Arendt’s banality of evil actually functioned as an overcoming of Gnosticism. Neiman also hinted at this: “Arendt thought that Gnosticism would be the most dangerous, attractive and widespread heresy of the future. She therefore sought descriptions of evil that resist the urge to give it satanic greatness, for such urges are both puerile and dangerous.” Arendt feared that a demonic/Gnostic interpretation of evil would be the easiest explanation for the horrors of the Second World War. Such demonization of the Nazi criminals, however, creates a radical political separation between “us and them,” and hence a Gnostic dualism between good and evil. Moreover, such an interpretation makes evil into an unfathomable abyss that eventually threatens to corrupt reality. If such grave evils are able to exist, the world in which they are contained is no longer reliable. In such an interpretation of evil, the evils of the Holocaust corrupt the very roots of reality. This would essentially imply the return of Gnosticism’s pessimistic cosmology. However, Arendt’s interpretation of evil as banal countered this relapse into Gnosticism, according to Neiman: “If the forces that produce evil have neither depth nor dimension, then Gnosticism is false.”

Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World