Love and Saint Augustine

254 Pages·1996·16.39 MB·English

by  Hannah Arendt

LOVE AND
SAINT
AUGUSTINE
a

LOVE AND
SAINT
AUGUSTINE
HANNAH
ARENDT
Edited and with an Interpretive Essay by
Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott
and
Judith Chelius Stark
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO & LONDON
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
Copyright © 1929by Julius Springer
English translation copyright © 1996by The Literary Trust of
Hannah Arendt Blücher
Copyright © 1996by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and
Judith Chelius Stark
All rights reserved. Published 1996
Printed in the United States of America
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02596-4(cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02597-1(paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-02596-9(cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-02597-7(paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Arendt, Hannah.
[Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. English]
Love and Saint Augustine / Hannah Arendt ; edited and
with an interpretive essay by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and
Judith Chelius Stark.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-02596-9— ISBN 0-226-02597-7(pbk.)
1. Love (Theology)—History of doctrines—Early
church, ca. 30–600. 2. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of
Hippo. I. Scott, Joanna Vecchiarelli. II. Stark, Judith
Chelius. III. Title.
BV4639.A6513 1996
177(cid:2).7(cid:2)092—dc20 95-12866
CIP
øThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for
Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials,ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Preface: Rediscovering Love and Saint Augustine VII
Acknowledgments
XIX
LOVE AND SAINT AUGUSTINE
Introduction
PART I Love as Craving: The Anticipated Future
I. The Structure of Craving (Appetitits)
2. Caritas and Cupiditas
3. The Order of Love
PART II Creator and Creature: The Remembered Past 45
I. The Origin 45
2. Caritas and Cupiditas 77
3. Love of Neighbor 93
PART III Social Life
REDISCOVERING HANNAH ARENDT
I. Introduction: "New Beginnings" 1 1 5
2. "Thought Trains" 142
3. Heidegger: Arendt between Past and Future 173
4. Jaspers: Arendt and Existenz Philosophy 198
References 2 I 3
Index 217
v

Preface
Rediscovering Love and Saint Augustine
Preparing our edited and revised English version of Hannah Arendt's Love
and Saint Augustine has been a major collaborative effort spanning a decade.
Although the number of books, articles, and conferences on Arendt's works
increases yearly, particularly in political science, Love and Saint Augustine
remains an almost unknown text-the last of Arendt's book-length manu
scripts to be published in English. Our joint work on the manuscript began
in 1985 after a chance encounter at the Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance
Studies Association held at Villanova University, where I, as a political sci
entist, was exploring the dissertation as the missing link between Arendt's
"political" and "moral" epistemology and]udith, as a philosopher, was ex
amining Augustine's idea of evil and its relation to political authority. Our
paths to Arendt's dissertation follow.
Scott's Path to Love and Saint Augustine
At Barnard College and Columbia University, where I studied political the
ory as an undergraduate and as a graduate Presidential Fellow, the physical
presence and intellectual aura of Hannah Arendt were unavoidable. Like
Margaret Mead, another eminent woman on the Morningside Heights
campus, Arendt was a "presence" at 16th Street and Broadway. Sightings
I
were reported, anecdotes shared. The political science community at Bar
nard and Columbia, in the grip of the Cold War, elevated Arendt's Origins of
Totalitarianism and On Revolution to canonic status.
Eventually I would go to the United Kingdom (1967-70), where I re
ceived my doctoral degree from the University of Strathclyde. Before I left
Columbia with a master's degree, however, I continued the work on the
history of political thought that I had begun at Barnard, this time with a
focus on the radical use of traditional sources in the medieval period, com
pleting a thesis on Marsiglio of Padua's reconstruction of Augustinianism.
My professors, Herbert Deane,]ulian Franklin, Arthur Hyman, Paul Oskar
VB
viii PREFACE
Kristeller and Norman Cantor, illuminated the sources of Western political
thinking with a passion and precision not unlike Arendt's. Kristeller, in fact,
had been her classmate at Heidelberg. As a result, medieval political dis
course has never been for me the alien language it often is for political scien
tists trained primarily in the writings of the moderns.
I began the process of rediscovering Arendt through the medium of
her revised dissertation in 1983 after I retrieved not only a copy of the En
glish translation from the Library of Congress but also her annotated
retyped manuscript. I had previously read a review of her posthumously
published Gifford Lectures and was intrigued by a brief, tantalizing refer
ence to the existence of a translated copy of the dissertation among her pa
pers in the Library of Congress. Given what I thought I knew of Arendt's
"politics only" approach to the public world, the undeniable fact that her
career had begun with an exploration of Augustine's idea of social life pro
voked my curiosity. When the text-an oversized pile of manuscript pages
-arrived from the Library of Congress, it was double surprise. E. B. Ash
ton's translation, apparently completed in 1963, had been revised by Arendt
in handwritten interlinear and marginal revisions, then partially retyped to
include and expand the revisions.
In 1984Jean Elshtain was coordinating political theory panels for the
national meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washing
ton and invited me to present my evaluation of the revised dissertation.
Arendt is one of the most widely respected yet controversial figures in
twentieth-century political science. Yet surprisingly, my argument for the
significance of the dissertation was the first time Arendt's encounter with
Augustine had been directly addressed in her chosen American academic
discipline. It was also the first time that Arendt's dissertation per se had been
taken seriously in political science as more than a standard academic debut.
Although heavily indebted to her mentors Martin Heidegger and Karl
Jaspers, Arendt's dissertation is her own respectful declaration of indepen
dence, which points the way to her later, explicitly political works. Thus,
from the beginning, rediscovering the dissertation by means of its 1960s re
visions has been controversial and will continue to be so until the whole
corpus of her work, in Germany and America, is evaluated and incorporated
into the "orthodox" rendering of Arendt's political thought.
Stark's Path to Love and Saint Augustine
My interest in both Augustine and Arendt began during my graduate
studies in philosophy at Marquette University. There I wrote my master's
REDISCOVERING LOVE AND SAINT AUGUSTINE IX
thesis on "Augustine's Notion of Peace" under the direction of the
Augustine scholar Paul Bryne. During the tumultuous days of the late 1960s
I plunged into Arendt's works, especially Between Past and Future, On Revolu
tion, and her most controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem. While reading
these works, I was delighted to discover a contemporary thinker who was
grappling with the most difficult and perplexing issues of our time.
In 1969 I decided to return to New York City, study with Arendt, and
thus complete my doctoral studies at the New School for Social Research.
During my time at the New School I also worked with Hans Jonas, William
Barrett, Aron Gurwitsch, and Arthur Hyman. These were the years in
which Arendt was engaged in working through her last major project, the
Gifford Lectures, which became The Life oft he Mind: Thinking and Willing.
Augustine figures prominently in this work, especially in the Willing vol
ume. The research for my own dissertation on Augustine's early views of the
will was carried out under Arendt's direction, including explorations of her
dissertation, Der Liebesbegriffbei Augustin, which was on reserve at the New
School Library. Unfortunately, I did not then glean much from that dense
German text, preferring instead to devote my time with Arendt to discus
sions and disputes about Augustine and his perplexing thoughts on the will.
Little did I know at that point that my work with Arendt on Augustine
would eventually lead me back to hers. After the publication of The Lift of
the Mind in 1978, I began to appreciate much more fully the depth and dura
tion of Arendt's fascination with Augustine. In 1986 I was invited to pre
sent my research in Rome at an international congress sponsored by the
Augustinian Patristic Institute celebrating the sixteenth centenary of Au
gustine's conversion, clearly signaling the importance of Love and Saint
Augustine among Augustinian specialists.
I have learned, however, that Arendt's ambivalence toward academic
philosophy, which (by way of a detour through theology) had been her first
love, is mirrored in contemporary philosophy's response to her thought.
Her stance derives, among other things, from what she saw as the inherent
tensions between philosophy and politics, as illustrated in the temptation to
support tyranny, to which philosophers such as Plato and Heidegger suc
cumbed. Even so, she never rejected the German philosophical tradition
from which she sprang. Today, research on Arendt in mainstream philoso
phy conferences and publications remains at the margins of discourse,
where political ideas or the writings of women are discussed. Still, Arendt as
I knew her would not have bothered about her status among philosophers of
"the tradition"; instead she would have praised and encouraged the perilous
task of thinking no matter where it occurred.