Pre-Gnostic Dualism. Around the beginning of the
Christian era, dualistic ideas appeared in Judaism, in
which, however, they remain limited by the rigorous
monotheism. Whether due to the influence of the
Iranian religion or to the autonomous development of
Judaism, Jewish writers teach that God acts and even
has created the world by means of two opposing
powers. According to the Rule of Qumrān (III-IV),
two spirits created by God, the Prince of Lights and
the Angel of Darkness, dominate the world. Philo (ca.
13 B.C.-ca. A.D. 50) says, though only in a single text,
that God created the world by means of two powers,
one of which is the cause of good things, the other
of evil things (Quaestiones in Exodum, I, 23). Philo
is, moreover, a Platonist, and it is not certain that for
him matter was created by God. The Jewish Apoca-
lyptic opposes the present to the future world in a sort
of temporal dualism. But nowhere in Judaism is the
denial of the value of the world carried to the point
to which Gnosticism went and where even certain texts
of early Christianity extended. The Qumrān's angel of
darkness is not the “prince of the world”; the two
spirits are in the world “in equal proportion.”
