Privatio and Radical Evil

Milbank opens Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (Radical Orthodoxy) with a discussion of neo-Kantian arguments concerning radical evil. In the light of the Holocaust and twentieth-century totalitarianism, they argue, the traditional Augustinian privatio is deeply inadequate.

In response, Milbank relativizes totalitarianism by arguing that “European and American liberal democracy has also engendered a continuous horror almost as grave as the Holocaust, and a more troublingly sustainable mode of nihilism, appropriately disguised by an unparalleled reign of kitsch . . . : this is the sequence of deliberate terror and extermination employed against civilian populations as a primary instrument of war and neo-colonial power from the Congo to teh Philippines through Hiroshima, Palestine, Kenya, Algeria and Vietnam to the Gulf War and Afghanistan.”

What characterizes the evil of modern power is not totalitarianism as such, but “the emptiness of secular power as such,” or “secular immanence” which cannot be anything but “totalizing and terroristic because it acknowledges no supra-human power beyond itself by which it might be measured and limited.” Guided by no religious, social, or political telos , except to protect the non-teleological pursuit of happiness, modern uses of power are, Milbank argues, inherently nihilistic. There is something “unprecendently sinister” about twentieth-century evil, but it is because it is immanent/secular, and directionless because secular.

For “privation theory,” Milbank explains, being is good and “since all power in order to be effective manifests the actuality of being, all power, as power, is good.” Evil, then, is not power as such, but rather “weakness and impotence,” a point he draws from Pseudo-Dionysius. He draws from this the conclusion that the will “is only actual and effective when it wills the good.” Evil cannot be willed as such; when someone chooses evil, it shows that his will is not in fact willing, not making a choice in freedom, but is captive to something prior to the will. Thus “no one, as willing, wills anything but the good, and evil only affects the will to the extent that a deficient good is being willed.”

This is disturbing for proponents of radical evil, since it seems to exonerate the will. Besides, since privation theory also says that “Being in its pure self-origination is infinite, and if Being as such is good, then, also, the infinite as such is good, indefeasibly good, beyond the possibility of swerving.” But this means that finite being is alone open to the possibility of evil, and that again seems to exonerate evil deeds by rooting them in the fact of finitude. Milbank admits that this appears to be what privation theory does, noting that Paul in Romans 7 “appears entirely to exonerate the will” by distinguishing between the good he desires and the evil he actually does. At least, it seems, the “I” remains perfectly innocent. (Milbank does not accept that inference, however, and suggests here and elsewhere that it rests on a prior Kantian notion of evil that locates evil in motivation and intention rather than in act.)

Ultimately, it seems that God Himself is responsible for evil: “since evil is rooted in finitude, and the finite is caused by the infinite, the infinite is the real ultimate source of lack, the ontological of the meontologicl.” If the infinite is construed as imperonal, then there is, in privation theory, an ontological cause of evil. A theory that seemed to deprive evil of all ontological weight seems to end up ontologizing evil.

Milbank’s riposte is to note that radical evil also rests on an ontological scenario. “Good/evil” is, for Kantian theory, “entirely prior to the distinction between infinite and finite,” and this means that the “infinite can manifest the extreme of evil.” This is a purely, and disturbingly, voluntarist theory. In Schelling, “the good will of God is the result of a radical decision within the dark indifferent ground of the infinite, and this alone ensures that God really is good.”