1. The life of Khoung-fou-tseu (Confucius) is as clear, accurate, and formal as that of a man who lived a century ago. The life of Zerduscht, his counterpart in Persian philosophy, is confused and mythical. Out of the wild legends of his birth, adventures, and reformation, hardly any orderly history can be made. The most intelligent modern critics have given up the attempt. They doubt that he existed. They think he stands for an epoch or a great struggle of opposing principles, that several people from that epoch or struggle may have been merged under one name, and that the traditional story may belong as much to one of them as to another.
2. Suppose we had to accept this conclusion. To what period would the imaginary hero belong? It is hard not to connect him with the general movement of the Asiatic mind that I have already mentioned. The Buddhist upheaval in Hindostan, the great Chinese reformation, and the movement in Iran or Persia, of which I now speak, may not have been more than a century apart, even if they were not strictly contemporary. They plainly had something in common. The Indian, Chinese, and Persian reformers all believed they were restoring an old order or principle that had been forgotten or violated and replaced by modern practices and notions. Neither the Buddhist nor the disciple of Zerduscht, any more than Khoung-fou-tseu, would admit to introducing innovations into his country’s worship or government; all professed to sweep innovations away. Yet this coincidence makes their differences more remarkable, as does the power each of them exerted. They left their mark on vast regions of the earth. They showed that there were great ideas of which these nations were, and perhaps had always been, the appointed keepers. In the practical records of Chinese thought and law we tried to find what is characteristic of the Chinese. Can we likewise get through the vagueness of the Zendavesta and find what lay hidden in the minds of those who wrote it or believed it?
3. It seems impossible to give any account of this strange collection of litanies. How it came together is still unsolved. Recent inquiries are shedding so much light on the debates about its language that it would be unwise to enter on them, even if my subject required it. If I gave specimens of its style as it reaches us through its French compiler, M. Anquetil, I might confuse readers about its purpose rather than help them to it. I will therefore offer only some general hints about the meaning and purpose of the change that has been connected for so many centuries with the name of Zoroaster. They are not at all new, and mostly agree with what all students of the subject have concluded. But they may show what place Persia holds in the history of philosophical inquiry, and how it is connected, by likeness or opposition, with Egypt, India, China, and Greece.
4. The difficulty of ascribing a personal existence to Zoroaster is much the same as with Lycurgus, Odin, and many others. It belongs chiefly to our own time. It comes partly from a true sense of how institutions, beliefs, and habits spread through particular races and mark them from the very first. It comes also from a vague and false feeling that acts can accomplish themselves without living agents, and that great conflicts can go on in the clouds and the air without human combatants or personal leaders. In each of these cases we shall probably return in the end to our forefathers’ belief in an actual legislator or champion. We may still admit that we cannot reach the very definite picture of his position and deeds that they reached, whether by filling the gaps in fact from their imagination, or by the opposite course of stripping legends of their poetry, which gives them their worth and meaning, and so reducing them to facts. Of Zerduscht I must speak as an actual person. He may have had another name, he may have done things we know nothing of, and he may not have done any of the things his biographers record. But I may assume that someone fought the conflict that produced such striking and lasting results, and I will speak on that assumption.
5. Zerduscht’s conflict was with the Magians. I take this to be the fact of his history, whatever fictions surround it. He found men who, as he believed, did homage to a power or powers of evil. They probably made no secret of it. They taught that such a power was to be worshipped, and they could teach the method. They knew the evil being’s secrets and could explain how to avert his wrath. Their influence rested on the belief that they had this knowledge.
6. This was true in practice whatever worship they also paid to a beneficent Divinity. There is no reason to suppose that reverence for Ormuzd had ceased among them. Probably they rendered him services regularly and punctually and called on the people to do the same. But what is the worship of a good Being when Evil openly dwells beside him? Evil inevitably becomes the God. His character leavens and moulds the whole service. Whatever the theories about how the two beings relate, Ormuzd really becomes the servant of Ahriman. The Magians were in truth Ahriman’s priests, even when they nominally bowed to his rival.
7. The effects of such a religion show themselves everywhere. Zerduscht felt them especially in one place. The earth in Iran was overgrown with weeds, and nothing was done to till it or make it fruitful. How much is contained in those words! What a record of the effects of a priesthood that regards its chief Divinity as the author of curses rather than blessings! There was slavish dependence on the seasons with no study of the laws governing them, and a fear of touching thorns and thistles as if they grew by divine ordinance and had a sacred right. The arms grew weaker from lack of manly work, and the heart grew weaker as hope decayed. A Magian could point to this triumphantly and say: “See the proof of our doctrine! Does evil not prevail, and grow mightier? What can we do but bribe it to be less severe and demanding? Where shall we direct our prayers and sacrifices if not to this terrible conqueror?” It was an opinion that kept confirming itself with new evidence, always producing the facts that proved it.
8. What line must a reformer take against them? He could admit no compromise. He must say outright: “Your whole scheme of worship is a lie, and the ground it stands on is a lie. The earth is meant to bring forth and bud; the thistles are meant to be destroyed. Man is meant to put seed into it and draw strength out of it. These evil spirits are not his masters, and he owes them no service. They create nothing, produce nothing, keep nothing alive. The powers of creation, production, and nourishment are all good. Whatever begets, brings forth, and makes life more plentiful is to be sought as a counter to the powers of death. However strong those powers are, there must be something stronger.”
9. So Zerduscht raises his prayer to these Powers of life and production. It is idle to pretend he invokes only one Power; the Zendavesta’s litanies are addressed to many. Yet the opinion is not as wrong as it seems. Zerduscht would have said himself that he worshipped only Ormuzd. He felt that as everything destructive and evil tends to division, so everything good tends to unity. In his mind this was not a theory, as it would have been for a Hindoo, but a strong practical conviction that he showed more in his acts than in words. He worshipped goodness. Whatever seemed to do good and act beneficially for man, in nature or beyond it, seemed to him to have come from Ormuzd and to tend to return to him.
10. The Magians were of course astrologers. They tended to see the stars as evil agencies and prophets of mischief to man. Zerduscht does not leave the line of thought he finds in his country. Light is the object of his reverence. Light is plainly the great source of the earth’s fruitfulness and man’s benefactor. In his mind it becomes identical with Ormuzd. It is Good, or such a witness and symbol of Good that he cannot tell them apart. Hymns and invocations to Light are surely ways of resisting the dark being and his agents, and of bringing good to the land and those who farm it.
11. Zerduscht was therefore as practical a man as Khoung-fou-tseu, aiming just as much at increasing his country’s wealth in the simplest sense. But he was directly opposed to the Chinese in that devotion was his great instrument. Even “instrument” hardly expresses the difference. He did not see prayer as a mere means to a result; for him it was an actual looking up to a Power able to help men against their enemies. The petitioner is driven to it by the might and number of the evil powers striving against him. His litanies may seek material blessings and deliverance from material evils, but they are certainly addressed to an invisible Power of Light, against a tyrant partly visible and partly invisible who would make all his acts and thoughts confused and dark. It is not easy to say how much visible idolatry he would have tolerated, but Herodotus’s testimony on the character of Persian worship carries great weight, and I think no clear evidence on the other side overturns it. He felt the absence of visible symbols to be the characteristic difference between Persian worship and his own. He did not see the empire in its strength, when his reform was presumably most strongly felt, but its influence had surely not passed away. We may fairly conclude the reform protested not only against the worship of Ahriman but against homage to visible things, which Ahriman’s servants the Magi would doubtless have encouraged. All the petitions of the Zendavesta point, at least primarily, to powers and influences that dwelt in natural things but could not be perceived by the senses. This distinction would come out more and more in the two opposing worships, until some eclectic philosophy, trying to reconcile them and divide their provinces fairly, assigned the whole outward framework of things to Ahriman as his original territory, and the invisible to Ormuzd as his creation, through which he made repeated assaults and incursions on his rival’s possessions.
12. But Zerduscht himself and his true followers had no such eclecticism. His faith was in a perpetual, uncompromising war between the powers of good and evil. The earth was no permitted or tolerated dwelling for Ahriman and his subjects; on the contrary, all prayers and sacrifices to Ormuzd were for the sake of the earth and its restoration. Here lies the interest of Zerduscht’s 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 presented itself to the Persian mainly not as an intelligence but as one who is right and true. Good and evil, right and wrong, became far more primitive and fundamental distinctions in his mind than in any heathen people of east or west. The Persians were much more distinctly a moral people than the Hindoos or any Greek tribe. Xenophon’s romance is a Greek’s open acknowledgment of this. He must have had plenty of experience of the gross dishonesty the Persians fell into in dealing with his countrymen, yet he still recognised and admired this moral character as typical. He had seen it in some degree in the younger Cyrus, and he fancied, or tried to fancy, that the founder of the nation had shown it almost perfectly.
13. In one respect it has been supposed that Zerduscht did recognise a reconciliation between the divinity he abjured and the one he worshipped. It has been thought that a boundless Time lay in the Reformer’s mind beneath all his conceptions of a good or evil being, and that both must have proceeded from it. It cannot be denied that the Zendavesta has litanies suggesting such a notion, which may be as early as Zerduscht. We shall see, in the second part of this sketch, how the doctrine drawn from them greatly influenced later Persian philosophy, and how it affected, and was affected by, the faith of the Christian church. But I conceive there is not the slightest proof that this abstraction interfered in any practical way with Zerduscht’s exclusive homage to Ormuzd and the benign powers he supposed to proceed from him. His prayers to a boundless Time seem to me to express his sense that there must be a deeper Unity, a more absolute Being, than he had grasped. How could he be satisfied with a Being he had to think of as one and almighty, yet identical with every gracious influence and productive power? For Ormuzd’s own sake and honour he needed some other, more distinct way of declaring and invoking him. This was the way. It was awkward and incoherent, led to the very result he wished to avoid, and was full of future abstractions and confusions. But a man as thoroughly practical as Zerduscht could use it with no care for its speculative difficulties, as a release for his spirit from a real and oppressive contradiction, and as a way of bringing his worship closer to his human and political faith.
14. The Cyropædia and Herodotus’s testimony about the Persians’ feelings toward their king, and his inseparable connection with their worship, fully confirm another important inference from the legends of Zerduscht. The Magian was officially his antagonist; some monarch was always the ally in his reforms. To exalt the royal function above the priestly, and to keep kings from being servants of priests, was surely a great part of his work. In this he was probably acting out a faith far older in Persia than himself. It is hard not to trace, as most modern historians have, an opposition between the Persian and Median tribes. It did not prevent an attempt at union between them but made it necessary, and it points to more than a strife of personal feelings and interests. Median predominance seems always to mean the triumph of a priestly order and priestly habits. Persian prevalence shows a king who knows he is a king and is determined to keep his authority against all opposers, whatever visible or invisible instruments they use. The nobler kings, such as Cyrus and Darius Hystaspes, do not merely proclaim their own tyranny. They assert that Ormuzd is King. They are as entirely religious as those leagued against them, and their faith is the ground of all their acts. In its strength they decree justice, organize satrapies, improve the farming of the land, and build one of those mighty monarchies in which we recognised the characteristic strength and spirit of Asia. In those monarchies everything depends on the central power, or rather on the earnestness with which it confesses its subjection to a gracious Power in whose name it rules and fights. The inscriptions Major Rawlinson has recently interpreted show how true this was of Darius Hystaspes. They embody the very spirit of the Zerduscht reformation, and might almost tempt us to the notion, favoured by some German critics, that he was the Prophet himself. That notion, I think, does not fit any popular tradition. Darius surely realised the conception of the teacher far more than any mere teacher could. His order was an attempt to imitate the order of the heavenly bodies and the calm regularity of Nature, which would have been especially admired by one who saw light as the centre of the outward universe and the king as the centre of human society.
15. But in the heart of this wonderful order lay seeds of weakness and decay. The king confessed a King mightier than himself, in whom dwelt supreme right and justice. But he was the one utterer of this higher Sovereign’s will, and his own absolute dominion represented the divine absoluteness. The light that comes from the heavenly bodies may symbolize a goodness and wisdom reaching the remotest corners, quickening the least thing as well as the greatest and calling forth its own distinct nature and properties. But this light may also be seen as gathered into one luminous orb, an object of distant reverence, altogether unlike what it shines on. The Persian mind tended more and more this way. The Zerduscht reform resisted it only briefly, and in one sense promoted it. He probably had more tribe feeling, more patriotism in the western sense, than we usually find among Asiatics. But the strength his faith gave the monarchy soon made it, like the great monarchies before it, impatient of boundaries, eager to swallow all tribes, and careless of their distinctions. His zeal in breaking the chains of priestly domination, which had hampered the sovereign’s free activity, might give wide scope to beneficent government and help put down many abuses and abominations fostered by the Ahrimanic devotion. On the other hand, he weakened the witness latent in the priestly character, which could not be wholly lost even after the priest became a servant of evil powers. That witness was that the oppressed subject has a refuge when the visible ruler becomes a self-willed despot, with no feeling of kinship to his subjects, paying habitual homage to Ahriman. Persia’s later history interprets the meaning and shows the power of Zerduscht’s principle, but also shows how little protection it gave against this danger. It shows what an opening, even a necessity, there was for Magian conspiracies and counter-revolutions to check royal tyranny, even to restore it when it had fallen through its own crimes and weakness. It shows a still greater need for some witness, which Asia could not supply, that life and movement are necessary for man as well as a fixed eternal law.
16. Those who delight in proving eminent teachers of past generations to be impostors, charlatans, or knaves dwell on some legends of Zerduscht’s life that, they think, convict him of many violent and ambitious acts. Once it is settled how much of these legends deserves credence, we may accept them as evidence against the Reformer. But it is a monstrous violation of critical fairness to reject as fiction all the records showing the high estimate his countrymen formed of him, while treating as true, though no less miraculous, those that offend our consciences. The overall impression they leave is certainly that Zerduscht was possessed with a sense of his vocation to put down the Ahrimanic worship by all possible means and to assert the worship of Ormuzd. Whether this should be done was a question of life and death, since the material as much as the spiritual well-being of Persia depended on it. I have no doubt that in pursuing this purpose he stirred up wars, persecuted, and pressed his own claims to inspiration until he may sometimes have forgotten the work in its champion. But I am equally convinced, from the results of his labours, that in the main he sacrificed himself to the cause, and not the cause to himself.
17. By this, I think, he has earned no unimportant place in a history of Philosophy. Yet the name does not belong to Persia, or to the Persian character as Zerduscht formed it. The light the Persian worshipped told him what to follow and what to shun. Their rule of right was given once for all, and whoever transgressed it was doomed. There was no room for speculation. They abhorred it as leading to confusion and darkness; refined symbolism implied to them falsehood and traffic with evil spirits. In their strength they crushed every kind of intellectual subtlety with law and the sword, as leading to dishonesty and trickery. In their weakness they shrank from it as an unknown, mysterious power they could not cope with. The fanaticism of Cambyses in Egypt, and the struggles attributed to Zerduscht with the intellectualism and priestcraft of the Brahmin, show some aspects of this character toward foreigners. Now we must look at another aspect. We must 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 that at every stage of its existence deserves the apostle’s description: “They seek after wisdom.”