Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources c10.s3.23

c10.s3.23

It is not always true that religious rapture, however erotically inclined, leads to moral default; it is also admitted that in a mystic attitude of emotional exaltation, even of the erotic type, the senses and the spirit can meet; but there can be little doubt that eroticism as a devotional principle is perilously liable to religious and moral excess. The erotic apotheosis of the legendary Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā in a background of highly sensuous charm is given a mystic, and even an austere, significance; and however much the mentality of such erotic emotionalists be criticised, the devout saints of Vaiṣṇavism have been, in actual life, morally irreproachable. Caitanya himself was susceptible to such emotional rapture, but personally he held to an ascetic type of morality and expressed strict views regarding sexual relationship. All this is freely admitted; but it should also be admitted that the danger comes not so much from erotic portrayal of the divine sport, which may be (but is not) symbolically understood, as from the excess of exclusive emotional strain involved in the imaginative experience of the erotic sentiment, and from actual practice of erotic situations as a religious rite. The Bengal school of Caitanya, no doubt condemns direct erotic practice, but it encourages vicarious erotic contemplation. It emphasises the inward realisation of the divine sports in all their erotic implications as the ultimate felicitous state, and thereby promotes the abnormal satisfaction of a highly refined erotico-religious sensibility. The dogma is implicitly accepted that Kṛṣṇa is the only male in the universe, and that the highest ideal of the devotee, like that of Rādhā, is the desire of a woman eternally seeking to satisfy her lover who, frankly, but divinely, thirsts after womanly charms of adolescence and youth. If this were only a symbol or allegory of the soul's longing for the divine lover, it would be a legitimate use of erotic imagery and erotic impulse in the service of religious symbolism. But the works of the sect make it quite clear that the erotic contemplation is not merely symbolical or figurative but, as we have said, vivid and literal. The dogma is carried further when the devout attitude becomes identical with that of Rādhā's companions¹, the highest mystic experience being in this case the detailed imaginative participation, in a vicarious mood, in the erotic sports of the deity. All this has been severely condemned by some critics as an emasculated ritual of emotional debauchery; but without going so far, it should be admitted that the intimate subtilising of erotic details, however mystically transfigured, is bound to be characterised as a psychological and ethical aberration rather than as a healthy ennobling religious mood.