Predrag Cicovacki 
Destined for Evil? 
The Twentieth-Century Responses

This collection of 15 essays on various aspects of the problem of evil brings together the opinions of well known authors from various disciplines [philosophy, theology, literary criticism, political science, etc].


This collection brings together a variety of responses to the ancient questions of whether we are — individually and collectively — destined for evil. The history of the previous century brought this question into the open morepoignantly than perhaps any other before it. Not surprisingly, then, what you will find here is a wide spectrum of opinions concerning the mystery of evil formulated throughout the twentieth century and at the very threshold of the twenty-first, which has inherited all of its open wounds and nightmarish memories. The pieces included here come from diverse fields: philosophy, religious studies, psychology, history, political science, and art; they also assume a variety of forms: essays, treatises, stories, correspondence, and interviews. The reader should not expect that the pieces collected here offer proven recipes of how to eliminate evil from the world: rather, they present a compelling testimony of human struggles with an aspect of our lives we cannot afford to ignore.


Contributors: Sharon Anderson-Gold, Hannah Arendt, Gil Bailie, Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, John P. Collins, Thomas Del Prete, Albert Einstein, Emil Fackenheim, Sigmund Freud, Philip Paul Hallie, Carl Gustav Jung, Michael Lerner, John Montaldo, Susan Neiman, Jeffrey Burton Russell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Tzvetan Todorov, Leo Tolstoy, Michael True, Nicholas Wolterstorff


Predrag Cicovacki is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, where he served as director of Peace and Conflict Studies and editor-in-chief of
Diotima: A Philosophical Review. His publications include
Anamorphosis: Kant on Knowledge and Ignorance (1997),
Between Truth and Illusion: Kant at the Crossroads of Modernity (2002),
Essays by Lewis White Beck: Fifty Years as a Philosopher (1998), and
Kant’s Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck (2001).

Table of Content

Introduction: The Anatomy of Evil – Predrag Cicovacki

Two Thousand Years and No New God – Gil Bailie

Identifying Good and Evil – Nicholas Wolterstorff

Kant and Radical Evil – Emil L. Fackenheim

Uprooting Evil and the Building of Ethical Communities – Sharon Anderson Gold

The Reality of Radical Evil – Jeffrey B. Russell

Roads to Hell – Susan Neiman

The Banality of Evil: Failing to Think – Hannah Arendt

Ordinary People and Extraordinary Vices – Tzvetan Todorov

Are Wars Inevitable? (this chapter has two authors) – Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud

From Relative to Absolute Evil – Svetozar Stojanovic

Killing in Vietnam: What Have We Done to Our Soldiers – Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

Thou Shalt Not Kill – Hermann Hesse

Searching for Self-Knowledge and Divine Wholeness – Carl Gustav Jung

Love and Cruelty: A Blue Spot in the Middle of the Hurricane – Philip Paul Hallie

Goodness at the Heart of Being – Michael Lerner

We Are Prodigals in a Distant Land: An Essay on Thomas Merton – John P. Collins

Recovering Paradise: Thomas Merton on the Self and the Problem of Evil – Thomas Del Prete

Exposing the Deceitful Heart: A Monk’s Public ‘Inner Work’ – Jonathan Montaldo

Lamentations and Losses: From New York to Kabul – Daniel Berrigan S.J.

Evil as Mystery: Primal Speech and Contemporary Poetry – Michael True

The Trial of Man and The Trial of God: Job and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor – Predrag Cicovacki

The Resurrection of Hell – Leo Tolstoy

The Gulag Archipelago (A Fragment) – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Helen’s Exile – Albert Camus