In spite of his reading of the theocentric moralists, in spite of all the thought he had given to the right ‘relationship between man and God, Father Joseph had failed to see that vicarious ambition is as much of an obstacle to union as personal ambition-that a craving for the glorification of France is merely Satan’s ‘manlier object’ at one remove. And whereas personal ambition is regarded by all the moralists as undesirable, only the most advanced theocentrics have detected the perniciousness of vicarious ambition on behalf of a sect, nation or person. For the immense majority of mankind, such ambition appears to be entirely creditable. That is what makes it so peculiarly dangerous for men of good-will, even for aspirants to sanctity, such as our Capuchin.
Father Joseph had freed himself from personal ambition; but as the devoted servant of a providential France and a divinely appointed Louis XIII, he was able to go on indulging the passions connected with ambition, and to go on indulging them, what was more, without any sense of guilt. To put it cynically, he could enjoy subconsciously the pleasures of malice, domination and glory, while retaining the conviction that he was doing the will of God. To retain this conviction was the more easy for him, inasmuch as he attempted, in Father Benet’s phrase, actively to annihilate his political actions, even as he performed them. To what extent such actions are ‘annihilatable’ is another question, which will have to be discussed later. For the present, it is enough to state that such active annihilation was in this case consistently attempted.
What finally tempted Father Joseph to commit himself definitely to a political career was the fact that a political career was extremely arduous and, to a part at least of his nature, disagreeable. Tenebroso-Cavernoso might enjoy the scheming and the diplomacy, and Ezechiely might vicariously exult in his royal master’s triumphs. But the contemplative who had spent so many hours of each day in communion with God could not but suffer from having henceforward to devote the greater number of those hours to affairs of state. That he should deal with such affairs was, however, his duty and the will of God, who evidently desired to try to the limit his powers of active annihilation. Moreover, a political career was very laborious, particularly when combined, as Father Joseph combined it from the first, with the direction of a whole congregation of nuns, the work of Apostolic Commissary for Missions and at least two hours a day of intensive mental prayer. Hence its attractiveness.
As a child he had asked to be sent to school for fear his mother should turn him into a mollycoddle; and now, as a man, he thought it his duty to accept the burden of political responsibility. A part of him, it is true, rather enjoyed the burden, but there was another part that groaned under its weight. It was because of that groaning that he felt himself justified in enjoying, that he felt finally certain that in accepting Richelieu’s invitation he was doing God’s will. Richelieu shared the friar’s convictions in regard to France, the monarchy, and the disagreeableness of political labour and the obligations which that very disagreeableness imposed. But whereas these convictions were of prime importance to Father Joseph, to Richelieu they were only a secondary consiseration. Even if France and the monarchy had meant nothing to him, he would still have found, in his native genius, his inordinate lust for power, his passion for money, amply sufficient reasons for going into politics.
Certain passages in the Cardinal’s letters and memoirs throw a very interesting light on the matters we have been discussing; for they reveal to us what Richelieu thought about his political activities, in their relation to God, his fellow-men and his own salvation. The Cardinal begins by making a sharp distinction between personal and public morality-between what Niebuhr would call ‘moral men and immoral society.’
‘Autre chose est être homme de bien selon Dieu
et autre chose être tel selon les hommes.’19
To take a specific example of this difference, the good man according to God must forgive offences against himself as soon as they are committed; but where offences have been committed against society, the good man according to men must do everything in his power to take vengeance. ‘The reason for this difference springs from the same principle as applied to two different kinds of obligation. The first and greatest obligation of a man is the salvation of his soul, which demands that vengeance should be left to God and not taken by the person offended. The greatest obligation of kings is the repose of their subjects, the preservation in its entirety of their state, and of the reputation of their government; to which end it is necessary to punish all offences against the state so effectively that the severity of the vengeance may remove the very thought of renewing the injury.’
Richelieu himself was a representative of the king and an «homme de bien selon les hommes». This being so, it was not legitimate for him to behave as an homme de bien selon Dieu, even though failure so to behave might imperil his chances of eternal bliss. His view of himself was at bottom very similar to that which the more tender-minded of communist sympathizers often take of Lenin-that of a kind of secular saviour, taking upon himself the responsibility for intrinsically evil acts, which he performs, with full knowledge of their consequences for himself, in order to ensure the future happiness of mankind. ‘Many men,’ wrote the Cardinal, ‘would save their souls as private persons who damn themselves as public persons.’ To benefit the French people (if not at the moment, at any rate at some future time), to increase the power and glory of France, as personified in her kings, he was prepared to run the appalling risk of going to hell.
And his punishment was not reserved exclusively for the next world; like all statesmen, he was called upon, here and now, to accept a frightful burden of fatigues and scruples and anxieties. He was one who, in his own memorable phrase, ‘lies awake at night that others may sleep fearlessly in the shadow of his watchings ‘-a l’ ombre de ses veilles. In this heroic self-portrait there is, of course, an element of truth; but it is very far from being the whole truth. In describing himself as a Promethean saviour, a voluntary scapegoat suffering for the sake of the people, Richelieu omitted to mention those little items of the five-million-a-year income, the dukedom, the absolute power, the precedence over princes of the blood, the fawnings and flatteries of all who approached him. ‘Verily, they have their reward.’
Father Joseph’s rewards were of a more rarefied kind and consisted in 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. Unlike Richelieu, he did not consider himself an homme de bien selon les hommes, risking his salvation by doing immoral things on behalf of the state. 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. In this way he believed that he could live and work, even at power politics, in a state of ‘holy indifference,’ very similar to the state recommended, in the Bhagavad Gita, to the hero Arjuna as he prepares to go into battle.
So much for motives and their rationalizations. In temperament, the two men differed profoundly. Father Joseph, as we have seen, was simultaneously Ezechiely and Tenebroso-Cavernoso. Richelieu exhibited no smallest trace of the Hebrew prophet. He had no enthusiasm, only a fixed intensity of purpose. Inspirations and happy intuitions played little or no part in his life; 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 Plessis de Richelieu and the greatest glory to France. In a word, he was exclusively Tenebroso-Cavernoso -but a Tenebroso-Cavernoso, we must always remember, strangely mitigated by ill-health and psychological instability.
There was madness in the family. Richelieu’s elder brother-the Carthusian monk, whom he dragged out of his monastery and made the Cardinal Archbishop of Lyon was not merely feeble-minded; he also suffered every now and then from delusions of grandeur, believing himself to be the First Person of the Trinity. Richelieu himself is known to have been a victim of fits of morbid depression and occasional explosions of rage, almost epileptic in their violence. Furthermore, a tradition was preserved in the royal family that, like his brother, he was sometimes subject to
