Evil typologies

I like typologies. It's a Five thang.

My friend Bill (who is a One) has us watching a 37-lecture DVD series on Why Evil Exists, by a U of Virginia professor, Charles Mathewes. So far, pretty good. Enuma Elish, the Greek tragedians, historians and philosophers, and the Old Testament.

It's primarily about human evil . His typology makes three basic streams of Western thought about the matter: evil as folly, evil as cosmic and evil as educational.

In the first, human rebellion against the moral order is the focus. In the second, evil is considered to be inherent in the structure of the world and so it is a question of management. And in the third, evil is seen to be useful for soulmaking or other moral improvement.

All three have something serious to say and, as Dr Mathewes points out, all of them can be seriously challenged. My history sets me in the first camp, but as an adult I am more sympathetic to the second, with a significant interest in the third. Me and Jung straddle the same streams.