions. When one considers that the purchasing power of a livre in the early seventeenth century amounted to seven or eight gold francs, one is forced to admit that, for a man whose profession discouraged him from ‘accumulating earthly treasures,’ the Cardinal did not do too badly.
Money and power were not the only ‘manlier objects’ for which Richelieu yearned. He also had an itch for literary fame. He employed a committee of five poets to work up his ideas into dramatic form, and when one of them, Corneille, wrote Le Cid, the Cardinal was consumed by envy and, through paid critics, tried to prove that the tragedy was entirely undeserving of the praise it had received
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Richelieu’s, it is evident from his biography, was a case which can have presented no difficulties to the Tempter. The Satan of Paradise Regained is only a shade more intelligent than poor Belial; but to land a pike so frantically greedy as was the Cardinal requires little more than the bare minimum of cunning. Any old ‘manlier object’ was bait enough for Richelieu. To Father Joseph, on the contrary, these glittering tin minnows were of no interest. Bait of a much subtler kind was required for him -something more intrinsically precious than power, cash or fame, some imitation of the real Good much more plausible and specious than a ‘ manlier object.’ Of such temptations the Satan of Paradise Regained makes no mention- for the sufficient reason, of course, that his inventor was not aware of their existence.
By nature and by puritan upbringing, Milton was a proud, stoical moralist. Strenuously cultivating self-reliance and a ‘self-esteem founded on just and right,’ he lived his whole life in happy ignorance of the fact that religion consists in the exact opposite of self-reliance and self-esteem-in total self-surrender to a God who is not merely a very virtuous puritan gentleman, considerably magnified, but a being of a wholly different order, incommensurable with man even at his highest and most righteous ; incommensurable, and yet suffering himself to be experienced by those who are prepared to accept the conditions upon which that experience may be had : the sacrifice of all the elements of their personality, the respectable no less than the discreditable.
Milton’s Christ never mentions the final and compelling reason why he must reject the wealth that will enable him to ‘do good,’ the power by means of which he may establish ‘the kingdom of heaven.’ That reason is that a son of God is what he is in virtue of his continual and perfect practice of God’s presence; and that the continual and perfect practice of God’s presence is impossible for a soul preoccupied with wealth or power. As it stands, Paradise Regained is a curiously uninteresting and obtuse affair. Its versified arguments are wordy battles between a Satan who is only John Milton in his uninhibited day-dreams (‘he was of the devil’s party without knowing it’) and a Saviour who is the same John Milton at his ideally best, in a kind of glorified de luxe edition.
A really intelligent Satan would have read the Lives of the saints and the writings of the mystics, and, having read, would have known how to deal with such sincere and devoted seekers of perfection as Father Joseph. And, of course, the real Satan, as opposed to the Miltonic invention, did know exactly how to deal with him; for the real Satan is the element in every individual being which hinders that being from dying to its selfhood and becoming united with the reality from which it has been separated. This being so, the intelligence, the sensibility, the spirituality of Satan is always exactly proportionate to the intelligence, sensibility and spirituality of the individual in whom he is at work. Milton’s Satan has the intelligence, sensibility and spirituality of a great poet who is at the same time a proud, passionate stoic; Richelieu’s, of a great statesman, with a similar stoic morality much less effectively in control of passions darker and more destructive.
The Satan who tempted Father Joseph into power politics was a different and much more interesting fiend. It was his business to tempt a man who had not only taken vows of poverty and humility, but who had also schooled himself, by a long course of theocentric spiritual discipline, into a condition in which he genuinely did not desire money and was more or less completely indifferent to power. As for fame, contemporary or posthumous, Father Joseph cared nothing for it. As a politician, he worked without show or noise, keeping himself deliberately in the background: as a writer, he courted anonymity in print and was content for the most part to leave his productions unpublished. In a word, the ordinary ‘manlier objects’ with which men of exceptional ability are tempted, made no appeal to him whatever. If this man was to be caught, the fiend would have to become a good deal cleverer and more subtle than the Satan of Paradise Regained.
Father Joseph was diverted from the road of mystical perfection by a set of closely related temptations-the temptation to do what seemed to be his duty, to accomplish what was apparently the external will of God; the temptation to be mistaken about God’s will and to choose a lower at the expense of a higher duty; and the temptation to believe that a disagreeable task must be good just because it was disagreeable. Let us consider these temptations in detail.
Father Joseph, as we have seen, was intensely a patriot and a royalist. Born and brought up during the civil wars, he had conceived a veritable passion for national unity, for order and for what was then the sole guarantee of these two goods, the monarchy. This passion had been rationalized into a religious principle by means of the old crusading faith in the divine mission of France and the newly popularized doctrine of the divine right of kings. Gesta Die per Francos summed up the first belief; the second was to find its most pregnantly abbreviated expression in Bossuet’s dictum : ‘The King, Jesus Christ, the Church-God under these three names.’ Hanotaux, the historian of Cardinal Richelieu, writes of the Capuchin that ‘he gave himself to two high causes, which absorbed his life, God and France, always ready to work and fight for either cause, but never separating one from the other, always responding to the call of an inner conviction, namely that France is the instrument of Providence and French greatness a providential thing.’ Granted the validity of these doctrines -doctrines which he held with a burning intensity of conviction-it was obviously Father Joseph’s duty to undertake political work for king and country, when called upon to do so. It was his duty because, ex hypothesi, such political work was as truly the will of God as the work of preaching, teaching and contemplation.
We come now to the second temptation-the temptation to fall into error regarding God’s will. One of the immediate reasons for this error has already been stated: Father Joseph believed that the cause of God and the cause of France were inseparable. We
