What does the famous thinker, who called herself a political theorist and was not even a Christian, have to do with Saint Augustine? And what do the Greeks have to do with it?
Hannah Arendt grew up in Germany in a non-religious, educated Jewish family that supported progressive social democratic views. She lost her father at the age of seven. Already at fourteen, Arendt had read the philosophical works of Immanuel Kant and the thinkers of ancient Greece. Only later, in the post-war world far from Germany, did she recognize her exceptional talent for understanding classical Greek culture and philosophy. Before the Second World War, she studied philosophy under the leading professors of her time. Alongside philosophy, she pursued minor studies in theology and classical Greek. She chose theology because she realized that she neither knew nor understood Christianity – more precisely, theology.
Arendt wrote because she wanted to understand what had happened in Germany in the 1930s, what had happened in the world under the totalitarian regimes of Germany and the Soviet Union, what she encountered in the United States, where she fled, and what took place in the newly founded State of Israel during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. She did not seek fame but understanding – and this understanding opened to her through the process of writing, making it possible for others as well. In 1929, at the age of twenty-three, Arendt received her doctorate from the University of Heidelberg with a dissertation on Saint Augustine’s concept of love.
The theological faculty in Heidelberg was not Catholic. For Catholic theologians, understanding the Bible was in one sense easier, since they could rely on the continuity of the Church’s tradition from the time of the apostles through the Church Fathers to the present day. The Mother Church has preserved Christ’s teaching intact – and it was precisely the Mother Church that defined the canon of Holy Scripture that we still follow today. Likewise, the Church’s magisterium has the task of safeguarding the original teaching of Christ and the apostles faithfully in accordance with the word of Scripture.
Faith Becomes Visible as Love
In Arendt’s time, theologians in Heidelberg began to study the Bible in its original languages without the later-added, often biased doctrinal interpretations on which Protestant theology had previously relied. The person and teaching of Jesus Christ became the central perspective for understanding Scripture. This approach came to be called the historical-critical method. Key theologians – the most prominent among them Karl Barth – set aside other ideological interpretations, ranging from liberal-rational to purely literalist, in order to seek an understanding of the revealed truth of Scripture from its original text. Such an approach offered security to those theologians who upheld the universality of the Church amid war and totalitarianism. At the same time, it opened the way for dialogue with Catholicism and made possible what we now call ecumenism.
Faith became visible as love, and love in deeds. The parable of the Good Samaritan makes this visible and helps translate it into everyday language. The Law of Moses, which Jesus affirms, commands love of God and neighbor. From an Israelite perspective, the neighbor who helped in distress was not another Israelite but a Samaritan – a foreigner from a people whose religion and morals were considered corrupted. From Christ’s perspective, love of neighbor is not mere contemplation but a concrete act in which a stranger saves the life of a possible enemy. Love becomes visible in action.
Hannah Arendt chose the active life over a purely contemplative philosophical or religious life. This choice was rooted in her study of Augustine, more precisely in her understanding of Augustine’s concept of love – what Augustine calls in Latin caritas and in Greek agape. Augustine frequently refers to the Greeks, especially in the first part of his work The City of God, written between 413 and 426 AD. Both Augustine and Hannah Arendt possessed extensive knowledge of Greek and Roman culture.
Love of Neighbor Requires Self-Sacrifice
Arendt was fascinated by historical turning points that changed the course of history and with it the fate of individuals and nations. Homer mourned the loss of souls in the destruction of Troy; Saint Augustine wrote The City of God under the shadow of Rome’s approaching fall; and Arendt experienced the Reichstag fire in 1933. Troy was destroyed in a war among Greeks, in which both sides had great heroes and in which both humans and their pagan gods resorted to deception. Homer shows respect even for enemy heroes because he remains faithful to truth. Saint Augustine, in turn, responded to the sack of Rome by defending Christians and Christianity. He shows what the return to old pagan customs brought with it. Augustine refers to Homer and recalls the age of pagan rulers, when cruelty, rape, and arbitrariness were part of everyday rule. Homer and Virgil describe how women, children, prisoners – practically all the defeated – were treated harshly. Before its final fall, Rome was besieged three times during Augustine’s lifetime; many fled and many died. Augustine emphasizes that Christians did not mistreat their enemies and were not cruel toward the defeated. History tells us that the love Augustine described eventually led to the conquered Rome bringing the conquering Visigoths to the true faith, and Rome became the heart of Christendom. Rome had Christ; pagan Troy did not – and Troy was never rebuilt.
Arendt fled Germany to the United States in 1933 and became stateless. She personally experienced how ineffective international organizations can be when a person becomes a pariah. This was one reason why love of neighbor meant for her direct action between people: otherwise it was merely common interest, not love. Love of neighbor requires self-sacrifice and the seeking of the other’s true good in God. It becomes distorted if love attaches primarily to self-interest or to created, limited things, thus detaching itself from God’s order. This, Augustine taught. He also reminded that misdirected love inevitably leads astray. Love of neighbor is practical, direct action – and speech itself is action, Arendt says. It means stepping into the public realm and taking a risk, for in the public sphere speech easily acquires a political dimension.
Illustration from Saint Augustine’s The City of God in Raoul de Presles’ translation from 1375. gallica.bnf.fr.
Traces of Truth
According to the Christian tradition, love and truth belong together: neither can stand alone. Arendt chose truth even when her own Jewish compatriots – understandably – pressured her and accused her of not loving her own people. She refused to accept falsehood and hypocrisy. She wanted to understand how truth is suppressed by political means. Arendt sought truth in politics and found it in factual truths – in concrete events and actions. She understood that in place of such facts one can construct logically consistent ideologies which, as political systems, begin to dominate and restrict all areas of human life. This is totalitarianism, whose most terrifying instrument is terror.
The destruction of Troy, the siege of Rome, and the burning of the German parliament building were examples of the physical destruction of history. The destruction of monuments, cities, inhabitants, and peoples moved ancient writers, Augustine, and Arendt to take up the pen so that reality would not vanish from memory. Merely rewriting truth ideologically is not enough if facts de facto speak against it. Physical destruction aims at erasing even the traces of factual truth.
In 1961, the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann captured newspaper headlines. Israel’s secret police abducted Eichmann from Argentina and brought him to trial in Jerusalem. The magazine The New Yorker sent Hannah Arendt to report on the proceedings. This resulted in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published in 1963. Eichmann was a key bureaucrat in organizing the logistics of Jewish deportations. According to Arendt’s observations, this man, responsible for immense crimes, was outwardly an insignificant official who did what he was told. At times he also acted on his own initiative and spoke in clichés in the name of an ideology that allegedly expressed the will of the supreme leader. He granted and revoked passports and official documents, negotiated with puppet Jewish councils about numbers of deportees, and organized train schedules. He was an efficient bureaucrat in a system that carried out orders unquestioningly and obediently. He operated in a society in which evil had become an everyday, ordinary, and almost unnoticed part of daily life. Evil became normal – banal, as Arendt aptly put it. From a Christian perspective, one might say that sin likewise becomes banal in a secularized society in which living in sin becomes a normal and accepted condition.
Remember Troy
In a 1964 interview, Arendt spoke honestly about the difficulties of her character and about what had hurt her most. What wounded her most was not the totalitarian system but the cowardice and betrayal of intellectual friends she greatly respected – among them world-famous philosophers such as Martin Heidegger. They were trapped in the snare of their own thinking and ideology. Intellectual rational truth is not the same as factual truth. Love becomes visible in deeds. This recalls Jesus’ friends who left Him alone, and Judas who betrayed Him.
Returning finally to Saint Augustine: he sees Rome under siege and knows it will fall. His response is to write about the City of God, the New Jerusalem, of which Rome for a time served as an image. “Remember Troy,” Arendt reminds us, referring to Homer – for remembrance gives us a measure for the present, just as Augustine urges us to remember the pagan past without Christ. Augustine does not merely lament the falling Rome but points toward the city God has prepared for us as our eternal home, and restores to our memory Love: the love of God and love of neighbor. For love is what truly matters, transforms, and endures forever.
Éva Reinikainen
Éva Reinikainen holds degrees in law and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Cluj-Napoca, as well as qualifications as a teacher of Catholic religion from the University of Helsinki. She works as a lecturer in Catholic religion in Espoo. Éva lives with her family in Munkkivuori, Helsinki, and belongs to Saint Mary’s Parish.