Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/191



Belief in an intermediary spirit between God and the world. From the days of Thales (about 600 ), the head of the school of Miletus, the Greek thinkers were in touch with the Orient. The Ionians were in close contact with the Persians. Pythagoras, we have seen, was believed by the classical writers to have been the pupil of Zoroaster, though several centuries intervened between them. Numenius of Apamea says that Pythagoras and Plato reproduce the ancient wisdom of the Magi and Brahmans, Egyptians and Jews. Alexandria became later a cosmopolitan seat of learning, and the intellectual East and West met there It was here that Judaism and afterwards Christianity were Hellenized. The wisdom of the East was held in high esteem at Alexandria. Persian influence, it seems, had been felt in Greece in the early formative period of its philosophy. Zarathushtra, we have noticed, postulated a quasi-independent spirit intermediary between the godhead and the universe. Anaxagoras calls it noûs, acting between God and the world as the regulating principle of existence. Plato says in his Timæus that the universe becomes an organism through the universal World-Soul that is created by the Demiurge, the Supreme Deity.

The Old Testament refers to the Spirit of Yahweh. Philo Judaeus unites the Greek and Jewish ideas about Logos and says that Logos is the first-born Son of God and acts as a vicegerent of God between God and the world. He is the prototypal Man after whose image all men are created. Logos is something more than Plato's Idea of the Good, because, like Spenta Mainyu, he is creatively active. In common with Spenta Mainyu, Logos is not a personal being, and like Spenta Mainyu again, he appears sometimes as identified with God and at other times seems to be an attribute of God. The Avestan texts refer to Spenta Mainyu and his adversary Angra Mainyu as thworeshtar or the fashion-