The Good Soldier Schweik

Huxley depicts the career of Tremblay as an example of what can happen when a person's powerful spiritual energies are channeled in the wrong direction. Huxley praises his early preaching and ministering to the sick and poor, his reflections and writings on a life of prayer through which, Huxley thinks, he came close to sanctity: "'at peace and happy in the conviction that his true vocation had been revealed to him". However, Huxley argues, the influence of Benet of Canfield, led Tremblay to abandon the traditional Christian mystical tradition, whereby the imagination was to be set aside once it had initiated a process of mystical ascent. Instead, Benet's followers developed a way whereby image and will came to impede spiritual enlightenment and "direct mystical experience" was subordinated to a personalised theology.