Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [117]
A great innovation of this period, in the Roman Empire as well as its arch-enemy the Persian Empire, was the possibility of individual choice in matters of religion. Everyone participated in the cult of his own city in times past and was theoretically free to give such other worship as time and pocketbook allowed. But the choices were greatly limited by the local nature of village life. All that changed in imperial cities. And the bigger the empire, the more available choices. Cosmopolitanism was greatly stimulated by the conquest of Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persia as well as the Eastern Mediterranean Basin. By enforcing the spread of Greek language, Alexander and his successors brought everyone into communication in an unprecedented way. This was a tremendous opportunity as well as a tremendous threat to ancient religions. All over the known world, religions, including Egyptian religion, Judaism, Babylonian religion, as well as Christianity, Manichaeanism, and the philosophical schools of Greece, became open and attractive to people who lived far from the original home of the religion due to the ease of communication and travel. Each religion developed a “diaspora,” or portable form, that first helped its own adherents while they lived far from home and later could and did attract people from all over the empire. Christianity and Manichaeanism had particularly formidable missionizers.
The early Sasanian Empire took action against this rampant multiculturalism. The result was the emergence of a Zoroastrian orthodoxy and suppression of a variety of alternative Zoroastrianisms. Competing religions were targeted even more for suppression. The first Sasanian kings, with their famous chief priests, Kartir and Tansar, began a systematic repression of the missionary religions within their empire. Judaism suffered from this persecution but perhaps, in retrospect, it was sheltered by its small numbers, restricted ethnicity, and lack of missionary zeal.
The results were more catastrophic for Christianity and Manichaeanism. They were immediately perceived as threats and persecuted severely, as Zoroastrian, Jewish, Manichaean, and Christian sources all attest. Zoroastrian orthodoxy emerged therefore partly as a defense against the perceived threat of Christian and Manichaean missionizing. Within the Zoroastrianism of the period, philosophical literature, which had already taken on the characteristics of a quest, began to treat other religions with skepticism. The Dâstân-i Mēnōk-i Krat, “the Law of the Spirit of Wisdom,” begins in the following way:
He went forth in the world in search of wisdom, from kingdom to kingdom and from province to province, and enquired, examined and comprehended concerning the several faiths and beliefs of those people whom he considered foremost in knowledge….36
The start is a concession to open-mindedness and cultural pluralism, which is part of the history of Zoroastrianism. It subjects many faiths to scrutiny with a standard perhaps a bit too Zoroastrian for current tastes in comparative religion, but it expresses the hope that faiths will teach the relationship between wisdom and the moral achievements of every person. This kind of writing would be impossible in a missionizing faith.
At the same time, we find Zoroastrian tracts explicitly designed to defeat the thought of other religions, as in the Škand gumānig-wizār (“A Trenchant Resolver of Doubts”), a tractate against Manichaeanism written by Mardan Farouk. It makes instructive reading when compared and contrasted with Augustine’s tractate against the Manichaeans. Augustine disliked Manichaean dualism, which Mardan Farouk found tolerable if impaired, while Augustine liked Manichaean asceticism, though he found it extreme, while Mardan Farouk found insufferable any ascetic practices at all. No wonder Manichaeanism disappeared,