Beyond Compare: St. Francis de Sales and Sri Vedanta Desika on Loving Surrender to God (review)

Francis X. Clooney continues his compelling engagement in inter-religious encounter with this latest project, an intensification and expansion of what seems to be among his deepest professional and spiritual sensibilities. A work that combines profound erudition and deep passion, Beyond Compare really is a mystical treatise emerging out of the intensity of Clooney’s own apparent openness to the divine, formed in decisive ways by his Jesuit training and shaped further by his empathetic and serious study of great Hindu theologians and devotional poets. In one sense, the book could be read as a highly cerebral study of two great spiritual writers from worlds that in some ways could not be further apart: the post-Reformation Europe of St. Francis de Sales and the Hindu community of medieval South India led by the brilliant Sri Vaishnava theologian Vedanta Desika. But to limit the book to an intellectual enquiry alone is to miss its point altogether. Beyond Compare is not only a systematic discussion of loving surrender in two different texts and traditions, it is really a direct encounter with loving surrender as an existential possibility. This provocative trajectory means that Clooney’s work does indeed go beyond the usual rubrics and objectives of contemporary scholarship, certainly in South Asian studies and perhaps even in theology, and instead becomes something almost startling in its freshness and potential. Beyond Compare, at root, is a work of profound spirituality, and, given the contemporary context of pluralism and inter-faith dialogue, has the potential to become a spiritual classic.

The book is grounded by a rigorous and systematic analysis of two key texts, one by the Catholic de Sales, the other by the Hindu Desika. As an intellectual investigation, the book is dense, and because so, perhaps may be less accessible to a broad audience of readers. This may be its most serious limitation. There are very few scholars, let alone lay readers, who share Clooney’s conceptual and linguistic skills, whose career has nimbly crossed academic disciplines and cultural boundaries with consummate grace and skill. On the other hand, as Clooney himself notes, a central point in gaining expertise in any field is precisely to make available that training and its fruitfulness in ways that benefit others. In any case, readers, regardless of their professional training, will profit from the Clooney’s considerable gifts and his use of them in this book. In the end, Beyond Compare makes both lucid and accessible the awareness of and prospects for loving surrender to God found in the work of de Sales and Desika.

However, while the book is clearly the product of uncommon intellectual and linguistic skill, it is hardly limited to conceptual analysis and abstraction. On the contrary, Clooney seems almost driven to investigate precisely how de Sales and Desika, operating from their respective traditions, each use the world of the written word to articulate, elucidate, and in the end call forth loving surrender to God. Writers, of course, typically engage topics they wish to probe, explore, and internalize, and in doing so are themselves changed, certainly intellectually, but also, potentially, affectively and ethically. Clooney’s study here seems at one level to be his own intimate and intense encounter with the prospects and possibility of loving surrender, along with all such surrender promises and intimates. He directly adverts to this personal sensibility early in the book, though perhaps more as a history of or launching point for the project. However, the entire study has the feel of Clooney carefully exploring and opening to loving surrender himself, not just as an intellectual exercise but as a dynamic and living spiritual possibility. In any case, all close readers of the book, regardless of faith orientation, will benefit from this rigorous analysis, owing to Clooney’s considerable intellectual acumen. However, those sharing certain presuppositions of Clooney (and of de Sales and Desika) will gain something...