In a memorandum on the affairs of Germany, which he wrote in January 1631, for the instruction of the King, Father Joseph insisted that French policy should be directed to the systematic exploitation of time as the deadliest of all weapons in the Bourbons’ armoury. To this end, the negotiations which he had begun at Ratisbon were to he continued, unremittingly. Through his agents the King was to go on offering French protection to the Electors, on condition that all, Protestant and Catholic alike, should band themselves together in a specifically German, anti-Spanish bloc, independent of the Emperor. Such a bloc would he strong enough to negotiate on equal terms with the Hapsburgs, and if the King of France were to act as mediator, the Electors could feel certain of reaching a final settlement favourable to themselves.
If such propositions were not made at once, and made, what was more, with every appearance of sincerity, the Electors would he driven back into the Emperor’s camp through fear of Gustavus. Should this happen, Father Joseph went on, the Emperor would find himself in a position to bring about an immediate settlement of all disputes. Which would he disastrous for the Bourbons; for it would leave the Hapsburgs free to turn all their military power against France. Every effort towards an early peace within the Empire and between the Emperor and his foreign enemies must therefore be uncovered and promptly scotched. But how? Father Joseph had his answer. His Most Christian Majesty could avert the catastrophe of an early peace by offering to become a peacemaker. ‘Assuming the office of mediator and arbitrator, and promising to help the Electors if they have need, the King can spin out matters indefinitely, counterbalance the authority of the Emperor, and retard the coming of peace in Germany until such time as we can be sure of the security of a general pacification’ -a general pacification, of course, favourable to Bourbon interests.
While the imperial Diet was in session, there had poured into Ratisbon, from every corner of Germany, an unending stream of supplicants, seeking redress from the assembled princes for the wrongs inflicted upon them during the campaigns of the preceding years. Nothing, of course, was ever done for them, and they either returned, embittered, to their devastated homes, or else, like Kepler, who had ridden all the way from Silesia to ask for the arrears of his salary as Imperial Mathematician, they quietly died and were stowed away in one of the churchyards of Ratisbon. Among these supplicants was a group of delegates from Pomerania. Humbly, but none the less insistently, they begged the Emperor and the Electors to consider the lamentable state of their province. In the preceding year, Wallenstein’s armies had stripped the country so effectively that the people had been starving ever since. Very many had died, and those who survived were eating grass and roots-yes, and young children and the sick and even the newly buried dead.
This seems to have been one of the first occasions,’ during the Thirty Years’ War, when public attention was called to the enforced cannibalism which was to become so horrifyingly common in Germany of those disastrous years. Emperor and Electors listened sympathetically to the Pomeranians, assured them of their deep concern and left the matter at that. Given the political system within which they lived and performed their functions, given the habits of thought and feeling then current in princely circles, that was all they could be expected to do besides, during the whole of the Thirty Years’ War, no German ruler ever went hungry. For dukes and prince-bishops there was always more than enough. The common people might be dying of hunger or living obscenely on human carrion; but in the imperial, electoral and episcopal banqueting halls, the grand old German custom of gorging and swilling was never abrogated. Full of beef and wine, the princes were able to bear their subjects’ affictions with the utmost fortitude.
But what about Father Joseph? He had lived among the poor and like the poor. He knew their sufferings, and he was the member of a religious order, vowed, among other things, to their service. And yet here he was, pursuing, patiently and with consummate skill, a policy which could only increase the sufferings of the poor he had promised to serve. With full knowledge of what had already happened in Pomerania, he continued to advocate a course of action that must positively guarantee the spread of cannibalism to other provinces. One wonders what went on in the friar’s mind during those daily periods of recollection when, examining his thoughts and actions, he prepared himself for what his master in mysticism called the ‘passive annihilation’ of mental prayer. First, no doubt, and all the time, he reminded himself that, in working for France, he was doing God’s external will.
Gesta Dei por Francos was an axiom, from which it followed that France was divine, that those who worked for French greatness were God’s instruments, and that the means they employed could not but be in accord with God’s will. When he angled for Father Joseph’s soul, Satan baited his hook with the noblest temptations: patriotic duty and self-sacrifice. Father Joseph swallowed the hook, and gave himself to France with as much ardour as he had given himself to God. But a man cannot serve two masters, God is jealous and the consequences of idolatry are disastrous. Because he still persisted in identifying the French monarchy with the ultimate reality apprehended in contemplation, Father Joseph failed to connect the plight of the Pomeranian cannibals with his own and all the other European statesmen’s infringement of the first two Commandments.
Sometimes, during his self-examination, it certainly struck him that he had resorted, during his negotiations, to methods of a sometimes rather questionable nature. (It was Father Joseph’s contemporary, Sir Henry Wotton, who defined an ambassador as ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.’ In the seventeenth century an envoy was expected not merely to lie, but also to conduct espionage in the country to which he was accredited.) Father Joseph was able to justify his diplomatic activities in two ways: in the first place, it was his patriotic duty to do these things ; and in the second, he always tried his hardest to practise ‘active annihilation’ in God, while he was doing them. Tilly and de Flamel and the anonymous Spanish pamphleteers might accuse him of criminal conduct; but what they did not and could not know was that all his actions were performed by one who strenuously cultivated the supreme, allcomprehending virtue which St. François de Sales described as ‘holy indifference.’
The earliest literary reference to ‘holy indifference’ occurs in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna assures Arjuna that it is right for him to slaughter his enemies, provided always that he does so in a spirit of non-attachment. When the same doctrine was used by the Illumines of Picardy to justify sexual promiscuity, all right-thinking men, including Father Joseph, were properly horrified. But for some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels. Father Joseph conducted a small crusade against the Illumines, who asserted that they could go to bed with one another in a spirit of holy indifference; but there seemed to him nothing in the least improper in his own claim to be a non-attached intriguer, spy and maker of wars. The truth is, of course, that non-attachment can be practised only in regard to actions intrinsically good or ethically neutral. In spite of anything that Krishna or anyone else may say, bad actions are unannihilatable. They are unannihilatable because, as a matter of brute psychological fact, they enhance the separate, personal ego of those who perform them. But ‘the more of the creature,’ as Tauler puts it, ‘the less of God.’
Any act which enhances the separate, personal ego automatically diminishes the actor’s chance of establishing contact with reality. He may try very hard to annihilate himself in God, to practise God’s presence, even while he is acting. But the nature of what he is doing condemns his efforts to frustration. Father Joseph’s activities at Ratisbon and as Richelieu’s foreign minister were essentially incompatible with the unitive life to which, as a young man, he had dedicated himself and which he was now so desperately struggling to combine with power politics. He could excuse himself for his more questionable acts by the thought that he was doing his best to perform them in a condition of active annihilation in God. The fact that his best efforts were not very successful he attributed, not to the intrinsically unannihilatable nature
