If the lyric note of great religious expression is rarely reached (only, perhaps, in a few pieces, such as the noble hymn to the sun-symbol), the sustained exposition of life is so reasonable and yet so lofty that to contemplate it after gazing at the extravagances of pillar-saints and Indian Yogi, signals, as it were, a return to sanity and health after the nuit blanche of fever.
The “Khordah Avesta” contains this counsel or good wish: “Be cheerful; live thy life the whole time which thou wilt live.” Man is not asked to do the impossible or even the difficult: he is asked to enjoy. To the extreme spirituality which shrank from making even a mental image of God is joined a “this worldliness” which saw in rational enjoyment a religious duty. Instead of choosing poverty, man was ordered to make good use of wealth; instead of mortifying the flesh, he was to avoid calumny, evil-speaking, quarrels, to give clothes to the poor, to pray not only for himself but for others. If he does wrong, let him repent honestly in his heart and do some practical good work as a pledge of his repentance. The soul which grieves for its wrongdoing and sins no more comes back into the light of “God the giver, Forgiver, rich in Love, who always is, always was, always will be!” When it was asked, “What is in the first place most acceptable to this earth?” the answer came: “When a holy man walks on it, O Zarathustra!” Good men work with God, who, sure of ultimate triumph, is yet Himself struggling now against the Power of Darkness. There is no religion without a good life: “All have not the Faith who do not hear it; all hear it not who are unclean; all are unclean who are sinners.” God did not send calamities to His servants, but He compassionates them in their trials: “The voice of him weeping, however low, mounts up to the star-lights, comes round the whole world.” It is no sin to desire riches: “Thy kingdom come, O Ahura, when the virtuous poor shall inherit the earth.” In spite of the sufferings of good people, even on this fair earth there is more of pleasantness for the good than for the wicked, and in the next world there is bliss eternal. I do not think that Robert Browning studied the Avesta, but to the thoroughly Zoroastrian line quoted above I am tempted to add this other which is not less so:—
“Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph.”
For the individual, as for the universe, Right must triumph. If the prophet of optimism has a harder task than the oracle of despair, it is, perhaps, a more profitable task.
The Parsi repeats daily, as his ancestors did before him, the so-called Honover or “Ahuna-Vairya,” or logos which brings God down to man as the Gayatri lifts man up to God: “One Master and Lord, all holy and supreme; one teacher of His Law, appointed by God’s almighty will as shepherd to the weak.” The Mazdean “law” was a thought-out system to prevent idolatry and atheism, and to make men lead good lives. There is no racial exclusiveness in it: the Mazdeans had no shibboleth or peculiar sign; Zoroaster, himself a foreigner, did not appeal to a chosen people or to a miraculously evolved caste: he only knew of good men and bad. A really good man, truthful and charitable in all his ways, had three heavens open to him even though he “offered no prayers and chanted no Gâthâs”; only the fourth heaven, a little nearer the presence of God, was reserved for those who had devoted their lives to religion. Temperance was enjoined, as without temperance there could not be health. The family was sacred and marriage meritorious: children, the gift of Ahura Mazda, were recruits for the great Salvation Army of the future. Immorality was severely censured, but the victims of it were befriended. Stringent and most humane religious laws protected the fille-mère from being driven “by her shame” to destroy herself or her offspring. Girls were married at sixteen: the address to young brides may be compared with that in the Rig-Veda: “I speak these words to you, maidens who wed. I say them unto you—imprint them on your hearts. Learn to know the world of the Holy Spirit according to the Law. Even so, let one of you take the other as the Law ordains, for it will be to you a source of perfect joy.”
At the time when Zoroastrianism was the State religion, the Sásánian period, we find that the kings frequently had harems. It is certain, however, that if in this as in other things the priests were complacent, they were untrue to orthodox Zoroastrian doctrine and custom, which only permitted the taking of a second wife in some rare cases, as when there was no issue by the first.
Even then, it does not seem to have been encouraged. The blot on Avestic morality is the strange recommendation of consanguineous marriages, which the Parsis interpret as far as possible in a figurative sense, but it must have been intended to be followed, though it is plain that such unions were never popular. The declared object was the hypothetical maximum purity of race: exactly the same object as that contemplated in the union of Siegemund and Siegelind in the Nibelungenlied—a curious parallel. To my mind, the desire to keep agricultural property together may have had something to do with it. The present moral ideas of the Parsis do not differ from those of Europeans, and when they requested to be placed under the English instead of the Hindu marriage law, their wish was granted.
In Avesta times the priests both married and toiled like the rest of the people. When their prosperity under the Sásánians tended to make them a class apart, they seem to have become less faithful to the ideals of their master, less stern in opposing evil in high places. It is a common experience of history. Originally they were true citizen-priests, mixing with the people as being of them. There was no life better or holier than the common life of duty and work. Isolation of any kind was contrary to the central Zoroastrian view of man as a social being. Among the wicked souls in hell, each one thinks itself utterly alone: it has no sight or knowledge of the host around it. Nothing could illustrate more powerfully than this the saying of a great French writer: “Seul a un synonyme: mort!” Solitude is the death of the soul.