The Ethicization of Religion

Planting the seeds of modern religion.

  The long shadow of Zarathustra.

            I recently watched a DVD lecture series called The Religions of the Axial Age, by Dr. Mark W. Muesse of Rhodes College.  "Axial Age"  is defined as a pivotal age, a point in time where everything changed forever.  He explains that between 800 BC and 200 BC, several different prophets and philosophers came onto the scene in four different parts of the Eurasian continent,  and they all radically changed the religious ideas of the areas where they lived.  Yet they all changed things in the same direction, and all modern religions bear the marks of the changes which these sages made. In short, there are ways in which all modern religions are similar to each other, but different from anything that existed before this transformation.

            During one brief period, philosophers all over Eurasia set down ideas that have defined religion and philosophy ever since. In China, Confucius and Lao Tse  gave China the political and philosophical underpinnings that served for 2,000 years.   In Palestine, Jewish prophets shaped what would become Judaism.  In Iran, Zarathustra (Zoroaster) had already established Zoroastrianism and directly influenced all of Iran and indirectly influenced every culture that later had contact with Iran, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  In South Asia, the Buddha and Mahavira founded Buddhism and Jainism. In Greece, Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle laid the foundation for Western philosophy.  And every one of these thinkers  wrestled with the same questions:  Who are we, how must we live, and what is our ultimate destiny? The Axial period ended twenty-two hundred years ago, yet nearly all major religions practiced today still derive core elements of their belief system from the religious and philosophical ideas first written down during this period.

            Prior to this time, religion was separate from ethics. Religions were about the ritual sacrifices owed to various local gods, and ethics was about what humans owed to each other--and it was not generally believed that there should be any connection between religious practice and ethical behavior.  The gods cared only about how an individual treated the gods, not about how humans treated each other.   But during the Axial Age, several philosophies arose which taught that the gods, or perhaps some impersonal force of nature, did care about our individual conduct,  and all our moral and ethical choices would be rewarded or punished, either in this life or the next.    Just the idea that there might be some sort of afterlife for ordinary humans was a stark transition, and the idea that we ourselves could influence that destiny by our own actions was also a departure from what had gone before. For those of you raised in the tradition of any Ibrahimic religion (Judaism, Christianity, or Islam),  the idea that you will ultimately be rewarded if you are good and punished if you are evil will seem pretty commonplace.  But before the Axial transformation, such ideas were unheard of.  Even Jews, whose religion had included an ethical code since Moses,  had no belief in an afterlife until after the Babylonian Captivity. 

            Why did this one period yield such an outpouring of creativity in ethical philosophy?   Dr. Muesse suggests a number of reasons.   One reason was urbanization.  Tribes that for thousands of years had been rural migrant herders found themselves in large, impersonal  multi-ethnic cities where no one knew their name and most did not even speak their language.  Life suddenly became a lot lonelier--and a lot more dangerous.  Back in the hills, a man lived as part of an extended family, clan, and tribe.  Life's grand questions were unimportant.  A man accepted his own mortality, because as he died, other generations of his family continued. It was all part of the natural cycle.   And unless you were raided by some other tribe, the people you saw would not try to kill you or cheat you or lie to you.  They were all family.  But urbanization changed all that.   To make matters worse,  the axial period was one of extreme political instability.  In China, this period was called the "Period of Warring States."   Slaughter and genocide reigned on a grand scale.  Any thinking person in these circumstances would be  tempted to wonder, "What does it all mean?"  All of the prophets and philosophers I mentioned, and probably hundreds more,  tried to find answers.  Those whose answers seemed to make sense to large numbers of others,  are those whose answers became influential enough to survive and be passed on to succeeding generations.  It is true that Jesus of Nazareth came 200 years after this period came to a close. But Jesus was a Jew who quoted Isaiah and other Hebrew Prophets who were indeed part of the axial period, and who had shaped the Judaism he grew up with.  So if you accept that Zarathustra was born about 628 BC, the traditional date given for his birth, then all of these sages were of the axial age. Only one problem:  scholars now believe that although Zoroaster's ideas were not written down till the 7th century BC, he actually lived much earlier---perhaps 10 or 15 centuries earlier.   That means he probably lived and died well before Abraham.  His ideas had a profound effect on the religions of the axial period and on every major religion since, but he himself may have died a thousand years before this age began.

The Long Shadow of Zarathustra.

            When dealing with any ancient leader who has attained a mythic stature, it may be helpful to try to separate the man from the myth.  So I'll digress a bit to  explore the real historical Zarathustra. To understand who Zarathustra was, you have to know who the Indo-Europeans were.  If your native language is any European Language other than Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, or Basque--then you speak an Indo-European tongue.  If you speak Iranian, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, or Pashto, you are also speaking an Indo-European language. The Indo-Europeans called themselves Aryans, and the name for Persia (Iran) and the name for Ireland, (Erin) both mean "Aryan."  But the Indo-Europeans did not originally come from anywhere in India or Europe.  About 3,500 BC, there was a group of related tribes scattered across the steppes of central Asia who all spoke a common language, a language  which scholars now call Proto-Indo-European. By 2,500 BC, there began an exodus in all directions that continued for 3,000 years.  First to leave were the Hittites, who went to Anatolia and the northern Levant about 2,500 BC.  Then there was an invasion of Egypt about 1,750 BC by chariot-driving red-bearded Indo-Europeans called the Hyksos.   And about 1,500 BC, a group of Indo-Aryans headed south and split into 3 groups: one conquered the Indus valley civilization of northern India, one conquered Iran, and one group, called the Mitanni, moved into the northern Zagros mountains next to the Hittites.  About 1,200 BC, Dorian Greek tribes invaded Greece and western Anatolia, disrupting and displacing a Mycenaean civilization of Greek speaking peoples who had migrated from the steppes somewhat  earlier.  After that, the Italians and Celts moved into southern and western Europe, followed by the Germanic peoples, and finally the Slavs.  And every one of these invasions was from that same central Asian grassland, and they all spoke an Indo-European language, though the one original language gradually evolved into many different tongues.  In fact, the entire early Mediterranean history is a story of non-Indo-European civilizations being invaded and destroyed by hoards of horsemen from the steppes, who then built new civilizations  which were themselves  to be destroyed by the next wave of horsemen from the steppes. And if there was one thing Aryans were good at, it was conquering.  By the start of the 20th century, 3/4 of the earth's population lived under  governments using Indo-European languages.  Why should this one small group be so successful?  Probably because they were the first people on earth to domesticate the horse.  It happens that the boundaries of their original range were exactly the same as the boundaries of the range of the Asian wild horse.  This was not a coincidence. For thousands of years, they had hunted the horse for food, much as the Plains Indians had hunted the Bison.  That's why they always happened to be where the horses were, and were therefore the first people to have an opportunity to domesticate them.

            Although the Aryans had begun making spoke-wheel carts almost as soon as they domesticated the horse, until their contact with Mediterranean cultures, about 3,000 BC, they lacked the technology to make a really good war chariot.  But by 2500 BC, armed with technologies they had learned from Mesopotamia, the Aryans had a good war chariot and knew how to use it.  And in the next millennium,  the conquest began.  And that's where Zarathustra came in.  The conquests  were unimaginably bloody. Whole villages were annihilated--men, women, and children were put to the sword. Zarathustra was a minor religious  functionary, an Aryan priest. He was appalled by the scale of the slaughter, and doubted if any of the gods approved of it, unless they were pretty evil gods.

            While bathing in a stream, he had a great epiphany which allowed him to simplify Aryan religion and give meaning to what he saw.  As Zarathustra saw it, of the 30 or so Aryan deities, there was really only one god, Ahura Mazda, the god of light and fire.  Mazda was good and wanted us to be good. There was another heavenly being, Ahriman, who was evil, and who wanted us to be evil.  Although Ahura Mazda was assisted by six other ahuras, and Ahriman was assisted by other daevas,  Ahura Mazda was really the only god.  The others were heavenly beings, perhaps like angels, but not really gods. So Zarathustra can be thought of as the first real  monotheist. He preceded Ikhnaton and also Moses by several hundred years. (Of course,  Moses was not really a monotheist;  he was a henotheist.  A henotheist agrees to worship only one god, whereas a monotheist believes that there is only one god. It is unlikely that the Hebrews would have a commandment requiring them worship only one god--- if they already believed that there was only one god.  According to Muesse, not till 2nd Ezekiel do we see any assertion that Hebrews considered their god to be the one and only god. )  Besides being the first monotheist, Zarathustra saw life as a grand struggle between good and evil, and he saw god, his one and only god,  as requiring us humans to take sides in that struggle.  He asserted that those who are on the side of good would be rewarded eternally, and when they die,  they would go to heaven--but the unjust would go to hell. But he also believed that time itself  had a beginning and would have an end. He prophesied that at the end of the world, there would be a last judgment. The dead would be resurrected and judged, along with those still living at that time. He also prophesied that a redeemer would be sent to save humanity, and that he would be born of a virgin.   Zarathustra also originated certain ritual practices,  including that people should pray five times a day, and that they should pray in the presence of fire.  Today, Christians do not generally pray five times a day, unless they are monks.  But they did until the late middle ages.  And Moslems still pray five times a day.  And do Christians pray in the presence of fire?  I was raised a Roman Catholic, and as an altar boy, one of my duties was to light the candles on the altar before each mass.  Now, since Zarathustra received his enlightenment while bathing in a river, I think we can assume that this might be the origin of baptism.

            If you were raised in the practice of any Western religion, you surely notice the parallels to Zoroastrianism.  Western preachers try not to emphasize these parallels as this might cast doubt on the uniqueness or divine origins of their own religion. But even the Eastern religions did not escape this influence. By the time that the  Buddha and Mahavira came onto the scene, Zoroastrian missionaries had already reached India. So these sages were already familiar with the basic ideas of Zarathustra, and so were their disciples.  Had that not been the case, the philosophies which flourished in the East might have been different.

            If you were raised in the practice any Ibrahimic religion, then you were probably taught that there is one god, that he is good, and that he wants you to be good.  And you may or may not have been taught that you will be eternally rewarded or punished by this god, or that there is a devil who would like you to be evil.   So, what most of you have been taught  is some kind of Zoroastrianism.  You may protest: "Yes, Zoroaster had these ideas--but so do nearly all major religions."   I would answer: "Of course they do----and they got these ideas from Zoroastrianism, either directly or indirectly."   We see such ideas as being pretty basic, so we might assume that if Zarathustra had never lived, someone else would certainly have thought of the same thing.  But perhaps not.  Religion began very early.  Consider that even the 30,000 year old cave paintings in Europe seem to show suggest some kind of shamanism, some primitive religious stirrings.  Yet, by Zarathustra's lifetime,  26,000 years later,  no one had yet gotten the idea that god wants us to be good.  They had 26,000 years to think about it,  and it had not yet occurred to anyone that the deity, if there be one, might have a preference that we not murder our neighbors.  Would we have waited another 26,000 years to get that message if Zarathustra had not come along? Who knows?

             I know what some of you may be thinking.  You're thinking that though all religions of the world claim to be dedicated to kindness, their adherents' actual record of behavior is so miserable that we'd be as well off with no religion at all.  But having no religion might not be the alternative that we would get. What if we continued to have religion-- but to a god who is evil and wants us to be evil.  (Would we have  hypocrites who would make an elaborate public pretense of being evil, but sneak away to do good things when no one was looking?)  More likely, what  we would get would be a devotion to gods who simply did not much care how we treated each other. This is the religion that the Romans had, and they were the one of the most brutal societies that ever lived.  Not only did they crucify tens of thousands of people for political reasons, in their final debauchery they crucified people in the arena just for sport.  Yet that all abruptly stopped when Rome converted to Christianity.   For about 1,200 years, from about 300 AD to 1,500 AD, the Christian church was firmly in charge of Europe, and much blood is on its hands.  But the usual  number murdered at the hands of Christian kings and church officials in any given year was infinitesimal compared to the scale of slaughter in pre-Christian Rome.  So the Axial Age changes in religion, changes that Rome never experienced until they embraced Christianity, were still a remarkable improvement.

            The only time most of us think of Zarathustra is when we hear Richard Strauss's tone poem,  "Thus Spake  Zarathustra".  And when we hear that grand opening codex, we think, "Wow! I don't remember who  Zarathustra was, but whatever he spake, it must have been pretty awesome!"   Trust me.  It was.