Meetings: Tues & Thurs, 2:00 - 3:15pm, UNL Newman Center
Instructor: Dr. John Freeh, Director of the Newman Institute
Credit Hours: 3
“Today I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse, choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live.” With these words the Hebrew book of Deuteronomy underscores the “mystery of iniquity,” that human tendency to choose what is destructive of self and others. If, as Origen says in the 3rd century, “the power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all,” why does humankind continue to choose evil? And how can we comprehend the claim of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost that “only in destroying I find ease”? The battle between good and evil lies at the heart of the human story, and some of literature’s most memorable characters – Medea, Faustus, Macbeth, Raskolnikov – provide a foundation for beginning to explore and perhaps understand this ancient “mystery.” By looking at these and other characters, as well as relevant texts from philosophers and theologians, this three-credit course will attempt to discover patterns of thought and action in those who embrace evil – and in those who reject it.
Required Texts: Euripides’ Medea; Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus; Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral; shorter readings as assigned