The Spiritual Gift of Madness

The poignancy of Sri Aurobindo’s messianic vision can best be experienced through his own words. I have selected a few extracts from Savitri, which is described above in chapter 18 on Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo’s work is the greatest example of a modern messianic vision.*56 By reconciling the ancient messianic vision with its modern context it demands to be taken seriously; it cannot be facilely dismissed as the product of archaic society unenlightened by the highest knowledge of science. As well as a gift to humanity, Sri Aurobindo wrote this poem for his own soulmate (to use a modern term that became popular years after Sri Aurobindo’s death), a French woman, Mira Richard, known as “the Mother.” They met when Richard, a longtime student of occult wisdom, came to India to be a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. Soon thereafter he recognized her as his equal and his partner. Their relationship was not physical as both believed sexual union would impede their spiritual work and their spiritual union. (As stated in chapter 17, Sri Aurobindo spent years in seclusion, which he believed necessary for his yoga. During that time he spoke to one person only—the Mother.) Sri Aurobindo was the only well-known Indian sage who had a spiritual partner. (Despite his reverence for her, Ramakrishna’s wife was submissive, as tradition dictated.)

Most of the disciples found in Savitri a thinly veiled autobiographical account of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s spiritual paths. Although Aurobindo’s vision of the attainment of physical immortality is the focus of Savitri, Aurobindo also discussed it in many of his philosophical works. (For a superb discussion of the metaphysical and scientific aspects see The Destiny of the Body1 by one of Aurobindo’s disciples.) We also find the idea of attaining an eternal spiritualized body in Christianity. For example, St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century depicted death as a result of our estrangement from God. Many Russian Christian theologians thought death was unnatural, a product of sin, as St. Paul said.

In the poem, Savitri confronts the god of Death and scorns him when he advises her to accept the death of her husband, Satyavan—who, doomed to an early death, dies one year after Savitri’s meeting with him:

My spirit has glimpsed the glory for which it came

Beating of one vast heart in the flame of things

My eternity clasped by his eternity

And tireless of the sweet abysms of Time

Deep possibility always to love

This, this is first, last joy and to its throb

The riches of a thousand fortunate years

Are a poverty.

But Death tells her that she shares the fate of all human beings. And that love on the Earth is doomed, that no joy of the heart can last beyond death:

If God there is he cares not for the world;

All things he sees with calm indifferent gaze,

He has doomed all hearts to sorrow and desire,

He has bound all life with his implacable laws; . . .

He sees as minute details mid the stars

The animal’s agony and the fate of man:

Immeasurably wise, he exceeds thy thought;

His solitary joy needs not thy love . . .

Furthermore, Death says Savitri is quixotically pitting herself against the “laws” of nature, the decree of God, and that even God is subject to the laws he made. This theology is common among those Christians who believe that theology must be subordinated to science. For many liberal Christians today, “reality” is revealed by scientific naturalism. Such a reification of science conflicts with the understanding of Christianity emphasized in St. Paul and preserved in Eastern Christian theology: death is a product of the fall, science describes the “laws” in the “fallen” universe only, the universe estranged from its divine source.

Aurobindo’s perspective is similar to Eastern Christianity: laws only seem eternal. Laws are, in fact, habits of man/woman and nature; they are subject to inertia as all habits are. Although many modern scientists also believe laws are really habits of nature, most treat laws as if they are independently decreed by nature and eternal, an inference questioned by the great skeptic David Hume. So when Death responds to Savitri, his words carry the inflection of modern science:

The cosmic law is greater than thy will,

Even God himself obeys the Laws he made

The Law abides and never can it change

The Person is a bubble on Time’s sea . . .

This truth I know that Satyavan is dead

And even thy sweetness cannot lure him back.

No magic Truth can bring the dead to life

No power of earth cancel the thing once done

No joy of the heart can last surviving death

No bliss persuade the past to live again.

But Savitri responds that human love has the sanction of the Divine:

My will is greater than thy law, O Death;

My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:

Our love is the heavenly seal of the Supreme . . .

Love must not cease to live upon the earth;

For love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,

Love is the far Transcendent’s angel here . . .

Death scoffs and advises her to realize that the world will always be a vale of sorrow and to seek instead the greater bliss (ananda) of extra-worldly nirvana. This soteriology posits that the greatest and most authentic happiness *57 can be found only by those who are liberated from worldly existence and absorbed into Brahman, the godhead. This is different from the Western idea of heaven, but the similarities are salient. Death says:

Dream not to change the world that God has planned . . .

If heavens there are whose doors are shut to grief

There seek the joy thou couldst not find on earth.

Turn then to God, for him leave all behind;

Forgetting love, forgetting Satyavan,

Annul thyself in his immobile peace.

O soul, drown in his still beatitude.

For thou must die to thyself to reach God’s height.

But Savitri rejects the postmortem nirvanic soteriology of Death. She scorns the boon of bodiless nirvana; she has another vision (see chapter 18 for Savitri’s rebuttal to Death’s claim above that lasting joy cannot and will not be found on Earth.) In the verse below, Savitri tells Death she has discovered God in the world. She tells him that she too has experienced the blissful union with the Brahman beyond the world; she has met “Spirit with spirit,” but as she sees it, this experience no longer seems unsatisfying to her. To one who has also experienced human love at its height, the beloved appears as a manifestation of God. This experience has given her a sense of kinship with all mortals who love and who die:

I have met Spirit with spirit, Self with self,

But I have loved too the body of my God.

I have pursued him in his earthly form.

A lonely freedom cannot satisfy

A heart that has grown one with every heart:

I am a deputy of the aspiring world,

My spirit’s liberty I ask for all.

Finally, Savitri has answered all Death’s arguments and stands waiting before him, a testimony to the power of will, the will to love that has conquered all the lower aspirations in humanity, even the aspiration to be merged into God. Death is silent, revealing that his power is not supreme. Savitri hears the voice of God:

I hail thee almighty and victorious Death

Thou art my shadow and my instrument

And the sharp sword of terror and grief and pain

To force the soul of man to struggle for light . . .