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Passionate Comparison: The Intensification of Affect in Interreligious Reading of Hindu and Christian Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2006

Francis X. Clooney
Francis X. Clooney
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
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Extract

How do we learn from religious traditions other than our own? How are we to assess what happens when that learning leads to affirmation and empathy, and thereafter affects how one lives one's life? We can wonder whether there is coherence in what we learn, what we think, how we feel, and how we choose to act. Optimism is not necessarily justified since it may be that due to the strictures of logic and religious commitment, religious reasoning and affective religious engagement diverge and even work at cross purposes. What is obviously and powerfully felt may not translate into explanations that observers, including theologians and scholars of religion, can understand or affirm. Conversely, the emotionally engaged practitioner who learns, feels, and acts in accord with what is learned across religious boundaries may not know what to say about this engagement, and often may not have mastered the appropriate technical language by which to explain and justify complex and extraordinary emotional engagements.

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ARTICLES
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Harvard Theological Review , Volume 98 , Issue 4 , October 2005, pp. 367 - 390
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© 2005 Cambridge University Press

How do we learn from religious traditions other than our own? How are we to assess what happens when that learning leads to affirmation and empathy, and thereafter affects how one lives one's life? We can wonder whether there is coherence in what we learn, what we think, how we feel, and how we choose to act. Optimism is not necessarily justified since it may be that due to the strictures of logic and religious commitment, religious reasoning and affective religious engagement diverge and even work at cross purposes. What is obviously and powerfully felt may not translate into explanations that observers, including theologians and scholars of religion, can understand or affirm. Conversely, the emotionally engaged practitioner who learns, feels, and acts in accord with what is learned across religious boundaries may not know what to say about this engagement, and often may not have mastered the appropriate technical language by which to explain and justify complex and extraordinary emotional engagements.

Scholars who are attentive comparativists may feel the tension with particular force. They may readily admit that there are boundaries dividing religions, boundaries that can be defended with good reasons, on intellectual grounds and for the sake of the well-being of a religious community as a whole. But they may also recognize that many people, themselves included, are already engaged in closer, more intensely configured exchanges to which settled meanings cannot be easily assigned or denied. Properly or not, such people have crossed religious boundaries so as to form affective attachments that are intelligent, liable to affirmation, and provocative of changes in their way of living. This affective connection rooted in practice is enormously important and convincing, even if in theory the comparative process is flawed, the learning incomplete, and the consequences illogical and unwarranted. Despite and because of such complexities, reflecting on this phenomenon may help us to develop richer and more adequate theologies about the intellectual and emotional dimensions of interreligious exchange, and about what is to be gained from actual comparative study.1

In these first paragraphs, I have already made use of a variety of terms referring to experience: affect, emotion, experience, passion. While I am not prepared to define and use any exclusive meanings in this essay, I am willing to borrow the helpful distinctions made by Charles Altieri at the beginning of The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). Altieri (p. 2) distinguishes “affect” into four categories: “feelings” (“elemental affective states characterized by an imaginative engagement in the immediate processes of sensation”); “moods” (“modes of feeling where the sense of subjectivity becomes diffuse and sensation merges into something close to atmosphere …”); “emotions” (“affects involving the construction of attitudes that typically establish a particular cause and so situate the agent within a narrative and generate some kind of action or identification”); and “passions” (“emotions within which we project significant stakes for the identity that they make possible”). I am particularly interested in “emotion” and “passion” in interreligious exchange, and will use these terms, along with the general term “affect,” to indicate the experience generated within religious traditions and across religious boundaries.

While this topic may be approached from a variety of angles, in the following pages I am interested in the learning and possible affective engagement that occur in the process of reading religious texts in one's own tradition, but then too, also in a tradition one approaches from outside. The appropriation of insights and desirable affective states from other religious traditions can be noticed and analyzed most expeditiously by way of careful attention to texts constituted not merely as depositories of information available for use in more theoretical discussions of culture and religion, but read as literary, rhetorical, and religious wholes that engage and change their readers. Texts are sites wherein intentional, integral transformation is plotted and promoted in a coherent way. Skilled authors compose in such a way as to transform their intended, attentive readers, to bring their lives into conformity with the realities and values their texts describe. Step by step, such texts draw the well-disposed person into a religious reading that is richly multidimensional and productive of affects irreducible to reasons offered in justification. Religious writing itself becomes the locus for further theological reflection: if openings for spiritual commitment and practice are written into a text, and if the text is read across religious boundaries to good effect, then intellectual and spiritual formation may be deepening and intensifying, as it were, line by line. Descriptions of such an experience may be difficult to articulate conceptually, being outside the purview of the typical theorizations of interreligious dialogue and exchange.

The dynamics of religious and interreligious affect and reading are best explored by way of particular examples. This essay is devoted largely to one particular case—the dynamics of reading a particular Hindu treatise that argues systemati-cally but also in terms of psychological analysis and rhetorical appeal. In the first section below, I introduce four chapters of a medieval Hindu spiritual classic, the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra, in order to see how this medieval Hindu author composes his text so as to instruct but also encourage and even arouse his reader to a particular and especially intense kind of religious practice—surrendering to the divine couple Śrī Lakṣmī and Nārāya

a.

2

Throughout, Vedānta Deśika uses a variety of terms to indicate this perfect religious act, most importantly śara

ā-gati (“going to refuge”), prapatti (“coming near”), and bhāranyāsa (“laying down the burden”). I generally use the inclusive term “surrender,” even if it does not precisely translate any of the pertinent terms.

By a variety of strategies, these chapters idealize for us a particular kind of person who thinks, feels, and acts in a radically passionate manner by surrendering to God. In the second section, I contextualize Vedānta Deśika's treatment by exploring how religious writers intentionally engage and seek to orient attentive readers, and how the latter shape appropriate responses and adapt new patterns of behavior that are rooted in their affective response to what they read. There I draw upon Charles Altieri's The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affect.3

I am also indebted to the detailed reflections of Paul Griffiths' Religious Reading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

For the sake of marking out the comparative dimension of what must remain a larger project, I turn in the third section to the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), a Roman Catholic saint, doctor of the Church, and founder of the Society of Jesus. In his brief, prescriptive Exercises, Ignatius draws the attentive exercitant (a reader of sorts) beyond speculation and spectatorship into practices culminating in heartfelt encounter with, surrender to, and service of God. Like Vedānta Deśika, he thus creates a context and background rich in opportunities and complexities for the comparativist. In the final section, I briefly review affective exchange in interreligious study, asking what happens when outsiders to a given tradition not only attend to the ideas of a religious text, but also read closely enough that its intended effect on the attentive insider also affects the outsider who has read her or his way into the tradition.

The Program for Surrender in the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra

The Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra (“The Auspicious Essence of the Three Myster-ies”) by Vedānta Deśika (Ve

kaṭanāta; 1268–1369) is a large and comprehensive exposition of the exegesis, philosophy, theology, practice, and religious sociology of south Indian Śrīvaiṣ

avism, an ancient tradition devoted to worship of Nārāya

a as the sole God, along with his consort, Śrī Lakṣmī. The Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra centers on exegeting the three sacred mantras

4

The Tiru Mantra (“Om, reverence to Nārāya

a”), the Dvaya Mantra (“I approach for refuge the feet of Nārāya

a with Śrī; reverence to Nārāya

a with Śrī!”), and the Carama Śloka (“Having completely given up all modes of righteousness, to me alone come for refuge. From all sins I will free you. Do not grieve.”) (Bhagavad Gītā 18.66).

cherished by the tradition. These mantras encode in three ways the act of surrender—a confession of the divine-human dynamic (in the Tiru Mantra), the enunciation of the words recited while surrendering (in the Dvaya Mantra), and the divine response to those who have taken refuge (in the Carama Śloka).5

The actual use of these mantras in ritual practice today requires further research since variations are possible.

The exegesis of the mantras in chapters 27–29 is balanced by the persuasion that comprises chapters 7–19 and spells out the manner and motive of a life lived in accord with the mantras.6

The overall structure of the text, then, is as follows: preface, the necessity of connection with and meditation on the lineage of gurus; chs. 1–6, the human problem, and the proper understanding of God, self, world—both self and world are entirely dependent on the Lord, for whom they exist and in whom they find their ultimate meaning and bliss; chs. 7–11, the personal appropriation of the human problem and formation toward surrender as the solution; ch. 12, surrender; chs. 13–19, life after surrender; chs. 20–22, the ascent to Heaven after death, and the final bliss; chs. 23–26, additional reflection on vexed issues; chs. 27–29, exegesis of the three mantras; chs. 30–31, instructions for the teacher and student; ch. 32, conclusions.

Throughout, exegesis, argument, rhetorical appeal, and conscious reflection on the nature of teaching and learning religiously combine in making an extraordinary demand on the reader: total surrender to God. In the following pages, I explore the dynamic of Vedānta Deśika's program of presentation and exhortation as these develop in chapter 7 (“On Being a Person Who Desires Liberation”), chapter 10 (“Fitness for Surrender”), chapter 11 (“The Dispositions Supportive of Surrender”), and, finally, chapter 12 (“The Act of Surrender along with the Helps Conducive to It”). I do this at some length to provide to the reader unfamiliar with Śrīvaiṣ

avism a useful feel for the sentiments of this tradition in one of its most extraordinary and powerful systematic expressions.

Fundamentally, at issue is a passionate love of Nārāya

a with the Goddess Śrī, and this divine couple realized as both transcendent and embodied in our world. Also at issue is the concise interplay of a reasoned assessment of the world, instruction about the act of surrender, and the facilitation of that act. The result of all this is not only an expert portrayal of the ideal person who surrenders to God, but also the provision of adequate materials by which a reader willing to think and to feel can become that ideal person, immersed in the dynamic of the text and realizing the life of surrender. And, keeping our subtext in mind, we can add that a modern reader from outside the Śrīvaiṣ

ava tradition is not entirely exempt from this process; beginning to understand, she or he also begins to feel and respond “as if” from within the tradition.

Chapter 7: On Becoming a Person Who Desires Liberation

The first six chapters of the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra were dedicated to the intellectual dimension of Śrīvaiṣ

ava faith and theology. In them, Vedānta Deśika expounded the essential nature of material things, persons, and God, and he proposed the fundamental theology underlying surrender to the Lord: humans are essentially dependent on and oriented to God, as a matter of fact and before any moral stance can or need be taken. The goal of the spiritual life is to experience and make conscious choices regarding what is already ontologically the case. It is the teacher's job to explain how things are to be understood, appropriated, and enacted. Accordingly, after the basic exposition in chapters 1–6, chapter 7 and subsequent chapters push the questions: To what extent do you find your current life intolerable enough to do something about it? Once you know the nature of world, self, and God, what do you do with your knowledge? Let us briefly examine each of these chapters.

Chapter 7's opening verse delineates the discomfort arising when a person has correct knowledge and sees without delusion how the world really is, and it strongly implies that things must change:

  • The turnings of time, prime matter and its modifications,
  • the faults that lie in the enjoyments of desire,
  • the experience of suffering the consequences of evil paths like a burning pit,
  • the set order of self and other as they really are, the divine place, the prison, this body —
  • knowing all these, who can bear this bondage? (278–9/88)7

    All translations are my own, though I am greatly indebted to the translation by M. R. Rajagopala Ayyangar in Srimad Rahasyatrayasara (Kumbakonam, 1956). Each translated excerpt is marked by two page numbers: the first is to a recent edition of chs. 1–12 of the text itself, Śrīmadrahasyatrayasāraḥ with the Pūrvasārāvādinī of Vedānta Rāmānuja and the Sāraprakāśikā of Śrīnivāsācāryasūri (Srirangam: Srirangam Srimath Andavan Ashramam, 2003), and the second page reference is to Ayyangar's translation, which readers may wish to use alongside my own.

Faced with the discomforts and dim prospects of dreary, mundane existence, a person must start seeing the world differently and, thereafter, acting differently. The point is made in the chapter's opening prose sentences:

People become clear about these things8

Mentioned in the verse and to some extent discussed in previous chapters.

thanks to texts instructive regarding the self. They see how the self has a proper nature that is self-illumined; how it is a knower, doer, enjoyer, and possessed of a body; how it is atomic in size, eternal, without parts, not liable to cutting, burning, suffering, drying, and the like; how it is devoid of increase or decrease, and the like; and thus how it is different from the body, senses, and the like that characterize the self. (281–2/88)

This initial recognition requires purification and deepening through an intensification of emotion, and a determination, rooted in insight, feeling, and desire, to live, rather, a life of service:

Determining, then, that it is worthwhile to gain a different body and ascend to the higher world, they thus become suited for those general human goals that extend beyond this world. They become afraid of the additional pains, such as again falling into hells, and the like, that are entailed by further births, and so they cease from the actions causing such woes. They ascertain that the Lord is distinguished as the one on whom everything is based; he is the one to be obeyed and is entirely different from the self, which is distinguished as paltry in power and atomic in size, as an abode of inauspicious things, as suited for the sorrows arising from ignorance, doubt, and reversal, and as existent entirely for the sake of another. People who know all this become the kind who desire the glory of the self's own proper form, glory in the form of service to the Lord. (282–4/88–9)

As is Vedānta Deśika's custom in almost every chapter of the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra, he is concerned in chapter 7 to show that the truths of which he speaks are encoded in the three holy mantras. Knowing them by heart and uttering them regularly, with ever-fuller knowledge of their meaning—this precious and open “secret” (rahasya) lies at the core of the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra and its tradition. Here Vedānta Deśika shows how the Tiru Mantra (the Sanskrit words Aum namo Nārāya

āya, which may be translated as “OM, reverence for Nārāya

a”) encodes surrendering to God, with the following four truths encoded in its syllables and syntactical form:

  1. The m in Aum indicates the self, and that self as essentially knowledge;
  2. The u in Aum means “only” and indicates that the self (m) exists solely for God (a);
  3. The elision of the root a required for the formation of Nārāya
    āya9

    That is, the name Nārāya

    a with its dative ending -āya—Nārāya

    āya.

    indicates the orientation of the self toward God and the erasure of ego;
  4. The negative implicit in Namaḥ—na mama, “not mine”—indicates that there is no place for an independent self.10

    I have thus summarized his arcane exegesis. For a more ample consideration of this kind of exegetical reading of the mantras, see Francis X. Clooney, Seeing through Texts: Doing Theology among the Śrīvaiṣ

    avas of South India (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996) 180–92.

He concludes by emphasizing the diligent practice that necessarily accompanies recitation:

In this way, according to the rule that [even wise and devout persons] will still experience other results, they must appropriately root out, in name and in reality, the “I” and “my” that exist in the form of confusions about being a self-dependent agent and enjoyer, an agent and enjoyer for one's own purposes. Thus they become steadfast and established in knowledge. (287–8/90)

Vedānta Deśika next cites thirteen Tamil and Sanskrit citations that highlight the problem of attachments, and the necessary and desired break. Here is a sample:

  • [Before, I wasn't one who could or couldn't,]11

    That is, he was unable even to make moral choices. (Bracketed phrases throughout this essay complete verses that Desika cites only in abbreviated form.)

  • I savored trivial things; I ended up leaving you,
  • [O highest one creating so many thousands of lives —
  • how can I reach your fine, lustrous, radiant feet?] (Tiruvāymo
    i 3.2.6)12

    For this essay I have simply translated the citations given by Vedānta Deśika, without attempting to locate them in their original context. I have extended several quotations beyond the words cited by Vedānta Deśika, however, when the sense requires it. The translations of these cited texts are my own, though once again I am deeply indebted to M. R. Rajagopala Ayyangar for his translation. Rather than fully cite the variety of editions and paginations of the translated texts, I have simply cited the chapter and verse numbers given by Ayyangar.

  • [The dizzying pleasure experienced in the five senses,]
  • seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting,
  • plus that unlimited but still puny pleasure that is hard to experience:
  • [all these have been given up by me.] (Tiruvāymo
    i 4.9.10)

  • Only those who do not know still hanker after royal power, their minds captive to possessiveness.
  • People like me are not like that; we are not intoxicated by the strong liquor of ego-thinking. (Viṣ
    u Purā
    a 6.7.7)

  • This people know: above the mansion of Brahmā lies the supreme world of
  • Viṣ
    u, pure, eternal, light, the highest Brahman. The deluded do not go there, those people whose selves are made of sense objects, tormented by vanity, covetousness, arrogance, anger, perfidy, and delusion; only good people go there, without a sense of possessiveness, without ego, without dualities, their senses controlled, delighting in meditation, in yoga. (Mahābhārata, Āra
    ya Parva, 262.37–39) (288–91/91–2)

Each citation is, of course, adduced out of context, and only erudite Śrīvaiṣ

avas will recall more of the context. But by instruction and meditation on the meaning of these texts, the reader will grasp the cited passages in a way that evokes their fuller meaning, including the drama and feeling of the scenes in which the verses are uttered. By such texts, Vedānta Deśika shows the warrants for his position in scripture and tradition; he is not offering new ideas. Citation also facilitates readers' reflection on such salutary texts, reflection that nourishes the reader by providing materials for meditation. Finishing the list, Vedānta Deśika aptly summarizes their meaning and the hoped-for realization that follows:

Aided by such textual authorities, [devout practitioners] can reflect clearly on seven faults inherent in experiences of nonconscious [material] reality and contrary to one's own innate bliss: being puny, unstable, rooted in sorrow, mixed with sorrow, being the cause of sorrow's rising, rooted in wrong ideas about oneself. [Such practitioners] also reflect clearly on the faults inherent in merely experiencing—as far as they can—consciousness among such things, and on the difference in experiencing the Lord, so different from all those experiences. (293/92)

He next consolidates the progress of the chapter by urging readers to live steadfastly the values they have learned:

In this way they reach the condition described where it says, “One who enjoys the highest self is one detached from the lower self” (Bārhaspatya Sm

ti). They cease to engage in dharmas requiring action, that is, “the duty characterized by activity, such as Prajāpati taught” (Mahābhārata 219.4.2).

They rather engage in those dharmas that are the cessation of activity, that is, “the duty characterized by cessation, such as the seer Nārāya

a taught” (Mahābhārata 219.4.2). (293/92)

Such is the mandate and the proper intent of scripture, which aims at affecting heart as well as mind:

If one clearly understands all these higher and lower truths and the human goals as previously explained, and if [knowing these truths] one engages in performing that means which, when preceded by detachment, leads to the highest human goal, then this is in accord with the statement, “What is heard [in revelation, śruti] results in virtuous behavior” (Sabhā Parva 5.116). Scripture elsewhere mentions the expected result: “All instructive texts are enjoined by people in order to quiet the mind. It is the one whose mind is always quieted that understands all the instructive texts” (Itihāsa Samuccaya 12.37). (293–4/92–3)

On this basis he mocks those who waste their knowledge:

If they ignore this result, they become objects of ridicule, as it says, “Like the dog that does not use its tail to cover its loins or to chase flies and stinging insects but leaves it useless, such is learning devoid of dharma.” (294/92)

Quite different are those who choose to live according to the values they so clearly see:

The people who hasten to employ the means to the highest human goal such as are appropriate to their own self and in accord with what is heard in scripture—“Let him act here in keeping with age, action, purpose, what is learned in scripture and what is known from ordinary life, cultivating sameness of form in dress, word, and behavior” (Laws of Manu 4.18)—these are the people who gain the excellence mentioned in texts such as, “Him the gods know as a Brahman,” and “Him the gods honor” (Viṣ

u Dharma 43.28). As it says, “Others rejoice at how they behave.” (294–5/93)

Obviously, the attentive reader—inside or outside the tradition—is likewise challenged to decide what to do with what she or he now knows.

At this chapter's end (and as at all chapters' conclusions) Vedānta Deśika offers two summary verses, one in Tamil and one in Sanskrit. They reinforce the chapter's theme, while also rendering it beautifully in a literary tour de force meant to win the admiration of learned readers and to throw the skeptical off balance. First, in Tamil:

  • Clasping the feet of the abiding ancient one
  • due to the good grace of those
  • who explain, “This is good, this is bad,” and
  • who explain the roiling ocean of sin, the state of destruction, the long-lasting fruits—
  • they gain the great, desired fruit, letting go of the five subdued senses. (296/93)

And then in Sanskrit, where the miseries of this world (sa

sāra) are stressed:

  • Putting away the sweet poison of external objects,
  • the wise person becomes averse to trying to gain the limited delights of self-experience,
  • and so longs for the experience of Brahman, bliss without limit—
  • by fortune perhaps there are in our world such persons who desire to give up this world. (297/93)

Vedānta Deśika's presentation of knowledge in this pivotal chapter is all about a deeper appropriation of all that was argued theoretically in earlier chapters. The hopelessness of the human condition is redeemed only by surrender to the Lord. To emphasize what constitutes a proper knowledge both clear and heartfelt, Vedānta Deśika employs various rhetorical strategies—prose and poetry, exposition, exegesis, citation, exhortation, prayer, the highly analytic and the more freely evocative—all inscribed in a text that expects and by tradition merits continual study. Understanding must be accurate, and Vedānta Deśika always begins by stating what he sees to be the correct ideas, properly reasoned; but his writing also aims at affective transformation. Readers who read and reflect clearly begin to feel and respond differently to a world that is now read and felt differently.

Knowing the truth and understanding its implications are important, but rarely do these suffice to change people, and so a deeper probing of the human mind and heart is required. Consequently, the following chapters, especially chapters 10 and 11 considered here, emphasize the required changes in affect, particularly the two key characteristics of the desperate seeker (chapter 10) and the five emotional dispositions that make one actually able to surrender to God (chapter 11).

Chapter 10: Two Characteristics of the Person Ready to Surrender

Chapter 10 highlights the two characteristics in accord with which a person turns to God in the act so prized in the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra: the person readied for God must be a person who has no resources to rely on and has nowhere to go for refuge. Its opening verse somewhat cryptically distinguishes more complex and simpler modes of approach to God in terms of the category of competence, marked by eight qualifications in devotion (bhakti) or six in surrender (prapatti):

  • Competence—capability combined with desire for a goal—is shaped in the threefold body, and its condition is established as restricted by the eight accessories and the six accessories;13

    That is, the eight accessories of devotion (bhakti), perhaps the eight limbs of yoga, and the five accessories of surrender (prapatti) plus the act of surrender, discussed in ch. 11.

  • it is revealed that the Lord is the refuge of all, and is confirmed by tradition;
  • all are competent for this good path—
  • just as in the law books all are competent to speak the truth (and exercise) other virtues. (358/111)

In this chapter Vedānta Deśika continues to speak about surrender, but in particular portrays it as an intense and passionate realization that only a singularly desperate person will undergo. The ontological framework was already stated in earlier chapters—the world and all living beings in essence depend entirely on God—but here Vedānta Deśika emphasizes that a person must realize this truth by cultivating two rather extreme characteristics, as knowledge passes over into emotion:

In addition to knowledge of the [divine-human] relationship that is known from revelation, and related matters, which she or he shares with the [devout] meditator, the person established in this special means to liberation—in the form of independent “taking refuge”—should also have competence distinguished by the characteristics of “having-no-resources” and “having-nowhere-to-go.” “Having-no-resources” means a lack of competence for other means. “Having-nowhere-to-go” means an aversion to all other goals, a turning away from every refuge other than the Lord. (363–4/112)

And again,

“Having-no-resources” and “having-nowhere-to-go” are connected with competent persons' being ignorant and incapable of any other means, and so, too, their inability to endure delay in attaining the result. Their turning away from protectors other than the Lord is distinguished by their conviction regarding that absolute dependence on the Lord alone that they share with all others; as it says, “O Bhārata, just as blades of grass are entirely subject to the wind, even so all beings are subject to the sway of the Lord.” They are also averse to all goals other than liberation. These factors distinguish such persons' competence for “taking refuge.” (365–6/113)

Ideally, when the reader contemplates the desperation and utter dependence taught and exemplified in texts, she or he seeks to live and feel that way herself or himself. Lucidly instructed, such a person is drawn into a story that is being told, and ever more intensely into a corresponding way of living. The internal qualifications—helplessness acutely experienced as “having-nothing” and “going-nowhere”—take priority over still needed but now secondary external qualifications regarding education, caste, and gender. The qualifications reshape and internally transform the persons who hear and accept Vedānta Deśika's teaching as their own story and context for action.

Since actual appropriation of these characteristics is the goal, and since appropriation requires patient practice rooted in reflection, here, too, the reader is offered a series of texts persuasively announcing these virtues of “having-no-resources” and “having-nowhere-to-go” and, ideally, inculcating them in the reader as well:

Abandoned by his father, the gods, and the great

ṣis, he wandered the three worlds, and came to Rāma alone for refuge (Rāmāya

a Sundara Kā

ḍa 38.33).

I am the abode of transgressions; I have no wherewithal, nowhere to go (Ahirbudhnya Sam

hitā 37.30).

I have no wherewithal, I have nowhere else to go, O my Refuge (Stotra Ratna 22).

Looking even to an infinite future, no other means can be seen (Śrīra

ga Gadyam).

In all the tens of millions and thousands of ages, there is no means for me [to attain] that liberation other than “taking refuge” at your lotus feet: this I know (Vaiku

ṭha Gadyam).

Having no other place to enter, I am at your feet (Tiruvāymo

i 6.10.10). (367/113)

An honest recognition of the dire human condition and one's own incapacity to act differently and properly; a recognition of the divine and human (teacher's) compassion; and a hope for some way out, because God is God: these mark the person who has actualized the states of “having-no-resources” and “having-nowhere-to-go,” and who is therefore in a position to surrender.

Chapter 11: The Dispositions Supportive of Surrender

Vedānta Deśika believes that surrender occurs the instant a person is delivered from the illusion of self-dependence and simultaneously comes to affirm God-dependence in a most acutely felt way. It is a unique moment, a grace, but several factors create its necessary environment. Chapter 11 highlights five dispositions that form persons who truly feel an intense desire to surrender: (1) a determination to do what is conducive to liberation; (2) a determination to avoid what is counterproductive; (3) a realization of pitifulness; (4) great confidence that something can be done; and (5) choosing a protector who will surely do it.14

The chapter's opening verse highlights the importance of gaining these proper dispositions and the truth that this is scripture's real meaning: “In this way, of this sort, once only, of necessity, such is surrender to the One who is an ocean of compassion, who controls the whole world from within, who is engaged in the destruction of what merely is, who is the Lord: surrender to Him by putting your burden upon Him; regarding all this, specific dispositions are voiced by scripture.” (371/115)

Each pertains to a person who has previously considered the possibility of surrender but who now, by the narrative of chapter 10, is coming to see and feel that she or he has no other viable recourse. The five dispositions describe and inscribe in more detail the rare but now increasingly likely response to the situation: (1) and (2) to live a life focused on the Lord and in horror of all that is contrary; (3) to be keenly aware of one's own limitations, yet (4) remain confident that surrender is possible and worthwhile, and so (5) in the end, make a choice for God as one's protector, with whom one will in fact choose to take refuge.

Vedānta Deśika reinforces the value of these dispositions and makes them more accessible by recalling exemplary persons who adopted them in the past. First, he draws on the celebrated Rāmāya

a epic, particularly the scene where Sītā, kidnapped by King Rāva

a and separated from her beloved husband Rāma, is held captive on Śrī La

kā and guarded by demonesses. He recounts briefly how Sītā's gracious demeanor softens the demoness in charge, Trijaṭā, who then exhorts her guards to take refuge with Sītā even if she is their prisoner. The five dispositions are exemplified in the behavior that Trijaṭā proposes: avoiding what would anger Rāma (2) and implicitly pleasing him (1), realizing their own helplessness (3), expressing confidence in Sītā and also in Rāma (4), and then actually asking Sītā to protect them (5). The second example, also from the Rāmāya

a, recounts how Vibhīṣa

a, a good demon, fails to persuade his brother, King Rāva

a, to let Sītā go, and then is himself exiled. Vibhīṣa

a goes and surrenders to Rāma, who is preparing to invade Śrī La

kā to win back Sītā. Vibhīṣa

a is praised as acting out the five dispositions when he shows himself intent upon pleasing Rāma entirely to (1) keep far from all that is contrary to Rāma (2); appear helpless (3); totally trust in Rāma (4); and, finally, ask Rāma to be his protector (5). By recollecting and appropriating these familiar narratives that are taken to reveal lucidly the five dispositions, readers become inspired to act that way themselves and, by modeling, learn how to do it.

Finally, perhaps for those unable to connect with the ancient narratives or simply to indicate how the eternal values are also exemplified in daily life, Vedānta Deśika gives a more immediate example from the world of business and identifies the five dispositions:

These ideas can be discovered either succinctly or at length in other contexts regarding “taking refuge,” and in ordinary life with respect to the entrustment of property to others. When a person entrusts property that one is unable to protect by oneself to a person who can protect it, do we not observe that the person thinks of doing what is pleasing (1) to that person, and of giving up even the thought of displeasing (2) that person? One realizes (3), “He can keep the property safe, he will do as required,” and so makes known to him one's inability to take care of it (4). One begs him (5), “You must protect it!” One entrusts it to him and, then, unburdened and without fear, and with one's arms folded on one's chest, lies down and sleeps. (390–1/120–21)

Next, after showing again in technical language that need not detain us here how the Dvaya Mantra (normally recited at the instant of surrender) inscribes these same dispositions, Vedānta Deśika explains that Nārāya

a, by his very nature, cares for and protects those who come for refuge; by that very nature Nārāya

a elicits a passionate response from those who know him. Theology and devotion cooperate in forming persons who think, feel, and act properly. The dispositions that foster surrender are taught and reinforced by narrative, example, mantra exegesis, and the dispelling of theological doubts. The reader is encouraged to see that surrender, though rare and extreme, is plausible according to scripture, tradition, and theology; it is possible, and persons who understand this can barely manage to resist making such a choice. What follows is the act of surrender in a single climactic moment, and that is the subject of chapter 12.

Chapter 12: Enacting Surrender and its Subsidiaries

Chapter 12 opens with a verse emphasizing the intensity and inevitability of the choice to be realized:

  • When something is desired but cannot in any way be attained by oneself or another,
  • there is a laying down of the burden, with a request—
  • “After this, independent of our effort, by your own self
  • this goal can be achieved”—
  • and this is what they call “taking refuge;”
  • such is the specific insight they realize. (412/127)15

    As in chs. 7, 10, and 11, Vedānta Deśika here takes time to show how the key insights are already present in the Tiru Mantra, descriptive of the general truth that all depends on the Lord and exists for the Lord.

The act of surrender is evoked in another list of citations inculcating and reinforcing transformative realization:

To fulfill the specifically enjoined meditation, “Throw yourself down before Me” (Sātvata Tantra), I, who belong to only one other while I am not de-pendent on anyone else nor fitting to anyone else, remain entirely dependent and accessory with respect to the Lord, who is free and on whom all depend entirely, and whose own purposeful goal is to protect. I must speak as follows: “I do not exist for myself, I ought not even to say that anything belongs to me without qualification.” As it says, “Even my self is not my own.” (Śānti Parva, 25.19) (416–417/128)

And also:

I am not worthy to possess and protect things under the guise, “I” and “mine”; I am neither free nor am I the primary beneficiary. As it says, “Of himself he is just a lump of clay, dependent on others, embodied, unable to protect himself—who can be the cause for the protection of this one?” (Śānti Parva, 294.19).

The discerning say in the course of their meditation, “Self, kingdom, wealth, spouse, vehicles—all this is the Lord's”: this must always be noted (Śānti Parva, 343.24).

For all this, the burden of protection is according to the saying, “The laying down of the burden of self and what belongs to the self is called the surrender of the self” (Lakṣmī Tantra, 17.79).

Indeed, he is the protector of all, as it says, “No one other than Hari, the Lord of all, is able to protect” (Viṣ

u Purā

a, 1.22.21).

He is the primary beneficiary and his is the fruit of protection, for as it says, “Being possessor of the fruit does not belong to the person protected by the Lord, and so, surrender of the self culminates in offering oneself to Keśava” (Lakṣmī Tantra 17.74). (418–21/128)

Even the final results of the entire process remain, as is proper, in the hands of the owner:

Just as the permutations of material reality please him, so, too, all those human goals that he bestows upon conscious beings please him to whom all is accessory; in this sense, the Lord is the primary recipient of all results.

This ambitious claim is made starkly clear by a pair of striking analogies:

In the same way, a man destroys nonconscious wooden dolls, then remakes them and fastens ornaments on them, and takes pleasure in seeing their beauty. So, too, he places a parrot in a cage, but then gives it milk and lets it fly as it wishes, taking pleasure in its pleasure. The detached person of spiritual taste enjoys both without making a distinction.16

That is, between the parrot's pleasure and his own.

(423/129)

The dynamic at work is therefore striking: because human nature is entirely oriented to God and everything already accords with God's will, humans must therefore learn to surrender to that Lord with emotional intensity. This is a realm where one must find one's way by heart and intuition, not simply by reasoning.

Vedānta Deśika once again appeals to tradition by citing verses 52, 53, and 60 of the Stotra Ratna of Ä

avantār, one of his illustrious Śrīvaiṣ

ava predecessors:

Whoever, whatever I may be in the body, whatever may be my qualities, right now I am given over by me at your lotus feet. (52)

My Lord, whatever and whoever I am, all that is yours alone, Mādhava; my mind is awake to this—so what can I offer to you? (53)

You are my father, you are my mother, spouse, child, beloved, heart-mate; you alone are my friend, my guru, my refuge in all the worlds; I am yours, your spouse, your people; I come to you; I have surrendered, and so yours alone is my burden. (60)

He then demonstrates how this same truth is eternally and presently imbedded in the Dvaya Mantra (“I approach for refuge the feet of Nārāya

a with Śrī; reverence to Nārāya

a with Śrī!”) that was recited in the act of surrender itself:

The first part of the Dvaya [“I approach for refuge the feet of Nārāya

a with Śrī”] has to do with the means, that is, surrender of responsibility to the Lord; it is accompanied by reflection on the fact that one is accessory to him and exists only for him. This is to be understood in connection with the verb [“I approach”] joined with the word “refuge” [“I approach for refuge”] for as such it implies the supplication for protection preceded by great faith. (428–9/131)

The disciple/reader is clearly supposed to recite the mantra reflectively, gradually appropriating its emotional overtones and its encoded practice as well as its meaning(s). The act and utterance of surrender are primary in the spiritual life:

The one who is himself the refuge and who accepts the burden indicates in the Sātyaki Tantra that this surrendering of the burden should be thought of as primary among the mantras of surrender: “Only with this [Dvaya] mantra one should give over one's self to me. The one who has given over to me whatever must be done will be the one who has done all that must be done.”17

Like any ritual act, surrender is accompanied by its mantra, the Dvaya: “In this performance of surrender with its subsidiaries, the surrendering of the burden for the protection of one's self originates in laying down the fruit pertaining to one's own self, accompanying this by uttering the Dvaya, and preceding it by reverence for the succession of gurus; the surrender is accompanied by the decision for what is conducive and the avoiding of what is contrary, etc., preceded by giving up being a doer, giving up the idea of ‘mine,’ giving up the fruit, giving up the means of obtaining that fruit.”

(431/131–2)

But surrender, as realization or action, accomplishes nothing of itself, so the devotee must realize that even here

the Lord is the means to the result; out of the love natural to him, he has been the primal cause of every act, beginning with giving body and senses to a human, all the way to that person's utterance of the Dvaya. This Lord is distinguished by a specific intent preceded by graciousness, and so is the unvarying cause; for persons devoid of other means, he himself also takes the place of a means. (435–6/133)

To make his points even simpler and more accessible, Vedānta Deśika then once more appeals to a predecessor, this time by repeating the words of surrender uttered by one of his teachers, Naṭātūr Ammā

:

18

Naṭātūr Ammā

, grandson of Varadaguru, who was a nephew of Rāmānuja, was a teacher of Vedānta Deśika in his youth.

I have been wandering in this world from beginningless time, doing what you do not desire. From this day forward, I must do what is conducive, and I must no longer do what is contrary. I have no wherewithal with which to attain you, and I have ascertained that you alone are the means. You must therefore be my means! Hereafter, from now on, can there be any burden either in the removal of what is not desired or in the attainment of what is desired? (437–8/133)

An esteemed elder has so simply and directly expressed his surrender, and thereby he also provides words the devotee can easily repeat.

Chapter 12 appeals to both mind and heart; it aims to inform, educate, disturb, make an urgent current demand, and persuade the reader to choose to surrender. Its theme, we have seen, has been reinforced repeatedly in these chapters that echo in different ways the simple fact that a person must realize the truth of what has been taught and make it his or her own in a final, definitive fashion by surrender. The reader is left with a question: will I perform the act of surrender, and now? The Śrīvaiṣ

ava reader has presumably spent a lifetime at least in learning the words and concepts, images, narratives, and emotions that combine to provide momentum toward this moment of surrender. But the outside reader cannot be presumed immune to the power of the text if she or he attentively appropriates its powerful and persuasive words. The more such an attentive outsider reads, the more the question becomes clear and is pressed home with urgency: are you the kind of person deeply emotional enough to surrender to the Lord as your last and only resort?

Reading the Text and Taking it to Heart

The Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra is an integral, systematic work that draws in its readers by engaging their minds, their emotions, and their inclination to act upon what they think and feel. It is not simply a report about other things, such as probable social practices of Śrīvaiṣ

ava Hindus in Tamil Nadu in the fourteenth century, or rituals of surrender not fully described in the text, nor is it merely a teaser to remind readers of what is available only from a living teacher. As effective religious rhetoric, its intent is to produce affective change at a fundamental level that, though guided and sharpened by lucid reasoning and systematic argument, cannot be fully assessed in terms of ideas; it dramatically engages whole persons who, in community, are taken with, inspired by, and persuaded by what they read and, ideally, thereafter persuaded to enact the program inscribed in the text by living in a way harmonious with their new passions.

To parse this process as a literary and textual phenomenon, I have found helpful Charles Altieri's The Particulars of Rapture, a study of the production and dynamics of emotion in literature.

19

I am grateful to Professor Altieri for comments on a draft of this essay, though of course the final product is solely my responsibility.

Altieri explores how emotions and the affective dimensions of human beings take form and become written, how they are related but not reducible to what can be conceptualized, and how readers find in works of fiction and poetry models for their own affective responses to their own concrete situations. In a key fourth chapter, “Why Manner Matters,” he reflects on the complexity of the presentation of the human situation in fiction or drama, and the complexity of the reader's response. Novels and plays are interesting in part because they portray for us persons acting in accord with plausible reasons but also in fidelity to their own reading of their situations and affective response to its possibilities. Successful literature makes available these ideal persons, and such accounts command the attention of readers who likewise imagine reshaping their own lives in response to such rational and emotional possibilities. Altieri does not extend his analysis to religious texts, but it seems appropriate to apply his insights to the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra as we have been reading it. Carefully and reasonably, Vedānta Deśika composes a world that requires affective response; the success of his writing is such that even readers who are not Śrīvaiṣ

ava can, precisely as readers, be drawn affectively into the world he inscribes for us.

Complete literary works incorporate a rich range of expressive strategies for signification that “cannot consist primarily in criteria for assessing the rationality or irrationality of beliefs. Instead we depend on a much more complex cultural literacy that provides rough terms enabling us to converse about whether or not particular expressions have effective force.”20

Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 122.

Of particular interest are the elusive affective responses to plausibly realistic and complex life situations, since what is at stake cannot be expressed with conceptual clarity. As Altieri observes, “Adapting to expressive behavior cannot be only a matter of finding how to make the beliefs compatible with rationality. We also have to learn to recognize and to appreciate what the particular activity makes visible about the person's relation to the specific situation.”21

Ibid., 121–22.

Analogously, Vedānta Deśika's expected and unexpected readers are persuaded to read the human situation so as to problematize it, and consequently opt for the extreme emotional response of admitting helplessness and surrendering without reserve to God. His careful writing succeeds insofar as it makes plausible this improbable notion that surrender to God is the right path for a reader smitten with both distaste for the world and desire for God. Precisely due to the combination of affective complexity and subtle writing, there is no reason—for it is not a matter of reasons—to deny to readers from outside the tradition the same process of reflection and affective response.

According to Altieri, that there are gaps between reader and text, across distances in time and place or due to the particularity of a situation at hand, is inevitable “when [the inscribed] cultural background proves not quite immediately effective.” Such gaps may also be virtues, since they require readers to play their constructive role. Engaged in the reading to fill in the gaps, she or he becomes increasingly affected by it: “Rather than simply adopting to the codes that the expression involves, we find ourselves having to adjust to its power of vividly maintaining its partial inappropriateness and hence its significant specificity.”22

Ibid., 122.

This adjustment involves simple clarification of what the text is about, but it is also a more complex engagement with the other (read in the text, pondered in light of the reader's actual life) in a particularity irreducible to any adequately reasoned scenario. Faced with a work of art or classic text, attentive readers revise and improvise their own ongoing projects of self-formation, drawing on “the vividness and expressive force” of works of art: “And responding to their vividness is a matter less of understanding their beliefs than of participating in specific deployments of visual energies, deployments that we can take up without worrying about their relation to where we stand actually and figuratively as viewers.”23

Ibid.

Similarly, authors of classic religious texts seek to engage readers and arrange affective and imaginative deployments that command the reader's attention and thereafter promote still further choices that make sense in the author's—and the author's tradition's—particular, intensely described world. That all this can be done “with worrying” strikingly illustrates how the questions and concerns posed by reason do not dominate in this context.24

Altieri nicely captures the right tension between the careful and the carefree: “Our sense of character must include in a loosely hierarchical order the full range of our investments and the basic principles on which we make evaluations. But most of the time we are free to cultivate various identities without worrying very much about how they can be integrated. … In such cases we are not establishing ultimate values; we are simply attaching our sense of identity to particular ways of acting or responding to others” (ibid., 140). This aptly captures the way in which we need to respond to the religious persona written into a religious classic that describes how proper persons are to act. On the importance of reading, see also Altieri's “Reading for an Image of the Reader: A Response to Block, Caraher, and Mykyta,” Reader 9 (1983) 38–44.

Accordingly, Altieri recommends that, in thinking about how we interpret literature, we shift from an adjectival to an adverbial understanding of emotion, in order to privilege action and the active mode in which expression takes place:

When we consider emotions adverbially we consider them as direct modifications of activities by the subject. For what becomes vivid is not our idea about the emotion but our sense of what goes into expressing the emotion. … The expression has force because of the qualities it exhibits as features of the forming of an attitude.25

Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 125.

As observers of art—and as readers—we catch expression in the act, as it were, compelled to participate in the act because we understand and feel it, and thereby reconfigure our own attitudes accordingly. Emotion must be understood as concrete and productive of changes in how one acts:

Manner matters because it puts the emphasis on concrete vividness as the locus of significance for the activity. Consequently, when we register the emotion adverbially we adjust how we project identities—about our own emotions or about agents whom we observe. We are responding not to how beliefs shape the person's world but to who the person becomes as he or she manifests the working out of attitudes in relation to that world.26

Ibid., 125–26.

As readers, we therefore

have to project ourselves imaginatively into what creates the vividness and gives it the possible power to modify its environment. The expression asks of us not that we offer an interpretation of it but that we adjust to its specificity. If we seek only explanations for actions, we tend to ignore everything that might give such particular expressions distinctive vividness and force.27

Ibid., 126.

Consequently, we read, we understand, we become involved in an active way that, from the start, involves our choices—all in terms of the particularity of a specifically described concrete time and place of intense emotional significance.

So, too, I suggest, reading portrayals of ideal persons in religious literature, such as persons surrendering to Nārāya

a, elicits further acts of imagination and acts of participation on the part of readers who pay attention and then respond sensibly to how those ideal persons are acting. Religious literature, too, aims for the affective transformation of the reader who pays attention to cues available in the text. Read attentively, the religious classic produces and renders legible a particular instance—a situation, opportunity, challenge, etc.—that begs for and provokes interpretive and affective responses that enable the reader to fit intelligently and affectively into the religious situation that has been presented. Again, all of this seems true whether the reader is a member of an intended religious audience, or is rather an outsider who finds her or his way to that tradition through texts.

It is fair then to extend to religious literature Altieri's admission that he values “works of art not because they promise to reward my prevailing emotional dispositions but because they promise to modify them. And they promise to modify them in ways that emphasize objective qualities of the work and so encourage me to reflect on who I become by virtue of how the states of mind are rendered.”28

Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 268 n. 19.

Religious literature offers a particularly intensive case of what Altieri means, as texts like the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra aim to effect spiritual changes in the reader, in part by facing the reader with the double reality of who God and the reader are—or rather, how God and the reader are—and eliciting from the reader ways of behaving appropriate to the divine and human ways of being. The better theological assessments of interreligious exchange are those that notice the complex import of that awareness and consequent choices.29

For an insightful discussion of literature and the role of the imagination, see Richard Moran, “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,”The Philosophical Review 103 (1994) 75–106.

Reading from the Outside In: Using the Spiritual Exercises alongside the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra

In his Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra, Vedānta Deśika intentionally engages the minds and hearts of readers. He instructs, argues, cites authorities, and rouses his readers to recognize God, self, and world as understood in his Śrīvaiṣ

ava tradition; to feel the various positive and negative experiences related to those realities; and to respond with appropriate affective states and consequent choices about how to live. In Altieri's terms, the most powerful dimensions of the writing and reading process have to do with manner and style, affective response to concrete, specific situations, and consequent adjustments in self-awareness and choices about ways to be and behave in the future.

All of this, I hope, makes sense. But today the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra is available to a much wider audience than Vedānta Deśika could have anticipated. His text is abundantly reprinted, it has been summarized in older and more recent publications, and it has been translated into English. Interested readers from outside the tradition can study and learn from Vedānta Deśika's system of thought, and they may thereby find themselves drawn toward affective as well as rational assent to the project of surrendering to the Lord, and to all the project implies. The complexities of religious reading are intensified and complexified when such “outside readers” move to center stage. While taking seriously their own tradition and its experiences, passions, and enactments, they nonetheless engage another tradition that is also religiously demanding, even if different emotions and instincts come to the fore. They read their way into a new tradition, but, precisely because of demands that traditions place on both the committed and the curious, they are also required to look back and reflect from a new vantage point on the commitments of their own tradition as hitherto lived and practiced. This new and more complex reflection across boundaries fosters a belonging “here” but also “somewhere else,” as the person becomes doubly disposed to learn from both traditions, and so is enabled to learn better, though more problematically, from both.30

See, also, my comments on this dynamic in ch. 5 of Clooney, Seeing through Texts.

Here, too, the analysis needs to go beyond ideas and arguments to the ways in which the reader is encouraged, by imagining, affirming, and appropriating what she or he reads, to react in accord with specific and intensified affects that, in turn, (re)shape patterns of living that endure beyond the text. The manner of reading and its affect are therefore primary in the interreligious context as well.

All of this is interesting and, if taken seriously, likely to become central to theology in the future. It is therefore instructive to pay close attention to the dynamics of reading a religious classic from a tradition other than one's own and finding attractive its communicative acts, explanations, exhortations, and directives. The pertinent reading and writing are specific, particular, and resistant to generalization, and the process and its meaning are likely to elude theological attention until the theologian starts paying closer attention to specific instances of interreligious affective engagement such as occur by reading. Accordingly, it is attention to the particular that illumines what is at stake. The entire phenomenon is rich and complex, but here I will simply supplement our prior concern for what is read (I) and how one reads (II) by attention to the reader. For this, I draw upon my own context as a proximate example.

In coming to understand the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra, I have been reading, and am now writing, as a person already formed in the Christian theological and spiritual traditions. I have already been attentive, in my own tradition, to how religious practices, specifically related to surrendering to God, are expounded and inculcated, accentuated in affective response such as cannot be rationalized or predicted. I have already been attending to how Christian religious classics work in obvious and subtle ways to intensify the reader's engagement. Even more specifically, I have been reading the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra in a particular light, that of the Catholic Christian tradition, and within that, the Jesuit tradition of Ignatius Loyola. His Spiritual Exercises, a brief text easily printed in fewer than fifty small pages, leads a person embarked upon meditation, along with her or his director, through a series of meditations on sin, and on the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that intensify the meditator's experience of remorse and love, and expect of him or her a change in way of life. That is, despite all the differences, Ignatius and Vedānta Deśika write with similar expectations, aiming at a similarly passionate love and service of God.

In his simple and spare Exercises, Ignatius seems intentionally to have left to exercitants much of the work of “filling the gaps” and generating intense emotional responses to God, using their own ingenuity and shifting frames of reference in order to keep finding where God can be near. Like Vedānta Deśika, Ignatius writes in order to command the minds and hearts of attentive persons, drawing them into more intensely realized passionate relations with the Lord they love. She or he gradually becomes a player in the Gospel narratives and personally dramatizes its encounters; her or his religious passion is aroused and enacted according to the intuitions of the heart, and toward union with and service to Christ in the present moment. After prolonged and patient reflection on self, God, and the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the Exercises reaches its climax in a moment of surrender to God occurring at the end of the contemplative period. Ignatius sets up the concluding prayer in a way that stresses the intersection of thinking and affective appropriation:

[Here I] call to mind the blessings of creation and redemption, and the spe-cial favors I have received. I will ponder with great affection how much God our Lord has done for me, and how much He has given me of what He possesses, and finally, how much, as far as He can, the same Lord desires to give Himself to me according to His divine decrees. Then I will reflect upon myself, and consider, according to all reason and justice, what I ought to offer the Divine Majesty, that is, all I possess and myself with it. Thus, as one would do who is moved by great feeling, I will make this offering of myself: “Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will—all that I have and possess. You have given all to me: to You, O Lord, I return it. All is Yours, dispose of it wholly according to Your will. Give me Your love and Your grace, for this is sufficient for me.”31

Adapted from The Spiritual Exercises (trans. Louis J. Puhl, S.J.; Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1957).

The Spiritual Exercises thus creates—in a person who enacts the text—a disposition and memory of practice. While the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra and Spiritual Exercises are not exactly analogous texts, the primary goal of producing affective change is common to both.

Thus, the Exercises' core moment of surrender to God deeply parallels the Śrīvaiṣ

ava enactment to which Vedānta Deśika points; Naṭātūr Ammā

(cited by Vedānta Deśika) and Ignatius resonate well in their affective intensity:

I have been wandering in this world from beginningless time, doing what you do not desire. From this day forward, I must do what is conducive, and I must no longer do what is contrary. I have no wherewithal with which to attain you, and I have ascertained that you alone are the means. You must therefore be my means! Hereafter, from now on, can there be any burden either in the removal of what is not desired or in the attainment of what is desired? (Naṣātâr Ammā¿)

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will—all that I have and possess. You have given all to me: to You, O Lord, I return it. All is Yours, dispose of it wholly according to Your will. Give me Your love and Your grace, for this is sufficient for me. (Ignatius)

While in some cases such juxtapositions may appear forced, in this case the two traditions—the one already familiar to and practiced by the reader, the other new, read in light of the familiar—are sufficiently parallel in their self-presentation and ways of involving the reader that studying them together creates fruitful possibilities and formidable problems. In whichever of the traditions a reader begins, she or he is likely to be drawn to the other as well, and so to be emotionally affected by both. In fact, I have read the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra as a kind of Exercises, and found in the latter the grounds required for taking the former as a text I could read with an expectation of familiarity. This result may not be rationally explicable or justifiable, but, nonetheless, the texts cooperate in persuasively transforming a reader who takes one, and then both, seriously.

Even the preliminary sketch offered here should indicate that the Śrīvaiṣ

ava Hindu tradition and the Ignatian tradition are parallel in fostering mutual expectations about the primacy of emotion, passion, and participation.

32

In the fuller study that I am currently writing, I will use St. Francis de Sales'Treatise on the Love of God (trans. Henry Benedict Mackey, O.S.B.; Westminster, Md.: The Newman Book Shop, 1942) as a more complete and parallel instance of a rhetorically effective text of religious commitment, and regarding which issues of reading are more acutely noticeable.

A reader formed in the Ignatian tradition not only understands the ideas of the Śrīvaiṣ

ava tradition, but also sees the affective demands that are being put before the religious reader, comes to understand and feel those demands, and so is likely to come to empathize more particularly and intensely with the ways and the goals of the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra. This would remain true even if the ordinary and expected Śrīvaiṣ

ava readers were to be dismayed at the idea of “visitors” from outside the traditions; the same phenomenon applies in reverse, should a Śrīvaiṣ

ava reader turn a to the Exercises and find affinity with them. While an array of doctrinal, historical, and cultural differences might well seem to block such empathy, it still remains possible; in fact, it does occur at a deep level as the double textual instruction affects readers and draws them more deeply into both worlds.

A Problem and a Possibility

If attentive readers take their texts as constructive wholes and not merely as contain-ers for notions about or references to extratextual realities, they become engaged in processes affecting their own emotional lives. This dynamic is most obviously noticed within religious traditions, as is intended by communities and their authors, but it ought not to be neglected in the realm of interreligious learning, where it similarly creates living interconnections even while reason is busy pondering whether such affective exchange across religious boundaries is possible at all.

But however interesting, none of this is without intellectual and spiritual problems. The interreligious reader is inevitably faced with two (or possibly more) irreconcilable commitments that will often seem unable to be honored simultaneously. A vigorous interreligious and cross-textual affective engagement may be admirable, but theologically it may be received skeptically, its meaning and value doubted.

At this point we might seek a theology of religions by which to decide what kinds of interreligious exchange are possible and what they are to mean according to the rules of one's home tradition; there is certainly room for this kind of reflection within the life of a community. But it would be a mistake were such theologizing to replace continued reading and reflection on the affective fruition of that reading. To conceptualize the problem of learning and feeling across religious boundaries and treat it simply according to the prior resources of one's own (religious or academic) tradition may easily let slip away the intensity that makes reading across religious boundaries so affectively real and persuasive. Theorization may, instead, dissipate the phenomenon of interreligious affect, making texts appear only as rather inert sources of information useful in discussions about religions. If we seek a meta-solution, we may inadvertently deny to texts their particular power, and thereby dissipate textual urgency in the course of an investigation ostensibly dedicated to understanding it. We must, therefore, stay with the particularities of the reading process across religious boundaries and the affective states generated in that process.

If so, then theory on its own, literary or theological, cannot arbitrate how readers should react to religious classics from other traditions. A person may already know that, whatever an individual might think, “home communities” are unlikely to accept into their approved and affirmed theologies any commitment to and worship in another tradition, and may disapprove of strong attraction to the wisdom and emotion of another tradition. But while the community has its own legitimate concerns, and theological reasoning its own responsibilities, intelligently and emotionally involved persons may have already shifted to a new situation wherein both sets of readings, traditions, spiritual goals, and affective states are afforded value and meaning, and these are opened to practical responses that elude even the most well-meant rational interpretations. Nonetheless, the act of complete surrender may stand at the very center of things—theologically and by way of desire—even if there is not, and perhaps cannot be, a norm by which to determine whether a person can love God in keeping with the instructions and persuasions of two instructive and imaginative texts.

But if readers cross religious boundaries affectively and by emotional adaptation even when reason insists on holding back, this affective boldness may offer a kind of solution: solvitur ambulando. Long before the theological reflection that occurs when people step back and ponder how their learning and experience might fit their tradition's theology and doctrine, a reader, in the process of reading, has already been recognizing that affective exchange, with its own intellectual dimensions, has already been occurring. To be sure, the goal of commitment and devotion is named differently in one or another text, and it may seem to be substantively different, such as here, where the Śrīmat Rahasya Traya Sāra and Spiritual Exercises invoke different deities, describe the human condition according to different fundamental theologies, and perhaps promise different final states. But such differences need not attenuate empathy nor undercut a formative emotional exchange. If it is possible to read in two traditions, the complex heritage of that double reading can hardly be denied. Or, to conclude on a more programmatic note: a comparative theology attentive to reading practices proposes issues that cannot be adequately recognized nor satisfactorily resolved by theorizations that shy away from affect, engagement, and the peculiar dynamic of reading religious classics interreligiously.