ABSTRACT
Many forms of religious faith disallow, at least in effect, any space for the Devil. In the Jewish and the Christian traditions the primary relation God has with the Devil is to be the Devil's sworn opponent, the divine foe of cosmic, worldly, and moral evil. On the question of dualist influences and Hebraic/Jewish thought, no Devil had as yet appeared in the preexilic period. The conflict of body and soul, with the material world as the source of evil, could eventuate in the notion of the Devil as "lord of this world". To the Pythagoreans, the soul is a prisoner of the body. It is true that many Greek philosophers remained monists, regarding evil as an undifferentiated aspect of the One and as lying in human error and weakness, but with Plato and the Platonists the ideal or spiritual world—the world of Ideas—emerged as at once more real and superior to the material world.
