Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

His Life and Attempts to Write about It
On His Published Prose Writings

Passages from The Riddle of This World [8]

Weber writes of Spinoza’s conception of God: “God is not the cause of the world in the proper and usual sense of the term, a cause acting from without and creating it once for all, but the permanent substratum of things, the innermost substance of the {{0}}universe.”[[Alfred Weber, History of Philosophy (London:Longmans, Green, 1904), pp. 328 – 29.]] Does this not find a parallel in the following lines from The Riddle of This World: “For it is not... a supracosmic, arbitrary, personal Deity himself altogether uninvolved in the fall who has imposed evil and suffering on creatures made capriciously by his fiat” [pp. 65–66]. I wonder why Spinoza did not arrive at a convincing explanation of the problem of evil and misery.

The European type of monism is usually pantheistic and weaves the universe and the Divine so intimately together that they can hardly be separated. But what explanation of the evil and misery can there be there? The Indian view is that the Divine is the inmost substance of the Universe, but he is also outside it, transcendent; good and evil, happiness and misery are only phenomena of cosmic experience due to a division and diminution of consciousness in the manifestation, but are not part of the essence or of the undivided whole-consciousness either of the Divine or of our own spiritual being.

6 October 1935