Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

The Revealer and the Revelation

How the horizontal view limits and maims one's spiritual perception is further illustrated in the case of the famous Gloomy Dean. Dean Inge is a divine and as spiritual a person as one can hope to be in the modern world. He has, however, voluntarily clipped his wings and in the name of a surer rational knowledge and saner spirituality prefers a lower flight among known, familiar and nameable ranges to a transcendent soaring in mystic regions beyond. He has made a somewhat trenchant distinction between the Revelation and the Revealer. He says we can know God only by his qualities: what he is, if anything, besides his qualities none can define. In the words of the poet,

These are His works and His veils and His shadows;

But where is He then? by what name is He known?¹

According to the Dean the qualities themselves are God, the living God whom one can worship. The True, the Good and the Beautiful – the Hellenic trinity he adores more than the Holy Trinity. "The God of religion is rather the revelation than the revealer. The source of revelation cannot be revealed: the ground of knowledge cannot be known".² This, one might say, almost echoes the Upanishadic mantra, "How can one know the knower?" (Vijñātāram are kena vijānīyāt). The Upanishad says indeed that he who thinks he knows does not certainly know, but he who says he knows not is the one who knows; he knows who knows not, he knows not who knows. This simply means that God, the supreme Reality, is apprehended in and through other channels than mind and reason. It is a commonplace of

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1 Who-Sri Aurobindo

2 Mysticism in Religion, by Dean Inge, p. 155. 341

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spiritual experience that the Spirit is directly, immediately realisable, although its indirect approaches are walled in by a thousand appearances. A direct non-rational experience is not however something vague, nebulous, inarticulate; it is even more concrete, precise and tangible than a sense experience or a rational idea. Not only so, a suprarational knowledge can be grasped and presented by the intellect if it is purified _and illumined. A brain mind under the sway of the senses and the outgoing impulse is an obstacle: it disturbs and prevents the higher Light. But passive and transparent it can be a faithful mirror, a docile instrument and channel. That is why the Upanishad says in the first instance that the supreme Reality cannot be seized by the reason, but in another context, it declares that the mind, the intelligence too has to hold and realise the same. Normally intellect acts as a lid, but it can also be a reflector or projector.

One knows the Revealer for one becomes it. Knowledge by identity is the characteristic of spiritual knowledge. If one keeps oneself separate and seeks to apprehend the Divine as an object outside, the Divine escapes or is caught only by the trail it leaves, its echoes and shadows, its apparent qualities and attributes. But one with the Divine, the being realises and possesses it in full consciousness, the Revealer reveals himself as such (vrnute tanum swām) and not merely in or as his phenomenal formulations.

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