ABSTRACT
In an essay entitled 'Evil, A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology', Ricoeur offers a hermeneutic critique of different discursive responses to evil: lament and blame, myth, wisdom, and theodicy. This chapter traces the main outlines of Ricoeur's genealogy of discourses and discusses Ricoeur's own hermeneutic response to the enigma of evil in terms of practical understanding; working-through, and pardon. The first discursive response, lament and blame (witnessed in the Hebrew Bible, for example) - differentiates between evil as suffering and evil as wrongdoing. The next discursive genre, myth allows for the incorporation of evil into 'great narratives of origin'. Wisdom discourse gives way, in turn, to the fourth discursive account of evil listed in Ricoeur's critical genealogy, namely, the speculative. Practical understanding is the name Ricoeur gives to that limited capacity of the human mind to think the enigma of evil.
