Eros and Abandonment between Caussade and Balthasar

Abstract

Eros and Abandonment between Caussade and Balthasar John-Paul Heil (bio) Eros, Abandonment to Divine Providence What is abandonment? Although they lived almost two centuries apart, the enigmatic French Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675–1751) and the celebrated Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) both grappled with this question. As Caussade puts it in his famous letters on spiritual direction, now collected as the Abandonment to Divine Providence, abandonment is "complete loyalty to God's will" via obedience to "the laws of God and the Church" as well as the fulfillment of "all the duties imposed on us by our way of life" and the loving acceptance of "all that God sends us at each moment of the day"; it is the life of devotion that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph lived to the "sacrament of the present moment."1 It is, for Balthasar, "unconditional self-surrender, being at God's disposal in transcendent openness to His provident will," an "absolute openness, like the fiat of the Mother of God, [that] proves itself in the act of obedience … the pure, naked, undefiled faith which does not want to decide for itself and so does not want to know anything."2 Though at first glance Caussade and Balthasar seem like an odd intellectual pairing, given their writing at a remove of two centuries from one another, Balthasar celebrated Caussade as the simultaneous culmination and surpassing of what he calls the "metaphysics of the saints," a turning-point figure [End Page 73] in the Church's intellectual history, and the most robust articulator of an Ignatian ethic of abandonment that Balthasar himself takes up and champions. Born in southern France, Caussade "certainly displays affinities" for a spirituality "steeped in the tradition of Francis of Sales and [Madame] Guyon,"3 which Balthasar traced as leading to the erring quietism of Fénelon.4 Caussade appears to have garnered very little fame during his life, instead moving around France as a schoolteacher, preacher, spiritual director, and college rector for the Society of Jesus.5 The humility of his life and the sparseness of details surrounding his biography have led some to challenge Caussade's authorship of Abandonment.6 For his part, Balthasar does not cast any doubt on Caussade as author of the letters that make up the treatise, instead focusing on the depth of the work's penetrating insights. In his The Glory of the Lord, vol. 5, Balthasar sees Abandonment as a reorientation of faith as "the way to God … the real presence of revelation," misread by Fénelon through "ontological concepts that deny or paralyze the proper activity of the creature" and "doctrine [that] lacks a Christological emphasis," towards "Biblical revelation."7 The darkness in which the abandoned soul seems to be left is always "the light of the Word of God," which "meets the readiness of the soul" in the "night of faith" in "the act of revelation, the act of nuptial union, the act of communion" (137–38). Balthasar emphasizes Caussade's foundational point, that abandonment is no "abstract idea of indifference" (131), as it was for Fénelon, but rather a concrete taking up with the fullness of one's being a personal relationship with Christ via the imitation of his own life: abandonment is how he and his Holy Family related to the Father. Angela Franks describes Balthasar's account of abandonment as a state of "evangelical poverty" characteristic of the "liquid availability" of "poverty—total self-gift, relinquished freely, flowing into the eternal life for which it was made," an "active readiness" that enables us to "move instantly in response to God's call" and opens for us the path to "the 'eucharistification' of man. As Balthasar says, the Son's '"having" a human nature, which is given away without reserve in [End Page 74] the Eucharist, is therefore nothing other than the earthly representation of the trinitarian poverty, in which everything is always already given away.'"8 Insofar as abandonment is living the self-giving life of Christ, it is living the life of the Trinity. Caussade and Balthasar concurred that abandonment is central to the development of a distinctly Christian metaphysics...