Abhishiktananda:The Ongoing Relevance of His Work

When Robert Cardinal McElroy was installed as archbishop of Washington, DC on March 18 of this year, he knew that one of the pastoral issues he was expected to face would be that of cuts in government service taking place in the United States. However, he also emphasized that political matters would not be at the center of his ministry. His main concern was elsewhere: “The drift of young people from the life of the church is, in my view, the overwhelming pastoral problem we face—and the first, second, and third priority.”¹ Cardinal McElroy was there reflecting an issue that has engaged the concern of many church leaders and scholars over the past decades. One example would be the many books by Stephen Bullivant, including Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II.² Another such study is Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization.³

The drift of the young away from the church, as well as a similar if somewhat less noticeable drift on the part of older generations, was also a major concern for the Benedictine monk Henri Le Saux (1910–1973), who had received permission to leave his monastery in Brittany to spend the final twenty-five years of his life in India, where he soon took the Sanskrit name Abhishiktananda (“Bliss of the Anointed One”).⁴ Even though many persons in the West know little about this man, his life and thought have been the focus of several books by and about him. The excellent biography by Shirley du Boulay⁵ is complemented by articles in journals, essays collected in books such as God’s Harp String: The Life and Legacy of the Benedictine Monk Swami Abhishiktananda,⁶ and volumes of Abhishiktananda’s own works, published originally in either French or English and by now translated into various other languages. Some of these other works will be referred to in this article, but its principal source will be the newly revised and updated edition of his letters.⁷ A major value of using such correspondence is that a person will normally express his or her thoughts more freely in letters that were never expected to be published. This updated work about “his life as told through his letters” also has the advantage of containing many letters that had not been available to James Stuart when he published the first volume more than thirty-five years ago. This updated edition, nearly 500 pages long, is “reader friendly” in that passages from the letters are marked by a vertical line running down the left side of the letter, with its source indicated by abbreviations keyed to the twenty-one recipients of the letters. Stuart’s own comments are interspersed between the quoted letters and provide the relevant background for understanding the context in which the letters were originally composed. In the present article, the page numbers of all quotations from this revised and updated volume of the letters will be given in parentheses following the quoted passage.

That Abhishiktananda was concerned about the drift of the young away from the Catholic church is evident from what he wrote in some of his letters. In one sent to his family back in France, he wrote in 1967: “The Church itself is in a serious crisis. We used to give the title of ‘Christian life’ to a certain kind of religious practice which had no influence on life, personal or social. . . . Young people reject religion as it is practiced and presented. They want reality, a true commitment to God” (272). And to the prioress of a Carmelite monastery back in Brittany he wrote in 1972: “How painful it is to see all these young people who come here [to India] in crowds, seeking an ‘inner life’ of which practically no one in the West is able to speak to them. What mankind needs today is a dimension of depth. The monasteries themselves either remain fixed in the Middle Ages or else are becoming secularized” (389).

The purpose of the present article is to reflect on how (or whether) Abhishiktananda’s works might contribute to understanding and even reversing the drifting of many persons away from the Church today. This will first require an overview of the evolution in his own thinking over the course of his lifetime. In doing so, I will not cover many of the details of his biography, for these have been well documented in books like the above-mentioned one by Shirley du Boulay or on the website of the Abhishiktananda Centre for Interreligious Dialogue.⁸

THE EVOLUTION OF LE SAUX’S THINKING OVER HIS LIFETIME

Any concern about the state of the Church was certainly not in the forefront of Henri Le Saux’s mind as he grew up as the oldest child of devout Catholic parents in a small town on the north coast of Brittany. Born on August 30, 1910, and christened Henri Briac Marie, as a child he felt such an attraction to the priesthood that his parents willingly had him enroll in a minor seminary when he was eleven years old, followed five years later by his moving to the major seminary in the city of Rennes. It was here, and apparently through the influence of a fellow seminarian who wished to become a Benedictine, that Henri himself decided to apply to join the monastic community at Sainte Anne de Kergonan on the west coast of Brittany. Having received his archbishop’s permission to transfer, he entered that Benedictine community on his nineteenth birthday. A letter written to a friend two months later evinced the kind of fervor that characterized the rest of his life, for as a postulant at Sainte Anne he spoke of having found “a life perfectly suited to the pursuit of holiness. . . . A monk cannot accept mediocrity; only extremes are appropriate for him” (7). He made final vows and was ordained a priest in 1935, thereafter serving in various positions within the community: librarian, assistant master of ceremonies, and lecturer on the Fathers of the Church for the younger monks. During the Second World War the abbey was requisitioned by German troops, forcing the monks to move to another location. At war’s end, Henri and his confreres were back at Kergonan, where he resumed his work as librarian and was given charge of the studies of the novices. During these years he also began reading works from India, such as Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali and the much older Vedas and Upanishads.

Le Saux’s sense that “only extremes are appropriate” for a monk lay behind his desire for something more than what he found in the abbey at Kergonan, however much he always felt that his monastic training there had been a positive background for all that he later found in India. With his abbot’s permission, he began searching for a way to lead a monastic life in that country. After a number of disappointments, he learned from the bishop of Tiruchirappalli in South India of a French priest who was already living in that diocese. This priest, Jules Monchanin, was delighted at the possibility of having an associate who shared the ideal of what Le Saux called the dream of fashioning “a Christian India, as our elder brothers [in previous centuries] fashioned a Christian Europe” (24). Both men envisaged “not the missionary life as it is commonly understood,” but rather as the way by which they could be witnesses to a life “rooted in the Church and at the same time in the midst of the world,” entirely consecrated to the contemplation of the Blessed Trinity” (17). Arriving at Colombo, Sri Lanka, in mid-August of 1948, Le Saux soon crossed over to South India, made the acquaintance of Fr. Monchanin at his presbytery, and began visiting many parts of Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state. A letter to his family exudes the delight he found in almost everything he experienced: “If you knew how natural everything seems to me here! It is as if I had lived here since my childhood. . . . Here I am in an entirely Indian setting. . . . Nothing European to spoil it” (31). The two priests’ desire to found an ashram of their own meant they would have to experience the life of some Hindu ashrams, for “otherwise we shall always be regarded as foreigners, and no one will have any wish for Christ” (38).

From such letters, it is obvious that at that point in his life, Le Saux was definitely a missionary, even if not as that term is normally understood. One of his letters home expresses his sadness that the Hindus were so misguided in their understanding of Christ and of the faith that Le Saux yearned to bring to them:

Alas, how far these people are from us; they speak of Christ with admiration and read the Bible; but for them Christ is only one of the many manifestations of God—on earth—Krishna, Buddha, Christ, Ramakrishna . . . They cannot understand that it is obligatory to have a definite faith, a fixed creed, and to belong to the Church. The nearer I come to these Hindus, the more I feel them at the same time close to me in their loyal search for God, and far from me in their psychological inability to admit that Christianity is the only authentic means of coming to God.

This attitude was soon to change in a drastic way. Among the Hindu ashrams that he visited was one near the mountain Arunachula, where a community of disciples had gathered around their elderly guru Shri Ramana Maharshi. Le Saux and Monchanin arrived there in January, 1949, and sat among the crowds during the public darshan, that is, the opportunity to behold a holy person in a sacred place. His first impression was disappointing, for the holy man “seemed so natural, so ‘ordinary,’ a kindly grandfather, shrewd and serene, very like my own. . . . I did not know what to make of him.”⁹ At that time, what had impressed Le Saux most was the profound concentration of some of the devotees and their “spell-binding” Vedic chants sung every morning and evening. But one of the members of the ashram’s inner circle, an English woman named Ethel Merstone, told him bluntly that he ought to be more receptive, more open before the one she considered her spiritual master. Perhaps by taking that advice to heart, he did soon find something extraordinary in Ramana Maharshi, who now seemed to be more than the sage of that particular ashram or mountain; rather, “it was the unique Sage of the eternal India that appeared to me.”¹⁰ In subsequent days he found that his nightly dreams were all about that sage, calling him to incorporate these powerful new experiences into his previous “mental structures,” his traditional understanding and expression of the Christian faith. No longer did he retain the desire to help fashion “a Christian India.” Now, and for many years thereafter, he accepted the “fulfillment theology” that recognized the positive value in another religion but saw it converging in the fullness of the Christian faith. Nowhere did he express this new attitude more clearly than in a letter addressed to his Breton family shortly before Christmas in 1950: “It is marvelous to be able to share the life of Hindus in this way. Most valuable experience for trying to discover by what path they will come from their Hinduism, from Shiva and Krishna to Christ” (60).

Le Saux now experienced that by Ramana Maharshi’s totally non-dual Advaita one is able to “plunge into oneself, at one’s own greatest depth” and so “be lost in the aham [the “I”; the pure inner Self] of the divine Atman . . . and feel all beings as myself.”¹¹ For the next two decades, close to the end of his life on earth, Abhishiktananda endeavored to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable truths: that of Advaita on the one hand and Christian Trinitarian doctrine on the other. This attempt was anguishing because, as he himself recognized, there seemed to be no way to do so within the framework of fulfillment theology, and yet his faithful adherence to all he had assumed about his faith ever since childhood seemed to require such a theology.

He frequently expressed his frustration by criticizing the degree to which he felt the Church was caught up in the “names and forms” (the namarupa) of its own creeds and practices, even as at the very same time he himself felt a lifelong attachment to them. His letters during these years convey the inner conflict, the feeling of being somewhat trapped by a Church whose teachings had reflected too much of their early influence from Greek thought. In a letter to his longtime priest friend Canon Joseph Lemarié, he expressed his anguish: “And how to explain to the Greeks—which is what Christians are—that God, the essential Mind, has nothing in common with anything that we can conceive of thought or intellect at the human, or even the angelic, level? You can guess the profound conflict of these two weeks [at the ashram of a Hindu guru, Shri Gnanananda]. I shall try to write about it to a very limited circle of those who could understand it” (124). As for publishing anything for a wider public, that required the approval of censors back in France, and such approval was often not forthcoming. The text of what he always considered his most creative work, Guhantara, was severely condemned by a French censor, at which Le Saux wrote in his diary in deep distress: “Then I shall give up writing. . . . Slaughtered by Fr. Bayart. By regarding me as not being a Christian, they will end up by making me so. Agony, agony.”¹²

All this is not to say, however, that he did not find similar issues with namarupa in other religions. For all that he valued in Hindu Vedanta, he admitted that its formulations were frequently confusing. In a long letter to Marc Chaduc, a young Frenchman who had become a devoted student or disciple of Abhishiktananda in the final two years of the latter’s life, he admitted that those formulations could be just as confining or confusing as those of the Christian religion. Both traditions relied too much on formulaic knowledge, gnosis, leading him to say that “we must throw out this gnosis and rediscover the freshness of the experience of Jesus, freeing ourselves also from our Vedantic formulations—which are just as limiting as those of the Jews and Greeks” (396). A few days later he wrote another letter to Marc Chaduc in which he went further and critiqued all religions for their reliance on “names and forms”:

When (religions) are too close, like the Muslim, the Jewish and the Christian, we look for common denominators. But when the fancy takes us, we can equally well make an eclectic Hindu-Christian system. . . . Then we realize that on the level of the namarupa no comparison is valid. (Religions are) grandiose dream-worlds. But be careful not to call them dreams from the point of view of a dreamer. . . . The man who is awake marvels at the dream; in it he grasps the symbolism of the mystery. . . . The only mistake is to want to absolutize each symbol.

For Abhishiktananda there was, therefore, a genuine value in the names and forms, the namarupa, of each religion, provided only that one keep in mind that there are what he sometimes called “two mental states,” both valid in their own way but mutually incommensurable. This position was clearly stated in a letter to his disciple Marc Chaduc in the following words:

As you rightly say, and as I have often thought myself, if Jesus said “Thou” to God and called him his Father, I have no right to look down on myself or anyone else who likewise says “Thou” to God. There may be days or periods when no “Thou” to God can pass my lips, but that is quite normal, and there is no need to be worried about it. They are two mental states, each of them seeking desperately to express the unique cid [awareness] of sat [reality]. And that freedom is what we have to insist on. But this freedom cannot be defined by Canon Law.

During this time when Abhishiktananda came more and more to recognize the subservient role of names, concepts, and ideas, he also became increasingly able to welcome the approach of death. The starkest sign of this approach came when he was literally felled to the sidewalk by a heart attack while in the city of Rishikesh on July 14, 1973. This was for him actually the culmination of a lifelong quest. Whereas some persons might be despondent at the approach of death, his reaction was totally the contrary. To his sister back in France he wrote: “It was a marvelous experience. The discovery that the Awakening has nothing to do with any situation, even so-called life and so-called death; one is awake, and that is all. While I was waiting on the sidewalk, on the frontier of the two worlds, I was magnificently calm, for I AM, no matter in what world! I have found the Grail! and this extra lease of life—for such it is—can only be used for living and sharing this discovery” (429).

Gratitude and praise were the sentiments in which he expressed himself most frequently during the following seven weeks, right up to the time of his death of a further heart attack on December 7. For all the anguish he had felt at times, everything seems to have come together at the end, and in a remarkably simple way. Never at all regretting his coming to India in the first place, he wrote to his friend Raimundo Panikkar on June 25, 1973: “What a blessing to have ventured on this step, even though I could not know then what was awaiting me here. What awaited me was this marvelous discovery that ‘aham asi’ [I am]—so simple, and so marvelous!” (419).

It was this same simplicity that he had come to relish in his Christian faith, the awareness of the mystery of the divine Presence everywhere and at all times, but more evident in the simple things of life than in the namarupa of ceremonies and doctrines. With special clarity he expressed this realization in a letter to a housewife in Bombay who had assisted in translating one of his works from French into English. To her he wrote: “Joy to you, to your husband, to your children. May it shed its rays on all! And don’t worry about those who love the esoteric, who run around to ashrams and ‘saints.’ The discovery of the mystery is so much simpler than that. It is right beside you, in the opening of a flower, the song of a bird, the smile of a child!” (387).

WHAT ABHISHIKTANANDA’S THOUGHT MAY SAY ABOUT THE STATE OF THE CHURCH TODAY

While it may be fascinating to trace the evolution in Abhishiktananda’s thinking during his two-and-a-half decades in India, the more important question is whether this has anything significant to say with regard to the kind of issue that Cardinal McElroy addressed at the beginning of his tenure as archbishop of Washington, DC—or more broadly, the issue of declining membership in churches and other houses of worship in many parts of the world today. There is no simple answer to this question. I will conclude this article by noting what seem to be both positive and negative aspects of Abhishiktananda’s thought in this regard.

On the positive side, most religious persons would surely affirm his emphasis on the divine Presence in everyone and everything. In a letter to Marc Chaduc he complained that “the world is dying from lack of depth, of roots! (378), and that “the salvation of the Church and of the world does not lie in extraordinary apocalyptic situations, but in the simple deepening of the sense of the intimate Presence of God. This I know, and I burn to make it known, to communicate this inward burning which comes from the nearness—ultimately, a felt nearness—of God. Not by missions, not by words, not by visible forms—only an irrepressible, burning and transforming Presence; and this communication is given directly from spirit to spirit, in the silence of the Spirit” (374). Those who experience this “transforming Presence” will manifest it not only in the way they pray or worship but also in the way they treat other persons. It is significant that Abhishiktananda, who had spent many months in solitude in mountain caves, taught that if you “read the end of Matthew 25 [that is, the verses about meeting Christ in the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, and the imprisoned], you will see what religion primarily consists of!” (317). He himself lived this to the best of his ability. Although he relied primarily on donations and Mass stipends simply to survive and therefore often had to say no to requests to give lectures in various parts of the country because he could not afford to travel, he nevertheless continued to give whatever meager financial assistance he could to a poor family in Tamil Nadu.

Also on the positive side is his recognition that there is true holiness outside the visible borders of the Church, a truth especially taught since the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church to non-Christian Religions (Nostra aetate). To his friend Joseph Lemarié he wrote: “One fine day we shall have to admit that holiness . . . is found just as often outside [the Church] as within, and that our Christian communities . . . are far from being exemplary” (155). Similarly, to a fellow Breton who had moved to New York he lamented: “What Pharisees we Catholics often are, and how the Lord sometimes delights in making us aware that Love (the essential thing) is sometimes found in greater measure outside the Church than within it” (164). A corollary of this, of course, is that there are various paths to the saving awareness of God’s presence. To a Swiss friend he admitted that he knew little of the Islamic movement of Sufism, since for him “the way of the Upanishads is enough. But [by] whatever path you come to it, it is the awareness of this Presence which must be reached. And when that is found, then you are free and need nothing more” (309).

As was noted earlier, at various times Abhishiktananda did not get permission from censors in France to publish one or another of his works. This was because in several respects his thinking went well beyond traditional ways of Catholic thought. Whether one calls these “negative” or simply “questionable,” they will make some readers of his works question their value for stopping or even reversing any drifting away from the Church or from religious practice in general. Having noted two positive aspects of Abhishiktananda’s thoughts, I will conclude with two that will likely raise eyebrows.

First, even though Abhishiktananda revered the person and teaching of Jesus right up to the end of his life in 1973, he came to be reluctant to speak of Jesus as a totally unique manifestation of God. This reluctance appears at various places in his writings, but perhaps nowhere as clearly as in a letter that he wrote early in 1971 to Sara Grant, a Sister of the Sacred Heart then teaching at Sophia College in Bombay. He wrote:

From the Christian point of view, of course, Christ is the Unique—it is through him that we see all the theophanies. He is the End of them, their Pleroma. . . . Yes, why then call him only Jesus of Nazareth? Why say that it is Jesus of Nazareth whom others unknowingly call Shiva or Krishna? and not rather say that Jesus is the theophany for us, Bible-believers, of that unnamable mystery of the Manifestation, always tending beyond itself, since Brahman transcends all its/his manifestations? . . . I can only feel questions now. Yet we have to try to discover at least an angle through which a path may open.

Another aspect of Abhishiktananda’s thought angle that will surely appear questionable to many, if not downright pessimistic, is his thinking about the demise of all religions. We have already seen his sense that the various creeds and practices, the concepts and ideas that may generically be called namarupa, tend in all religions to become absolutized, to become “the last word,” without genuine recognition that they are on a different level from the experience of the divine Presence. In June of 1972 he wrote to Marc Chaduc: “What is horrifying in theology and Canon Law is the treatment of namarupa as absolutes, whereas they are a game, lila, the sparkle of maya. . . . It is from the very inside that we play the game—without judging—and suck from the full bottle of the Mass and the other sacraments! But it is very clear that this is incomprehensible to the men of the System” (381). But in that same letter he was just as critical of Vedantin philosophers: It is “precisely the greatness of the Upanishads” that “Dialectic has not yet dried up intuition . . . Then came the philosophers and dissected the Brahman-Atman (Shankara and Co.)—though he is one-without-a-second, and in his manifestation is just himself.” Despite the fact that Abhishiktananda did not know other religious traditions nearly as well as he knew Christianity and Hinduism, he was convinced that this tendency to absolutize creeds and doctrines was inflicting deadly harm on all religions, to the point that he once wrote to Canon Lemarié: “Meditation on the Upanishads makes me ever more keenly aware of the transformation through which the Church, and indeed all religions, must pass. The age of religions . . . has passed. . . . So much for all the efforts at renewing the Church (and equally, Hinduism), when seen from the height of these Himalayas!” (382).

If nothing else, these collected letters of Abhishiktananda confront the reader with the stark question of deciding to what extent and in what respects he may have been right. 

Notes

1. Archbishop Robert McElroy, quoted by E. J. Dionne, Jr., “The Vatican’s Man in Washington,” Washington Post, March 23, 2025.

2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

3. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2013.

4. In this article I will refer to him as Henri Le Saux up to the time in the early 1950s when he began using the Sanskrit name Abhishiktananda.

5. The Cave of the Heart: The Life of Swami Abhishiktananda (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005).

6. Edited by William Skudlarek, O.S.B. (New York: Lantern Books, 2010).

7. James D. M. Stuart, Swami Abhishiktananda: His Life Told through His Letters, revised and updated by Swami Atmananda Udasin (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish, 2025).

8. See https://abhishiktananda.org.in/html/life-of-swami-abhishiktananda.php.

9. Abhishiktananda, The Secret of Arunachala: A Christian Hermit on Shiva’s Holy Mountain, trans. James Stuart, 2nd ed. (Delhi: ISPCK, 1997), 6.

10. Abhishiktananda, Secret of Arunachala, 9.

11. Abhishiktananda, Ascent to the Depth of the Heart: The Spiritual Diary (1948–1973) of Swami Abhishiktananda, trans. David Fleming and James Stuart (Delhi: ISPCK, 1998), entry for May 4, 1952.

12. Abhishiktananda, Ascent, entry for Dec. 30, 1954.