PHIL 210 World Religions · Man’s Inhumanity to Man · Lecture 3 (rev1 documentary narration, 2026-11-04; main lecture, slides 1–48: A through AW)
Estimated runtime: about 35–37 minutes spoken — 4,844 words at 130–140 words a minute, plus a short pause at each of the 48 slide changes (about 2 minutes more).
Documentary narration. Read slowly, at about 130–140 words a minute, and let the pauses breathe. There is no recorded audio for this lecture. Bracketed lines are stage directions; do not read them aloud. Every slide is narrated; the paintings carry on-screen captions, which are not read aloud. Source notes, Russian text, and [verify] items stay in the deck’s presenter notes, after the narration, and are not spoken.
Slide 1 · A — The Problem of Human Evil
Buna. The labor camp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Summer, 1944.
The first two lectures asked what happened. This one asks a harder question. Why?
Why would God allow it, if there is a God? And why would human beings do it?
This is the problem of human evil.
A word of care before we begin. You will hear about the hanging of a child at Auschwitz. You will hear about a town whose Jews were burned in a barn by their neighbors. The pictures in this lecture are paintings, not photographs. If you need to look away, look away. You can still listen.
Slide 2 · B — A boy from Sighet was a prisoner at Buna.
Summer, 1944. A fifteen-year-old boy from Sighet, in Romania, is a prisoner at Buna. His name is Eliezer Wiesel. The world will come to know him as Elie.
Buna is the labor camp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz.
One evening, after a work detail, the SS assemble the prisoners on the parade ground.
Three gallows stand there.
Three prisoners are to be hanged for sabotage. Two men. And a boy, a pipel, a young servant of one of the block chiefs. Wiesel says he had the face of a sad angel.
The prisoners are made to watch. Then they are made to march past the bodies, and look at them.
Slide 3 · C — The prisoners were made to watch a boy hang.
The two men die quickly.
The boy is so light that the rope does not break his neck. For more than half an hour, Wiesel writes, he hangs between life and death, while the prisoners file past him.
Behind Wiesel, a man asks where God is.
The boy is still struggling. The question comes again.
And Wiesel hears a voice inside himself answer. God is here. He is hanging on this gallows.
[Pause, ~3 seconds]
Slide 4 · D — On Rosh Hashanah he refused to bless God’s name.
That evening, he writes, the soup tasted of corpses.
A few months later comes Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Ten thousand prisoners pray.
Wiesel refuses to bless God’s name.
He has not stopped believing that God exists.
He has stopped believing that God is just.
And he is furious.
Slide 5 · H — Ivan Karamazov returned his ticket.
Seventy years before Auschwitz, a novelist puts that protest in its sharpest form.
Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov. 1880.
Ivan Karamazov is a brilliant skeptic. He tells his younger brother Alyosha, a novice monk, story after story of children tortured by adults. He grants that God may exist. He grants that at the end of time there may be a universal harmony, in which everything is explained.
He refuses it anyway. No harmony is worth the tears of one tortured child.
“It isn’t God I don’t accept, Alyosha; I am only most respectfully returning Him the ticket.”
After Auschwitz, Ivan’s protest stops being a classroom exercise. The question is no longer whether there is evil in the world. It is whether any account of God can stand next to a child on a gallows.
Slide 6 · F — Theodicy: justifying God in the face of evil.
Behind Wiesel, a man asked where God was. Ivan asked whether any harmony could be worth one child’s tears. The question is very old, and it has a name.
Theodicy. Two Greek words. Theos, god. Dikē, justice. A theodicy is an attempt to justify God’s goodness in the face of evil. The philosopher Leibniz coined the word, in 1710.
The problem is often drawn as a triangle. Three claims. God is all-powerful. God is all-good. Evil is real.
Any two sit together comfortably. Hold all three, and the triangle breaks.
If God is good and cannot stop evil, God is not all-powerful. If God can stop it and will not, is God good?
The classic form of this dilemma is credited to the Greek philosopher Epicurus. But no writing of his that contains it survives. It comes to us through a Christian writer, Lactantius, around the year 313, who repeats it in order to answer it. So we say: attributed to Epicurus.
After Auschwitz, believers had to face that triangle again.
Slide 7 · I — Jewish Responses
We begin with the Jewish answers. With protest. With the death of a God. And with a new commandment.
And we begin with the boy from Buna.
Slide 8 · J — Wiesel survived and wrote Night.
Wiesel survives.
After the war he goes to France. He becomes a journalist. For about ten years he keeps silent about the camps.
Then he writes. Night appears first as a long Yiddish memoir, in 1956. Two years later comes a much shorter French version, La Nuit. It becomes one of the most-read books about the Holocaust.
Wiesel never offers a theodicy. He offers protest. And protest is an old Jewish form of faith. Abraham bargains with God over Sodom. Moses argues with God in the desert. The psalmists ask how long God will hide his face.
Wiesel quarrels with God because he cannot let God go.
Slide 9 · K — Wiesel put God on trial.
In 1979 he puts the quarrel on stage.
The Trial of God is set in a Ukrainian village in 1649, after a massacre of Jews. Three wandering minstrels arrive on the festival of Purim. They stage a trial. The defendant is God.
No one will take God’s defense. No one except a mysterious stranger, who turns out not to be who he seems.
Wiesel said the play grew out of something he witnessed as a boy in the camp. Three learned Jews put God on trial one night, and found him guilty. Then, because it was time, they went to evening prayers.
The story is often repeated. But it rests on Wiesel’s own later recollection, and he told it in slightly different ways over the years. Treat it as his memory. Not as a documented event.
Slide 10 · L — A Protestant dean told a young rabbi that the Holocaust was God’s plan.
West Berlin. August 1961.
A young American rabbi, Richard Rubenstein, meets a Protestant dean, Heinrich Grüber.
Grüber is no Nazi. He helped Jews escape. He was sent to Sachsenhausen and Dachau for it. He has testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
And in conversation he tells Rubenstein that the Holocaust was part of God’s plan for the Jews. God used Hitler, he says, as he had once used Nebuchadnezzar.
Slide 11 · M — Rubenstein concluded that the God of history had died.
Rubenstein leaves that meeting convinced. He can no longer believe in the God of covenant and history: the God who chooses a people, and acts in its history to reward and punish.
If that God exists, then Auschwitz was God’s will. Rubenstein will not say that.
So he puts the choice starkly. Either God willed Auschwitz, as Grüber said. Or the old picture of a God who rewards and punishes in history is false.
A kind, brave man, who had risked his life for Jews, had followed the old theology to its logical end. And the end was monstrous. For Rubenstein, that is the proof that the theology has to go.
In After Auschwitz, in 1966, he writes that we live in the time of the death of God. We live, he says, in a cold, silent universe, indifferent to human purposes.
He does not abandon Judaism. Its rituals and its community, he argues, are more necessary than ever.
Many Jews are scandalized. Rubenstein later softens some of his claims. But after his book, no one can talk about God after the Holocaust as though nothing had happened.
Slide 12 · N — Fackenheim heard a 614th commandment.
Emil Fackenheim had been arrested in Germany after Kristallnacht, in November 1938, and held at Sachsenhausen before he escaped. He became a rabbi and a philosopher, in Canada.
For years he argued that no event in history could challenge faith. In the 1960s he concluded that Auschwitz did.
Jewish tradition counts 613 commandments in the Torah. In 1967 Fackenheim proposes a 614th. He hears it, he says, as a commanding Voice from Auschwitz.
“Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories.”
Survive as Jews. Remember the victims. Do not despair of humanity, or of the God of Israel. Otherwise Hitler accomplishes after death what he could not accomplish in life.
Slide 13 · O — Fackenheim refused to explain Auschwitz.
Jewish faith, Fackenheim argues, has always rested on root experiences. The Exodus. Sinai. Events in which the people believed God had acted and spoken.
Auschwitz is another kind of event. Epoch-making. No earlier framework can absorb it. It cannot be fitted into the old pattern of sin and punishment; that would make the murdered children guilty. And it cannot be ignored.
He notices something else. After 1945, secular Jews who believe in nothing in particular still refuse to stop being Jews. They still marry Jews. They still raise Jewish children. Fackenheim hears in that refusal a kind of answer to the commanding Voice.
He does not explain Auschwitz. He refuses to. Rubenstein said the God of history had died. Fackenheim says that whatever God’s silence means, to give up would be to finish Hitler’s work.
Slide 14 · BK — After Auschwitz, Jewish theology changed.
Gather up what these Jewish thinkers have said.
Wiesel protests. He quarrels with God from inside faith. He puts God on trial, because he cannot let God go.
Rubenstein concludes that the God of history, the God who rewards and punishes, has died.
Fackenheim hears a 614th commandment. Survive as Jews. Remember. Do not despair. And he refuses to explain.
They disagree about almost everything. But none of them accepts the old answer, that suffering is punishment for sin. That answer would make the murdered children guilty.
Later the rabbi Irving Greenberg will name the test they share. “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.”
Slide 15 · P — Christian Answers
Now the Christian answers.
They come with fifteen centuries of argument behind them. And with a question of their own to face.
Slide 16 · Q — Augustine stole pears for the pleasure of doing wrong.
The most influential Christian answer comes from North Africa, from a bishop. Augustine of Hippo.
He grows up in Thagaste, in what is now Algeria. His father is a pagan. His mother, Monica, is a devout Christian. He is brilliant and ambitious. He studies rhetoric in Carthage, lives for years with a woman he never marries, and fathers a son.
For nine years he belongs to the Manichaeans. They teach that the world is a battlefield between two equal powers, one good, one evil. It seems to explain why the world is so mixed.
But one memory from his teens will not leave him. He and his friends steal pears from a neighbor’s tree. They are not hungry. They throw most of the pears to the pigs. They do it for the pleasure of doing what is forbidden.
Why would anyone choose wrong just because it is wrong? It is the problem of evil in miniature. Inside himself.
Slide 17 · R — In a garden in Milan, a child’s voice chanted “take up and read.”
He moves to Rome, then to Milan, as a professor of rhetoric. There he hears the sermons of Bishop Ambrose. He begins to read the Platonists.
Milan. Summer, 386.
In a garden, Augustine is in tears. He cannot change his life.
From a nearby house he hears a child’s voice, chanting: “take up and read.”
He opens a copy of Paul’s letters. He reads a passage in Romans. It turns him around.
At Easter, 387, Ambrose baptizes him.
Slide 18 · S — Augustine decided that evil was a hole, not a thing.
In time Augustine rejects the Manichaeans entirely. Reading the Platonists, he comes to see that evil is not a substance. Not a power at all.
Everything God made is good. Evil is a privation: a lack, a corruption of a good that should be there. The way blindness is the absence of sight. The way a hole is the absence of cloth. Evil is a parasite on the good.
Then where does it come from?
From the will of free creatures. God made angels and human beings free, because a creature that can only obey is not capable of love. Freedom includes the power to turn away from God, toward lesser goods. Pride. Possession. Power. That turning is sin, and the suffering of the world flows from it.
On this view the gallows at Buna is not God’s work. It is human work.
Slide 19 · T — Hick called the world a “vale of soul-making.”
A second Christian tradition looks back to Irenaeus, a bishop of Lyon in Gaul, around the year 180. Human beings, he suggests, were not created finished. They were created immature, like children. They must grow toward the likeness of God, through experience. Including hardship.
In 1966 the British philosopher John Hick builds on that idea. He calls the world a vale of soul-making, a phrase borrowed from a letter of the poet John Keats. A world without pain or danger, Hick argues, would produce no courage, no compassion, no moral strength. Souls are made, not born.
Hick admits that no growth in this life can make sense of suffering on the scale of Auschwitz. He looks to a life beyond death.
His critics answer simply. A child on a gallows is not being made into anything.
Slide 20 · U — Bonhoeffer spoke against the Nazi takeover of the churches.
Christian answers carry a burden that Jewish answers do not: Christianity’s own long hostility toward Jews, which Lecture 1 traced as one root of modern antisemitism. After 1945, many Christian theologians ask not only, where was God? They ask, where were the Christians?
A few Christians did resist.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is born in 1906 into a distinguished Berlin family. In his twenties he is already a Lutheran pastor and theologian.
In 1933 Hitler comes to power. Bonhoeffer speaks against the Nazi takeover of the German Protestant churches, and against laws that push Christians of Jewish descent out of the ministry. He helps lead the Confessing Church, which refuses Nazi control. He runs an illegal seminary for its pastors, until the Gestapo shuts it down.
Slide 21 · V — Bonhoeffer joined the plot against Hitler.
In the war he goes further.
Through his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, he joins a circle in German military intelligence that is plotting against Hitler. He uses his church contacts abroad to tell the Allies about the resistance. He helps smuggle a small group of Jews to Switzerland.
April 1943. He is arrested.
July 20, 1944. The attempt on Hitler’s life fails. The Gestapo finds documents linking him to the conspiracy.
April 9, 1945. A few weeks before the war in Europe ends, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is hanged at the Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Slide 22 · W — From prison he wrote of a God who suffers.
From his cell in Berlin’s Tegel prison, he writes to his friend Eberhard Bethge. The letters will be published as Letters and Papers from Prison.
July 16, 1944.
“God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.”
A few lines later: “The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.”
This is not a tidy explanation. The Christian God, Bonhoeffer is saying, does not stand above suffering and arrange it. He enters it.
Slide 23 · X — A German prisoner of war saw the photographs and felt shame.
Hamburg. Jürgen Moltmann is born there in 1926, into a secular family.
At sixteen he is drafted as an anti-aircraft auxiliary. In July 1943 he survives the firestorm bombing of his city. The friend standing next to him is killed.
He serves as a soldier. In 1945 he surrenders to British troops.
In a prisoner-of-war camp, he and the other German prisoners are shown photographs. Bergen-Belsen. Buchenwald. He will say later that they were overwhelmed with shame.
In a British camp a chaplain gives him a Bible. He reads the psalms of lament. He reads the story of the crucifixion. And in them he finds a God who understands the abandoned.
Slide 24 · Y — Moltmann quoted the gallows at Buna.
Moltmann becomes one of the most important Protestant theologians of the twentieth century.
In The Crucified God, in 1972, he argues that the cross means God is not untouched by suffering. God suffers in and with the crucified Jesus, and so stands with every victim.
And he quotes the scene that opened this lecture. The gallows at Buna, and the voice that answered that God was there, hanging on the gallows. Any other answer, Moltmann says, would be blasphemy.
Many Jewish readers object. Wiesel’s line was a cry of accusation. Perhaps the death of faith. Not a Christian theology of the cross.
One scene, read by a Jewish survivor and by a German former soldier. It points in two directions. Both readings are still argued over.
Slide 25 · Z — What Neighbors Did
From God, we turn to human beings. To neighbors. In two small places: one in Poland, one in France.
[Content note, spoken:] This part describes the burning of a town’s Jews in a barn. Look away if you need to.
Slide 26 · AA — The townspeople turned on their Jewish neighbors.
Jedwabne is a small market town in northeastern Poland. Before the war, about half its people are Jews.
Soviet forces occupy it in 1939. On June 22, 1941, Germany invades the Soviet Union. Within days the Soviets are gone, and the Germans have arrived.
July 10, 1941.
Polish townspeople, with Germans present and encouraging, round up the town’s Jews in the market square. They humiliate them. They make some of them carry a statue of Lenin. They beat and kill many.
Men from the town and nearby villages come armed with clubs, axes, and iron bars. Some of the killers have done business with their victims. Some went to school with them.
Families try to hide in fields and cellars. They are dragged out.
Slide 27 · AB — They drove the rest into a barn and set it on fire.
Then they drive the rest into a barn on the edge of town. The barn belongs to a local Pole. They set it on fire.
Men. Women. Children. Old people. They burn inside it.
A handful escape, some of them by hiding with Polish families.
The people who did this are not strangers. Not soldiers from far away. They are neighbors, who know their victims by name.
[Pause, ~3 seconds]
Slide 28 · AC — A historian’s book forced Poland to face Jedwabne.
For decades the story is largely forgotten. A postwar monument blames the Germans.
Then, in 2000, the historian Jan T. Gross publishes a book about it. In English, a year later, it is called Neighbors. Gross builds it largely from testimony given to a Jewish historical commission after the war, and from the records of a 1949 Polish trial of some of the killers.
The book sets off a national crisis of conscience. Many Poles think of their country only as a victim of the war. And it was one: Germany murdered millions of Polish citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish. Neighbors forces Poles to face a hard fact. A country can be a victim and still contain perpetrators.
July 2001. The sixtieth anniversary. Poland’s president, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, comes to Jedwabne and apologizes, in his own name and in the name of those Poles whose consciences are moved by the crime.
Gross gives a figure of about 1,600 victims. Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance investigates, partly exhumes the site, and concludes that the number was much lower. At least 340.
The numbers are disputed. That neighbors did it is not.
Slide 29 · AD — The villages of Le Chambon hid thousands.
Neighbors also rescue.
South-central France. The Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, around the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Protestant country.
In the 1930s and 1940s these villages shelter several thousand refugees and smuggle them to safety. Many of them are Jewish children.
The pastors André and Magda Trocmé and Édouard Theis lead the effort. But it depends on farmers and families who take strangers in.
The villagers remember their own ancestors. Huguenots, persecuted as a religious minority.
In 1990 Israel honors the whole region.
Slide 30 · AE — Yad Vashem has honored 28,707 rescuers.
Since 1963 Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, has honored non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. It calls them the Righteous Among the Nations.
As of January 1, 2024, it has recognized 28,707 people. The largest national group comes from Poland: 7,318.
And in Jedwabne’s own district, a Polish family named Wyrzykowski hid seven Jews.
Slide 31 · AF — Monsters and saints are made, not born.
The killers of Jedwabne and the rescuers of Le Chambon are the same kind of creature. Nothing in their biology divides them. They are divided by what they choose. And by what earlier choices have made them ready to choose.
Monsters and saints are made, not born.
This is where the religious answers have been pointing all along. Augustine placed evil in the will. Hick saw souls being made. Fackenheim spoke of a commandment, which only means something to beings who can obey or refuse.
The great religions disagree about God. But nearly all of them place the immediate source of evil in human choice.
Philosophy asks how that choosing works. And why it so often goes wrong.
Slide 32 · AG — What Philosophy Asks
Two philosophers, nearly two centuries apart, look into that choosing.
One finds evil at the root. The other finds it on the surface.
Slide 33 · AH — Kant wrote about radical evil at sixty-nine.
Königsberg, Prussia. Immanuel Kant spends his whole life there.
He is the philosopher of reason and duty. The moral law, he teaches, commands every rational being, unconditionally. Act only on principles you could will to be universal laws.
He is no gloomy pessimist.
But in 1793, at the age of sixty-nine, he publishes a book called Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. It opens with an essay on what he calls radical evil.
Slide 34 · AI — Kant said evil was a matter of order.
All human beings, Kant observes, know the moral law. We also have natural desires. For comfort. Approval. Safety. Advantage. These are not evil in themselves.
Evil, for Kant, is a matter of order. Every person adopts a basic ranking of motives.
A good person puts the moral law first, and pursues self-love only within its limits.
An evil person reverses the order. He follows the moral law when it suits his self-love. And drops it when it does not.
We have, Kant argues, a propensity to that reversal. A built-in tilt toward putting ourselves first. It comes in three degrees. Frailty: we know the good and fail to do it. Impurity: we do the right thing for mixed motives. And wickedness: we have made self-love our ruling principle.
Most human evil, he thinks, is not dramatic. It is the quiet habit of excusing ourselves.
Slide 35 · AJ — “Radical” meant root, not extreme.
Radical comes from the Latin radix. Root.
Kant does not mean extreme. He means that this evil lies at the root of the will, in the first principle by which we choose. So it corrupts every choice made from it. Not one bad deed. A twisted starting point.
Here Kant faces a puzzle. He calls the propensity innate, found in everyone, even in the best of us. But if it is innate, how can we be blamed for it?
His answer: it is innate only in the sense that it is there as far back as we can trace our moral lives. It is not a physical inheritance, like eye color. It is a choice, a deed of freedom, made at a level we cannot observe. So we are responsible for it.
It is Kant’s version of what Christians call original sin, stripped of the story of Adam.
Slide 36 · AK — Kant said a person could turn around.
And because it is a deed of freedom, it can be undone.
No outside force can uproot it. But a person can overcome it, through what Kant calls a revolution in his way of thinking: a fundamental reversal that puts the moral law back in first place. Then, slowly, a reform of conduct.
We ought to become better. Therefore we can.
Kant also sees that choices build on each other. Each time we put ourselves first and excuse it, the excuse comes easier. Over time, choices form a character. And a character makes some choices feel natural, and others unthinkable.
Think of the man who walks into the barn at Jedwabne with a torch. A long series of earlier choices has made him. And he is responsible for every one of them.
Slide 37 · AL — Israeli agents seized a man named Ricardo Klement.
A suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. May 11, 1960.
A man named Ricardo Klement walks home from a bus stop. Israeli agents seize him.
Nine days later they fly him to Israel.
His real name is Adolf Eichmann. As head of the Gestapo office for Jewish affairs, he organized the deportation of millions of Jews from across Europe, to the ghettos and the killing centers.
Slide 38 · AM — Eichmann was tried in a booth of bulletproof glass.
Jerusalem. April 11, 1961. The trial opens.
Eichmann sits in a booth of bulletproof glass.
More than a hundred witnesses testify. Many of them are survivors, telling their stories in public for the first time. The trial is filmed and broadcast.
In December 1961 the court convicts him. On the night of May 31 to June 1, 1962, he is hanged. He is the only person ever executed by the State of Israel after a civil trial.
Slide 39 · AN — Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem expecting a monster.
In the press section sits Hannah Arendt.
She is a German Jewish philosopher. She studied with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. In 1933 the Gestapo arrested her. She fled to France. In 1940 she was interned in the Gurs camp. She escaped, and in 1941 she reached New York.
Now she has come to Jerusalem for The New Yorker.
She expects to see a monster.
Slide 40 · AO — She saw a man who said he had only done his duty.
She does not see a monster.
She sees a man who speaks in clichés and bureaucratic jargon. He seems proud of his efficiency. He insists he personally has nothing against Jews. He says he only did his duty. Six psychiatrists, she reports, have found him normal.
Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, appears in 1963, first as articles, then as a book. In its epilogue she writes that the trouble with Eichmann was “precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
His last words, at the gallows, are a string of graveside clichés. Arendt calls them the lesson of “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
Banal means commonplace. Ordinary. Trite. Arendt is not saying that what Eichmann did was ordinary. She is saying that the man who did it was.
Slide 41 · AP — Arendt concluded that Eichmann could not think.
What is wrong with Eichmann, Arendt concludes, is not hatred. Not sadism. It is thoughtlessness.
He cannot, she writes, think from the standpoint of anyone else.
By thinking she means something specific. The silent dialogue a person carries on with himself, in which he asks whether he can live with what he is doing.
Someone who never has that conversation can be made to do almost anything. Provided it comes with orders, language rules, and a career.
The Nazi bureaucracy gives Eichmann all three. Final solution. Evacuation. Special treatment. Words designed so that no one has to think about what they mean.
Slide 42 · AQ — The camps tried to make human beings superfluous.
Arendt had already studied the system that produced him. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, in 1951, she argued that totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Soviet alike, aim not merely at tyranny but at total domination.
The camps were their laboratories.
There the regime tried to destroy first the legal person. Then the moral person. And finally individuality itself, turning human beings into bundles of reactions. Its goal was to make human beings, as human beings, superfluous.
And it happens to perpetrators as well as victims. A functionary who cannot think has also been made superfluous as a person.
Slide 43 · AR — Arendt took back “radical evil.”
The book causes a storm. Many readers think she has trivialized the Holocaust, made Eichmann seem less guilty, and been unfair to the Jewish councils in the ghettos. Among them is her old friend Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism. In June 1963 he writes to accuse her of lacking love for the Jewish people.
She replies in July. Her answer reads like a reply to Kant.
“It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface.”
And then: “Only the good has depth and can be radical.”
Slide 44 · AS — Kant found evil at the root; Arendt found it on the surface.
Arendt herself had used Kant’s term, radical evil, in Origins. Now she takes it back.
Kant found evil at the root of the will. Arendt finds it on the surface, spreading through people who never go deep enough to ask what they are doing.
That does not make it less dangerous. It makes it more dangerous. It needs no monsters. Only enough people who do not think.
And Arendt never says that Eichmann is innocent. She agrees that he should hang. The ordinariness of evil makes the obligation to think and to judge more urgent. Not less.
Slide 45 · AT — Education did not stop the doctors.
Is education the answer?
Consider two doctors.
Josef Mengele. At Auschwitz he selects prisoners for the gas chambers and experiments on twins. He holds doctorates in anthropology and in medicine.
Shirō Ishii. He directs Japan’s Unit 731. He is a trained physician.
Education did not stop them. It made them more efficient.
Education alone is not enough. What matters is an education that teaches people to think, in Arendt’s sense. To judge. And to find the courage to act on that judgment.
As the villagers of Le Chambon did.
Slide 46 · AU — The Bible commands zakhor, “remember.”
The Hebrew Bible commands zakhor. Remember. Again and again.
Yad Vashem takes its name from the prophet Isaiah. “I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name.”
It exists so that the dead will not be erased a second time.
But memory is not only for the dead.
Slide 47 · AV — Return to Buna
Return, one last time, to the parade ground at Buna.
None of the answers we have heard makes that boy’s death make sense. Not Augustine’s. Not Hick’s. Not Rubenstein’s, or Fackenheim’s. Not Kant’s, or Arendt’s.
They are not meant to.
What they can do is tell us where to look. At God. And at ourselves. And what to do with what we have seen.
Slide 48 · AW — Closing: Carol Gluck
The historian Carol Gluck, speaking in a video interview:
“If memory and history are not used for a better future, but only to re-enact the hostilities of a bad past, then none of us is doing our job.”
[Silence — hold on the quotation, ~6 seconds. End of main lecture.]
Pierian Spring · Independent Study
Today’s lecture ends here. The Pierian Spring is required independent study, not part of the timed lecture: students read it in the deck (each slide’s “Read the section” pop-up) and in the essay. It is not narrated. About 2,690 words.
Slide 49 · AX — Pierian Spring: Independent Study
“A little learning is a dang’rous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.” (Alexander Pope)
Today's lecture ends here. Continue on your own: the sections below are required independent study. They carry the questions of the lecture into the Hebrew Bible, later Jewish and Christian thought, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, and the social science and political philosophy of evil.
Slide 50 · AY — Job protested, and God said he was right.
The Book of Job begins like a folk tale. Job is a wealthy man in the land of Uz, "blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil" (Job 1:1, NRSV). In the heavenly court, "the satan," the accuser, suggests that Job is good only because God has made him prosperous. God permits a test. In one day Job loses his livestock, his servants, and his ten children. Then he is struck with sores from head to foot.
Three friends come to comfort him, and for most of the book they argue. Their position is simple: God is just, so suffering must be punishment, so Job must have sinned. Job insists he has not, and demands that God answer him. Finally God speaks "out of the whirlwind" (38:1): "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding" (38:4). God never explains the wager. God shows Job the size and strangeness of creation, and Job falls silent.
Yet at the end God turns to the friends: "My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has" (42:7). The protester was right; the defenders of easy justice were wrong. The book refuses the idea that suffering is always deserved. That is why Wiesel and other post-Holocaust writers return to it.
Two other biblical resources mattered to Jews long before 1945. The Akedah, the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), became in medieval Jewish memory a model for martyrdom, especially after the Rhineland massacres of the First Crusade in 1096. The Book of Lamentations mourns the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in 587 BCE and is read every year on the fast of Tisha B'Av. Both gave Jews a language for catastrophe; neither offered an explanation.
Slide 51 · AZ — Three more Jewish thinkers rethought God’s power.
Eliezer Berkovits (1908–1992), an Orthodox rabbi, argued in Faith after the Holocaust (1973) that God's power is shown in self-restraint. For human beings to be free and responsible, God must at times hide his face, hester panim, a biblical phrase (Deuteronomy 31:17–18). The price of human freedom is that human beings can commit Auschwitz. Berkovits did not think this made the suffering acceptable; he thought faith had to live with the question.
Hans Jonas (1903–1993), a philosopher whose mother was murdered at Auschwitz, gave a lecture in 1984 called "The Concept of God after Auschwitz." He proposed a God who, in creating a free world, gave up power, so that God suffers with the world but cannot intervene. Jonas chose to keep God's goodness and give up God's omnipotence: one corner of the triangle removed.
Irving Greenberg (born 1933), an American Orthodox rabbi, proposed, in an address given in New York in the early 1970s and published in 1977, a "working principle" for theology after the Holocaust: "No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children." He had in mind the Hungarian Jewish children thrown alive into fire pits at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. He also spoke of "moment faiths," moments when faith is possible and moments when it is not.
Slide 52 · BA — The Qur’an called suffering a test.
The Qur'an addresses suffering as trial. God "created death and life to test you [people] and reveal which of you does best" (67:2), and "We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger, and loss of property, lives, and crops" (2:155), with good news for those who, when disaster strikes, say "We belong to God and to Him we shall return" (2:156). Suffering is not proof that God is unjust; it is the arena in which faith and patience (sabr) are tested, and final justice belongs to the Day of Judgment.
The Qur'an also tells the story of human evil's origin. When God commands the angels to bow to Adam, Iblis refuses, out of pride: he claims he is better, made of fire while Adam is made of clay (2:34; 7:11–18). He vows to lead human beings astray, and God allows it until the Day of Judgment. Evil here begins in arrogance, and human beings remain responsible for whether they follow it.
Muslim theologians debated how far human beings are free. The Mu'tazila insisted on human free will to protect God's justice; the Ash'arites stressed God's absolute power and spoke of human beings "acquiring" acts that God creates. Both sides agreed that God is just and human beings accountable.
Finally, Qur'an 5:32 is often quoted against mass murder: whoever kills a soul, unless for murder or corruption in the land, it is as though he had killed all mankind; and whoever saves a life, as though he had saved all mankind. Read it in context: it is addressed as a ruling given to the Children of Israel, following the story of Cain and Abel. It closely parallels a teaching in the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5).
Slide 53 · BB — Karma moved the problem away from God.
In Hindu traditions, karma means action and its consequences. Every action leaves an imprint that ripens, in this life or a later one, within the cycle of rebirth, samsara. Suffering is therefore not the arbitrary act of a creator but the fruit of past action. This moves the problem away from God's justice: there is no all-powerful judge who could have prevented it, only a moral order that works like a law of nature. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna to act according to his duty without attachment to the fruits of action, a teaching about how to act in a world shaped by karma.
Buddhism, which has no creator God, has no theodicy in the Western sense. The Buddha taught that life is marked by dukkha, suffering or unsatisfactoriness, which arises from craving. The roots of harmful action are three: greed, hatred, and delusion. Evil is not a cosmic power but a condition of the untrained mind, and it can be uprooted through the path of ethical conduct, meditation, and wisdom.
Karma raises its own hard question. Does it mean the victims of genocide deserved their fate? Many teachers in both traditions reject that use of karma. They point out that karma is meant to guide one's own conduct, not to judge other people's suffering, and that compassion is the right response to suffering. Students should notice how morally intolerable the other reading would be, and why.
Slide 54 · BC — In a tavern, Ivan told his brother about tortured children.
The lecture borrowed Ivan Karamazov's image of returning the ticket. Here is the whole scene, which many readers consider the most powerful statement of the problem of evil ever written.
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) was Fyodor Dostoevsky's last novel. It tells of a coarse, greedy father, Fyodor Karamazov, and his three sons: Dmitri, passionate and reckless; Ivan, an educated intellectual; and Alyosha, the youngest, a novice in the local monastery under a beloved elder, Father Zosima. In Book 5, "Pro and Contra," Ivan and Alyosha meet in a tavern. Ivan, who is about to leave town, wants for once to talk to his brother about the things that matter.
Ivan begins by saying he accepts God. What he cannot accept is God's world. Then he tells stories, collected, he says, from newspapers and histories. Turkish soldiers in Bulgaria who tossed babies in the air and caught them on bayonets in front of their mothers. A well-educated couple who beat their five-year-old daughter and locked her on freezing nights in an outhouse, where she wept and prayed to "dear little God" to protect her. And a retired general on his estate, with kennels of hundreds of hounds, whose favorite hound was hurt in the paw by a stone thrown in play by a serf boy of eight. The general had the boy locked up overnight, then in the morning, before the household and the boy's mother, had him stripped and made to run, and set the hounds on him. They tore him to pieces before his mother's eyes.
Ivan does not deny that suffering might one day be explained. Perhaps, he says, at the end of time the mother will embrace the torturer who had her son torn apart by dogs, and all three will cry out with tears, "You are just, O Lord!" But he refuses to join in. A higher harmony, he says, "is not worth one little tear of even that one tortured child," because the child's tears remain unatoned for. "I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong." And then: "Besides, they have priced harmony too high; paying so much for admission is quite beyond our means." So he hands back his entrance ticket: "It isn't God I don't accept, Alyosha; I am only most respectfully returning Him the ticket." "That is rebellion," Alyosha said quietly, looking down.
Ivan then presses Alyosha. Imagine, he says, that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny, to make people happy in the end and give them peace and rest at last, but that to do it you must "torture to death just one tiny creature" and found the edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you agree to be the architect on those terms? "No, I would not," Alyosha said quietly.
Slide 55 · BD — Ivan’s Inquisitor arrested Christ, and Christ answered with a kiss.
Next Ivan recites a "poem" he has composed, "The Grand Inquisitor" (Book 5, chapter 5). In sixteenth-century Seville, Christ returns, and the aged Cardinal Inquisitor has him arrested. At night the Inquisitor visits his prisoner and explains why the church has corrected Christ's work: human beings cannot bear the freedom Christ offered them; they want bread, miracle, and authority, and the church has given them these in his name. Christ listens in silence. At the end, as Ivan tells it, "he suddenly, in silence, approaches the old man and quietly kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips. That is the whole answer." The old man shudders, opens the door, and lets him go.
When Ivan finishes, he asks whether Alyosha will renounce him. Alyosha gets up and kisses him on the lips. "Literary theft!" Ivan cries, suddenly elated. "You stole that from my poem!" Alyosha does not refute Ivan. He answers the way Christ answered the Inquisitor, with love.
Slide 56 · BE — Dostoevsky answered with a life: Father Zosima.
Dostoevsky knew Ivan's argument was strong; he wrote to his editor that the next book was meant as its answer. That answer, in Book 6, "The Russian Monk," is not an argument but a life: the teachings of the dying Father Zosima. Zosima tells of his older brother Markel, who died young and who, near the end, told their mother that "each of us is guilty before everyone, for everything, and I more than all." Zosima made those words the heart of his teaching. Earlier in the novel, in his last words to the monks (Book 4, chapter 1), he says that a monk's goal is reached only when he realizes that he is "guilty before all people, for all and for everything, for all human sins, of the world and of each one." Instead of standing outside the world and judging God for it, Zosima calls people to take responsibility for its suffering through active love. Whether that answers Ivan is something readers have argued about ever since.
John Hick took Ivan seriously in Evil and the God of Love. He accepted that no theodicy could make a tortured child's suffering acceptable in itself, and he did not claim to justify any particular horror. His soul-making view could only argue that a world in which real persons are formed in freedom requires a real possibility of terrible evil, and that the final good God brings about, beyond this life, will be so great that it will be seen to have made the whole process worthwhile. Hick admitted that this answer could be judged only from the end, and that Ivan's protest remains the strongest objection to it.
Slide 57 · BF — Milgram found that many people obeyed.
In July 1961, three months after the Eichmann trial opened, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began an experiment. Volunteers were told they were helping study learning and were asked to give electric shocks of increasing strength to a "learner," actually an actor, whenever he made a mistake. In the best-known version, about two-thirds of participants went all the way to the highest level on the board, 450 volts, despite the learner's protests, because a man in a lab coat told them to continue. Milgram published Obedience to Authority in 1974 and linked his results directly to Arendt.
Later research complicated the picture. Gina Perry's study of the Yale archives (2012) found that experimenters often departed from the script and that many participants suspected the shocks were not real. Obedience rates varied widely across Milgram's many versions. Still, partial replications, such as Jerry Burger's in 2009, found that many people will go further than they expect.
In August 1971, Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment assigned college students to be "guards" or "prisoners" in a mock prison. It was stopped after six days because some guards became abusive. For decades it was taught as proof that situations make people cruel. But in 2018 Thibault Le Texier, using the Stanford archives, showed that the guards had been coached toward toughness and that the study was not the neutral experiment it claimed to be. Treat it as a cautionary story, not as evidence.
Slide 58 · BG — Two historians read the same records and disagreed.
Lecture 1 told the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 at Józefów as Christopher Browning reconstructed it in Ordinary Men (1992). Browning concluded that the men killed mainly for situational reasons: conformity, careerism, deference to authority, the wish not to leave comrades to do the dirty work, along with the war and antisemitic propaganda.
In 1996 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen used many of the same records in Hitler's Willing Executioners and came to the opposite conclusion. Ordinary Germans killed, he argued, because they shared an "eliminationist antisemitism" deeply rooted in German culture; they wanted to kill. The book was a bestseller and a sensation, especially in Germany. Most historians, Browning among them, criticized its use of evidence and its picture of a single German mindset. The debate is a version of this lecture's question: are perpetrators made by situations, or by beliefs and choices, and how do the two interact?
Slide 59 · BH — Hobbes and Rousseau disagreed about human nature.
Lecture 1 explained how Thomas Hobbes used the unit's epigraph. His fuller view of human nature appears in Leviathan (1651), chapter 13. Without a common power to keep them in awe, he argued, human beings live in a condition of war of every man against every man, in which the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." People are driven by competition, fear, and the desire for glory. Only a strong sovereign can restrain them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau answered in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). Hobbes's "natural man," he said, was really social man, already corrupted. In the state of nature human beings were simple, solitary, and moved by self-preservation and by pity, a natural reluctance to see others suffer. Corruption came with society: property, comparison, vanity, and inequality.
The Holocaust is uncomfortable for both. It happened inside one of the most orderly, lawful, educated states in Europe, which seems to refute Hobbes's faith in the sovereign. And it was done with the tools of advanced civilization, which might seem to support Rousseau, except that the killers of Jedwabne used clubs and a barn.
Slide 60 · BI — Tapes from Argentina showed a different Eichmann.
In Eichmann before Jerusalem (German 2011; English 2014), the historian Bettina Stangneth studied the writings and taped conversations Eichmann produced among Nazi exiles in Argentina in the 1950s. They show a committed, proud antisemite, nothing like the colorless functionary Arendt saw in the courtroom. Many scholars now think Eichmann performed thoughtlessness at his trial to save his life. Whether that refutes the "banality of evil" as a general idea, or only shows that Arendt chose a poor example, is still debated.