In the period during which the two faiths had the most direct contact neither Christianity nor Zoroastrianism could be said to have had a univocal orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the first two centuries of the Christian church had revealed certain key themes and resolved several points of theological controversy within the religion, and Zoroastrian thought was achieving new levels of theological and polemical sophistication under the sponsorship of the early Sasanian kings.
One idea that was important to both faiths during late antiquity was ritual purity. Such eminent scholars of religious studies as Mary Douglas have attempted to locate similarities among the various understandings of purity in the religions of the world, but the purpose of this paper is just the opposite: to highlight the differences between ideas of purity, in particular the differences between the Christian and Zoroastrian conceptions. While the two faiths’ rituals regarding impurity are to a large degree similar to all cleansing rituals—washing with a liquid, water in the case of Christianity and ammonia-rich bull’s urine in the case of Zoroastrianism—the two theological explanations given for why purity is important bear little resemblance. This difference in rhetoric, as will be shown, reflects two contrasting understandings of ritual purity, each of which expresses certain concepts and preoccupations that the other religion would be unable to describe using its own language.
Zoroastrianism is monotheistic in some respects and dualistic in others, but its purity rituals emphasize its dualistic elements. In Zoroaster’s cosmology, time is divided into three ages, of which the contemporary one is the second, the time of “mixing” (Gumezisn) of good and evil. The prophet predicted that the third age, “separation” (Wizarishn), would come about when the forces of the evil being Ahriman had been defeated through the purification of the universe. Until that time, according to Zoroaster, Ahriman and Ohrmazd, the benevolent god, are engaged in a battle in which all of mankind is enlisted. The three pillars of Zoroastrian ethics – “good thoughts, good words, and good deeds” – are understood to be the mechanisms by which individuals are able to help Ohrmazd and weaken Ahriman. In purity rituals in particular, impure objects are understood to be the property of demonic forces and pure objects are understood to be resistant to them. In this territorial conflict, the two sides of good and evil are on essentially equal footing.
The act of purification should not be understood as devotional; a Zoroastrian priest’s attitude towards a purified object was not the same as his attitude towards the sacred fire of a fire-temple, truly an object of worship. Rather, sacrificial vessels were purified as a practical measure to guard against contamination of a ritual by evil spirits, and after being used in sacrifices the vessels were discarded. The taxonomy of purity and impurity is likewise amoral: impurity derives from “dead” objects, a classification which includes the obvious objects (human and animal corpses) but also any part of the body that becomes separated (nails, hair, semen, urine, menses, saliva, blood). Food, which likewise passes through the boundary between human body and outside world, is also subject to considerable scrutiny and precaution regarding purity.
It is important to note that impurity is not attributable to immoral action. The expulsion of semen involved in intercourse is considered to be unclean and couples are required to engage in a purification ritual afterward engaging in intercourse, but Zoroastrian scripture is emphatic that fruitful marriage is always preferable to celibacy. Unlike Christianity, Zoroastrianism’s theology includes no skepticism regarding sex; the fact that it carries with the inevitable consequence of impurity could not be said to imply anything about its moral standing as a behavior but rather renders it, at most, inconvenient.
However, while it is true that ritual impurity was not considered to reflect any moral failing, indifference to impurity certainly was. Zoroastrianism understands a separation between matter (getig) and spirit (menog), but the two are inextricably linked. One’s actions in the material world affect the cosmic battle between good and evil. As Zaehner points out, Zoroaster assigned purity and virtue eschatological significance: “. . . Zoroaster seems to have been interested in establishing the Kingdom of Righteousness here on earth.” Purity had to be maintained not simply as a loving tribute to the benevolence of the creator but as a concrete step towards an eschatological golden age.
Purity also had moral significance on the scale of the individual. Individual judgment, as described both in Zoroastrian scripture and non-canonical literature, takes place when the soul arrives at the “Bridge of the Requiter,” meets its spirit-double (den), and is judged according to the deeds of his life, a reckoning in which his adherence to purity laws is given considerable weight. The importance of purity to this judgment is highlighted by the prominence of impurity among the punishments of hell. The Arda Wiraz Namag, which details a virtuous man’s journey through hell, places greater emphasis on the “impurity and filth” involved in hell’s various torments than on the pain inflincted by them. Clearly, zealous maintenance of as much purity as can be achieved is morally relevant to each individual as well as to the human race at large.
The social and class implications of adherence to purity laws bear mention. While Mary Boyce suggests that purity laws were kept by high and low class Persians alike, the stringency of Zoroastrian purity rituals, and menstrual practices in particular, became markers of high social standing relative to such ethnic minorities as Rabbinic Jews. As Yaakov Elman explains:
Although medieval Talmudic commentaries assume that [the menstrual policy of tractate Niddah] was a rabbinically inspired severity, it is clear from Rava’s response to R. Pap (in B. Niddah 66a) that he considered this stringency to be a custom, and not a prohibition. The Babylonian Talmud itself testifies to the popular origin of this stringency—perhaps in response to a “holier than thou” attitude perceived by the populace as emanating from their Persian neighbors, a social pressure to which the rabbis themselves sometimes responded (e.g. B. Sanhedrin 37b). Surely, we must conclude that Babylonian Jewish women did not have to remain isolated on spare rations in a windowless hut for up to nine days, as was prescribed for Zoroastrian menstruant women.
Zoroastrians themselves were equally sensitive to the social implications of their purification rituals. Intermarriage with non-Zoroastrians was forbidden; the justification given was that non-Zoroastrian women, not keeping the menstrual laws, would be unclean. However, the effect of protecting the Persian elite against any incursion from ambitious outsiders interested in political and social power was incidentally, if not coincidentally, achieved. The rhetoric of pollution and impurity also appears in several anti-Jewish and anti-Christian polemics from Sasanian times, indicated the extent to which it was part of their self-image.
Christianity’s understanding of ritual purity is deeply connected with the controversy in the early Church over the place of Jewish law in the new Christian religion. Discussion often focused on the most prominent and distinctive laws: those regarding circumcision, kosher food practices, and the impurity of menstruant women. Saint Paul’s epistles put forward a decisive judgment on the question of kosher laws (“For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost”) and circumcision (“In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision”). However, the Church’s potential adoption of an idea of ritual purity similar to Judaism’s remained an open question, nowhere more clearly than in the debate over the observance of Jewish menstrual laws. A third century document known as the Didascalia Apostolorum implores female Jewish converts to Christianity to cease their observance of the laws of niddah (menstruation) on the grounds that to persist in observing niddah would devalue the sacrament of baptism. On the other hand, Dionysius of Alexandria believed that the impurity associated with menstruation was still relevant to Christianity inasmuch as it precluded contact with the Eucharist:
The question touching women in the time of their separation, whether it is proper for them when in such a condition to enter the house of God, I consider a superfluous inquiry. For I do not think that, if they are believing and pious women, they will themselves be rash enough in such a condition either to approach the holy table or to touch the body and blood of the Lord. . . [T]he individual who is not perfectly pure in soul and in body, shall be interdicted from approaching the holy of holies.
Even in Scripture, the importance of impurity is unclear. There is some ambiguity in the story told in Mark 5:25-34: when Christ feels “that virtue had gone out of him” after the woman with a twelve-year blood flow touches the hem of his garment: is this because he expended power in healing her, or because contact with her impurity had diminished his power? The woman’s fear at being identified as the one who had touched Christ’s garment suggests that the latter reading is plausible, which would indicate that the Christ of the Gospels accepted, or at least took seriously, the Levitical categories of purity and impurity.
Paul is adamant that Levitical dietary restrictions are irrelevant to believing Christians, but the New Testament is not clear on the broader question of food purity. Matthew 15:11 reads “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” However, Paul declares that Christians should not eat meat they know to be left over from an idolatrous sacrifice. His explanation that this rule is for “his sake that shewed it” ignores the question of food purity and focuses instead on reminding pagans of the folly of their sacrifices, and his subsequent exhortation to “eat or drink or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God,” if it is not to be taken as a blanket statement of antinomianism, is similarly uninstructive. Christians who considered pagan gods to be insubstantial fictions might subscribe to the belief that food consecrated to a nonexistent being would be morally indistinguishable from unconsecrated meat. However, many late antique religions regarded rival religions’ gods not as fictions but as demons—the Roman attitude towards the Jewish god, for example, or the Rabbinic attitude towards Christ —which would complicate an attempt to see meat that had been offered to idols as benign.
In addition to the controversial adaptation of Jewish purity to a Christian context, there is in late antique Christianity a prominent conception of purity that does not derive from the Jewish tradition. In a divergence from the traditions of both Judaism and Zoroastrianism, Christianity developed extended theological justifications for an ethical celebration of virginity and celibacy. The early monastic tradition from the desert fathers in Egypt to Basil the Great in Cappadocia insisted upon chastity for monastic brothers and sisters. The theological understanding of sexual purity rests upon the absolute priority of the next world relative to the vanity of the material world. By this logic, to become enslaved to sexual desire would be to have un-Christian attachment to worldly things. Christians were permitted to marry, but the Gospels emphasize that being a “eunuch for the kingdom of heaven” is to be preferred: “Him that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” Other kinds of bodily purification through ascetic trials, including fasting and abstaining from sleep, flourished among the anchoritic monks of Egypt.
While Dionysius of Alexandria can speak of being pure “in soul and in body” within a Christian context, Christianity does not have a concept of ritual purity in the physical and amoral sense in the way that Judaism and Zoroastrianism both do. Saint Pelagia was a courtesan prior to being saved and turning to extreme asceticism, but her transition from harlot to holy woman did not include any ritual of purification directed specifically towards her sexual impurity. Nevertheless, baptism rendered her not only newly Christian but newly “virgin.” It was her dedication to sexual purity that allowed her to regain this purity—a matter of spirit, not flesh. Tertullian admits in De Spectaculis that, even in the case of stadia and pagan spectacles, “it is not the places in themselves that defile us, but the things done in them.” In short, Christianity has some idea of purity “in body”—the idea of virginity, for example—but it almost always subordinate to purity “in soul.” Usually, the latter even has the power to confer the former, as in 1 Corinthians 7:18 (“Is any man called being circumcised? Let him not become uncircumcised. Is any called in uncircumcision? Let him not be circumcised”). Even bodily purity, therefore, is oriented towards the moral cultivation of the individual soul rather than towards the intrinsic importance of eradicating pollution in the physical world.
Having mentioned the social value of Zoroastrian purity laws relating to women, the importance of purity and especially virginity to Christian women also bears mention. Gillian Clark’s Women in Late Antiquity discusses the extent to which women achieved freedom from the constraints of having a husband either through consecration to Christ or through widowhood. These women used their independence to exert power within the Church. It was common for wealthy widows to select a priest or parish and become a patron of either charitable works or the arts. These women eventually became so influential (and their would-be heirs so frustrated) that Roman law adjusted to prevent widows from bequeathing money to the Church.
The rhetorical differences between Zoroastrian and Christian ways of talking about purity should be clear: the former is primarily material and done for the sake of the cosmic battle between good and evil while the latter is primarily spiritual and done for the sake of moral betterment through diminished worldliness. However, there are implicit as well as explicit differences between the two. For instance, Zoroastrian purity was a social phenomenon: disposing of a corpse within the constraints of the purity regulations governing burial requires the cooperation of a large group; conspicuous menstrual protocols reinforced solidarity within the Sasanian Persian elite; many of the purity regulations regarding the disposal of nails and hair required a communal repository on the outskirts of town, which discouraged the solitary living practiced by Christian monks. Christian asceticism, on the other hand, had the opposite effect. Anchoritic monks were obviously solitary, but even coenobitic monks spent the greatest part of their time in solitude. Where Zoroastrianism used purity to call attention to the importance of the material world, Christianity used it to call attention to the material world’s utter vanity. Where Zoroastrian purity is inclusive, involving every member of the community in order to enlist them in an ultimately eschatological battle, Christian purity is a method for distinguishing between the saintly and the insufficient, those who “can receive it” and those who cannot. The attempt to integrate those Persians not involved in the priestly hierarchy of the fire-temples into Zoroastrian religious life contrasts sharply with Christian asceticism’s belief that Christians who rejected celibacy were categorically less holy than those who took on that burden.
A contrast between Zoroastrian and Christian visions of the eschaton further illustrate the differences between the two. The final stage of human history as inaugurated by a cataclysmic religious event is central in both faiths, but the nature of the cataclysm varies. In Zoroastrianism, this world will be cleansed by the forces of Ohrmazd and an era of peace will begin. Christianity, on the other hand, does not offer to purify the existing earth but instead offers a new one on which the era of peace will take place. Both faiths’ cosmologies begin with a narrative of a perfect world corrupted by some supernatural evil influence, but their solutions diverge. The Zoroastrian emphasis on purifying this world and the Christian emphasis on transcending it make sense in this context.
The theological trajectory of Christianity in late antiquity seems to suggest that the Church was moving away from ritual purity and towards purity of the spirit. This skepticism regarding the corruptibility of objects can be seen in Persian Christian martyrologies. These stories often signal the dramatic conversion of their main characters by having them commit some ritual outrage: for example, the fourth-century story of a female saint who stomps out a sacred fire during “the time of her impurity” in order to indicate her contempt for Zoroastrianism. Also, Christians living in Babylon did not attempt to mimic elite Zoroastrian menstrual practices in the way that Jewish women in the same area did, not because they were necessarily less socially ambitious but because their own faith lacked even an approximate equivalent to the Zoroastrian custom, and so they were without any practice upon which they could base any rival development in that direction. These facts indicate that Christians who came into contact with Babylonian Zoroastrians were skeptical of their emphasis on ritual purity, observing very few similarities between Zoroastrian purity and purity in their own religion.
To assert any influence in either direction, either through mimicry or repudiation, is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is important to note that merely the use of the concept of purity was insufficient to forge a significant common ground between the Christians and Zoroastrians who lived near one another in late antiquity. Both attempted not merely to manage sinfulness but to purge it, and so developed ways of talking about purity and how it can be achieved. However, the differences between the two faith’s attitudes towards the idea of purity renders this parallel essentially superficial.
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