Evil is good at making us more conscious. Meditate on evil and you delve into the limitations of being human. Explore evil and you wonder if there can be a force opposed to Creation or perhaps whether the origin of evil exist within the Creator itself. The story of Job certainly suggests that God can be in cahoots with evil. Then again, maybe evil is an illusion, a result of a limited way of looking at life.

I have learned from my students, however, that people easily become uncomfortable talking about evil, almost as if they sense the presence of some alien awareness eavesdropping on their conversation. "Shouldn't we surround ourselves with light before we talk about evil?" someone asks. So we say a prayer and surround ourselves with light to protect us from the evil one. Afterwards, I point to my own heart and ask, "could there be any evil in here? Does surrounding ourselves with light protect us from what's inside?" My question raises perceptibly the level of discomfort in the classroom. Now we are under the spell of evil.

Evil is good at creating a sense of magic. From the beginning, the ambiguity about whether evil originates outside ourselves or from within us has been part of its mystique. In these latter days, when the world's future seems to wait upon the revealing of the script secretly written by divine destiny (or perhaps our own choices), evil becomes a hot topic. According to Bernard McGinn, author of Anti-Christ: Two thousand years of the human fascination with evil (Harper Collins), the ultimate reason for the existence of evil is to remind us of the importance of our choices. It is a supreme paradox that even within a history that may be divinely governed, our own choices matter.

The author is immanently qualified to pass judgment upon the role of the embodiment of evil within the history of our spiritual imagination. He is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor of Historical Theology and the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago and editor of the 80-volume series, Classics of Western Spirituality. In this current work, he takes us on the journey of evil from Day One to the Last Day. It is a history of theological debate within the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

I was fascinated to learn of the origins of the Anti-Christ legend within Jewish history and of the important role the Essenes played by their portrayal, within the Qumran scrolls, of the followers of Belial. I learned the meaning of more technical terms (millenarianism, premillenarianism, apocalyptic eschatology, fundamentalist apocalypticism, post-tribulationist) than I ever imagined existed surrounding the role of evil in the destiny of history.