Why Evil Exists

Whether we view it in theological, philosophical, or psychological terms, evil remains both a deeply intriguing question and a crucially relevant global issue. Now, Professor Mathewes offers you a richly provocative and revealing encounter with the question of human evil - a dynamic inquiry into Western civilization's greatest thinking and insight on this critical subject. With the inspired guidance of these 36 lectures, you'll engage with how both individual thinkers and larger trends of thought have faced evil, studying the work of major theologians, philosophers, poets, political theorists, novelists, psychologists, and journalists. You'll study the psychology of evil in Islamic theology, as well as the weighty meditations of St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Lyon, and Martin Luther. And among contemporary views, you'll grasp Arthur Cohen's extraordinary post-Holocaust reformulation of faith in a God whose reality "is our prefiguration" - the promise of what we may become. Parallel with the theological accounts, you'll also study primary currents of Western secular thinking on evil in the work of key philosophers and social theorists. You'll investigate Thomas Hobbes's proposition that good and evil are invented constructs of human language, and Kant's conception of morality as located in the human will. You contemplate Freud's hypothesis of the "death drive," an innate, destructive force of the psyche, and Hannah Arendt's highly influential analysis of the "moral inversion" of Nazism. So why does evil exist in the world? Join a deeply insightful teacher in facing this fascinating, primordial question - a chance to bring your own most discerning thought to a crucial challenge for our world.

All Lectures:
1. The Nature and Origins of Evil
2. Enuma Elish - Evil as Cosmic Battle
3. Greece - Tragedy and The Peloponnesian War
4. Greek Philosophy - Human Evil and Malice
5. The Hebrew Bible - Human Rivalry with God
6. The Hebrew Bible - Wisdom and the Fear of God
7. Christian Scripture - Apocalypse and Original Sin
8. The Inevitability of Evil - Irenaeus
9. Creation, Evil, and the Fall - Augustine
10. Rabbinic Judaism - The Evil Impulse
11. Islam - Iblis the Failed, Once-Glorious Being
12. On Self-Deception in Evil - Scholasticism
13. Dante - Hell and the Abandonment of Hope
14. The Reformation - The Power of Evil Within
15. Dark Politics - Machiavelli on How to Be Bad
16. Hobbes - Evil as a Social Construct
17. Montaigne and Pascal - Evil and the Self
18. Milton - Epic Evil
19. The Enlightenment and Its Discontents
20. Kant - Evil at the Root of Human Agency
21. Hegel - The Slaughter Block of History
22. Marx - Materialism and Evil
23. The American North and South - Holy War
24. Nietzsche - Considering the Language of Evil
25. Dostoevsky - The Demonic in Modernity
26. Conrad - Incomprehensible Terror
27. Freud - The Death Drive and the Inexplicable
28. Camus - The Challenge to Take Evil Seriously
29. Post - WWII Protestant Theology on Evil
30. Post - WWII Roman Catholic Theology on Evil
31. Post - WWII Jewish Thought on Evil
32. Arendt - The Banality of Evil
33. Life in Truth - 20th-Century Poets on Evil
34. Science and the Empirical Study of Evil
35. The "Unnaming" of Evil
36. Where Can Hope Be Found?