An Ambiguous Citation in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition

Author(s): Frederick M. Dolan

Source: The Journal of Politics, Vol. 66, No. 2 (May 2004), pp. 606-610
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science
Association
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An Ambiguous Citation in Hannah Arendt’s The
Human Condition

Frederick M. Dolan
University of California at Berkeley

Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality is by common consent one of her most numinous contributions
to political philosophy. Arendt introduces the idea in the course of her attempt to draw out the sig-
nificance of the ever-present possibility that someone, somewhere, sometime might say or do some-
thing that makes possible a fresh start in the realm of human affairs (Arendt 1958, 247). She
characterizes this ineradicable possibility as nothing less than “the miracle that saves the world” from
the ruin to which it is otherwise subject. The greatest symbol of this possibility—“its most glorious
and succinct expression,” Arendt says—is the Christian Gospels’ announcement of “glad tidings”: “A
child has been born unto us.” It is this Christian figuration of the miraculous through the image of
the newborn that gives Arendt the term “natality.”

In Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H.

Auden (2003), Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb points out that Arendt, a Jew, never-
theless credits Christianity with the greatest expression of natality. This appeal
to the Gospels is further striking in that, as is evident throughout her work, Arendt
vehemently rejects the devaluation of the world and elevation of the soul that
marks Pauline Christianity. It would appear right to assume that Arendt’s aim in
appealing to the Christian image of natality is to avoid the specifically Jewish,
prophetic content of worldly hopes, such as the reestablishment of the Davidic
kingdom, while celebrating worldliness as such. But she silently “edits” the
Gospels, as it were, in order to avoid attributing divine, otherworldly status to the
child who has been born unto us so that it represents the possibility of redemp-
tion in “this” world. Arendt intends in this way to preserve “Jewish” worldliness
as against the Pauline denigration of the world in favor of the soul, while retain-
ing from Christianity the universality implicit in its “glad tidings.”
Arendt hopes to preserve something approaching the traditional philosophical
striving for transcendence while avoiding the traditional understanding of tran-
scendence as overcoming the limits of the human condition. Like her teacher
Martin Heidegger, Arendt sees that desire as having had disastrous consequences.
Gottlieb places Arendt’s quest within a special tradition of non-Apocalyptic
Jewish Messianism, a move that has the advantage of permitting a distinctly “non-
Grecophile” understanding of Arendt’s work. The context for understanding

THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, Vol. 66, No. 2, May 2004, Pp. 606–610
© 2004 Southern Political Science Association

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 An Ambiguous Citation in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition 607

Arendt in these terms could be widened even further, however. As Kerr (1997)
shows, an orientation to the problem of what Heidegger calls “finite transcen-
dence” marks the thinking of some of our most compelling and individuated
philosophers, including not only Heidegger but Stanley Cavell, Charles Taylor,
Luce Irigaray, Iris Murdoch, and Martha Nussbaum. It seems that a “theologi-
cal” perspective enables us not only more clearly to understand Arendt vis-à-vis
religious traditions, but also to place this thinker, commonly dismissed as hope-
lessly idiosyncratic, more solidly in the company of mainstream, albeit highly
individuated, thinkers.
It turns out, however, that Arendt’s citation of the Gospels is even more
complex, and far more ambiguous, than this account suggests. For when we look
more closely at Arendt’s appeal to the Gospels’ glad tidings we discover an
anomaly. When Arendt writes about “the few words with which the Gospels
announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us’ ” (1958, 247), we
are presumably meant to understand that these few words are found in the Gospel
according to Luke. No other Gospel contains the story of the angel who appears
before the shepherds at night, and Luke is the standard reference for the tale. But,
turning to Luke, we find that the wording there is by no means so succinct as
Arendt’s quotation seems to demonstrate. Instead we read that the angel
announced: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which
is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). Arendt’s gloss on this line—“A child has been
born unto us”—calls to my mind not Luke but Handel’s stunning chorus from
Part One of his Messiah, which begins “For unto us a child is born” and which,
in line with Arendt’s intentions, can indeed easily be felt to celebrate ordinary
human natality not divine incarnation. And there is a very good reason for this.
The libretto of Handel’s chorus is drawn not from Luke or any other Christian
text, but from the Book of Isaiah of the Tanakh, or the Jewish Bible. There, in
Isaiah 9:6, we read: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given”—almost
the exact words, and surely the real source, of what Arendt spuriously attributes
to the Christian Gospels. Arendt seems simply to have blended the end of the first
clause of the line from Isaiah with the beginning of the second, so that “For unto
us a child is born, unto us a son is given” becomes (with the addition of a change
in tense) “A child has been born unto us.” She then transferred the blend thus
created from the Tanakh to the Christian Gospels.
In her early work Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt asserts “one does not escape
Jewishness.” (Arendt 1975)1 Is her qualified embrace of an image of the Christ-
ian idea of a universally human hope, the appearance of a dispensation relevant
to all the nations and not only the chosen people, more apparent than real? Has
Arendt failed to escape her own Jewishness? The answer is not as clear as it might
seem to be. After all, Luke speaks of a “Saviour” being born “in the city of David,”
wording that chimes with the specifically Jewish announcement in Isaiah of a

1
“Aus dem Judentum kommt man nicht heraus”: the title of the concluding chapter.

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608 Frederick M. Dolan

Messiah who is to restore the Davidic kingdom, and Arendt suppresses precisely
those “Jewish” resonances. We might just as well take Arendt to be following the
early compilers of the Christian Bible, who saw in the so-called “Old” Testament
the mere allegorical prefiguration of the “New”—which is why Handel was happy
to use lines from Isaiah in the Messiah. It seems that Arendt has not, or not only,
“edited” a Christian text to render it selectively more “Jewish” but also to make
it in other respects less Jewish. And she has retrospectively attributed to a Jewish
text a Christian meaning, asserting that the glad tidings of natality, though first
vouchsafed to a chosen few, indeed apply “to all men.” Perhaps Arendt has
escaped Jewishness, after all—assuming, of course, that Christianity indeed
amounts to an escape from Jewishness and is not rather, as Nietzsche would say,
its culmination. Whatever we finally decide to hear in Arendt’s blend-and-switch
operation, it throws into relief the complexity of her orientations to the many
philosophical and spiritual traditions that converge in her thought.
A more straightforward question is whether this is anything more than an
instance of Arendt nodding. That is a good omen, I would argue, for to my way
of thinking Arendt does well to obscure the sources of her metaphor for inexpli-
cable turning points. Extraordinary as the birth of a child always is, other expe-
riences too provoke our sense of the miraculous. This has been described well
(putting aside his many inanities) by Bataille in his words about “happy tears”
(Bataille 1947, 187). Happy tears are our response to something that is unmis-
takably present but, as it were, just cannot be. They well up whenever we
encounter something to which we feel inclined to say: Impossible—and yet there
it is. This could be the birth of a child, or, as in Bataille’s example, the dis-
covery that one who was thought dead is in fact alive and well, or even—a more
troubling and rarely discussed experience—the death of a loved one, the
survivors’ reaction to which is not infrequently a feeling of unwanted elation or
lightness. The point is that not only beginning is salvific or redemptive; in their
own strange way, the ruinous events of ordinary life can be as well. Happy tears,
Bataille says, correlate with the moment of the sacred, the sovereign, or indeed
with the Moment itself—the timeless moment that frees us from the servile tele-
ology of seeing the present as an effect of the past and slave to the future. Some
of these examples may seem too unworldly to be of use to Arendt, but not, I think,
when we acknowledge that after The Human Condition she “comprehend[ed]
[worldliness] in a much larger sense” than the political but rather “as the space
in which things become public. . . . In which art appears, of course. In which all
kinds of things appear” (Arendt 1993, 20).
Further insight into this phenomenon is provided by Gottlieb (2003). She
points out that it belongs to the (or rather a) messianic sensibility to understand
that the “end of time” has, so to speak, “already happened.” The redeemed, mes-
sianic world, accordingly, is in a sense already present, but in an inconspicuous
manner as the potential to adopt a redeeming perspective on time. It is not a
matter of waiting for redemption, as if time is an objective, autonomous struc-

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 An Ambiguous Citation in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition 609

ture that generates development independently of the agent and that gradually,
inevitably devours itself. The point rather is to achieve the slight but significant
change of perspective that plays down the fallen and plays up the redeemed.
From this point of view, the struggle between fallen and redeemed perspec-
tives on time is not an apocalyptic spectacle, but precisely the sort of hidden
drama that befits a Deus Absconditus. And Arendt’s distinctive and highly indi-
viduated Messianism, Gottlieb shows, is literally inconspicuous: it is implied,
hinted, alluded to, and figured throughout her texts, but never explicitly acknowl-
edged. It follows that natality—the miraculous event of a new beginning—need
not be, or rather must not be, as dramatic as we are in the habit of supposing.
Arendt’s reputation as the advocate of an “heroic” concept of political action must
be revised accordingly. In moments when time is glimpsed as redeemed not
fallen, it is as if the world is there simply for our immediate enjoyment. This is,
and always has been, experienced best among intimate friends and couples, and
it is most aptly sheltered by their conversation as it is elaborated over the years—
the sort of thing that Cavell finds on display in Hollywood comedies of remar-
riage such as His Girl Friday and The Awful Truth. This is to say that the
miraculous is properly cultivated in everyday domestic life—which is a very good
thing, because we are not likely to discover a political form for it any time soon
(restricting ourselves, that is, to modern conceptions of the political). Not poli-
tics, but the novel and poetry and other arts are where we take up the miraculous
in something approaching a durable form. And we are not without resources;
already we are the inheritors of a rich and developed tradition. Arendt’s miracle
of natality, in Christian terms at least, is really the idea of epiphany, the feast of
which, in the Christian liturgy, celebrates among others the first miracle: the trans-
formation of water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana. And just this idea of
epiphany was already taken up and turned into a truly political mode of life by
James Joyce, who succeeded in transforming Dublin into a world-historical city,
on a par with Troy or Rome, not through political action of the sort with which
we have become all too familiar but by means of art.
Inconspicuousness, Gottlieb suggests, is what allows Arendt to affirm that the
natural ruination of all things human need not be the damning condemnation of
the human condition that it seems to be. For natality ensures that a fresh start is
always at least possible (it only awaits our noticing it) while avoiding our two
main alternative (but, as Arendt believes, disastrous) sources of metaphysical
comfort. These are the idea of an absolutely transcendental being and the modern
ideology of progress towards increasing comfort by means of the technological
fabrication of the world as a planned abode. When we grasp the importance to
Arendt of the value of inconspicuousness, we see with renewed clarity her inten-
tion to find a view of politics that does not presuppose the state. To this end she
adopts Jesus of Nazareth (if not Jesus the Christ) into the canon of major polit-
ical philosophers—an act that reminds us how powerfully individuated is her
voice among political thinkers and how much of what she has to say is still to be

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610 Frederick M. Dolan

assimilated by the profession of political theory. From the point of view of this
intention, Arendt’s sly rewriting of the Bible makes bad scholarship, but good
sense.

Manuscript submitted March 25, 2002

Final manuscript received August 25, 2003

References
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Arendt, Hannah. 1975. Rahel Varnhagen: Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüdin aus der
Romantik. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, pp. 203–13.
Arendt, Hannah. 1993. Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954. New York, San Diego, and London:
Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993.
Bataille, Georges. 1947. La Part maudite. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1949.
Gottlieb, Susannah Young-ah. 2003. Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt
and W.H. Auden. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Kerr, Fergus. 1997. Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1997.

Frederick M. Dolan is associate professor of rhetoric, University of California

at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94270-2670 (fmdolan@socrates.berkeley.edu).

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