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When a Church Made One of These Positions a Heresy

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When a Church Made One of These Positions a Heresy

Most of this cluster of positions is philosophical rather than disciplinary, argued over rather than ruled on. Metaphysical dualism of good and evil is the exception, because more than one church body has formally condemned it rather than merely disagreed with it.

Manichaeism, teaching two eternal principles of light and darkness locked in cosmic struggle, was condemned repeatedly by the early church, and Augustine's own decade as a Manichaean hearer before his conversion gave Western Christian anti-dualism its most influential critic from the inside. Centuries later, Catharism, a medieval dualist movement strongest in southern France, taught a comparable division between a good spiritual God and an evil material creator, and it was suppressed rather than merely refuted: the Albigensian Crusade from 1209 and the Fourth Lateran Council's 1215 canons directed against heresy together ended it as an organised movement in the West.

The reason given, then and since, is usually the problem it appears to solve too easily. Dualism accounts for evil without compromising a good God's power, but only by dividing sovereignty itself, and the monotheistic traditions have consistently judged that price too high, preferring accounts of evil that leave omnipotence and goodness both intact even at the cost of a harder philosophical problem. Zoroastrianism, by contrast, built its cosmology on the division rather than treating it as an error to be excluded, and never faced an equivalent internal suppression for holding it.

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