INFINITE PATHS TO INFINITE REALITY

Sri Ramakrishna & Cross-Cultural

Philosophy of Religion

Ayon M a h a r aj
 INFINITE PATHS
TO INFINITE REALITY
Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural
Philosophy of Religion

Ayon Maharaj

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 িতিন অন , পথও অন ।
— ীরামকৃ

God is infinite, and the paths to God are infinite.

—Sri Ramakrishna

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 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi
A Note on Sanskrit and Bengali Transliteration xiii
Abbreviations of Texts xv

Introduction 1

PART ONE:  The Infinitude of God

1. Sri Ramakrishna’s Harmonizing Philosophy of Vijñāna Vedānta 13
I. The Spiritual Basis of Sri Ramakrishna’s Philosophical Outlook:
His Upbringing, Religious Practices, and Mystical Experiences 17
II. Five Interpretive Principles for Reconstructing Sri Ramakrishna’s
Philosophical Views from the Kathāmṛta 19
III. The Central Tenets of Sri Ramakrishna’s Vijñāna Vedānta 27
IV. Beyond “Neo-Vedānta”: Implications of Sri Ramakrishna’s
Philosophy of Vijñāna for Discourse on Modern Vedānta 45
2. A Cross-Cultural Inquiry into Divine Infinitude: Sri Ramakrishna,
Paraconsistency, and the Overcoming of Conceptual Idolatry  51
I. Satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma: Sri Ramakrishna in Dialogue
with Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and Viśvanātha Cakravartin 53
II. Scotus and Cusa: Two Medieval Christian Paradigms for
Understanding Divine Infinitude 63
III. The Paraconsistent God: Sri Ramakrishna and
Benedikt Paul Göcke 67
IV. Idol versus Icon: Sri Ramakrishna and Jean-Luc Marion 72

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vi

viii • Contents

PART T WO :  Religious Pluralism

3. “All Faiths Are Paths”: A Reconstruction and Defense
of Sri Ramakrishna’s Vijñāna-Based Model of Religious Pluralism  85
I. A Reconstruction of Sri Ramakrishna’s Model
of Religious Pluralism 88
II. Sri Ramakrishna’s Response to the Problem of Conflicting
Religious Truth-Claims 101
III. Addressing Major Objections to Sri Ramakrishna’s Religious
Pluralism 109
4. John Hick’s Vedāntic Road Not Taken? Hick’s Evolving Views on
Religious Pluralism in the Light of Sri Ramakrishna  117
I. Sri Ramakrishna’s Legacy: Sri Aurobindo’s “Logic of the Infinite”
in the Context of Nonsectarian Vedānta 119
II. The Early Hick’s Aurobindonian Model of Religious Pluralism 124
III. The Ontological Underpinnings of the Later Hick’s
Quasi-Kantian Model of Religious Pluralism 133
IV. A Ramakrishnan Critique of Hick’s Quasi-Kantian
Pluralist Model 138
V. Adequacy Criteria for Assessing Theories of Religious Pluralism 147

PART THREE:  Mystical Experience

5. Beyond Perennialism and Constructivism: Sri Ramakrishna’s
Manifestationist Model of Mystical Experience  153
I. Perennialist Models 156
II. Constructivist Models 162
III. Sri Ramakrishna’s Experiential Method 169
IV. A Reconstruction of Sri Ramakrishna’s Manifestationist
Model of Mystical Experience 183
V. Anticipating a Possible Objection 193
6. A Cross-Cultural Defense of the Epistemic Value of Mystical
Experience: Sri Ramakrishna, Self-Authentication, and the Argument
from Experience  196
I. Sri Ramakrishna’s Critique of Theological Reason 198
II. Sri Ramakrishna and the Question of Self-Authenticating
Mystical Experience 201

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 Contents • ix

III. The Argument from Experience in the Light

of Sri Ramakrishna 211
IV. The Cross-Checkability Objection 219
V. The Conflicting Claims Objection 231

PART FOUR :  The Problem of Evil

7. Sri Ramakrishna’s Multidimensional Response to the Problem of
Evil: Skeptical Theism, Saint-Making Theodicy, and the Panentheistic
Standpoint of Vijñāna  241
I. Karma and Līlā in the Classical Vedāntic Theodicies of Śaṅkara
and Rāmānuja 245
II. Sri Ramakrishna’s Skeptical Theist Refutation of Evidential
Arguments from Evil 249
III. Sri Ramakrishna’s Saint-Making Theodicy 255
IV. Reconciling Sri Ramakrishna’s Saint-Making Theodicy with
His Hard Theological Determinism 264
V. Sri Ramakrishna’s Theodical Endgame: The Panentheistic
Standpoint of Vijñāna 268
VI. Anticipating Possible Objections 273
8. A Cross-Cultural Approach to the Problem of Evil: Sri Ramakrishna,
the Rowe-Alston Debate, and Hick’s Soul-Making Theodicy  281
I. Skeptical Theist Positions in Dialogue: 
Sri Ramakrishna and Alston 282
II. Soul-Making Theodicies in Dialogue: 
Sri Ramakrishna and Hick 292
III. A Ramakrishnan Critique of Hick’s Soul-Making Theodicy 297
IV. Toward a Metatheodicy: Adequacy Criteria
for Assessing Theodicies 305

Methodological Postlude 311

Bibliography 315
Index 335

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 INTRODUCTION

One can write shelves of philosophical books based on any one of

Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings.
—s w a m i v i v e k a n a n d a 1

What can contemporary philosophers and theologians learn from

a nineteenth-century Indian mystic? This book proposes that Sri
Ramakrishna (1836–1886), an unlettered Bengali sage, has much to
teach us. He is best known for having affirmed the harmony of all reli-
gions on the basis of his own richly varied mystical experiences and
eclectic religious practices, both Hindu and non-Hindu. His spiritual
journey culminated in the exalted state of “vijñāna,” his term for the
“intimate knowledge” of God as the Infinite Reality that is both per-
sonal and impersonal, with and without form, immanent in the uni-
verse and beyond it. Sri Ramakrishna’s expansive spiritual standpoint
of vijñāna, I argue, opens up a new paradigm for addressing central
issues in the philosophy of religion.
Although Sri Ramakrishna never presented a systematic philos-
ophy, his recorded oral teachings in Bengali address a wide range of
philosophical issues and draw on numerous Indian philosophical tra-
ditions. To date, however, surprisingly few books have been devoted
to Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophy. In Bengali, the only sustained ex-
amination of Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophy is Svāmī Prajñānānanda’s
eight-volume study.2 In English, there are a number of book-length his-
torical and psychobiographical studies of Sri Ramakrishna, but there is

1. LP I.iii.1 / DP 387.

2.  Svāmī Prajñānānanda, Vāṇī o Vicār:  Śrī R āmakṛṣṇa Kathāmṛter Vyākhyā
Viśleṣan, 8 vols. (Kolkata : Sri Ramakrishna Vedanta Math, 1974–95). In chapter 1,
I argue that Prajñānānanda’s study, while important, has major limitations—the
most serious one being his overeagerness to fit all of Sri Ramakrishna’s philosoph-
ical teachings into the sectarian framework of Advaita Vedānta.

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2

2 • infinite paths to infinite reality

not a single academic book on Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophical views.3 However,

several scholars—including Satis Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Tapasyananda, and
Jeffery D. Long—have written insightful articles and book chapters on different
aspects of Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophy.4 Building on their work, I have ventured
to write the first scholarly book in English on Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophy.
There are three primary reasons why Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophy deserves
a book-length treatment. First, his philosophical views, as original as they are
sophisticated, constitute a significant—if neglected—chapter in the history
of Indian philosophical thought. Second, Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings influ-
enced some of the most important figures in modern Indian thought, including
Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi,
and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.5 Thus, a careful study of Sri Ramakrishna’s

3.  Historical studies of Sri Ramakrishna include Amiya P. Sen’s two books, Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa: The Sadhaka of Dakshineswar (New Delhi: Penguin, 2010), and Three Essays on Sri
Ramakrishna and His Times (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2001). Psychobiographical
studies of Sri Ramakrishna include Carl Olson, The Mysterious Play of Kālī: An Interpretive Study
of Rāmakrishna (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990); Narasingha Sil, Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa: A
Psychological Profile (Leiden: Brill, 1991); Narasingha Sil, Ramakrishna Revisited: A New Biography
(Lanham, MD:  University Press of America, 1998); Jeffrey Kripal, Kālī’s Child: The Mystical and
the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Sri Ramakrishna (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press,
2004). Such psychobiographical studies of Sri Ramakrishna are based on highly controversial,
and culturally specific, psychoanalytic assumptions that tend to distort, rather than illuminate, Sri
Ramakrishna’s life and teachings. For an incisive critique of psychobiographical approaches to Sri
Ramakrishna, see Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana, Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kālī’s
Child Revisited (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2010).
4. See, for instance, Walter Neevel, “ The Transformation of Śrī Rāmākrishna,” in Hinduism: New
Essays in the History of Religions, ed. B. L. Smith (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 53–97; Freda Matchett,
“ The Teaching of Rāmakrishna in Relation to the Hindu Tradition and as Interpreted
by Vivekānanda,” Religion 11 (1981), 171–84; Satis Chandra Chatterjee, Classical Indian
Philosophies: Their Synthesis in the Philosophy of Sri Ramakrishna, 2nd ed. (Calcutta : University
of Calcutta, [1963] 1985), 104–52; Swami Tapasyananda, Sri Ramakrishna’s Thoughts in a
Vedantic Perspective (Mylapore, India :  Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1993); Arindam Chakrabarti,
“ The Dark Mother Flying Kites: Sri Ramakrishna’s Metaphysic of Morals,” Sophia 33.3 (1994),
14–29; Swami Bhajanananda, “Philosophy of Sri Ramakrishna,” University of Calcutta Journal
of the Department of Philosophy 9 (2010), 1–56; Jeffery D. Long , “Advaita and Dvaita: Bridging
the Gap—the Ramakrishna Tradition’s both/and Approach to the Dvaita/Advaita Debate,”
Journal of Vaishnava Studies 16.2 (Spring 2008), 49–70.
5.  For a discussion of the influence of Sri Ramakrishna on Sri Aurobindo, see Ayon Maharaj,
“ Toward a New Hermeneutics of the Bhagavad Gītā: Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, and
the Secret of Vijñāna,” Philosophy East and West 65.4 (October 2015), 1214–17. Tagore offers a
paean to Sri Ramakrishna in his 1936 speech, “Address at the Parliament of Religions,” in The
English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 4, ed. Sisir Kumar Das and Nityapriya Ghosh
(Kolkata : Sahitya Akademi, 2008), 957–65. Gandhi remarks on Sri Ramakrishna in the fore-
word to Swami Nikhilananda, Life of Sri Ramakrishna (Kolkata :  Advaita Ashrama, [1928]
2008), ix. Radhakrishnan was influenced by Sri Ramakrishna primarily through his encounter
with Swami Vivekananda’s work. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, “Swami Vivekananda and Young
India,” Prabuddha Bharata 68.5 (May 1963), 183–84.

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 Introduction • 3

philosophy enriches our understanding of modern India’s complex intellec-

tual landscape. Third, Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophical positions resonate
strongly with cutting-edge work in Western philosophy of religion, thereby in-
viting cross-cultural philosophical inquiry. On the one hand, considering Sri
Ramakrishna in the light of recent Western philosophy helps bring out the rigor
and force of his views. On the other, Sri Ramakrishna’s remarkably expansive con-
ception of God as the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality provides a powerful
alternative to the more narrowly theistic paradigm of many Western philoso-
phers and theologians. Therefore, contemporary scholars stand to learn a great
deal from Sri Ramakrishna’s fresh and capacious perspective on a variety of phil-
osophical problems.
Methodologically, this book combines detailed exegesis with cross-cultural
philosophical investigation. My exegetical aim is to provide accurate and chari-
table reconstructions of Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophical views on the basis of his
recorded oral teachings. Throughout this book, I rely primarily on two Bengali
source-texts for information on Sri Ramakrishna’s life and teachings. Without
a doubt, Mahendranāth Gupta’s Śrīśrīrāmakṛṣṇakathāmṛta (1902–32; here-
after Kathāmṛta)—which was later translated into English as The Gospel of Sri
Ramakrishna—is the most reliable and comprehensive source of Sri Ramakrishna’s
teachings.6 Gupta, who frequently visited Sri Ramakrishna between 1882 and
1886, recorded with almost stenographic accuracy Sri Ramakrishna’s conversa-
tions with his numerous visitors.7 Indeed, many of Sri Ramakrishna’s intimate
disciples, including his wife Sāradā Devī and Swami Vivekananda, attested to
the faithfulness and precision of Gupta’s work.8 Of course, reconstructing Sri
Ramakrishna’s views on the basis of his oral teachings is far from straightforward.

6.  The literal meaning of Śrīśrīrāmakṛṣṇakathāmṛta is “The Nectar of Sri Ramakrishna’s

Words.” There are, of course, other collections of Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings compiled
by some of his other disciples, including Svāmī Brahmānanda’s Śrīśrīrāmakṛṣṇa Upadeśa
(Kolkata :  Udbodhan, 1961) and Sureścandra Datta’s Śrīśrīrāmakṛṣṇadever Upadeśa
(Kolkata :  Haramohan Publishing , 1968). I  rely on Gupta’s Kathāmṛta for three main rea-
sons. First, it is the most accurate and extensive source of Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings. Second,
only the Kathāmṛta provides crucial information about the context of Sri Ramakrishna’s
teachings—such as whom he was addressing, where and when he spoke, and so on. Third, as
far as I am aware, there are no substantial discrepancies in Sri Ramakrishna’s recorded philo-
sophical teachings across the various compilations. Therefore, for the purposes of this book, it
has not been necessary for me to consult other compilations.
7.  Gupta actually published his work in five volumes (in 1902, 1904, 1908, 1910, and 1932),
each of which begins with entries from 1882 and ends with entries from 1886. See Śrīśrīrāmak-
ṛṣṇakathāmṛta: Śrīma-Kathita, 5 vols. (Kolkata : Kathāmṛta Bhavan, 1902–32). The publisher
Udbodhan later combined these five volumes into a single volume arranged in chronological
order. Throughout this book, I refer to the single-volume Udbodhan edition of the Kathāmṛta.
8. See K v–vi for Swami Vivekananda’s and Sāradā Devī’s laudatory remarks about the accuracy
of the Kathāmṛta.

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4 • infinite paths to infinite reality

Hence, in section II of chapter 1, I explain my hermeneutic procedure for recon-

structing Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophical positions from the Kathāmṛta as accu-
rately as possible.
I will also refer frequently to the Śrīśrīrāmakṛṣṇalīlāprasaṅga (1909–19; here-
after Līlāprasaṅga), a detailed biography of Sri Ramakrishna written by his dis-
ciple Svāmī Sāradānanda.9 The Līlāprasaṅga is an invaluable source-text, as it
contains detailed and reliable accounts of Sri Ramakrishna’s spiritual practices
and mystical experiences not found in other texts, including the Kathāmṛta. At
certain places in his biography, Svāmī Sāradānanda also offers his own interpre-
tations of Sri Ramakrishna’s spiritual practices, mystical experiences, and philo-
sophical ideas. For the sake of historical accuracy, I will rely as much as possible
on noninterpretive passages from the Līlāprasaṅga—in particular, accounts of
incidents in Sri Ramakrishna’s life and reports of his teachings and mystical expe-
riences that are either in Sri Ramakrishna’s own words or in the words of someone
who was present with him at the time of the event in question.10
Throughout my book, the task of philosophical exegesis goes hand in hand with
a broader cross-cultural project: bringing Sri Ramakrishna into dialogue with re-
cent Western philosophers. As a contribution to the nascent field of cross-cultural
philosophy of religion, this book participates in the recent movement away from
comparative philosophy and toward more creative and flexible paradigms for
engaging in philosophical inquiry across cultures.11 These new methodolog-
ical paradigms go by a variety of names, including “cross-cultural philosophy,”12

9. The literal meaning of Śrīśrīrāmakṛṣṇalīlāprasaṅga is “The Divine Play of Sri Ramakrishna.”

10.  Some scholars, such as Neevel (“The Transformation of Śrī Rāmākrishna,” 67), claim that
Sāradānanda had a bias toward Advaita Vedānta, which sometimes colored his account of Sri
Ramakrishna’s life and spiritual practices. However, Neevel still accepts the reliability of much
of Sāradānanda’s biography. Even if Neevel’s objection is true, it would not vitiate my philosoph-
ical reconstructions, which are based on noninterpretive passages from Sāradānanda’s work.
11.  See Jonardon Ganeri’s recent manifesto, “Why Philosophy Must Go Global,” com-
prising his two articles, “Manifesto for a Re:emergent Philosophy,” Confluence 4 (2016),
134–41, and “Reflections on Re:emergent Philosophy,” Confluence 4 (2016), 164–86; M.
Kirloskar-Steinbach, Geeta Ramana, and J. Maffie, “Introducing Confluence:  A Thematic
Essay,” Confluence 1 (2014), 7–63; Ethan Mills, “From Comparative to Cross-Cultural
Philosophy,” in Comparative Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, ed. Sarah Mattice, Geoff
Ashton, and Joshua Kimber (New Castle upon Tyne, UK :  Cambridge Scholars Publishing ,
2009), 120–28; Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber, eds., Comparative Philosophy without
Borders (London:  Bloomsbury, 2016), 1–33; Andrew Tuck, Comparative Philosophy and the
Philosophy of Scholarship:  On the Western Interpretation of Nāgārjuna (New  York:  Oxford
University Press, 1990).
12.  Jay Garfield, Empty Words:  Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation
(New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. viii; Mills, “From Comparative to
Cross-Cultural Philosophy”; Thomas Dean, ed., Religious Pluralism and Truth:  Essays on
Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (Albany : SUNY Press, 1995).

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 Introduction • 5

“global philosophy,”13 “fusion philosophy,”14 “re:emergent philosophy,”15 and “bor-

derless philosophy.”16 While these postcomparativist paradigms differ in subtle
ways, they all share a fundamental commitment to drawing on the conceptual
resources of numerous philosophical traditions in order to address philosophical
problems.17 As Jay Garfield admirably puts it, the goal of cross-cultural philos-
ophy is “not so much to juxtapose texts from distinct traditions to notice similari-
ties and differences as it is to do philosophy, with lots of texts, lots of perspectives,
and lots of hermeneutical traditions—to make the resources of diverse traditions
and their scholars available to one another and to create new dialogues.”18
My aim, then, is not to compare Sri Ramakrishna with Western philosophers
but to shed new light on central problems in cross-cultural philosophy of religion
by bringing Sri Ramakrishna into creative dialogue with recent Western think-
ers. Along the way, I often draw comparisons between Sri Ramakrishna and nu-
merous Western philosophers, but such comparisons are always in the service of
cross-cultural philosophizing.
For reasons of space, this book engages primarily the work of recent analytic
philosophers of religion, with the exception of a discussion of the Continental
philosopher Jean-Luc Marion in chapter 2. Since Continental philosophy of re-
ligion is a rich and vast field in its own right, it would take an entirely different
book to explore how Sri Ramakrishna could be brought into conversation with
such Continental thinkers as Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel
Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Merold Westphal.19 Moreover, since I aim for depth
rather than comprehensive coverage, I focus on four topics in the philosophy of
religion: the infinitude of God (chapters 1 and 2), religious pluralism (chapters 3

13.  Thom Brooks, “Philosophy Unbound:  The Idea of Global Philosophy,” Metaphilosophy
44.3 (April 2013), 254–66.
14.  Mark Siderits, Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy:  Empty Persons (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2003), xi.
15. Ganeri, “Manifesto for a Re:emergent Philosophy.”
16. Chakrabarti and Weber, Comparative Philosophy without Borders, 22.
17.  As Michael Levine points out, some self-identified “comparative philosophers”—such
as Eliot Deutsch and Levine himself—do engage in the kind of cross-cultural philosophical
problem-solving that philosophers like Siderits consider to be postcomparativist. Levine, “Does
Comparative Philosophy Have a Fusion Future?,” Confluence 4 (2016), 208–15. While I agree
with Levine that comparative philosophy has often encompassed creative cross-cultural work,
the label “comparative philosophy” is still misleading, since it foregrounds the narrow aim of
comparison.
18. Garfield, Empty Words, viii.
19. An important book in Continental philosophy of religion is Merold Westphal’s Overcoming
Onto-Theology:  Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New  York:  Fordham University
Press, 2001).

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6 • infinite paths to infinite reality

and 4), the nature and epistemology of mystical experience (chapters 5 and 6),
and the problem of evil (chapters 7 and 8).
Chapter  1 sets the stage by reconstructing Sri Ramakrishna’s overall philo-
sophical framework. Militating against narrow sectarian interpretations of Sri
Ramakrishna’s philosophical teachings, I argue that his philosophy is best charac-
terized as “Vijñāna Vedānta,” a resolutely nonsectarian worldview—rooted in his
own mystical experience of vijñāna—that harmonizes apparently conflicting reli-
gious faiths, sectarian philosophies, and spiritual disciplines. I first delineate five
interpretive principles that I employ throughout the book in order to reconstruct
Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophical views on the basis of the Kathāmṛta. I then elab-
orate the six main tenets of Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophy of Vijñāna Vedānta.
On the mystical basis of vijñāna, Sri Ramakrishna affirms that both the imper-
sonal nondual Brahman of Advaitins and the loving personal God of theists are
equally real aspects of one and the same Infinite Reality. The remaining seven
chapters of this book explore the far-reaching philosophical implications of Sri
Ramakrishna’s unique standpoint of vijñāna.
Chapter 2 investigates the nature of divine infinitude from a cross-cultural
perspective by bringing Sri Ramakrishna into conversation with classical Indian
philosophers as well as Western philosophers and theologians. Sri Ramakrishna
claims that God is “infinite” (ananta) in the sense that God’s nature is an inex-
haustible plenitude that exceeds the grasp of the finite human intellect. I identify
what is distinctive in Sri Ramakrishna’s conception of divine infinitude within
the Indian philosophical context by comparing it with the Vedāntic views of
the Advaitin Śaṅkara, the Viśiṣṭādvaitin Rāmānuja, and the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava
Viśvanātha Cakravartin.
The remainder of the second chapter ventures into cross-cultural terri-
tory. First, I  briefly identify some striking affinities between Sri Ramakrishna’s
vijñāna-based conception of the Infinite God and the medieval Christian theo-
logian Nicholas of Cusa’s doctrine of God as the coincidentia oppositorum (“co-
incidence of opposites”). I  then bring Sri Ramakrishna into dialogue with the
contemporary analytic theologian Benedikt Paul Göcke. According to Göcke,
God is infinite in the radical sense that God is not subject to the law of contra-
diction and, therefore, should be analyzed in terms of “paraconsistent logic.”20
I contend that while Göcke’s argument helps clarify the paraconsistent underpin-
nings of Sri Ramakrishna’s own conception of the Infinite God, Sri Ramakrishna
pursues the paraconsistent logic of divine infinitude more fully and consistently
than does Göcke. Finally, I  triangulate Sri Ramakrishna and Göcke with the

20.  Benedikt Paul Göcke, “ The Paraconsistent God,” in Rethinking the Concept of a Personal
God, ed. Thomas Schärtl, Christian Tapp, and Veronika Wegener (Münster:  Aschendorff,
2016), 177.

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 Introduction • 7

contemporary Continental philosopher Jean-Luc Marion. Marion’s trenchant

critique of various forms of “conceptual idolatry” and his positive account of God
as agape resonate with Sri Ramakrishna’s views on divine infinitude. At the same
time, however, Sri Ramakrishna helps us see how both Göcke and Marion lapse
into different forms of conceptual idolatry in their own right.
While it is well known that Sri Ramakrishna taught the harmony of all reli-
gions, scholars have interpreted his views on religious diversity in a number of
conflicting ways. Chapter  3 argues that Sri Ramakrishna’s spiritual standpoint
of vijñāna holds the key to understanding his nuanced position on religious di-
versity. In particular, I reconstruct from his teachings a unique, and philosophi-
cally sophisticated, model of religious pluralism. According to Sri Ramakrishna,
since God is the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality, there are correspondingly
infinite ways of approaching and realizing God. Therefore, all religions and spir-
itual philosophies—both theistic and nontheistic—are salvifically effective paths
to one common goal: God-realization, or the direct spiritual experience of God
in any of His innumerable forms or aspects. I then examine Sri Ramakrishna’s
response to the thorny problem of conflicting religious truth-claims. He recon-
ciles religious claims about the nature of the ultimate reality on the basis of his
capacious ontology of God. Every religion, he claims, captures a uniquely real
aspect of the Infinite Reality. Regarding other types of religious truth-claims, he
maintains that while every religion errs on some points of doctrine, these errors
do not substantially diminish the salvific efficacy of religions. Finally, I defend Sri
Ramakrishna’s religious pluralism against numerous objections leveled by schol-
ars such as R. W. Neufeldt and Ninian Smart.
Building on the third chapter, chapter 4 explores the British philosopher John
Hick’s early and late views on religious pluralism in the light of Sri Ramakrishna.
Between 1970 and 1974, the early Hick espoused a Vedāntic theory of religious
pluralism—based explicitly on Sri Aurobindo’s “logic of the infinite”—that
comes remarkably close to Sri Ramakrishna’s vijñāna-based pluralist model.
According to the early Hick, the Infinite Divine Reality is both personal and
impersonal, even though our finite minds are unable to grasp how this is pos-
sible. The early Hick derived a robust model of religious pluralism from this
Aurobindonian premise of unfathomable divine infinitude: since each religion
captures at least one true aspect of the Infinite Reality, the various conceptions of
the Divine Reality taught by the major world religions are complementary rather
than conflicting.
By 1976, however, Hick abandoned this Aurobindonian line of thought in
favor of his now well-known quasi-Kantian theory of religious pluralism, accord-
ing to which the personal and nonpersonal ultimates of the various world reli-
gions are different phenomenal forms of the same unknowable “Real an sich.”
As numerous critics have pointed out, Hick’s quasi-Kantian pluralist model fails

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8 • infinite paths to infinite reality

to honor the self-understanding of most religious practitioners, who take their

respective ultimates to be literally, and not merely phenomenally, true. On this
basis, I argue that Sri Ramakrishna’s vijñāna-based model of religious pluralism,
which grants full ontological reality to the personal and nonpersonal ultimates
of the various religions, is more robust and philosophically viable than Hick’s.
Chapter  5 draws upon Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings and mystical testimony
in order to develop a new conceptual framework for understanding the nature
of mystical experience. In recent analytic philosophy of religion, two conflicting
approaches to mystical experience have been especially influential:  perennial-
ism and constructivism. While perennialists such as Walter Stace and Evelyn
Underhill maintain that mystical experiences are the same across cultures, con-
structivists such as Steven Katz and Hick claim that a mystic’s cultural condi-
tioning plays a major role in shaping his or her mystical experiences.
After identifying the strengths and limitations of these two positions, I argue
that Sri Ramakrishna champions what I call a “manifestationist” approach to mys-
tical experience that provides a compelling dialectical alternative to both peren-
nialism and constructivism. In Sri Ramakrishna’s view, “God manifests Himself
in the form which His devotee loves most” (K 101 / G 149–50). From the stand-
point of vijñāna, Sri Ramakrishna asserts that mystics in various traditions ex-
perience different real manifestations of the same impersonal-personal Infinite
Reality. Accordingly, while Sri Ramakrishna agrees with the constructivist view
that a mystic’s background beliefs are reflected in his or her mystical experiences,
he rejects the epistemic subjectivism of constructivists like Katz and Hick. At the
same time, Sri Ramakrishna takes the Infinite Reality to be the common onto-
logical object of all mystical experience, but he rejects the reductive perennialist
view that all mystical experiences are phenomenologically identical. Thus, I con-
tend that Sri Ramakrishna’s manifestationist paradigm provides a more accurate
and nuanced account of mystical experience than those offered by many recent
philosophers of religion.
Chapter 6 explores how Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical testimony and teachings
enrich contemporary philosophical debates about the epistemic value of mystical
experience. These debates center on a key question: are we rationally justified in
taking mystical experiences—either our own or those of others—to be veridical?
After briefly outlining Sri Ramakrishna’s views on the scope of theological reason,
I consider whether he accepts the possibility of self-authenticating experiences of
God—that is, experiences of God that guarantee their own veridicality to their
epistemic subjects. Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical testimony, I  argue, lends strong
support to the philosopher Robert Oakes’s position that self-authenticating expe-
riences of God are, indeed, logically possible.
The remainder of chapter 6 focuses on the argument from experience, which
has been widely discussed by contemporary philosophers of religion—the

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 Introduction • 9

argument that it is reasonable to believe that God exists on the basis of the testi-
mony of people claiming to have experienced Him. As we will see, Sri Ramakrishna
defended a simple version of the argument from experience, and his teachings
and mystical reports also support the fundamental premises of the more sophis-
ticated versions defended by recent philosophers such as Richard Swinburne and
Jerome Gellman. Moreover, I argue that Sri Ramakrishna’s distinctive approach
helps defuse two of the most serious objections to the argument from experi-
ence: first, that mystical experiences, unlike sensory experiences, cannot be ade-
quately cross-checked; and second, that different mystics often make conflicting
claims about the nature of the ultimate reality they allegedly experience.
Chapter  7 reconstructs Sri Ramakrishna’s multifaceted response to the
problem of evil. Several of Sri Ramakrishna’s visitors argued that instances of
apparently pointless evil—such as Genghis Khan’s act of mass slaughter—make
it reasonable to believe either that God does not exist or that God is omnipo-
tent and omniscient but not perfectly good. Sri Ramakrishna answers that the
ways of an omniscient and omnipotent God are inscrutable to the finite human
intellect—a response, I  argue, that is best understood as a skeptical theist po-
sition:  in light of our cognitive limitations, we are never rationally justified in
believing that God has no morally sufficient reason for permitting a given in-
stance of evil.
Sri Ramakrishna’s skeptical theism dovetails with a full-blown theodicy—a
positive account of why God permits evil and suffering. By situating Sri
Ramakrishna’s theodicy in the context of the classical Vedāntic theodicies of
Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja, I set its distinctive aspects into relief. According to Sri
Ramakrishna, God permits evil “in order to create saints” (K 37 / G 98). On the
basis of such teachings, I reconstruct what I call Sri Ramakrishna’s “saint-making”
theodicy: since God has created this world as an environment for saint-making,
evil is as necessary as good. Through the experience of good and evil in the course
of many lives, we gradually learn to combat our own evil tendencies and cultivate
ethical and spiritual virtues that bring us closer to the goal of eternal salvation
that awaits us all.
Finally, I  discuss the crucial mystical dimension of Sri Ramakrishna’s the-
odicy. His theodicy culminates in an appeal to his own panentheistic experience
of vijñāna, which reveals to him that God has become everything in the universe.
From this mystical standpoint, Sri Ramakrishna is able to resolve lingering prob-
lems raised by his saint-making theodicy: since God Himself sports in the guise
of both evildoers and their victims, the problem of evil—which presupposes a
difference between God and His suffering creatures—loses its urgency.
Chapter 8 adopts a cross-cultural approach to the problem of evil by bring-
ing Sri Ramakrishna into conversation with recent philosophers. I begin by com-
paring Sri Ramakrishna’s skeptical theism with William Alston’s skeptical theist

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10 • infinite paths to infinite reality

refutation of William Rowe’s argument from evil against God’s existence. On the
one hand, I draw upon Alston’s skeptical theist response to Rowe as a means of
developing and defending Sri Ramakrishna’s own skeptical theist position. On
the other, I argue that Alston’s failure to consider Indian karma-based theodicies
significantly weakens his argument.
I then bring Sri Ramakrishna’s saint-making theodicy into dialogue with
Hick’s “soul-making” theodicy. Hick provides convincing arguments for the
necessity of evil in a soul-making environment, which equally support Sri
Ramakrishna’s saint-making theodicy. Furthermore, Hick’s “use of eschatology
to complete theodicy”—his argument that a successful theodicy must accept the
view that everyone will be saved—helps to clarify the importance of the doc-
trine of universal salvation in Sri Ramakrishna’s own theodicy.21 I argue, however,
that Hick’s soul-making theodicy also has major weaknesses, which stem from
his Christian assumption of a one-life-only paradigm and his neglect of mys-
tical experience. On this basis, I make the case that Sri Ramakrishna’s mystically
grounded saint-making theodicy, which presupposes rebirth, has significant phil-
osophical advantages over Hick’s theodicy.
Hopefully, this book will inspire scholars to explore further how Sri
Ramakrishna’s unique mystico-philosophical perspective can enrich contem-
porary discussions of a wide range of philosophical and theological issues.
The book’s broader polemical aim is to challenge the methodological paro-
chialism of philosophy as it is often practiced in the Western world.22 To
remain vital, we must adopt a broader, and more rigorous, cross-cultural
methodology that draws on the resources of both Western and non-Western
philosophical traditions. Cross-cultural philosophizing, as I  understand it,
should be seen less as a niche activity of a tiny minority of philosophers than
as a methodological imperative for all philosophers. The time has come for
philosophers to go global.

21. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Palgrave Macmillan, [1966] 2010), 351.
22.  For a spirited critique of the parochialism of contemporary Anglophone academic phi-
losophy, see Bryan W. Van Norden’s recent book, Taking Back Philosophy:  A Multicultural
Manifesto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

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