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.

In this summary of the second chapter of his book, The Age of Nihilism, Fr. John discusses the early life and faith and incarceration of Russia's great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Unlike his contemporaries--particularly Nietzsche--the novelist found in traditional Christianity the only hope for a Christendom living under the terrible specter of nihilism.

In this final presentation on the nihilistic philosophy of Nietzsche, Fr. John considers the philosopher's final work, an autobiography entitled Ecce Homo. The book's strange title is discussed in light of Nietzsche's claim to be the West's alternative to Christ. The episode ends with a spiritual and psychological reflection on why, having completed the work, Nietzsche went totally insane.

In his continued account of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fr. John discusses the megalomaniac philosopher's effort to replace the Gospel with an atheistic "transvaluation of all values."

Friedrich Nietzsche is in many ways the father of modern nihilism. In this episode, Fr. John describes the philosopher's relationship to the atheism of contemporary utopian Christendom, and how the music of Richard Wagner played a role in leading him toward nihilism. As with previous episodes, this one introduces the listener to some music that is both beautiful and historically important.

In this episode, Fr. John begins an account of Friedrich Nietzsche by discussing Richard Wagner, a direct influence on the philosopher whose infidelity with women and famous operatic work, The Ring of the Nibelung, helped inspire the coming age of nihilism.