Abandonment

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Abandonment names two nearly opposite movements that share a word. In the older, religious sense it is something a person performs: the deliberate surrender of self-will, the handing of one’s life over to the care and ordering of God. In the later, existentialist sense it is something done to the person: the condition of finding oneself thrown into existence with no higher authority to guarantee one’s choices, no fixed nature, no excuse. The same term holds both the most trusting and the most desolate readings of the human situation, and the difference between them lies hidden in a single unspoken preposition — whether the self is given over to something, or left behind by it.

A surrender performed: the devotional sense

The devotional sense runs deep in Christian contemplative writing, where to abandon oneself was to stop steering — to release the anxious management of one’s own fate and rest in providence, receiving whatever each moment brings as sent rather than seized. The act presupposes a particular anatomy of the soul: the obstacle to union is taken to be the restless, self-grasping will, and the cure is to set that willing down so that something other than the self can act in its place. This is not passivity for its own sake but a transfer of agency — the creature’s small steering surrendered to a larger ordering it trusts is already at work. The whole architecture turns on free will: abandonment is an act of the will against the will, the one choice whose content is to stop choosing on one’s own behalf.

Sculpture of Meister Eckhart at Bad Wörishofen, Germany — Lothar Spurzem, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0 DE)

The clearest medieval formulation belongs to the Rhineland Dominicans. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328) made Gelassenheit — releasement, letting-be — a load-bearing term, built on the verb lassen, which carries at once the sense of verlassen (to abandon, to leave behind) and überlassen (to hand over, to give into another’s keeping). Both senses operate at once: the soul leaves behind its own grasping precisely in order to give itself over. Eckhart paired this with Abgeschiedenheit, detachment, which he ranked above love, humility, and mercy as the highest of the virtues — the immovable stillness in which the self no longer clings to anything, not even to its own images of God. In that emptied ground of the soul (the Seelengrund or grunt) the “birth of God in the soul” could occur, and the detached person came to live, in Eckhart’s phrase, ohne warum — without a why, acting from the ground rather than for a reward. His teaching drew the attention of the Cologne inquisition; the bull In agro dominico (1329) condemned a series of propositions extracted from his work, while noting that he had submitted before his death.

Eckhart’s Dominican heirs carried the vocabulary into pastoral use. Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361), the Lebemeister or “master of living,” reframed releasement for the cure of souls, insisting that the ground of the soul is God-given by grace rather than a natural possession, and that a peasant in Gelassenheit may stand nearer to God than a religious without it. In Tauler the suffering self is a “school,” and abandonment is less a metaphysical leap than a slow, disciplined letting-go of self-orientation — the Gemüt, the heart’s disposition, turning from its own willing toward the ground where God works. The anonymous Theologia Germanica, a treatise from the same fourteenth-century Rhineland milieu later printed by Martin Luther (1516, 1518), pressed the theme to its sharpest edge: the annihilation of self-will and its replacement by the will of God. This whole current belongs to the wider history of Christian mysticism and shares the grammar of apophatic theology — the soul emptied of its own content so that what exceeds all content may enter.

The devotional sense did not end with the medieval Rhineland or the Quietist censures. A milder, sacramentalized form survived in the French Jesuit tradition, above all in the eighteenth-century teaching gathered under the title Abandon à la providence divine — the doctrine that holiness consists in receiving each present moment as the form God’s will takes for the soul, so that the duty of the instant, however ordinary, becomes the whole of the spiritual task. Here abandonment is domesticated: not the alarming dissolution of the will that Rome had condemned, but a quiet, repeatable consent to circumstance read as divine address. The structure is constant across all these forms — Eckhart’s emptied ground, Tauler’s turned Gemüt, the Theologia Germanica’s annihilated will, the Jesuit consent to the present instant. In each the self treats its own willing as the problem and trust as the solution; in each it lets go into a fullness it takes to be already holding it. The variable is only how complete the letting-go is permitted to be before the Church judges that it has cut the very nerve of striving.

How far surrender may go: the Quietist controversy

The question that haunts the devotional sense is one of measure: how far can the will be surrendered before the surrender dissolves the very will the Church held necessary for the moral and sacramental life? That question came to a head in the seventeenth-century Quietist controversy. The Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos taught a contemplation of pure rest in which the soul, having abandoned its own activity, ceased even to resist temptation or to make distinct acts of devotion; his Spiritual Guide was widely read until Rome condemned sixty-eight of his propositions in the bull Coelestis Pastor (1687) and he died under sentence. In France the controversy reopened around Madame Guyon’s teaching of “pure love” — a love of God so disinterested that it would consent even to its own damnation if such were God’s will — and “holy indifference,” a settled neutrality toward one’s own salvation.

François Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, after the 1713 portrait by Joseph Vivien (Alte Pinakothek) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The dispute then became a duel between two of the age’s great churchmen. François Fénelon (1651–1715), archbishop of Cambrai, defended a refined and qualified version of disinterested love in his Explication des maximes des saints sur la vie intérieure (1697), citing canonized spiritual writers in his support; Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, prosecuted it as a revival of Quietist error that hollowed out hope and effort. Fénelon submitted the book to Rome for judgment. By the brief Cum alias (12 March 1699), Innocent XII condemned twenty-three propositions drawn from it — as the document put it, temerarious, scandalous, and apt to lead the faithful by degrees into errors already censured — though the censure stopped short of declaring the work heretical. Fénelon read the condemnation from his own pulpit and submitted without reserve. What the controversy fixed was a boundary line: the Church affirmed abandonment to God’s will as the heart of the contemplative life, while ruling that no surrender may extend so far as to extinguish hope, abolish petition, or release the soul from striving against sin. The willed letting-go remained orthodox; only its limitless form was condemned.

A condition suffered: the existentialist inversion

The existentialist sense is a deliberate inversion of all of this, and it borrows the devotional vocabulary in order to empty it. Its proximate root is Martin Heidegger’s Geworfenheit, “thrownness” — the bare fact that the human being finds itself already cast into a particular existence, a world and a situation it never chose and cannot get behind. Jean-Paul Sartre took up this motif and renamed it.

Jean-Paul Sartre in 1965 — Dutch National Archives / Anefo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 NL)

In L’existentialisme est un humanisme, the 1945 Paris lecture published the following year and rendered into English by Philip Mairet in 1947, Sartre used délaissement — abandonment, often Englished as “forlornness” — and tied it to a single stark claim: that the word means only that God does not exist, and that one must follow that absence through to the end. If there is no God, there is no author of human nature, no maker who fixed in advance what a human being is for. Existence precedes essence; the human comes into the world undefined and must invent the value of every act with nothing outside the inventing to underwrite it. This is what Sartre meant by saying the human is “condemned to be free” — condemned, because thrown into a freedom not chosen; free, because nothing external can be blamed for what is made of it. Where the mystic’s abandonment is a chosen act with a trusted recipient, Sartre’s is a found condition with no recipient at all: not a giving-over but a being-left.

The relation between atheism and this abandonment is, for Sartre, exact rather than incidental. The contemplatives abandoned the self to fill an absence of self-will with the presence of God; Sartre’s abandonment is the discovery that the place where God was supposed to be is empty, and that the values once thought to issue from there must now be authored by the human being or not exist at all. The word remembers what it now denies. It still carries the grammar of trust — one abandons oneself to — even as Sartre strips away the to and leaves only the bare fact of being abandoned. The vocabulary of the cloister, drained of its recipient, becomes the vocabulary of the absurd.

The existentialist register also reverses the devotional account of where the danger lies. For the contemplatives the peril was an excess of self-will: the grasping ego that would not let go. For Sartre the peril is the opposite — the refusal to own one’s freedom, the flight into “bad faith” by which a person pretends to be determined by a nature, a role, or an external command, as if some author still stood behind the choices. The devotional tradition asks the self to disown its willing and rest in a providence that holds it; Sartre forbids exactly that consolation, since to attribute one’s life to any authority outside the choosing is, on his account, a lie. The two abandonments thus pull in contrary directions even where their language coincides: one seeks release from the burden of being one’s own foundation, the other insists that no release is available and that the burden is the human condition itself. This places the term at the hinge between free will understood as a gift to be surrendered and freedom understood as a sentence that cannot be handed back — and at the boundary where trust in fate or providence gives way to the unconsoled freedom that a thoroughgoing agnosticism or atheism leaves in its place.

A nineteenth-century forerunner stands between the two poles.

Søren Kierkegaard, drawing by Wilhelm Marstrand, 1870 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Søren Kierkegaard, a Christian, had already described the dizziness of freedom as a kind of being-left: the self brought before its own possibilities with no guarantee that any choice is the right one, yet — unlike Sartre — still set before God. In Kierkegaard the vertigo of abandonment is real but provisional, resolved by a leap of faith back into trust; in Sartre the leap is refused on principle, and the vertigo is final. The same phenomenon — a self standing over an abyss of its own freedom — receives a religious reading in the one and an atheist reading in the other, which is precisely why the single word can house both.

Research and scholarship {#research}

The primary text for the existentialist sense is Sartre’s lecture, hosted in the Mairet 1947 English translation at marxists.org; the standard modern English edition is Carol Macomber’s translation (Yale University Press, 2007), with Annie Cohen-Solal’s introduction. The lecture is best read against Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), where facticity and freedom receive their fuller systematic statement, and against Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), the source of the thrownness motif Sartre redeployed; David Farrell Krell’s Basic Writings (1977) and the standard Macquarrie–Robinson translation supply the Heideggerian background.

For the devotional sense, the foundational accounts of the Quietist affair remain the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia entry and, in modern scholarship, Louis Cognet’s Crépuscule des mystiques (1958) on the Bossuet–Fénelon quarrel. The Rhineland background is most authoritatively treated in Bernard McGinn’s The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, 1300–1500 (Crossroad, 2005); Eckhart’s vocabulary of detachment, releasement, and the “ground” is analyzed in Frank Tobin’s Meister Eckhart: Thought and Language (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986) and surveyed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The public-domain English access to the primary Rhineland sources runs through the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century translations — Susanna Winkworth’s Theologia Germanica (1854) and History and Life of … John Tauler (1857), and C. de B. Evans’s translation of Pfeiffer’s Eckhart (1924) — each of which rests on uncritical pre-modern texts and intermixes genuine and spurious sermons, a caveat any serious reading must carry. Eckhart’s own German corpus was critically sorted only in Josef Quint’s Deutsche Werke (from 1936); the genuine Tauler sermons in Ferdinand Vetter’s Die Predigten Taulers (1910).

That a word built for trust could be lifted whole into a philosophy of its absence is the most telling fact about it. Abandonment hides a preposition, and the entire weight of the meaning rests on which one is meant. To abandon oneself to God is the contemplative’s whole life; to be abandoned by the God who was supposed to stand there is Sartre’s whole premise. The act and the condition wear one name, and a reader who hears only the noun cannot tell which one has just been spoken — until the preposition, said or unsaid, decides everything.

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