Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics is a book by Aldous Huxley published in 1941.

It is a biography of François Leclerc du Tremblay, the French monk who served as advisor to Cardinal de Richelieu and was referred to by others as l'éminence grise.

"[1] Huxley depicts the career of Tremblay as an example of what can happen when a person's powerful spiritual energies are channelled 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" (p.86).

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.