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In this episode Trent reveals five books to help Christians better understand the nature of evil.
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Transcript:
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the 16th century, the Ecumenical Council of Trent said Christians ought to fear for the combat which yet remains with the flesh, with the world, with the devil, wherein they cannot be victorious unless they be with God’s grace.
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the Christian life is a constant struggle against evil. And in today’s episode of The Council of Trent, we’re going to review five books along with some honorable mentions related to the topic of evil. So you can better be prepared to understand evil and be able to cooperate with the grace of God to resist it.
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So let’s begin starting with.
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Number five. C.S. Lewis 1940 book, The Problem of
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The problem of evil is probably the oldest argument against the existence of God. In the early church, Christians had to contend with dualist heretics who claimed that evil was the result of an evil god connected to the material world, whereas the good God that we should worship is only related to the spiritual world.
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This led to heresies that claimed material pleasure, like eating certain foods or engaging in the marital act were evil, even though God created those things for human beings. And while some critics of Catholicism tried to connect this passage to fasting and voluntary celibacy, it is this Gnostic dualism that Saint Paul is probably talking about in first Timothy four one through five, where he says this.
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Now the spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons through the pretensions of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good.
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However, pagan philosophers would say that if God made everything, then that means God made evil. And so God can’t be all good. Enter Saint Augustine, who answered this objection by saying that evil is not a positive thing. God made evil is instead an absence of goodness in God’s creation. That God tolerates. Evil is an absence of good.
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In the same way darkness is in absence of light or cold is an absence of heat in the problem of pain. Lewis expands on Augustine’s idea and makes helpful observations about how evil is a corruption of the good Emir. Christianity. Lewis also addresses the issue and says this.
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Evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers which enable evil to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things. Resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself. That is why dualism in a strict sense will not work.
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If we’re going to fight evil, then we have to know what evil is, and knowing that evil is a perversion of the good helps us to resist temptation, because we can recognize a thing that is good and see how it is misused to become evil. So, for example, we shouldn’t scrupulously refuse to ever become angry because anger is a good thing when it motivates us to fight injustice.
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If we just bottle up all of our anger as being evil, then we’ll end up having a Ned Flanders meltdown.
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Calm down. Natalie. They did their best shot. Little Italy. Italy. Gotta be nice. I still, think dog crap. Can’t you morons do anything right?
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Hey,
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Instead, Ephesians four 2627 says, be angry, but do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil.
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Problem of pain is a great introduction to the privation view of evil, but after reading it, there are two follow up books I’d recommend. The first is Lewis’s 1961 book, A Grief Observed, where you see him deal with suffering in a raw way after the death of his wife.
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This is important to consider because there is a difference between facing the idea of God allowing evil, and facing the reality of God allowing evil in our lives. The second book is philosopher David Berg’s 2019 book, The Metaphysics of Good and Evil, where you’ll find rigorous replies to philosophical criticisms of the privation view of evil.
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Number four C.S. Lewis 1942 book The Screwtape Letters.
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C.S. Lewis is the goat when it comes to apologetics for the common man, so it’s no surprise he’s made the list more than once. Though this work is somewhat unpleasant to read. The Screwtape Letters is composed as a work of letters between two demons. Screwtape, who is an experienced senior demon in Hell’s Department of Temptation, and Wormwood, his less experienced nephew who is a junior tempter that needs help with his human assignments.
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The characters also pop up in various online memes, where evil advice gets reposted with the salutation your affectionate Uncle Screwtape.
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The Screwtape Letters reminds Christians of how evil quietly and subtly enters their lives. If Problem of Pain shows us what evil is, Screwtape Letters shows us how evil enters our lives. And I’ll admit, it’s creepy reading the demonic advice and recognizing it in our own life where it’s worked, including things like Screwtape telling Wormwood to use a gradual approach to get someone into evil habits, and to turn victories over evil into occasions for spiritual pride.
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In fact, C.S. Lewis said this was his least favorite book to write because it’s not pleasant for the creative mind to dwell in the demonic for long periods. In a later preface to the book, he said this.
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I had, moreover, a sort of grudge against my book for not being a different book, which no one could write. Ideally, Screwtape advice to Wormwood should have been balanced by arc angelic advice to the patients guardian angel. Without this, the picture of human life is lopsided. But who could supply the deficiency? Even if a man and he would have to be a far better man than I could scale the spiritual heights required?
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What answerable style could he use for the style would really be part of the content. Mere advice would be no good. Every sentence would have to smell of heaven.
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For fallen creatures, it’s easy to imitate hell, but impossible to imitate heaven without divine assistance. I experience the same thing when writing my book, Devil’s Advocate, which is an extended conversation with my own inner voice of doubt that made me depressed to interact with over long periods.
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Another literary example of this depiction of evil would be Vladimir Nabokov’s 1952 novel Lolita. The novel is about a nearly 40 year old man named Humbert Humbert concocting a scheme to marry a woman so he can violate her 12 year old daughter Dolores, who he nicknames Lolita. What makes the novel even more disturbing is that it’s told from Humbert’s perspective, and he’s an unreliable narrator.
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Humbert is highly educated, and he speaks of the kind of hypnotic prose this means. As a reader, you must be on guard when listening to him, lest you sympathize with his perspective and buy into his false description of reality, which tries to narrate romance. But any sensible person would call rape. I’m not even saying that you should read this book.
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It’s a very dark book. I’m just citing it as a powerful fictional illustration of a very real kind of evil. I read the book once, and I’ll probably never read it again, because it was nauseating to interact with that kind of narrator, sort of like how you’d feel if you had an extended conversation with Hannibal Lecter from silence of the lambs.
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Unfortunately, many people get the wrong lesson from the book and believe Humbert’s description of reality. So they sexualize Dolores and try to turn all of this into a tawdry kind of tale, like in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of the book, which has led to the popular misconception of Lolita being a sexually precocious tempter rather than the victim of a monster.
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That’s why my favorite covers of Lolita are this one that emphasizes Lolita as non-sexual innocence, and this one showing the monster who violates her.
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So now that we know what evil is and how it enters our lives, it’ll be good to read a book that explains how evil ideas and practices spread so quickly in the modern world. Which brings us to Number three, Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
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In the book, postman says that when communicating ideas, the medium matters more than the message. He said when an idea is communicated through books, it can be put forward in a sustained and logical way for people to understand. But when an idea is put forward on television, it becomes superficial and people are persuaded by spectacle rather than substance.
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Postman also compares the dystopian versions of the future Orwell’s 1984 and Aldis Huxley’s Brave New World in the novel 1984. Government censorship suppresses truth, but in Brave New World, all you need to suppress truth are drugs and distractions that turn people into vapid idiots addicted to pleasure who just don’t want to read. Postman argued that Huxley’s dystopia was much more likely to happen than Orwell’s.
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Fast forward 40 years later, where ideas are communicated in memes and short form video content, and you see Postman’s warnings constantly being vindicated. In fact, a 2025 study found that, quote, 35% of Gen Z K-12 students say they dislike reading and 43% say they rarely or never read for fun.
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fact, 40% of U.S. adults did not read a book last year, and 50% of all reading in the U.S. is done by 4% of adults. So put down your smartphone, turn off the TV and read a book. Just take a look. It’s in a book,
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A reading rainbow.
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Number two. Victor Frankel’s 1946 book Man’s Search for meaning.
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The first half of this book describes Frankel’s experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, where he saw that people who found a sense of purpose or hope were often more resilient and better able to survive. The second half of the book than introduces Frankel’s approach to psychology, which he calls logo therapy.
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This approach teaches people to find meaning through their work, their relationships, and the attitude they choose towards unavoidable suffering. Frankel says that while people can’t always control their circumstances, they can always choose their response, and this freedom to find meaning is essential to living a fulfilling life. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from the book illustrating this principle.
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Once an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression, he cannot overcome the loss of his wife, who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrain from telling him anything, but instead confronted him with the question,
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What would have happened, doctor, if you had died first and your wife would have had to survive you? Oh, he said, for her this would have been terrible how she would have suffered. Whereupon I replied, you see, doctor,
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Such a suffering has been spared her. And it was you who have spared her this suffering, to be sure, at the price, that now you have to survive and mourn her.
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He said no word, but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment. It finds a meaning such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
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conversely, when people do not find objective meaning in life, but simply go along with life on a whim, that’s where a lot of evil can take root. We’ve already seen this in people who reduce the meaning of life to scurrying from one pleasure to another, like in Brave New World. But you can also see this in average people who commit unspeakable acts of horror, because the only meaning they had in life was just doing what everyone else said they should be doing.
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This is summarized well on the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, described in Hannah Arendt 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem A report on the Banality of Evil.
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The phrase banality of evil refers to how evil, even unspeakable evil, often doesn’t manifest itself in over the top ways like you might find in a cartoon supervillain. Instead, I rent showed that Eichmann’s behavior and excuses were rooted in committing horrible evil not because he hated Jews, but because he just wanted to do his job and conform to social expectations.
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And this isn’t unique to Eichmann. James Waller’s book, Becoming Evil How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, shows that most people who commit genocide do so to conform to a society that is progressively dehumanize the victims of genocide, not because they themselves are psychopaths. Although I also recommend the book The Sociopath Next Door, which estimates that 1 in 25 people lacks or ignores their conscience, and so they have a greater capacity for a more active kind of evil.
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But despite how depressing all of this is, this shows why the gospel is good news. Even when we see our wretched selves, we can take comfort in knowing this does not define us. And even if a supremely evil person escapes justice in this life, they will face the King of Glory in the next life.
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But if atheism were true and everything were a cosmic accident, then there would be no objective meaning of life to hold on to in the face of suffering. However, when people find meaning in the face of evil, then that gives them the strength to face evil. And the revelation of God’s love for humanity is the essence of that meaning.
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Saint Paul put it well in his letter to the Romans when he said this.
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We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us while we were yet helpless at the right time. Christ died for the ungodly. Why? One will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die.
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But God shows his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
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And finally, the number one book to understand evil. We got to go back to the source, the book of Genesis.
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nearly all Christians know the story, but it’s still worthwhile to go back to the beginning to really understand what evil is. The Book of Genesis helps us understand the nature of evil by showing both its origin and its recurring patterns throughout human history. For example, Adam and Eve’s disobedience of God is also our continual disobedience of God.
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I mean, we like to think that if we were in the Garden of Eden, we wouldn’t have been so stupid. But we do the same thing Adam and Eve did every day. When we give in to temptations and choose to sin. And as Genesis unfolds, these same patterns repeat themselves in the lives of the patriarchs.
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Cain’s jealousy leads to murder. Abraham and Sarah struggle with fear and deception. Jacob deceives his father and brother, and Joseph’s brothers betray him out of envy. Also notice the poetic justice in how God uses evil to accomplish good. This can be seen in Jacob deceiving his father Isaac with animal skin in order to steal Esau’s birthright. Then Jacob is deceived when his children use animal skin to lie to him about Joseph being killed when they, out of hatred and jealousy, sold Joseph into slavery instead, and Joseph’s own suffering at the hands of his brothers is not meaningless, because through divine providence, it leads to the salvation of his family.
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When Joseph becomes an official in Egypt and saves his family from a famine after he is reunited with his brothers, Joseph tells them words we should always remember when we face our own trials.
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You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring it about, that many people should be kept alive as they are today.
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Saint Paul gives similar encouragement in Romans 828 where he says this
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we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.
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And if you like a longer fictional reflection on themes found in the Book of Genesis, I recommend John Steinbeck’s 1952 book East of Eden, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families living in early 20th century Salinas Valley in California.
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So those are five books and some related works on the nature of evil. I hope they’re helpful for you. Leave a comment below about other books you think should have made today’s list, and be sure to check out my other episodes on classic novels that Christians should read that I’ll link to in the description below.
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Thank you guys so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.