Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

EVIL: QUESTIONING AND CHALLENGING THEOLOGY AGAIN AND AGAIN 99Evil can also be expressed as the “mysterium inquitatis”since every human being experiences it and suffers from it in amanner that is completely personal and unique. Also every erais characterized by typologies of experiences of specific evils. Itseems that the recent and contemporary era may have added anew dimension to the horror and depth of evil, a new “nonquality.”In the next section we will explore some of these characteristics.2. The scandal of evil symbolized in the name ofAuschwitzIn the twentieth century evil assumed a new destructivedimension, our understanding of evil took a kind of “qualitativeleap” toward the negative. The situation in the second half ofthe twentieth century has often been described as the “post-Auschwitz” period, so that Auschwitz has become the paradigmfor atrocious evil on a level previously unknown. The name“Auschwitz” becomes the metaphor for what is considered as arupture in the historical development of civilization, as a catastropheof universal proportions. 11In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on theBanality of Evil, Hannah Arendt gave a razor-sharp analysis ofthe evil of Auschwitz. In the “Postscript,” a kind of final evaluationof the book, Arendt characterizes the evil of Auschwitzwith the term “administrative massacre.” 12 For the evil ofAuschwitz was not a question of distinct and limited operations,but rather of a massacre, strategically calculated andplanned, with the complete extermination of the Jewish populationas its purpose. 13 To achieve a project on this scale requiredorganization by an absolutist regime driven to the extreme at11Regina Ammicht-Quinn, Von Lissabon bis Auschwitz (Freiburg-Schweiz: Universitätsverlag, 1992), 195-197.12Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality ofevil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 288.13See Irving Greenberg, “Clouds of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism,Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Eva Fleischner, ed.,Auschwitz: Beginning of a new Era? (New York: Ktav Pub. Co., 1977). Six