Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

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Dionysian and Apollonian

Dionysian and Apollonian have been a fashionable antithesis, following upon Nietzsche's use of the terms. After Nietzsche they are always opposed roughly as Romanticism and Classicism, instinct and reason, natural state and civilisation, myth and rationalism, music and the plastic arts, the dithyrambic and the reflective as exemplified in the chorus and the dialogue respectively of a Greek tragedy.¹ Recently the antithesis à la Nietzsche has come into special literary prominence in connection with the life-vision and soul-attitude of Nikos Kazantzakis. In an excellent exposition of Kazantzakis's synthesis of the two in what that great Greek poet calls "the Cretan Glance", we find Kimon Friar speaking of "the Apollonian or classical ordered vision of life" in one place and of "the eye of Hellenic Greece (or Apollo)" in another.²

Sri Aurobindo's Man, which time and again brings in the Gods of Greece, throws, in passing, a shaft of new light on the real meaning of the contrasted concepts. We may prepare our vision of this shaft by noting some remarks of Sri Aurobindo's apropos of the pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus. Sri Aurobindo

¹ Dictionary of World Literature, edited by Joseph T. Shipley (New York, 1942), p. 40, col. 2. ² Op. cit., p. xix.

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puts a stress on a period of Mystics preceding that of the philosophers and takes up the issue often discussed: Was Heraclitus a mystic or a rationalist? Sri Aurobindo agrees that Pfleiderer's view of Heraclitus as a pure mystic is exaggerated, but he discerns a certain truth behind this misconception. He¹ opines: "Heraclitus' abuse of the Mysteries of his time is not very conclusive in this respect; for what he reviles is those aspects of obscure magic, physical ecstasy, sensual excitement which the Mysteries had put on in some at least of their final developments as the process of degeneration increased which made a century later even the Eleusinian a butt for the dangerous mockeriesj of Alcibiades and his companions. His complaint is that the secret rites which the populace held in ignorant and superstitious reverence 'unholily mysticise what are held among men as mysteries'. He rebels against the darkness of the Dionysian ecstasy in the approach to the secrets of Nature; but there is a luminous Apollonian as well as an obscure and sometimes dangerous Dionysian mysticism, a Dakshina as well as a Varna Marga of the mystic Tantra. And though no partaker in or supporter of any kind of rites or mummery, Heraclitus still strikes one as at least an intellectual child of the Mystics and of mysticism, although perhaps a rebel son in the house of his mother. He has something of the mystic style, something of the intuitive Apollonian inlook into the secrets of existence."

We may pause over the expressions: "a luminous Apollonian...mysticism", "the intuitive Apollonian inlook". Surely, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, "Apollonian" cannot be equated with "the classical ordered vision of life". The post-Nietzschean usage must appear to him as mixing up the light of reason and reflection with a supra-intellectual and intuitive luminosity. And, when we turn to his poetry, the two Greek powers mixed

¹ Heraclitus (Calcutta, 1947). pp. 3-4.

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up emerge distinctly. They are Athene and Apollo. Apollo, God of the Sun, Leader of the Muses, Inspirer of Poetry, Lord of the Delphic Oracle, cannot be the voice of Reason. Thinker also he could be, as we gather from some lines in Ilion 1 but it is with a seer-thought that he comes, as these very lines
attest:

Miracled, haloed,

Seer and magician and prophet who beholds what the thought cannot witness,

Lifting the godhead within us to more than a human endeavour,

Slayer and saviour, thinker and mystic, leaped from his sun-peaks

Guarding in Ilion the wall of his mysteries Delphic Apollo.

Athene, not Apollo, is the clear and tempered light of the thinking mind, though still not without the breath of inspiration that always works when this mind is not all on its own but knows a rapport with a greater illumination, the intuitive Truth Consciousness beyond the intellect. Not Apollo, but Athene is the divinity of mental Wisdom. Even as far back as the drama Perseus the Delioerer ² of Sri Aurobindo's Baroda days we have those lines on Athene:

A noble centre of a people's worship,

To Zeus and great Athene build a temple

Between your sky-topped hills and Ocean's vasts:

Her might shall guard your lives and save your land.

In your human image of her deity

A light of reason and calm celestial force

And a wise tranquil government of life,

1 Pp. 4-5. 1 Collected Poems and Plays, Vol. I, p. 305.

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Order and beauty and harmonious thoughts

And, ruling the waves of impulse, high-throned will

Incorporate in marble, the carved and white

Ideal of a young uplifted race.

For these are her gifts to those who worship her.

Here we have Classical Greece hit off to a nicety. But the typical spirit of the Greece of Pericles and Phidias and Sophocles— "the inspired reason and the enlightened and chastened aesthetic sense", as Sri Aurobindo's Future Poetry¹ has it—is developed not only when a crude vitalism is overpassed: it is developed also when a mighty supra-intellectualism is left behind. This latter aspect is shown magnificently in "The Book of the Gods" in Ilion.

Zeus summons all the Gods to assembly and declares the divine will that Troy should perish and be razed to the ground, however heart-rending the event may prove to many of the deities, for only by the perishing of one culture and the arising of another can man progress: the hour is ripe now for the advent of the rule of Reason and there must be for its sake the subdual of three powers—Aphrodite, Ares and Apollo. After addressing several of the Gods, far-seeing Zeus says to "the brilliant offspring born of his musings":²

"What shall I say to the thought that is calm in thy breasts, O Athene?

Have I not given thee earth for thy portion, throned thee and armoured,

Darkened Cypris' smile, dimmed Hera's son and Latona's?

Swift in thy silent ambition, proud of thy radiant sternness,

Girl, thou shalt rule with the Greek and the Saxon, the Frank and the Roman.

¹ P. 63. ² Ilion, p. II9.

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Worker and fighter and builder and thinker, light of the reason,

Man shall leave all temples to crowd in thy courts, O Athene.

Go then and do thy will, prepare man's tribes for their fullness."

A little before this speech, Zeus addresses Apollo, and the Sun-god makes an outburst which etches most tellingly the true nature of the Apollonian. No doubt, it has certain lines of communication with what we may term "the Atheneian", yet it differs with it from its own level just as much as does the Dionysian from another. It hardly represents the godhead "of peace and leisure and repose, of aesthetic emotion and intellectual contemplation, of logical order and philosophic calm"¹ and it would be incorrect to contrast "the restless masculine power of Dionysus and the quiet feminine beauty of Apollo".² Sri Aurobindo's Apollo cries to the Father of the Immortals:³

"Zeus, I know that I fade; already the night is around me.

Dusk she extends her reign and obscures my lightnings with error.

Therefore my prophets mislead men's hearts to the ruin appointed,

Therefore Cassandra cries in vain to her sire and her brothers.

All I endure I foresee and the strength in me waits for its coming;

¹ Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy "Friedrich Nietzsche" (Pocket Books Inc., New York), PP.407.

2 Ibid.

3 Ilion, p. 116

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All I foresee I approve; for I know what is willed, O Cronion.

Yet is the fierce strength wroth in my breast at the need of approval

And for the human race fierce pity works in my bosom;

Wroth is my splendid heart with the cowering knowledge of mortals,

Wroth are my burning eyes with the purblind vision of reason.

I will go forth from your seats and descend to the night among mortals

There to guard the flame and the mystery; vast in my moments

Rare and sublime to sound like a sea against Time and its limits,

Cry like a spirit in pain in the hearts of the priest and the poet,

Cry against limits set and disorder sanities bounded.

Jealous for truth to the end my might shall prevail and for ever

Shatter the moulds that men make to imprison their limitless spirits.

Dire, overpowering the brain I shall speak out my oracles splendid.

Then in their ages of barren light or lucidity fruitful

Whenso the clear gods think they have conquered earth and its mortals,

Hidden God from all eyes, they shall wake from their

dream and recoiling Still they shall find in their paths the fallen and darkened Apollo."

Apollonian and Dionysian are really the two poles of a single phenomenon—an illuminating force stronger than the intellect's, a direct intuition supra-rational in the one and infrarational in the other. The latter is inferior in quality, but both are necessary if the "numinous" is to become established in embodied life: the Dionysian is the support of the Apollonian, 21

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it is the power of response below to the grandeur above. But it can be aligned to this grandeur only if the rational receives full growth: "for humanity at large," says Sri Aurobindo, "the mind and intellect must develop to their fullness so that the spirituality of the race may rise securely upward upon a broad basis of the developed lower nature in man, the intelligent human being." And when the intellect comes into play, it may try to put everything else into the background, lest its own free total flowering should be impeded. "Therefore we see," remarks Sri Aurobindo, "that the reason in its growth either does away with the distinct spiritual tendency for a time, as in ancient Greece, or accepts it but spins out around its first data and activities a vast web of the workings of the intelligence, so that, as in India, the early mystic seer is replaced by the philosopher-mystic, the religious thinker and even the philosopher pure and simple." Ultimately, however, the intellect has to realise its basic function and pave the path of the superior intuition and effect for it a successful rendezvous with the inferior. When in "The Book of the Gods", the turn arrives for Athene to speak, Sri Aurobindo makes her closing words to Zeus ring thus:¹

"This too I know that I pass preparing the paths of Apollo

And at the end as his sister and slave and bride I must sojourn

Rapt to his courts of mystic light and unbearable brilliance.

Was I not ever condemned since my birth from the toil of thy musings

Seized like a lyre in my body to sob and to laugh out his music,

Shake as a leaf in his fierceness and leap as a flame in his splendours ?

¹ Ibid., p. 119-2.

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So must I dwell overpowered and so must I labour subjected

Robbed of my loneliness pure and coerced in my radiant freedom,

Now whose clearness and pride are the sovereign joy of thy creatures."

This is not a direct reference to a final stage of Greek cultural history: it states only the inevitable culmination of the history of the human mind.

Perhaps we shall be asked: "What about the two maxims inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi: gnothi seauton and meden agan? Do not 'Know thyself' and 'Nothing in excess' prove the poised and prudential reign of the intellect in the Apollonian? How would Sri Aurobindo's thesis hold face to face with them?"

Those maxims would contradict Sri Aurobindo's thesis if there were not the need to reconcile them with the prophetic transport of insight which the Delphic priestess exemplified. She was after all the mouthpiece of one who declares:

"Dire, overpowering the brain I shall speak out my oracles splendid"—

one about whom Sri Aurobindo again writes:

Master of Truth who sits within Delphi fathomless brooding

Sole in the caverns of Nature and hearkens her underground murmur...¹

Nature's secrets, whether directly grasped from beyond the mind or raised up from the subliminal depths where they may lie reflected and echoed, are the priestess's province, and they cannot be disclosed by mere rational processes. In Virgil we have the vividest account of what happened to her in her

¹ Ibid., p. 16.

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oracular moods. Day Lewis¹ has translated this passage on the Sibyl of Cumae:

The Sibyl cried, 'for lo! the god is with me.' And speaking,

There by the threshold, her features, her colour were all at once

Different, her hair flew wildly about; her breast was heaving,

Her fey heart swelled in ecstasy; larger than life she seemed,

More than mortal her utterance: the god was close and breathing

His inspiration through her.

Of course, a sheerly intellectual colour can be given to the Delphic maxims, and such colour came to be accepted when the mystical tradition grew fainter and fainter. But, undivorced from their background and taken in the proper context, they must carry a deeper sense. H. D. F. Kitto² informs us that "Know thyself" means only: "remember what you are—a man, and subject to the conditions and limitations of mortality." A less humbling interpretation might be: "analyse your nature by observation and introspection and ratiocination and realise your weaknesses on the one hand and your excellences on the other." The second half of this interpretation would join up with Pindar's "Become what you really are", Protagoras's "Man is the measure of things", Sophocles's

Many marvels there are,

But none so marvellous as Man.

It also looks forward to Plato's "Knowledge" which is "Nous", the intuitive insight crowning the work of the intelligence. The

¹The Aeneid of Virgil, p. 120, line 46-51.

²The Greeks (Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1951), P. 111.

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most adequate reading would be wholly in terms of such insight: the Apollonian self-knowledge was to be won by a burst of inner light on the receptive mind—it would be part of a process such as Sri Aurobindo¹ has described, with a pointer at the Delphic priestess, in the course of a long passage on the workings of the goddess Inspiration:

The inspiring goddess entered a mortars breast,

Made there her study of divining thought

And sanctuary of prophetic speech

And sat upon the tripod seat of mind:

All was made wide above, all lit below.

As for the Apollonian moderation, to see it correctly we must understand the religious cosmic perception from which the maxim about it took birth. Sri Aurobindo² has formulated this perception very effectively:

"...there is something subtle, inscrutable and formidable that meets us in our paths, a Force of which the ancient Greeks took much notice, a Power that is on the watch for man in his effort at enlargement, possession and enjoyments and seems hostile and opposite. The Greeks figured it as the jealousy of the gods or as Doom, Necessity, Ate. The egoistic force in man may proceed far in its victory and triumph, but it has to be wary or it will find this power there on the watch for any flaw in his strength or action, any sufficient opportunity for his defeat and downfall. It dogs his endeavour with obstacle and reverse and takes advantage of his imperfections, often dallying with him, giving him a long rope, delaying and abiding its time,—and not only of his moral shortcomings

¹Savitri, Book One Canto One, p. 48.

²"Mind, Nature and Law of Karma", The Problem of Rebirth (pondicherry 1952), p, 168.

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but of his errors of will and intelligence, his excesses and deficiencies of strength and prudence, all defects of his nature.

It seems overcome by his energies of Tapasya, but it waits its season. It overshadows unbroken or extreme prosperity and often surprises it with a sudden turn to ruin. It induces a security, a self-forgetfulness, a pride and insolence of success and victory and leads on its victim to dash himself against the hidden seat of justice or the wall of an invisible measure. It is as fatal to a blind self-righteousness and the arrogations of an egoistic virtue as to vicious excess and selfish violence. It appears to demand of man and of individual men and nations that they shall keep within a limit and a measure, while all beyond that brings danger; and therefore the Greeks held moderation in all things to be the greatest part of virtue."

Sri Aurobindo¹ explains further: "This is really a resistance of the Infinite acting through life against the claim of the imperfect ego of man to enlarge itself, possess, enjoy and have, while remaining imperfect, a perfect and enduring happiness and complete felicity of its world-experience."

So we may say that the meden agan of the Delphic temple is simply a decree against human egoism, against the aggrandisement of imperfect manhood: it emphasises the necessity of checking the litdeness of man from straining towards greatness without first purifying the selfish motive in him. It is no mere reasonable doctrine of the golden mean: it takes account of secret cosmic forces, the mysterious gods. And it can be seen as directed actually against a Dionysian upsurge in mental man to drown his supra-intellectual possibilities: what is to be restrained is the desire revelling in a magnification of the crude stuff of our being which needs katharsis, purgation, and which on its own would blur our intellectual nature and prevent this nature's opening to the sun of truth-knowledge, the Apollonian

¹ Ibid., p. 165.

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lustre revealing the god-self in us that has to be known.

Possibly the maxim of moderation taught in part that even the fiery inspiration from above the intellect was not safe outside a certain measure for the unregenerate human and also that a bit of the Dionysian was required to save one from an excess of the Apollonian. That may be why it was reported that for three months in the year Apollo allowed Dionysus to work in his temple. Further, remembering that the supra-intellectual and the infra-intellectual are pole and pole of a single phenomenon of intuition we may guess a frequent if not constant contact between Apollo and Dionysus: a sign of it may be discerned in the physical disposition of the priestess during her oracular moments, the poise over a cavern, the breathing of fumes from below. Has not Sri Aurobindo himself once pictured Apollo as seated brooding in Nature's caverns and hearkening to her underground murmur and do we not have in his lines about the sanctuary of prophetic speech and the tripod seat of mind a reference to the mystic result in a double-directioned phrase:

All was made wide above, all lit below?

However, considered in regard to origins and fundamentals, meden agan as well as gnothi seauton may be linked to Apollo's supra-intellectual purpose. Neither of them proves the Apollonian to be the pure intellect.

Finally, we must not mistake the famous calm face of Apollo for the poise of reason, nor his harmonious function as a concern for logical ordonnance. All the gods have a wideness of being, a cosmic air, which can hold in a comprehensive calm the most intense outbreaks of energy. And the supra-intellectual is always a harmonising power, keeping all things in step and capable of order and organisation by a direct insight into them.

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