Two principles · the tidy solution and its price

Manichaean dualism at its cleanest: Light and Dark as two eternal, uncreated principles, neither derived from the other, tangled by an invasion. It solves the problem of evil completely and instantly — evil is not God's fault because it is not God's at all — and Augustine, who lived inside it for nine years, spent the rest of his life explaining what it costs. The price is that God is no longer infinite (something stands outside him), no longer omnipotent (he lost a battle), and the world is a war zone with no possible reconciliation. The Kabbalah takes the hardest available road here instead: the sitra achra, the "other side," is real, but it is derived — a shell grown around severity, sustained by the light it steals, and ultimately part of the one source's single economy. This costs the Kabbalah an easy answer to suffering and buys it a universe with one author. Every tradition on this bench pays for the problem of evil somewhere; this node is where you can see the two invoices side by side.