What interests Montherlant in Le Maître de Santiago is not the hero's struggle or relationship with God but the inner mechanism of the psychological phenomenon of faith, that phenomenon combined with intransigence, and the ambiguity of abnegation and pride…. [Montherlant] at no time treats the supernatural as such but describes an emotional and intellectual attitude toward it.

Another of Montherlant's concerns … is that of "the imitation of life." By that he means that no rule of composition, no pre-established principle of what a dramatic character must be, should turn the playwright away from the faithful reproduction of psychological flux, its surprises, even its incoherence…. For Montherlant man is essentially a psychological mechanism whose workings do not follow a logical development. He can be described in terms of classical psychological categories …; he is made up of contradictions; he surprises others and surprises himself. And the objective of theatre...