These psychological lesions were not, however, so serious that they prevented Richelieu from doing his work. He did it with the efficiency which is possible only to those who possess, as well as the highest intellectual abilities, an extraordinary strength and fixity of resolution. Few men will anything very strongly, and out of these few, only a tiny minority are capable of combining strength of will with unwavering continuity. Most human beings are spasmodic and intermittent creatures, who like above everything the pleasures of mental indolence. ‘It is for this reason,’ says Bryce, ‘that a strenuous and unwearying will sometimes becomes so tremendous a power, almost a hypnotic force.’ Lucifer is the highest mythological incarnation of this intense personal will, and the great men who have embodied it upon the stage of history participate, to some extent, in his satanic strength and magnificence.
It is because of this strength and magnificence, so very different from our own weakness and mental squalor, that we continue to hark back nostalgically to the biographies of such men as Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and that, as each new imitator of Lucifer arises, we prostrate ourselves before Him, begging him to save us. And, of course, many of these Great Men would genuinely like to save their fellows. But since they are what they are, not saints, but petty Lucifers, their well meant efforts can lead only to the perpetuation, in some temporary less or more unpleasant form, of those conditions from which humanity is perpetually praying to be saved. Great Men have invariably failed to ‘deliver the goods’; but because we admire their qualities and envy their success, we continue to believe in them and to submit to their power. At the same time, we know quite well, with a part of our being, that Lucifers cannot possibly do us any good; so we turn for a moment from such incarnations of the personal will to those very different human beings, who incarnate the will of God.
The Saints are even more willing to help than the Great Men; but the advice they give is apt to seem depressing to men and women who want to enjoy the pleasures of indolence. ‘God,’ say the Saints, ‘helps those who help themselves ‘; and they go on to prescribe the methods by which it is possible to help oneself. But we don’t want to have to help ourselves; we want to be helped, to have somebody who will do the work on our behalf. So we turn back again to the Incarnations of the personal will. These Great Men have not the smallest doubt of their ability to give us exactly what we want -a political system that will make everybody happy and good, a state religion that guarantees God’s favours here on earth and a blissful eternity in paradise. We accept their offer; and immediately the other part .of our being reverts to the saints, from whom once again we tum to our disastrous Great Men. And so it goes on, century after century. The pathetic shilly-shallying has left its accumulated traces in our libraries, where the records of Great Men and their activities in history fill about as much shelf-room as the records of the Saints and their dealings with God.
Richelieu was one of the great incarnations of the personal will. It was to his never relaxed inflexibility of purpose that he owed his extraordinary career, and by means of which he was able to stamp his impress so profoundly upon the history of Europe. Father Joseph gave the appearance of being more dispersed and fluctuating than his political chief. But under the variations of tone and manner, and in spite of those sudden gusts of enthusiasm by which he seemed periodically to be carried away, he retained a fixity of purpose no less unbending.
On more than one occasion, indeed, he proved himself the more determined of the two; when Richelieu showed signs of weakening, the friar revived his courage and, by sheer strength of will, carried him forward, through all difficulties, to the desired goal. ‘I have lost my support,’ Richelieu kept repeating after his friend’s death, ‘I have lost my support.’
That Father Joseph was able to act as a source of strength to this man, whose genius consisted precisely in being strong, was due, one may guess, to the fact that, for a quarter of a century, he had been following Benet of Canfield’s Rule of Perfection, reduced to the sole point of the Will of God. In the language of the mystics, ‘Perfection’ is the state of total and continuous self-abnegation in Reality-the state of those who can say, ‘ I live, yet not I, but God lives in me.’ From their biographies, it is clear that the men and women who have come to such perfection receive, among the other fruits of the spirit, an extraordinary accession of moral strength.
It is a strength wholly different in quality from the inflexibility of the tensed, self-centred personal will of the stoic and the petty Lucifer -of the ‘fiend of righteousness,’ in Blake’s expressive phrase, and the fiend of unrighteousness. The will of the self-abnegated person is relaxed and effortless, because it is not his own will, but a great river of force flowing through him from a sea of subliminal consciousness that lies open in its tum to the ocean of reality. He radiates joy and a beautiful and yet awe-inspiring serenity; he works with irresistible gentleness; being completely humble, he wields the authority of a power infinitely greater than himself, and of which he is merely the instrument.
In his early manhood, Father Joseph displayed this peculiar strength which belongs to the self-abnegated man. That he had completely achieved the perfection of the unitive life may be doubted. If he had, it is hard indeed to believe that anything even a sense of duty, even a desire for painful self-sacrifice would have induced him to enter politics. But though he had not gone the whole way, he had certainly gone far -far enough, at any rate, to be able to make a profound impression on the monks whom, as Provincial of Touraine, it was his business to govern and instruct. What struck them, as I have already noted, was the gentleness and humility with which he exercised his powers. Vigilant, firm, tolerating no lapse from the Franciscan rule, he knew how to punish without arousing resentment, how to administer rebukes in which he personally was not involved, except as the channel through which a force, recognizably divine, was flowing. When Ange de Joyeuse called him the perfect Capuchin, he was very nearly right. But, alas, not entirely right.
Enough of the Old Adam remained in him to succumb to those extremely subtle temptations prepared by his attendant Satan. Without giving up his mystical practices, and in the belief that he could simultaneously serve God and the Cardinal, he became a politician. In spite of the friar’s almost superhuman efforts, the attempt to make the best of both worlds failed as completely as his Master had said it would. His policies (as we can now see clearly enough) did not produce the results they were intended to produce; and the quality of his spiritual life (as he himself perceived before he died) progressively deteriorated. Nevertheless, in spite of this deterioration, he carried over into the period of his association with Richelieu something of the more-than-personal strength which had been his in the earlier days. Nor must we forget that, even in cases where the perfection or total self-abnegation in reality is not achieved, the mere practice of spiritual exercises is capable by itself of enhancing the strength of will.
Spiritual exercises need not necessarily be associated with God ; a man can, if he so chooses, make himself one-pointed for one-pointedness’ sake, or for the sake of his nation, his party, his sect, or even the devil. In all these cases he will gain strength, for the simple reason that spiritual exercises are a device for tapping, canalizing and directing the sources of the will below the threshold of awareness. A current flowing from the subliminal sea is in itself a tremendous force, even though this sea may remain cut off from the ocean of reality beyond it. Richelieu seems to have relied entirely on the upper levels of the conscious, personal will. Hence the appalling strain under which he continually lived -a strain that told severely on a constitution never robust at the best of times, and that resulted every now and then in a temporary failure of nerve. It was on these occasions that he turned to the Capuchin for support. From the depths of a nature in which the conscious will had been systematically aligned with the subconscious, and through which, perhaps, a little of the power inherent in reality still flowed, Father Joseph was able to give him the strength he needed.
CHAPTER VII La Rochelle
Richelieu had set himself two great tasks: to unify France under an omnipotent monarchy; to break the power of the Hapsburgs and to exalt the Bourbons in their place. The possibility of defeating Spain and Austria depended, obviously, on the previous accomplishment of the first task. Divided, France was weak. Hampered by his chronically rebellious nobles and by the Protestants, who formed a state
