Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Hindu Mysticism: On Ramakrishna’s Transcendent Devotionalism

In his religiosity, Ramakrishna (1836-1885), a Hindu mystic and priest at temple of the goddess Kali, the goddess of death, drew on the Bhakti (devotee), (Advaita) Vedanta, and Tantra aspects of Hinduism, as well as on Islam and Christianity to a much lesser extent, toward his goal of realizing God, which can also be put in terms of achieving self-knowledge of one’s true nature (atman). In the Bhavagad-Gita, Arjuna demands to see the god Krishna as he really is, but Krishna has to hold himself back, showing himself in (human) bodily form, albeit with a myriad of heads. Even a distended form such as this is too much for Arjuna. Moreover, ignorance cannot take in reality or awareness itself without it being adorned in anthropomorphic (i.e., having human characteristics) ornaments that Hume discusses in his Natural History of Religion. Krishna’s promise in the Gita is relevant, in “that, through His Maya, He will assume a human body and manifest His powers whenever religion declines, and will help [people] to obtain peace.”[1] It is through illusion that a deity assumes the likeness of a human form because seeing a deity’s essence in Brahman is simply too much for mere mortals.

Being corporeal, the human body resonates with the selfish, greed-instigating materialism that Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s closest disciple, claims, albeit with more than a tinge of resentment, is associated with modern (i.e., twentieth-century) Western civilization. The secularity in the West, especially with the epistemological reduction to empiricism further narrowed to natural science, “could not lead [people] to the knowledge of Atman,” or, I might add, to Brahman (and that Atman is really of Brahman).[2] In other words, “knowledge obtained through the senses will not enable [people in the West] to discover the reality beyond time and space,” especially in a decadent culture “founded on self-love, desire for worldly possessions and absence of faith in religion.”[3] Instead, knowledge of a person's own soul "is through self-control [of the mind as by meditation or renunciation], selflessness, and introspection."[4] 

Seeing the “face” of the divine as embodied in personified forms only gets a person so far if the goal of realizing the divine lies inherently beyond the limits of human resemblance, or, as Dionysius wrote, beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotions). Because Ramakrishna went beyond empirical representations of Kali in worshipping the divine “Mother,” such transcendence was very much a part of his mature religious belief-structure and practice.

For example, Tantric ritual centers around the worship of shakti, which literally means “energy, ability, strength, effort, power, might, and capability.”[5] In Hinduism, shakti is the universal power that underlies and sustains everything that exists. Shakti connotes femininity, and is synonymous with Devi, the goddess consort of Shiva, who furnishes the power (or energy) of the male deity. In Tantric Shaktism, Shakti is the principal deity, hence being akin to Brahman.[6] The goal of tantric practice is to transcend the tall hedge that separates the holy and unholy and thus achieve moksha, or liberation by seeing everything in the world as manifestations of shakti.[7]

In Christian terms, Gertrud of Helfta’s visions of Jesus as her divine spouse included one vision of Jesus lifting over the divide between the sacred and the profane, where she sees the wounds on his resurrected body, but this empirical representation may belie Gertrud’s claim of being transported to the divine side. To be sure, Gertrud’s goal of being in God, whose essence is (agape) love, which Calvin, unlike Augustine, thought people could have in this world, transcends being married to Jesus, and thus marital union, but her worship and visions did not go so far. Her image of Christ, as a “mask of eternity,”[8] became her final obstruction to even deeper, immersive union with God qua divine rather than erotic love. From his Confessions, it can be concluded that Augustine may have been held back in from achieving further transcendence by the same obstacle.

In contrast, Ramakrishna’s worship in nineteenth-century India went beyond the bodily representation of Kali to the goddess being essentially Brahman, which transcends the very notion of a deity (i.e., an entity that encapsulates the divine as personified). When asked about Kali worship, Ramakrishna said, “I do not worship Kali made of clay and straw. My Mother is the conscious principle. My Mother is pure Satchidananda—Existence-Knowledge-Bliss-Absolute. That which is infinite and deep is always dark-coloured. The extensive sky is dark-coloured and so it the deep sea. My Kali is infinite, all-pervading, and consciousness itself.”[9] Darkness represents mystery, as in being ineffable (i.e., the unknown). In Hinduism, Brahman, and any god or goddess deemed to be supreme and thus sharing Brahman-qualities, is the darkness within the stone idol of Kali that, being inside the statue, knows no form.

Regarding his vision of Kali, Ramakrishna said, “in my heart of hearts, there was flowing a current of intense bliss, never experienced before, and I had the immediate knowledge of the Light that was Mother.”[10] On another occasion, Ramakrishna described the vision as follows: “(I)n whatever direction I looked, I found a continuous succession of effulgent waves coming forward, raging and storming from all sides with a great speed. Very soon they fell on me and made me sink to the unknown bottom.”[11] He “saw a conscious sea of light. But what about the divine Mother’s form consisting of pure consciousness only”?[12] Did Ramakrishna see that form? Saradananda assumes so because Ramakrishna “uttered repeatedly the word ‘Mother’ in a plaintive voice.”[13] I find it spurious reasoning to conclude that such an utterance means that Ramakrishna’s vision was limited Kali’s female form—such a form would detract from seeing pure consciousness as a sea of light. Saradananda’s notion that the divine Mother’s form consists “of consciousness only” suggests that form is not being used here to refer to that of the human body. Indeed, immediately after the vision, Ramakrishna was still begging the goddess to show herself to him.[14] But, then, as Ramakrishna would later report, after he lost consciousness under the weight of such “unbearable anguish,” he “saw that form of the Mother with hands that give boons and freedom from fear—the form that smiled, spoke and consoled and taught me in endless ways!”[15] I contend that the vision of a “conscious sea - light”—consisting of “pure consciousness”—can be distinguished as more transcendent, and more wholly other (than us), than the female form of the Goddess that he saw while he was unconscious. His vision went beyond the goddess as an embodied entity to grasp the goddess’s essence as Brahman.

The shift in transcendence can be seen in Ramakrishna’s realization when he was “having the divine vision of the child Rama constantly,” being “(a)bsorbed in the meditation of that divine form in the mood of maternal affection towards Him, that, as Ramakrishna put it, “’Rama, who is the son of Dasaratha, is in every being; the same Rama is immanent in the universe and yet transcends it.’”[16] The “divine form” of the child Rama cannot hold Rama “entering the universe and eternally manifesting Himself as it” and being “ever existent in His own attributeless nature devoid of Maya [illusion] and beyond everything in the universe.”[17] Once Ramakrishna had reached the point of his life when he was engaged in his religious exercises, he would stay in a mood until “it experienced its ultimate limit, getting at last a glimpse of the non-dual consciousness beyond.”[18] To put it plainly, “seeing” the face of God in such rawness blows away not just the form of a child, whether in Hinduism or Christianity, but form itself. As Dionysius points out in his text, even the notion of an entity is taken from our experience of the world in which we live, rather than being necessarily applicable to a deity’s essence as Brahman, or, in Christianity, divine love (agape).

Such transcendence would translate into Gertrud of Helfta, a Medieval Christian nun, transcending her experience and vision of loving marital union with Christ to go on to experience indwelling in divine love itself, being in God rather than merely in relation to God. Similarly, such transcendence goes beyond Ramakrishna’s own practice of the Madhura-bhava, the “sweet mood as of the spouse of God.”[19] With Ramakrishna being “ever desirous to have the love of Krishna,” as Gertrud was in regard to the love of Jesus, that Ramakrishna “was a male person disappeared altogether and every thought, word or movement of his became womanly”—even wearing women’s dresses for six months—“in the faith that he was the spiritual consort of God.”[20] Gertrud didn’t have to change genders mentally and spiritually because she was a woman and Jesus is incarnated as a man, but she too viewed herself as a spiritual consort of a deity. But unlike Gertrud’s spiritual transcendence to spiritual matrimonial love, Ramakrishna’s religious experience and vision of the goddess being a “wonderful state of complete absorption in” the goddess transcends marital union and even a vision of the goddess’s hands and smile.[21] Put another way, Ramakrishna’s practice wherein his will perfectly reflects that of Kali as though being in the goddess compares to Gertrud’s unrealized goal of being in God, which is a more perfect union than is her liturgical marital union with Jesus and Ramakrishna’s “unbounded yearning for the complete”—only it is not complete even as an ideal!—"union for all times without a break with one’s darling of the heart.”[22] Even though “cruelly obstructed by manifold barriers,” the marital union sought may seem to be complete without such barriers, but this is not so relative to the deeper union as is evinced in dwelling in the divine.[23]

In short, Ramakrishna went further—transcended deeper—than Gertrud had because he surpassed even Kali manifesting as a deity ironically through intense devotion to that goddess. Gertrud had achieved only so much in her marital visions and experience of Jesus as her spiritual spouse, just as Ramakrishna could not hope to achieve a complete union as Krishna’s consort even if there were not a hedge between us and the gods.

That Ramakrishna went deeper in experiencing Kali than he could as Krishna’s consort, even with the efficacy of the method-acting bringing forth genuine female spirituality, is not to say that Ramakrishna ceased to have visions of the goddess in anthropomorphic terms. Before his vision, while worshipping and meditating, he “used to see a hand of the divine Mother or a foot, bright and delicate, or Her sweet, affectionate and smiling face, supremely beautiful. Now he saw, even at times other than those of worship and meditation, the full figure of the effulgent Mother, smiling and speaking, guiding and accompanying him and saying, ‘Do this, don’t do that.’”[24] In the years when Ramakrishna was practicing Tantric rituals (Sadhana), he had visions of “the divine Mother Herself dwelling in the female form.”[25]

Although used by one of Ramakrishna’s disciples to argue that Ramakrishna’s love as a devotee for the divine Mother and as a woman-attired consort of Lord Krishna was qualitatively different than the love that we mere humans who are not incarnations of a god (i.e., avatars) have, differentiations of kinds of love having differing relations to body can be used to understand how seeing the face of divinity beyond the particular deity’s form is more transcendent, and thus richer in terms of religious experience and insight, than devotional love that is oriented to an embodied deity. Swami Saradananda distinguishes love as “the attraction of one body for another” from “the attraction towards the aggregate of the noble qualities manifested in a particular body”—the latter being “so-called transcendental love” rather than love whose reference point is “free from the consciousness of the gross body and subtle desires for enjoyment.”[26] Both of these degrees or kinds of love are less than the best from a religious standpoint because they can be had by people who identify with their body “and conscious of being that alone.”[27] Ramakrishna did not identify with his embodied form, and certainly not with that alone, so he was able to have “true transcendental love.”[28] Because such love is greater than love of abstract qualities of an embodied person, I contend that the truly transcendent love transcends that of devotion or matrimony to a deity that is viewed as having a body, and thus a form. Even subjecting the divine to a form lessens it, as, for instance in Christianity God voluntarily lowers itself in selfless, or self-emptying love (agape) by becoming incarnated in a human body (i.e., Jesus).

David Hume’s theory of the human mind that it cannot hold onto or envision divine simplicity for long without retreating back to imagery that is familiar can explain the human preference for embodied gods (i.e., subjecting divinity to form). To be sure, Hume overlooked how the experience of transcending the divine clothed in familiar garb can transform the ornaments. Ramakrishna, for example, could “see an extraordinary ray of light coming out beaming from Her eyes, touching all the offered articles, taking their essential parts and withdrawing itself into Her eyes.”[29] The light transforms Her eyes, such that they become less familiar and more “other.” Similarly, as if the stone image of Kali were but training wheels on a small child’s bicycle, Ramakrishna reached the point of no longer needing to see the idol to see “the living Mother Herself, all consciousness, and with hands that offered boons and freedom from fear.”[30] When he was practicing Tantric rituals (Sadhana) from 1861-1863, “there was no limit to the number of the [goddess’] forms, ranging from the two-armed to the ten-armed.”[31] Ramakrishna’s visions of the goddess’ presence came to no longer reflect the engraved stone renditions of Kali, and that enabled the arms to differ from the two that human bodies have.

Ramakrishna could even transcend even the dichotomy that I have used as paradigm of sorts of the divine in a familiar form versus love (the Christian God) or pure consciousness (Brahman). Ramakrishna had a vision, for instance, of “the divine mother’s form, consisting of consciousness only.” The transformation of form itself by having transcended it can be regarded as the epitome of how transcending deified form can transform how a devotee sees form.

The implications should not be ignored, for from reflecting on them our own perspective of liturgy and worship itself can be radically changed. Even the scripture as guidelines for Ramakrishna’s liturgy could be seen as training wheels, for Ramakrishna’s worship as the priest of a Kali temple “passed beyond the prescribed limit of the devotion enjoined by the scriptures and took a speedy course along the exalted path of pure devotional love.”[32] Imagine a Roman Catholic priest putting the written Eucharistic prayer aside to speak spontaneously in devotional love for Jesus even in consecrating the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and the superordinate bishop telling the laity to let the priest be led so by the love. Imagine Gertrud of Helfta taking off her wedding band and dress to walk naked into a sea of divine love that transcends even the Incarnation, and thus marital union with Christ. The established rituals in religious liturgies can be seen from this mature religiosity as but firm guardrails for spiritual that to spiritual adults no longer look solid. The examples of Ramakrishna and mystics of other religions are worth our study lest it be only garden-variety eros and ego rather than spiritual maturity that relegate the hedges that spiritual children need. Fortunately, Mathur at Janbazar had the spiritual insight to recognize that Ramakrishna’s intense devotional love for the goddess had filled the temple “with an intense manifestation of palpable divine presence,” which certainly justified him having taken off the liturgical training wheels to act by the faith of his devotional love.

It can be argued antithetically, however, that transcending the goddess as a deity-entity to be engulfed in pure consciousness, or Brahman (i.e., Kali is essentially Brahman), may be considered to be devoid of distinctly religious content. Losing even the anthropomorphic garb of the goddess could mean leaving the religious domain for the tautology of consciousness of the whole. If this is a valid argument, then Ramakrishna’s holding onto to some visually-human attributes, such as having a hand and a smile, after ironically seeing (i.e., transcending) Kali’s “face” as pure consciousness itself, is necessary. That is to say, transcending a familiar mask of eternity to dwell in an absolute union with the divine may not obviate human (or familiar) images of a beloved deity. In this case, that such images are transformed, as, for example, Christ’s resurrected body is transformed and not the same as his earthly body, is crucial.



1.  Swami Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna: The Great Master, Jagadananda, trans. (Madras, IN: Sri Ramakrishna Math Mylapore, 1952), p. 16.
2. Ibid. p. 13.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Monier Williams, Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary.
6. Vanamali, Shakti: Realm of the Divine Mother (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).
7. Carl T. Jackson, Vedanta for the West (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).
8. This term was coined by Joseph Campbell, a mid-twentieth century scholar of religion who, like Ramakrishna, emphasized what religions have in common, as per his “gracious message: As many faiths, so many paths and You will realize the divine Lord through any spiritual practice performed with a sincere heart.” Saradananda, The Great Master, p. 16.
9. Swami Chetanananda, Ramakrishna as We Saw Him (St. Louis: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1990), p. 404.
10. Saradananda, The Great Master, p. 140.
11. Ibid., p. 141.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., p. 215.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 231.
19. Ibid., p. 149, 143.
20. Ibid., p. 233.
21. Ibid., p. 149, 143.
22. Ibid., p. 235.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 143.
25. Ibid. p. 201.
26. Ibid., p. 235.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., p. 143.
30. Ibid., p. 144.
31. Ibid., p. 202.
32. Ibid., p. 147. See also p. 149: “The Master had then gone beyond the limits of devotion enjoined by the scriptures and became engaged in the worship and other services of the divine Mother with Ragatmika devotion.” The use of the word, “enjoined,” can, I submit, be taken as a euphemism for what in more practical terms is more akin to “prescribed” or even “mandated.” That love in devotion to an entity that is but stone or wood in form within the boundaries of our earthly domain can be sufficient for a devotee to walk through the wall of encrusted requirements backed up by religious authorities tells us something about the sheer intensity that such love can reach in the human mind/soul (animus).

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Faith Seeking Understanding: On Religious Experience beyond Divine Marriage

On October 24, 2024, Pope Francis released his encyclical, Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us), on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the letter, he recounts “Saint Gertrude of Helfta, a Cisterian nun, tells of a time in prayer when she reclined her head on the heart of Christ and heard it beating.”[1] She wondered why the Gospel of John does not describe a similar spiritual experience, and concluded that “the sweet sound of those heartbeats has been reserved for modern times, so that, hearing them, our aging and lukewarm world may be renewed in the love of Christ.”[2] The pope concludes in the letter that this might hold for our times too. I contend that Gertrud’s spirituality can speak to the current modern age, in which that of Gertrud—the thirteenth century—hardly seems modern, but not in terms of focusing on Jesus’ resurrected heart; instead, Gertrud can point us beyond the limits of marital-union imagery with Jesus to experience that transcends the use of imagery that may say more about us and our world than that which transcends even the limits of the human imagination. Turning to the criticisms of Gertrud’s spirituality (and intelligence) by Thomas Merton and William James, I intend to salvage Gertrud in order to uncover her spiritual maturity.

According to Thomas Merton, Jesus said to Gertrud of Helfta, a nun in thirteenth century Europe, “I wish your writings to be an irrefutable testimonial of my Divine Love in these latter days in which I plan to do good to many souls!”[3] Jesus even dictated to her the title for her book: Herald of Divine Love. His rationale was that, as he told the nun, “souls will find in [the book] a foretaste of the super-abundance of my divine love.”[4] The inclusion of latter days flags the nun’s claim that it was actually Jesus who was talking with her, rather than her hallucinating, for in no sense can we say in hindsight that the thirteenth century could be characterized as the latter days of Christianity. This objection is only relevant, however, to the metaphysician (i.e., is Jesus a real entity?), the psychologist (i.e., was Gertrud hallucinating?), and historian (i.e., was Gertrud speaking to the resurrected historical Jesus of the Gospels?). The cost in making these category mistakes—taking religion to reduce to another domain and thus its criteria—is the missed opportunity (hence opportunity cost) to study the nature or essence of divine love, for that is the distinctly religious content in Merton’s report. Although academic study is obviously not necessary for a person to be religious, I, unlike Merton, applaud Gertrud’s intellectual forays into “secular” knowledge because intelligence plus knowledge can facilitate a person’s religious development.

Merton wrote of Gertrud as having been “an intelligent child with a taste for secular literature. Unfortunately, however, this taste became too absorbing. Although in itself it was harmless, or even good, it grew to such proportions and came to occupy such an inordinate place in her life that it choked the development of grace in her soul. . . . She was completely devoured by this one passion for the pleasure she found in reading the literature of the world. Psychologically speaking, what had happened was a completely unhealthy exteriorization of her whole self. She had developed a habit of pouring herself out, wasting her energies in the pursuit of her own satisfaction.”[5] But after some visions of Jesus, she “passed from tepidity to the closest mystical intimacy with the Sacred Heart,” which, being Jesus’s “infinitely perfect love for us,” became “the one big reality of her life.”[6]

Merton’s jejune and petty characterization of the intellectual life is hardly fair. At Yale’s divinity school, where I studied theology (while studying philosophy, history, film and education in the liberal arts college), faith seeking understanding was the mantra for both the students and the “scholarly priests” on the faculty. Of course, no Yale student could ever be accused of being an over-achiever, but this does not necessarily mean that God is thereby slighted by taking studying seriously, for God can be reckoned as the ultimate source even of the sliver of potential knowledge that a human being can learn in a lifetime. In fact, academic study can lead to a more mature religiosity.

William James criticizes Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690), a European nun and mystic who emphasized the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as being “so feeble of intellectual outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship which she embodies.”[7] So who is right on the religious verdict on intelligence—Merton or James? Surely it is not necessary to religiosity, and intelligence and accumulated knowledge can bolster arrogance if devoid of benevolentia universalis, or simple kindness, as is all too common at Yale and Harvard in New England—far indeed from the Midwest. Even so, to love ideas is not in itself to hate God or reckon oneself to be a deity among mere, stupid mortals. It may be said of intelligence applied to religion that Satan is cleaver and yet God is omniscient (i.e., all-knowing). For us mere mortals stuck in between, ideas about the world and especially about God and even religion as a distinct domain can facilitate our religious development toward maturation. As Paul wrote, “When I became a man, I put away childish things.”[8]

William James had no patience for stymied, or jejune spirituality. He contrasts Gertrud’s “proofs of Christ’s partiality for her undeserving person” through assurances “of his love, intimacy, and caresses and compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort” with the capability of the modern religious person to get past the idea of God as a dispenser of “personal favors.”[9] I don’t believe James was being fair to the pious nun, for she was very mature in terms of religious development.

Gertrud’s use of partiality in describing her relationship with Jesus does not mean that she felt superior or better off with respect to other people; rather, the favoring she perceived from Jesus allowing his “visible presence” to show to her has to do with her own unworthiness, given “such disorder and confusion” within her that “was no fitting dwelling for [Jesus].[10] Given her self-knowledge of her “stiff-necked obstinacy” and her “tower of vanity and worldiness,” favor had to do with the sheer grace that afforded her the privilege of having visions of Christ.[11] “I must confess in very truth that this was a grace given freely and in no way deserve,” she wrote before noting that “severe punishments” were what she deserved.[12] Her sense of being favored was that by grace alone such punishments were obviated and even replaced by visions of Jesus. This had nothing to do with being favored over other people, and as a self-declared wretch, she surely would not have presumed to be favored over anyone. James comes off as a cold and resentful or at least biased member of the faculty at Harvard, and thus hardly alone there, but very far indeed from Gertrud and other mature religious folk whose humility warrants partiality.

Secondly, James neglects Gertrud’s goal being to see God’s face and paradoxically to be in God and thus in God’s love, understood as agape, or self-emptying (divine) love, which goes beyond marital connotations associated with her yearning for Jesus. Circling back to Merton, we can say that Gertrud used her God-given intellect polished by years of study at the monastery, to transcend the bridal language she uses to describe the anthropomorphic marital love between her and Jesus by going on to characterize her goal of blissful union with God, which is mystically higher than merely being married to a manifestation of God.

Although Gertrud antedates David Hume’s seventeenth-century warning of the human mind’s inherent susceptibility to remaking God in our own image by anthropomorphizing familiar ornaments onto the pure idea of divine simplicity, I suspect Gertrud was able to use her studies and her innate intelligence to figure out the limitations of human analogies such as marriage and even erotic language, which compromise God being wholly other, and thus not even a being in the sense that we think of beings.[13]

Describing the liturgically-oriented fifth spiritual exercise in Gertrud’s program, two scholars distinguish Gertrud’s marital (and erotic) analogy wherein a nun “in a wedding dress [and] with a spousal dowry”[14] has is spiritually (and liturgically) married to Jesus, “the immortal spouse,”[15] from the telos, or ultimate goal in the following passage: “Having concluded the nuptial contract with the Lord, the mystic is burning for the kiss of her immortal spouse, for the wedding embrace in the innermost bedchamber of the heart. With the Lord as husband, the offspring of this marital union will be perfect love; it will mean becoming one spirit with God.”[16] I contend that the offspring transcends the marriage union as well as the marital and sexual language.

Gertrud was able to conceptualize her telos as an indwelling union in the divine, which is a closer and less humanlike union than is implicit in her vision of Jesus “leaning towards her like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss.”[17] It is important not to take even such sensual language too literally. According to two scholars, “When Gertrud thus focuses on Christ’s glorified human nature, she does not emphasize the belief that human nature in general is restored through the incarnation of Christ. She often distinguished between the ‘rotten body’ and the spirit. The body-soul dichotomy remains unreconciled in the Spiritual Exercises.”[18] This is only a relative or temporary problem, however, as Gertrud believed that at death, a person can flow back into God,”[19] which obviates even any relationship basis of union by transcending into God as love. Being in God transcends having a relationship with God, and it is precisely by one’s intellect and learning that a person can figure this out. Circling back to James, it can be said that whereas wanting to be married to Jesus can involve a desire for preferential treatment, though there is no evidence that Gertrud thought she alone could be Jesus’s spouse, indwelling in divine, pure (i.e., selfless) love transcends wanting preferential treatment.

With regard to the domain of religion as sui generis (i.e., distinct and of its own type of domain), although God by definition in being omniscient and transcendent is not limited to human systems of logic, it doesn’t hurt to be able to prune off wayward, human, all too human branches of even theological ratiocination as incoherent or really of another domain; otherwise, the human mind’s susceptibility to superstition and emotional enthusiasm in matters of religion could take over. As a prime candidate for pruning, Merton insists that the suddenness of Gertrud’s profound change “only emphasizes the fact that it was utterly beyond her own powers and was a pure gift of God.”[20] His assumption that a sudden change in a person cannot happen or has never happened before in a person without grace, or that sudden, momentous change is somehow contrary to human nature, is specious reasoning. It is similar to concluding that because a sick person prayed to John Paul II after his death and then gotten well without a medical reason (as if medicine were complete), the former pope must be a saint even though he did not act sufficiently on reports of child-rapes by priests and coverups by their respective bishops. Positive correlation is not sufficient to attest to causation. This logical point is often lost to the fervor of religious ideology.

It is also by intellect that we can come to realize the need to uproot the exogenous plants from the religious garden so we can see, understand, and experience the innately religious fauna that has been quietly growing underneath. Ignorance, superstition, and enthusiastic fervor can otherwise lead a person to claim to know rather than believe something that is a matter of faith. This fallacy, which involves reducing religion to some other domain (e.g., empirical science), involves an epistemological category mistake regarding what can be known. Subjecting a faith-claim to the verdict of what can be known from a historical account, or inferred from the result of an “arm chair” psychological analysis, for example, can be thwarted by previous study in logic and philosophy in general. Ironically, such “secular” studies protect the domain of religion from the encroachments of other domains as well as from overstepping onto other domains with an overriding arrogance of superiority based on a religious-domain-only belief claim.

From another shore, Merton saw fit to psychoanalyze Gertrud’s voracious appetite for knowledge, and William James claimed that “the revelations of Christ’s sacred heart” were Margaret Mary’s “hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing.”[21] The modern mind will doubtless give credence to the rendering of religious experience into psychological terms. In 2023, I attended some lectures of a class at Yale on the results of empirical studies in psychology on religious beliefs. Generally speaking, empirical social-science tests can contribute to philosophy and the subject-matter of religious studies, though it is important to remember that the faith claims themselves do not suffer a consequent loss of validity in terms of religious meaning.

In the 1980s, in reaction to the historical critical method that had emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, Han Frei, a Yale professor of theology, claimed in his text, Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, that historical questions of, and, one could add doing psychologically analysis on, characters and events in faith narratives such as the four Gospels comes at the cost of grasping the religious meaning in the stories. In other words, let the stories speak to you; don’t interrupt them to get behind the stories.

Just as Donald Trump was deemed an easy target by American psychologists when he was running for U.S. president in 2024 even though none of those “educated” psychologists had subjected him to psychological tests, let alone even met him in person, so too it must be easy as well as tempting to analyze the religious experiences of people whose religious sensitivity enables even elaborate descriptions of such experiences. Applying psychological analyses to nuns who lived many centuries back and claiming that the results trump their respective religious experiences is not only fraught with difficulties that could render the results invalid, but also superimposes another domain onto that of religion without justification. A good education in the liberal arts and a sharp intellect can critically examine such unsubstantiated assumptions in what has become known as critical thinking.

Religion, I submit, should be treated as a distinct domain, and thus with its own sort of meaning, experience, and criteria. This is not to say that the domain cannot intersect or has never intersected with other domains, such as history and psychology; James may be right about the specious ontological basis of visions; Jesus referring to the thirteen century as “latter days” belies Gertrud’s claim that an entity outside of Gertrud’s mind was speaking to her in her vision. Even so, for people interested in the religious domain, whether in regard to faith or a resulting experience or practice, religious meaning is the gold to be dug up, whether or not it is attached to a historical event has come out of a psychological state wherein the contents of a vision are not themselves empirical; the religious meaning is still real in its own sense, and thus such meaning can be related to religious creeds, doctrines, and systemic theologies by criteria innate to the religious domain rather than superimposed by another domain. Not only is it the case that secular knowledge and an analytical and logical intelligence need not be a threat to religion; a good liberal-arts and sciences education can actually facilitate a person’s religious maturation and prune off the dead wood in the religious domain as well as overhanging branches from trees growing in other domains. 



1. Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos, October 24, 2024, para. 98.
2. Ibid.
3.  Thomas Merton, “Saint Gertrude, Nun of Helfta, Germany,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38.4 (2003): 452. Merton cites  Héraut 2.10.5.
4. Ibid.  Merton cites Héraut, Prologue.
5. Ibid., p. 453.
6. Ibid., pp. 454, 457, 456.
7. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), p. 262.
8. 1 Cor. 13:11. Paul writing about spiritual growth.
9. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 262.
10. Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, Margaret Winkworth, ed. and trans. (New York: Paulist Press), p. 96.
11. Ibid., pp. 95-6.
12. Ibid., p. 97.
13. Pseudo-Dionysius makes this point in his sixth-century writings. Moreover, he wrote that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotions). God, in other words, goes beyond the erotic language that Augustine applies to his yearning for God in Confessions.
14. Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), verse 227.
15. Ibid.
16. Gertrud Lewis and Jack Lewis, “Introduction,” in Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 15.
17. Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 263.
18. Gertrud Lewis and Jack Lewis, “Introduction,” in Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 8.
19. Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), verse 285.
20. Thomas Merton, “Saint Gertrude, Nun of Helfta, Germany,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38.4 (2003): 454.
21. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 261.

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

The Resurrected Body of Jesus: A Viable Launching Pad for Mysticism

Gertrud of Helfta (1256-1301) was a Christian nun whose sensitivity to mystical experience can be characterized as a bridal mysticism within a Christ mysticism. Think of Christ; turn yourself over to Christ. She brings in the related theme of light, which is salient in the Gospel of John, with Christ saying, I am the light of the word. Yet her mystical sensitivity was such that she could transcend even Christ’s resurrected body, which can be said to have been her favorite mask of eternity through which love, which, as Paul and Augustine had claimed, is God. This does not mean that the mask is finally tossed aside as somehow erroneous; rather, it is to say more generally that people who have an enhanced sensitivity to the mystical in a religious, or transcendent, sense, are oriented to going beyond God in our likeness to experience God as wholly other—as radically transcendent—and thus leave oneself behind.

Gertrud's guide to monastic prayer includes the following in the imperative form, “pray to the Lord to lead you into the school of love where you may learn further to recognize and love Jesus.”[1] Sight is implicit, if recognizing Jesus includes seeing his body. The theme of Gertrud’s third spiritual exercise (spiritual dedication) is “spiritual matrimony, wherein the nun is the bride and Jesus Christ is the bridegroom.  Eros is not excluded, the love being of caritas rather than agape for the nun even though “Christ’s desire is as great as the bride’s” and “this marriage of love” is rendered an “inseparable union” of “chaste love” by a “kiss of love.”[2] Clearly, Descartes’ mind-body dichotomy does not apply, as Christ’s resurrected body is transformed from being an earthly body.

In short, Gertrud’s language, which can be likened to Augustine’s erotic pining for God’s scent in The Confessions, includes even if as an illusion, sexuality and thus bodies rather than just souls.  Although Gertrud likens the “bond of love between the two spouses”—the nun and Jesus—to “the glue that unites the Father to the Son,” the “true spouse and wife, made fertile, brings forth the fruits of life.”[3] The sexual imagery, in which bodies are salient, simply cannot be ignored.

The likeness to the relation between the Father and the Son in the Trinity, however, should be taken with a grain of salt, given Augustine’s claim that likening the relation between the Father and the Son to that of a human father and son (or daughter) is an instance of idolatry. Augustine acknowledges that human weakness “can only think of what it has been accustomed to do or hear.”[4] And yet he warns that “no carnal thought creep up” when we think of Jesus’ line, “As the Father has taught me,” such as in thinking of how a human father teaches his son.[5] Thinking of the relationship in the Trinity as being akin to a human relationship is to “fashion idols.”[6] But then is not thinking of approaching Jesus by incorporating sexual language also idolatrous? Fortunately, Gertrud’s goal goes beyond such imagery, and, moreover, even Jesus’ resurrected body. Her attitude toward human bodies, no doubt informed from living in a monastery from the age of 5, would argue against her resting for eternity with even a transformed yet still corporeal (rather than gnostic) body (of Jesus).

Even though Gertrud “focuses on Christ’s glorified human nature, she does not emphasize the belief that human nature in general is restored through the incarnation of Christ.”[7] For example, distinguishing the “rotten body” from the spirit (e.g., Spiritual Exercises, VI, 612f) is consistent with mortification, “dying to oneself in order to live for God alone (III, 149), which is implied in the “process of inner liberation.”[8] This is also consistent with Gertrud’s leitmotif of death of the corporeal body in its earthly state constituting “a beginning rather than an end, a paradoxical reversal of death and life, which . . . goes back to the mystery of the Cross.”[9] Yet Gertrud holds that Christ’s “human nature” is retained “in his heavenly state.”[10] Moreover, her mysticism is “typically Christ-centered,” with “Christ in his humanity” forming “the basis and focus of all of Gertrud’s writing.”[11] Put another way, It is the “human nature of Christ as one with the Spirit and as part of the Trinity, while still, Gertrud writes, ‘in the substance of my flesh,’” that “represents the pivotal point of Gertrud’s mystical life.”[12] I submit that the likeness of “my flesh” involves, on the devotee’s part, a “rotten body,” and furthermore that it would be difficult for Gertrud to stay with the bridal language to characterize her goal of blissful union with God, which for her includes being in God.

Fortunately, Gertrud transcends the mind-body dichotomy altogether in writing of God as Goodness (bonitas), Love (caritas), Cherishing-love (dilectio), Compassion (misericordia), Peace (pax), and Loving-kindness (pietas).[13] These words for divinity obviate the pitfall from anthropomorphism in rendering the transcendent as human, all too human. This is avoided to an extent by “employing simultaneously both male and female attributes for God.”[14]

The same is done in Hinduism, in depicting the deity, Shiva, as both male and female—as conjoined bodily with his consort, Devi, as in (in Christian terms of marriage) made one flesh. Ganesha, the Hindu god that has an elephant head, goes even further in upsetting the convenient assumption that a deity resembles our human form externally.

Put in simpler theological terms, Christ’s transformed (rather than earthly) resurrected body is Gertrud’s centering pole that she grasps as though with one arm as she leans out yearning for mysterium divinum; “the mystical experience” being “per se ineffable.”[15] In Spiritual Exercises, the “desire to reach God sine impedimente (without any hindrance) is reiterated throughout as direct contact with the Divine remains her goal,” and of course her summum bonum, which Plato describes merely as eternal moral verities (truths).[16] “Ah! O love, may your cherishing-love consummated in me be my end and consummation.”[17] Although she adds her hope that she “may appear worthy in the presence of the immortal spouse, in a wedding dress and with a spousal dowry,” I contend that being in the divine that is love transcends even a bridal union with Christ’s resurrected body.[18] So here Gertrud can be interpreted as describing the means (i.e., being married with Jesus in his resurrected condition, including bodily) after having depicted the end, or consummation, with divine love itself. There is a danger, therefore, that devotees following Gertrud’s spiritual exercises in praxis may focus on the means too much, without even pondering what divine love is in itself as a distinct type of love. As distinct, illusions to sexuality and even bodies can only go so far on the way to divine love saturating the devotee from within in the end.

Gender, and even anthropomorphism are hindrances from the perspective of experiencing union with the source of the divine, which transcends the limits of human thought and perception, as Dionysius suggests. Relatedly, in Hinduism, the part of Purusa’s primordial body that extends beyond most of that body—that which becomes the world—is transcendent in that it lies beyond our realm. Only once even such basic obstacles as gender-identification and the tendency of the human brain to render radically “other” thoughts into familiar terms are transcended can a person like Gertrud of Helfta have “inner freedom” (Libertas cordis), which is Gertrud’s most “unique characteristic and her most important theme in general.”[19] According to Gertrud, a “mystical rebirth in God” entails “integrity of faith, triumph over the enemy, unyielding perseverance, and freedom of spirit.”[20] Such freedom is needed to see “God face to face for eternity.”[21] Ironically, the light showing God’s true face transcends the light of the world.



1, Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989): V. verses 311-12, p. 84, italics added.
2, Ibid., p. 14.
3, Ibid., p. 14.
4, Augustine, Tractates on John: Books 28-54, 40.4, trans. John W. Rettig, Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 88 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 126.
5, Ibid.
6, Ibid.
7, Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 8.
8. Ibid., p.9.
9, Ibid., p. 10.
10. Ibid., p. 7.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid. The use of the Latin word, caritas, rather than the Greek word, agape, is, I submit, misplaced in being an appellation for God. For Augustine, caritas is not selfless love, but is infused with, and thus not cut off from, garden-variety eros, albeit sublimated to the summum bonum. For the basis of this idea, see Plato’s Symposium. Calvin was more idealistic concerning the potential of human love in applying agape, which is divine selfless love, as evinced in God the Father allowing his Logos to be incarnated as His Son and even to suffer an excruciating death. Therefore, I contend that the sort of love that is divine is more accurately rendered as selfless (agape) rather than including human instinct (caritas).
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. “Gertrud’s text unequivocally defines the summum bonum in terms of the biblical ‘seeing God face to face.’” Introduction of Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 8.
17. Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989): V. verses 216-17, p. 81.
18. Ibid., verses 226-28, p. 81.
19. Ibid., p. 10.
20. Ibid., p.12, italics added.
21. Ibid.

Thursday, October 17, 2024

Love as God Loves Us: Embodying Inconvenient Compassion

I contend that compassion is an automatic byproduct of having shut out the outside world for a time to experience transcendence in its religious sense (i.e., reaching beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and emotion). Such experience as prayer, for example, or meditation can result in a heightened sensitivity in perceiving the world, including things and other people who are in proximity. Such sensitivity where other people are being perceived can illicit compassion to them. It is the bracketing experience itself, away from our daily life, rather than what is being prayed about or meditated on that triggers the generalized sensitivity and thus the enhanced readiness or inclination to feel compassion where it applies. I submit furthermore that with some beliefs regarding how God in the Abrahamic religions views us creatures in Creation, we mere mortals can assume to some degree the perspective that, given how God is depicted in scriptures, God would or does have in watching us in our own little worlds.


The full essay is at "Love as God Loves Us."

Taking God’s Perspective: Disgust to Compassion

I contend that compassion is an automatic byproduct of having shut out the outside world for a time to experience transcendence in its religious sense (i.e., reaching beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and emotion). Such experience as prayer, for example, or meditation can result in a heightened sensitivity in perceiving the world, including things and other people who are in proximity. Such sensitivity where other people are being perceived can illicit compassion to them. It is the bracketing experience itself, away from our daily life, rather than what is being prayed about or meditated on that triggers the generalized sensitivity and thus the enhanced readiness or inclination to feel compassion where it applies. I submit furthermore that with some beliefs regarding how God in the Abrahamic religions views us creatures in Creation, we mere mortals can assume to some degree the perspective that, given how God is depicted in scriptures, God would or does have in watching us in our own little worlds.


The full essay is at "Taking God's Perspective: Disgust to Compassion."

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

A Hindu Goddess Destroying and Recreating Other Hindu Deities: Contrasting the Christian Trinity

The Saundarya Lahari characterizes the Hindu goddess, Devi, as being the power behind the proverbial throne—meaning the thrones of the three main deities, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Without Devi bestowing her power on those (and all other) gods, they would “return to their primal, dormant state” until revived by the power that Devi wields as signified visually by the weapons that she holds.[1] Are those deities merely dormant, however, or are they destroyed when Devi withholds her power? For there is an appreciable difference between being rendered impotent or inactive, and being zerstört (i.e., destroyed). In Greek mythology, one thing that distinguishes the gods from morals is that of the two, only the gods cannot die. In Christianity, Jesus Christ survives the death of his corporeal body, which is transformed in the bodily resurrection on Easter in a way that would have perplexed Plato. Indeed, it is interesting to compare the Trinity with the relation of the foundational goddess Devi to the three main gods in the Saundarya Lahari, a poem doubtlessly written by a devotee of the goddess.

Verse 25 of the Hindu poem highlights the points that “Devi is supreme” and the other “divine beings . . . serve and praise Her. Devi provides the foundation for the gods and their worship.”[2] Francis Clooney’s translation goes as follows:

“Benevolent one, may the worship rendered to the three gods born of Your three qualities be as worship rendered to Your feet, for near the jeweled seat on which Your feet rest, they ever stand, folded hands adorning their crowns.”[3] 

Worshipping Brahma, who is the creator deity, Vishnu, who sustains the world by inhaling its pollution, and Shiva, the destroyer, is tantamount to worshipping the goddess, Devi, as the three gods stand at her feet, which in turn are associated with her power and thus protection. It is as if Devi is sitting on a throne, at the bottom of which the three main Hindu gods are standing. The image in Christianity of Jesus sitting on the right side of the Father may come to mind, though in that case, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not separate deities, but, rather, are three manifestations of one God. To be sure, in Hinduism, the deities are considered to be manifestations of Brahman, which is consciousness/awareness beyond that of sentient beings, existence/reality, and bliss, and is not thought of as a supreme personal deity as is the Abrahamic deity. The supremacy of Devi is that of one deity over others (in terms of power), and in Christianity the Father and Son are of one substance rather than one manifestation of the God being superior to the other. Even so, the Christian image is hardly disparate here in imagining the special relationships in verse 25 of the Saundarya Lahari.

Swami Tapasyananda’s translation of verse 25 can be approached as providing additional details, albeit at the expense of the poetic and linguistically literal qualities of Clooney’s more concise version:

“The worship done at Thy feet, O Consort of Siva, is also the worship of all the three Deities Brahma, Visnu and Siva, who have their origin in Thy three Gunas (Rajas, Sattva and Tamas). They require no special worship, because they are ever waiting with their joined palms held above their diademed heads in salutation to Thee by the side of the foot-stool of diamonds that bear Thy feet.”[4]

Tapasyananda does not provide a commentary on this verse; even so, we can visualize the three main Hindu gods standing next to the foot-stool that Devi, who is presumably sitting (on a throne), is using to rest her feet. Again, Jesus sitting at the right side of the Father may come to mind. But the three main Hindu gods—those of creation, sustaining the world, and destroying the world, respectively, don’t all align with the three Persons of the Christian Trinity.

God as creator or Jesus Christ as manifesting the Logos may be thought prime facie to resonate with Brahma as the creator deity in Hinduism, but the fact that Brahma draws on Devi’s rajas guna dispels any such likeness under the rubric of creating. In his commentary on verse 53, which I will draw on below to make another point, Tapasyananda claims that the rajas, sattva, and tamas are not only qualities found in nature, but are also Devi’s creative power and are thus the respective origins of the three main gods.[5] If the parallelism between listing the three gods and the three gunas means that the latter are respective to the order of the deities, then Brahma, the god who creates the world is characterized by Rajas: “activity, passion, desire, attachment, and energy.”[6] Rajas “embodies movement, expansion and upward flow.”[7] In Christian theology, the creative agent in God is the Logos, or “word” or “reason,” which is that which later incarnates as Jesus Christ. The nature of God as an intelligent being is highlighted in the Logos, whereas passion and desire are among the qualities in which the Hindu god Brahma has its origin, which, by the way, means that Brahma has his origin in Devi’s creative power. Also, whereas the Christian God can be reckoned as being the source of the energy that is in Creation, Brahma can be characterized in terms of the creative energy itself, which comes from Devi. In this sense, the transcendent Christian God is more like Brahman than the Hindu deities. All except for Devi, however, as the devotee writes of that goddess,

“You are mind, You are air, You are wind and the rider of wind, You are water, You are earth, beyond You as You evolve there is nothing higher, there is only You, and when You transform Yourself by every form, then You take the form of consciousness and bliss as a way of being, O Shiva’s youthful one!”[8]

Besides being the basic elements that make up creation (though the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles included fire along with earth, air, and water), Devi is mind, and thus awareness/consciousness. In verse 30 the poet writes to Devi, “You are eternal” and “I am You.” Both verses describe Devi close to how Brahman is described elsewhere (awareness, existence itself, and bliss). Devi pervades creation and even beyond, as there is nothing higher; “there is only You.” Perhaps it could be said that Devi is beyond functionality—having also an ontological existence that renders the goddess qualitatively different than the other gods and goddesses because only Devi can be understood in terms that apply to Brahman. In this sense, Devi is more like the Christian deity than are the other Hindu gods and goddesses, for which particular functions are emphasized (e.g., Shiva is the destroyer). In other word, Devi (in assuming Brahman qualities) can be thought of as the awareness and reality within which the big deities exist and perform their functions. It follows that in destroying the world, Shiva cannot destroy Devi.

Whereas both Brahma and the Christian God are associated with creating the universe, the god Shiva bears little resemblance to the Christian God, which as Paul and Augustine wrote, is essentially love. Compassion and mercy outweigh the destructiveness of God’s wrath. Shiva having its origin in the tamas guna, which is associated with “inertia, ignorance, delusion, darkness, and heaviness,” and represents “sloth, dullness, and downward flow.”[9] None of these qualities pertains to the Christian God, even in its wrath.

As for Vishnu, in that his origin is in the qualities of sattva, this god can be characterized by “truth, goodness, harmony, balance, and spiritual essence,” as representing “light, intelligence, and consciousness.”[10] Whereas Shiva destroys, Vishnu sustains, or saves the world at least in the meantime, and, furthermore, as having the qualities of goodness, harmony (peace), a spiritual sense, light, intelligence, and consciousness, Vishnu can be viewed in terms similar to Jesus. The second “person” of the Trinity (i.e., Jesus) is the Logos, which in turn, as reason, can be associated with intelligence. Indeed, Vishnu’s incarnation or avatar as the god Krishna has been likened to Jesus Christ, as compassion is salient to both the Hindu god and the incarnated manifestation of the Christian God (i.e., Jesus Christ). Indeed, the Christian Incarnation can be thought of as the consciousness of God winnowed through a (finite) human body.

Even given these likenesses between Vishnu and Jesus, the latter is a manifestation or “Person” of a deity, whereas Vishnu is a deity (among others). Also, the relationship between Vishnu and Devi is not between two manifestations (or “Persons”) of one God (though admittedly of Brahman, though that is not a deity). Devi is a goddess and Vishnu is a god; both are Hindu deities to be worshipped even though worshipping Devi is sufficient because Vishnu has his origin in Devi’s creative power (sattva). To be sure, it could be said that Jesus gets his power from the Father, as for instance when Jesus calls on God the Father in bringing Lazarus back to life. “Jesus looked up and said, ‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me.’”[11] Whether Jesus’ Father could cut off Jesus’ power such that Jesus would be rendered inactive or even destroyed (beyond just the death of his body) may be similar to asking whether Devi could render the other Hindu deities merely dormant or actually destroy them by taking away their power.

Francis Clooney’s translation of verse 26 of the Saundarya Lahari is relevant:

“Virinci [Brahma] returns to the five elements, Hari [Vishnu] ceases His delight, the destroyer [Kinasa (Yama, the god of death)] meets destruction, the lord of wealth loses wealth, the untiring array of great Indras also close their eyes, and in that great dissolution, O good woman, Your Lord plays.”[12]

On the one hand, Brahma seems to be destroyed by Devi, who returns that god to the five basic elements in the world; Kinasa is destroyed because he himself meets destruction; and, moreover, the word “dissolution” implies more than the gods merely going inactive. On the other hand, Vishnu no longer being delighted, the lord of wealth losing wealth, and the Indra closing his eyes may be interpreted as Devi merely rendering those deities passive by taking away their respective powers. Yet in describing the whole verse in terms of “dissolution,” the poet may have meant destruction rather than inactivity, given that the word “dissolution” has been defined as the “dissolving” or “separation” of something “into component parts”, as in “disintegration” or “death,” or the “termination or destruction by breaking down, disrupting, or dispersing.”[13]

Tapasyananda’s translation of the verse might be helpful too:

“Virincill (Brahma) is reduced into elements: Hari (Visnu) retires into passivity; Kinasa (Yama the god of death) himself dies; Kubera the god of wealth meets with his end; and Indra with all his followers closes his eyes in destruction. When such, O Sati (chaste Consort of Siva), is the state of all beings at the time of the total dissolution (mahasamhara) of the universe, Thy husband Sadasiva [Shiva] alone is sporting.”[14] 

Even though Vishnu being passive resonates with that god no longer having delights rather than necessarily being destroyed, Kinasa, Kubera, and Indra are clearly destroyed, given the respective words, “dies,” “meets with his end,” and “destruction,” respectively. Vishnu too seems to be destroyed rather than merely rendered inoperative because Devi leaves only Shiva, her husband, around “at the time of the total dissolution (mahasamhara) of the universe.” Maha Samhara can in general mean “destruction, annihilation, or dissolution.”[15] None of these words are consistent with, or imply someone merely being rendered impassive. The destruction presumably includes the gods, as, according to the Rig Veda, they came out of purusa’s head rather than having existed prior to the primordial human body out of which the heavens and the earth were carved.

Devi only excepts Shiva because out of the loyalty or faithfulness that a consort has to her husband, the wife gains power, and Devi is all about power. In his commentary on the verse, Tapasyananda explains that the indestructability of the couple, Siva-Sakti (i.e., Shiva and Devi), is due to Devi’s “whole-hearted faithfulness” (pativratya) to her husband, “which according to Hindu belief, is supposed to generate great power in a woman.”[16] Perhaps as a result of if such an augmentation to her power, it is so great that she can bring the other deities back into existence, rather than merely allow them to be active again. This would indeed justify her claim that devotees need only worship her to worship the three main gods.

For we find later in the Saundarya Lahari, in the Flood of Beauty (verses 42-91), in verse 53 specifically, that the three main gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, “still play a part in the drama of beauty and pleasure surrounding Devi. To do so, they must exist after having been destroyed by Devi. They exist due to Her glance: “O beloved of the Lord, when Your eye shadow smears in play[,] Your triad of eyes displays three colors distinctly, and so recreates the three gods—Druhina, Hari, Rudra—after they’d ceased; Your eyes shine like the triad of qualities, sattva, rajas, and tamas.’”[17] In being recreated after they had ceased—being recreated means that ceased to exist rather than merely ceased to be active is the correct implication—the gods Druhina (i.e., Brahma), Hari (Vishnu) and seemingly inconsistently because Devi had not destroyed her husband, even Rudra (Shiva) are again existing. Tapasyananda’s translation of verse 53 fills in some of the details of Devi’s glance, which is enough to bring the main gods back into existence:

“O Consort of Isvara [Shiva]! Thy three eyes look tri-coloured when the black of the beautifying collyrium shines by the side of their natural white and reddish tinges, each keeping its distinctiveness. It looks as if these three colours represent the three Gunas of Rajas, Sattva, and Tamas, which Thou assumes with a view to revive Brahma, Visnu, and Rudra [Shiva] after their dissolution in the Pralaya, and start them once again on the creative activity.”[18]

In his commentary, Tapasyananda notes that the three colors represent the three gunas respectively, which Devi uses as the “creative power” with which to revive the three gods and enable them to be active.[19] By implication destroying them and rendering them inactive are distinct. Devi does both in destroying Brahma and Vishnu, as reviving rather than merely enabling activity are both done in verse 53.

Tapasyananda’s choice of the word, revive, is particularly interesting, as it may imply bringing back to life rather than merely existence. In Clooney’s translation of the verse, he uses “recreate” rather than “revive”:

“O beloved of the Lord, when Your eye shadow smears in play[,] Your triad of eyes displays three colors distinctly, and so recreates the three gods—Druhina, Hari, Rudra—after they’d ceased; Your eyes shine like the triad of qualities, sattva, rajas, and tamas.[20]

Clooney “opted for the more literal translation of punah srastum—the verb srj usually means ‘to create,’ whereas ‘revive’ is a weaker translation; it may be that [Tapasyananda] wanted to show that the deities were not dead, but only in a swoon.”[21] If so, then Clooney’s interpretation leaves Devi with more power, as more is needed to destroy and recreate than merely to render something (or someone) powerless. The poet’s point that a devotee of Vishnu or Shiva, for example, need only worship Devi, as the power behind those gods, rather than also worship them too, is stronger. In my own search, I found that punah srastum can also mean “to originate,” which bolster’s Clooney’s interpretation, which, by the way, is consistent with the inclusion in the verse of the word “cease.”

In short, Devi destroys gods rather than merely renders them impotent (non potentia). In viewing the big gods as destroyed and then recreated along in the cyclical paradigm of the religion, Hinduism differs fundamentally from the Abrahamic religions, wherein Yahweh/God/Allah is not created or subject to creation, but, rather, like Brahma, creates the universe. Neither is the Abrahamic God subject to being destroyed, given the divine attribute of omnipotence; nothing has power over God.

Furthermore, interpreting Devi as reviving the big gods may imply that the gods are alive. In the Christian New Testament, Jesus revives Lazarus, who is not a god. Reviving a person is distinct from when God the Father resurrects Jesus. Devi does not resurrect, or much less bodily resurrect, Brahma and Vishnu (and perhaps Shiva).[22] So from a Christian standpoint, Devi reviving gods and goddesses simply does not make sense. This is yet another reason for going with Clooney’s translation. Also, the ancient Greeks would not have understood how a deity can be destroyed and then recreated later, because immortality is a major attribute of a Greek god or goddess (being a giant is the other main requirement).

To be sure, in a general sense, God manifesting as the Father brings the divine manifestation that is Jesus back from having been killed. This is vaguely akin to Devi bringing at least two major gods back to existence after having destroyed them because the leitmotif is that of something divine ending and being brought back by something else that is divine. In Christianity, this has been referred to as God “self-emptying” of itself first in allowing itself to be incarnated alongside a human nature (albeit still fully divine and fully human: comprising one essence and two distinct rather than blending natures) and then to allow the Christ to die, which is more than merely being made inactive. In Hinduism, the main gods are destroyed then revived by the creative powers of a goddess, Devi. Devi herself does not suffer any self-emptying; in fact, being able to destroy and revive even gods means that her power is so great that only she is truly worthy of being worshipped, whereas in Christianity, all three Trinitarian manifestations, or “Persons,” of God are worthy of being worshipped in their own terms; worship of God the Father does not mean that neither the Son or the Holy Spirit need be worshipped. In contrast, the Saundarya Lahari, a poem of devotion to the Hindu goddess that empowers, destroys, and recreates all of the other gods and goddesses, asserts that given those powers, worship directed solely to Devi is sufficient; other divine manifestations of Brahman stand below Devi’s throne. Omnipotentia is, in other words, a very important divine attribute.

Yet another implication for Christianity is whether the Father’s power is great than that of Jesus, as the latter calls on the Father to revive Lazarus. If so, then being consubstantial (i.e., being of the same substance) does not necessary mean having the same amount of power. As manifestations of Brahman, according to Shankara, who was a Hindu theologian, Hindu deities are consubstantial, yet as the Saundarya Lahari insists, they differ greatly in power—Devi’s being so much more that she can destroy and recreate the other gods and goddesses. God manifesting as the Father in the Trinity, whose three manifestations are eternal and thus the two others cannot be destroyed and recreated by the Father, does not have that much power over the Son and Holy Spirit. In fact, it is the Son as the eternal Logos that is the Christian God’s Word that is that God’s creative power.



1. The quoted text is from Francis X. Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 160.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Saundarya-Lahari of Sri Sankaracarya, trans. Swami Tapasyananda (Mylapore, Chennai: Sri Ramakrishna Math Printing Press, 1987), p. 72.
5. Ibid., p. 118.
6. Quoted text is from a search of the three names of the gunas at Brave.com (accessed October 14, 2024).
7. Ibid.
8. Verse 35 of the Saundarya Lahari. Francis X. Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
9. Quoted text is from a search of the three names of the gunas at Brave.com (accessed October 14, 2024).
10. Ibid.
11. The Gospel of John 11:41 (NIV).
12. Francis X. Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 160.
13. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary entry for “dissolution.” (Merriam-webster.com accessed on October 14, 2024).
14. Saundarya-Lahari of Sri Sankaracarya, trans. Swami Tapasyananda (Mylapore, Chennai: Sri Ramakrishna Math Printing Press, 1987),  p. 72.
15. Quoted words are from a search of the definition of Maha Samhara at Brave.com (accessed October 14, 2024).
16. Ramakrishna Math Printing Press, 1987), p. 73.
17. Francis X. Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 160.
18. Saundarya-Lahari of Sri Sankaracarya, trans. Swami Tapasyananda (Mylapore, Chennai: Sri Ramakrishna Math Printing Press, 1987), p. 117.
19. Ibid., p. 118.
20. Francis X. Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 160.
21. Francis X. Clooney, Personal correspondence, October 16, 2024.
22. I enclose “Shiva” in parentheses because of the contradiction in Devi having not destroyed Shiva and yet in verse 53, that god is included with the other two main Hindu gods as being revived by Devi. Although it is possible that another, prior verse has Devi destroy Shiva, which is unlikely because of the power that Devi (and the couple) gets for loyalty to her husband, I think it more likely that there is a contradiction in the text, which could indicate that it evolved over time, even after having been written, and perhaps more than one writer contributed to the poem. So it could be that in imposing unity on the poem, the error lies with the reader rather than the writer(s).