Hannah Arendt’s EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL (1963) elicited much controversy shortly after it was published, especially over two of its topics: the alleged complicity of European Jews in the Holocaust; and the concept of “the banality of evil.” Arendt claimed that the leadership of the Jewish Councils (Judenrate) had “cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis.” Basically, she claimed, their policy was to advise surrender rather than flight, and this policy was disastrous. Critics charged that she was “blaming the victim.” They likewise objected to her portrait of Eichmann as a rather dull-witted bureaucratic type who simply followed orders. He was, in short, not a moral monster, the enormity of whose crimes — her critics claimed — made him Satanic.
Arendt stood by her account. In a letter to one of her critics, the great scholar and philosopher Gersholm Sholem, she wrote the following :
“It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ’thought-defying,’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality.’ Only the good has depth and can be radical” (7/14/63).
I’m not sure I agree with her. I think evil has as much depth as good. Eichmann was indeed banal, for he was a simple bureaucrat who regarded his function amorally, the way a worker in a slaughterhouse goes about his job slitting the throats of chickens or lambs as if they were carrots or potatoes. Hitler, on the other hand, was demonic. The paradigm or stereotype of the demonic is the Serpent in Genesis or Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost or Satan in Dante’s Inferno. These characters of myth are characterized by their lust for POWER. They cannot abide the thought that they are subordinate to God. As Milton’s Satan puts it, “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Augustine summarized the essence of evil as Amor Sui, or self-love, as opposed to Amor Dei, or love of God. It would seem paradoxical that self-love is the root of evil, or “radical” evil. After all, Jesus said that “all the Law and the Prophets” can be summarized in two positive injunctions: “Love God, as he has loved you, with all your heart and mind; and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” He acknowledges that self-love is natural, normal, appropriate, and even necessary. The problem is when self-love becomes exclusive, that it’s the center of your loving. The ultimate object of love is God, and that love is reciprocal; and it is the model of how we relate to our “neighbors” — that is, other human beings who are in our vicinity, our “neighborhood.” Our neighbors are not abstractions but real people whom we can see and interact with. We must “love” them as we love ourselves as we love God, who started the whole process by creating us out of love for Himself. “God” is the principle of creation, or Creation: we exist, the universe exists, by virtue of a Creative Force we call “God.” God is this creative force. He creates, and he loves his creations. He cares for them. Love as caritas.
Satan, by contrast, is the Destructive Force. Being is Good, Nothingness is Evil. Evil seeks Nothingness. It seeks to bring to Nothing all that Is. According to our myths, which anthropomophize God and Satan, this will to Nothingness is rooted in the Self-Love that dominates all motivations. Psychologically, the motive is “cupidity,” or greed, as in the Biblical verse, “Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas.” Biblical mythology would have the desire for power to be a kind of greed for something that belongs to another. Satan wants the power that properly belongs only to God. That is “radical evil.”
Finally, Hannah Arendt’s doctoral dissertation — which she wrote under the direction of Karl Jaspers, who was a serious Christian — was “St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Love.” She was a Jew who respected her traditions and her identity as a Jew, but she was deeply interested in Saint Augustine. She once said, “Augustine was Rome’s greatest philosopher. Alas, he was a Christian!”
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