Privatio boni and banal evil

In the view of many, the Holocaust belied the Augustinian description of evil as the privation of good. Something much more insidiously positive was at work in the death camps. Hannah Arendt, however, seems to confirm the Augustinian perspective in her treatment of the banality of evil. According to Milbank, “For Arendt, famously, the mass murderer Albert Eichmann, on trial in Jerusalem, discloses not a pre-Satanic will to evil, nor a lust for horror, but instead ‘the banality of evil,’ an incremental and pathetic inadequacy of motive which escalated imperceptibly into complicity with unimaginable wickedness.” Arendt’s analysis suggests that Auschwitz is “not the revelation of evil perpetrated for its own sake, but rather a demonstration that even the most seemingly absolute evil tends to be carried out by people who imagine, albeit reluctantly, that they are fulfilling the goods of order, obedience, political stability, and social peace.”