Inspiration and Effort

SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI

AND DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA

TWO LETTERS

1

The thesis you have passed on to me cannot stand as it is. Although the research is excellent its foundation is rather unfortunate and needs some modification. If left without a shift in perspective, it will blur the truth of the matter.

The author conceives Sri Aurobindo as modelling Savitri upon Dante's Divine Comedy, following its theme and making extensions of it in the light of his own spiritual experience. It is even suggested that he is presenting Dante, filled out and expanded, to the modern world. And his own poetic performance is attributed to his extreme admiration for the Florentine's work and to its overwhelming influence on him.

It is true that Sri Aurobindo gave Dante a very high rank: Dante figured for him among the giants of poetry. But Sri Aurobindo certainly did not put him at the sheer top. Dante stood on a slightly lower level, along with Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton — just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the e1ite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa.

Four criteria Sri Aurobindo set up for the absolute first rank. They may be summed up: originality of imagination, power of expression, creative genius, range of subject-matter. The last criterion implies also scale of work or what we may call quantity of quality. Dante just misses the utter Everest-point and sits crowned on a Kanchanjanga because his work does not have an equal genius with Vyasa's, Valmiki's, Shakespeare's and Homer's for creating a teeming world of living characters and real-seeming situations and "unknown modes of being". An energetic constructiveness

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on a grand scale rather than a formative force as of a demiurge distinguishes Dante, even as it marks out Kalidasa who, like him, would otherwise be in the company of those topmost four.

So Sri Aurobindo's admiration for Dante could never have been of the extreme order. Though, among the world's epics, he put the Divine Comedy alongside of the Odyssey as least sinking in poetic quality throughout its great length, he could not but be aware of their difference in elemental creativity. And it is also this difference that should be one of the factors deterring us from pressing too far the comparison between Savitri and the Divine Comedy. We may also remember that to have a sustained quality does not necessarily render a work superior to another which has ups and downs. Horace's dictum, "Even Homer sometimes nods", refers to the Iliad, but surely the epos of Achilles's wrath is greater than that of Odysseus's wanderings. There is a dazzling fire, there is a dizzying flight in the former that reveal more and reach farther than all the wondrous discoveries of the "many-counselled" sailor among the islands of the Aegean. In a dissimilar yet perhaps not quite unconnected universe of discourse we may note Sri Aurobindo's rating Shakespeare much higher than Racine in spite of the Frenchman's uniform perfection of art and the Englishman's repeated scoriae or, to put it more expressively, his sun-spots. Shakespeare has a height or a depth of vision, a magnificence or a mystery of word which Racine, for all his beautiful polish and finish, rarely, if at all, equals.

Sri Aurobindo may be said to have been poetically influenced in a basic sense by Homer and Shakespeare from his earliest days and, later, by Vyasa, Valmiki and the mantras of the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita. If any poetry not exactly of the sheer top, though high enough, deeply permeated him, it was Kalidasa's more than Dante's.

This is not to say that Dante has nothing to do with Savitri. Interesting and even illuminating comparisons may be made, on the whole as well as in some details, between

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Savitri and the Divine Comedy. Many parallels drawn by the thesis can hold, but its point de depart has to be changed. And here the most important thing to be borne in mind is the real source of the Aurobindonian epic.

Dante differs fundamentally from Sri Aurobindo in not being, in the true sense, a mystic. Sri Aurobindo has designated Dante's poetry, as well as Milton's, religious, not mystical. And that means it is the imaginative projection of certain strong mental beliefs and vital attitudes touched by an intuition of God and of a supernatural Beyond. There is no direct occult experience, no immediate spiritual realisation at the back of it. Something from the occult domain and the spiritual plane was sure to come on the breath of the intense and authentic inspiration that was Dante's, but upon it and around it his poetic imagination has played. And, since he did not have, in the supreme degree, the creativity of which Sri Aurobindo speaks, the play of the poetic imagination could not always transmit that "something" in its utter essence.

A further point is the emphatically Christian character of Dante's "towering fantasy" (to use his own expression). The theology of Thomas Aquinas, with the metaphysics of Aristotle as its substructure, and the whole orthodox framework of the Mediaeval mind are an integral part of Dante's universe. The poet's individuality, his personal concerns, his sympathies with the old Classical world and the boldness of his opinions have blended with the traditional elements — and there is also a wide humanity tingeing everything and bringing what we may term a world-cry into so many of the poet's articulations. Still, Mediaeval Christianity, however universalised, is magisterial in the Divine Comedy — and with it there opens a gulf between Dante and Sri Aurobindo.

No doubt, Mediaeval Christianity, no less than Graeco-Roman Classicism and Modern Europe, are included in Sri Aurobindo's vast cultural consciousness. But all these strains are taken up by a profound identity with the oriental soul and particularly with the multi-dimensioned Indian spirit.

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Even more, there is at work in the Aurobindonian consciousness

 the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

Sri Aurobindo does not merely sum up the whole past of human history: he also embodies the light of a new evolutionary future pressing for universal realisation. With the varied past of mankind and especially India's broad-based synthesis of Nature and Supernature as his launching-pad, his vision zooms into a Vita Nuova beyond Dante's conception, and from the height of this Unknown he looks at everything. A fresh astonishing light — the infra-red of Nature's unfathomed secrets, the ultra-violet of Supema-ture's unreached arcana — is brought forth by him. What was a vague dream of the Ideal, an elusive hope of the Perfect, a struggling aspiration to the Plenary — all this is given substance and shape in Sri Aurobindo's experience and self-expression. All this comes to verbal life most clearly and comprehensively in the 23,814 lines of Savitri. Knowledge of states of being and planes of consciousness such as even the greatest spiritual scriptures of India have never compassed shines out in intimate detail. These scriptures, with their warm touch on mystical reality, may be said to have prefigured that knowledge; but they are themselves shadowy in comparison to Sri Aurobindo's masterful disclosures. How much more so must be the Dantesque Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, for all the systematic accounts of their levels and all the insets of human drama they carry!

The system itself of other worlds unfolding in the Divine Comedy has little counterpart in Savitri. Where in it is the hierarchy of planes — subtle-physical, vital, mental, psychic, "overhead", and lastly "the radiant world of the Everlasting Truth"? Except for the common factor of exploring the ultra-terrestrial and for some correspondences here and there of setting and symbolism, we are in radically dissimilar dimen-

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sions. Nor can we say that Sri Aurobindo's hierarchy can be divided and distributed into three general sections covered by Dante's labels: "Inferno", "Purgatorio", "Paradiso". The subtle-physical and vital planes have their own hells and heavens: neither these hells nor these heavens can be lumped together to make a Dantesque picture. It is not possible also to ignore these heavens and restrict that label to the idealities of the mind-plane and the rapturous intensities of the psychic. Both below them and above we have para-disal expanses, and at the summit we have the supreme beatitudes —

White chambers of dalliance with Eternity

And the stupendous gates of the Alone.

A breath from such altitudes does get wafted in the closing canto of Dante's epic, which, barring a symphony of Beethoven's, is perhaps the most glorious voice Europe has heard of the Divine Ananda, but there too the scheme of Christian theology is at work. On occasion we have an anticipation of some Aurobindonian God-glimpse as in:

O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,

 sola intendi, e da te intelletta

e intendente te ami e arridi!

Laurence Binyon englishes the lines:

O Light Eternal, who in thyself alone

Dwell'st and thyself know'st and self-understood,

Self-understanding, smilest on thine own!

Barbara Reynolds's version reads:

Eternal Light, that in Thyself alone

Dwelling, alone dost know Thyself, and smile

 On Thy self-love, so knowing and so known!

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Both the translations are awkward in places and lack the clear natural conciseness and force of the original; but the original is perfect with the harmonious directness of the imaginative intellect's language intuitivised. It is not that Sri Aurobindo's utterance always differs toto coelo, but everywhere we have the sweep of a deeper vibrancy, and again and again we get mantric outbursts dealing with a theme not far removed from that of Dante's lines, either quietly spell-binding —

The superconscient realms of motionless peace

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone —

or thrillingly rapt:

Timeless domains of joy and absolute power

Stretched out surrounded by the eternal hush;

The ways that lead to endless happiness

Ran like dream-smiles through meditating vasts:

Disclosed stood up in a gold moment's blaze

White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite.

Perhaps the spiritual difference will be best gauged if we put side by side with these passages an Aurobindonian moment itself which comes nearest the Dantesque:

There knowing herself by her own termless self,

Wisdom supernal, wordless, absolute,

Sat uncompanioned in the eternal Calm,

All-seeing, motionless, sovereign and alone.

Mention of mantric outbursts, involving a disparity between the sources of the two poetic perfections that are respectively Dante's and Sri Aurobindo's, brings us to a final point. In all those parts of Savitri where the old poem written in 1916, as far as we know, was enormously enlarged and completely transformed, Sri Aurobindo writes with an in-

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spiration that comes straight from "overhead" levels through a mind entirely silent in a permanently established peace of the infinite and universal Self of selves — Atman that is Brahman. Sri Aurobindo's mind does not build up anything on its own: it does not say to itself," "Here is Dante's Divine Comedy describing an other-worldly journey through the pit of punishment and suffering, the mount of repentance and self-chastisement, the free spaces of ecstasy and epiphany. I will take up this theme and erect the lucent structure of a new epic. A tale from the Mahabharata of a fight between Love and Death is apt to my purpose. Basing myself on it I will write a new Divine Comedy. Everywhere I will take help of a Dantesque scaffolding and bring my own spiritual experience as well as my awareness of the modern world's needs to bear upon the general pattern of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise and on various particulars of the Mediaeval Italian poet's significant vision. I will be a magnified Dante." The whole mode of procedure natural to a master Yogi like Sri Aurobindo would be foreign to any such self-conscious mental project.

True, Sri Aurobindo's mind was a highly and diversely cultured one and the "overhead" afflatus would take up all that richness full of sounds and sights caught from numberless past creations of poetry. But it would not start from this richness. The start would be far beyond it. An adesh, a divine command, would be upon his mind in poetic work as in any other. And the command would bring about an expression of his multifarious spiritual realisation, his immediate experience of all the inner and upper worlds beyond our earth and pour all his knowledge forth in inevitable words propelled sheer from the mystical truth of things and never from any artistic ambition, any emulation of past poetic achievements, even though the literary loves and cultural responses that were his would find a new avatar for themselves in several portions of the epic creation that is essentially independent of them. If we properly understand the Yogic manner in which Sri Aurobindo wrote Savitri, we would,

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while noting and underlining whatever Dantesque affinities have got woven into the fabric of vision and word, refrain from ascribing to him an all-influencing motive of writing Dante larger and more luminous.

2

I admire the spirit in which the writer of the thesis has taken my criticisms — and the spirit persists in spite of the "defence" put up at some points. This defence is welcome, for it clarifies a number of issues, without wanting us to refrain from modifying the language and turn of treatment in the thesis wherever necessary. The writer's modesty is worthy of a true researcher and comparative student.

I should like to make a few remarks apropos of some "defensive" observations. In one matter I fear the observer has gone rather astray. The impression seems to be there that "perfection of form" is missing among the criteria Sri Aurobindo has set up for the highest poetry. That is why the writer desires us not to concentrate only on what is called "elemental creative energy". But surely "perfection of form" is implied in the criterion "power of expression", which stands for the poetic gift of making flawless form by means of words. Actually this criterion involves both the things the writer puts apart. It is precisely "the channelising of that energy into a creative work of art". By "creative genius" (Sri Aurobindo's third criterion) is not meant merely a Niagara-rush a la Kazantzakis. There is a specific meaning attached to the term. It stands for the demiurgic capacity to create a world of one's own — living characters or else vibrant modes of being variously interrelated within a real-seeming milieu. It is because Dante, just like Kalidasa, has not enough of this capacity that he fails to rank with the sheer pinnacles of Parnassus: Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Vyasa. His having less of inequalities, fewer ups and downs, does not help him: those four have enough ups, and these ups have in a greater

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degree the creative genius which Sri Aurobindo speaks of. All great poets must have great elemental energy, but only when that energy is at its greatest in all the four attributes mentioned by Sri Aurobindo is the greatest poetry born. The isolation of this energy as one of the attributes out of the four and the identification of it with "creative genius" has made our correspondent labour an irrelevant point.

Not quite accurate also is our friend's placing on a par Sri Aurobindo's choice of the five-act Elizabethan model of the Drama and his choice of the Savitri-story for an epic like Dante's, dealing with other worlds. His Savitri in its gigantic "multifoliate" complexity has little in common with the Divina Commedia's structure to merit comparison with the close approximation of the structure of Rodogune and other plays to the model followed by the Elizabethan dramatists. Of course in general we have hells and heavens and perhaps even purgatories in Savitri, but they are of an entirely different kind and also they are differently organised. The correspondent appears to be somewhat in two minds here. At one place we read of "the occult experiences during the travels of Aswapati" and at another we get a reference to Savitri's own inner explorations "of the triple worlds of Night, Twilight and Day". It is only the latter that invite some comparison with Dante's scheme, but still in too broad a manner. The former hardly provide "vital connections" — though both may and do admit now and then the striking of a Dantesque chord in the Aurobindonian symphony.

And the chord would be all the more authentic because Sri Aurobindo, as the author of the thesis should know, was familiar with Italian sufficiently to read the Divina Commedia in the original. But nothing really links up Savitri with this mighty product of the Middle Ages of Europe in an organic and inevitable manner. I go to the length of asserting that even if Dante had never lived and his epic had never reared its "towering fantasy" the tale of Love and Death out of the Mahabharata would have been taken up by Sri Aurobindo and metamorphosed into almost the very same super-epic of the

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Spirit that is Savitri. I say "almost", for what would have been missing are lines here and there which have not only a Dantesque cast of utterance but also something of the substance of the Florentine's vision. That is all.

Provided we keep this foundational truth in mind we are free to make a comparative study and bring with it a fine literary as well as philosophico-spiritual insight. But I would rather dwell on several small pregnant anticipations by Dante than trace a host of amplifying correspondences in Sri Aurobindo.

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