Good and Evil. The contrast between Good and Evil
in Paradise Lost, or between Light and Darkness in,
say, Zoroastrianism is, from our broad approach, a
symmetry by polarity. As a religious tenet in advanced
theological stages, this symmetry is rational and ideal-
istic, in earlier creedal it is sensuous and realistic.
It is remarkable that in the Old Testament there is
very little of this polarity in the advanced theocratic
message of the leading prophets, much less than in the
fully religious or only semi-secular thinking of an
Anaximander, Xenophanes, Aeschylus, Empedocles,
and Plato, in classical Greece. However, by religious
intensity, Greece was probably less theocratic than Old
Israel.
