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Warfare in the Cosmos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

George Boas
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Extract

If one were to arrange the history of the ideas of violence and aggression in periods, the first would be that in which such evils were accepted as an integral part of cosmic history. I refer to what we know of Zoroastrianism. According to this complex of ideas there is a constant battle going on between the forces of evil and those of good, a battle whose ground extended to the limits of the universe. Little if anything is known of the sources of this cosmology but judging from appearances it looks as if they were the frank acceptance of the empirical observation that evil is an active force, autonomous and normally present in all human affairs. History would seem to be the result of an ever-living struggle between evil and the good. That the two sets of contradictory forces are given divine names, Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, is of no importance here. What is of importance is the acceptance of the evil powers as something inevitable and the relegation of the triumph of goodness to the infinitely remote future.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 20 , Issue 78 , June 1972 , pp. 38 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 I use the translation of L. H. Mills in the Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max Müller, Oxford 1887, vol. 31.

2 See her "Un Episode de la rencontre Est-Ouest, Zoroastre et Héraclite," in Etudes Présocratiques, Paris, 1970.

3 Translation of R. G. Bury, in the Loeb Classical Library, 1952, p. 55.

4 Satan appears by name only three times in the O.T., his most impressive appearance being in the prologue to the Book of Job where he is a tempter. So in I Chronicles 21, 1 we read, "And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel." His third appearance is in Zechariah 3.1, "And he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him." Hence it is fair to say that a supernatural agent of evil did exist in the popular mind. Compare this with the speech of Dragon in the Acts of Thomas, 32. W. F. Barnett in his article on Satan in the Catholic Encyclopedia says, "Contact with Persian demonology probably influenced Judaism to solidify its concept of Satan; human life and history with their conflicts became the battleground between good and evil, between God and Satan. A transcendental dualism was thereby introduced into Judaism for the first time."

5 Froissart may not have been a reliable historian of economics and politics but he does represent the feelings of chivalric society. Cf. the idea of vengeance in Greece in E. Rohde, Psyche, pp. 178 ff., English translation, N. Y. 1925.

6 Though this is a commonplace, it may be just as well to refer to Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, par. 200 and 260.

7 Cf. Carlyle's On Heroes and Hero-Worship, Lecture III, Everyman edition, p. 324. The Hero in Carlyle is "sent" by God. He sees the essence, super-temporal, in things and thus penetrates through their out husk. But he also, like Dante, è stato all'Inferno.