HeyJ XLI (2000), pp.

154169

ARENDT, AUGUSTINE AND EVIL1

DAVID GRUMETT

Kings College, Cambridge, UK

In her early adult life, Hannah Arendt experienced at first hand the reality of political evil. In the summer of 1933, shortly after Hitlers appointment as German Chancellor, she was undertaking research into anti-Semitism in the Prussian State Library on behalf of the German Zionist Organization when she was arrested and kept in German police custody for eight days. On release, realizing the danger she was in, she fled to France. Her comparative safety there, however, ended once Germany had declared war on France. In May 1940, when Germany invaded, she was interned as a German living in Paris, but in the chaos following the French defeat in the following month she used her ingenuity to obtain liberation papers to leave the camp. She was soon in danger yet again, this time as a Jew living in Vichy France. Fortunate enough to obtain a US emergency visa, wise enough to avoid seeking a Vichy government exit permit, and lucky enough to be allowed clearance from the Spanish authorities to cross into Portugal, she fled to the United States in January 1940.2 There were thus at least five occasions on which she narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp, from where transportation to a death camp would sooner or later have been likely. A small amount of attention has been given to Arendts work on Augustine, though surprisingly none has focused on the concept of evil.3 Arendts concept of the origin and nature of evil is usually attributed to her personal experience of totalitarianism and later coverage of the trial of the Final Solution bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann.4 This however fails to give a full account. Its intellectual roots are rather to be found in her doctoral dissertation on Augustine, published in 1929.5 The overall importance of Augustine for Arendts thought is as an existentialist, an interpretation a world-view removed from medieval political Augustinianism and even from mainstream interpretation in the early decades of this century. Arendts work is indeed an early contribution to a major shift in Augustine scholarship.

The Editor/Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.

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Arendts Heidelberg dissertation was supervised by Karl Jaspers, who was supplanting Heidegger, under whom Arendt had studied at Marburg, as her chief mentor. Its dense German prose and long untranslated classical passages probably limited its accessibility. An English translation was prepared by E. B. Ashton in about 1958 which Arendt began revising for intended publication in 1964 or 1965, signing a contract with Crowell-Collier in 1962.6 Arendt commented to Mary McCarthy that she was trying not to do anything new, but only to explain in English (and not in Latin) what I thought when I was twenty.7 Scott and Stark, who compiled the dissertation, confirm this by noting that the continuity is remarkable between the 1929 German original and Arendts 195862 revisions.8 It is therefore not a major interpretive issue to distinguish the two. The revisions were however not completed and the revised translation never published. Arendt had travelled to Jerusalem to file reports on the Adolf Eichmann trial (April 1961 to May 1962) for The New Yorker, and these attracted much publicity and embroiled Arendt in great controversy, which fully occupied her. Two dissertation translations were finally published: Le Concept damour chez Augustin. Essai dinterprtation philosophique by Anne-Sophie Astrup in 1991 and Love and Saint Augustine by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark in 1996. Scotts and Starks work is based on Ashtons translation and Arendts revisions of the first two sections, and has a shorter but vaguer title than the original German or the French translation of the German. The dissertation is arranged in three parts which serve to show three conceptual contexts in which the problem of love plays a decisive role (A, p. 3). The first part begins with Augustines understanding of love as appetitus (craving or desire), which seeks possession of an object and temporally is the anticipated future. The evil that fear makes us shun is whatever threatens our happiness, which consists in possession of the good. So long as we desire temporal things, we are constantly under this threat, and our fear of losing always corresponds to our desire to have (p. 10, my italics). The summum bonum, by contrast, cannot be lost (or possessed) in this world. Love as appetitus however seeks inferior, mutable goods: The good love craves is life, and the evil fear shuns is death. The happy life is the life we cannot lose. This however leads to a contradiction: First, the good is the object of craving, that is, something useful that man can find in the world and hope to obtain. In the second context, the good is defined by fear of death, that is, by lifes fear of its own destruction This basic fear of death guides all our fears of specific evils. Thus in its flight from death, the craving for permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death (p. 17). Fearless possession can be achieved only under the conditions of timelessness (p. 14),

156 DAVID GRUMETT and cannot be the outcome of appetitus because this is the anticipation of the future. Love that desires a worldly object, be it a thing or a person, is constantly frustrated in its very quest for happiness (p. 19). The second part begins with the happy life, which temporally is the remembered past. The knowledge of the possible existence of the happy life is given in pure consciousness prior to all experience This knowledge of the happy life is not simply an innate idea, but is specifically stored up in memory as the seat of consciousness (p. 47). The creature in its createdness derives its sense of meaningfulness from a source that precedes its creation, that is, from the Maker who made it. The very fact that man has not made himself but was created implies that the meaningfulness of human existence both lies outside itself and antedates it (p. 50). Nevertheless, in the pure act of finding himself as part of Gods creation, the creature is not yet at home in the world (p. 67). By seeking happiness for its own sake, man remains in a state of superbia (pride). The happy life, even enjoyed in common with others, remains fundamentally human-centred and therefore incomplete. The third shorter part gives in light of the preceding analysis an authentic and durable basis for social life. Humanitys common descent is its common share in original sin and therefore the neighbour is the constant reminder of ones own sin (pp. 102 and 105). Only by recognizing the reality and inescapability of human sin can humans begin to build a stable social life. Neither desire for possession nor desire for the happy life can do this, because they are human-centred and not Godcentred. Social life can exist only amongst those with faith in God and in the highest good, unattainable in sinful, this-worldly life. The believer cannot however live in isolation, being unable to act by himself (separatus), only with others or against them (p. 107), and is therefore driven into human society. His ties with other humans must however always remain subordinate to his caritas for God. In the civitas Dei, love rests on the common knowledge of a common danger (p. 110). Augustine recognizes that human social life is precarious, due to human sin.
II. AUGUSTINE ON EVIL IN THE WORLD

Ontological conception Augustine identifies evil negatively, especially in his early works. Because evil is by definition not good, and whatever exists as a substance is good, evil cannot have substantial existence (C 7.1218). Indeed, the whole meaning of evil is derived from the privation of form (Q 6). This view of evil as ontological privation was essentially Platonic, originating in Parmenides and finding new expression in the Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism of Augustines age. Babcock succinctly expresses the gap that Augustine soon perceived in the (traditional)

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Platonic account, which is that it does not account for the origin of evil; and, above all, it does not capture the active force of evil as a power exerting itself in opposition to even if wholly constrained by the divine design.9 The importance of this relational view of evil alongside the ontological one quickly became important for Augustine, who wanted to do justice to human experience as well as to demands of reason. It is only for God and for his created universe, considered as a whole, that evil does not exist. Unlike traditional Platonism, but along with Neoplatonists, Augustine felt compelled to take the phenomenon of evil seriously. To do this, he developed a phylogenetic (aetiological) diagnosis within the established ontogeny of evil. Societal conception Russell notes of Augustine that doubting his early optimism, he became convinced that sin was not a mere and simple aversion of the soul from higher to lower goods, but rather a continuing process given momentum by the force of habit (consuetudo).10 Consuetudo is the root of the mistaking of Gods true creation (A, p. 77) and a key concept in Augustines doctrine of the transmission of original sin. Once a particular sin is committed, its reappearance is more likely than before. Arendt notes in the dissertation that the law of sin is the force of habit and that it is precisely by clinging always to the past that habit demonstrates the original sinfulness of mans own will (A, pp. 82 and 83). Consuetudo is exhibited in particular types of worldly behaviour: temporality, human society and the private life. In The City of God, Augustine argues that it was the shameful luxury and hedonism that developed in Rome following the defeat of Carthage, Romes chief enemy, and not the Christian faith, that was responsible for Romes decline, charging the Romans that you engender from prosperity a plague of moral ills worse than the raging of enemies (CD 1.30). What Augustine saw as obsessive materialism and concern for temporal goods and gratification was in contrast to the virtues exhibited in the earlier Roman empire as well as to fundamental tenets of Christian faith. The root of evils is greed or cupiditas (1 Tim 6 : 10), that is, the willingness to have more than enough of any object of immoderate desire (LA 3.17). Wickedness springs from the lust for domination or the lust of the eyes or sensuality or from these in combination (C 3.816). Of physical objects, temporal honour and power, and human friendship, Augustine says: Sin is committed for the sake of all these things and others of this kind when, in consequence of an immoderate urge towards these things which are at the bottom end of the scale of good, we abandon the higher and supreme good that is you, Lord God, and your truth and your law (C 2.510). Appetitus, which in the dissertation seeks temporal possession for its own sake, leads to moral and social decline.

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An instance of the seeking of human company for its own sake is Augustines own theft of pears from an orchard with friends. He recalls: My love in that act was to be associated with the group in whose company I did it My pleasure was not in the pears; it was in the crime itself, done in association with a sinful group (C 2.816). Augustine and his friends did not steal the pears through hunger, nor for any other good or bad motive. Augustine examines the circumstances and concludes simply: It was all done for a giggle (C 2.917). The solace of friends was a source of repair and restoration for Augustine in his early dissolute life and this is the key point a substitute for God. This was a vast myth and a long lie because the flattery of this kind of friendship is corrupting (C 4.713 and 9.818). Such friendship is not entered into for mutual support in the face of the common knowledge of a common danger (A, p. 110) but is a symptom and source of human sin. Of preference for private interest above the public good and above God, Augustine states:
Your truth does not belong to me nor to anyone else, but to us all whom you call to share it as a public possession. With terrifying words you warn against regarding it as a private possession or we may lose it. Anyone who claims for his own property what you offer for all to enjoy, and wishes to have exclusive rights to what belongs to everyone, is driven from the common truth to his own private ideas, that is from truth to a lie. For he who speaks a lie speaks from his own (C 12.2534).

This unchangeable good is common, not private, and only when the will cleaves to this good does one enjoy a happy life (LA 2.19). Even the happy life is, as we have seen in the dissertation, transitional. The common good may not be the consensus or majority view of the day, as true inward justice judges not by custom but by the most righteous law of almighty God which remains unaltered everywhere and always (C 3.713). For Augustine, in a significant departure from Plato, coercive social power is based neither on nature nor on justice; it is rather a condition of slavery caused by sin.11 Providential conception Although Arendt does not develop this aspect in the dissertation, it later assumes great importance for her. Evil in the world is, for Augustine, contrary to natural order. No-one is happy without the highest good, and the eternal law has established with unshakeable firmness that the will is rewarded with happiness or punished with unhappiness depending on its merit (LA 2.9 and 1.14). Augustine however recognizes that divine providence, a notion foundational to previous Greek philosophy, does not exclude all the things which we acknowledge to be evil, that is, evil in its relational and phylogenetic aspect, from the divine order (ordo) (O 2.724). Evil is however not tolerated, but punished. Divine

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providence does not punish by miraculous intervention in the temporal world for Augustine, it is far simpler than this. The fact that inordinate desire rules the mind is itself no small punishment (LA 1.11). Because only its will and free choice can make the mind a companion of cupidity (ibid.), ones punishment is that which human beings do to their own injury because, even when they are sinning against God, their wicked actions are against their own souls (C 3.816). Von Balthasar expresses this idea succinctly: Gods law is both positive and natural. Man is never rewarded or punished purely from outside, but by the operation of his nature itself. Augustine therefore attaches vital importance to the harmony between providence and personal development. His thesis is that nothing is guided by God purely externally without at the same time being guided internally.12 This is the crucial link between Augustines ontogenetic (privatio) and phylogenetic (consuetudo) conceptions of evil. Misery results when lower goods are desired so much that they are thought to be the only goods (CD 15.4). Augustine came to recognize that he and his friends suffered as a result of their own follies (C 6.69), an instance being Augustines physical sickness on arrival in Rome, when he came bearing all the evils I had committed against you, against myself, and against others (C 5.916). Loss of an earthly good is punishment for the sin of desiring it, but punishment also involves deprivation of natural goods (CD 1.10 and 19.13). Punishment is, moreover, not a right to which a wronged person is entitled and may exercise. Rather, punishment is a natural good and its administration therefore a human duty. It is precisely because good people neglect to be bitter to the wicked that they also suffer like the wicked (CD 1.9). Love of neighbour is the commandment to ensure that the neighbour also loves God, and to wish that the neighbour does the same for oneself (CD 19.14). Again appears the common knowledge of a common danger (A, p. 110), which is human sinfulness.

III. ARENDT ON EVIL IN THE WORLD

I will now use Arendts well-known work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil to compare Arendts and Augustines analyses of evil in the world. It is important to realize that Arendts concept of banality predates Eichmann, being used at least twice in The Origins of Totalitarianism in her discussion of the total domination that totalitarianism seeks to gain over human life. She states that human experiences themselves can communicate no more than nihilistic banalities, and speaks of creating a society in which the nihilistic banality of homo homini lupus is consistently realised (T, pp. 442 and 459), that is, one in which human nature is continually exposed and destroyed. Eichmann

160 DAVID GRUMETT is not a revelation to Arendt but an opportunity for her to test and develop a concept which she already possesses. The three thought trains that had previously and would subsequently occupy her can be identified in Eichmann: the individual, the social and the political-providential. The individual Arendt agrees with the prosecution lawyers that the man Eichmann was the origin of great evil. It is in the individual will, and neither society nor the political-providential order, that the origin of evil, for Arendt and Augustine, is to be found. The Israeli chief prosecutor had been trying to portray Eichmann as a perverted and cruel man who took pleasure in the suffering of others. Arendt however comments:
It would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal (E, p. 276).

Eichmann was not an exception in ordinary, respectable society, but the ideal citizen of the modern state, obedient within its bureaucratic structure and keen for his own advancement through it.13 He lived the happy life dealt with in the second part of the dissertation. Referring to crimes discussed in Totalitarianism, Kateb notes that some of the practitioners or abettors of pathology emerge from the book with a heightened humanity.14 One person mentioned in Eichmann became after the war director of a chocolate factory.15 It is indeed established in the trial that Eichmann never himself killed a person or even gave an order to kill, and Arendt notes that he probably did not even have the guts to kill (E, p. 215). Eichmann is not a Manichean or Romantic demon but banal, unable to think, will or judge (in the Arendtian senses of these terms) and with little personal character, interests or opinions. Even the people who killed with their own hand were not sadists or killers by nature (E, p. 105), indeed, a systematic effort was made to exclude those who derived pleasure from killing.16 Arendt argues that Eichmann and those like him do not have evil natures, but lack certain fundamental human goods. They do not possess an evil will, but are deficient in good will. The social There had been (too) many others like Eichmann.17 The unusual thing about him was not the acts he had committed or failed to commit, but that he was brought to account for them.18 Shortly before Eichmanns trial, Arendt produced her detailed phenomenology of the human condition in modernity.19 The eponymous work identifies the rise of a consumer society which, since labour and consumption are but two

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stages of the same process, is also a labouring society. Labour, however, never has durable products, generating (as for Marx) only the necessities of life itself and ending only with the death of the labouring organism. The hope of animal laborans in a labouring and consuming society that only one more step [is] needed to eliminate labour and necessity altogether (H, p. 87) is an illusion. The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans (H, p. 126). The following sentence shows the bridge back to Arendts dissertation: The spare time of the animal laborans is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites (H, p. 133). Arendt sees modern (labouring and consuming) society as based on appetitus and having engendered moral collapse through its cupiditas (wrongly-directed desire) and inversion of the right order of eternal and temporal goods. The political Arendt argues that, whilst being a crime against the Jews, the extermination of so many of the Jewish people was a crime against humanity itself (E, p. 269). Indeed, it is precisely as a crime against humanity, that is, as one which offends universal norms of human conduct, that the extermination counts as a crime against the Jewish people. Arendt justifies her support for the death penalty for Eichmann in the following harsh and striking terms:
We refuse, and consider as barbaric, the propositions that a great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal (Yosal Rogat). And yet I think it is undeniable that it was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty (E, p. 277).

For Arendt, Eichmann has excluded himself from the natural human and moral order Augustines ordo completely and irreversibly, and brought his end upon himself. His purely instrumental role does not excuse him. On the contrary, states the judgment, the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands (E, p. 247).20
IV. AUGUSTINE AND ARENDT ON THE INNER LIFE

Augustine holds together the inner life of personal commitment and social and political life in the temporal world to allow the possibility of

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safeguarding the world from evildoing. A life of leisure without a thought for the welfare of ones neighbour is just as bad as a life of activity without a feeling of need for the contemplation of God (CD 19.19). An important similarity of approach between Augustine and Arendt is that both are concerned to make sense of the absolute subjectivity (in human terms) of the individual, yet both recognize that the individual lives surrounded by other individuals in a given world and acts in concert with them (A, p. 107). Arendt explains in The Life of the Mind that the immediate impulse for her preoccupation with mental activities in that work was her attendance at the Eichmann trial. It was this event that reminded her, if she needed reminding, that das ttige Leben ist nicht das ganze Leben.21 She recalls:
I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous (L I, p. 4).

For Arendt, the principles by which we act and the criteria by which we conduct our lives depend ultimately on the life of the mind.22 She had discovered in Augustines thought the complex relationship between inner mental life and living in the world, and uses the external and internal Augustinian mental triads (memoria, intelligentia, voluntas and esse, nosse, velle respectively) to develop her mental triad of thinking, willing and judging. Thinking Arendt possesses two distinct concepts of thought, defined in terms of distinct goals, and both traceable to Augustine. The goal of intellect is truth and the goal of thinking is meaning (L I, pp. 601 and 1314). Intellect is oriented to obtaining knowledge about the world and seeks factual (empirical) truth. The role of intellect as a safeguard for factual truth makes sense when intellect is located within Augustines external mental triad of memoria, intelligentia and voluntas (memory, intellect and will). Intellect first organizes sense data in order that they may be stored as images in the memory. The object of cognition is presented by the perceivers own memory and not directly by visual or other sensory perception. The non-intellectual branch of thought has as its end not truth, but meaning. This part of thought is located in Augustines internal mental triad of esse, nosse and velle (existence, knowledge/cognition and will) as esse. Arendt appropriates the Platonic concept of thinking as a silent dialogue with oneself, according to which thinking requires selfintegrity. Since thinking is the silent dialogue carried on between me

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and myself, I must be careful to keep the integrity of this partner intact; for otherwise I shall surely lose the capacity for thought altogether.23 This process of thinking generates the individual conscience. Arendt states of the thinking ego:
Its criterion for action will not be the usual rules, recognised by multitudes and agreed upon by society, but whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to think about my deeds and words. Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home (LI, p. 191).

If Augustine believed in innate human knowledge of good and evil, he did not think that such knowledge was fully recoverable in this life, owing to human sinfulness inherent in imperfect human wills. The best that can be expected is continual striving through desire for God. Arendt comments that if there is anything in thinking that can protect men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent in the activity itself, regardless of its objects (L I, p. 180). Thinking is an ever-present faculty in everybody and moreover required of everyone:
Thinking accompanies life and is itself the de-materialised quintessence of being alive; and since life is a process, its quintessence can only lie in the actual thinking process and not in any solid results or specific thoughts (L I, p. 191).

The activity of thinking results in conscience as its by-product (L I, p. 193). Peeters expresses the dialogical connection well: Parde et pluralit se tiennent, tout dans la communication avec autrui que dans le dialogue (pensant) avec moi-mme.24 Thus corrupted, unconscientious thinking is that which tends towards superbia, which denies human equality through its denial of the two-in-one dialogue of conscience (T, p. 476). The denial of thinking as a dialogue between equal partners in the soul leads directly to the denial of human equality in sinfulness and thus to the disordering of human social life. Willing In her discussion of the primacy of the will in Duns Scotus, Arendt argues that in line with all his predecessors and successors, he denies that man can will evil as evil (L II, p. 131). If the will does not will evil directly, it is crucial to understand how it can be, for Augustine and Arendt, the origin of evil. Arendts concept of will is crucial to an understanding of her thought about the mind and of her concept of the origin of evil, but overlooked by many interpreters. None the less, as Arendts work on Kant has come to illuminate her concept of judgement, so might her work on Augustine shed new light on her concept of willing. Augustine is the thinker given the most extended treatment in Willing. Moreover, as Arendt describes Kant (provocatively) as the

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first philosopher of judgement, so she describes Augustine as the first philosopher of the will (L II, p. 84). In Augustines external mental triad (memoria, intelligentia and voluntas), voluntas has the pivotal role. Arendt analyses this as follows:
The will by virtue of attention, first unites our sense organs with the real world in a meaningful way, and then drags, as it were, this outside world into ourselves and prepares it for further mental operations: to be remembered, to be understood, to be asserted or denied (L II, p. 100; cf. C 11.35).

It is only the will that unites the minds inwardness to the outside world (ibid.), and thus for Arendt as for Augustine the will indeed partakes in the very act of cognition.25 The will preserves factual truth, and this preservation of truth is a pre-political process. Riley notes that for Arendt the custodians of truth must be extra-political, outside the polis; the guardians of truth are non-political guardians who keep politicians from revising facts in a way that will generate murderous opinions.26 The custody of factual truth is nevertheless of profound political importance for precisely this reason. Arendt states conclusively of the will and the various faculties it unites that there is no doubt that all those politically relevant functions are performed from outside the political realm.27 Arendts concept of willing is also related to the concept of velle in Augustines internal mental triad (esse, nosse, velle). Caritas is the moral virtue associated with a good velle and concupiscentia or cupiditas with a will that has turned away from the good. All striving after knowledge is linked to caritas, which is the turning of the human will (velle) from temporal goods to God. Morality is for neither Arendt nor Augustine only an epistemological problem but one of human love and human will.28 Morally good actions and moral responsibility require a good velle. Some writers suppose from Arendts statement that the integration of thinking, willing and judging with each other and thus with action is possible only in times of crisis, that the life of the mind as such is completely autonomous and, furthermore, all three faculties of this life are completely autonomous with regard to one another.29 This however fails to recognize the simple but crucial fact that Arendt saw herself, just like Augustine and Barth, as writing precisely in such a time of crisis. These were dark times in which great atrocities had been committed and apparently stable political order had disintegrated. It is precisely in such times that men and women should, and must, summon up the will to act. Judging It is often assumed that Arendts theory of judgement is based on and inspired by Kants theory of aesthetic judgement. Augustines aesthetic theory is, however, the more likely origin of Arendts concept of judgement,

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as it directly relates this to her concept of evil, fills a lacuna in her account, and addresses a tension in Kant which Arendt identifies but does not resolve in concluding her thirteenth and final lecture. Arendt argues that the heart of Kants political philosophy is not his obviously political works (which are not normally counted among his key philosophical writings), nor the categorical imperative, but his work on aesthetic judgement. This was, and remains, an unusual interpretation, and not a reading of Kant on his own terms.30 It suggests, for reasons that will shortly be given, that the treatment is in fact inspired by Augustine. Arendt is unsympathetic for the better-known aspects of Kants moral theory because, although capable of existential interpretation, they can too easily be misunderstood and thus contribute to the dutiful, rulefollowing behaviour of which Eichmann and many others were guilty and which produced so much evil. Eichmann even cited the categorical imperative at his trial to justify his behaviour. Arendt carefully distinguishes the two operations of will inherent in judgement. The operation of imagination establishes the condition of impartiality or disinterested delight and the standard of the inner sense (cf. voluntas in the memoriaintelligentiavoluntas triad) and the operation of reflection the condition of publicness or communicability and the standard of common sense or taste (cf. velle in the essenossevelle triad). The latter constitutes the moral act of judgement. This nevertheless does not explain why aesthetic judgement works. Arendt describes the difficulty in her own words:
The chief difficulty in judgement is that it is the faculty of thinking the particular; but to think means to generalize, hence it is the faculty of mysteriously combining the particular and the general. This is relatively easy if the general is given as a rule, a principle, a law so that the judgement merely subsumes the particular under it. The difficulty becomes great if only the particular be given for which the general has to be found (K, 1376, my italics).

We must turn to Augustine for an answer to this puzzle. A valuable recent work is Carol Harrisons Beauty and Revelation.31 Harrisons analysis, which draws on Balthasars theological aesthetic, is based on the close relation between form, order and beauty in Neoplatonism and Augustine particularly. Forma is not simply an outward appearance or visible form, as for Plato, but for Augustine also the existence of a particular thing in the fullest sense of the word: it is forma which gives it its life and being.32 Particular objects in the world, in so far as they exist, are good, and derive their existence and beauty from their forma. Created reality is not therefore simply a distraction for man, but, for one who can see, a revelation of Gods creative and providential ordering, and also, Augustine states, of his love.33 The italicized caveat signifies the existential leap crucial for both Augustine and Arendt inherent in judgement: The fact that this form is revealed in created, temporal reality

166 DAVID GRUMETT means that it is not, and cannot be, seen in its fullness, but that man must have faith in it.34 Sinful man is compelled by the fact of his worldly existence to come to terms with the world by an act of faith as a starting point for the deepening of faith:
Following mans fall, or his aversion from God, emphasis is firmly placed upon the temporal and created realm: man no longer has a direct and intuitive grasp of truth within, in his mind, but rather needs temporal revelations of God to reconvert and reform him.35

Superficially, there may not be much difference between aesthetic judgement and the various modes of concupiscentia earlier discussed. On the contrary, the standpoint of judgement is that of the spectator, and temporal goods are not enjoyed for their own sake but are a speculum (bad mirror)36 of divine truth. The final unity between natural and supernatural order provided by aesthetic categories37 that enables judgement, is perceived only in faith. This Augustinian justification of Arendts concept of aesthetic judgement avoids the tension in Kantian thought that Arendt identifies but leaves unresolved. This tension is between the beliefs in the infinite progress of humanity, and in human dignity bound up with human autonomy and particularity, held simultaneously. If humanity shall improve into the future, how can it possess absolute dignity at any particular point in history? Arendt concludes her final lecture by turning on Kant:
It is against human dignity to believe in progress. Progress, moreover, means that the story never has an end. The end of the story itself is in infinity. There is no point at which we might stand still and look back with the backward glance of the historian (K, 1377).

Augustine does not however assert infinite human progress but recognizes human sinfulness. The backward glance is crucial to judgement, and is Arendts existential leap of faith by which she is able to make an aesthetic judgement of Adolf Eichmann.
V. CONCLUSION

The concept of human free will, developed by Augustine in order to account for the existence of evil, is especially important to Arendt. Augustines and Arendts concept of evil can therefore only be understood as a concept of the origin of evil. The will, as both Roman voluntas and specifically Augustinian velle, unifies the different faculties of the mind and unites them with the outside world. Willing is thus not confined to issues of personal mortality but occurs within relationships of power and even of violence.38 Arendt moreover identifies and appropriates elements of Augustinian social criticism for her own Zeitkritik

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and is then able to conceptualize the banality of evil in concrete terms as the misdirection of human free will from higher to lower goods, from caritas to cupiditas. This is turn enables her to develop an Augustinian theory of judgement according to which evil can be judged both in everyday situations and on the unprecedented scale that has been witnessed in the modern period. Her concept of the banality of evil could rightly be called theological.39 Reiff notes: In Hannah Arendts theology of politics, totalitarianism is the burden (punishment) of our time, visited inevitably upon Western man for hybris; for a politics whose dynamic is expansion for expansions sake; for a morality that believes everything is possible and everything is permitted.40 The unusual power of Arendts analysis suggests a need for the greater diffusion of theological concepts in current secular political thought, which seems to have solved most problems apart from those associated with having a mind and living in a world. Arendt is not, of course, a specifically Christian thinker. Although she in places laments the decline in acceptance of aspects of a Christian world-view, she does not believe that this can simply be wished back into place. She does not, for instance, hold divine grace or the mediation of Christ as components of her thought, as Augustine does. She rather brings Augustines world-view, explored in her early study of Augustine, to bear on the modern and contemporary human condition. Perhaps it was from Augustine that Arendt learnt the importance for political thought of properly recognizing human sinfulness and worldly facticity if it is to confront the problem of the origin of evil. This is what makes her concept of the origin of evil and her existentialism valuable and believable. She describes Augustines idea of brotherly love in the following terms:
The possibility of living in the world but being guided by a transcendence that does not conceive of itself as realisable on earth (eschatological consciousness). This remove from the world does not give rise to any will to change the world, but at the same time it does not represent an escape from the world, i.e., a world historically structured in a particular way and one whose historicity is seen as absolute.41

Arendts and Augustines recognition of the existence of great evil in the world and of the facticity of human existence in the world is far from pessimistic. On the contrary, it is precisely by being content to live in the world that a human may do his or her part to safeguard its reality and protect if from evil.42
Notes 1 Abbreviations used for frequently-cited works of Arendts are: A Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996); E Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1994); H The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989); K Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); L The Life of the Mind, two volumes (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1981); T The Origins of Totalitarianism

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(London: Allen & Unwin, 1962). Abbreviations used for frequently-cited works of Augustines are: C Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); CD The City of God Against the Pagans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); LA On Free Choice of the Will (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1993); O Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil in Writings of Saint Augustine, volume I (New York: CIMA, 1948), 227332; Q Eighty-Three Different Questions (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1982). 2 See the standard biography by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 1057 and 14863. 3 Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, Rediscovering Love and Saint Augustine, interpretive essay in Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, pp. 113211; R. Beiner, Love and worldliness: Hannah Arendts reading of Saint Augustine in L. May and J. Kohn (eds.), Hannah Arendt, Twenty Years Later (Cambridge Mass. and London: MIT, 1996), pp. 26984; J.-C. Eslin, Le Pouvoir de commencer: Hannah Arendt et saint Augustin, Esprit 143, 10 (1988), pp. 14654; P. Boyle, Elusive Neighbourliness: Hannah Arendts Interpretation of Saint Augustine in J. W. Bernauer (ed.), Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt (Boston: Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 81114; C. T. Mathewes, The Challenge of Tragedy for the Human Good: The Augustinian Proposals of Reinhold Niebuhr and Hannah Arendt (University of Chicago Ph.D. thesis, 1997); T. E. Breidenthal, The Concept of Freedom to Hannah Arendt: A Christian Assessment (University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1991). Young-Bruehl gives in an appendix a fairly detailed exposition of the dissertation itself. J. Kohn, Evil and Plurality: Hannah Arendts Way to The Life of the Mind, I in May and Kohn (eds.), Hannah Arendt, pp. 1503, deals briefly with what Kohn identifies as the Augustinian basis of Arendts concept of evil as privation. 4 F. X. Winters elaborates on the particular interest shown in the trial by the political philosopher who nearly did not live to philosophize. See The banality of virtue: reflections on Hannah Arendts reinterpretation of political ethics in Bernauer (ed.), Amor Mundi, p. 189. 5 Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (Berlin, 1929). 6 Scott and Stark, Rediscovering, pp. x and 119, who refer to Arendts 13 January 1964 letter to George McKenna in the Library of Congress archives. 7 Arendts 20 October 1965 letter in Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, edited by Carol Brightman (London: Secker & Warburg, 1995), p. 190. 8 Scott and Stark, Rediscovering, p. 154. 9 W. S. Babcock, Sin and punishment: the early Augustine on evil in J. T. Lienhard, E. C. Muller and R. J. Teske (eds.), Augustine, Presbyter Factus Sum (New York: Lang, 1993), p. 241. 10 E. H. Russell, Only Something Good can be Evil: The Genesis of Augustines Secular Ambivalence, Theological Studies 51, 4 (1990) p. 706. See also J. G. Prendeville, The Development of the Idea of Habit in the Thought of Saint Augustine, Traditio 28 (1972), pp. 29100. 11 M. Ruokanen, Social Life in Augustines De civitate Dei (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), p. 18. 12 H. U. von Balthasar, Augustine in The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, seven volumes (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 198291), volume II: Studies in theological style: clerical styles, p. 140. 13 A. Milchman and A. Rosenberg, Hannah Arendt and the Etiology of the Desk Killer: The Holocaust as Portent, History of European Ideas 14, 2 (1992), pp. 21820. 14 G. Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa NJ and Oxford: Robertson, 1983), p. 52. 15 Wilhelm Koppe, the Higher S.S. Leader, had first been in charge of gassing at Chemlo and then was appointed to make Poland judenrein. Roald Dahls Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is not far off the mark, although Willy Wonka was probably more cruel to his customers. 16 For Arendts discussion of the little men who staffed the camps, see her introduction to B. Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings Against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others Before the Court at Frankfurt (London: Pall Mall, 1966). 17 Eichmann receives just one cursory mention in Totalitarianism as head of Himmlers special Gestapo department for the liquidation (T, p. 402). Given the number of departments and officials involved in many different bureaucratic sectors and stages, the description does not indicate Eichmanns especial personal importance. 18 The judgment notes that in the death camps it was usually the inmates and the victims who had actually wielded the fatal instrument with their own hands (E, p. 246). The primary reason that so many killers could not be brought to account was that they in turn had become victims.

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19 Arendt, The Human Condition. 20 On 10 August 1999 the Israeli Justice Ministry announced that the 1,300-page manuscript produced by Eichmann during his captivity will be released from the Israeli State Archives to international scholars and Eichmanns family, following a request from two of Eichmanns sons. See O. Gozani, Eichmanns death cell memoirs to be released and Sons ask for Eichmanns war memoirs, The Daily Telegraph (London), 11 and 5 August 1999. This event may well generate new interest in the character of Eichmann and in his trial. 21 H. Jonas, Handeln, Erkennen, Denken zu Hannah Arendts philosophischem Werk in A. Reif (ed.), Hannah Arendt, Materialien zu ihren Werk (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1979), p. 355. 22 B. J. Bergen, The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and the Final Solution (Lanham MD and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), p. 102. 23 Arendt, Truth and politics in Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 245. 24 R. Peeters, La Vie de lesprit nest pas contemplative: Hannah Arendt et le dmantlement de la vita contemplativa in A.-M. Roviello and M. Weyembergh (eds.), Hannah Arendt et la modernit (Paris: Vrin, 1992), p. 16. 25 A. Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1982), p. 126. 26 P. Riley, Hannah Arendt on Kant, truth and politics in H. L. Williams (ed.), Essays on Kants Political Philosophy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), p. 319. 27 Arendt, Truth and politics, p. 262. 28 This does not turn Augustine into a Pelagian. The concept of human free will is entirely compatible with that of divine grace, as it is only through grace that humans are enabled to love God and to will the ends that he desires for them. Moreover, in a state of estrangement from God, humans can never be certain that they are under the grace of God apart from by the exercise of their free will for the best possible ends. 29 B. Clarke, Beyond the Banality of Evil , British Journal of Political Science 10, 4 (1980), p. 434. A. Heller likewise notes that the life of the mind as such is completely autonomous and, furthermore, all three faculties of this life are completely autonomous with regard to one another in Hannah Arendt on the vita contemplativa in G. T. Kaplan and C. S. Kessler (eds.), Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Judging, Freedom (Sydney and London: Allen & Unwin, 1989), p. 147. S.T. Leonard states similarly of Arendt that she understood the pedagogical efforts to be relevant only in moments of dire emergency in Evil, violence, thinking, judgment: working in the breach of politics in C. Calhoun and J. McGowan (eds.), Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 323. 30 This is the basis of Rileys critical treatment Arendt on Kant. Arendts focus however says more about her understanding of politics than about her interpretation or misinterpretation of Kant. 31 Harrisons approach is distilled in her justified complaint that all too often Augustine is characterized as remaining a good Manichee. See Carol Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 271. 32 Harrison, Beauty, p. 38 and Balthasar, Augustine, p. 115. 33 Harrison, Beauty, p. 249, my italics. 34 Ibid., p. 51. 35 Ibid., p. 272. 36 In the introduction to her work, Harrison points out that antique mirrors were of much poorer quality than mirrors today. The speculum analogy is therefore never used to imply perfect reflection, but rather the dim image of an object perceived using discernment. See ibid., pp. 12. 37 Balthasar, Augustine, p. 141. 38 See E. Vollrath, Politik und Metaphysik zum politischen Denken Hannah Arendts in Reif (ed.), Hannah Arendt, pp. 1958 for analysis of Willens in terms of Herrschaft, Macht and Gewalt. 39 J. W. Bernauer, The faith of Hannah Arendt: amor mundi and its critique-assimilation of religious experience in Bernauer (ed.), Amor Mundi, pp. 128 and P. Reiff, The Theology of Politics: Reflections on Totalitarianism as The Burden of our Time, Journal of Religion 32, 2 (1952), pp. 11926 are general examinations of Arendts use of religious concepts and categories. 40 Reiff, Theology of politics, p. 119. Allusion is made to The Burden of our Time, which was the original title of The Origins of Totalitarianism. 41 Arendt, Philosophy and sociology in J. Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding, 19301954 (New York and London: Harcourt & Brace, 1994), p. 39. 42 My thanks are due to Dr Douglas Hedley for discussion and advice given in the preparation of this article, and to Ms Anne Seller.

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