Ramakrishna and Rolland

The bridge Rolland built between Ramakrishna's ecstatic devotion and European philosophicaltradition remains incomplete.

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Wehave notyet achieved the synthesis of East and West, mysticismand reason, spirituality and activism that both men embodied. Theforces of division, violence, and materialism have not beenvanquished. Yetthe bridgestands, invitingcrossing.

In 1929, when Romain Rolland's "La Vie de Ramakrishna" emerged from Parisian publishing houses, it carried within its pages something far more radical than mere biographical scholarship.

Here was a Nobel laureate, a towering figure of European letters, bending his considerable intellectual apparatus not to explain away the ecstasies of a Bengali mystic, but to render them comprehensible ~ even necessary ~ to a Western world stumbling blindly toward the abyss of its second great war. The book was an act of translation in the deepest sense: not merely linguistic, but civilizational.

Rolland came to Ramakrishna through the labyrinthine pathways of his own searching. By the 1920s, the author of "Jean-Christophe" had evolved from celebrated novelist into something more urgent: a conscience in exile. His uncompromising pacifism during the First World War had made him anathema in France, yet prescient everywhere. When the guns finally fell silent, leaving ten million dead and European humanism in tatters, Rolland was among those rare intellectuals willing to admit that Western civilization had catastrophically failed some fundamental test of its own values. It was in this spiritual crisis that India appeared to him ~ not as the exotic periphery of colonial imagination, but as a repository of wisdom that might yet redeem humanity's squandered inheritance. Through his correspondence with Rabindranath Tagore, and later with Gandhi himself, Rolland perceived in Hindu philosophy something that Christianity, bloodied by its complicity with nationalism and militarism, seemed incapable of providing: genuinely universal ethics grounded in the radical unity of all existence.