W. Rhys Davids), that system of religion simply
ignored the conception of an All in All. And this not at all on
philosophical grounds, but because its aims were entirely practical. For
the aim of its founder was to show men how by a virtuous life, or lives,
they might at last attain annihilation--or, at any rate, the extinction
of the individual self, the apparent separateness of which was, in his
view, the source of all misery. And if he could teach his followers to
attain that salvation, he was entirely indifferent as to the opinions
they might hold about the ultimate nature of the world, provided only
that they did not fall into any heresy which proclaimed an immortal
soul.[8]
[Sidenote: Persian Religions, not strictly Pantheistic.]
[Sidenote: A World Drama or Process is a Human, not a Divine Aspect of
Things.]
The accounts given to us by the best authorities on Zoroaster and
Parseeism scarcely justify us in thinking the religion of the Zendavesta
to be Pantheistic in our sense of the term. For though it would appear
that Ormuzd (or Ahuramazda), the God of light and goodness, originated
in, or was born from and one with a nameless impersonal Unity, such as
may answer to Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable," it cannot be accurately
said that, according to the Persian view of the world, there is nothing
but God. For, to say nothing of the apparently independent existence of
the principle of darkness and evil called Ahriman, the relation of the
Amshaspands, or supreme spirits, and of the Izeds, or secondary spirits,
as well as of the Fereurs, or divine ideas to the impersonal Unity,
seems to be rather that of emanations, than parts of a Whole.
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