Robert Charles Zaehner

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Robert Charles Zaehner (1913 - 1974) was a British academic who specialised in Eastern religions. He was also an intelligence officer.

Contents

[edit] Life

Born April 8th 1913 in Sevenoaks, Kent, the son of Swiss immigrants, Zaehner was educated nearby at Tonbridge School. Later admitted to Christ Church, Oxford, he studied Greek, Latin, Persian, and Avestan, gaining first class honours in Oriental Languages. In 1936–37 he studied Pahlavi with Sir Harold Bailey at Cambridge, where he began work on his Zurvan, a Zoroastrian Dilemma. During World War II he served starting in 1943 as a British intelligence officer at the British Embassy in Tehran; thereafter he filled a diplomatic role there until 1947. It was in Iran that he became a Roman Catholic.[1]

Back in Britain he pursued his academic research while also working as an MI6 officer. During 1949 he was stationed in Malta for the training of anti-Communist Albanians. In 1950 he secured appointment as Lecturer in Persian at Oxford University. He returned briefly to Iran to perform government service. Back at Oxford in 1952 he was elected Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics. He served in this academic post until his death in 1974. He delivered the Gifford Lectures, 1967-1969.[2]

When in Tehran during 1951, he held the rank of Counsellor for a period of one year. In fact, he continued as an MI6 officer, now in an effort to protect Shah Reza Pahlavi's hold on the Peacock Throne from the republican, left-leaning Premier of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. He also was assigned to preserve Iran's oil production for a British government-controlled entity, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In the 1960s, MI5 counterintelligence officer Peter Wright questioned Zaehner about allegations that he had been a spy for the Soviet Union, harming British intelligence operations in Iran and Albania during the period following the War. Wright wrote in his 1987 book Spycatcher that Zaehner's denials had convinced him that the Oxford don had remained loyal to Britain.[3]

He died on November 24th 1974. He never married.

[edit] Academic works

His reputation rests primarily on his studies of Zoroastrianism, notably his 1955 book, Zurvan, a Zoroastrian dilemma, an original discussion of the later Zurvanite deviation from the reigning dualist orthodoxy (probably the original Zoroastrian doctrine). Zaehner also wrote the more accessible The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (1961), which explores the era of the founding of the religion by its prophet (for whom Zaehner gives traditional sixth century dates), and later its decline, when there arose the doctrines of the Zurvan i Akanarak [Infinite Time].[4] Facets of his interpretation of Zoroastrian religious history are novel.[5]

Zaehner wrote extensively on comparative religion,[6] as well as on mysticism. He criticized the simple idea of the mystical unity of all religions, basing his contrary ideas and proposals on accepted texts which describe the experience of mystics from different traditions, and their interpretive theology.[7][8] In his book comparing the mystical literature and practice of Hinduism and Islam, he began by describing and discussing four different types of mysticism found in the history of the Hindu tradition, and a fifth from Buddhism.[9] During the 1940s which he spent in Iran he had returned to the Christian faith, converting to Catholicism; accordingly, he also published several comparative works expressly from that perspective.

Zaehner gave the Gifford Lectures during the years 1967-1969. In these sessions he presented a grand historical overview of how the different religions have nurtured and interpenetrated each other, with an historically obfuscated result that neighboring religions would develop the other's theological insights, as well as employ the other's distinctions to accent their own doctrines. Zaehner also provided a suggestive commentary.[10]

[edit] Popular Works

Like Aldous Huxley he had taken mescalin, but he came to a different conclusion. In his 1957 book Mysticism. Sacred and Profane. An Inquiry into some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience, he aims to uphold a distinction between monism on the one hand and theistic mysticism on the other. In part he relies on the personal experience of Martin Buber (Preface). He thus sets himself against Huxley's idea of the Perennial Philosophy.

In his Our Savage God (1974), especially in his essay "Rot in the Clockwork Orange" at pages 19-73, he argued against aspects of an oriental monism which he saw as leading logically to the excesses not only of Timothy Leary, or of Aleister Crowley, but ultimately to those of Charles Manson. On this later, he seems to follow the book by Ed Sanders, The Family, with its melodramatic philosophical take on the murders.

[edit] Quotes

The whole ascetic tradition, whether it be Buddhist, Platonist, Manichaean, Christian or Islamic, springs from that most polluted of all sources, the Satanic sin of pride, the desire to be "like gods".[11]

There is indeed a sharp division between those religions whose characteristic form of religious experience is prayer and adoration of Pascal’s God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob on the one hand, and religions in which sitting postures designed to find the God within you are thought to be the most appropriate ways of approaching the deity.[12]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ See below at External Link, the "Gifford Lecture Biography."
  2. ^ See below at External Link, the "Gifford Lecture Biography."
  3. ^ Peter Wright with Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher (Toronto: Stoddart 1987).
  4. ^ Zaehner, Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (New York: Putnam 1961) at 33; 181.
  5. ^ Sometimes Zaehner will differs with, e.g., Mary Boyce, i.e., for discounting the Parthian period, as not known to be authentically Zoroastrian. Compare: her Zoroastrians. Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1979, 1985) at 80-82; and, Zaehner, Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (1961) at 22, 175. Boyce also favors an earlier dating (1400 to 1000 B.C.) for the prophet Zarathustra in her A History of Zoroastrianism (Leiden/Köln: E.J.Brill 1975) at 190.
  6. ^ He focused primarily on Hinduism and Islam. E.g., in The Comparison of Religions (1958). Yet he demonstrated wide learning across many areas, e.g., in his Christianity and other Religions (1964).
  7. ^ E.g., Zaehner, Mysticism. Sacred and Profane (Oxford Univ. 1957, 1961) at 168.
  8. ^ Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (Univ.of London 1960, reprint 1969) at vii-viii.
  9. ^ Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (1960, 1969) at 6,, in connection with S. N. Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy (Cambridge 1951), and Hindu Mysticism (Chicago 1927).
  10. ^ The Lectures were later published by Zaehner as Concordant Discord. The Interdependence of Faiths (Oxford Univ. 1970).
  11. ^ Zaehner, Our Savage God (1974) at 235.
  12. ^ Zaehner, Our Savage God (1974) at 234.

[edit] Zaehner Bibliography

  • Zurvan. A Zoroastrian Dilemma. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955.
  • The Teachings of the Magi. A compendium of Zoroastrian beliefs. George Allen & Unwin, 1956.
  • Mysticism: Sacred and Profane. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1957.
  • The Comparison of Religions London: Farber & Farber 1958.
  • At Sundry Times. An essay in the comparison of religions. London: Farber & Farber 1958.
  • Hindu and Muslim Mysticism. University of London, Athlone Press, 1960.
  • The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1961.
  • Hinduism. Oxford University Press, London, 1962.
  • The Convergent Spirit. Towards a dialectics of Religion. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1963.
  • Matter and Spirit. Their convergence in Eastern Religions, Marx, and Teilhard de Chardin. Harper & Row, New York, 1963.
  • The Catholic Church and World Religions. London: Burns & Oates 1964.
  • Christianity and other Religions. New York: Hawthorn Books 1964.
  • Concordant Discord. The Interdependence of Faiths. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1970.
  • Evolution in Religion. A study of Sri Aurobindo and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Oxford Univ. 1971.
  • Dialectical Christianity and Christian Materialism. London: Oxford Univ. Press 1971.
  • Drugs, Mysticism and Make-believe. Collins, London, 1972.
  • Our Savage God. The Perverse use of Eastern Thought. Sheed & Ward, New York, 1974.
  • Foolishness to the Greeks. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer 1974.
  • The City within the Heart. Crossroad, New York, 1981.

EDITOR OR TRANSLATOR:

  • Hindu Scriptures. Translated and edited by R.C.Zaehner. London: J.M.Dent 1966.
  • The Bhagavad Gita. With commentary based on the original sources. Oxford Univ. 1969.
  • The Concise Encyclopedic of Living Faiths. Edited by R.C.Zaehner. Hawthorn Books, New York, 1959.

[edit] Other material

  • Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: their Religious Beliefs and Practices. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1979.
  • Peter Wright with Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher. Toronto: Stoddart 1987.

[edit] External Link

Gifford Lecture Biography

[edit] See also

Sacred-profane dichotomy