Ramakrishna (1836-1886)

The journal of "M.": rare documentary proximity

Unlike most of India's great spiritual figures, whose biographies rest only on accounts composed long after their deaths, Ramakrishna's principal source is a quasi-contemporary and detailed document: the journal kept by Mahendranath Gupta (1854-1932), a schoolteacher known only by the initials "M.", who visited the master from 1882 onwards and noted down, often the very same evening, the conversations, gestures and mystical states he observed^[4]. This material was published in Bengali under the title Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita ("The Nectar of Sri Ramakrishna's Words"), in five volumes appearing successively in 1902, 1904, 1908, 1910 and 1932 — the last volume's publication having been delayed by M.'s own declining health^[5]. The abridged English translation, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, by the monk Swami Nikhilananda, appeared in 1942 from the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York and remains the most cited Western reference^[6].

This documentary proximity is a rare asset for the historian: it makes it possible to date and situate with precision a large part of Ramakrishna's teachings and biographical episodes, whereas the biography of figures such as Shankara rests only on late and largely legendary hagiographies^[7]. It does not, however, remove every critical difficulty.

Second-hand biographies and their limits

Three other major sources complete the picture, but with a different status. Swami Saradananda (1865-1927), a direct disciple of Ramakrishna, wrote between 1909 and 1919 a detailed Bengali biography, Sri Sri Ramakrishna Lilaprasanga, translated into English as Sri Ramakrishna the Great Master — a text written several decades after the events, by an author fully committed to devotion to his master^[8]. The German philologist Friedrich Max Müller, a renowned specialist in comparative religion, published as early as 1898 — only twelve years after Ramakrishna's death — Râmakrishna: His Life and Sayings, based on the testimonies of Vivekananda and other witnesses, favourable and unfavourable alike; the French writer Romain Rolland, a correspondent of Freud, published in Paris in 1929 the first volume of his Essay on the Mysticism and Action of Living India, entitled The Life of Ramakrishna^[9].

This plurality of sources — a quasi-contemporary journal, a disciple's biography and two works by Western sympathisers, published on either side of the First World War — thus offers substantial material, though not free of a structural bias: all of them come from the circle of the disciples or from declared sympathisers of the modern Vedantic movement. It is precisely this documentary imbalance that would feed, a century later, the scholarly controversy around Jeffrey Kripal's book, set out further on in this article.

Birth and family

Ramakrishna was born on 18 February 1836, at about five o'clock in the morning, at Kamarpukur, a village in the Hooghly district of Bengal, under the name of Gadadhar Chattopadhyay^[10]. His father, Khudiram Chattopadhyay (born 1775), a pious and poor Brahmin, and his mother, Chandramani Devi (born 1791), already had three children — the eldest, Ramkumar, thirty-one years his senior, a sister, Katyayani, and a brother, Rameswar^[11]. The father died in 1843, leaving the family in increased poverty. At the age of nine, in 1845, Gadadhar received the sacred Brahmin thread, but soon neglected formal schooling in favour of village religious theatre and an intense, spontaneous piety^[12].

First childhood ecstasies

According to the testimony reported by his biographers, Gadadhar had, at about the age of ten or eleven, his first experience of altered consciousness: crossing a paddy field, he is said to have been seized with ecstasy at the sight of white cranes standing out against a dark stormy sky, temporarily losing awareness of the surrounding world^[13]. This episode, reported without particular doctrinal emphasis by the most cautious biographers, inaugurates a series of states which the devotional tradition would call bhava (rapture) or samadhi (mystical absorption), and which more sceptical observers would later describe as "trance" or even seizures of neurological origin — a debate dealt with further on in this article. In 1852, at sixteen, Gadadhar joined his elder brother Ramkumar at Calcutta to assist him in his priestly duties^[14].

Rani Rasmani, Mathur Babu and the Kali temple

On 31 May 1855, Ramkumar officiated at the consecration ceremony of the great Kali temple of Dakshineswar, on the banks of the Hooghly north of Calcutta, founded by the wealthy widow Rani Rasmani^[15]. Ramkumar became its first titular priest; on his death in 1856, Gadadhar — now Ramakrishna — succeeded him as permanent priest, in charge of the daily worship of the goddess Kali^[16]. Her son-in-law and administrator of the temple, Mathuranath Biswas ("Mathur Babu"), quickly became a constant support and protector of the young priest, whose extreme devotional behaviour — prolonged weeping before the image of the goddess, disregard for ordinary ritual proprieties, repeated mystical absorptions — at first alarmed the temple entourage.

The "madness" for Kali

From his twentieth year onwards, Ramakrishna intensified his practice to excess in the eyes of those around him: he spent whole days and nights in prayer, meditation and adoration of the Goddess, sometimes in the temple, sometimes in the neighbouring grove called Panchavati, seeking a direct vision of Kali rather than formal ritual worship. His family, alarmed by what it took for religious madness, decided to marry him off to bring him back to a normal life — a common practice in Bengal at the time for steadying a young man judged unstable.

Marriage to Sarada Devi (1859)

In May 1859, Ramakrishna married Saradamani Mukhopadhyaya, known as Sarada Devi, then aged five or six — Sarada having been born on 22 December 1853 at Jayrambati, a village neighbouring Kamarpukur^[17]. According to Bengali custom of the time, the child bride remained with her parents until puberty; when she joined her husband years later, Ramakrishna had already fully embraced the monastic life of the renouncer (sannyasi), and the marriage was never consummated^[18]. Sarada Devi nevertheless remained his closest spiritual companion until his death, before becoming, after 1886, the figure venerated as the "Holy Mother" by the whole movement stemming from Ramakrishna^[19].

Bhairavi Brahmani and tantra

In 1861, an itinerant ascetic woman known as Bhairavi Brahmani arrived at Dakshineswar and became Ramakrishna's first attested spiritual guide, initiating him into tantric sadhana (disciplined practice) according to the Shakta and Vaishnava tantric tradition^[20]. Under her direction, Ramakrishna went through, one by one, sixty-four major tantric exercises, completed in 1863^[21].

The council of pandits and the recognition of "avatarhood"

It was also Bhairavi Brahmani who first interpreted Ramakrishna's ecstatic states as the manifestation of an avatara (divine descent), and defended this thesis before an assembly of scholars (pandits) convened at Dakshineswar. Among the participants were Vaishnava Charan, a recognised leader of Vaishnava society and a fine connoisseur of the devotional scriptures, who fully endorsed the Brahmani's conclusions, and Gauri Kanta Tarkabhushana, a renowned scholar of the tantric school^[22]. This episode, often cited by the devotional tradition as the first public and learned recognition of Ramakrishna's exceptional spiritual status, illustrates a recurring trait of Indian hagiography: the validation of a religious charisma by a circle of local doctrinal authorities, with no centralised body comparable to an ecclesial magisterium intervening to decide in the last resort.

Totapuri and the Advaitin illumination

In 1864 or 1865, an itinerant Naga monk called Totapuri, belonging to the Mahanirvani monastic order, initiated Ramakrishna into the life of renunciation (sannyasa) and the teaching of Advaita Vedanta — the non-dualist school whose classical doctrine Adi Shankara had fixed ten centuries earlier^[23]. Under his guidance, Ramakrishna attained nirvikalpa samadhi, the highest state of non-dual absorption in this tradition, remaining in it — according to the traditional account — for six months, without even awareness of his own body^[24]. Totapuri, whose stay at Dakshineswar was initially meant to last only a few days according to the custom of itinerant renouncers, finally remained nearly eleven months with Ramakrishna^[25].

The Shodashi Puja: the wife adored as the Divine Mother (1872)

On 5 June 1872, during the feast of Phalaharini Kali Puja — Swami Saradananda for his part places the episode a year later, on 25 May 1873, a sign of the uncertainties inherent in a chronology reconstructed after the fact — Ramakrishna performed the Shodashi Puja: he seated Sarada Devi on the ritual seat usually reserved for the image of the goddess, adorned her with flowers and sacred marks, and worshipped her according to the mantras prescribed for Tripurasundari, one of the forms of the Mother Goddess^[26]. Despite this extraordinary ritual veneration, Sarada Devi continued to lead a life of village simplicity — washing linen, sweeping, cooking — in a conjugal relationship that remained purely spiritual^[27].

The Islamic sadhana (1866)

In 1866, a Hindu convert to Sufism named Govinda Roy, a familiar of Dakshineswar, initiated Ramakrishna into Muslim practice. According to the traditional account, Ramakrishna, impressed by the faith and love of God shown by Govinda, decided to try this path in turn, reasoning in these terms: "This too is a path to the realisation of God; the playful Mother, source of infinite play, has blessed many people with the attainment of her lotus feet by this path also"^[28]. He then repeated the name of Allah, observed the five prescribed daily prayers, and lived according to the rules of Islam for three days, at the end of which — the hagiographic account reports — he was granted a vision of a radiant, bearded figure, perhaps Muhammad, who approached him before merging into him, plunging him into mystical absorption^[29].

The vision of Christ (November 1874)

In November 1874, a devotee named Sambhu Charan Mallick read passages of the Bible to Ramakrishna in the garden of Jadunath Mallick, south of the Dakshineswar temple^[30]. According to the account recorded by Swami Saradananda and taken up in the introduction to the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Ramakrishna first saw a painting of the Madonna and Child come alive before his eyes, rays of light penetrating his heart; three days later, walking under the Panchavati grove, he met a fair-skinned figure with elongated eyes and a slightly flattened nose, who embraced him before disappearing into him^[31]. This experience, reported by his biographers as an authentic "Christian sadhana", led him to the same synthetic conclusion as his tantric, Vaishnava, Advaitin and Muslim experiences:

"I have practised all religions — Hinduism, Islam, Christianity — and I have also followed the paths of the different Hindu sects [...] I have found that it is the same God toward whom all are directing their steps, though along different paths." — Ramakrishna, reported words in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. Swami Nikhilananda, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, New York, 1942^[32]

The doctrinal synthesis

This cycle of experiments — more than a decade between the start of the tantric sadhana (1861) and the Christic vision (1874) — constitutes, in the devotional tradition stemming from Ramakrishna, the lived experimental proof of his central thesis: that the same Absolute allows itself to be reached by religious paths that appear incompatible. It is this same experience that the modern current known as perennialist — from Vivekananda to Aldous Huxley and Frithjof Schuon — would invoke as the foundation of the thesis that all the great religions converge toward the same metaphysical summit; a separate Ignispedia article examines this thesis in detail and the Catholic answer it calls for.

The Brahmo Samaj and the Nava Vidhan

From the mid-1870s onwards, Ramakrishna's fame spread beyond the circle of temple visitors to reach the Bengali intellectual elite in contact with Western modernity. His first meeting with Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-1884), the reformist leader of the Brahmo Samaj — a reformed monotheistic movement born of contact with colonial Christianity — took place in 1875^[33]. Sen, at first reserved before Ramakrishna's rustic and unconventional manners, was finally won over less by his doctrine than by the authenticity of his behaviour, which he identified as that of a true saint^[34]. Under this influence, Keshab reintegrated certain elements of Hindu devotional polytheism and founded the Nava Vidhan ("New Dispensation") movement, structured around two principles borrowed directly from Ramakrishna: the worship of God as Mother, and the affirmation that "all religions are true"^[35]. In 1878, Keshab published Paramahamser Ukti ("Sayings of the Paramahamsa"), the first printed collection of Ramakrishna's teachings; the following year, the Brahmoist Pratap Chandra Mazumdar wrote in English the first biography of Ramakrishna, The Hindu Saint, which helped spread his name as far as the West^[36].

Narendranath Datta and the future monks (1881-1885)

In 1881, Ramakrishna met for the first time two teenagers who would become his closest monastic disciples: Rakhal (the future Swami Brahmananda) and above all Narendranath Datta, eighteen years old, a brilliant student steeped in Western philosophy and initially sceptical of popular mysticism^[37]. This young man would become, after the master's death, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), the decisive figure in the worldwide spread of modern Vedantism and founder, in 1897, of the Ramakrishna Mission — a separate Ignispedia article traces his own biography.

"M." and the birth of a gospel

It was also during this period, from 1882 onwards, that Mahendranath Gupta began recording his visits to Dakshineswar in the journal which would become, after Ramakrishna's death, the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita — described earlier in this article as the most reliable source, and the closest to the facts, for reconstructing the master's final teachings.

Diagnosis and the move to Cossipore

From 1885 onwards, Ramakrishna suffered from a persistent sore throat, soon diagnosed as cancer; his condition deteriorated to the point of requiring a move from Dakshineswar to Shyampukur, then to a rented convalescent house in the Cossipore (Kasipur) garden, near Calcutta, where a circle of young disciples — Narendranath foremost — organised a permanent rota to nurse him^[38].

Kalpataru Day (1 January 1886)

On 1 January 1886, Ramakrishna, feeling momentarily better, came down to walk in the Cossipore garden in the early afternoon. During a conversation with his devotee Girish Chandra Ghosh, he entered a state of deep ecstasy and touched several of his assembled disciples, granting each of them, according to the traditional account, a personal spiritual experience matching their most intimate aspiration^[39]. He then uttered the formula that has remained famous:

"What more need I tell you? I bless you all. May you all be illumined!" — Ramakrishna, at the Cossipore garden, 1 January 1886^[40]

This episode, commemorated each year by the Ramakrishna movement as "Kalpataru Day" (the "wish-fulfilling tree" of Indian mythology), is interpreted by his disciples as the summit and final fulfilment of his spiritual life.

Death (16 August 1886)

Ramakrishna died in the night of 15 to 16 August 1886, at about one o'clock in the morning, at the Cossipore garden, at the age of fifty^[41]. Shortly before his death, he is said to have given sixteen disciples the ochre garment of renunciation, the founding gesture of the monastic order that would bear his name^[42].

God with form and God without form

Unlike Shankara, for whom the ultimate Brahman is strictly impersonal and without attributes (nirguna)^[43], Ramakrishna refuses to decide between God with form (saguna — the Goddess Kali, Krishna, Rama, Christ) and God without form (nirguna — the impersonal Absolute of the Upanishads), affirming that both are equally real, two faces of one and the same indivisible reality which he calls Brahman-Shakti^[44]. This position, which holds together devotional bhakti and intellectual jnana, clearly distinguishes his teaching from the severe monism of classical Advaita.

The parable of the many paths to the roof

On 27 October 1882, addressing Keshab Chandra Sen in particular, Ramakrishna developed the image that would become emblematic of his doctrine:

"The important thing is to reach the roof. You can reach it by stone stairs or by wooden stairs or by bamboo steps or by a rope. You can also climb up by a bamboo pole." — Ramakrishna, words of 27 October 1882, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. Swami Nikhilananda, p. 111^[45]

The image, developed in the same conversation, serves to illustrate his conviction that religions, despite their contrasting outward forms, would all lead to the same summit — that of the direct realisation of God.

The parable of the blind men and the elephant

Ramakrishna also takes up, to illustrate the limits of any partial doctrine, the famous Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant: each, touching a different part of the animal — the trunk, the ear, the leg — describes a totally different object, without any of them grasping the whole. Applied to religions and philosophical schools, this image serves, in his teaching, to relativise any particular doctrine's claim to embrace alone the whole of the divine mystery.

The long wait and tears for God

Despite this insistence on the plurality of paths, Ramakrishna maintains an uncompromising spiritual demand: the necessity of an ardent, almost painful longing for God, a condition he expresses in terms of great psychological rawness:

"People shed a whole jug of tears for wife and children. They swim in tears for money. But who weeps for God?" — Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. Swami Nikhilananda^[46]

He adds that in this "Kali age" (the present age according to Hindu cosmology), three days of ardent aspiration would suffice to obtain divine grace, and recommends that anyone sincerely seeking God withdraw for a time from family life to weep over his absence^[47].

The Divine Mother and purified tantra

The worship of Kali, goddess of destruction and transformation in Shakta Hinduism, occupies a central place in Ramakrishna's spirituality; he systematically designates her as the Universal Mother, at once the source of the manifested world and of its dissolution. His insistence on ascetic purity — the explicit refusal of any tantric practice of a sexual nature, unlike certain more radical branches of Shakta tantrism — has been noted by several of his biographers as a distinctive trait of his religious personality, and would later become a central point of friction in the scholarly controversy set out below.

The 1897 foundation and Belur Math

After Ramakrishna's death, his sixteen direct monastic disciples first regrouped in a dilapidated house at Baranagar, near Calcutta, forming the nucleus of the future monastic order. On 1 May 1897, Swami Vivekananda, returned from his world tour and his resounding address to the World's Parliament of Religions at Chicago (1893), formally founded the Ramakrishna Mission, an organisation devoted to charitable, educational and missionary action in the spirit of his master^[48]. On 9 December 1898, Ramakrishna's relics were transferred to newly acquired land at Belur, in the Howrah district, which became the permanent seat of the Ramakrishna Math (the monastic order proper) and of the Mission^[49].

Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother

After her husband's death, Sarada Devi became the living spiritual reference of the nascent movement, guiding the young monks and devoting her life to receiving disciples until her death on 20 July 1920 (sometimes dated 21 July according to sources)^[50]. Venerated as the "Holy Mother", she remains today a figure of devotion in her own right within the movement, distinct from Ramakrishna himself.

Western influence and modern Hindu nationalism

The Western diffusion of Ramakrishna's message owes much to Vivekananda, whose opening address at the Chicago Parliament in 1893 popularised a universalist reading of Vedantism with an American and European public already shaped by the waning orientalism of the late 19th century. More recently, the figure of Ramakrishna, like that of Adi Shankara, has also been mobilised in the context of the rise of contemporary Hindu nationalism, as a symbol of an Indian spirituality presented as superior and all-encompassing over against Western religious traditions — a political instrumentalisation which must not, however, obscure the properly spiritual question raised by his teaching.

Jeffrey Kripal's thesis (1995)

In 1995, the American scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal published with the University of Chicago Press a resounding work, Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, which received that same year the award for best first book from the American Academy of Religion^[51]. In it, Kripal argues, on the basis of a psychoanalytic reading of the Kathamrita and of Saradananda's biography, that Ramakrishna's mystical experiences were, for a significant part, the sublimated expression of a repressed homoeroticism, and that the movement stemming from Ramakrishna knowingly published expurgated and incomplete editions of certain biographical documents concerning him^[52].

The scholarly refutations

This thesis provoked intense controversy, both in the West and in India^[53]. The monk Swami Atmajnanananda contested the concealment charge as early as 1997, arguing that the Jivanavrittanta, the text Kripal presented as suppressed, had been reprinted nine times in Bengali before 1995^[54]. In 2010, Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana published with Motilal Banarsidass a systematic refutation, Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali's Child Revisited, identifying in Kripal's work errors of translation from Bengali, speculative generalisations and cases of "documentary and contextual manipulation"^[55]. Other scholars, including Alan Roland, Kelley Ann Raab, Somnath Bhattacharyya and the philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, have argued that the categories of Western psychoanalysis apply with difficulty, without critical adaptation, to South Asian religious practices structured by very different cultural frameworks^[56]. The Bengal specialist Brian Hatcher, for his part, partly defended the validity of some of Kripal's translations — a sign that the debate remains, on this precise point, genuinely disputed rather than settled on one side alone^[57].

Earlier readings: Rolland, Isherwood, Kakar

Before Kripal, other Western authors had already questioned the psychological status of Ramakrishna's ecstatic states, without reaching the same conclusions. Romain Rolland, in his 1929 Life of Ramakrishna, argued on the contrary that these experiences were not pathological, and contested the relevance of a purely psychoanalytic reading applied to a mystic — a position he defended in his correspondence with Sigmund Freud himself^[58]. The British writer Christopher Isherwood, an avowed homosexual, devoted a 1965 biography to him, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (Simon & Schuster, New York), in which he concluded, with an honesty his readers have often noted: "I couldn't honestly claim him as a homosexual, even a sublimated one, much as I would have liked to be able to do so"^[59]. The Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, in The Analyst and the Mystic (1991), proposed for his part a non-pathologising meta-psychological explanation, connecting Ramakrishna's mystical realisation to a creativity proper to the psyche, while noting that Western, culturally situated conceptions of eroticism and gender contributed to the Western difficulty in correctly understanding figures such as Ramakrishna^[60].

What the Church can recognise

A Catholic can recognise, in Ramakrishna's life, several traits that call for genuine esteem: the intensity of his thirst for God, his radical detachment from material goods and comfort, his ascetic discipline and his patient search, through multiple paths, for an authentic experience of the divine rather than ritual or intellectual comfort. The Second Vatican Council, in its declaration Nostra Aetate (28 October 1965), offers the theological framework for appreciating such convictions without rejecting them wholesale: "The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men"^[61]. The decree Ad Gentes of the same year takes up the patristic doctrine of the "seeds of the Word" (semina Verbi), according to which elements of truth and goodness, sown by Providence, can be found in the great religious traditions of humanity, called to be recognised, purified and fulfilled in Christ^[62].

Relativistic religious pluralism in question

This genuine esteem must never, however, make us forget what is problematic for the Catholic faith in Ramakrishna's central thesis — the underlying equivalence of all religions. The declaration Dominus Iesus, published on 6 August 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, names precisely this type of thesis and situates it in its contemporary context:

"The Church's constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle)." — Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, 6 August 2000, § 4^[63]

The same document specifies, a few paragraphs further on, the point directly opposed to Ramakrishna's formula about "many paths to the same roof":

"It excludes radically the indifferentist mentality 'imbued with a religious relativism which leads to the belief that one religion is as good as another'." — Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, 6 August 2000, § 22^[64]

The document adds that "it would be clearly contrary to the Catholic faith to regard the Church as one way of salvation alongside others"^[65], a clarification which obviously holds, by direct logical extension, for any other religion presented as equivalent to the revelation of Christ. Recognising that God can act, through his grace, within non-Christian religious traditions — which the magisterium affirms without detour — is indeed something quite different from affirming that these traditions, taken in themselves, would lead to the same goal by a path objectively equivalent to that of the Church.

Avatara and Incarnation: two irreducible logics

The central concept which the devotional tradition applies to Ramakrishna himself — that of avatara, the periodic "descent" of the divine into an earthly form — belongs to a theological logic fundamentally different from that of the Christian Incarnation, even if the two notions have sometimes been brought together superficially in modern interreligious dialogue. The Catechism of the Catholic Church recalls that the Incarnation designates a unique event: "Taking up St John's expression ('The Word became flesh': Jn 1:14), the Church calls 'Incarnation' the fact that the Son of God assumed a human nature in order to accomplish our salvation in it"^[66]. This assumption is definitive and unrepeatable: the eternal Word took flesh once for all, at a precise point in history, and remains for ever united to this concrete humanity, including in his glorious resurrection.

The avatara, in classical Hindu theology, obeys quite another logic: a temporary manifestation, called to repeat itself whenever the cosmic order (dharma) requires it, and whose relation to the matter assumed remains, according to the schools, closer to a functional appearance than to a permanent hypostatic union between a divine nature and a fully concrete human nature. The British comparatist Geoffrey Parrinder, in his classic study Avatar and Incarnation (1970), devoted a whole book to the scrupulous examination of this structural difference between the two notions — a work which remains the starting academic reference for anyone wishing to go deeper into the question beyond this article^[67]. The Catechism further specifies that the revelation brought by Christ is definitive and knows no successive equivalent: "God has said everything in his Word [...] There will be no other word than this one", in the formula of St John of the Cross taken up by the Catechism^[68]. This affirmation excludes, by construction, the idea of an indefinite series of divine manifestations of equivalent status, whether borne by the classical Hindu doctrine of the avatara or by the devotional elevation of a modern spiritual master to the same rank.

Mystical experience and Catholic discernment

The question of the status of Ramakrishna's ecstasies — authentic mysticism for his disciples, a psychologically problematic state for certain Western interpreters, as the Kali's Child controversy has shown — recalls, by contrast, the demand proper to Catholic mystical theology. Masters such as St John of the Cross or St Teresa of Avila insisted on the necessity of a rigorous discernment of mystical states, judged not by their subjective intensity alone but by their fruit — effective charity, humility, conformity to the doctrine received from the Church and submission to proven spiritual guidance. Nothing in this article claims to judge, in the internal forum, the subjective authenticity of Ramakrishna's experiences; but the Catholic encyclopaedia must note that the Hindu devotional tradition, lacking a centralised doctrinal magisterium comparable to that of the Church, has no such criterion of external, objective verification — which leaves the validation of Ramakrishna's "avatarhood" resting, in the last analysis, on the assent of a circle of favourable disciples and pandits, as the episode of the 1863 council reported above shows.

Ramakrishna remains a spiritual figure of uncommon intensity: a man who devoted his entire adult life to a radical quest for God, going through, one by one, the great religious paths of his time in search of the same flame. His thirst, his tears for God, his detachment from goods and honours challenge Christians on a precise point: is our own desire for God even comparable, in intensity, to that of this man who wept whole nights before the image of the Goddess?

But where Ramakrishna concludes, at the end of his experience, that all paths are objectively equal because they lead to the same summit, Christians receive in Christ a revelation of quite another order: not a synthesis of equivalent paths, but the unique and definitive irruption of the Word made flesh, "who by his incarnation, death and resurrection has brought to fulfilment the history of salvation"^[69]. Christ does not close the list of possible avatars: he is "the way, and the truth, and the life" (Jn 14:6), "one God, and one mediator between God and men" (1 Tim 2:5) — not through arbitrary exclusivism, but because God himself, in Jesus Christ, has said once for all, in the concrete history of a people and of a man, what no mystical repetition, however sincere, can add to or equal.

• Mahendranath Gupta ("M."), Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, 5 vols., Calcutta, 1902-1932 — English trans. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Nikhilananda, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, New York, 1942.
• F. Max Müller, Râmakrishna: His Life and Sayings, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1898.
• Romain Rolland, The Life of Ramakrishna (Essay on the Mysticism and Action of Living India, I), Paris, Stock, 1929.
• Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1965.
• Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana, Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali's Child Revisited, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 2010.
• Geoffrey Parrinder, Avatar and Incarnation, London, Faber and Faber, 1970.
• Philosophia perennis: Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Guénon and the thesis of a universal religion — the Catholic answer to the perennialist pluralism of which Ramakrishna is the modern source.
• Adi Shankara (c. 788-c. 820) — the philosopher of Advaita Vedanta whose doctrine of the impersonal Brahman Ramakrishna takes up and softens.
• Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) — the disciple who institutionalised Ramakrishna's teaching in the West and in India.