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Dilatato Corde 1:1
January – June, 2011 
Abhishiktananda shortly before his death.
ABHISHIKTANANDA'S UNDERSTANDING OF THE MONK Abstract Henri le Saux, who in India took the name Abhishiktananda, insists that true interreligious dialogue is not discussion about the differences of religious practices or doctrines, but heart-to-heart communication about the experience of God. Contemplatives of different religious traditions are, therefore, not only well suited for dialogue at the level of depth, but spontaneously drawn to it. Abhishiktananda further proposes that the eremitic life is all but a sine qua non for the monastic contemplative and debatably interprets the Rule of Benedict as supportive of this position.
To appreciate Swami Abhishiktananda's understanding of monasticism and his conviction that the monastic vocation is one that is especially suited to interreligious dialogue, special attention should obviously be tgiven to the works in which he explicitly addresses the monastic way of life. These works may be less well knwon than those in which he reflects on the Chrsitian faith with rgards to the spiritual and ilosophical traditions of India. I have identified nine published works in which Abhishiktananda directly treats of monasticism. They are, in chronological order, 1951 1956 1956 1958 1964 1969 1969 1973 1974 As essential as these works are for appreciating Abhishiktananda’s understanding of monasticism and his own monastic life, it is also necessary to consult his spiritual diary and his letters. Selected entries from his diary were edited by Ramon Panikkar, who also provided an introduction and notes, and published as La Montée au fond du coeur. Le Journal intime du moine chrétien-sannyāsī hindou by O.E.I.L (Paris) in 1986. It was then translated into English by David Fleming and James Stuart and published in 1998 by ISPCK in Delhi under the title Ascent to the Depth of the Heart: The spiritual diary(1948-1973) of Swami Abhishiktananda (Dom H. Le Saux). Selected letters of Abhishiktananda have appeared in two works: Henri Le Saux, Lettres d’un sannyasi chrétien à Joseph Lemarié, edited by Joseph Lemarié and Françoise Jaquin and published by Cerf (Paris) in 1999, and James Stuart’s Swāmī Abhishiktānanda: His Life Told through his Letters published by ISPCK (Delhi) in 2000. In his diary and his letters, especially those to his close friends and confidants, Abhishiktananda could say exactly what he thought and felt. For example, writing to his good friend, the Carmelite Sister Térèse de Jésus Lemoine in 1970, he confessed
Already fifteen years earlier he had boldly stated in his diary, “In every fibre of my soul I am a Hindu monk” (Ascent, August 13, 1955, p. 115). In his introduction to the published diary Ramon Pannikar writes that the text contains “some far too unqualified assertions and generalizations and one-sided judgments” and that such statements should therefore be assessed only in the context of the author’s life and of his published work (p. XV). However, I believe that these more personal works may be revelatory of Abhishiktananda’s deepest convictions and feelings. In what he wrote for publication, he would naturally have felt the need to be more objective, more “balanced.” Nowhere in the works he wrote for publication have I found anything approaching his declaration that his monastic ideals go beyond what can be realized within Christianity or that he is, in every fibre of his soul, a Hindu monk. The reason he did not publish such statements, I would guess, is not that he changed his mind. Rather, I believe he judged that it would not be prudent to give public expression to views that could be denounced, misunderstood, or found hurtful. One should remember, moreover, that not all of Abhishiktananda’s letters or the complete spiritual diary have been published. Furthermore, it is somewhat surprising—to me, at least—to find that the index appended to the English translation of the published diary does not include a single reference to “monk” or “monasticism,” even though there are a number of entries in which Abhishiktananda does reflect on the meaning of monasticism and his own monastic vocation. The omission of any reference to monasticism in the index makes me wonder if the editor may have omitted diary entries in which Abhishiktananda offers further reflections on what it means to be a monk. It should also be pointed out that Abhishiktananda did not keep a diary during the years 1950 and 1951, the first years of the Saccidananda Ashram that he and Jules Monchanin founded as the initial step in shaping Christian monasticism according to the ascetical traditions of India. Monastic life is essentially contemplative
The first and longest chapter of An Indian Benedictine Ashram, published in 1951, is entitled “Contemplation,” and opens with the words “Contemplation stands supreme” (pp. pp. 1, 2f ). In his forward to this work, James Mendonça, the Bishop of Trichinopoly who invited Monchanin and Le Saux to India, says
In a 1953 letter to his close friend Canon Joseph Lemarié, Abhishiktananda writes, “Only in solitude does anyone enter the heart of monastic life, because only there he enters ‘within’, and monastic life is essentially a life ‘within’” (Stuart, p. 69). In Ermites du Saccidânanda, published in 1956, he (or is it Monchanin?) writes, If utilitarianism, pragmatism, or Americanism [sic!] should make its way into monasteries, the only recourse left for those who still love their vocation will be to flee to the desert. Even as a juridical entity, monasticism is essentially directed to interior solitude. Solitude is the only thing that makes it fruitful (p. 116). [1] Early in 1961 he writes in his diary, “The monk’s role: to be conscious of the Presence. The priest realizes it sacramentally, the monk mystically, not by work, not by word, not by speculation, but interiorly” (p. 240). In his talk at the All India Seminar in Bangalore in 1969, he refers to “that life of pure contemplation and silence which is the essential characteristic of the monastic tradition.”Ashrams, he says, are “devoted to the monastic and therefore more or less exclusively contemplative life,” which he then goes on to describe as the “purest type of monastic life” (“Monasticism and the Seminar,” pp. 537, 538). In a 1973 letter written to his sister, Marie-Thérèse, herself a Benedictine nun, he says, “It is here that I truly find the meaning of the monastic life. ( . . . ) It is so simple, this mystery of the Within. . . . How complicated I find an organized monastic life; here we have a freedom of the Spirit like the old Eastern monks” (Stuart, p. 325). Finally, in the paper he prepared for the Second Asian Monastic Congress in 1973, the year of his death, he wrote, “Jnana [the word means knowledge or wisdom] aims directly at the ‘mystery’ and takes no notice of its signs and expressions, be they ritual, cultural, mythical, conceptual or even historical. Jnana . . . is par excellence the way of the monk.” While admitting that the spiritual tradition of India includes monks who belong to sects more in the line of bhakti [devotion], and even monks who have chosen the path of seva-karma [service], he concludes his paper by saying, “It seems normal that Christian monks in India should allow the Spirit to lead them though the path of jnana, for nothing could be more consonant with their vocation as witnesses to the Absolute” (“Experience of God in Eastern Religions,” pp. 154, 157). Monastic life is ideally eremitic For Abhishiktananda the answer is clear: Solitude. Even though the Rule of Benedict speaks of cenobites as the “fortissimum genus” of monks, Abhishiktananda insists that the ideal monk—the monk who seriously devotes himself to the contemplative life—is a hermit. He even goes so far as to claim that “the Rule of Saint Benedict, in its enumeration of the various kinds of monks (ch. 1) places the hermits first” (The Further Shore, p. 29). What the Rule in fact says is “Monachorum quattuor esse genera manifestum est. Primum coenobitarum, hoc est monasteriale, militans sub regula vel abate. Deinde secundum genus est anachoritarum. . . .” (It is clear that there are four kinds of monks. First are the cenobites, that is, those who live in a monastery, doing battle under a rule and an abbot. Then in the second place come the anchorites. . . . (RB 1). Although one might argue that when Benedict goes on to describe anchorites as those who “go out well armed from the ranks of the community to the solitary combat of the desert,” he implies that the cenobitic life can be understood a preparation for a “higher” form of monastic life, Abhishiktananda’s statement that the Rule of Saint Benedict, in its enumeration of the various kinds of monks, places the hermits first strikes me as tendentious rather than objective. In fact, the Rule is written precisely for monks who live in community, and do so all their lives. Benedict ends his Rule, it is true, by calling it a “minimam inchoationis regulam” (RB 73), a “minimal rule for beginners.” However, he speaks of the perfection of the monastic life not in terms of a cenobite becoming a solitary, but of a cenobite who attains “loftier heights of doctrine and virtue” (i.e., contemplation??) within a community. For Abhishiktananda, however, the true monk is the hermit, indeed, the wandering sannyāsi, whom the Rule would probably have referred to as a gyrovague, who is said to be even worse than a sarabite—and sarabites have already been referred to the same first chapter as “the most detestable kind of monks”! At least in his published writings, Abhishiktananda does not present monastic community life as conducive to an experiential knowledge of God; in fact, one gets the impression that he regards communal life as something that is to be left behind by those who want to devote their life to the contemplative search for God. For example, in a manuscript entitled Amour et sagesse written for his mother six years before his departure for India, he speaks of the “search for God in contemplation which withdraws monks and virgins from the company even of good people and inspires them with a desire for solitude” (Stuart, p. 9). While he Rule of Benedict, the “holy rule” to which Abhishiktananda said in his 1948 letter to Jules Monchanin he was “deeply attached” (Stuart, p. 20), draws principally on the Egyptian monastic tradition, which emphasizes the relationship of each individual to God via the spiritual father and which holds the hermit in high regard, it is also inspired by the monastic rule of Saint Augustine, which highlights the relation of the brothers to one another. At the very beginning of his Rule Augustine asserts, “The chief motivation for your sharing life together is to live harmoniously in the house and to have one heart and one soul seeking God.” [2] Even though the actual quantity of literary borrowing from Augustine’s rule is rather modest, the qualitative influence of Augustine’s thought on the Rule of Benedict is extremely significant. In fact, one could say that some of the best known and most admired qualities of the Rule of Benedict—its humaneness and concern for fraternal relationships—can be directly attributed to the influence of Augustine. [3] Abhishiktananda’s downgrading of the communal dimension of monastic life is problematic not only because it suggests that a life lived in community and a life given to contemplation are somehow at odds, but also because it calls into question, at least implicitly, the Christian understanding of salvation as a communal reality, characterized by the relational virtues of justice, forgiveness, charity, and peace. According to Abhishiktananda,
I would argue, however, that what the Rule of Benedict proposes as a sign of the eschaton is precisely a community of monks who live by God’s commandments every day, treasure chastity, harbor neither hatred nor jealousy of anyone, do nothing out of envy, do not love quarreling, shun arrogance, respect the elders and love the young, pray for their enemies out of love for Christ, and never lose hope of God’s mercy. As will be evident to anyone familiar with the Rule of Benedict, these qualities are taken from chapter four, “The Tools for Good Works.” The final words of the chapter are significant: “Now the workshop in which we shall diligently execute all these tasks is the enclosure of the monastery and stability in the community.” Why does Abhishiktananda all but ignore the horizontal dimension of monastic life? Was it because he was, by nature and temperament, attracted to a solitary life? Or was it because he was, by nature and temperament, attracted to deep involvement with other people, but intellectually convinced that to be true to his monastic vocation of seeking God, he had to devote himself to solitude, because the way of the hermit was the surest, most ideal way to God? Those who knew Abhishiktananda have often commented on how much he loved being in the company of friends and how animated he could become in his interaction with them. One of those people, Father George Gispert-Sauch SJ, wrote in a letter to me that “The joy he experienced in his relations with others, his sense of humour, his wide correspondence, his need of sharing, and his ecclesial activism in the last years of his life here below may suggest him as ‘naturally’ a man of action and exchange.” One of his closest friends, Murray Rogers, recounted in an interview that on one occasion when Abhishiktananda had come to visit, he suggested that some time be set aside for silence and solitude. Abhishiktananda’s immediate reply was that he didn't come to Jyotiniketan (Rogers’ ashram) for solitude; he came to talk! Although Abhishiktananda devoted extended periods of time to solitude and wrote about the ideal form of monasticism as a life totally given to contemplation and lived in solitude, it is clear he was a fully engaged, indeed a very active, monk during his years in India. Abhishiktananda’s idealization of the eremitic life may also be related to the fact that he found community life at Kergonan and Shantivanam extremely difficult. At Shantivanam the problem was that he had to give so much time and attention to administrative and financial matters, but that does not seem to be the case at Kergonan. In a letter written on September 13, 1955, to his good friend and former confrere and student Joseph Lemarié, he spoke of the “depression and anger” that he often experienced at Kergonan (Lettres . . . à Joseph Lemarié, p. 137). Some months later, on February 5, 1956, he confided to his diary, “Is not this in-quietudo something psychologically much deeper in me, some childhood accident perhaps, manifesting itself in a violent form in my distaste for the monastery and for my present situation?” (p. 143). Commenting on another letter he wrote to Lemarié a decade later in which he said, “. . . it was in my deep dissatisfaction that my desire to come to India was born,” Stuart opines that he was referring to “something much deeper than a reaction to the superficial irritations which are part and parcel of any community life” (p. 13). Whatever the cause of Abhishiktananda’s dissatisfaction with monastic life during his years at Kergonan, it seems clear that he even though he was naturally communicative and loved being with friends, he never found living in community conducive to the “total monasticism” he dreamt of. Whether it was, at least in part, because of his dissatisfaction, even disillusionment, with community life as he found it at Kergonan—or should we say his disillusionment with his own inability to live in community?—or because of his distaste for all the administrative affairs he had to attend to at Shantivanam, or for some deep psychological problem he alludes to, he so idealized the eremitic way of life that he virtually dismissed community life as in any way conducive to a contemplative experience of God. [4] I am aware of a couple indications that Abhishiktananda may have had some misgivings about holding the communal form of monastic life in such low esteem. Fabrice Blée recounts that when he visited the Benedictine nuns at Saint Michel de Kergonan in October 2010, one of the nuns read a letter that Abhishiktananda sent his sister, Marie-Therèse. In this letter, written in 1958, he says,
Writing in his journal on December 30, 1972, Abhishiktananda says
By “diverse spiritual contexts” does he mean contexts other than monasticism, or contexts within monasticism? Probably the former, for in a letter to his sister Marie-Thérèse on March 22, 1973, he says “I have already told you what perfect hermits there are among the Hindus, so much so that the other day I wrote to the organizers of the Monastic Congress of Asia next October to say that is to them far more than to Christian monasteries that we should go to rediscover the spirit of the Desert Fathers” (Stuart, p. 325). Monastic life is naturally dialogic Abhishiktananda recognized that religious renewal in India had always been the work of monks, that is, of people who had given up everything and dedicated themselves to celibacy and total poverty. Indian monks were mendicants who came to an experiential knowledge of God in solitude and silence. Since they were totally unattached, they were able to teach others that the way to the “mystery” contained in the Scriptures and sacred traditions was the way of the “heart” that had been revealed to them (“Le monachisme chrétien aux Indes,” p. 285). [6] For Abhishiktananda, interreligious dialogue meant entering deeply into the Indian way of experiencing the God who is other than but not separate from us. If the monk is essentially a “God seeker” (RB 58) and if God is, as Augustine put it, not only “superior summo meo,” but also “interior intimo meo” (Confessions III, 6, 11), then the search for God must go inward and go deeper. Dialogue, said Abhishiktananda, means “a real desire to learn from the other party” (The Church in India, p. 60) and he was utterly convinced that Christians in general, and Christian monks in particular, had much to learn from the age-old spiritual wisdom of Indian holy men who devoted their lives to coming to an experiential awareness of the God who dwells in the guhā, the cave of the human heart. Abhishiktananda was also convinced that dialogue “must reach the depth, the only possible meeting place” and he believed that encounter in the depth is “an unsought happening as soon as two people longing for God meet one another” (The Church in India, p. 61, 63). It is precisely “in that call arising from the depths of the human heart,” he says,
As Abhishiktananda recognizes, “depth” is the key to a true understanding of the monastic life (indeed of the spiritual life) and interreligious dialogue. If one remains on the surface, concerned primarily with rules, traditions, customs, observances, and doctrinal formulations, discussion and even debate are much more common than heart-to-heart dialogue, even between religious people who want to be open to the beliefs and practices of others. True dialogue is an expression of communion with the other who searches for communion with the Presence in which, in whom, “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). That is why the contemplative, the one who strives always to go deeper, to discover the God who is “interior intimo meo” is the person especially suited for interreligious dialogue, as distinguished from interreligious discussion. Abhishiktananda was convinced that “dialogue . . . should always be, on the side of Christians, something spontaneous, arising just because they are ‘ordained’ by love to the other as a result of their incorporation into Christ” (The Church in India, p. 63). Thus, if one were to ask him whether or not interreligious dialogue was a fitting and proper activity [pace, Swamiji!] for monks, he would very likely have said that the answer was self-evident. Dialogue, he would insist, is the heart-felt, spontaneous, and even urgent exchange that takes place between people for whom nothing is more important than the search for God. Notes [1] This is my translation of « Le jour où l’utilitarisme, le pragmatisme, l’américanisme pénétreraient dans les monastères, le seul recours pour ceux qui aimeraient encore leur vocation serait la fugue au désert. Le monachisme jusqu’en son juridisme est essentiellement ordonné à la solitude au-dedans. Là seulement il est ‘fecond ‘. » [2] Augustine of Hippo and his Monastic Rule, tr. George Lawless, OSA (Oxford: OUP, 1987), p. 81. [3] See “Pre-Benedictine Monasticism in the Western Church” in RB 1980: The Rule of Saint Benedict in Latin and English with Notes, ed. Timothy Fry, O.S.B., et al. (Collegeville MN: The Liturgical Press, 1981), pp. 63f. [4] For an eloquent treatment of the transformative power and contemplative dimension of monastic life lived in community, see Frère Ivo Dujardin’s article “Interreligious Dialogue at Tibhirine” in this issue of Dilatato Corde. [5] My translation of « La perfection, sans y penser, dans les petits et menus détails de ta vie… Là est la paix, là est la joie. Il a fallu que je vienne aux Indes pour comprendre cela. On me l’a répété en mon noviciat, et je n’y croyais pas. Je voulais de belles et hautes idées. Je rêvais du ciel vécu dans une tête dure de Breton. Comme cela le Seigneur a pris les grands moyens et m’a amené ici. Si j’avais été plus docile, ç’aurait été combien plus simple! Ne fais pas comme moi surtout. » Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, International Bulletin, E. 29-30 (2010) 33. [6] My praphrase of « Les grandes figures que avaient été à la tête de tous les renouveaux religieux de l’Inde avaient été des moines, c’est-à-dire des gens qui avaient tout quitté du monde, des joies et des commodité qu’il apporte, qui s’étaient voués au célibat et à la pauvreté totales — celle du mendiant — qui avaient « réalisé » Dieu dans la solitude et le silence et, libres de tout, étaient désormais capables d’enseigner aux autres le chemin du « cœur » qui leur avait été révélé, la voie vers ce « mystère » contenu aux Écritures et aux traditions sacrées. » |
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