Influence of Zoroastrian Dualism on the modern religious and philosophic ideas of Europe

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Thomas Hyde who was studying Zoroastrian doctrines in Oxford at the end of the seventeenth century, coined the word "dualism". This was taken over by Bayle and later by Leibniz. Christian Wolff, Kant's mentor, extended its use to metaphysics, applying it to the Cartesian doctrine which views "thought and matter" as two mutually independent substances. Against this dualism, Kant, Spinoza, then later Fichte and Hegel reacted with idealism, and the positivists with materialism.

Plethon was one of the first who in his writings talked about Zoroastrian and Platonic systems and placed his Magnum Opus, the Laws, under the double patronage of Zoroaster and Plato. Among those who attempted a compromise between Christianity and Platonism - itself supposed to have been derived from Zoroasterianism, we may cite not only Bessarion, Pico della Mirandola, Marsile Ficino, and Erasmus, but also Franciscus Patricius, the editor of the larger recension of the Chaldaic Oracles, who wrote that:

Zoroaster, first of all people, almost laid the foundations, however, rough, of the Catholic Faith. (Duchesne-Guillemin, Western Response to Zoroaster, p. 4)

To the Christians, Iran had always been, above all, the homeland of the Three Wise Men who guided by a star, had come to prostrate themselves at Bethlehem. Zoroaster and the Magi used to be cited by the Apologists from Justin onwards as among those external witnesses they call upon to corroborate and justify the truth of Christianity to pagans.

H. H. Shaeder tries to find an Iranian origin for Christianity. He writes:

With the knowledge of the Avesta, there arose the temptation to search for concealed sources of primitive Christianity in the Iranian religion. (ibid., p. 16, and Goethe's Erlebnis des Ostens, p. 134)

Zoroaster’s influence in the European literature and thought can be seen in works of such imminent men as Voltaire, Diderot, Goethes, Byron, Wordsworth and Shelley.