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.

The devotional sense runs deep in Christian contemplative writing. To “abandon” oneself was to stop steering — to release the anxious management of one’s own fate and rest in providence, accepting whatever each moment brought as sent. The seventeenth-century quietist controversy turned on how far this surrender could go before it dissolved the will and the effort that the Church held necessary; Fénelon defended a refined version of it against Bossuet, and Rome eventually censured the more extreme forms. The same impulse appears, differently inflected, in the German mystics’ Gelassenheit — the “releasement” or letting-be that Eckhart and Tauler made central, a giving up of grasping so that the soul becomes empty enough for God to act in it. What unites these is the conviction that the self’s own willing is the obstacle, and that peace lies in setting it down.

The existentialist sense is a deliberate inversion. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his 1945 lecture later published as Existentialism Is a Humanism, borrowed the religious vocabulary and emptied it of its consolation. By abandonment (French délaissement, sometimes rendered “forlornness”) he meant the bare fact that if there is no God, there is no author of human nature and no external source of value — so the human being is “condemned to be free,” responsible for choices that nothing outside the choosing can underwrite. The mystic abandons the self to something; Sartre’s human is abandoned by the thing that was supposed to be there, and finds nothing in its place. The word’s history is part of his point: it remembers the trust it now denies.

The two usages are not merely a pun, and the resemblance is worth weighing rather than collapsing. Both describe a self that has let go of its own foundations — but one lets go into a fullness it trusts is holding it, the other into an emptiness it takes to be all there is. Whether these are opposite responses to the same vertigo, or simply two unrelated experiences wearing one name, is the kind of question the word leaves open. It marks the point at which a person stops underwriting their own existence, and reports nothing about what, if anything, catches them.

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