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A State of Mixture
Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity
By Richard E. Payne UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96153-1
CHAPTER 1
The Myth of Zoroastrian Intolerance
Violence and the Terms of Christian Inclusion
THE LEGACY OF KERDIR
A single religious authority has shaped our understanding of how Zoroastrians regarded the adherents and institutions of other religions. The mowbed Kerdir who served three successive kings of kings in the third century — Shapur I (r. 241–70), Ohrmazd I (r. 270–71), and Wahram I (r. 271–74) — was the only priest in the Sasanian period prolifically to have produced inscriptions. On the stone walls of the so-called Kaaba of Zoroaster, alongside an inscription of Shapur I and beneath relief sculptures of early Sasanian rulers, he recounted his career as the supervisor of the institutionalization of Zoroastrianism throughout the nascent empire. This inscription was duplicated on the neighboring reliefs of Naqsh-e Rustam and on the image of Wahram I at Sar Mashad, where Kerdir appears alongside the king of kings as a partner in rule. According to the mowbed's account of his own activities, he erected fire temples everywhere from the heart of Iran in Babylonia to its limits in Peshawar. He organized the performance of the Yasna and instructed believers in the principles of the Good Religion. He also claimed to have suppressed the other religions in Iranian territory: "The Zoroastrian religion [den mazdesn] and the priests held great authority in the empire [šahr]. The gods, water, fire, and domestic animals received satisfaction, and Ahreman and the demons received blows and suffering. The doctrine [keš] of Ahreman and the demons was expelled from the empire and became unbelief. The Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, Nazarenes, Christians, Baptizers, and Manichaeans were struck in the empire. Idols were destroyed, and the residences of demons were eliminated and became the place and seat of the gods." On the basis of this account, historians have argued that Kerdir oversaw a persecution of the named groups, inaugurating a project whose aim was the elimination of religious others, toward which subsequent Zoroastrian religious authorities worked until the end of the empire. If such was the goal, the flourishing of Jewish and Christian communities from the third century through the seventh suggests that they made little headway against these groups. The prophet Mani was slain at the behest of the court for rivaling the ritual power and cosmological knowledge of Zoroastrians, but there is no persuasive evidence for action against Christians or Jews during the era of his tenure. Nevertheless, histories of Zoroastrian interactions with Christians, Jews, and others in the Sasanian period often begin with, and rely on, Kerdir's self-representation as a paradigmatic example of how his fellow religious authorities, whether in the third century or the sixth, treated or wished to treat rival religious groups. He has provided the archetype of the persecutory Zoroastrian.
What follows questions whether Zoroastrian religious authorities were inherently persecutory, beginning with the most articulate member of their ranks. At first glance, Kerdir's inscription seems to lump together "the doctrine of Ahreman," idolatry, and the deviant religions as equivalently evil institutions that Zoroastrians should work to eliminate. Closer inspection, however, suggests important distinctions among these institutions that could have provided a basis for preserving certain religious groups within a Zoroastrian empire. Ahreman's keš, a term that could designate a doctrine or a sectarian group, was to be expelled. Idols and idolatrous places of worship were to be destroyed. The deviant religions were, by contrast, simply to be "struck" (zadan). This verb has been interpreted as implying destructive actions with a view to elimination. But a struck object is neither destroyed nor eliminated. It is, rather, subdued. Blows are instruments of discipline and subordination instead of destruction. Regardless of whether the mowbed realized the claims he pronounced in his inscriptions, he envisioned the suppression of religious others rather than their elimination, their subordination to the institutions of the Good Religion, which was to reign supreme in an Eranšahr embodying its cosmological ambitions. Christians, Jews, and others were to be disciplined, where supposed demon worshipers and idolaters were to be destroyed. It was this task of subordination that the mowbed set for himself. His primary goal was to place the Good Religion on solid institutional foundations in an era when the ideology of Iran was merely an idea, without fire temples, ritual performances, or laws as its anchors in space and society. He thus not only established such institutions but also propagated the superiority of the religion as the foundation of the new empire in inscriptions and rock reliefs. The reference to religious others in the inscriptions rhetorically defined the superior position of the Good Religion in relation to its known rivals at the same time as fire temples, a class of religious professionals, and laws were being created. The undertaking of actions physical or symbolic, such as violence against Christians, Jews, or others, was not necessarily an essential feature of the project of Kerdir and his successors.
The fine distinctions in Kerdir's verbs prefigure the views of later Zoroastrian religious authorities who allowed for the inclusion of subordinated religions in the empire. The third-century mowbed has too often been seen in isolation, largely on account of his industrious self-promotion. Scholars have generally privileged his voice as representative of Zoroastrian religious professionals since his inscriptions are the only extensive contemporary literary sources for their thought. But, for the reasons we have considered in the introduction, the views of Zoroastrian exegetes, scholars, and jurists that have been preserved in the ninth-century collections of Middle Persian literature should not be dismissed. They include voluminous discussions of the problem of the place of religious others in a Zoroastrian empire, with which Kerdir was perhaps the first to wrestle in writing. In her study of "tolerance and intolerance in Zoroastrianism," Mary Boyce juxtaposed the mowbed's claim of having struck Christians and others to the statements of Sasanian kings of kings and scholars hostile toward non-Zoroastrian groups, providing a catalog of intolerant views which argued that the supposedly destructive fantasies of Kerdir proliferated in the following centuries. What such studies of Zoroastrian thought and practice have overlooked are statements in the selfsame texts expressing a positive regard for the agden, "those of bad religion," within the empire. Zoroastrian discussions of bad religions as social and political problems were grounded in the concerns of late Sasanian scholars over the capacities of humans to contribute to the cosmological struggle that the kings of kings superintended in league with Ohrmazd. These scholars were not inclined to the simplistic, binary thinking and inveterate antipathy toward religious others that the label intolerant, often applied to them, evokes. The third-century mowbed's differentiation of bad religions into separate categories meriting distinct actions and approaches finds resonance in these later texts that evaluated religious others in terms of a hierarchy of better and worse rather than a binary of good versus evil. Their novel perspective on the religious landscape of late antiquity merits exploration.
Alongside the inscription of Kerdir and the more militant voices among the Zoroastrian scholars, historians have placed another, more voluminous corpus of sources: East Syrian histories of martyrs. As we saw in the introduction, there are nearly sixty accounts composed in the Sasanian era of Christians killed at the hands of Zoroastrian religious authorities in the fourth through early seventh centuries. These describe periods of persecution, radupye in Syriac, both before and after the recognition of the Church of the East in 410. Shapur II was believed to have persecuted Christians relentlessly from 340 to 379, the so-called Great Persecution that was paradigmatic for the framing of subsequent outbreaks of violence as time-bound, systematic radupaye. The reigns of Yazdgird I, Wahram V, Yazdgird II, Peroz, Husraw I, and Husraw II were each reported to have contained periods of persecution against the Church of the East, even though its rapidly developing institutions continued to expand unabated. The catalyst for violence was, in the hagiographical representations, the unwavering hostility of Zoroastrian religious authorities toward Christians. In the accounts of persecution, mowbed torment and kill Christians with bloodthirsty glee, devising ever more elaborate modes of torture and execution to inflict as much pain as possible on the persecuted. If their willingness to slay Christians and destroy churches was constant, their influence at the court of the king of kings was supposed to have fluctuated. Kings of kings who heeded the religious authorities persecuted Christians, while those with the will to ignore their demands did not. This framework for understanding and representing interactions between Zoroastrian religious authorities and Christian communities, ultimately derived from East Syrian self-representations, remains the historiographical consensus.
Periods of persecution, fluctuating relations between kings of kings and mowbed, and intolerant Zoroastrians are stock themes of historical writing on the Sasanian period that have been perpetuated in the absence of critical studies on the East Syrian and Armenian hagiographical sources on which these accounts are based. The Christian representation of Zoroastrians, in other words, has triumphed in the modern imagination of the past, regardless of whether East Syrian authors achieved the social and political ambitions they set for themselves in late antiquity. The introduction has highlighted the consistency of the Sasanian commitment to Zoroastrianism anchored in the idea of Iran. This chapter seeks to replace the commonplace of Zoroastrian intolerance around which historians have so frequently organized their analyses of Iranian society in late antiquity with a model of the differentiated, hierarchical inclusion of religious others rooted in Zoroastrian cosmological thought. It lays the foundations for the subsequent chapters, which examine the particular contexts in which Christians and Zoroastrians negotiated the terms of the former's inclusion in the empire. Concepts of tolerance and intolerance, redolent with notions of liberal political virtue, are unhelpful instruments for the analysis of ancient societies, not least because they fail to capture ancient understandings of religious difference and their corresponding practices. The image of the intolerant mowbed has obscured Zoroastrian concepts and practices of inclusion and exclusion that evolved in tandem with the empire. Dispensing with the language of tolerance allows for the analysis of the culturally and historically specific ways in which hierarchically organized groups, themselves shape-shifting entities, regulated their interactions with one another in theory and practice. Symbolic and physical acts of violence were instruments of organization and regulation in ancient political cultures, and decoding their significance can as often reveal the dynamics of cooperation as of conflict.
To reconstruct the institutions, including norms and practices, through which Zoroastrians structured their interactions with religious others, this chapter pursues two distinct objectives. First, we recover the cosmological perspective of Zoroastrian religious authorities on the culturally diverse population of Iran, which gave rise to a range of accounts of the place of bad religions in the social and political order. Rather than seek, or even imagine, the systematic exclusion of religious others, priestly scholars developed techniques for their regulation and disciplining, with the goal of ensuring that they did not jeopardize the operation of the institutions of the Good Religion. If ancient Zoroastrians are best known for their dualism, their concepts of mixture, intermingling, and hierarchical order will emerge as equally salient in Iranian political culture. Second, a strong correlation between such theoretical discussions and the political practice of the Iranian court will be demonstrated on the basis of a comprehensive and critical reexamination of the East Syrian hagiographical sources. East Syrian authors composed their works for polemical purposes, to construct communities defined through their experience of violence at the hands of their religious adversaries — Jews, Manichaeans, and especially Zoroastrians. They also drew from Roman martyrologies to compose the representations of Zoroastrian religious authorities and kings of kings as persecutors. Their accounts of how Zoroastrian authorities thought or behaved cannot be accepted as historical. The following sections, therefore, look beyond the stereotyped and polemical passages of the East Syrian hagiographical works to context-specific details concerning the actions of imperial authorities, such as names, dates, precise locations, and historically verifiable or plausible acts of mowbed or kings of kings. This reading of the corpus of East Syrian hagiography reveals the consistent, rather than fluctuating, use of violence against religious others by the Iranian court in particular circumstances as a means of establishing norms of interaction between Christian and Zoroastrian elites. These lines of research converge to show how the Zoroastrian institutions of the empire facilitated the expansion of Christian and Jewish communities throughout its history. Zoroastrians in late antiquity should be known for having practiced differentiated, hierarchical inclusion rather than intolerance.
A STATE OF MIXTURE
To understand how Zoroastrian elites regarded the human populations of their empire, we need to begin with the primordial creation, accounts of which established models for political action. Ohrmazd brought the physical world into being as a vehicle with which to defeat Ahreman. His creation was to pass through three successive three-thousand-year stages, according to the most prevalent schema, in order for the cosmological triumph to be achieved. This beneficent deity initially created the heavens, water, earth, and fire as well as the primordial plant, animal, and human as wholly good material elements that would serve him in the impending struggle with his evil counterpart. After three thousand years, Ahreman created material elements of his own — darkness and xrafstar, wicked animals — and penetrated the good creation with demonic powers, precipitating an era of confrontation between good and evil supernatural forces acting through their respective good and evil creations. This age of struggle constituted the three-thousand-year period of human history in which Zoroastrians found themselves in late antiquity. The arrival of a savior figure, the Sošyans, was to mark the end of the age, indeed the end of history, and the beginning of a world restored to its state of primordial perfection, the frašgird. The intervening period of human political history was known as the "state of mixture" (gumezišn). During the mixed age, Ohrmazd and his supernatural allies waged war against Ahreman by means of good creations, enlisting the stars against demonic planets, crafting mountains to make waters flow into pure, life-giving reservoirs, and revealing religion and its rites to humanity. Every component of the material world of necessity participated in the cosmic struggle. But humans played a special, even determinative, role. As fundamentally good creations, they contributed to Ohrmazd's restorative work by means of their mere existence, like flora and beneficent fauna. The revelation of Zoroastrianism, however, gave humanity a package of rituals and actions through which men and women could not only support the efforts of the good deity but also accelerate the gradual victory of good over evil, tipping the balance in the interim in favor of Ohrmazd even as humans continued to await the frašgird. It was the capacity to choose whether or not to serve the forces of good that distinguished humans from other corporeal creatures in the state of mixture.
The implications of this understanding of the nature of the world and humanity for the politics and society of the Iranian Empire cannot be underestimated. The empire was conceived as a vehicle — akin to Ohrmazd's original creation — for organizing collective actions to maximize the contribution of humanity to the cosmological struggle. Through the erection of fire temples for the performance of the Yasna, the extension of arable lands for the cultivation of plants, and the creation of legal institutions to heighten human fertility, Eranšahr anchored what was a global restorative project in the territories that the Sasanians ruled. The responsibility for organizing and operating these cosmological institutions rested with a privileged, comparatively narrow group of men: those descended from the first man, Gayomard, via the primordial kings through the Kayanian dynasty, which accepted and propagated the teachings and rituals of Zoroaster into the present — that is, the Sasanians and allied aristocratic houses that constituted the er, the "Iranians." To be Iranian was first and foremost to possess an ethical disposition transmitted via a lineage that positioned one as an ally of Ohrmazd more efficacious in facilitating the cosmological struggle than any other kind of human. This branch of humanity enjoyed such superior ethical qualities as loyalty, righteousness, and nobility that rendered theirs a "lineage of leaders" (dahibedan tohmag).
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Excerpted from A State of Mixture by Richard E. Payne. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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