Charles E. Snyder
The title Love and Saint Augustine deviates from a literal translation of Hannah Arendt’s 1929 dissertation Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer Philosophischen Interpretation (The Concept of Love in Augustine: An Attempt at a Philosophical Interpretation). In fact, the deviant title of the now-standard English edition of the dissertation is the brainchild of E. B. Ashton, a translator commissioned in the early 1960s by an American publishing company that managed to secure the rights to the dissertation and Arendt’s contractual agreement to assist in the production of an English edition. Ashton was expedient in producing a translation. The manuscript pages of his end of the project reached Arendt’s desk fairly quickly. But for more than two years, Arendt procrastinated. In a letter to Mary McCarthy in 1965, Arendt confessed to the absurdity of the entire project.1 She believed that she had to “re-write the whole darn business,” which meant revisiting the original German dissertation and emending Ashton’s translation. Arendt eventually abandoned the project, leaving behind the “purely philosophical interest” of the dissertation to attend to issues of the present that had more pressing political significance. A passionate concern for illuminating the experiences of modern political life was pronounced in almost all of Arendt’s writings. The dissertation, however, is a clear aberration from that truism. On its own, the work invalidates the judgment that “there was never anything pedantic or scholastic about her.”2
Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark preserve Ashton’s translation of the title for their 1996 English edition and remove his proposed subtitle, “An Essay in Philosophical Interpretation.” In a collection of her papers at the Library of Congress, one can see that Ashton’s title page was one of the pages left unmarked by Arendt, along with the pages of the Introduction, the latter half of Part II, and the entirety of Part III.3 Does the lack of annotation on these pages confirm Arendt’s satisfaction with Ashton’s English, including his title? It seems unlikely, if one considers the extensive marginal annotations Arendt made on Part I and the first half of Part II, before abandoning the project.
Recounting such minutiae in the history of the now-standard English edition might seem otiose. In this case, however, for the afterlife of the Heidelberg dissertation, these details are indicative of the subtle attempts on the part of Scott and Stark to mitigate the excessively formal character of the original interpretation.4 Let’s remember that young Arendt endeavored to interpret Augustine philosophically, with an analysis of concepts, or conceptual contexts. The philosophical character of this interpretation coincides with her attempt to isolate in Augustine’s thought a “pre-theological sphere.” In pursuit of the meaning and importance of neighborly love for Augustine, Arendt sought to disentangle the so-called sphere of the pre-theological from questions of Christian faith and religious dogmatism. However, to locate conceptual inconsistencies in Augustine’s disparate writings is not to show that love is a conceptual “problem”5 —not in the case of Augustine’s writings anyway. Instead, one encounters in his writings the posing of existential questions by means of which a man of letters gradually transformed from a professor with professional ambitions into a leader of a religious and political community in Roman Africa as Bishop of the Church. The standard English title signals Augustine’s saintly life in a way that young Arendt sought to set aside from the analysis. The English title eliminates any reference to the conceptual mediation of love in the dissertation, as well as young Arendt’s explicit designation of the work as a philosophical interpretation. The original title of the dissertation has only relative significance, however; for such cosmetic adjustments to the title do nothing to mitigate the formal character of its content.
Overview
The dissertation consists of three analyses or “conceptual contexts” that focus on Augustine’s concept of love. In a brief introduction, Arendt describes the taxonomy of the three contexts, subdividing each of the first two contexts (Part I and II) into three chapters, respectively. The third and final context (Part III), “Social Life,” by far the most compact part of the dissertation, contains no chapter subdivisions. The first two chapters within the first two contexts (chapters one and two of Part I, and chapters one and two of Part II) examine the conceptuality of an alleged “pre-theological sphere.” According to Arendt, the two basic definitions of love given by Augustine operate independently of the divine commandment to love one’s neighbor, for they correspond to a natural “law written in our hearts” preceding the divine law of God, which commands from the outside: “Do not do to another what you do not wish to have done to you.” The isolation of a pre-theological sphere is the reason that Arendt sets aside Augustine’s personal “subservience to scriptural and ecclesias tical authority.” Instead, she proposed to delineate for analysis a conceptual sphere in which the Greek rudiments of Augustine’s thought guide his concept of love and his conceptual turn to dogmatic Christianity. However, as I will reconstruct grosso modo, the isolation of a pre-theological sphere is an ill-conceived strategy. It misrepresents the Greek legacy of Augustine’s thought and his existential turn to Christianity.
In Part I, Arendt analyzes a pre-theological structure of love in terms of a desire for the possession of something for its own sake. The analysis continues in Part II, with love now re-conceptualized by Augustine as the amorous relation of the creature to its source, namely, a divine creator. The first chapter in each part examines each definition in its pre-theological guise. But in the second chapters, Arendt examines the transformations both definitions undergo in the turn to Christianity. The analysis of the first context comes to a close with a third chapter in which Arendt sought to demonstrate how the formal definitions of love foster a certain conceptual incongruity in Augustine’s thought. In this first formal context, the primary object of love is happiness understood in terms of everlasting life. The dark aspect of this love is the anxious fear of death or losing life. A quest for the freedom from such fear ensues. In pursuit of such freedom, love manifests either as cupidity or as charity. In cupidity, one desires the very impermanent things certain to be lost in death, but charitable desire transforms that anxious fear into a love built on the recognition that happiness and eternal life are to be found in God alone. The individual thus turns away from the world in a quest for God—the true object of desire. As the world forfeits its relevance in the liberating desire for eternal life, the individual’s neighbor as a real object of desire becomes a problem for Augustine to conceptualize, according to Arendt.
Arendt then shifts to a second formal context. The emphasis is no longer on the anticipated future of an eternally blessed life after death. The individual looks back in remembrance to a transcendent past, to the origin of human existence. Arendt later revises a key portion of the dissertation to link memory more explicitly with birth (or what is in the later revisions called natality), just as desire is linked to death. The individual who covets the world forgets that the world is dependent on God. Memory acts as the corrective of false desire. With the help of God’s grace, an amorous relation to God arises from a comprehending remembrance of God as creator, disentangling the creature from the world and its impermanence. In comprehending oneself as a creature of God’s creation, the creature recognizes the mortal dependence on God’s grace. Charity is given new expression in this context, for with great humility and near total self-oblivion, the creature desires to love the world and others as God loves his creation. But once again a conceptual incongruity rears its formal head, according to Arendt. In brief, charitable loving entails that the other ceases to be anything other than a creature of God. The self-oblivion of loving the creator entails the oblivion of the neighbor’s worldly distinctions as a self to be loved for his or her own sake. The first two contexts of love take the self as the basic unit of analysis, as the passionate individual in Part I then becomes the passionate creature whose origin lies with God in Part II. Arendt therefore searches for a neighbor’s relevance by examining the potential relevance of another individual or self, what is termed in the singular as “the other.”6 Up to this point in the dissertation the analysis had been atomic in centering on a “self” for whom “the other” is purported to be relevant. The individual is not the primary bearer of love, however; it is the collective agency of the church, of brothers and sisters joined in loving God as the worthy object of love. To be sure, the creaturely self is an agent of loving the neighbor, but such love has a precondition outside the passionate self: the ontological or existential priority of the community. The church’s love of God establishes in advance the social context in which it is possible for the atomic individual to actualize the proper kind of love. Neighborly love thus acquires its importance in the realm of community, a form of the social based on the incarnation of Christ. Augustinian love departs from the Greek philosophical tradition in giving existential priority to a community of believers for the very possibility of an individual’s love. But this re-orientation is not sensu strictissimo a turn away from a pre-theological sphere. By the “pre-theological,” Arendt can only mean “pre-theological” in the Christian sense, which is not equivalent to the “pre-theological” as such. From Aristotle to Greco-Roman Stoicism, on through Plotinus’s harmonization of Platonic and Peripatetic metaphysics, a theological heritage in the thought of Augustine is undeniable, especially in the two basic definitions of love in terms of desire. In Aristotle, for example, theologikē has explanatory power for a metaphysica generalis (a science of to on hē on or ontology) that yields an account of desire and God’s immutable essence (Metaphysics 12).7 Desire and its proper objects receive their most general ontological determination from the explanatory power of this “science.” Plotinus, too, develops an alternative onto-theological conception of desire in the striving to unite with the absolute simplicity of the One, the cause of all being (Enneads, III.5). Augustine’s philosophy recasts, with profound originality, the onto-theological tendencies of Greek philosophy, capturing the distinct character of desire or love that binds the Christian community. Arendt’s talk of the pre-theological obscures this entire legacy.
In the final part of the dissertation, the self or creature is finally considered social. Human creatures share a common descent from Adam, which produces an equality of fate and sinfulness. The fate of death and mortality is the shared destiny of human kind. Creatures thus have their origin in human propagation from Adam, and in the divine through God’s creation of Adam. The former grants creatures a home in the world, while the latter reveals that our proper home is with God. Arendt must now face Augustine’s Christian view of faith more directly, for the death of Christ is redemptive for every person in the equality of sinfulness and death. The creaturely self is now seen as deriving his being from eternity and from the historical fact of God’s rev elation in Christ. Because all creatures share equally in sin, Christ’s entrance into the world redeems all people. In this equality of sinfulness and redemption, the neighbor takes on new relevance. Neighbors bond over a shared past, for the neighbor is just like oneself, whether or not God has already worked his grace in the neighbor; even in the case of a neighbor living a life of sin, the neighbor still reminds others of a shared past. In this way, Augustine supplants a series of onto-theological conceptions of desire in Greco-Roman philosophy with a new onto-theological notion of human desire that has its ground in the institution and social life of the Christian church.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949–1975, ed. C. Brightman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1995), Letter to McCarthy, October 20, 1965, 190.
2 L. P. Hinchman and S. K. Hinchman, “In Heidegger’s Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenological Humanism,” The Review of Politics 46 (1984): 183–211, 183. Cf. Arendt and McCarthy, Between Friends, Letter to McCarthy, October 20, 1965, 190.
3 Hannah Arendt’s papers are available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/arendthome.html.
4 Cf. P. Boyle, “Elusive Neighborliness: Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of Saint Augustine,” in Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. J. Bernauer (Dordecht: Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 81–113, 109, n. 33.
5 Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine: Hannah Arendt, ed. J. V. Scott and J. C. Clark (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3.
6 Ibid., 96.
7 Martin Heidegger, “Die onto-theologische Verfassung der Metaphysik,” in Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 35–73. S. Kampowski proposes what he thinks is a possible solution that Arendt did not consider, and thus elaborates on the onto-theological resources in Augustine’s thought (Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in Light of Her Dissertation on St. Augustine [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008], 184–85).