Charles E. Snyder
Aurelius Augustinus (Augustine) was born in the North African city of Thagaste in 354 CE. In his early years, Augustine engaged in a broad and distinguished study of the liberal arts. Later, as a young man, he was inspired by the dialogues of Cicero, principally the Hortensius, a now lost exhortation aimed at persuading readers to pursue a life of philosophical reflection. He decided to apply his precocious talents as a student and pursue a career teaching rhetoric and Latin literature in his hometown of Thagaste before taking up teaching posts at Carthage, Rome, and finally Milan, the last stop of this early professional voyage. For most of this journey, Augustine had been a reluctant adherent of the Manichean religion. At Milan, Augustine attended the sermons of Ambrose, the then bishop of the city. Those sermons put Augustine in direct contact with modern Platonism. The encounter with Ambrose and what we now call neo-Platonism liberated Augustine from the Manicheans, setting him on a path toward his famous conversion to Christianity and eventually his return to North Africa, where he became the bishop of Hippo Regius, near his hometown. He died in 430 CE and was canonized as a saint in 1303 by a Christian pope named Boniface VIII. He left a heterogeneous body of writings, letters, sermons, and treatises, and a masterpiece of philosophical autobiography, the Confessions.
Nearly fifteen hundred years after Augustine’s death, Hannah Arendt fulfilled the doctoral requirements of the University of Heidelberg with a dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine. The dissertation was published in 1929 under the title Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation, literally in English “The Concept of Love in Augustine: An Attempt at a Philosophical Interpretation.” In conformity with the mores of professional philosophers at modern research universities such as Heidelberg, the dissertation of this twenty-two-year-old German-Jewish woman ascended beyond the biographical vicissitudes of Augustine’s eventful life. Young Arendt sought refuge in the purity of rational analysis. The dissertation does exactly what the subtitle states: it is an “attempt” at interpreting Augustine philosophically, or in Arendt’s German, the attempt “einer rein philosophisch interessierten Untersuchung [at a purely philosophically interested investigation].”1 The philosopher in training lifted a single “problem”—the problem of neighborly love—from the heterogeneity of Augustine’s corpus and the turbulence of his intellectual life. Perhaps more than any other single feature of the work, this extraction signifies what Arendt meant by an investigation of purely philosophical interest.
Political Turn
Over a decade later, the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany lands Arendt in the United States. By this time, her intellectual interests have shifted dramatically. Arendt is no longer driven by a purely philosophical interest. To be sure, the early philosophical interpretation of Augustine yields dividends on the other end of that shift, especially for the emergence of the theme of human plurality in its relation to the question of politics2 and the modern process of secularization as it contrasts with the ancient quest for immortality.3 Arendt first articulates a notion of freedom under the rubric of “natality” in the early 1950s. That notion soon finds its way into an essay, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” which she later added to the 1955 and 1958 re-editions of The Origins of Totalitarianism.4 The notion of natality has its conceptual pedigree in the early analysis of the dissertation, but at that point that notion had not been explicitly formulated.
After the war, Arendt would characterize Augustine en passant as a “great thinker who lived in a period which in some respects resembled our own more than any other.”5 Any comparison between Roman political hegemony in the fourth century CE and the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth was unthinkable for Arendt, or anyone else, during the years of the Weimar Republic. But just as Arendt would later publicly identify as a political theorist and resist the label of philosopher, a corresponding transformation had by then occurred in the way that Arendt refers to Augustine. Whatever his thought represented for Arendt in the late 1920s, Augustine certainly wasn’t the political theorist that he became for Arendt in the early 1950s.6 This political emphasis continues. A year before the publication of The Human Condition (1958), Arendt names Augustine “the greatest theorist of Christian politics.”7 Arendt published as early as 1930 a short article for a German newspaper marking the fifteen hundredth anniversary of Augustine’s death. But even then Arendt did not consider the political implications of Augustine’s writings germane to the Protestant and Christian traditions of Western Euro pe.8
Philosophical Return
In Volume II of The Life of the Mind, a section titled “Willing,” Arendt claims that Augustine’s solution to the “problem” of the will resembles the modern philosophical solution of John Stuart Mill, that of the “enduring I.”9 Furthermore, Arendt now attributes to Augustine “a philosophy of natality,” a contention that no other reader of Augustine would ever dare to attribute to his writing. With this philosophy in view, Arendt discerned a second resemblance between Augustine and modern philosophy: Augustine’s philosophy of natality is viewed as the conceptual precursor of Kant’s doctrine of the freedom of the will.10 Karl Jaspers noted Arendt’s tendency to make Augustine say things that he does not say. Augustine’s “philosophy of natality” is a prominent instance of this observation.11
Only in revising the dissertation in the 1960s does Arendt insert the Latin phrase that elicited the later formulation of natality: “That a beginning be made, man was created.”12 Arendt’s use of this passage dates from a period in which she reflected on the devastating experiences of anti-Semitism, mass deportations, statelessness, concentration camps, police terror, and mass murder. A 1951 entry in her Denktagebuch shows Arendt thinking through Augustine’s Latin phrase at De civitate dei (xii 20) in connection with totalitarianism, but the first published citation of this passage and the concomitant elaboration of freedom under the rubric of birth appears only in 1953. Birth becomes natality, the ontological root of human action and the “miracle that saves the world” in The Human Condition.13 The decisive shift in the twenty-year interval from Der Liebesbegriff to the 1958 English edition of Origins is a move toward an explicit formulation of human plurality, as Arendt’s Denktagebuch attests.
To preserve the integrity of human plurality for the maintenance of the public sphere, Arendt’s postwar thought banishes love as a passion of anti-political consequence. If love, this most powerful anti-political force, is to survive and flourish, it must remain private, for “it is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.”14 Young Arendt’s analysis of the “problem of love” (das Liebesproblem) gave this force a decidedly formal exegesis it would no longer require. In Liebesbegriff, Arendt had yet to formulate in distinct terms that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”15 Nor had she articulated an alternative to the passion of love, namely, the solidarity guided by reason, as she does in On Revolution. If those notions had crystallized in the dissertation, Arendt would have been equipped to criticize Augustine’s concept of love for God in the terms she had later reproached Rousseau’s flawed conception of the general will. Both Rousseau and Augustine annihilate the distinction built into the condition of human plurality, the very condition “of living as a distinct and unique being among equals.”16
Conclusion
Arendt admitted that in her youth she had been “truly naïve.”17 Whether, and to what extent, this negative self-assessment was meant to apply to the conceptual analysis of love is difficult to say. Of course, Arendt did sell the rights to the dissertation to a publisher, sensing that the publisher would soon go bankrupt and that she could at least turn a quick profit from the deal.18 But Macmillan later acquired the rights to the dissertation. She contractually agreed in 1962 to assist the publisher in reissuing the dissertation in English, but Arendt later reneged on the contract and abandoned the project. Why does this project of revising the dissertation for publication fall stillborn? One might suppose that Arendt was at the time consumed by the controversy following her report on the Eichmann trial,19 or, given the extent of her annotations, perhaps full-scale revisions would have been too arduous and thus not worth the effort.20 There is, I think, a simpler explanation. Arendt lost interest in completing a philosophical project she hardly had the interest in reviving. Her turn in the late 1940s and early 1950s to the political condition of human plurality set the stage for her theoretical interventions in the dark times of modern life.
One might protest against this political reading of Arendt’s postwar development, insisting that the dissertation already contained the fundamental structure of philosophical concerns that would remain in place throughout her work. A political reading might overlook a philosophical dimension of questioning that persists in her thought from the dissertation onward. In other words, Arendt had arrived at this philosophical dimension as a “political philosopher” before the traumatizing events of the 1930s and 1940s. The purpose of Arendt’s The Human Condition, according to this philosophical reading, is to address universal questions about the dignity of worldly existence, given that “the entirety of Arendt’s philosophical work merely elaborates the question she posed directly to Augustine: ‘Why should we make a desert out of this world?’”21 The philosophical reading is, however, anachronistic and one-sided. The form and content of her early philosophical concerns with Augustine undergo a political transformation as she began to respond to incidents of lived experience in the postwar period. Arendt continued to think through universal questions about the world, but those questions generate opinions of her own. Her interpretations of texts no longer seek that naive refuge in the abstruse realms of exegesis and conceptual analysis. Exegesis gives way to what is more often than not the articulation of her own engaged judgments—framed by notions of plurality, solidarity, and natality—that are issued in order to make sense of what we are doing in an age which has lost the capacity for political action. No one should deny that Augustine’s philosophy helped Arendt arrive at those framing notions, but the politically inflected notions of plurality and solidarity foreign to the dissertation would have to wait until after her exile from Germany and the devastating experiences of the war for explicit formulation. The shift from exegesis and analysis of concepts to the opinionated writings which respond to incidents of human experience is less a formal shift than it is a transformation in the substance of her thought.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer Philosophischen Interpretation, ed. L. Lütkehaus (Berlin: Philo, 2003), 27. Cf. J. V. Scott and J. C. Clark, eds., Love and Saint Augustine: Hannah Arendt (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6.
2 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, two volumes, ed. U. Ludz and I. Nordmann (Berlin: Piper, 2002), Heft I (21), Heft II (8).
3 Hannah Arendt, “History and Immortality,” Partisan Review 24, no. 1 (1957): 11–53.
4 For a survey of the emergence of natality in Arendt’s thought, see R. Tsao, “Arendt’s Augustine,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. S. Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010), 39–57.
5 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review 20, no. 4 (1953): 377–92, 390.
6 Arendt, Denktagebuch I, Heft III, April 1951 (16), (17), (18).
7 Arendt, “History and Immortality,” 20. Cf. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 73.
8 Hannah Arendt, “Augustin und der Protestanismus,” Frankfurter Zeitung 902, no. 75 (April 12, 1930): 12.
9 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. II (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 104.
10 Ibid., 109.
11 G. McKenna, “Augustine Revisited,” First Things 72, no. 46 (1997): 43–47, 46.
12 “Initium ergo ut esset, creatus est homo,” Augustine, De civitate dei (xii 20). Cf. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 108.
13 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 247.
14 Ibid., 51–53.
15 Ibid., 8, n. 1. Cf. S. Chiba, “Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political: Love, Friendship, and Citizenship,” The Review of Politics 57, no. 3 (1995): 505–35, 510, 520 on Arendt’s bias.
16 Arendt, Human Condition, 158.
17 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence: 1926-1969, ed. L. Kohler and H. Saner (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), Arendt to Jaspers, September 7, 1952. Cf. E. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 91.
18 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, Arendt to Jaspers, January 16, 1966.
19 Scott and Start, Love and Saint Augustine, xiv.
20 S. Kampowski, 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), 15.
21 R. Beiner, “Love and Worldliness,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. L. May and J. Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 281.