The Problem of Evil

NEXT WEEK I BEGIN teaching seniors at Cranbrook School about “The Problem of Evil.” I’m wondering, are they going to think that there even is such a thing? Have they been so desensitized by video games and mass media that the concept of “evil” belongs in a category along with “wizard,” “zombie,” and “orc?” The German writer Hannah Arendt wrote a book subtitled “The Banality of Evil,” in which she argued that the monstrous atrocities of the twentieth century have made the concept of evil unoriginal, boring, and trite.I wonder...

If my students think there is no such “thing” as evil, they will already have something in common with Plato, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, who all taught (if I understand them correctly) that evil has no real existence of its own, but only as a deprivation of something good. Perhaps I can get my nephew Ben to design me a “Classical Philosophy Video Game” in which virtuous angels go about zapping sinister outcroppings of Nothingness into the Fullness of Existential Stature. Come to think of it, that is just what Gandalf was trying to do to the Ringwraiths, and what Walker Percy wrote about in his novel Love in the Ruins.  Who knew?  

This class is going to be fun, at least for me.