The victory of Christianity over paganism and Judaism was conceived allegorically by the Gnostics as the battle of the gods of these religions. The Redeemer was then conceived to appear at the psychological moment and to win the victory; and this appearance of Christ as Redeemer is not only the highest point in the development of the human race, but it is the dénouement in the drama of the universe. Nature was therefore conceived by them to be a battle-ground of the gods and the strife to be waged between the forces of good and evil. The good gets the victory by means of Christ. The battle was conceived in the neo-Pythagorean form of the dualism of matter and spirit, but was expressed in mythical terms. The heathen gods and the god of the Old Testament, who took the form of the Platonic demiurge, were the powers in the world which the highest God had to overcome. The dualism of good and evil was conceived to be the same as between spirit and matter, and was elaborated in a fashion true to the Alexandrian school. The space between God and matter was conceived to be filled in by a whole race of dæmons and angels, arranged according to the Pythagorean numbers. The lowest was so far from the divine perfectness as to be in touch with matter, and he is the demiurge who formed the world. The battle then was between good and evil, light and darkness, until the Logos, the Nous, Christ, the most perfect of the intermediary beings, came down and by incarnation released from matter the imprisoned spirits of men and even of the fallen angels, like the demiurge. This is, in brief, the Gnostic explanation of history. This dualism was quite consistent with contemporary Christian ethics, which had then become Stoic. But this dualism was not consistent with monotheism, the fundamental Christian principle. The internal danger in Patristics――of swamping the fundamentals of Christianity through Hellenizing them――appears thus early. The early Christian found at the beginning an antagonism between his fundamental monotheistic metaphysics and Greek dualistic ethics.