Father Joseph / Père Joseph, Gray Eminence
example · book: Grey Eminence (Aldous Huxley) ·
retold in 11 talks
Father Joseph, Richelieu's right hand who engineered Thirty Years' War policy and organized murders, simultaneously wrote mystical letters to a convent at the level of Saint Teresa or John of the Cross, authentic spirituality alongside absolute political evil.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 10
“this is what bothers so much Aldous Huxley. How can a guy who is doing all this at the same time how can he write something that you cannot but say if you are honest, my God this is the pearl, the thing itself.”
“how the same person can order poisoning, torture, manipulate and nonetheless you cannot find this in his meditations.”
“a person can be a monstrous plotter yet his self-understanding his existential religious experience can be spotlessly authentic”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Aldous Huxley10Père Joseph (François Leclerc du Tremblay)6Brian Victoria8D. T. Suzuki8Lavrentiy Beria3Jonathan Littell3Richard Rorty4Julius Rosenberg2
alongside works
Every retelling 10
Father Joseph, Richelieu's right hand who engineered Thirty Years' War policy and organized murders, simultaneously wrote mystical letters to a convent at the level of Saint Teresa or John of the Cross, authentic spirituality alongside absolute political evil., illustrating authentic inner experience and atrocity,spirituality and violence,gap between inner life and ethics
Aldous Huxley's biography of Cardinal Richelieu's right-hand man: an extremely brutal political manipulator who also wrote authentic, high-level Christian mystical meditations, the same person, with no contradiction visible in either register., illustrating the neighbor as abyss,inner authenticity coexisting with outer brutality
Cardinal Richelieu's advisor Père Joseph was simultaneously the most Machiavellian political schemer of the Thirty Years' War (arguably responsible for the parcelling of Germany and thus, mythically, both world wars) and an authentically devout mystic whose spiritual life was spotlessly genuine, Žižek uses this to insist on the impossible conjunction: a person can be a monster and simultaneously have authentic inner experience., illustrating home as evil,splitting of public/private,coincidence of opposites
Cardinal Richelieu's advisor was simultaneously the architect of destructive political intrigue and a genuine contemplative mystic; Huxley tries to explain this via Western Christianity's excess fixation on Christ's suffering., illustrating inner authenticity as no guarantee against monstrosity,gap between inner life and ethics
Cardinal Richelieu's eminence grise ordered tortures and concluded cynical great-power pacts by day, then wrote sublime mystical meditations by night, the same person. Huxley was troubled by this gap; Žižek uses it to argue that inner truth (mystical depth) is precisely where we lie., illustrating inner truth as site of deception,sincere hypocrisy,pagan universe of meaning
Father Joseph, Richelieu's counselor, deliberately prolonged the Thirty Years' War to prevent German unification (Aldous Huxley argues this enabled WWI and WWII), while writing beautiful mystical meditations in the evenings. Huxley's disturbed response led him to turn to Zen, which Žižek then deconstructs with D.T. Suzuki., illustrating fundamental lie,authenticity and ethics,religion and violence