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Document Details : Title: Kwaad als perversio boni Subtitle: Post-holocaust perspectieven op de Godsvraag Author(s): POLLEFEYT, Didier Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 53 Issue: 4 Date: 2013 Pages: 366-379 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.53.4.3203333 Abstract : In an era in which worldwide conflicts again and again demonstrate the ineradicability of human evil, the renewed question about the relation between God and evil seems meaningful. This question about the relation between God and evil is by no means a new one. For centuries theologians have tried to reconcile the two. Seven decades ago, the sheer scale and the cruelty of the Holocaust severely tested these explanations, however. Traditionally, there are three approaches to the relation between God and the evil of Auschwitz. In the first, the concentration camps signalled the death of God. The second situates evil within God and the third considers evil to be something external. A fourth theological model did not get the attention it deserved in the debate on the Holocaust: evil as the absence of the good or of God (privatio boni). In this contribution, the author starts from the idea of the privatio boni as it can be found in Thomas Aquinas’ de Malo; this describes evil as the human freedom to ignore the appeal of the good or of God, and evil as a parasite on the good or on God. Using analyses by Arendt, Fasching, Hauerwas and Burrell, the author shows how the moral self of the perpetrators fragmented in psychological processes (doubling) during the Holocaust, allowing evil to take root in the good or in God. In this article, the author also radicalises the idea of privatio boni. The evil of the concentration camps was not just an absence of the good or of God (privatio boni), it was also manipulated, cheated and perverted (perversio boni/perversio deus). At Auschwitz, evil abused the good (Gott mit uns). And still, the barbarity of Nazism does not mean the end of God. God as the ‘other than being’ (autrement qu’être) will always elude attempts to capture Him in a system of good and evil, He escapes human perversion and radically questions it. |
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