An avatar is... never merely a prophet. He is a realiser and establisher — not of outward things only, though he does realize something in the outward also... It was not at all Rama's business to establish the spiritual stage of that evolution — so he did not at all concern himself with that. His business was to destroy Ravana and to establish Rama Rajya... an order proper to the sattvic civilized human being who governs his life by finer emotions, moral ideals, such as truth, obedience, cooperation and harmony, the sense of domestic and public order — to establish this in a world still occupied by anarchic forces... the vanaras and rakshasas.
It was Rama's business to be not necessa-rily as perfect, but as largely representative of sattvic man, faithful husband, obedient son, a tender and perfect brother, father, friend — of the outcast Guhaka, of animal leaders, Sugriva and Hanuman, of the vulture Jatayu, friend of even rakshasa Vibhishana. All that he was in a brilliant, striking but above all spontaneous and inevitable way... with a certain harmonious completeness.
But most of all, it was his business to typify and establish the things on which the social idea and its stability depended, truth and honour, the sense of dharmas, public spirit and sense of order.
To truth and honour, much more than to his filial love and obedience to his father — though to that also — he sacrificed his personal rights... and went into exile in the forests. To his public spirit and his sense of public order he sacrificed his own happiness and domestic life and the happiness of Sita.
In that he was one with the moral sense of all the antique races, though at variance with the later romantic individualistic sentimental morality of the modern man who can afford to have that less stern morality just because the ancients sacrificed the individual in order to make the world safe for the spirit of social order.
Finally, it was Rama's business to make the world safe for the ideal of the sattvic human being by destroying the sove-reignty of Ravana, the rakshasa menace. All this he did with such a divine afflatus in his personality and action that his figure has been stamped for more than two millennia on our minds, on Indian culture, and what he stood for has dominated the reason and idealising mind of man in all countries...
When I spoke of the gap that would be left by his absence, I did not mean a gap among the prophets and intellectuals, but a gap in the scheme of avatarhood — there was somebody who was the avatar of the sattvic human as Krishna was the avatar of the overhead superman — I can see no one but Rama who can fill the place...
As for the avatarhood, I accept it for Rama because he fills a place in the scheme... for when I read the Ramayana I feel a great afflatus which I recognise and which makes of its story — merely fairy tale though it seems — a parable of a great critical transitional event that happened in the terrestrial evolution and gives to the main character's personality and action a significance of the large typical cosmic kind which these actions would not have had if they had been done by another man in another scheme of events.
By Sri Aurobindo Excerpted from The Purpose of Avatarhood: Letters on Yoga, Part I, Vol 22.