Love and Saint Augustine by Hannah Arendt

Author:Hannah Arendt [Arendt, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 1996-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

2 / “Thought Trains”

Major Themes and Terminology

The themes and modes of discourse Arendt introduces in her dissertation are major “thought trains” in her subsequent work. All of them carry her through and beyond the thicket of Heideggerian phenomenology with Augustine’s caritas as her primary conceptual vehicle. “Love” is the source of both individuation and collectivity, an existential link between past and future as well as the means of banishing the fear of death. Augustine’s caritas allows Arendt to redefine Being as transcendent Creator and at the same time to engage Being directly in the human condition, thereby overcoming a fundamental tension in Heidegger’s work. The effect of Arendt’s appropriation of Augustine’s caritas is to merge, and thereby transcend, both Jaspers’s “factual-life-in-process” and Heidegger’s “question of Being.”

In Arendt’s hands, mortality, the quintessential “limit condition,” is the occasion for a personal search for the Creator. The focus of her inquiry is the ontological source rather than its negation in the oblivion of death. Via Heidegger, Arendt uses the concept of time, within which to situate the “throwback” of the search. But Arendt’s understanding of time, mediated most directly by Augustine, is memoria. Both Being and Time are returned to the level of personal experience. As a mental faculty explored in depth in the dissertation, memory provides the means by which future and past meet in the mental nunc stans, or “space” of memory. Projected outward in her later works, the locus of encounter is transformed into the “public space,” where immortal acts of word and deed take place. Caritas bridges reason and judgment in the space provided by memory. It is caritas and its targeted mental faculty, free will, that transform Heidegger’s anxiety-ridden “they” into the community of “neighbors” in the world, who are loved both for themselves and for the sake of their common Source.

When Arendt came to America and shifted her conceptual venue to an explicitly public space, her Augustinian neighbors in the “world constituted by men” would become citizens of similarly constituted republics, bound by social and political contracts at their “founding.” Then, too, the nunc stans as mental space in which past and future meet in a “sempiternal” present would appear in her American works as the vantage point for an observer/actor—the foundation for judgment as well as for thought and free will.

“Quaestio Mihi Factus Sum” (“I am become a question to myself”)

Arendt uses this text from Augustine’s Confessions as the opening theme for her philosophical analysis. In the introduction to the dissertation she characterizes this quaestio as “human existence reflecting on itself” and identifies it as the pivotal existential dilemma. According to Arendt, formulating the quaestio begins the lifelong task of thinking through the human being’s fundamental relationships to the world, to God, and to other human beings. The quaestio is Heidegger’s “call” translated into a theological context. Once asked, the quaestio initiates what Arendt terms the “transit” out of this world. Through this spiritual journey, the questioner discovers his true source in the eternal Creator and then returns to constitute the world as the human community.

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