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Monday Morning Greetings 2024 #15 – A Beautiful and Puzzling Theology

April 8th, 2024

A puzzling verse:

 

“Only the most fortunate will relish the mad words of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu, which were mixed with jubilation, envy, agitation, submissiveness and grief, all produced by ecstatic loving emotions.” (Cc. Antya-līlā 20.1)

 

This verse is from the last chapter of the Śrī Caitanya-caritāmṛta. I was up to this verse in my class and was asked to explain it. I thought deeply about how and realized that first I needed to explain the theology of Śrī Caitanya. Below are my thoughts as to why Śrī Caitanya is such a necessary manifestation of the divine and then my attempt to explain this verse in context:

 

  1. God means the Supreme Controller.
  2. Supreme Controller means Supreme Enjoyer. Why else would control be necessary?
  3. The ultimate enjoyment is pure love, and therefore to be the Supreme Enjoyer means to have the fullest experience of pure love.
  4. Love is an energy experienced between two people in relationship to each other – the object of love (the beloved) and the subject of love (the lover).
  5. It is a principle of love that the lover enjoys more than the beloved. Take motherly love, for example. The object of that love is the child, the beloved of the mother, and subject of that love is the mother, the lover of the child. They both enjoy the same energy of motherly love but from a different vantage point. But who enjoys that motherly energy more? Is it not our experience that the mother, or one who gives love, even though selfless, enjoys more than the beloved, or one receiving it?
  6. In the same way, according to Gauḍīya theology, in terms of love of God, although God (the beloved of the devotees) and the devotee (the lover of God) both enjoy the same love or energy between them, called prema, it is the devotee who enjoys that love more.
  7. Therefore, for God to be the Supreme Enjoyer and thus claim an Absolute position, He must also experience love from the perspective of His devotee.
  8. And that is the story of Śrī Caitanya, how God, who is relishing the love of His devotees, also becomes His own devotee in order to experience the joy of being a lover of God. But there is more.
  9. Śrī Krishna (God), to be the Supreme Enjoyer, must not only enjoy the love of His devotee, but He must also enjoy the love of His topmost devotee and at the height of that love. Therefore, Śrī Caitanya is the story of Śrī Krishna becoming His own devotee to experience the love of Śrī Radha at the time of her deepest separation from Śrī Krishna, which is the height of Her love.

 

Now that I have explained the ontology of Śrī Caitanya, now let us try to make sense of what is described in the first verse of this chapter referenced in the introduction. When emotion reaches an all-consuming height, it is called rasa whether it’s tragedy (karuṇa-rasa), romance (śṛṅgāra-rasa), chivalry (vīra-rasa), or in the case of devotion to God, bhakti-rasa. Now if bhakti-rasa is the all-consuming height of devotion and, in fact, the pleasure potency of God, then how can we imagine the height and intensity of that emotion experienced by Śrī Radha in her deepest feelings of separation from Śrī Krishna and emulated by Śrī Caitanya? Describing the very end part of Śrī Caitanya’s life, Śrīla Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja tries to give us a glimpse of what Śrī Caitanya’s attainment of such overwhelming ecstatic emotions is like, beginning with introductory verse of the final chapter of Śrī Caitanya-caritāmṛta.

 

“Only the most fortunate will relish the mad words of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu, which were mixed with jubilation, envy, agitation, submissiveness and grief, all produced by ecstatic loving emotions.” (Cc. Antya-līlā 20.1)

 

A puzzling verse indeed and this is my humble attempt to make sense of it.

 

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