Meditate, loving the vile

It is usually reasonably easy to love those who are possessed of attractive qualities. Zoroastrianism demands love of those who are vile. There was probably no time in Zoroastrian history when this was more difficult, since the moral culture of western societies today pro-jects an optimistic view of human nature which is utterly unlike the way most people actually are. Yet the unfavorable contrast does not appear to upset the basic belief, now so widespread, that humanity is essentially good, and that individual men and women are so worthwhile that they deserve immortality. The last point is meant seriously. Zoroastrians have always followed the words of Zarathushtra himself in teaching that at the end of the world there is judgment, and that like the sheep and the goats, the people of the world will be divided between the virtuous, or those aspiring with all their strengths to virtue, and the corrupt.

Today, however, there seems to be a strong tide flowing against discrimination of any kind — at least in the western world — when it comes to human worth; almost everyone who bothers to think about it, including probably a majority of believers in Zoroastrianism, suppose that everyone merits eternal life. A few rotten apples are left in the barrel: paedophiles and mass murderers — the demons singled out by the Press — racists and perhaps, drug dealers, have no place in the secular kingdom of the righteous. But in general western trained and western minded people are universalists, and the elevated estimate of human nature which now prevails will not allow for any statistically significant numbers to be destined for extinction.

When everyone is thought to be so lovely, how is it that real people, the people of everyday encounter, can be so awful? The contrast is left tantalizingly unrecognized. Zoroastrians, as a matter of religious belief, see humanity as deeply flawed: for them love of the dreadful becomes a real discipline, a means of achieving growth in the moral attrition of familiar experience.

For the humanists, for whom men and women are doctrinally essentially good, the frequent confrontation with the plain evidence of the wrongness of their convictions appears undisturbing. So the awful characteristics of others become attributed to the chances of social conditioning. There also exists a large category of pathological moralists who are drawn either professionally or privately to interfering in the lives of others. Love thy neighbor, a popular concept in a secular sense, can be interpreted within a culture of welfare entitlements and other provisions of the state which do not require personal involvement. Zoroastrianism is about the love for a neighbor. And love hurts, it involves real sacrifice, it goes against the grain of our nature in all but the most favored circumstances. It exists indiscriminately in relation to the good and the bad, and it makes us like Zoroaster. The intrinsic pessimism about human nature in the Zoroastrian view of things is more than compensated by a supreme optimism about the great love of Ahura Mazda. The sign of its presence is when people love one another, not because they are nice but because they share the universality of sin.

FURHOK K. TANGREE

La Roche-sur-Foron

France