This is Communio Sanctorum, the history of the Christian Church, season two.

We're going to go forward in time from our last episode nearly a millennium.

Last time we talked about the Gnostics and the serious challenge that they presented at the

early church.

The dualism that lay at the heart of Gnosticism continued to rear its hoary head in the

centuries that followed.

It was part and parcel of the Zoroastronism and the Manichaeanism that was rooted in Persia

and was the official faith of the Sassanid Empire. Dualistic ideas were so popular, they managed

to infiltrate many Christian communities in both the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire.

When Rome fell and Byzantium carried on in its place, the influence of dualism

lingered. Church leaders were able to hold it at bay by using the work of earlier fathers

who fought Gnosticism. But as those works fell out of use, dualism resurged. This dualism came in

many forms, as we will see. But the basic idea was that the forces

of light, good, and God are on one side, with the powers of darkness, evil, and the devil on

the other. And if your response to that is, wait, isn't that what the Bible says? There's another

important component that we need to insert.

In dualism, the two sides are equal in relevance and power. They are co-eternal, and in fact,

going way back to the beginning, they were originally joined into a hole that somehow got split

and led to the creation of the physical universe.

And if all of this sounds vaguely like the plot for an upcoming superhero movie,

it's all just coincidence, or is it?

The expression that most forms of dualism take

...