In this episode, Fr. John describes how the Nazis, once in power, pursued a culture war against existing German values and beliefs by attacking Christianity, advancing neopaganism, and elaborating a racist utopia.

In this episode, Fr. John launches into the darkest period of the age of nihilism, Nazi Germany. In it, he explores the conditions of Western culture following the First World War and how they subverted both traditional Christianity and secular humanism. He concludes with a review of the ideological mythology contained in Hitler's Mein Kampf.

In this final episode dealing with the Soviet Union under Stalin, Fr. John narrates one of the most chilling episodes in the ideological project to apply the transformation-imperative to a nihilistic, post-Christian Christendom.

Father John continues his account of the Soviet Union's totalitarian project of building socialism by contrasting its nihilistic ideology with the sacramental experience of traditional Christianity.

In this episode, Fr. John begins a discussion of ideological world-building during the twentieth-century age of nihilism. The Communist leadership of the Soviet Union under Stalin drew on the philosophies of both Marx and Nietzsche to advance a terrifying counterfeit of the transformation-imperative in ancient Christian cosmology.

Father John describes the way the First World World shattered confidence in utopia with Western Christendom, and how the growing specter of nihilism caused a small and diverse group of intellectuals to return to traditional Christianity in the years that followed.

In this episode, Fr. John reviews the rise of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century, an artistic movement that largely annihilated centuries of tradition in Western painting, music, and literature. He continues by exploring the rise of dehumanizing and demoralizing views of the human condition advanced by atheistic social scientists of the period such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud.

In this final episode telling of Dostoevsky's encounter with the "specter of nihilism," Fr. John brings attention to the novelist's characters that most revealed the radiant hope of Christ. The first of these was Prince Lev Myshkin in the novel The Idiot. The second was Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. The episode concludes with an excerpt from Age of Nihilism about Dostoevsky's vision of the heavenly transformation of the world.

In this episode, Fr. John reflects on Dostoevsky's spiritual prescription for Christendom as it began to fall under the specter of nihilism. Repentance was the center of the paradisiacal culture of the first millennium, and in his novels Dostoevsky countered atheistic contemporaries like Nietzsche by showing how neglect for it leads only to the human being's self-destruction.

Returning to a literary career after a decade of exile, Fyodor Dostoevsky confronted one of the great delusions of secular humanism: that man is ultimately a rational being whose happiness depends on the exercise of self-interest. Characters in his novels The Idiot and Demons were designed to demonstrate that nihilistic self-destruction is the only outcome of such convictions. Father John concludes the episode by showing how nihilism played itself out in the fictional moral collapse of Dostoevsky's protagonist Raskolnikov and the real-life moral collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche.