1. The biography of Khoung-fou-tseu is as clear, accurate, and formal as that of a man who lived a century ago. Zerduscht, his biography. The biography of Zerduscht, who occupies the corresponding place in the annals of Persian philosophy, is altogether confused and mythical. It is hardly possible to compose any orderly history out of the wild legends of his birth, his adventures, and his reformation. The most intelligent modern critics have given up the task. They doubt whether such a man ever existed; they think that he represents an epoch, or a great struggle of opposing principles,—that different persons who illustrated that epoch, or engaged in that struggle, may have been blended under one name, and that the traditionary history may have as much or as little to do with one as with another of them.
2. His age. If we were forced to acquiesce in this conclusion, to what period will this imaginary hero belong? It is difficult not to connect him with that general movement of the Asiatic mind to which we have already alluded in this sketch. The Buddhist convulsion in Hindostan, the great Chinese reformation, and the movement in Iran or Persia, of which we are now to speak, if not strictly contemporaneous events, may not have been separated by the distance of more than a century. What was common in the different Oriental reformations. That there was something common in them all will easily be admitted. The Indian, the Chinese, the Persian reformers, alike believed that they were bringing back some old order or principle, which had been forgotten or violated, or for which some modern practices and notions had been substituted. Neither the Buddhist nor the disciple of Zerduscht would have allowed, any more than Khoung-fou-tseu, that they were introducing innovations into the worship or polity of their country: all professed to sweep innovations away. Their great differences. But their differences are only made the more remarkable by this coincidence, and by the power which all were able to put forth. They did leave an impress upon vast regions of the earth,—they proved that there were certain great ideas of which these nations were, and perhaps had always been, the appointed depositaries. We have tried to discover in the practical records of Chinese thought and legislation what their characteristic is; is it possible to penetrate through the vagueness of the Zendavesta, and to detect what was latent in the minds of those who composed it, or believed in it?
3. The Zendavesta. To give any account of this strange collection of litanies seems impossible. How it came together is a question still unsolved. The debates about the language in which it is composed are receiving so much illustration from recent inquiries, that it would be unwise to enter upon them, even if our subject required it. If we gave specimens of the style of the book, as it comes to us through the French compiler, M. Anquetil, we should perhaps rather confuse our readers respecting its object than help them to arrive at it. We shall, therefore, content ourselves with some general hints respecting the meaning and purpose of the change which has been for so many centuries connected with the name of Zoroaster,—hints not in the least novel, in accordance for the most part with the conclusions at which all students of the subject have arrived, but which may throw some light upon the question, what place Persia occupies in the history of philosophical inquiries, and how it is connected in the way, either of resemblance or opposition, with Egypt, with India, with China, with Greece.
4. The Persian reformer a real person. The difficulty of attributing a personal existence to Zoroaster is very much that which meets us again in the cases of Lycurgus, Odin, and many more; a difficulty, we may be permitted to remark, belonging chiefly to our own time, connected with a true feeling of the wonderful manner in which institutions, beliefs, habits, have diffused themselves through particular races, and characterised them from the very first; connected also with a vague and false feeling, that acts can somehow accomplish themselves without living agents,—that great conflicts may be transacted in the clouds and the air, without human combatants or personal leaders. In each instance we have named, it is probable that we shall ultimately return to the belief of our forefathers in an actual legislator or champion, however we may confess our inability to arrive at that very definite notion of his position and acts, which they attained by supplying the chasms of fact out of the stores of their imagination, or by the opposite process of stripping legends of their poetry,—of all that gives them their worth and significance, and so reducing them into facts. Of Zerduscht we must speak as an actual person; he may have had some other name,—he may have done acts of which we know nothing, and have not done any of those his biographers record; but that there was some one who maintained the conflict which produced results so striking and so lasting we may at once assume, and speak upon the assumption.
5. His enemies The Magians. The conflict of Zerduscht was with the Magians. This we take to be the facts of his history, whatever fictions may surround it. He found a set of men doing homage, as he believed, to powers, or a power of evil. Probably they made no secret of this homage. They taught that such a power was to be worshipped; they could teach the method of the worship. They knew the secrets of the evil being; they could explain how his wrath was to be averted. Upon the belief that they possessed this knowledge their influence stood.
6. Ahriman the object of Magian worship. This was practically the case whatever worship they might also pay to a beneficent Divinity. There is no reason to suppose that the reverence for Ormuzd had ceased among them. Most likely there were services which they rendered habitually and punctually to him, and called upon the people to render. But what is the worship of a good Being, when the Evil dwells professedly side by side with him? The latter becomes inevitably the God. The character of the whole service is leavened and moulded by his character. Let the theories respecting the relation of the two beings towards each other be what they may, Ormuzd becomes really the servant of Ahriman. The Magians were in truth his priests, even when they were nominally bowing to his rival.
7. Effects of this worship on tillage. The effects of such a religion manifest themselves in all directions. Zerduscht felt them in one direction especially. The earth in Iran was overgrown with weeds; nothing was done to till it or make it fruitful. How much is gathered up in these words! What a history of the effects of a priesthood, which looks upon its chief Divinity as the author of curses instead of blessings! Slavish dependence upon seasons, without any study of the laws which govern them,—a fear of meddling with the thorns and thistles as if they grew by Divine ordinance, and had a sacred right which could not be disturbed,—the arms growing feeble every day from want of manly exercise in their appointed work,—the heart growing feeble through the decay of hope: Practice and theory acting and reacting on each other. here was a state of things to which a Magian might triumphantly point and say, “See the proof of our doctrine! Does not the evil prevail; is it not becoming mightier? What can we do but bribe it to be less severe and all-exacting? Where shall we direct our prayers and sacrifices if not to this terrible conqueror?” It was an opinion which was always establishing itself by new evidence,—always producing the facts which demonstrated it.
8. The Ormuzd worshipper. What line must a reformer take to encounter them? He could admit no compromise. He must declare at once “Your whole scheme of worship is a lie; the ground on which it is based is a lie. The earth is meant to bring forth and bud; the thistles are meant to be destroyed. Man is meant to put the seeds into it, and call the strength out of it. These evil spirits are not his masters; he owes them no service. They create nothing, produce nothing, keep nothing alive. The powers of creation, production, nourishment, are all good. Whatever begets, brings forth, makes life more plentiful,—this is to be sought for as a counteraction to the powers of death. Let them be as strong as they will, there must be that which is stronger.”
9. Polytheism of Zerduscht To these Powers of life and production, then, Zerduscht raises his prayer. It is idle to pretend that he invokes only one Power. The litanies of the Zendavesta are addressed to a multitude of Powers. And yet the opinion is not so wrong as it may seem. Zerduscht would have affirmed himself that he worshipped only Ormuzd. The Monotheistic element latent in it. He felt assuredly that as all which is destructive and evil tends to division, so everything which is good tends to unity. This was not a theory in his mind, as it would have been in a Hindoo’s; it was a strong practical conviction which he did not so much utter in words as exhibit in his acts. He worshipped goodness. Whatever seemed to be doing good, to be acting beneficially for man whether in nature or out of nature, this seemed to him to have proceeded from Ormuzd, and to have a tendency to return to him.
10. Ormuzd light. The Magians were of course astrologers. Their tendency was to contemplate the stars as evil agencies,—prophets of mischief to man. Zerduscht does not depart from the line of thought which he finds in his country. Light is the object of his reverence. Light is evidently the great source of fruitfulness to the earth. Light is man’s benefactor. It becomes identical in Zerduscht’s mind with Ormuzd. It is Good, or such a witness and symbol of Good as he cannot distinguish from it. Hymns and invocations to Light are surely means of resisting the dark being and his agents,—means of bringing good to the land, and to those who cultivate it.
11. Zerduscht was, therefore, as practical a man as Khoung-fou-tseu, as much aiming at the increase of the wealth of his country in the simplest sense of the word. But he was directly opposed to the Chinese, in that devotion was his great instrument. The word “instrument” is hardly adequate to express this difference. Prayer the great weapon of the Persian against the evil powers. Zerduscht did not look upon prayer in any sense as a mere means to a result; it was in his mind an actual looking up to a Power who was capable of helping men against their enemies. The petitioner is driven to it by the might and the multitude of the evil powers which are striving against him. His litanies, if they seek for material blessings and deliverance from material evils, yet are undoubtedly addressed to some invisible Power, some Power of Light, against a tyrant partly visible, partly invisible, who would make all his acts and his thoughts confused and dark. Prayer mainly to invisible powers. It is not easy to say how much of visible idolatry he would himself have tolerated; but the testimony of Herodotus as to the character of Persian worship is certainly entitled to very great weight, and is not, we conceive, overborne by any clear evidence on the other side. He felt the absence of visible symbols to be the characteristic difference between the Persian service and his own. Though he did not see the empire in the time of its strength, when we may suppose the Zerduscht reform to have been most strongly felt, yet we may be sure that its influence had not passed away; and we may fairly conclude that it was not only a protest against the worship of Ahriman, but against the homage to visible things, which his servants the Magi will doubtless have encouraged. All the petitions of the Zendavesta seem to point, primarily at least, to powers and influences,—powers and influences, as we have said already, which dwelt in natural things, but still which were not cognizable by the senses. The later philosophy gives up the visible world to Ahriman. This distinction we may believe would come out more and more prominently in the two opposing worships, till at last some eclectical philosophy, seeking to establish a kind of reconciliation between them, and to make a fair distribution of their respective provinces, will have assigned the whole outward framework of things to Ahriman as his proper and original territory, maintaining the invisible as the creation of Ormuzd, and that through which he was carrying on repeated assaults and incursions upon the possessions of his rival.
12. But there was no such eclecticism as this in Zerduscht himself, or in any of his true followers. His faith was in a perpetual uncompromising war between the powers of good and evil. The earth was no permitted or tolerated habitation of Ahriman or his subjects; on the contrary, it was for the sake of the earth and for its restoration that all prayers and sacrifices were to be addressed to Ormuzd. Opposition between Zerduscht and the Brahmins. And herein certainly is the interest of the Zerduscht doctrine and reformation for the moral philosopher. It was a search after light, an inquiry after the Being who gives light and order to the universe. Only this source of light and order did not present itself mainly to the Persian as an intelligence, but mainly as one who is right and true. Good and evil, right and wrong, became in his mind much more primitive, fundamental distinctions, than they ever did in the mind of any heathen people of the east or of the west. The Persians were much more distinctly a moral people than the Hindoos, or than any tribe of the Greeks. The Persian morality. Xenophon. Xenophon’s romance is a distinct acknowledgment of this fact by a Greek. Though he must have had plentiful experience of the gross dishonesty into which they fell when they were engaged in transactions with his countrymen, yet he still recognised and admired this as the typical form of that character which he had seen in some measure in the younger Cyrus, and which he fancied, or tried to fancy, had been exhibited almost perfectly in the founder of the nation.
13. In one way it has been supposed that Zerduscht did recognise a kind of reconciliation between the divinity whom he abjured and the divinity whom he worshipped. Time without bounds. A Time without bounds, it has been thought, lay in the mind of the Reformer, beneath all his conceptions either of a good or evil being; both alike must have proceeded from it. How this idea entered into the faith of Zerduscht. That there are litanies in the Zendavesta which suggest such a notion, and which may be as early as the time of Zerduscht, it is impossible to deny; that the doctrine which is deduced from them very greatly influenced the later Persian philosophy we shall see when we come, in the second part of this sketch, to consider how it affected, and was affected by, the faith of the Christian church. But that this abstraction really interfered in any practical sense with the homage—the exclusive homage—which Zerduscht paid to Ormuzd, and to the different benignant powers which he supposed to proceed from him, there is, we conceive, not the slightest proof. The use of prayers to a Time without bounds did, it seems to us, express the teacher’s consciousness that there must be a deeper Unity, a more absolute Being, than he had apprehended. He was not satisfied—how could he be?—with a Being whom he must contemplate as one and almighty, and yet who was identical with every gracious influence, every productive power. For the sake and honour of Ormuzd himself he needed some other more distinct mode of declaring him, of invoking him. This was the mode—awkward and incoherent, leading to the very consequence which he sought to avoid, pregnant with future abstractions and confusions, but one which a man so thoroughly practical as Zerduscht could resort to without any care about its speculative difficulties, as an escape for his spirit from a real and oppressive contradiction, as a way of bringing his worship into closer sympathy with his human and political faith.
14. The Persian king. The Cyropædia, and the testimonies of Herodotus respecting the feelings of the Persians towards their king, and his inseparable connection with their worship, fully confirm another most important inference which we should deduce from the legends respecting Zerduscht. The Magian, officially, was his antagonist; some monarch was always the ally in his reforms. To exalt the royal above the sacerdotal function, to prevent the kings from being the servants of the priests, was unquestionably a great part of his work. An antagonist of the priests. Herein he was probably acting out a faith which was far older in Persia than himself. It is difficult not to trace—most modern historians have traced—an opposition between the Persian and Median tribes (an opposition not preventing but necessitating an attempt at union between them), which points to more than the strife of mere personal feelings and interests. Medians and Persians. The Median predominance seems always to indicate the triumph of a priestly order and of priestly habits; the Persian prevalence shows that a king is ruling who knows that he is a king, and is determined to maintain his authority against all opposers, by whatever visible or invisible instruments they may work. The nobler kings, such as were Cyrus and Darius Hystaspes, do not merely proclaim their own tyranny. They assert that Ormuzd is King; they are as entirely religious as those who are leagued against them; their faith is the ground of all their acts; in the strength of it they decree justice, organize satrapies, improve the tillage of the land, constitute one of those mighty monarchies in which we recognised the characteristic strength and spirit of Asia. In those monarchies everything depends upon the central power, or rather upon the earnestness with which the central power confesses its subjection to a gracious and beneficent Power in whose name it rules and fights. Darius Hystaspes. The inscriptions which Major Rawlinson has recently interpreted show how remarkably this was the case with Darius Hystaspes: they embody the very spirit of the Zerduscht reformation, and might almost tempt us to the notion, a favourite with some German critics, (not, however, it seems to us, compatible with any of the popular traditions,) that he was identical with the Prophet. He no doubt realised the conception of the teacher much more than any mere teacher could have realised it. The king the source of light. His order was that attempt to imitate the order of the heavenly bodies, the calmness and regularity of Nature, which one who looked upon light as the centre of the outward universe, and the king as the centre of the human society, would especially have admired and rejoiced in.
15. Weakness of the Persian order and mind. But in the heart of this order, wonderful as it was, lay seeds of weakness and decay. The king confessed a King mightier than himself; a King in whom dwelt supreme right and justice. But he was the one utterer of the will of this higher Sovereign; his own absolute dominion represented the divine absoluteness. The light which comes forth from the heavenly bodies may symbolize a goodness and wisdom that penetrates into the remotest corners, that quickens and enlivens the least thing as well as the greatest, calling forth its own distinct nature and properties. But this light may be looked upon as gathered into one luminous orb, an object of distant reverence, altogether unlike the materials on which it shines. Such was more and more the tendency of the Persian mind; the Zerduscht reform did not resist it for more than a short time, nay, in one sense promoted it. There was probably in him more of tribe feeling, more of patriotism in the western sense of the word, than we commonly meet with among Asiatics. But the strength which his faith gave to the monarchy soon made it, like the great monarchies that had preceded it, impatient of boundaries, eager to swallow up all tribes within itself, careless of their distinctions. Zerduscht’s zeal in breaking the chains of priestly domination, which had prevented the free activity of the sovereign, might give a large scope to beneficent government, and be the instrument of putting down a multitude of abuses and abominations that were fostered by the Ahrimanic devotion. On the other hand, he weakened the witness which was latent in the priestly character, which could not be wholly lost even after the priest had become a servant of evil powers, that there is a refuge for the oppressed subject when the visible ruler becomes a mere self-willed despot, when all feeling of relationship to his subjects has forsaken him, when he pays habitual homage to Ahriman. The later history of Persia, while it interprets the meaning and illustrates the power of Zerduscht’s principle, shows also how small a protection it afforded against this danger; what an opening, nay, what a necessity there was for Magian conspiracies and counter-revolutions to check the regal tyranny, even to restore it when it had fallen through its own crimes and weakness; what a still greater need there was that some witness, which Asia could not afford, to prove that life and movement are necessary for man, as well as a fixed eternal law.
16. Zerduscht’s ambition and fanaticism. Those who find an especial delight in proving eminent teachers of former generations to be impostors, charlatans, or knaves, dwell much upon some of the legends of Zerduscht’s life, which convict him, they think, of many violent and ambitious acts. When it is settled how much of these legends are entitled to credence, we may accept them as evidence against the Reformer. But to reject all the records which show the high estimate that his countrymen formed of him, as mere fictions—to assume those as veracious, though not less miraculous, which offend our consciences—is a monstrous violation of critical fairness. The total inference which they leave upon our mind is certainly this, that Zerduscht was possessed with a sense of his vocation to put down, by all possible means, the Ahrimanic worship, to assert the worship of Ormuzd. Whether this should be done or not was a question of life and death; the material, as much as the spiritual, well-being of Persia depended upon it. We have no doubt that, in the accomplishment of this purpose, he stirred up wars, persecuted, urged his own claims to inspiration, till he may sometimes have forgotten the work in its champion. But we are equally convinced, from the results of his labours, that he did, in the main, sacrifice himself to the cause, and not the cause to himself.
17. Zerduscht, in what sense a philosopher. By doing so he has, we think, earned for himself a right to no unimportant place in a history of Philosophy. The name does not belong to Persia, or to the Persian character as it was formed by Zerduscht. The light which the Persian worshipped told him what it behoved him to follow, what to shun. Their rule of right was given once and for ever; whoso transgressed it was doomed. There was no room for speculation. They abhorred it as leading to confusion and darkness—refined symbolism implied in their minds falsehood, and traffic with evil spirits. Intellectual subtlety of all kinds in the days of their strength they crushed with law and the sword, as leading to dishonesty and trickery; in the days of their weakness, they shrunk from it as an unknown mysterious power which they could not cope with. The fanaticism of Cambyses in Egypt, the struggles which are attributed to Zerduscht with the intellectualism and priestcraft of the Brahmin, exhibit some aspects of this character towards foreigners. We have now to contemplate another; we have to see in what sense the Persians were philosophers, by viewing them in contrast with the nation to which that title strictly and originally belongs; the nation which, in every stage of its existence, merits the apostle’s description, “They seek after wisdom.”