Jesus Christ
(Sri Aurobindo:) “Christ realised himself as the Son who is one with the Father — he must therefore be an aṁśa avatāra, a partial incarnation.”[1]
(Mother to Satprem, 1962:) “Sri Aurobindo considered Christ an Avatar (a minor form of Avatar). One emanation of the Divine's aspect of Love, he always said. But what people have made of him! ... ”[2]
(Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita:) “When we thus understand the conception of Avatarhood, we see that … the external aspect has only a secondary importance. Such controversies as the one that has raged in Europe over the historicity of Christ, would seem to a spiritually-minded Indian largely a waste of time; he would concede to it a considerable historical, but hardly any religious importance; for what does it matter in the end whether a Jesus son of the carpenter Joseph was actually born in Nazareth or Bethlehem, lived and taught and was done to death on a real or trumped-up charge of sedition, so long as we can know by spiritual experience the inner Christ, live uplifted in the light of his teaching and escape from the yoke of the natural Law by that atonement of man with God of which the crucifixion is the symbol? If the Christ, God made man, lives within our spiritual being, it would seem to matter little whether or not a son of Mary physically lived and suffered and died in Judea. So too the Krishna who matters to us is the eternal incarnation of the Divine and not the historical teacher and leader of men.”[3]
(Sri Aurobindo, 1935:) “If the Mother was present in the life of Christ, she was there not as the Divine Manifestation but as one altogether human. For her to be recognised as the Divine would have created a tremendous disorder and frustrated the work Christ came to do by breaking its proper limits.”[4]
- (Sri Aurobindo's aphorism:) “38 – Strange! The Germans have disproved the existence of Christ; yet his crucifixion remains still a greater historic fact than the death of Caesar.”
- (Disciple, 1960:) “To what plane of consciousness did Christ belong?
(Mother:) In the Essays on the Gita Sri Aurobindo mentions the names of three Avatars, and Christ is one of them. An Avatar is an emanation of the Supreme Lord who assumes a human body on earth. I heard Sri Aurobindo himself say that Christ was an emanation of the Lord’s aspect of love.
The death of Caesar marked a decisive change in the history of Rome and the countries dependent on her. It was therefore an important event in the history of Europe.
But the death of Christ was the starting-point of a new stage in the evolution of human civilisation. This is why Sri Aurobindo tells us that the death of Christ was of greater historical significance, that is to say, it has had greater historical consequences than the death of Caesar. The story of Christ, as it has been told, is the concrete and dramatic enactment of the divine sacrifice: the Supreme Lord, who is All-Light, All-Knowledge, All- Power, All-Beauty, All-Love, All-Bliss, accepting to assume human ignorance and suffering in matter, in order to help men to emerge from the falsehood in which they live and because of which they die.”[5]
- ↑ Letters on Yoga – I, p.501
- ↑ Agenda, 15 December 1962
- ↑ Essays on the Gita, p.15, “The Divine Teacher”
- ↑ The Mother with Letters on The Mother, p.90
- ↑ On Thoughts and Aphorisms, p.61
See also