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

4. Loving Surrender: Insight, Drama, and Ecstasy

142 Loving Surrender: Insight, Drama, and Ecstasy Chapter 4 Loving Surrender Insight, Drama, and Ecstasy I have been wandering about this world from time without beginning, doing what does not please You, my God. From this day forward, I must do what pleases You, and I must cease what displeases You. But my hands are empty, I cannot attain You, my God; I see that You alone are the way. You must be my way! Hereafter , in the removal of what does not please You or in the attainment of what pleases You—can anything be a burden to me? De2ika, Essence But mark, I pray you, Theotimus, that even as our Savior, after he had made his prayer of resignation in the garden of Olives, and after he was taken, left himself to be handled and dragged about at the will of them that crucified him, by an admirable surrender made of his body and life into their hands, so did he resign up his soul and will by a most perfect indifference into his Eternal Father’s hands. For when he cries out: My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? this was to let us understand the reality of the anguish and bitternesses of his soul, and not to detract from the state of most holy indifference in which he was. This he showed very soon afterwards, concluding all his life and his passion with those incomparable words: Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit. De Sales, Treatise Everything up to now has been preparatory for the subject matter taken up in this chapter, for here we finally encounter the major theme of each text: loving surrender as abandonment into the hands of the God of our Lord Jesus Christ and as acknowledging one’s helplessness and taking refuge at the feet of the divine couple, Narayana with Sri. In light of the preceding chapters’ reflections on De2ika’s and de Sales’ conception of their reasoning and writing (chapter 2) and several key strategies of that writing (chapter 3), we can now examine how they present the rationale, value, and practice of loving surrender to help readers become people who can detach themselves even from the religious resources that have benefited them along the way—as devout practitioners, respected members of society, persons with every intellectual and spiritual resource at hand, even as literate readers—and actually make the choice for loving surrender . Though De2ika and de Sales dealt with very different communities and likely readers, both idealize the person who has nothing, who has lost everything other than God. Rather than simply report on it, both the Essence and the Treatise seek to catalyze and enhance this dependent yet free way of life. Let us see then how they describe and promote loving surrender, and put their discerning readers in the liminal situation where loving surrender is now a real option. I. The Theological Presuppositions of Self-Abandonment Although spiritual insight and practice are the authors’ main concern, de Sales and De2ika are also alert to the rational and theological underpinnings of loving surrender as a radical yet intelligible religious goal. So it is important to understand something about the intellectual context for loving surrender that is presupposed in the Treatise and Essence. Both authors see keenly the enormity of the obstacles to self-improvement and self-liberation, and both feel the weight of the work that would be required were humans to see it as their own task to make themselves into new beings. Accordingly, they agree that the displacement of personal agency and responsibility, leading to loving surrender into God’s hands, is the easier and better way even for humans capable of other worthy choices. But for this to work, proper dispositions regarding grace and human freedom must first be in place. 1. De Sales: Freely Choosing to Let God Be All in All De Sales’ early crisis regarding predestination—if grace and salvation are matters of God’s sovereign and mysterious freedom, we cannot The Theological Presuppositions of Self-Abandonment 143 144 Loving Surrender: Insight, Drama, and Ecstasy take it for granted that we ourselves are saved, and we cannot really change our situation in God’s eyes1—is not a theme of the Treatise, but it may be presumed to influence his representation of love as the highest and truly liberative human act and experience, and his...