Episode Details

In the year 524, a condemned man named Boethius sat in a cell awaiting a brutal execution and wrote down the question that has haunted the West ever since: if there is a God, whence comes evil? It is the hardest objection ever put to the faith — and this episode, true to its promise, states it at full and terrible strength before it answers a word, from the cold logic of Epicurus to the scream of Ivan Karamazov, who returns God his ticket over the tears of a single tortured child.

Then come the great answers, and they are not waved-away comforts: evil as the absence of good, from Augustine; the freedom that alone makes love possible; the world as a forge for souls; Job, answered by God not with a reason but with a whirlwind. And finally the answer that is Christianity’s own and no other’s — not a God who explains suffering from a throne, but a God who entered it, hung in the dark of it, and was raised out of it. Only the suffering God can help. The wound does not fully close. But neither does the unbeliever walk away clean.