It may be doubted, however, whether he himself was ever granted this sceptre of the spirit. That he had a very complete control of all his lower passions is certain; but we have the evidence of his passionate and explosive writings, as well as of his recorded taste for sudden revelations, visions and raptures, to show that he never succeeded in overcoming his all too natural desire to take the kingdom of heaven by violence. It is permissible to believe that, if he had overcome it, if his experience of union had been more tranquil, freer of his own intense feelings about God and fuller of God himself, he would never have consented to imperil this genuine awareness of reality for the sake of political duties hardly compatible even with his monastic vows and certainly incompatible with the life of contemplation.
Father Joseph’s experience of union may have been incomplete and not of the highest order; but on its own level, it was ‘undoubtedly authentic. With the passage of the years, however, even this experience became rarer. Given over to unannihilatable activities, he came to be possessed, in spite of his daily practice of mental prayer, by a sense of bitterness and frustration. Visions, it was true, and prophetic revelations were still vouchsafed to him; but the unitive life of his early manhood was at an end ; he had the dreadful certainty that God had moved away from him.
It was a dark night of the soul-but not that salutary dark night described by St. John of the Cross, not the dark night of those who are undergoing the final and excruciating purgation from self-will; no, it was that much more terrible, because fruitless and degrading, dark night, which is the experience of those who have seen God and then, by their own fault, lost him again. That Father Joseph knew what had happened to him is proved by the following passage from a letter written in this latest period of his life to one of the Calvarian Abbesses.
‘I know,’ he says, ‘by personal experience -I who, in punishment for my faults and for having misused the time God gave me, have now so little leisure to think of my inward being and am for ever distracted by a host of different occupations-I know how bad it is not to be united to God, not to give one’s soul into the possession of the spirit of Jesus, to be led according to his will; and I know too how necessary it is for this to keep good company, in which the faithful can help and strengthen one another.
When I think thus and then look and see how I and the most part of creatures live our lives, I come to believe that this world is but a fable, and that we have all lost our senses-for I make no difference, except for a few externals, between ourselves, the pagans and the Turks.’ These are despairing words, words that make one wonder whether the unhappy man had come to doubt of his salvation. And having penned them, back he had to go to the hideous work to which his duty to the Bourbons had harnessed him, the work of spreading famine and cannibalism and unspeakable atrocities across the face of Europe. Back he had to go to the distracting cares which cut him off from the vision of reality; to the bad company of King and Cardinal, ambassadors and spies; back finally to all the criminal follies of high statesmanship; to the Satanic struggle for power in a world, which he knew to be a fable, a mere nightmarish illusion, to the orgies of violence and cunning; to the dreary battles of force and fraud, waged by two parties of madmen, between whom, as he had now come to perceive, there was nothing whatever to choose. And as a reward for turning his back upon God, they had promised to give him a red hat.
CHAPTER X Politics and Religion
The nature of Father Joseph’s life is such that the record of it can hardly fail to raise, in an inquiring mind, a number of questions not directly related to that biography. These questions are all more or less puzzling, but so intrinsically important that the historian of this strange career would be doing less than his duty if he failed at least to try to answer them. The first question concerns facts. What were the historical consequences of the policy which Father Joseph assisted Richelieu to carry out? The others are of a more speculative nature and involve problems in morals. What ought to have been the attitude of a man in Father’s Joseph’s position towards politics? What, if anything, can a contemplative do for his fellow-men outside the field of politics? And, conversely, what can politicians do for their fellow-men within that field, and with no assistance from the contemplative? Let us consider these questions in order.
Of the immediate results of Richelieu’s foreign policy, as measured in terms of human misery, I have already spoken. Statistically speaking, what was the total sum of this misery? Popular tradition in Germany has tended to exaggerate the figures. In the later seventeenth and during the eighteenth century there grew up a myth of the Thirty Years’ War -a myth more dramatically frightful even than the reality, and for that very reason more potent in its effects upon the minds of those who believed it. Recent research has shown that the old mythical statistics must be considerably scaled down. But even when all the necessary discounts have been made, the figures are sufficiently appalling. In 1618 the population of Germany was about twenty-one millions. In 1648 it had shrunk to about thirteen millions. At a period of history when the population curve for Europe in general was turning upwards, these lands east of the Rhine lost above one-third of their inhabitants by massacre, famine, exposure and disease. More than any other war in recent European history, the Thirty Years’ War was a people’s war, in the sense that it involved non-combatants equally with professional soldiers.
Material destruction was relatively less than the destruction of human life. In the seventeenth century explosives were not manufactured in bulk and were relatively inefficient. But, without a plentiful supply of explosives, it is difficult to destroy solidly built structures of stone. What perished, therefore, was only what could be readily burned-that is to say, dwelling houses, especially the flimsy hovels of the poor. Town and country suffered almost equally. The burghers were stripped of their money and lost their trade. The peasants were stripped of their produce and lost their homes, implements, seed and animals. The loss of cattle, sheep and swine was particularly serious. As we have seen in the case of revolutionary Russia, a depleted stock of animals can only be replaced over a long period of time. Two or three generations passed before the natural rate of increase had made up for the depredations of Wallenstein and Mansfeld, Tilly and Gustavus, the Spanish and the French.
On the structure of German society the Thirty Years’ War produced certain undesirable effects, which have proved to be of great historical significance. Here again the myth which has helped to mould the modern German mind fails at many points to correspond to reality. It has been customary in Germany to attribute all the country’s ills to the Thirty Years’ War. But the truth is that even before the war began, Germany was in a bad way. German prosperity was based on commerce and had been bound up with that of Venice. During the sixteenth century, the trade routes had changed their course. The Mediterranean lost its commercial significance, and the economic basis, upon which the urban life of Germany had been built, began to crumble away. Meanwhile the production of agricultural wealth declined owing to the Peasants’ War, which left the defeated party an oppressed majority implacably hostile to its masters. Agriculture does not flourish when a state of latent civil war exists between owners and workers. Confusion was worse confounded by religious and political division.
Two thousand sovereign states, most of them surrounded by tariff walls and many with independent currencies more or less seriously debased, created so much internal friction that the exchange of goods and services between one part of the country and another became a matter of the greatest difficulty. At the same time the Reformation had divided the people, first into two, and then, with the advent of Calvinism, into three mutually hostile camps. Into this dismal Germany of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries no outstanding figures were born. The intellectual life of the country was stagnant and the prevailing standards of morals and manners were brutishly low. Foreign travellers in Germany were struck by only one thing -the revolting gluttony and intemperance of the inhabitants. The Germans, or at any rate the more prosperous of them, ate and drank more than any other people in Europe, and were extremely proud of the fact. At this particular moment of history, they had nothing else to be proud of.
The Thirty Years’ War completed the ruin of which the discovery of America, the Reformation and the Peasants’ War had begun. Commerce and industry came to a standstill, with the result that a
