The Two Conceptions of God, pp. 590-592 (SH 292)

Savitri Class in Hindi with Alok Pandey
Book Nine: The Book of Eternal Night, Canto Two: The Journey in Eternal Night

At each level of our existence we construct an image of God. When we are plunged into the utter darkness of Ignorance, we at first deny God or any Source of Light and Truth, later we construct a God who is much like our state. We erect a God who punishes so that we may worship him or a God whom all must fear. But Savitri’s God is the luminous One who is ever full of Compassion and Love, ever ready to lean down towards suffering earth and redeem it.

But to her claim opposed, implacable,
Insisting on the immutable Decree,
Insisting on the immitigable Law
And the insignificance of created things,
Out of the rolling wastes of night there came
Born from the enigma of the unknowable depths
A voice of majesty and appalling scorn.

As when the storm-haired Titan-striding sea
Throws on a swimmer its tremendous laugh
Remembering all the joy its waves have drowned,
So from the darkness of the sovereign night
Against the Woman’s boundless heart arose
The almighty cry of universal Death.

“Hast thou god-wings or feet that tread my stars,
Frail creature with the courage that aspires,
Forgetting thy bounds of thought, thy mortal role?

Their orbs were coiled before thy soul was formed.
I, Death, created them out of my void;
All things I have built in them and I destroy.
I made the worlds my net, each joy a mesh.

A Hunger amorous of its suffering prey,
Life that devours, my image see in things.

Mortal, whose spirit is my wandering breath,
Whose transience was imagined by my smile,
Flee clutching thy poor gains to thy trembling breast
Pierced by my pangs Time shall not soon appease.

Blind slave of my deaf force whom I compel
To sin that I may punish, to desire
That I may scourge thee with despair and grief
And thou come bleeding to me at the last,
Thy nothingness recognised, my greatness known,
Turn nor attempt forbidden happy fields
Meant for the souls that can obey my law,
Lest in their sombre shrines thy tread awake
From their uneasy iron-hearted sleep
The Furies who avenge fulfilled desire.

Dread lest in skies where passion hoped to live,
The Unknown’s lightnings start and, terrified,
Lone, sobbing, hunted by the hounds of heaven,
A wounded and forsaken soul thou flee
Through the long torture of the centuries,
Nor many lives exhaust the tireless Wrath
Hell cannot slake nor Heaven’s mercy assuage.

I will take from thee the black eternal grip:
Clasping in thy heart thy fate’s exiguous dole
Depart in peace, if peace for man is just.”

But Savitri answered meeting scorn with scorn,
The mortal woman to the dreadful Lord:

“Who is this God imagined by thy night,
Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,
Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?
Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts
And made his sacred floor my human heart.

My God is will and triumphs in his paths,
My God is love and sweetly suffers all.
To him I have offered hope for sacrifice
And gave my longings as a sacrament.

Who shall prohibit or hedge in his course,
The wonderful, the charioteer, the swift?

A traveller of the million roads of life,
His steps familiar with the lights of heaven
Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;
There he descends to edge eternal joy.

Love’s golden wings have power to fan thy void:
The eyes of love gaze starlike through death’s night,
The feet of love tread naked hardest worlds.
He labours in the depths, exults on the heights;
He shall remake thy universe, O Death.”

[Savitri: 590 – 592]

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(line breaks added to emphasize separate movements)