dualism

dualism, in religion, the doctrine that the world (or reality) consists of two basic, opposed, and irreducible principles that account for all that exists. It has played an important role in the history of thought and of religion.

Nature and significance

In religion, dualism means the belief in two supreme opposed powers or gods, or sets of divine or demonic beings, that caused the world to exist. It may conveniently be contrasted with monism, which sees the world as consisting of one principle such as mind (spirit) or matter; with monotheism; or with various pluralisms and polytheisms, which see a multiplicity of principles or powers at work. As is indicated below, however, the situation is not always clear and simple, a matter of one or two or many, for there are monotheistic, monistic, and polytheistic religions with dualistic aspects.

Various distinctions may be discerned in the types of dualism in general. In the first place, dualism may be either absolute or relative. In a radical or absolute dualism, the two principles are held to exist from eternity; for example, in the Iranian dualisms, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, both the bright and beneficent and the sinister and destructive principles are from eternity.

In a mitigated or relative dualism, one of the two principles may be derived from, or presuppose, the other as a basis; for example, the Bogomils, a medieval heretical Christian group, held that the Devil is a fallen angel who came from God and was the creator of the human body, into which he managed by trickery to have God infuse a soul. Here the Devil is a subordinate being and not coeternal with God, the absolute eternal being. This, then, is clearly a qualified, not a radical, dualism. Both radical and mitigated types of dualism are found among different groups of the late medieval Cathari, a Christian heretical movement closely related to the Bogomils.

Another and perhaps more important distinction is that between dialectical and eschatological dualism. Dialectical dualism involves an eternal dialectic, or tension, of two opposed principles, such as, in Western culture, the One and the many, or Idea and matter (or space, called by Plato “the receptacle”), and, in Indian culture, maya (the illusory world of sense experience and multiplicity) and atman-brahman (the essential identity of self and ultimate reality). Dialectical dualism ordinarily implies a cyclical, or eternally repetitive, view of history. Eschatological dualism—i.e., a dualism concerned with the ultimate destiny of humanity and the world, how things will be in the “last” times—on the other hand, conceives of a final resolution of the present dualistic state of things, in which evil will be eliminated at the end of a linear history constituted of a series of unrepeatable events instead of a cyclical, repetitive one. The ancient Iranian religions, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, and gnosticism—a religio-philosophical movement influential in the Hellenistic world—provide examples of eschatological dualism. A type of thought, such as Platonism, that insists on a profound harmony in the cosmos, is thus more radically dualistic, because of its irreducibly dialectical character, than Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, with their emphasis on the cosmic struggle between two antithetical principles (good and evil). Midway between these extremes is gnostic dualism, which has an ontology (or theory of being) of an Orphic-Platonic type (see below Among ancient civilizations and peoples) but which also affirms the final disappearance and annihilation of evil with the eventual destruction of the material world—and thus comprises both dialectical and eschatological dualism.

In philosophy, dualism is often identified with the doctrine of transcendence—that there is a separate realm or being above and beyond the world—as opposed to monism, which holds that the ultimate principle is inside the world (immanent). In the disciplines concerned with the study of religions, however, religious dualism refers not to the distinction or separation of God and the world but to the doctrine of two basic principles, a doctrine that, moreover, may easily be compatible with a form of monism (e.g., Orphism or the Advaita school of Vedanta) that makes the opposition between the One and the many absolute and sees in multiplicity merely a fragmentation (or illusory obliteration) of the One.