The Devils of Loudun - Quotes

 The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley

NY:  Perennial Library, 1952

(page 22)   But partisanship is a complex passion which permits those who indulge in it to make the best of both worlds.  Because they do these things for the sake of the group which is, by definition, good and even sacred, they can admire themselves and loathe their neighbors, they can seek power and money, can enjoy the pleasures of aggression and cruelty, not merely without feeling guilty, but with a positive glow of conscious virtue.  Loyalty to their group transforms these pleasant vices into acts of heroism.  Partisans are aware of themselves, not as sinners or criminals, but as altruists and idealists.  And with certain qualifications, this is in fact what they are.  The only trouble is that their altruism is merely egotism at one remove, and that the ideal, for which they are ready in many cases to lay down their lives, is nothing but the rationalization of corporate interests and party passions.

(66)  His career was a demonstration of the fact that, in certain circumstances, crawling is a more effective means of locomotion than walking upright, and that the best crawlers are also the deadliest biters.

(98)  We are born with Original Sin;  but we are also born with Original Virtue - with a capacity for grace, in the language of Western theology, with a “spark,” a “fine point of the soul,” a fragment of unfallen consciousness, surviving from the state of prmal innocence and technically known as the _synteresis_.

(115)  To sins of the will and the imagination kind nature sets no limits.  Avarice and the lust for power are as nearly infinite as anything in this sublunary world can be.  And so is the thing which DH Lawrence called “sex in the head.”  As heroic passion, it is one of the last infirmities of noble mind.  As imagined sensuality, it is one of the first infirmities of the insane mind.  And in either case (being free of the body and the limitations imposed by fatigue, by boredom, by the essentail irrelevance of material happenings in our ideas and fancies), it partakes of the infinite.

(134)  Few people now believe in the Devil;  but very many enjoy behaving as their ancestors behaved when the Fiend was a reality as unquestionable as his Opposite Number.  In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils.  This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge in their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good.  And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism and true religion.

(156-157)  By those who serve him, a great man must be treated as a mixture between a god, a naughty child and a wild beast.  The god must be worshiped, the child amused and bamboozled, and wild beast placated and, when aroused, avoided.  The courtier, who, by an unwelcome suggestion, annoys this insane trinity of superhuman pretension, subhuman ferocity and infantile silliness, is merely asking for trouble.  

(174)  “The soul is immortal, created of nothing, and so infused into the child or embryo in his mother’s womb, six months after conception;  not as the brutes, which are ex traduce (handed on by parent to offspring) and, by dying with them, vanish into nothing.” - Robert Burton

(192)  Those who crusade, not _for_ God in themselves, but _against_ the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began.  By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.

(260)  Every crusader is apt to go mad.  He is haunted by the wickedness which he attributes to his enemies;  it becomes inn some sort a part of him.

(284)  Insofar as they are incarnated minds, subject to physical decay and death, capable of pain and pleasure, driven by craving and abhorrence and oscillating between the desire for self-assertion and the desire for self-transcendence, human beings are faced, at every time and place, with the same problems, are confronted by the same temptations and are permitted by the Order of Things to make the same choice betweenn unregeneracy and enlightenment.  The context changes, but the gist and the meaning are invariable.

(307)  We participate in a tragedy;  at a comedy we only look.  The tragic author feels himself into his personages; and so, from the other side, does the reader or listener.  But in pure comedy there is no identification between creator and literary creature, between spectator and spectacle.  The author looks, judges and records, from the outside;  and from the outside the audience observes what he has recorded, judges as he has judged and , if the comedy is good enough, laughs.  Pure comedy cannot be kept up for very long.

(312)  That the infinite must include the finite and must therefore be totally present at every point of space, every instant of time, seems sufficiently evident. 

(331)  The fundamental human problem is ecological:  men must learn how to live with the cosmos on all its levels, from the material to the spiritual.  As a race, we have to discover how a huge and rapidly increasing population can go on existing satisfactorily on a planet of limited size and possessed of resources, many of which are wasting assets that can never be renewed.  As individuals, we have to find out how to establish a satisfactory relationship with that infinite Mind, from which we habitually imagine ourselves to be isolated.

(350)  For these neo-conservatives [Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany] , mass intoxication was chiefly valuable, henceforward, as a means of heightening their subjects’ suggestibility and so rendering them more docile to the expressions of authoritarian will.