"In the first novel, Valis, the protagonist Horselover Fat was obsessed -- and for good reason: His girlfriend had killed herself -- by the problem of evil. He finally came to the conclusion that two gods exist, which is to say a bitheism, each contending against the other. Although Valis Regained draws heavily on the bitheism of the Qumran people, it basically presents another view, not syntonic to Horselover Fat: monotheism, with the notion that evil has no true existence of its own but borrows its existence, or is lent its existence, from the one God. Valis Regained bases its theology on the extraordinary passage in Isaiah 45:6-7 [the capitalization is Dick's own]:

". .. so that men from the rising and the setting sun

may know that there is none but I:

I am the LORD, there is no other;

I make the light, I create darkness,

author alike of prosperity and trouble.

I, the LORD, do all these things."

Had Couliano taken the time to study the first novel in the trilogy -- Valis -- it is possible that his judgment as to the presence of Gnostic ideas in Dick's work would have changed. Nonetheless, the comparison of these two quotations is useful not only as a validation of Dick's knowing use of religious source material but also as a fair warning to all those who would paste a doctrinal label of any sort on Dick's work. Dick's viewpoints were multifold, indeterminate, and changeable; he cannot rightly be described by any "ism."

Observe how Dick, in tracing out the possibilities of this spiritual viewpoint, employs the narrative gifts of a fiction master to create a haunting parable of a fallen and amnesiac god who must wander for centuries through his own creations to win his own redemption: