Staring into the Heart of Darkness

New York Times June 4, 1995

By Ron Rosenbaum

IN WHICH SATAN MAKES A BEAUTIFUL PRESENTATION

THE PASTOR IS STRUGGLING. HE'S TRYING TO EXPLAIN, to paint a picture of the terrible choice his parishioner faced that night at the lake. The pastor is the Rev. Mark Long; his parishioner is Susan Smith and her choice, according to her own handwritten confession -- the choice she's facing the electric chair for -- was to strap her two young boys into the child safety seats in her Mazda and send it rolling down an embankment into John D. Long Lake.

We're speaking in the pastor's office in the rear of the United Methodist Church of Buffalo, S.C., just a few miles from the lake in Union where Smith disposed of 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex. This is the church where Long preached and Susan Smith prayed throughout the "ordeal" she manufactured for herself and the nation by claiming that a black carjacker had kidnapped the children she'd actually killed.

Our conversation took place a few weeks after Susan Smith's shocking confession. The media invasion that blitzed the sleepy Carolina countryside has subsided a bit. Remote trucks are no longer prowling the malls. But the nature of Susan Smith's act is still the subject of heated debate and speculation here and across America. The lakeside site of the killings is still a magnet for stunned and puzzled visitors drawn to the shore to leave offerings for the two dead children at makeshift shrines; and to stare into the opaque water wondering what was going on in Susan Smith's mind in committing the EVIL DEED (as the tabloid Star called it) -- and what went through God's mind in permitting it.

The great tabloid stories are the ones that raise theological questions, which is why a certain other case going on in Los Angeles is a big tabloid story but not a great one. Which was why I thought it might be useful to begin an exploration of what we talk about when we talk about evil with a conversation with Susan Smith's spiritual counselor, the pastor who figured prominently in every stage of the sensational affair, from praying with her through the phony ordeal to praying for her after she confessed the truth.

By the time I spoke with Long, the usual questions were bubbling up about Susan Smith's state of mind that night, the degree of actual responsibility she bore for her act. Was it an "evil deed," or the product of dysfunction disorder, past abuse, mental disease? Since no one "in her right mind" could have committed the evil deed, she must have been "out of her mind," she must have "lost her mind": she wasn't really responsible.

And so there were already whispers of sexual abuse, of "a suicide by proxy syndrome," even of Prozac use. She was beginning to look less like the perpetrator than the victim: she was the victim of an "irresistible impulse," she had no choice, it really wasn't her act, it really wasn't her. (Her lawyer has not ruled out an insanity defense.)

Yet something about the act, some primal, mythic, Medea-like aura emanating from the fact of a mother killing her young seemed to summon up the stark language of evil, the search for some Satanic cause. And then, shortly before I spoke with Long, Newt Gingrich weighed in with his theory of Susan Smith's act. In Gingrich's view the real cause of Susan Smith's act was not Susan Smith; she was just the "efficient cause" in the Aristotelian sense. The formal cause was the 60's -- liberalism, the Great Society, the counterculture -- and the amoral social ethic they supposedly produced. It wasn't Susan Smith who pushed the Mazda into the lake; it was George McGovern.

Curiously, for an apostle of individual moral accountability, Gingrich was trying, however clumsily, to do what the Left, what Great Society liberals, have been accused of doing: he was blaming society for the evil deed of an individual.

The pastor doesn't see it that way.

For one thing, he insists on Susan Smith's moral autonomy that night. He believes she had a choice between good and evil. Had a choice and knew what she was doing when she made it.

It's a highly controversial assertion these days, but to Long, it's an article of faith. Controversial because it's rare to use the language of choice and evil with such confidence. Controversial because Susan Smith -- young, naive, troubled, depressed, possibly abused, panicked, jangled, struggling with the trials of a low-wage single mother -- scarcely seems the Medea type, the kind of person who would knowingly, deliberately choose evil. (According to some recent newspaper reports, a panel of psychiatrists found her competent to stand trial, although possibly suffering from a mental disability that could have played a role in her act.)

But the pastor has no doubt that she had a choice. For him, it's a matter of presentations. "We're Arminians," Long tells me, referring to his Methodist denomination's doctrine on the question of good and evil. "We believe we have free choice and that with free choice comes evil. Evil exists because we have freedom" -- that is, freedom wouldn't be free if we weren't free to choose evil as well as good.

"Arminius -- wasn't he the Dutch theologian who split with Calvin over -- what was the issue?" I ask Long.

"Calvin believed that God has already determined whether you are among the elect," he says. Whether, in other words, God has chosen you to be one of those who, faced with a choice, will choose good or evil. Which means that some who choose evil don't have a real choice. "We believe everyone always has a real choice," Long says.

And he proceeds to conjure up a vision of what Susan Smith's experience of that choice was.

That night at the lake with her toddlers strapped in, with her fears about the future running through her head, Susan Smith was witness to two "presentations," Long tells me. "God made her a presentation and Satan made her a beautiful presentation." She evaluated them, the pastor believes, and proceeded to choose Satan's.

It's a harsh view, this Arminian interpretation of Susan Smith's act, and one I'm not sure I agree with. It implies that not only was she seduced by Satan's beautiful presentation, but also that she explicitly rejected God's. Calvin's view of the situation is fairly harsh as well, but less so on Susan Smith than on God, leading some to question why He couldn't have, in His omnipotence and benevolence, prevented it.

After leaving the pastor I headed down to the lake where Susan Smith drowned her boys. The question I found myself asking there, by the shore in the presence of the sad shrines to the dead children, the question that had been on my mind ever since Long voiced the phrase, was this:

What could be so beautiful about Satan's beautiful presentation?

A DIGRESSION IN WHICH WE COMPARE THE EVIL OF TWO 10-YEAR-OLDS TO THAT OF ADOLF HITLER

WHAT DOES IT MEAN THESE DAYS TO CHOOSE EVIL? WHAT does it mean to choose to call someone evil? There was a morning a year or so ago in London when the anxieties and ambiguities of current discourse on evil were suddenly and dramatically thrown into relief for me. That morning all the papers were filled with EVIL in headline size type. EVIL . . . WICKED . . . UNPARALLELED EVIL. The words were headlined extracts from the judge's sentence in the James Bulger murder trial. This was the case of the two 10-year-old Liverpool boys who lured a 2-year-old away from his mother, beat him to death and then left his lifeless body lying on some railroad tracks to make it seem as if he'd been accidentally run over by a passing train. It was this last, all-too-clever, chilling touch that led the judge to denounce the young killers not as misguided, abused, troubled children (even though there was evidence of inadequate care), but as unequivocally WICKED, EVIL.

What struck me about the EVIL filled headlines was their contrast with a conversation I'd had just the night before about Adolf Hitler. It was a conversation in which one of the most distinguished Hitler scholars in the world, Hugh Trevor-Roper, could not bring himself to pronounce Hitler consciously, knowingly evil. Hitler, he believed, was "convinced of his own rectitude," he told me. His deeds may have been evil, but he did them believing, however delusively, that he was doing good. It was the second such conversation I'd had in a short period of time. In the other, a psychoanalytically oriented historian told me that Hitler "was a prisoner of his pathological unconscious drives" -- therefore not consciously responsible for his deeds, not capable of knowing and committing evil in the way, presumably, a fully and successfully psychoanalyzed patient would be.

And so there was our problem with evil encapsulated in its starkest terms: 10-year-old boys can be pronounced evil, wicked to the highest degree, but not Hitler.

I returned to an America that seemed similarly conflicted about what to call evil. The Menendez juries were divided by the abuse excuse; the growing power of the recovery movement encouraged the notion that no one was evil, only abused, co-dependent or suffering from poor self-esteem -- no matter how evil-seeming the act, the inner child was good. Opposed to this were powerful forces that still believed in absolute black and white, good and evil: fundamentalist religion (with its fear of Satanists and Satanic ritual abusers) and pop culture, with its evil Klingons and Darth Vaders and Hannibal Lecters.

It's a split that persists and may have only been superficially papered over when the President put evil in the headlines again by calling the perpetrators of the Oklahoma bombing EVIL COWARDS. Suddenly, evil was on everyone's lips as if John Doe No. 1 had invented it.

Between that morning in London and my trips to Susan Smith's crime scene and later to the Oklahoma blast site, I'd made it a point to immerse myself in the theoretical literature on evil, the state of the art of the ongoing debate in philosophic and religious circles. Prominent among these works are the reflections on the subject by post-Holocaust theologians who argue that a previously unwitnessed "radical evil" had come into being in the death camps, a previously inconceivable capacity for evil that required a radical re-evaluation of human nature -- and of the nature of God.

But in a sense, the extreme example of Hitler and the Holocaust is not necessarily helpful in trying to understand the questions raised by more ordinary cases like that of Susan Smith. Her case, her choice, the notion of Satan's beautiful presentation raise the two eternally troubling aspects of the problem of evil: the source of evil in the human heart, and the persistence of evil in the heart of the world, or, put another way, why, if there is a God, does He permit an evil like child murder to take place without intervening?

IN WHICH SATAN PENS A POEM

IT WAS AN ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION -- OF GOD'S ROLE -- that I found myself confronting in dramatic and disturbing form down at the murder scene, the shore of John D. Long Lake.

Standing there near dusk in the very spot Susan Smith stood -- at the top of a dirt track sloping down to the water's edge -- I tried to imagine just what had been beautiful about Satan's beautiful presentation.

Sure, Satan probably had better graphics. You have to assume he had the services of some of Madison Avenue's greatest admen at his command. But still, what exactly would Satan's unique selling point be: Could snazzy graphics alone make murdering your children seem "beautiful"?

Yes, some advantages would accrue from killing the kids, which Satan would certainly have not hesitated to point out. It would be a big plus in the relationship area: the wealthy boyfriend -- who, Susan Smith believed, had a problem with her children -- might be more willing to commit. And, yes, killing the kids and telling the cops they'd been kidnapped by a black carjacker could make her the center of attention, not just in Union, S.C., but in the whole bighearted nation, which would be sending prayers, love, sympathy and TV crews, enough to make her a bigger star than Madonna, enough to make her a kind of grieving Madonna, in an almost religious, cultic sense -- there's all that. (And Satan's presentation probably left out the part about her eventually getting caught and going to jail and maybe the chair -- typical!)

So there were some advantages on that side of the ledger. From a certain perspective it might look "beautiful" to you. Still, you're killing your kids. It's not really beautiful for them, is it? All of Satan's graphics and all of Satan's admen couldn't pull that off, could they?

But maybe they did: maybe Susan Smith did come to believe it would be beautiful for the children too, even more beautiful. Consider the way she portrays her decision in the handwritten confession she inscribed after she abandoned the carjacker scam and admitted she drowned her babies. For the most part, she portrays herself as emotionally distraught. That night at the lake she didn't want to go on living, she says. "I was an absolute mental case!" She first considered killing herself, but ruled that out because it would be cruel to leave her children motherless.

Less cruel, more beneficent, she decided, was to kill them. How could she arrive at that conclusion?

"I love my children with all my ," she writes at one point in the rambling, childishly scrawled confession document. "My children deserve to have the best, and now they will."

My children deserve to have the best. What could she have meant by "the best"? Sending them screaming and choking to the bottom of a lake, dying with the knowledge that their mother abandoned them? No, she probably didn't mean that. She probably meant they'll have the best now because they're with God in heaven. She seems to have convinced herself that child murder was an act of self-sacrificing maternal benevolence, akin to, say, an Upper East Side socialite who, after her divorce, gives up her in-home personal trainer in order to afford the tuition at a more expensive private school: "My children deserve to have the best."

Susan Smith did even better for her children, better than getting them into Dalton: she got them into heaven.

It's hard to imagine someone in her right mind taking this logic literally (which must give her lawyer some hope for an insanity plea). But that's the beauty of Satan's beautiful presentation, the rough draft of which I found right there on the shore of John D. Long Lake.

I arrived at the lakeshore in the late afternoon after a heavy shower had done some damage to the homemade shrines to little Michael and Alex. Down close to the water's edge at the foot of a sign that said "No Boating After Dark" was an almost druidic worship circle.

A 10-foot circle of ground entirely carpeted in flowers; red, blue and silver heart-shaped balloons; a thick herd of mostly powder blue stuffed animals -- little teddy bears, lions and tigers, along with little cards and handwritten poems addressed to the two dead boys.

People had been coming for days since the car and the bodies had been dragged out of the lake to deposit these tokens of their bereavement and bewilderment. For some of the couples I met down by the lake, it seemed Michael and Alex had become, in the nine days when they were presumed kidnapped but not dead, their own substitute children or grandchildren; when they turned out to have died it was almost as if they felt the loss personally. Michael and Alex were the perfect idealized children they never had.

There was something touching about the shrine, but also, on that afternoon, something particularly depressing: today all the little teddy bears and toys had been crushed into the mud by the pelting rains, the flowers' petals crushed into the mire, making the shrine scene even more immensely desolate, almost as if the heavens were declaring their disdain for all these well-meaning but pitifully inadequate efforts to explain or understand the evil deed and the deaths.

The rain had also caused some of the ink to run on the little notes and poems that pilgrims had painstakingly penned and left for the dead boys, but one poem in particular caught my eye. Handwritten in a neat, schoolmarmish style and stapled to a little wooden stake in the midst of the powder blue teddy bears, it may have caught my eye because earlier I found a slightly different version of it in a smaller shrine-circle higher up on the embankment. The fact that it appeared in two different versions suggests that the poem is a standard work of consolatory literature, perhaps even a staple of sympathy cards.

In any case, the poem was a primal work of theodicy, which is the attempt to reconcile the persistence of evil with the existence of an all-powerful and benevolent God. This poem, in particular, seemed an earnest (if, to my mind, monstrous) attempt to explain why God had permitted an apparent triumph of evil, the murder of two innocent children -- but an attempt that makes it sound more like God had committed the murder.

The gist of the poem was this: God looked around heaven one day and found it a bit dreary. He thought the place could use some floral accents to brighten it up. So He looked down at Earth and saw two lovely little "rosebuds" He fancied -- the unblemished souls of Susan Smith's two boys. He liked the look of them so much He had to pluck them for His own garden. That is -- although the poem doesn't make this explicit -- kill them and install them in heaven to perk the place up.

It is meant to be an image of sugary piety: the little boys are with God in His beautiful heavenly abode because He loved them so much; He took them because the innocence of their souls was so precious and beautiful to Him, because, as the poem concludes, "angels are so hard to find." They're free now from the harsh realities of the world He saved them from, the muck of the lake bottom, the mud of the earth smearing the fluffy coats of their powder blue teddy bear totems. But beneath the sugary piety is an image of absolutely sickening cruelty. A picture of God as an irritable, demonic esthete so easily bored with His decor that He arranges the murder of two young children in order to add a dash of color to His abode.

It's meant to be consoling, but in fact it's one of the most terrifying depictions of the deity I can imagine, far more genuinely blasphemous than anything Salman Rushdie has invented.

And yet there it is, this cute little poem, among the flowers and the heart-shaped balloons and the stuffed animals, posing as just another fluffy piece of sentimentality.

Who could possibly want people to believe in a God like that? Who but . . . Satan? It struck me then that perhaps this was Satan's beautiful presentation to Susan Smith: You're not murdering your children for your own convenience, you're giving them a precious gift, a shortcut to heaven. "My children deserve to have the best, and now they will." What could be better than an honored place in God's little garden?

It seemed to me that the same culture of unthinking, insulting piety ("don't feel bad that your children were murdered; it's all for the best because it cheers God up and that's what's important") that produced sentiments like this can be held accountable in part for the act itself. If Newt Gingrich can blame the Great Society, etc., I can blame this simpering greeting-card theodicy. It's a more persuasive solution to the mystery of what was going through Susan Smith's mind -- and it shows up dramatically in her confession as the motive for her act: "My children deserve to have the best," so I killed them to install them in God's garden.

I'm sure there's something irrational and excessive about my antipathy to this poem. The pious insistence that everything was O.K., everything was for the best, that there's no Problem of Evil to resolve, isn't meant to insult the dead or diminish their suffering. But it does. I suspect my inclination to locate the evil in the case in the poem was a kind of displacement from a reluctance to locate the evil in either of the other alternatives: Susan Smith or God. IN WHICH A HIT MAN DEFINES THE ETHOS OF AN AGE: 'I CAN EXPLAIN THAT, MAURY'

THE MORNING AFTER MY VISIT TO JOHN D. LONG LAKE, WHILE packing for the flight home from South Carolina, I found myself watching an edition of the Maury Povich show on my hotel-room TV. And catching a moment that somehow seemed to sum up in a single line an entire culture, the culture of the excuse, of explanation as exoneration. Talk-show culture has tended to suggest that we can trace all our problems to past abuse of one kind or another, and that once explained, we are absolved. Talk-show culture has been the last refuge of the Enlightenment belief that to understand all is to forgive all.

This particular show featured various participants in a sordid murder-for-hire plot. The details have faded somewhat but I recall there being a hit man who'd been hired by an ambitious yuppie type to kill his mistress because she was pregnant and wouldn't have an abortion, and he felt the prospect of babies (she was expecting twins) would cramp his lifestyle and flatten his career trajectory.

Now it seemed that the hit man had been caught and, in turn, ratted on the yuppie who'd hired him -- although it also seemed from some of the testimony, which a shocked Maury was reading to his studio audience, that the hit man was pretty gung-ho about the hit until he'd been caught.

In one passage Maury read, the hit man was bragging to the yuppie about how thorough he was going to be, promising that he'd make sure to shoot the pregnant girlfriend through the stomach to be certain both babies died. As I recall, Maury stopped at this point and confronted the hit man about his coldblooded barbarity.

His response: "I can explain that, Maury."

Talk shows like Maury's have become the American equivalent of the Athenian agora, where citizens, sophists and philosophers bat around questions of behavior. They can be barometers of public feeling on questions of good and evil. It occurred to me that a talk-show host like Maury has probably examined far more bad behavior than most philosophers, heard more explanations than any shrink and might have something to say about current attitudes toward evil.

When I got back to New York I put in a call to Maury and asked him about that memorable line -- "I can explain that, Maury." Did it sum up the contemporary approach to evil?

"Absolutely," he told me. But something's changed, he went on to say. "Audiences are not buying it anymore. They never bought it from the hardened criminal but now they're not buying it from the ordinary person who hadn't been in trouble but gets in trouble and then has some kind of, well, let-me-tell-you-what-happened-to-me-as-a-child defense."

Given that talk-show audiences are the barometer of national sentiment, Maury feels he can pinpoint the moment when the needle on the dial of national consciousness shifted from permissive green to angry red:

The moment Lyle reloaded.

The moment in the course of the Menendez brothers' double murder when Lyle and Erik had emptied their shotguns into the bodies of their parents, but realized their mother was still alive, crawling around in the blood. The moment when the supposed threat to their lives from the Big Bad Abusing Daddy was over. He was dead as a doornail but Mom was alive and whimpering and, as Maury puts it, poor-little-rich-boy Lyle "went out of the house and then came back in to blow away the mother."

In doing so, Maury believes, and then asking for our sympathy, Lyle and Erik blew away the delicate fabric of empathy that talk-show confessionals had woven around those who excused their crimes with tales of childhood abuse.

"That was the crushing blow for the whole abuse defense," he said. "That jolted audiences. There's been a backlash. Abuse defenses are now looked at cynically, and audiences are falling back on the old beliefs in good and evil." They are, moreover, capable of making subtle philosophic distinctions between modes of evil, a fact that becomes apparent in Maury's recollection of one of his Jeffrey Dahmer shows. Maury was telling me about his personal pantheon of evil. There was Charles Manson, of course: "The ultimate evil talk-show guest is Charles Manson. Why? No remorse. And Jeffrey Dahmer."

He'd done a lot of shows on Dahmer, he told me. He'd had members of Dahmer's family, members of the families of Dahmer's victims; they'd discussed the childhood traumas that may have turned him into a serial killer and a cannibal.

But it wasn't the horror of Dahmer's crimes that audiences had reacted most strongly to, Maury told me. It was the cards. "We also had on these people who did these trading cards. Jeffrey Dahmer trading cards! Oh, my God. I had to hold them" -- the audience -- "back. It was universal."

The audience was making a fascinating distinction between degrees of evil here: Jeffrey Dahmer killed and ate his dates, but it's possible to see the pathetic Dahmer doing it not out of some Chianti-and-fava-bean, Lecter-like delectation, but out of some hideous, uncontrollable compulsion, the product of profound pathological damage to his psyche.

But those who go on national TV hawking Jeffrey Dahmer trading cards, taking some snickering delight in profiting off images of the victims, they can't really say, "I was abused as a child, therefore I am compelled to earn a living turning other people's tragedies into serial-killer chic."

While they kill no one themselves they are more consciously wicked, the audiences seemed to think, more coldblooded, than Dahmer himself.

"When you start capitalizing on this in public, merchandizing it," Maury says, "the public begins to think; 'hey, they think we'll be attracted to this.' " The audience thinks evil is being imputed to them.

Thank God we have talk shows to expose this capitalization on evil.

But in fact the audience is making a sophisticated distinction here, one familiar to academic philosophers but lost in the fuzzy way we confuse evil deed with evildoer -- the way we conflate in the word "evil," badness-in-general, with genuine wickedness.

It might help to think of the categories of evil as somewhat akin to the City of Los Angeles. In the sense that in both cases the name is a general term for a number of very different and distinct subdivisions. Some of these suburbs of evil are less interesting or controversial: the category of natural evils (earthquakes and the like), evil not caused by man, is only controversial when natural evils are specifically attributed to acts of God and the proportionality of His justice and mercy are questioned. Then there are evil deeds committed with intention to do good, and evil deeds done without the intention to commit evil. Finally, we come to the inner sanctum of the suburbs of evil, to the most elusive and exclusive subcategory of evil, a category some philosophers still refuse to concede even exists, although most of us know it when we see it. The heart of the heart of darkness, the Beverly Hills of evil: conscious, intentional evil, or as the philosophical literature prefers to call it, wickedness. Some subdivide wickedness itself even further until we arrive at the innermost enclosure. There behind the iron spiked gates is the very Bel Air of evil: malignant wickedness, coldblooded evil for evil's sake.

While wickedness has a naive, fairy-tale-like ring to it, conjuring up wicked witches or the mustache-twirling villains of melodrama, it's a concept that has been the subject of serious philosophic debate for 2,500 years, ever since Socrates memorably decreed that it could not possibly exist. In the Protagoras, he declares by fiat that no one can know good and yet choose to do evil. In other words, intentional evil is impossible. People do evil when they mistakenly think they're doing good, or when they're deluded by evil maxims or ideologies. But no one does evil for the sake of evil.

One of the most useful recent analyses of this question is by an Australian philosopher, S. I. Benn. Benn rigorously examines the box within the box within the Chinese box of categories of wickedness, and finds himself hard-pressed to prove the innermost box is not empty. Struggling against Socrates's decree that knowing the good and doing evil is impossible, and against Kant, who, as Benn puts it, "denies that human beings can adopt as a fundamental maxim, informing all rational choices, as a kind of perverse moral law, the maxim 'Do evil for evil's sake,' " Benn parades the usual suspects from literature -- Milton's Satan ("Evil be thou my good"), Iago and Claggart in "Billy Budd." But he cites no examples from history or daily life. (Hitler, he says, falls into a lesser category he calls "conscientious wickedness.") And Benn has trouble finding some psychological basis for conceiving of such a person. "The unalloyed wickedness of malignity presents a logical or a psychological problem."

In the end, Benn has to fall back on the Prince of Darkness. Mounting a counterattack on Kant's denial that human beings can consciously adopt "evil maxims" and do evil for evil's sake, Benn seizes on (what I would consider) Kant's throwaway line on the question: that only "a devilish being" could behave that way. And tries to pin Kant to the ground with it. If he believes in "devilish beings," that is, wicked satanic spirits, Benn argues, "I cannot see why human beings may not also be satanic."

Here, then, at the furthermost reaches of the innermost four-chambered heart of darkness, even the most rigorous of philosophers is thrown back on theology. And we witness, in the driest of dry dispassionate analyses, the rebirth of Satan.

IN WHICH WE WORRY ABOUT THE REBIRTH OF SATAN AND POSE THE $64,000 QUESTION.

THE SAME DAY I SPOKE WITH MAURY, I HAD LUNCH WITH Andrew Delbanco, a scholar who has a theory about the historical source of our conflicted feelings about evil. He has mapped out, in fact, a kind of five-stage evolution of the shifting American attitudes toward evil and its demonic embodiment. I found myself impressed by the subtle and fluid historical analysis that Delbanco, a professor of literature at Columbia, has employed in thinking through the question for his forthcoming book, "The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil."

In his research for a previous book,"The Puritan Ordeal," Delbanco told me, over burgers at a place near the Columbia campus, that he'd noticed what he believed to be an important shift in the conception of evil in the culture of the American colonies. Before they left Europe, Delbanco argues, the Puritan sects that founded the New England colonies had a pronounced and traditional Augustinian attitude toward evil. While the man who became St. Augustine would sometimes speak of Satan as the source of evil, his later work, the theology that became the defining philosophy of Christian belief about evil, conceived of it not in terms of a Being, a Satan, but as Nonbeing. Evil was an absence, an emptiness, a privation of the good; it has no positive embodiment, no satanic incarnation.

But, Delbanco argues, something about the vastness and terror of the new world they clung so perilously to the edge of, something about all that Nonbeing threatening to engulf them, engendered in the colonists a powerful wish to embody evil in a palpable Being, in the figure of Satan, a fearsome specter but one somehow more knowable than the boundless darkness beyond their ken. Soon you had Satan prowling the fields and byways of New England. You had the Salem witches "confessing" they'd embraced Satan before they were put to death.

And then, says Delbanco, after a couple of centuries of Satan's tyranny over the imagination, there comes, sometime in the 1830's, a caesura in the evolution of evil in America: what he calls "the death of Satan." The terrifying wilderness mapped and cleared now saw the rise of the cult of individualism, the cult of the self-made man in the self-made land, a despiritualized postapocalyptic religious faith. The figure of Satan, the belief in the literal presence of a prince of darkness, faded like the ectoplasmic emanation of a spiritual medium.

So far, so good. Evil evolving from Nonbeing to Being to Unbeing. But later in the century a disturbing consequence of the death of Satan began to be made manifest, Delbanco believes. Without a single vivid figure on which to project our fear and hatred of evil, what happened was a kind of sublimated diffusion of the impulse to personify evil -- the demonization of groups. The waves of fear and hatred targeted at immigrants, at darker-skinned people from freed slaves to Southern and Eastern Europeans, at Jews and "subversives" culminated in the extremes of McCarthyism, often characterized as "witch hunts."

Which brings us to the confusion over evil we are experiencing today, Delbanco believes. The reaction against the demonizing impulses of racism, xenophobia and McCarthyism resulted in a skepticism about any use of the word evil. In the last few decades, scholars and thinkers have come to believe that any value judgments at all are hopelessly compromised and corrupted by self-interest, by motives of power and prejudice; that competing systems of values are not better or worse but merely rival, relative frameworks.

This is a state of affairs, Delbanco believes, that harbors a potential for danger. Danger because the longing to believe in evil, too long frustrated by a reigning doctrine that refuses to concede such longing has any rational basis, can lead to an eruption of an irrational demonizing impulse, perhaps one on a scale we've never seen before. A rebirth of Satan.

These are more than mere abstract concerns; it occurred to me that we may be seeing the first symptoms of this in the remarkable willingness to believe in the often ludicrously crude "revelations" of satanic ritual abuse that emerge from the manipulated memories of those who fall into the hands of therapists who specialize in "uncovering" them.

Why do such revelations find such willing believers? Precisely because they satisfy a longing to believe that evil exists, a longing that persists despite the reigning assumptions of a culture that marginalizes the deep-rooted intuition that evil, and evil people, are real. People want to believe in Satanists because at least they have no problem asserting the reality of evil. The Satanists say it loud: We're evil and we're proud.

Is this concern about the consequence of the dematerialization of evil really the Weimar argument? I asked Delbanco, referring to the school of thought that blames a reaction against modernism for the receptivity to Hitler. Was he suggesting a reaction to post-modernism may be our downfall?

Delbanco hesitates to go that far. Because he believes there are far many healthier and virtuous elements within American history and American society to compare it with Weimar.

"But how do you go back across that bridge from skepticism to absolutes -- once you've burned it?" I asked him. "How do you find a basis for believing in absolute good and evil?"

"That's the $64,000 question," he replied, aware of the trickiness of the problem. His own solution, which he expands on in "The Death of Satan," has been to find a way back to belief in objective good -- a solid foundation that he feels can be found in American history, in, for instance, renewed appreciation of the works of Abraham Lincoln.

But what about evil? Is there a bridge back to a common, an undeconstructed view of what we mean by evil, or are we trapped in our own relativistic frameworks? It's not an academic question, it's one we're forced to face every day when we make "value judgments." And it's one that I believe is part of the surprising popular appeal of a film like "Pulp Fiction." Because that's precisely the question that the film addresses.

IN WHICH THE BIG KAHUNA MAKES A PRESENTATION: A DIGRESSION ON THE THEOLOGY OF 'PULP FICTION,' WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE RELEVANCE OF BURGER NAMES TO ETHICAL RELATIVISM.

PERHAPS IT'S UNDERSTANDABLE THAT SO MUCH OF THE critchat discussion about "Pulp Fiction" has missed the point: the flashy violence, trashy language and bloody brain spatterings are red herrings that easily distract.

In fact, in its own sly but serious way, "Pulp Fiction" is engaged in a sustained inquiry into the theological problem of the relativity of good and evil. What I love about Quentin Tarantino's screenplay is how apparently throwaway time-passing dialogue often embodies tricky theological questions.

Consider the much-discussed but little-understood "mindless chitchat" about the French names for Big Macs and Quarter Pounders with cheese that preoccupies the hit men, Vincent and Jules, as they cruise through L.A. on the way to commit a contract hit for their big-time drug-dealer boss.

Just two bored "thick-witted hit men" (as the jacket copy for the published version of the screenplay inaccurately describes them) filling time.No, wrong: the Quarter Pounder exchange is one of the key poles of the sophisticated philosophic argument underlying "Pulp Fiction."

Like the discussion of the contextual legality of hash bars in Amsterdam ("It's legal, but it ain't a hundred percent legal") and the gender-based framework for judging the transgressiveness of giving the boss's wife a foot massage ("You're sayin' a foot massage don't mean nothin' and I'm sayin' it does. . . . We act like they don't, but they do"), the exchange about Quarter Pounders is ultimately about the relativity of systems of value.

They have to call a Quarter Pounder with cheese a "Royale with cheese" in Paris, Vincent explains to Jules.

"You know why they call it that?" Jules later asks one of the small-time dealers he and Vincent are about to murder.

"Because of the metric system?" the dealer guesses correctly. Jules praises his intelligence before shooting him. The grams of the metric system, the pounds and ounces of the Anglo-Saxon avoirdupois system are systems of value, yes, but still just different names for the same thing, different ways of expressing the weight and value of the same greasy slab of meat, a suggestion that all systems of values, categories like good and evil are just names given to behavior, names that carry no real weight themselves but merely reflect the different linguistic and cultural frameworks of the namer -- of whoever holds the power or the franchise to give the name. A multiculturalist, relativistic vision of burgers. One that is challenged, however, by the introduction of the Big Kahuna Burger into this conversation -- and the manifestation of the Big Kahuna himself.

Big Kahuna is the Hawaiian phrase for high priest, and Big Kahuna Burger is from "that Hawaiian burger joint," the one that has supplied the burger that the doomed small-timer is eating when the hit men call. "That's a tasty burger," says Jules, taking a bite out of his victim's meal. He offers one to Vincent, who declines, saying, "I ain't hungry" -- the division between them over Big Kahuna Burgers foreshadowing the division between them over the imminent manifestation of the Big Kahuna, the "divine intervention," as Jules comes to call it, that ensues. A hidden confederate of the doomed small-time dealer emerges from the bathroom, firing point-blank at Jules and Vincent. All the bullets miss. ("God came down from heaven and stopped the bullets," Jules insists. It "was a [expletive] miracle. . . . I felt God's touch.")

The invocation of the Big Kahuna challenges the ironies of nominalism (it's all in the name) and ethical relativism (it's all in the frame) that have been flickering back and forth in the Quarter Pounder dialogue. Challenges them by posing absolutism beyond (or beneath) frameworks, points of view and eyes-of-beholders, forcing Jules to question his own comfortable framework, something Vincent never does.

Jules is a guy who has previously been discussing the fine points of the ethics of foot massages while killing time before executing a contract murder for a crime boss. Within his framework, murder is not a violation of any code but a fulfillment of the ethics of loyalty and justice. (He's carrying out a sentence.) Before the Big Kahuna, we are in, with Jules, the ethically relative framework of the "Godfather" movies, where family values can include coldblooded murder and still seem like virtues. But suddenly he rejects the "tyranny of the evil man" for a transcendent framework.

Still, the film doesn't blindly junk relativism for absolutism about good and evil; it's intelligent and self-conscious enough to see the problem in accepting the Big Kahuna's presentation.

"You witnessed" a miracle, Vincent tells Jules. "I witnessed a freak occurrence."

"You don't judge [expletive] like this based on merit," Jules says. "Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is I felt God's touch. God got involved."

Which is an answer, but is it the answer to the $64,000 question, the problem of how to get back beyond relative frameworks to some absolute shared sense of evil?

Leaving it up to whether one feels "God's touch" can be dicey: the people who murder abortion doctors claim to feel God's touch; terror bombers say they feel God's touch. In the search for absolutes we may be back to personal frameworks again. Perhaps it's comforting that philosophers have as much difficulty as hit men in deciding what's the Big Kahuna and what's just another Whopper.

IN WHICH MARIO CUOMO WRESTLES THE PROBLEM OF EVIL TO A DRAW.

"THIS IS MARIO CUOMO," the message on my answering machine began. "Evil is the absence of good."

That was it, end of message. But I suspected he had more to say on the subject. That's why I'd faxed him. I knew he didn't really think that Augustine's idea of evil as Nonbeing answered all the questions.

I knew that because a few years ago, in the course of an interview with me, Cuomo had spoken rather eloquently about the troubling insolubility of the mystery of evil.

"There is no explanation of evil, I don't think anywhere," he'd said then. "There isn't sufficient understanding allowed us to be able to explain evil. I don't mean sin, but the unexplained pain to children sitting in Vietnamese villages who got their eyes blown out of their heads by explosions they didn't know were coming and that they had nothing to do with. The mother losing four children in a row, the apparently senseless tragedy. My brother's son freezing to death at age 5 out in Copiague. How do you explain that? The apparent injustice. You can't. You read McBrien's two volumes on Catholicism, which is all the rage now for Catholics theologically -- he says there's no point in giving a lot of pages to the subject of evil because we don't have an explanation."

And so I faxed the now ex-Governor again, this time suggesting that his phone message didn't exhaust the subject. When he called me back, I reminded him of what he'd said about Richard McBrien and the absence of an explanation for evil. The following dialogue ensued.

Q: Doesn't what McBrien says imply that Augustine's explanation is inadequate?

A: Define Augustine.

Q: [Echoing Cuomo's phone message] Evil is the absence of good.

A: That's not an explanation. That's a re-definition!

Q: But that was the message you left on my machine.

Once past this initial sparring, Cuomo conceded that the question is not exhausted by a one-sentence reduction of Augustine. "If you look at all religions in terms of what they say about evil, none of them are powerfully persuasively consistent with the rationale of a good God, a benevolent force. The best I've found is Teilhard de Chardin in 'The Divine Milieu.' "

Cuomo went on to cite Teilhard's explanations of evil but, to my surprise, only to dismiss them as inadequate.

"He says you couldn't enjoy fulfillment until you knew imperfection -- without evil there's no struggle, no accomplishment. Also evil is allowed so you can reflect on the perfections of other parts of existence, the way blindness sharpens other senses, the way the scar in the stone is used by the sculptor to create a greater whole, imperfection becomes the basis for greater perfection."

These are variations on what others have called "soul-making" theodicies -- evil exists to challenge and improve the soul who encounters it, a kind of aerobics class view of spiritual evolution in which you feel the burn of evil to pump yourself up to greater good.

"These are not," Cuomo conceded, "powerful intellectual arguments that leave one satisfied."

Isn't there something also unsatisfying, I asked him, about seeing evil as an absence -- hasn't he ever felt it as a positive presence in people?

"No person is all evil," he began, but yes, "I have many times seen people who for an instant, for a moment, were pure evil. I could see it in their faces, I could see it in their scream, I could feel it in their fists -- they would kill you."

The violence in that description: it's characteristic of Cuomo that when he speaks of the presence of evil, he speaks in terms of violence. Violence is not a particularly sophisticated philosophical concept; when we wish to speak of the heart of darkness we tend to search for some dark Dostoyevskian meta-consciousness, a diabolism of the mind rather than the fist. Some think that violence can be explained away by lesser phenomena: violent genes, violently deranged neurochemistry, the simpler forms of mental pathology.

But Cuomo will not let violence off the hook, so to speak; he became frankly impassioned as he began speaking about domestic violence, "husbands hitting wives," and then, escalating his rhetoric and raising his voice, he declared: "This is the most violent society in world history. Have I seen evil? Absolutely. We see it more in this country than in any country in the world."

"How can you say that?" I asked, wondering about this rather impolitic statement from someone still considered a national political figure.

But Cuomo insists: "There's more violence" -- here in the United States -- "and that's the real evil, the ultimate evil."

He didn't stop there, he pressed on to a fervid peroration on violence, which, interestingly, seemed to begin with a reference to Susan Smith.

"It's bad enough, in fact, to see someone drowning and not rescue them. But to push them into the water, to enjoy watching them drown -- that's violence. To hurt a person deliberately, to scar them, to kick them, to kick a child, to make a child cry. That's violence, and we do it more than anybody."

We do it more than anybody. I'm still not sure I agree with Cuomo's calculations on quantity. But I found his down-to-earth emphasis on violence as the essence of evil a refreshing change from the convoluted theological speculations I'd been immersed in. Whatever the source, the cause, the explanation for kicking the child -- for inflicting violence on an innocent of any kind -- there is an irrefutable viciousness to it that cannot be argued away.

It seemed that for Cuomo, the revulsion at violence was an impassioned absolute that came from the heart, not just the mind, shouldering itself through the formidable ratiocination of his speculative intellect to express an angry truth of the soul.

Something similar happened when we turned to the question of theodicy, not the evil in man but the evils that happen to men, to innocents, to children. I asked him about the death of his brother's child, who'd fallen through the ice of the canal behind his house.

"Was that a moment when you questioned God?" I asked him.

"What my brother, my sister-in-law, my whole family concluded then," he told me, "is that either there is some explanation that eludes me at the moment, or there is none. If there is no explanation, if there is utterly no rationale, then I'm not sure I can deal with the rest of my life. I'm not sure I can make myself sufficiently comfortable in this environment to go forward in it. Therefore, I must accept the thesis that there is some justification."

Some justification for the cruel death of a 5-year-old?

"That in the long run it does somehow work out, even if I don't understand at the moment."

It's a harsh view: looked at in rational terms, the evil that God apparently permits is utterly inexplicable. More than that, it's an inexplicability so stark and glaring that once glimpsed firsthand, it makes life itself unbearable ("If there is no explanation I'm not sure I can go forward"), makes suicide the logical choice. Only an irrational and unsupported leap of faith that somehow in some way God can explain why it was necessary for a 5-year-old to freeze to death can keep one from slitting one's wrists.

It's a choice he's made -- to keep going on -- but not one that has left Cuomo intellectually satisfied. He's still searching for a more rational answer. "Whenever somebody tells me to read some thinker, the first place I run is to the index to find out -- what does it say about evil. To me it's still the big question."

IN WHICH GOD GIVES DRIVING INSTRUCTIONS TO SOME BUT NOT OTHERS, AND MANY FABULOUSLY O.K. PEOPLE IGNORE TRANSWORLD DEPRAVITY.

OKLAHOMA CITY. "ANGEL Man," one of the heroes of the post-blast rescue effort, is telling me a chilling story. About a moment several years before the blast when he came face to face with evil and the specter of death.

We're in a sunny motel coffee shop the day after the rescue workers pulled the last bodies from the rubble, but the scene Angel Man conjures up is a dark, lonely stretch of the Interstate between Ponca City and Oklahoma City. It's 2 A.M., his wife is asleep by his side and suddenly he's being stalked by another car.

"There were only two vehicles on the road. I went to pass this other vehicle and saw it was a carload of some rough-looking people. My wife was sleeping. You know, bad things happen on the Interstate." A bad thing began to happen. That car of rough-looking people "pulled up next to me. A woman was trying to say something through the window. I experienced something ministers experience at funerals, at deaths, at the side of someone who dies. I just felt death."

He speaks with some authority on the subject. A youthful, evangelical preacher, the Rev. Robert Wake, a.k.a. Angel Man, has spent the past two weeks feeling death with the families of the Federal building bomb victims. Shortly after the explosion, he joined the death-notification teams, the ministers, grief counselors and social workers who broke the news to the relatives of victims being pulled from the rubble. It is one of the most horribly difficult human interactions one can imagine, but something about Wake -- his empathetic manner, his steadfast faith -- made his presence a particular comfort. He estimates he's spoken to "at least 60, 70 percent of the families of the dead." He's gone to funerals with them. He's seen "the crying, the grief, the desperation -- it's been a life-changing experience," he tells me.

A name-changing experience as well: it was his work with the families and rescue workers that earned him the nickname "Angel Man," he told me. "The families got tired of sitting around" waiting for bad news. "And they wanted to do something for the rescue workers."

One of the things he and the families began to do was coordinate the influx of "angel pins" being sent to the site from all over the country. To Wake, the angels on the angel pins represent guardian angels; he personally pinned hundreds of them on rescue workers as symbols of gratitude and talismans of protection.

"I'd be out at the site and workers would be chasing me down in golf carts calling out 'Angel Man!' Then a couple of newspapers picked up the name." And, he's heard that an upcoming episode of "Real Stories of the Highway Patrol" will open and close with an angel-pin moment.

That night on the Interstate, Wake could have used a guardian angel; he got more than that, he got God Himself. He has only heard the voice of God twice before in his life, he says, once at age 9, a second time at age 21. He has no doubt who it was that night, the night he stared evil in the face and "felt death."

Those rough-looking types in the other car on the lonely highway suddenly shifted from stalking and menacing: "All of a sudden they ran me completely off the Interstate into the median. And then they stopped" -- pulled in front to block him. "At that very instant I heard a voice say go across the median: drive in the other direction."

He followed directions, wheeled around and headed off in the opposite direction: evil and death did not cross that median to follow. And he was sure it was the voice of God intervening to save his life and that of his sleeping wife. "You don't hear it every day." But he knows it when it speaks. "In time of danger He's always there."

I have no reason to doubt Angel Man's story. But it's the kind of story that creates a problem. The problem Mario Cuomo wrestles with. The problem Holocaust survivors and theologians wrestle with.

If you believe in a God who has the power and the goodness and the inclination to intervene in the personal crisis of Angel Man, to speak to him and give him advice on evasive driving tactics to enable him to escape evil -- if you believe in God as the Ultimate Omnipresent Highway Patrol Man, then the question must arise: Why intervene to save Angel Man from evil and fail to intervene to save the children in the day care center in the Federal Building on April 19? Why not speak to the parents driving those helpless innocents to their rendezvous with a fertilizer-and-fuel-oil inferno and tell them: cross the median, go the other way?

Angel Man has an answer for that. He has many answers for that. Indeed, just about everyone I spoke to in Oklahoma City has an answer to that. And almost all the answers had to do with how much good has come out of the evil for Oklahoma.

"Even if the man" -- the suspect McVeigh -- "meant to do evil, he managed to accomplish some good," Angel Man says. "All he did was cause the genuineness of Oklahoma to come alive."

And when I asked Angel Man why God permitted evil to happen to the children, he told me: "The thing about it is there's been a lot of good come out of this. . . . What's so amazing about it is that God can take bad situations and make wonderful things out of them and He's doing that. God has done many miracles" in the rescue process, Angel Man continued, and, "in a way it overshadows -- it may not look like it overshadows, but in the long run, He's made a miracle out of it. Sometimes He allows things to happen to bring people together."

It was remarkable how frequently this was the response of Oklahomans to the explosive manifestation of evil in their presence. And it was puzzling to me at first, this repeated insistence that the real meaning of the whole murderous episode was how it was really about good, about the manifestation of the goodness of Oklahoma to the world, almost as if this more than balanced out the hundreds of dead and injured.

Here is Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma boasting to a newspaper reporter that his state emerged "from this muscular, attractive and lionized."

Muscular, attractive, lionized. An image enhancing makeover! The bombing made the state a sexy celebrity. "The good will generated by this tragedy," the Governor went on, "is a door-opening opportunity for us and one we fully wish to enjoy."

The Mayor of Oklahoma City was even more effusive. "This has given this city an opportunity to expand its horizons. It's a terrible way to do it," he conceded, "but we do end up getting a real opportunity."

Finally, there's the Governor's wife, Cathy Keating, who most explicitly proclaimed that the murderous explosion was really about the defeat of evil. This revelation came to her at a prayer service for the victims, who unfortunately will not be able to enjoy the muscular, attractive, prosperous future of Oklahoma. But no matter; at the end of the service the participants broke into a heartfelt chorus of the Broadway show tune about their state, triumphantly concluding, "Oklahoma, O.K.!" which convinced her, the Governor's wife said, that "evil didn't win. Really, it was the epitome of good triumphant over bad."

Someone less empathetic and philosophical about such things than I might wonder about the strenuousness with which Oklahomans were patting themselves on the back. Someone might say, sure, they're O.K., the ones singing -- they're not dead. Is it not a bit unseemly to insist so fervidly that everything is really O.K., most especially that they're O.K. -- when no one accused them of not being O.K.? Almost as if the whole thing was about them, about the survivors, not the victims.

But in a sense, it is about the survivors, about us, about those who have to go on living with the knowledge of, the presence of evil. And since I am an empathetic, philosophic sort, I'm not criticizing Oklahomans for their apparent self-congratulatory preoccupation but trying to understand it as a consequence, a delayed symptom of an all-too-close encounter with inexplicable evil -- the difficulty we all have in staring too directly into the heart of the heart of darkness.

It's almost like physics: just as the blast instantly converted mass into energy in a murderously destructive fashion, the evil unleashed by the blast must similarly be transmuted into Greater Good. It's almost an Iron Law, akin to the Law of Conservation of Mass, only this one enforced by the media. ("This is a story about hope.") Rather than allowing a space for contemplating evil, experiencing rage, pain, a moment of doubt about ourselves or the kind of world we're confined in, victory, triumph over evil must be declared instantly. It's an unfortunate tribute to the power, the fear of evil that its potency has to be denied or erased rather than faced.

It may be an American trait to insist that something new and good must always be seen to emerge from evil. It's an instructive contrast to read the views of those post-Holocaust theologians who argue against an easy triumphalist "explanation" for the slaughter in Europe (that, for instance, it paved the way for the establishment of the Biblically promised Jewish state in the Holy Land), because some clouds are not redeemed by silver linings, however bright. Because to focus on finding good in some tragedies is to trivialize the tragedy, diminish the suffering of those who died -- and the evil of those who killed them.

Instead, the party line in Oklahoma is that the real story is about how fabulously O.K. we are as a people, how fabulously O.K. God and human nature are once again proved to be. Which brings us to the other pervasive theme of post-Oklahoma comment: God is still in control. Before I went down to Oklahoma City that phrase popped up in a newspaper data-base search for linkages of "Oklahoma" and "evil."

"It's terrible and painful now but God is still in control," said one minister. "It's shocking and awful but you should know that God is still in control of the world," said another. "He hates evil and wickedness as much as we do."

The lines seem to be a staple of consolatory rhetoric, much like the "angels are hard to find" phrase is when dealing with the death of children like Susan Smith's.

The sentiment was there the morning I made my way past the first line of police cars to get to the inner perimeter of the blast site for a close-up view of the carnage. An F.B.I. chaplain was on hand preparing for the final visit of the bereaved families to the gutted building where their loved ones had died. The chaplain tried to make the sentiment sound new or just-thought-up for a reporter from The Dallas Morning News: "These people are going through so much shock and grief," he told The News, "I sense deep grief." After a moment of what the reporter thought was deep reflection, he said, "I hold to the faith that God is still in control."

It's a nice sentiment and one can hardly fault it if it helps ease the suffering of the moment. But it's the kind of argument that if looked at a little closely -- if taken seriously as theodicy -- seems to contain a troubling contradiction. If God is in control now and still hates wickedness, was He in control and hating wickedness when John Doe got ready to detonate his bomb? If He was both in control and hated wickedness, why wouldn't He have saved the lives of the children at the day care center?

The primal appeal of that statement, the urgent need to believe someone is in control -- even an out-of-control Alexander Haig, saying "I am in control here in the White House" after President Reagan had been shot -- is powerfully clear. It belongs to an earlier, deeper stratum of consolation-for-evil than currently fashionable modes.

The more sophisticated contemporary trends in explanation for evil try to convince people that God is really not in control of evil. That's the essence of Rabbi Harold Kushner's "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." His book has undoubtedly been a help to many people in pain, but it does so at the cost of diminishing God to something less than an Omnipotent Being -- to something more like an eager cheerleader for good, but one decidedly on the sidelines in the struggle against evil.

We should not be angry and curse God, Rabbi Kushner insists, after some horrible tragedy, because he doesn't control events; he hates wickedness but he's often powerless to stop it from happening. In effect, we need to join Him in rooting for good -- our job is to help cheer Him up.

And then there is the approach of Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame. I'd spoken with Plantinga, who is widely regarded as one of America's leading philosophers on these questions. And I'd found myself fascinated by his influential treatise, "God, Evil and the Metaphysics of Freedom." In fact, I'd brought it down with me to the Oklahoma City blast site, and at one point some of the photocopied pages slipped out of my notebook and began to blow around the rubble-strewn site.

Plantinga uses the complex equations of symbolic logic to prove that it is logically impossible for God to "control" the amount of evil in the world. That, so long as there is real free will, God could not have actualized a world in which there is significantly less evil than there is in this one. The keystone of Plantinga's proof is a quality he calls "transworld depravity." Plantinga argues that it is at least possible that in any of the alternate worlds God might have actualized, there will exist a class of individuals who will always freely choose evil -- their freely chosen recalcitrance is, in effect, beyond the control of God. Transworld depravity, as I see it, cosmically transcends original sin as a principle of evil, because it's beyond God's control.

There's something about that phrase, transworld depravity, that has a resonance beyond its narrow application to symbolic logic. It's a phrase that deserves to enter the language; it's perhaps a better, more evocative substitute for the word evil. I feel I've met some individuals who exhibit it. I suspect we all have a bit of it in us.

And so, with thoughts of transworld depravity spinning through my head, I found myself at the inner perimeter of the blast site, staring into the blown out interior of the Federal building.

I'd seen the same image hundreds of times on TV. But seeing it in that setting -- surrounded by the accouterments of consolation: the teddy bears wired to the chain-link fence, the letters from schoolchildren pinned all around the bears, letters declaring (in almost identical phrases) "Love Will Overcome Evil," "Love Will Prevail," "Love Is Eternal" -- gives the image a more disquieting dimension.

There is a deeper dimension, too, to the interior of the building not apparent in the flat pixels of the TV screen: With the fourth wall demolished, it's possible to see farther into the dark recesses of the blasted-out floors. The gaping holes in the facade revealed dark thickets, snaky tangles of torn cable, giving the building face a Medusa-like aspect. Staring into it, I found it difficult not to see the gaping holes in the building as a metaphor for the gaping holes in the fabric of our state of understanding of the Problem of Evil.

Gaping holes that are painful to gaze at because they remind us of the blown-out lives that make the problem more than an abstraction. Painful to gaze at because they proclaim an essential ignorance and failure in constructing an explanation for evil that will stand up to the explosive trauma of such tragedies.

Gaping holes that are nonetheless better acknowledged and investigated than papered over with the pretense that we know all the answers and that everything is and will be O.K.