On Savitri
THEME/S
A supreme epic always has a limitless vastitude for its canvas and an unreachable loftiness of its expression. Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is also the latest and the greatest of the Scriptures; it includes and transcends the essence and significance of all other Scriptures. The theme and vision, fact and experience, and word and phrase used from other Scriptures gain here a meaning and a suggestion beyond what they have in the original, sometimes even beyond recognition.
The term "God's covenant", a frequent expression in the Old Testament of the Bible, for example, undergoes a sea-change when Sri Aurobindo employs it in Savitri. In the Bible the term is used with reference to God's compact with the Israelites who were considered as God's chosen people. Sri Aurobindo speaks of" God's covenant with the Night" in the context of presentation of the evolution of the Inconscient into the Superconscient. Early in Savitri Aswapati, the "colonist from immortality" and the human father to be of the Avatar Savitri, after acquiring the secret knowledge that the Supreme (Lord) left his "white infinity"
And laid on the Spirit the burden of the flesh,
That Godhead's seed might flower in mindless Space,'
arrived at a state in which he could enter a hidden chamber where all the secrets are revealed.
In the glow of the Spirit's room of memories...
He could re-read now and interpret new
Its strange symbol letters, scatered abstruse signs...
And recognise as a just necessity
Its hard conditions for the mighty work,
Nature's impossible Herculean toil....
The dumb great Mother in her cosmic trance....
Accepts indomitably to execute
The will to know in an inconscient world,
A will to live in a reign of death,
The thirst for rapture in a heart of flesh,
And works out through the appearance of a soul
By a miraculous birth in plasm and gas
The mystery of God's covenant with the Night.2
1Savitri, p. 73. 2Ibid., p. 75.
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Before we continue with the study of Sri Aurobindo's widening, heightening and deepening the meaning of the Biblical word and phrase for his own purposes it is necessary to consider a key expression he adopts from the Bible in Savitri.
All must have noted that Sri Aurobindo uses more than once the term Word with reference to Savitri, the Avatar of the Mother. We see the Lord addressing her,
O human image of the deathless word...
O living power of the incarnate Word!3
One remembers immediately the well-known Biblical words,
In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God.4
The Word spoken of here is Christ, the Son of God, the second Person of the three-Personed God, the first Person of whom is God, the Father, and the third, God, the Holy Ghost; Christians do not think in terms of God, the Mother.
It may be pointed out that Vak, corresponding to Logos, the Word, is not strange to Indian tradition. Actually in Lalitā Sahsranāma, the Supreme Mother is addressed as Vak in her four planes of operation, Parā, the Transcendent, Pashyanti, the Seeing One, Madhyama, the Middle or the subtle One, and Vaikhari, the Gross.5
But Sri Aurobindo took the expression from the Bible. We will see that there is much of the Christ-figure in Savitri. But Sri Aurobindo knew long before the Biblical scholarship discovered it that the Evangelists remembered the Old Testament all the time and were making their work correspond, if not conform, to what was said or presented in the earlier Scripture. Recent scholars have shown that the Christ-figure in the Gospels represents the Lady Wisdom or the Wisdom Woman of the books of the Old Testament, including those which are called Apocryphal.
The first critic to demonstrate their identity was Father Raymond Brown. He writes:
We suggest that in drawing this portrait (of Jesus as the incarnate revelation descended on high to offer man light and truth) the evangelist (St. John) has capitalised on an identification of Jesus
3Ibid, pp. 683, 693. 4St. John, I.i.l. 5Lalitā Sahasranama, Verse 81.
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with the personified divine Wisdom as described in the Old Testament.6
Father Brown like other Western scholars speaks of "the personified divine Wisdom". The Hebrews were Oriental like the Indians and saw Wisdom as a Person, not Personification a Presence, a Power, a Shakti, as we would call her. The original Hebrew word Hokma, like the Sanskrit word Medha and the Greek word Sophia, was feminine. On the contrary the word Logos in Greek for the Word was masculine. The word wisdom also indicated the quality as the Word indicated Utterance, like Vak.
But the ancient Hebrews themselves were bound by their monolithic idea of Monotheism. Otherwise they would have seen the power they called the Lady Wisdom or the Wisdom Woman what would correspond to Parashakti.* We may note en passant that in the New Testament we have something of the vision of God the Mother in the conception of Virgin Mary.
Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna) says,7
I consider this doctrine (of Virgin Mary) the most beautiful
* Mrs. Sonia Dyne in a personal letter writes to me that Wisdom was more a person than personification. She says that according to Jewish writers like Raphel Patal the idea of god the Mother was not far from the Jewish mind. Patal's work to which she refers is titled The Hebrew Goddess. According to him, in spite of the lone father figure of the Jewish God in the popular imagination there dwelt a world peopled with and haunted by feminine numina The popular term Shekina, not found in the Bible but is used in the Talmud reminds Mrs. Dyne of the Indian term Shakti. Hokma or Wisdom described in the Proverbs, as we saw, was God's earliest creation and daily delight. According to Patal the word used in the text is playmate in the place of delight. The word playmate reminds Mrs. Dyne of the line in Savitri (p. 61 ):
There are Two who are One and play in many worlds.
Patal tells us that Greshom Holem interprets the love between God and Wisdom as the love of husband and wife. According to him Philo unequivocally says that God is the husband of Wisdom. Mrs. Dyne refers to the line in Savitri.
Creatrix, the Eternal artist's Bride!
It need not be said that when we speak of God and his Shakti as husband and wife it is only a way of speaking to describe the indescribable relationship of the divine powers.
6The Gospel According to St. John.
1A Follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo, p. 39.
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component of the ensemble, (of the different traditions brought together by the Churches), bringing into the new religion (Christianity) the vision of God, the Mother, in a deeper fashion finer and closer approach to the Indian insight of the Adya Shakti, the Para Prakriti, whom Sri Aurobindo addresses in Savitri,
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride!8
To return to the identification of the Wisdom Women with Christ, Brown shows the almost identical language with which they are described in the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament and St. John's Gospel respectively:
Lady Wisdom existed with God from the beginning even before there was an earth (Proverbs,viii, 22-23; Sirach, xxiv, Wisdom, vi, 22; so also the Johannine Jesus who is the Word who was in the beginning(I.i.l) and was with the Father before the world existed (xiii, 5). Wisdom is said to be a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty (Wisdom, vii, 25 so also has Jesus the Father's glory which he makes manifest to man (i, 14; viii 50 ; xi, 4 xvii, 5 , 22 , 24). Wisdom is said to be the reflection of everlasting light of God, (Wisdom, vii, 26 and in lighting up the Path of men (Sirach 1, 29) she is preferred to any natural light (Wisdom vii, 10, 29); in Johannine thought God is light (Epistle of John 1,1,5) and Jesus who comes forth from God is the light of the world and of men (St. John's Gospel, 1,4-5, viii, 12; ix, 5) ultimately destined to replace the natural light (Revelations, xxi, 25).
Brown quotes many more examples from the Wisdom Books and St. John's Gospel to show the identity between Lady Wisdom and Jesus. He also points out that even the Synoptic Gospels are not without passages which recall from the Wisdom Books. As has been noted before the evangelists had always an eye on the Old Testament and were keen on relating Jesus to the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is interesting to note that what Luke attributes to "the Wisdom of God" (xi, 49) Matthew attributes to Jesus himself, (xxiii, 34). In Matthew xi, 25-27 and Luke x, 21 we have almost an identical passage that shows that Jesus is the source of all wisdom. Brown also refers to the appeals of Wisdom in Sirach and Jesus in Matthew inviting men to
8Savitri, p. 345.
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come to her/him for rest.
Fr. A. R. Ceresco, a Canadian Hebraist who taught at St. Peter's Seminary, Bangalore and is currently in Philippines, quotes the two parallel passages. We read in Sirach,
Come to her (Wisdom) with all your soul
And keep her ways with all your might....
Bear her yoke, it is golden ornament
Her bonds are a purple cord.9
In the Gospel of Matthew we read how Jesus tells his disciples,
Come to me, all who are labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart and
You will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.10
If there is an identity between Jesus and the Lady Wisdom as the Word of God, there seems to be a close link between the Lady Wisdom and the Supreme Mother and her Avatar in Savitri. The passage quoted by Amal Kiran to show the symbolic significance of Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and the words addressed by Aswapati to the Divine Mother when she is ready to offer him her boon reveals the link. The expression Wisdom-Splendour brings out the experience of Wisdom as light, as is seen in the Biblical passages referred to by Raymond Brown. More than once Sri Aurobindo brings together the terms Wisdom and the Word with reference to the Mother. When Aswapati, as the Traveller of the Worlds (planes or states of Consciousness), is in the empire of the Little Mind he sees a whole crowd of tiny entities who rule human life and are responsible for the little actions of human beings. All move through friction and struggle to eternal harmony. Describing the various stages of the movement, Sri Aurobindo comments,
A Word, a Wisdom watches us from on high,
A Witness sanctioning her will and works.11
The use of an indefinite article before Word, Wisdom, Witness is meant to refer to an aspect of the Supreme Power or even to indicate that the Power is far beyond us and beyond our intellectual comprehension.
9Sirach, xxiv, p. 19. 10St. Matthew, xi. 28-39. 11Savitri, p. 168.
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When Aswapati is in the Kingdom of Greater Mind, we are told
A Wisdom knows and guides the mysteried world;
A Truth-gaze shapes its beings and events;
A Word self-bom upon creation's heights,
Voice of the Eternal in the temporal spheres.12
The terms "a Witness" in the first passage and "a Truth-gaze" in the second add a new dimension to the Wisdom and the Word, indicating a kind of passivity (not inertness) that watches and guides and shapes quietly. The Lord as a Witness (Sakshi) is not new to the Indian experience. Sri Aurobindo presents the Mother as the Witness. The quality of passivity is brought out in another passage. When Aswapati moves from the very home of the World-Soul, the heart of Time and Space, to the Kingdom of Greater Knowledge
He moved through regions of transcendent Truth
Inward, immense, innumerably one13
and sees
A wisdom waiting on Omniscience14
who
Sat voiceless in a vast passivity.15
Incidentally Wisdom waiting on Omniscience echoes the Biblical idea of Wisdom in the Old Testament and Word in the New "being with God".
In an earlier situation when Aswapati was in the Empire of the Little Life he saw that
Unknown, unfelt, the mighty Witness lives
And nothing shows the Glory that is here.
A Wisdom governing the mystic world, 16
observes the stream of movements.
While in the Empire of the Little Life, Aswapati saw (as we are told in the canto preceding the one from which we have quoted above)
A Wisdom that prepares its far-off ends
Planned so to start her slow aeonic game.17
The Wisdom in Savitri has a great etza, to use a Biblical Hebrew
12Ibid, p. 271. 13Ibid, p. 299. 14Ibid, p. 300.
15Ibid 16Ibid, p. 159. 17Ibid, p. 141.
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word, which means a great plan of action, a greater and larger etza than any known before, which is no less than the evolution and a total transformation of the world.
We have been identifying Wisdom with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo himself links the Mother and Wisdom in a well-known passage. While describing the birth of the Flame that is Savitri, the Seer-Poet says:
Again the mystic deep attempt began,
The daring wager of the cosmic game.
For since upon this blind and whirling globe
Earth-plasm first quivered with the illumining mind...
A Mother wisdom works in Nature's breast
To pour delight on the heart of toil and want.18
Wisdom, the Mother or "the Mother wisdom" who "works in Nature's covert breast" does all that is necessary to make the cosmic evolution possible. Yet there are realms in which she is not present. There, whatever beauty or perfection is seen, we see a lack of her power. In Book II Canto 6 we see Aswapati entering the Kingdoms of Greater Life. He notes how Life
... would bring the glory here of the Absolute's force,
Change poise into creation's rhythmic swing,
Marry with a sky of calm with a sea of bliss.19
Yet,
For all the depth and beauty of her work
A wisdom lacks that sets the spirit free.20
The phrase "that sets the spirit free" is a direct echo of the words of Jesus. Jesus actually speaks of
The truth that sets the spirit free.21
In the same book and the canto where the above passage appears, Sri Aurobindo repeats the words verbatim:
The advent for which all creation waits,
The beautiful visage of Eternity
That shall appear upon the roads of Time.
Yet to ourselves we say rekindling faith,
"Oh, surely one day he shall come to our cry,
18Ibid, p. 353. l9Ibid, pp. 195-96. 20Ibid, pp. 196.
21St. John, viii, 32.
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One day he shall create our life anew
And utter the magic formula of peace
And bring perfection to the scheme of things.
One day he shall descend to life and earth,
Leaving the secrecy of the eternal doors,
Into a world that cries to him for help,
And bring the truth that sets the spirit free."22
The words of Jesus at the end of the passage and the Christian expression advent at the start lead us on to another aspect of our subject. Till now we have been stressing the identity of Word of the New Testament with the Wisdom of the Old Testament and both with the Supreme Mother and her Avatar in Savitri. It was pointed out even at the start that Savitri is also associated with the Christ-figure. She is the Word and the Saviour as we notice from the very beginning of the epic, or the Scripture as we have called it.
The passage just quoted, beginning and ending with the Biblical terms, speaks of the advent for which all creation waits and the person concerned, we hope, will surely come one day. In the poem, it is Savitri who comes to the world that calls for help. It is she that is "the Incarnate Word of God." She is the Saviour while speaking of whom Narad brings before us the magnificent vignette of the Crucifixion. There are hints of the association of Savitri with Christ from the very beginning of the poem. Association does not imply identification but it does imply a close link between the two.
In the opening canto of the epic we are told how Savitri awoke with the rest of the tribe at the dawn and, because of her being akin to Eternity from which she came, she took no interest in any small happiness. She was a mighty stranger in the human field. Life
Offered to the daughter of infinity
Her passion-flower of love and doom...23
The term passion-flower (passiflora in Latin), rather the creeper bearing the flower, suggests the instruments of Christ's passion or his suffering on the Cross. The corona of the creeper suggests the crown of thorns. Later in the Epic, when Savitri is one with the cosmic Spirit as she sits by the sleeping Satyavan, she is described as being
... the red heart of the passion-flower.24
22Savitri, p. 200. 23Ibid, p. 7. 24Ibid., p. 557.
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The association of the Christ-figure with Savitri is continued after the earlier passage in a different form.
Mortality bear's ill the eternal's touch...
It meets the sons of God with death and pain.
A glory of lightnings traversing the earth-scene,
Their sun-thoughts fading, darkened by ignorant minds,
Their work betrayed, their good to evil turned,
The cross their payment for the crown they gave.25
The passage, like the whole section early in the epic, anticipates what we are to see in detail later. A whole book is yet to be written on the architectural quality of Savitri in which each portion of the poem is bound to the other portion by a splendid artistic unity. When Narad tells Savitri's parents in her presence that Satyavan whom she has chosen for her Lord is due to die exactly in a year from the day he is speaking to them, her mother asks her to mount her chariot once again, go forth and choose another partner. Savitri refuses to do so and Narad tells the queen that Savitri has a mission to fulfil. He explains the function of pain in life and the pain that has to be undergone by the world-redeemers. His words echo the passage just quoted.
Hard is the world-redeemer's heavy task;
The world itself becomes his adversary,
His enemies are the beings he came to save.
Those he came to save are his antagonists:
This world is in love with its own ignorance,
Its darkness turns away from the saviour light,
It gives the cross in payment for the crown.26
The Mother's comment on the earlier passage is equally applicable to the second since it has a similarity to the earlier in theme and tone.
That is the history of human life upon earth: each time that help has been sent to hasten the evolution, it has been received in that way. But each time the effort and the help are bigger, higher, truer; and each time a little work, some result, is achieved; and step, by step the world grows towards its Realisation.27
The Mother's comment makes it clear that the Christ-figure is seen in Savitri in relation to the world's evolution and as a step in the
25Ibid, p. 7. 26Ibid, p. 448. 27The Mother, About Savitri, plate 25.
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direction. It is needless to say that Sri Aurobindo does not see the Christ-figure as a Christian would see. That is obvious even in the famous vignette of crucifixion in Narad's speech in spite of some precise details and words repeated from the Bible.
The Son of God bom as the Son of man
Has drunk the bitter cup, owned Godhead's debt,
The debt the Eternal owes to the fallen kind
His will has bound to death and struggling life
That yearns in vain for rest and endless peace.
Now is the debt paid, wiped off the original score.
The Eternal suffers in a human form,
He has signed the salvation's testament with his blood:
He has opened the doors of his undying peace.
The Deity compensates the creature's claim,
The Creator bears the law of pain and death;
A retribution smites the incarnate God.
His love has paved the mortal's road to Heaven:
He has given life and light to balance here
The dark account of mortal ignorance.
It is finished, the dread mysterious sacrifice,
Offered by God's martyred body for the world,
Gethsemane and Calvary are his lot,
He carries the cross on which man's soul is nailed;
His escort is the curses of the crowd;
Insult and jeer are his right's acknowledgement;
Two thieves slain with him mock his mighty death.
He has trod with bleeding brow the Saviour's way.
He who has found his identity with God
Pays with his body's death his soul's vast light.
His knowledge immortal triumphs by his death.
Hewn, quartered on the scaffold as he falls
His crucified voice proclaims, "I, I am God;"
"Yes, all is God," peals back Heaven's deathless call.28
The richness and complexity of the tweny-nine lines make any comment sound shallow. All that one can venture to say is that the vividness of the picture and the precision of some details should not blind us to the truth and reality beyond all creed and belief. When we also bear in mind that it is Narad, the Indian seer with the total
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knowledge of all that has been, is and to be, who is speaking, we see that the whole picture is of a universal, of a symbolic significance.
The opening line of the passage sounds completely Christian in presenting the Christian experience of the Incarnation. It is the Son of God bom as the Son of Man. We have referred already to the vision of the three-personed God of whom God the Son is the second person. We will have occasion to consider the idea of the three persons in some detail.
In the present passage the first part ending with the words "God's martyred body" focuses on the "Son of God" who is not really different from God who is also called the Creator and the Eternal. The second part beginning with "Gethsemane and Calvary" focuses on the Son of Man, who identifies himself with God and declares himself at the end, "I am God." We shall later discuss the question of the identification, "I and my father are one." Here it suffices to note the shift of focus from the first part to the second part of the passage. Then, "has drunk the bitter cup" is a direct echo of Christ's in the Bible in the symbolism that is obvious in his words. When Judas Iscariot helps the men of the Jewish Chief Priest to capture Jesus, his disciple Peter attacks the slave who nears his Master and cuts off his ear. Jesus tells Peter to put his sword in his sheath and asks
Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?29
The word "bitter" is Sri Aurobindo's addition not without a suggestion from the Bible. When Christ is on the cross the wine he is offered is mixed with gall. The idea of retribution is typically Biblical. According to the traditional wisdom of the Jews everyone has to suffer punishment for the sins he has committed. In this context the incarnate God suffers punishment not for his sins. Is he not above all sin and virtue, being the very Lord? Sri Aurobindo does not see sin in the Christian way but in the sense of ignorance (avidyā) as he makes it obvious in the passage. The line
He carries the cross on which man's soul is nailed
suggests a meaning that is not necessarily Christian. It is man's soul that is nailed when the Son of God bears the Cross—because, as we shall see—according, to Sri Aurobindo the Son of God stands for the individual Self.30
The words "It is finished" are very famous and are echoed and reechoed in Renaissance Literature, especially in the Latin version in
295f. John, xviii, 11. 30Ibid, xix. 30.
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the Vulgate consummatum est, since it was the Vulgate which was used at the time. The original Greek form—since the New Testament was written in Greek tetalestai was not well known. What "It" stands for is explained by Sri Aurobindo:
The dread mysterious sacrifice.
The "sacrifice" is "mysterious" because the nature and the significance of it are not comprehensible to the human intellect. It is no less than the Holocaust of the Divine—what Sri Aurobindo calls the primal sacrifice—the Divine who falls into the state of Ignorance and Night.
Gethsemane is the Garden across the Olive Hills in which Jesus undergoes intense agony not long before the great sacrifice. The agony is a spiritual experience with no resemblance whatsoever to human agony which is essentially egoistic. It is there that his disciples deny him and Judas betrays. Gethsemane stands for inexplicable agony, denial and betrayal. Calvary is the Latin form of the Hebrew word Golgotha meaning "the place of the skull," a place on the hill near Jerusalem, where criminals were crucified. As is mentioned in the passage under discussion two thieves are crucified along with Jesus. We also see that he is insulted and jeered by the crowd. Calvary, therefore stands for human callousness in the treatment of the Saviours.
As we noted at the start of the discussion of the passage in the section commencing with the mention of Gethsemane and Calvary we are not told something about the Lord himself but Lord in human form who has accepted the limits and limitations of the human being, yet not forgetting his identity with God. It is the human incarnation which has to declare his identity with God. He has to say, after his triumph in the Tragedy, making his immortal knowledge triumph in death, paying with his body's death his soul's vast light,
I, I am God.
It is possible that Sri Aurobindo, in the manner of Shakespeare and others of his Age, is punning upon the first "I" and the word "aye"(pronounced like I) meaning "Yes". That such a pun is intended is indicated by the answering "Yes" in the next line,
Yes, all is God.
Sri Aurobindo did not hesitate to use any device when it helped him to present his own vision of things.
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But, strictly speaking, Jesus's last words on the cross are not the words Sri Aurobindo makes the Saviour speak. The phrase from St. John's Gospel "It is finished" was used by Sri Aurobindo earlier. In St. Mark and St. Matthew Jesus died with a loud cry. But sometimes before the death he cries out:
My God, my God why do you forsake me?31
In St. Luke three hours before Jesus "gave up his ghost"(=died), one of the two thieves crucified along with him turned to Jesus and said:
Jesus, remember me when you come to your Kingdom.32
Jesus responds
Truly, I say to you, you will be with me in Paradise.33
Though Sri Aurobindo's attribution to Jesus of his last words does not correspond to his actual words, it is not against the spirit of any Gospel. Earlier Jesus had declared his identity with God though not in the sense in which the evangelists understood the words. The line that follows is typically Aurobindonian:
"Yes, all is God," peals back Heaven's deathless call.34
The passage as a whole is a superb picture of the Divine becoming human and undergoing not only death but ignominy. It certainly brings out the poignancy as well as the sublimity of the Divine sacrifice but it is by no means "Christian " in a limited sense. The words "cross" and "crucify" appear quite a few times in the course of the poem but, as in the above picture, they assume more than, sometimes other than, "Christian" meaning. It may be of interest to note what the "cross" stands for in the Yoga according to Sri Aurobindo:
The Cross is in Yoga the symbol of the soul and nature in their strong and perfect union, but because of our fall into the impurities of ignorance it has become the symbol of suffering and purification.35
He also explains differently, rather with different focus:
The cross is the sign of the triple being, transcendental, universal and Individual.36
31Sr. Matthew, xxvii, 50, 46. 32St. Lake, xxiii, 42. 33Ibid., xxiii, 43.
34Savitri, p. 446. 35The Hour of God, SABCL, Vol. 17, p. 99.
36Letter on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 23, p. 983.
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In Savitri Sri Aurobindo generally uses the terms "cross" and "crucify" with reference to infliction of pain and suffering, not necessarily Christ's as noted above.
Aswapati on his upward march of self-discovery first feels the fall of thought, release from joy and grief, and an escape from ego. After the negative experience he feels the Supreme Presence he is yearning to near.
A moment's sweetness of the All-Beautiful
Cancelled the vanity of the cosmic whirl.
A Nature throbbing with a Heart divine
Was felt in the unconscious universe;
It made the breath a happy mystery
And brought a love sustaining pain with joy;
A love that bore the cross of pain with joy
Eudaemonised the sorrow of the world.37
"Eudaemonised" may be taken to mean to transform the sorrow of the world into delight. (According to the dictionary, "Eudaemonism" is a system of ethics bearing moral obligation on tendency of action to produce happiness. There is nothing ethical here in Savitri, all spiritual compassion.) The love presented here, though not Christ's, is not unlike his.
In the context of Savitri finding her soul there is a description of the Psyche in an Upanishadic language:
A being no bigger than the thumb of man...
Identified with the mind and body and life,
It takes on itself their anguish and defeat,
Bleeds with Fate's whips and hangs upon the cross.38
Our true being is the Psyche that takes a new mind and life and body every time it takes birth. The anguish and defeat undergone by body, mind and life are suffered by Christ-like Psyche, bleeding with Fate's whips, bleeding on the Cross. As indicated already, and as we will see again, Sri Aurobindo considers the Christian concept of the Son of God as standing for the individual Self.
The Primal descent of the Superconscient Divine into this world of Void, Nescience and Pain, mentioned already while discussing the vignette of Christ's crucifixion, is described in the following lines:
37Savitri, p. 312. 38Ibid, pp. 526-27.
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In the enigma of the darkened Vasts,
In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite
When all was plunged in the negating Void,
Non-Being's night could never have been saved
If Being had not plunged into the dark
Carrying with it its triple mystic cross.39
The mystic cross is the cross of the counterpart of the Cross of the triune Powers of Sat, Chit and Ananda. Here the term has no connection with the term as used till now.
There are uses of the term which have little to do with the cross that Christ bore or even with its symbolic significance, but it gains its meaning because of the usual sense of the term. In the World of Falsehood,
Being collapsed into a pointless void
That yet was a zero parent of the worlds;
Inconscience swallowing up the cosmic Mind
Produced a universe from its lethal sleep;
Bliss into black coma fallen, insensible,
Coiled back to itself and God's eternal joy
Through a false poignant figure of grief and pain
Still dolorously nailed upon a cross
Fixed in the soil of a dumb insensient world
Where birth was a pang and death an agony,
Lest all too soon should change again to bliss.40
Sri Aurobindo comments on the lines as follows:
This has nothing to do with Christianity or Christ but only with the symbol of the cross used here to represent a seemingly eternal world-pain which appears falsely to replace eternal bliss. It is not Christ but the world-soul which hangs here.41
On one occasion Sri Aurobindo brings out the irony of the self-aggrandising human ego's claim to bear the cross when it is frustrated in its ambition. As a contrast to the divine pathos of the Madonna of Sorrows we hear the voice of the Titanic Ego who says
I am the Man or Sorrows, I am he
Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe;
To enjoy my agony God built the earth.42
39Ibid, pp. 140-41. 40Ibid, p. 221. 41Ibid, p. 777. 42Ibid, p. 505.
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The word "crucify" is also used in a context not meant to give the usual meaning though it is close to the right one.
Savitri seeks her soul and comes to the country of the fixed Mind; there
Mind claimed to be the spirit and the soul.43
When dissatisfied with the world in spite of her being lured to stay there, the creatures wonder why she was leaving a perfect world; some say:
... Nay, it is her spirit she seeks.
A splendid shadow of the name of God,
A formless luster from the Ideal's realm,
The Spirit is the Holy Ghost of Mind;
But none has touched its limits or seen its face.
Each soul is the great Father's crucified Son.44
What makes all go wrong is the mistaking of the Mind for the Supreme Father.
From the very beginning we have been referring to Sri Aurobindo's idea of Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. In the above passage the Mind is mistaken for the Father and that makes it impossible to get the true conception. There is another passage that brings us very close to the conception. Before she faces Death in the Forest, Savitri undergoes great spiritual experiences. First there is the experience of the great Nihil and Void. This is followed by the experience of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness. It is when she experiences the All-Negating Absolute that she saw the individual Self in her die, the cosmic disappear; she was not able to feel the presence of the transcendental Power. Sri Aurobindo described her state in the following words:
The Holy Ghost without the Father and Son.45
The Father is the transcendental Power, the Son is the individual Self, the Holy Ghost
... a substratum of what once had been,
Being that never willed to bear a world
Restored to its original loneliness,
Impassive, sole, silent, intangible.46
43ibid, p. 498. 44Ibid., p. 500. 45Ibid., p. 552. 46Ibid.
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experience and that of the Mother. Can we really expect that their experience will be renewed in us? The obvious answer must be "No", followed after a certain amount of soul-searching by a qualified "Yes". The openers of the path have gone in front, and their labour is vain if there are none to follow. The experience may be renewed in us to the extent that past preparation has been made—in this life or other lives— and to the extent that we are open to what the Mother has called "the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness." There is no doubt that we are brought into direct contact with these true vibations through the medium of Savitri: "Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is truth in its plenitude, the Truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents."12
The Mother's words give away part of that secret. As Aswapati climbs the World Stair, he experiences successively all the planes of consciousness that influence or impinge upon our own inner and outer being. These influences, for the most part undetected by our waking mental consciousness, are explored by Aswapati through the power of his Yoga. Their essence or their vibration as the Mother puts it, is captured and held by Sri Aurobindo before it has passed through the distorting filter of the analytic mind. It comes to us clothed in 'Truth's form-robes by the Seers woven from spirit-threads"13 and charged with the initiatory power of a Mantra. The intellect retreats in silence from its vain attempt to analyse this miracle. So it is, that the experience may indeed be renewed for us, not only by the action in us of Sri Aurobindo's wonderful commentaries which satisfy the mind, but even more perfectly by his amazing defining insights instantly recognised as Truth.
Thus we may think we know what instinct is, but when Sri Aurobindo calls instinct the "chrysalis of Truth"14 the image opens a window in the mind onto vistas of meaning beyond the power of three common words to express. We may think we can distinguish faith from belief, until he reveals to us in a picture what faith really is:
To the celestial beauty of faith gave form
As if at flower-prints in a dingy room
Laughed in a golden vase one living rose.15
12 Perspectives of Savitri, Vol. 1, p. 49.
13Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 599.
14 Savitri, p. 134. 15Ibid, p. 539.
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The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,
The body of earth a tabernacle of God.48
Later he says,
A soul shall wake in the Inconscient's house;
The mind shall be God-vision's tabernacle,
The body intuition's instrument.49
Much earlier when Savitri is sitting by the side of sleeping Satyavan and counting hours of his approaching end, a Voice asks her to arise and vanquish Time and Death. Savitri questions why she should do it at all. She asks why she should lift her hands to shut heavens,
Or straggle with mute inevitable Fate
Or hope in vain to uplift an ignorant race
Who hug their lot and mock the saviour Light
And see in Mind Wisdom's sole tabernacle.50
The contrast between the last two passages is instructive.
In the lines just quoted the ignorant human race mocks the saviour Light—the words take us back to the theme discussed already—and see in Mind (foolishly) the Wisdom's sole tabernacle. In the other passage, the Mind shall be God-vision's tabernacle. The Mind at its best has a mental Vision of God. It is only the ignorant people who think that Mind is the sole tabernacle of Wisdom. The true tabernacle or sanctuary of Wisdom is far above the Mind. We saw how Savitri could not abide in the country of the fixed Mind.
Another notable Biblical word used by Sri Aurobindo for his own purposes is from the New Testament, "epiphany". Though like "advent" and other words, "epiphany" has acquired a general meaning of manifestation; it refers to Christ before the Magi, the Wise Men from the East. The manifestation is an equivalent of Sakshatkara. There are quite a few occasions when Sri Aurobindo employs the word. We may cite one or two significant ones. A magnificent example occurs when Savitri, towards the end of her debate with Death, is transfigured into the Goddess she is and tells the mighty Power how all contraries are aspects of God's face and the Many are the innumerable One. In what may be called the climax of the divine vision she brings before Death, she says:
48Savitri, p. 699. 49Ibid., p. 707. 50Ibid, pp. 474-75.
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All there is a supreme epiphany:
The All-Wonderful makes a marvel of each event,
The All-Beautiful is a miracle in each shape.151
The lines make us not merely understand what epiphany means but make us see it. Also Death himself has a vision of Savitri as the Divine Mother.
Describing the Childhood of the Flame (Savitri) Sri Aurobindo says:
... with a greater Nature she was one.
As from the soil sprang glory of branch and flower,
As from the animal's life rose thinking man,
A new epiphany appeared in her.52
The four lines present an epitome of the evolution described in the supreme scripture: from soil to plant and tree, from animal to human the thinking being, from the human to the Divine. Each stage of the evolution is a manifestation or "epiphany" of a greater Power. It may not be irrelevant to mention at this stage a few words that are not necessarily Biblical but are Christian and therefore related to our subject. It need not be said that Sri Aurobindo uses the words as he does other terms for his own purposes. Chapel, for example, is a place of worship attached to a private residence or an institution, even as a cathedral is a public place of worship, especially the principal church of diocese. We may take an example or two of both the words. Cathedral or chapel presented by Sri Aurobindo is not material building but a state of consciousness in which one turns to a power good or evil in a great limited way
When, for example, Aswapati has acquired secret knowledge and cut off his moorings with material nature, he lives as a figure
Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts
Under its arches dim with infinity.53
On the other hand, when the great Traveller comes to the Kingdoms of the Little Life, he sees Life's
... anguished claim to her lost sovereign right...
Adorer of a joy without a name,
In her obscure cathedral of delight
To dim dwarf gods she offers secret rites.54
51lbid, p. 663. 52Ibid, p. 357. 53Ibid, p. 79.
54Ibid, p. 134.
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In the Debate of Love and Death we hear Savitri telling the Dark Force the purpose of the Creation:
For this the Spirit came into the Abyss
And charged with its power Matter's unknowing Force,
In Night's bare session to cathedral light,
In Death's realm repatriate immortality.55
The word chapel is also used in a similar way. When Savitri begins the search for her soul she first has a fearful picture of the subconscient. When, however, she turns from the scale of ignorance to that of knowledge she perceives man's evolution. From apelike state,
Man stood erect, he wore the thinker's brow...
A vision came of beauty and greater birth
Slowly emerging from the heart's chapel of light.56
In the World of Falsehood we see a horrible religion:
In a fell chapel of iniquity...
...from each window peered an omnous priest
Chanting Te Deums for slaughter's crowning grace.57
In the last line of the passage we have another expression which means praise, hymn. The phrase Te Deum is from the beginning of the famous hymn Te Deum laudanum = Thee, O Lord, we praise.
We may now ask ourselves if there is any thematic link, in however small way, between the Bible and Savitri. As has been mentioned more than once, Savitri is concerned with the evolution from the Inconscient to the Superconscient, transformation of the very physical to the Spiritual, the final transformation made possible by the descent of the Supermind. As the Lord tells Savitri in his last speech, at present
Mind is the leader of the body and life,
Mind the thought-driven chariot of the soul.58
He adds that
Mind is not all his tireless climb can reach...
There is an infinite truth, an absolute power...
55Ibid, p. 632. 56bicL, p. 485. 57Ibid, p. 228.
58Ibid., p. 704.
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A star rising out of the Inconscient's night,
A sun climbing to Supemature's peak.59
A time shall come when
The superman shall wake in mortal man
And manifest the hidden demi-god
Or grow into the God-Light and God-Force...
Then shall the earth be touched by the Supreme-
Then shall the embodied being live as one
Who is a thought, a will of the Divine...
An instrument and the partner of his Force...
All then shall change, magic order come
Overtopping the mechanical universe.
A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal's world...
And thrill with love of God the enamoured heart...
And found Light's reign on her unshaking base...
Even there shall come as a high crown of all
The end of Death, the death of Ignorance...
When superman is bom as Nature's king,
His presence shall transfigure Matter's world...
This earthly life become the life divine.60
This vision, of course, has not been presented by any Scripture including the Veda and the Gita. What the Bible does is to anticipate, however distantly, something of the experience. In his Problems of Early Christianity, Amal Kiran quotes from St. Paul and shows how there is such an anticipation. To the extent there is, it becomes relevant to our brief study of the relationship between the Bible and Savitri. After quoting from the Epistles of St. Paul about the Last Day of Judgement, Amal Kiran remarks:
...the consummation for Paul is not a new earth-life, it is a departure from it into another world of glory and blessedness. In the concept of transfiguration of the living into spiritual bodies of a future time there is genuine prefiguration of the Aurobindonian vision.61
We may conclude the essay with a very different type of relationship between the Bible and Savitri. Till now we have been concerned
59Ibid. 60Ibid., pp. 705-11.
6177ie Problems of Early Christianity, p. 249.
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with Sri Aurobindo's use of word and phrase and idea and situation from the Bible in his poem though little to do with their original usage. Now we may consider if Savitri itself can help us understand the Bible better. All are aware that Sri Aurobindo has re-interpreted the Veda, the Upanishad and the Gita and brings out their inner significance fully and comprehensively than ever before. One wishes he had re-interpreted at least portions of the Bible. But a study of Savitri does seem to make at least one great Book of the Bible, perhaps the most spiritual of all the Books of the Old Testament, mean much more than what it does according to the classical interpretations, both Christian and Jewish.
Neither the Jewish nor the Christian commentators of Job see Job's suffering as purposive and meant to evolve the character of Job. Job is no saviour the kind of whose suffering we have seen above. There are commentators, though, who see Job as a pre-figuration of Christ. The lines in Savitri which have a bearing on the experience of Job may be quoted before we briefly indicate the way in which Job evolves:
Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men
To greatness: an inspired labour chisels
With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.
Implacable in the passion of their will,
Lifting the hammers of titanic toil
The deimurges of the universe work.62
Perhaps more significant are the words of the Mother of Might,
I rend man's narrow and successful life
And force his sorrowful eyes to gaze at the sun
That he may die to earth and live in his soul.63
In Job it is the Lord himself who causes pain and suffering on the protagonist in order to raise him from the Sattwic state of perfection to the state beyond quality, of a Gunatita who can have the direct vision of the Lord.
At the start of the book we see Job as being "perfect" and "upright", "fearing God and eschewing evil." He is rich and prosperous. He is also blessed with seven sons and three daughters and each of the seven sons lives in a house of his own. If Job, in spite of this prosperous state is pious and moral, the sons indulge in perpetual feasting, each
62Savitri, p. 444. 63Ibid., p. 510.
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throwing a banquet to all his brothers and sisters everyday, the first son throwing a banquet on the first day of the week, the second son on the second day of the week and so on. Job actually offers burnt-offerings to the Lord and sanctifies them, thinking that they may take God lightly in their lives. God, seeing Job's moral and religious perfection, wants him to rise to a spiritual state when he could not only know about God and lead a good life but know him directly from the depths of being in which state alone such a knowledge and experience are possible. It is to underscore this point that Job is made to say at the end,
I have heard about thee with the hearing of my ear but now I see thee with mine own eye.64
To make the evolution of Job from a religious and moral man to a spiritual being possible the Lord enacts a drama, draws the attention of the cynical figure called the Satan—the definite article is used along with his name, hassatan in Hebrew; he is different from the Arch-enemy of God and Man of the later days—to Job and praises him at being perfect and upright and as fearing God and avoiding evil. As the Lord expects, the Satan questions if Job fears God for nothing. The Satan believes that one can be good only when everything is all right with him. Job's cannot be desireless devotion or ahaituki bhakti if we can attribute such a high philosophical concept to him, as commentators normally do. The Satan thinks that if only Job loses his all he will curse him to his fate. God takes the opportunity to make Job suffer intensely since it is only through suffering Job's evolution is possible. God asks the Satan to take away all Job has,— his property and even his ten children. The fellow does it readily, delighting as he does in others' suffering. But Job's Sattwic nature does not change. He tells himself that God gave and God has taken away all he had. He only blesses God, contrary to the Satan's prediction that he would curse him. God again points to the Satan "his servant" Job, who continues to be perfect and upright. The cynic says that what Job has lost is only the outer cover of his belongings, his skin remains sound. The Lord permits him to inflict intense physical suffering on Job, without touching his life. The Satan brings down on him a dreadful skin-disease cap-a-pie. Job's wife almost echoing the Satan's words, though because it is too unbearable to see Job's suffering, asks her husband to curse God and die. The good
64The Book of Job, XLII. 5, p. 500.
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man asks her not to talk like a foolish woman. One must accept whatever God gives with an equal spirit, good or evil. The worst suffering does not change his Sattwic nature. Job moves away outside town, scrapes himself with broken piece of pot and sits on an ash heap.
Hearing about his misfortune, three of his friends from distant places gather together and call on Job. They sit silently with him for a week. With the passing of days the pain intensifying, Job's Sattwic nature wears away and at last Job sinks away into despondency or Tamasic Vishada and curses the hour he was bom and conceived and wishes he had died at his birth and regrets why he is still alive.
The friends who have come to console him are horrified that Job who used to comfort others in distress when he was alright now falls into a state of dejection forgetting his piety (fear of God). They think he must have sinned; else he could not have suffered. We have mentioned the traditional Jewish belief in retributive justice. But Job is sure he has done nothing to deserve suffering. Job defends himself each time. The argument and counter-argument take place in three cycles. What happens in the discussion is Job's rising from Tamas to Rajas and even to Sattwa though he falls to the lower state and rises again till at last he passes beyond the Gunas.
He has the Lord's universed vision, Viswarupa Darshan—the Lord reveals his Infinity—and when Job has evolved as He intended restores to him all that was taken away. It is needless to say that once Job sees the Lord with his own eyes, there is neither pain nor grief. It is possible that a study of Savitri could throw at least some light on other portions of the Bible as it can on other Scriptures. It is possible because, as we said at the start, Savitri is a Scripture that includes and transcends the essence of all other Scriptures.
K. B. SlTARAMAYYA
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