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lxviii
VENDIDAD.
$ 3. Alexander's invasion brought in its wake political and moral anarchy. Zoroastrianism did not perish ; its dogmas, its worship, and part of its mythology survived ; but for want of a sacred authoritative book, there was no Zoroastrian orthodoxy. At the same time, the barriers between East and West being broken, all religions and systems were brought face to face. The religious question became the order of the day. Buddhism and Brahmanism pushed from the East, Judaism from the West, Hellenism ruled all over Iran. In the systems that from all the four points of the compass spread into Iran, either with a conscious propagandist spirit, or through the slow, blind influences of every day contacts, Zoroastrianism found both what repelled and what attracted it. Its practical and moral ideal revolted against the inert asceticism of Buddhism, the ethical indifference of Brahmanism, and the superstitious, low worship of immoral Devas.
$ 4. Greece and Palestine, on the contrary, brought to it novel, fascinating, and edifying thoughts. How far and deep Hellenism made its influence felt is symbolically expressed on the coins of the Philhellen Arsacidae. Not that I think that Zeus impressed in any active way the worshippers of Ahura, though Herodotos and Aristotle had recognised their affinities, as the Sassanians did later on. It was Greek philosophy that reacted on the Zoroastrian schools. Platonism was there, as it was in Western Asia,
the bond between the East and Greece.' What struck the Mazdean sages most in it was what at the same time impressed the Hellenist Jews so inuch: the idea of the Logos, that divine intelligence abstracted from God and interposed between him and the world; also the concept of an ideal world, the heavenly unseen prototype of the material one. After the Iranian Logos, Vohu Manô, rose the Amshaspands, to share with him the government of the soul and the world. Then came a host of divine abstractions, to impersonate all the spiritual and material forces of nature. In spite of the dryness and scholastic rigour with which the doctors invested Mazdeism, one cannot help admiring the practical good sense and idea of proportion
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