Religious Dualism: Some Logical and Philosophical Difficulties

AFLOROAEI - Religious Dualism: Some Logical and Philosophical Difficulties
reject but complete each other” 42 . As a rule, dualism becomes
obvious in the anthropomorphic visions, in which the cosmos
and its creation is explained by means of categories defining
human behaviour. “From an anthropomorphic perspective, the world
seems to have been created like any man-made thing. The dualism
characterising the demiourgos’ work is expanded to the whole universe.
But there is something more about it, the difficulty of expressing the
bivalence of the principle in an intelligible way. Philosophers have faced
this difficulty for a long time, being hardly able to overcome it” 43 .
However, the dualism of certain cosmogonic legends is, in
some cases, questionable. For example, it is hard to sustain the
idea that “the devil is co-eternal with God”, and, consequently,
“it does not depend on Him ontologically” 44 . Such a nondependence
would place the devil in a world completely
separate from that created by God. Let us remember that, for
the Christian fathers, eternity does not always appear as a
determination of God. From an apophatic perspective, God is
neither eternal nor non-eternal, he is beyond these criteria, the
Creator of both eternal and temporal things. Vladimir Lossky
revives an older idea, stating that, from the point of view of
apophatic theology, eternity itself was created by God 45 . In fact,
even if we understand eternity as an unlimited period, aion, it
still represents a determination. Or a determination is a
manifestation of the divine creative power. In other words,
eternity originates in the divine act of creation, it represents a
manifestation of the divine creative power. Lossky restates an
observation made by Saint Maxim the Confessor, that eternity
defined in opposition with time is still a determined eternity. It
42 Ibidem, pp. 103-104.
43 Ibidem, p.104. The idea is developed with further details. „All these
aspects characterise the same anthropomorphic vision which function in
strict spatial coordinates: a particular place of the genesis is located in the
vicinity, a certain real or imaginary character looks like the local people, etc.
The cosmos is modelled twice: firstly, it behaves like people in general,
secondly, like the people living in a determined time and space” (ibidem, p.
118). 44 Ibidem, p. 112, with reference to a cosmogonic legend mentioned by
Tudor Pamfile in The Tale of the Old World based on Romanian Folk Beliefs,
edited and prefaced by Antoaneta Olteanu, Paideia Publishing House, p. 8.
45 Cf. Vladimir Lossky, Écrites théologiques (the study Création: temps
et éternité), Edition du Cerf, in the collection La vie spirituelle, nr. 677, tome
141, 1987, pp. 562-581.
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