I first read Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun while riding a bus to Ithaca, N.Y. during a high school music trip when I was 15. Returning to the book more than 25 years later, I have made several discoveries. The first, and least important, is that I must have been such a nerd to read books like this in plain view of my peers! The second, and not surprising, is how much of it I did not understand. Huxley dips into the deep end of the pool, letting his account of a minor incident in a 17th century Ursuline convent unfold against a backdrop of broader political, religious and intellectual movements.
At 15, I had only the vaguest notion who Louis XIV was, assumed that Huguenot was a flavour of ice cream, and knew only enough about René Descartes to curse him in math class. And I am quite certain that my eyes glazed over when I first encountered this passage: “In the current translations of the Lord’s Prayer we ask to be delivered from evil. But is it certain that apo tou ponerou is neuter rather than masculine?” (p. 170) (Apo tou ponerou is transliterated Greek: if masculine, then it says “from the evil person” (i.e. the devil); but if neuter, then it says “from the evil thing” (i.e. evil generally). There is no way to determine for certainty which is correct. The NT Koine is full of such exegetical ambiguities which English translations fail to capture.) It is reassuring to recognize that, now and again, like mud flung at a wall, some of my education sticks.
The third discovery—far more subtle than whether or not I understood what Huxley was writing about—is how sensitive I have become to the intellectual and cultural tradition in which the author formulates and communicates his ideas. At 15, it could not have occurred to me to ask whether Huxley was writing from the world view of a modern or post-modern thinker. At 15, I was taking music history courses at the conservatory, and had only just encountered the idea of Romanticism. I hadn’t the slightest idea how Romanticism is connected to what we now describe as modern. As I read Huxley today, I recognize how far my sensibilities have strayed from those of a man who was roughly a contemporary of my grandfather. The gulf between our respective ways of apprehending the world comes to light by comparing Huxley to a post-modern writer who has treated similar material—Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization.
Huxley tells the story of a secular priest, Urbain Grandier, handsome, well-spoken, a bit of a political animal, who engaged in one dalliance too many when he impregnated a young woman of quality whose father happened to be the local prosecutor. The father assembled an ever-growing cabal of Grandier’s enemies who were bent upon the securing the priest’s ruin, but the man had proven to be adept at avoiding both legal and political traps. And then an extraordinary opportunity presented itself. A small group of Ursuline nuns, and most notably their prioress, exhibited symptoms of demonic possession and claimed that it was Grandier who had been the agent of these dark forces. In fact, it appears that Grandier had maintained no contact with the nuns, and had pointedly refused their (written) request to become their confessor. Huxley presents the events through original documentation strung together with intermittent psychosexual analysis. After considerable maneuvering, the cabal finally brought Grandier to trial, confirmed that he was responsible for the demonic possession, and was allowed first to put the question (excruciating torture) and then to burn the priest at the stake.
Huxley’s approach is remarkably similar to Foucault’s. He takes great pains to explore events as contemporaneous documents present them. Then he engages in a kind of deconstruction. How is it possible, he wonders, that all the players in this cruel drama could openly acknowledge, as post-Enlightenment believers, that Grandier’s possession was not “real,” yet at the same time believe absolutely in the righteousness of their cause? The intersection between Huxley and Foucault occurs near the end when Huxley considers of the fate of Jean-Joseph Surin, the principal exorcist and confessor to the Ursuline prioress. Following the events of Loudun, and for a period of nearly 20 years, Surin lost the power of speech, including even the power to communicate through writing. Because he was a priest of considerable repute, he was not consigned to the public madhouse; nevertheless his confrères subjected him to severe derision and abuse. This is the terrain which Foucault explores in his book: the description, diagnosis and treatment of the mentally ill in early modern France.
While both authors engage in a kind of deconstruction, there is a difference: Huxley is not content merely to leave the broken shards in a heap; he feels compelled to reconstruct them into something coherent. The results of this impulse to coherence are frequent incursions of idiosyncratic commentary, and these sound a discordant tone to the ear of the 21st century reader. It is not simply the fact of incursions, but their tone, which jangles, for each of Huxley’s proposals is advanced with a certainty which leaves one shaking one’s head. And so he holds forth with an absolute confidence on the principles of ontology and spirituality (p. 86), the historical critical theory (p. 253), the literary theory (p. 273), and, not surprising given Huxley’s early essay “The Doors of Perception,” the theory of self-transcendence which inspired (& helped to rationalize) the drug culture of the 1960’s (p. 71). This provides the foundation for a surprising trinitarian theology which loosely adapts mystical notions found in Buddhism and Hinduism to the Christian apprehension of God. It is difficult not to snicker and dismiss the whole thing as the speculative ramblings of an disillusioned academic who spent too much time dropping acid with his students.
It is difficult for me not to curse Huxley as an irresponsible old fart hawking damaged goods. It may well be legitimate to believe that one must rebuild what one has torn down. Huxley exposes the institutions of the 17th century church as instruments of evil in the world. He exposes the sane as incorrigibly mad and the mad as sorely abused. The obvious reason for presenting history, even history so perverse as this, is that it leverages opportunities to learn. We witness abuses within the church nearly 400 years ago, and then we draw comparisons to the church in today’s world and ask: has anything changed? Foucault might say that change is impossible because the structures for self-analysis (most notably our syntax) give us no more access to insight than our ancestors enjoyed. And so he might leave us to despair. But Huxley believes in the possibility of self-transcendence. There is a clarity of vision available to us if we guard against activities which offer, not so much self-transcendence as escape. Huxley’s view is hopeful. However, he embeds his message in such goobledy-gook! And so, as we try to take a considered view of the progression of ideas during the latter half of the 20th century, we see Huxley’s sloppiness as a broad invitation to later thinkers, like Foucault, to deliver a harsh corrective. Foucault obliges with a systematic ferocity which leaves us standing in ashes.