Hannah Arendt And Theology

Provides a fresh perspective on Hannah Arendt and the relevance of her thought to theological reflection.

Explores the relationship between Hannah Arendt's thought and theology. This volume is a manifold approach to a less evident and much-neglected undercurrent in the work of Hannah Arendt, namely her ambiguous relation to the Judeo-Christian religious heritage. It contains discussions about strictly theological motives--like salvation or original sin--but it also explores topics such as forgiveness, love, natality, and the world within the religious aura.

Dieses Buch greift ein zentrales, aber wenig beachtetes Thema im Werk Hannah Arendts auf: ihr ambivalentes Verhältnis zum jüdisch-christlichen Erbe. Schon in ihrer Dissertation über den Liebesbegriff bei Augustinus entwickelte sie die Hauptmomente ihrer Lesart. Arendts starkes Konzept der »Weltlichkeit« könnte gerade heute hilfreich sein für einen Ausgleich zwischen Säkularismus und dem offenkundigen Fortwirken religiöser Überzeugungen. Obschon Arendt sich erklärtermaßen als säkulare Denkerin verstand, öffnet ihr Werk Perspektiven einer neuen, vielleicht sogar messianischen Haltung zur Weltlichkeit und Endlichkeit des Lebens. In einer berühmten Formulierung der Vita activa charakterisiert sie diese mit den Worten »Vertrauen« und »Hoffnung«.

"In his 1935 treatise on divine sovereignty, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber introduced the idea of an 'anarchic soul of theocracy.' A decade before, the German jurist Carl Schmitt had coined the term 'political theology' in order to designate the Christian theological foundations of modern sovereignty and legal order. In a specular and opposite gesture, Buber argued that the covenant at Sinai established YHWH as the King of the Israelites and simultaneously promulgated the principle that no human being could become sovereign over this people. In so doing, Buber offered an interpretation of Jewish theocracy that is both republican and anarchic. Republican because, by pivoting on the idea that democracy is a function of a people's fidelity to a prophetic higher law, theocracy displaces the central role of the human sovereign. Anarchic because this divine law is saturated with the messianic aim to put an end to relations of domination between peoples. In this book I show that this republican and anarchic articulation of the discourse of political theology characterises the development of Jewish political theology in the 20th century from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt"--

The brilliant thinker who taught us about the banality of evil explores another brilliant thinker and his concept of love. Hannah Arendt, the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, began her scholarly career with an exploration of Saint Augustine’s concept of caritas, or neighborly love, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger. After her German academic life came to a halt in 1933, Arendt carried her dissertation into exile in France, and years later took the same battered and stained copy to New York. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, as she was completing or reworking her most influential studies of political life, Arendt was simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts she was using in her political works of the same period. The dissertation became a bridge over which Arendt traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine's question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change. In Love and Saint Augustine, political science professor Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and philosophy professor Judith Chelius Stark make this important early work accessible for the first time. Here is a completely corrected and revised English translation that incorporates Arendt’s own substantial revisions and provides additional notes based on letters, contracts, and other documents as well as the recollections of Arendt's friends and colleagues during her later years. “Both the dissertation and the accompanying essay are accessible to informed lay readers. Scott and Stark's conclusions about the cohesive evolution of Arendt’s thought are compelling but leave room for continuing discussion.”—Library Journal “A revelation.”—Kirkus Reviews

The Visitation of Hannah Arendt is an attempt to literally enact Arendt’s notion of "natality". Arendt, known to a large extent through her engagement with the public sphere and with political discourse, is invited here to pay intimate visitations to four different figures: an anonymous student, the poetess Dahlia Ravikovich, the ghost of Stefan Zweig and Michal, Saul’s daughter. The intellectual visitation, as a complex process of both mimesis and rejection, is revealed to be a natality, a rebirth in spirit. The book presents an aesthetic-semiotic reading of Arendt by traversing the ensemble of her work. A special chapter is dedicated to Eichmann in Jerusalem.

A splendid piece of scholarship on a major twentieth-century thinker often overlooked. / This book presents an original scholarly analysis of the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt, focusing on an area hitherto ignored: the ways in which Augustine s thought forms the foundation of Arendt's work. Stephan Kampowski here offers readers a valuable overview of central aspects of Arendt s thought, addressing perennial existential and philosophical questions at the heart of every human being.