Love and Saint Augustine PDF
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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.
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