Hannah Arendt: Philosopher of Politics, History, and Faith

voegelinview.com/hannah-arendt-philosopher-of-politics-history-and-faith/

Grant N. Havers April 6,

2020

Hannah Arendt’s immigration to the United States in the early 1940s

reminds me of a comment made by a professor of a post-WW2
American history course that I took as an undergraduate. “If it weren’t
for Hitler, America would not have a philosophical tradition.” What he
probably meant was that the high number of philosophers who fled
Nazi Germany for the far more hospitable shores of America had a
profound and enduring impact on American intellectual life well into
the Cold War era. Even though my professor overstated the absence
of a philosophical tradition in America before the 1930s, there is no
question that German émigrés such as Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin,
and Leo Strauss reinvigorated the study of political philosophy—the
study of what constitutes the best or most just political regime.

Arendt was born in Hanover in 1906, but she lived many of her
formative years in Königsberg and Berlin. She was raised in a secular
Jewish home, which had fully assimilated the liberal values of the
Enlightenment. Unfortunately, these values did not have much staying
power in her native Germany. In 1933, she fled the rising menace of
Nazism and eventually made her way to the United States, where she
taught at distinguished institutions such as the New School for Social
Research and the University of Chicago. She died in New York City in
1976.

It is hard to classify Arendt’s thought, given the fact that she was a
political philosopher, an historian of ideas, and a public intellectual,
writing on a wide range of topics such as totalitarianism, anti-
semitism, Augustinian theology, Heidegger (her former professor), the
American and French revolutions, and the meaning of authority (as
opposed to violence). If there is one theme that unites the vast corpus
of works that Arendt composed, it is her interest in the use and abuse
of language in politics and the corresponding evasion of responsibility
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for one’s actions. More than most of her philosophical brethren,
Arendt was acutely aware of the paradox of language, which can both
reveal and conceal the truth, especially in the political realm.
Totalitarian regimes were the worst offenders here. Not only did they
eliminate privacy and freedom; they eradicated truth as well. “For
history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility—based upon the
fact that it is enacted by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no
longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and
are misused to prove this or that opinion.” (The Origins of
Totalitarianism, 9) However, even within a democracy, both the Left
and the Right can misuse language (re-invent and distort the meaning
of words).

No doubt, her background as a German Jew helps to explain this

interest in the misuse (or just plain reinvention) of language. The Jews
of Europe have always been sensitive to the nuance of language, or
the layers of meaning that language can reveal and conceal. Even
during the Enlightenment, a time at which European Jews were given
full political rights and freedoms, for the first time in history, Jews had
to be sensitive to the meaning of words. Yet the terms
“Enlightenment” and “freedom” could be understood in different
ways. Until the rise of Nazism in Germany, German Jews had generally
embraced the Enlightenment, that great secular movement that
advanced intellectual and religious freedom, as an indestructible
tradition that guaranteed the rights of Jews. All that the
Enlightenment asked of Jews was to privatize their faith (or remove it
from the political realm) and to assimilate the values of liberalism.

The rise of Hitler to power dramatically and fatefully demonstrated to

German Jews that the Enlightenment tradition was very destructible,
that in fact even an enlightened European civilization could go to the
bad. Arendt shared the same misgivings as her fellow German Jews
Leo Strauss and Theodor Adorno on the limits of the Enlightenment.
They were haunted by the same question: had the Enlightenment not
only failed to protect the Jews but even contributed to the rise of
Hitler in Germany? Because the Enlightenment had extended freedom
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to both Jews and anti-Semites under the banner of freedom of
speech, had this well-meaning tradition given freedom to those who
sought to destroy the Enlightenment and European Jewry altogether?
Worst of all, those anti-Semites on the far Right who hated the
Enlightenment blamed the Jews for inflicting a decadent and libertine
philosophy onto real Germans, a philosophy that was also blamed for
the political and economic collapse of Germany after WW1. In short,
the Enlightenment had not eliminated anti-Semitism at all. As Arendt
wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “In contrast to all other groups,
the Jews were defined and their position determined by the body
politic. Since, however, the body politic had no social reality, they were
socially speaking in the void.” Jews were both everywhere and
nowhere, anathema to a society that never quite accepted the
Enlightenment.

Even in her American exile, living and working comfortably in a nation

that was wedded to the tradition of freedom of speech and other
Enlightenment values, Arendt was keenly aware of the misuse of
language within a democracy. It was not only totalitarian regimes that
were capable of reinventing “freedom” and “equality” and turning
them into their nightmarish opposites. What she famously called the
“banality of evil,” the all too human temptation of ordinary persons to
rationalize evil, extended to both democratic and tyrannical regimes.
Evil was not some aberrant practice that exotic personalities
practiced. Evil was banal because it was committed by respectable
nameless bureaucrats wearing suits and ties. In her essay “Lying in
Politics,” which she penned during the Vietnam War amid the
explosive revelations that came out of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt
took aim at the US government for systematically lying about the
Vietnam War and even went so far as to claim that the “willful,
deliberate disregard of all facts, historical, political, geographical” of
the Vietnam War’s architects was eerily similar to tactics and
assumptions made by the communist enemy. Arendt agreed with the
New Left critique of the war that the US government had ignored the
basic facts of Vietnamese history in order to claim falsely that Vietnam
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was a mere pawn of world communism. The fact that a majority of the
people, the masses, had gone along with these lies only vindicated
Arendt’s Platonic suspicion of democracy as a whole.

Arendt’s sensitivity to the misuse of language, along with indifference

to basic facts and truths, perhaps explains why she was often leery of
the usage of religious language in politics. In her view, the language of
the Bible was so loaded with meaning that it was extremely vulnerable
to abuse in the hands of political authorities. This reticence may
explain why she insisted, for example, in On Revolution, that
Christianity, properly understood, is essentially apolitical, and has no
true pretensions to wield power in the secular world. Christianity
allowed for freedom from politics. (For this reason, she turned to
ancient Greek political philosophy, perhaps with the encouragement
of Heidegger, as the one tradition that is properly suited for the
political life.) No doubt, the demonic misuse of Christian language
during the Nazi era, which helped to rationalize the persecution of the
Jews, explains these doubts about applying Christianity to the world of
politics. She notes in Eichmann in Jerusalem how the architect of the
Final Solution had dared to say at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 that he
was simply following the golden rule, or Kant’s categorical imperative,
when he exterminated six million Jews in the name of love and duty!
Her attitude towards Christianity was not, however, one of hostility. In
fact, in On Revolution Arendt wrote that the “terrifying question of
good and evil could not even be posed, at least not in the framework
of Western traditions, without taking into account the only completely
valid, completely convincing experience Western mankind had ever
had with active love of goodness as the inspiring principle of all
actions, that is, without consideration of the person of Jesus of
Nazareth.” In short, Arendt was praising the love incarnated in the
person of Christ as the only complete and authentic pathway to
understanding good and evil in the modern era.

Yet this love allegedly has little applicability in the realm of politics.

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“A few words need still to be said about the not infrequent claim that all
modern revolutions are essentially Christian in origin, and this even when
their professed faith is atheism. The argument supporting this claim
usually points to the clearly rebellious nature of the early Christian sect
with its stress on the equality of souls before God, its open contempt for
all public powers, and its promise of a Kingdom of Heaven—notions and
hopes which are supposed to have been channeled into modern
revolutions, albeit in secularized fashion, through the Reformation…But if
this is true, then it is secularization itself, and not the contents of Christian
teachings, which constitutes the origin of revolution.” (Arendt, On
Revolution, 16)

Throughout her writings, Arendt insists that Christians are too

focused on the Second Coming to be preoccupied with the earthly
travails of the political, as if waiting for the apocalypse has had no
political ramifications. In her study of revolutions, Arendt is
determined to excise revealed religion from American political history
in favor of paganism.

Arendt credits Christianity for making possible what paganism never

did—a “freedom from politics.” (On Revolution, 280) For this reason,
she insists that Christianity has nothing to do with the American
founding. The American founders were more likely influenced by the
pagan narrative of Virgil’s Aeneid, which recounted the creation of a
new nation after the destruction of an old one. (On Revolution, 204-05)
The Romans, who eschewed even the slightest separation of politics
and religion, nevertheless are the models of American republicanism.
Somehow, the old Roman trinity of religion, tradition, and authority
made its way into the consciousness of the founders, although Arendt
offers not a shred of evidence for this claim. (On Revolution, 117, 197,
206) Still, this thesis allows Arendt to deny the originality of the
American revolution. For if the Romans are so paramount as an
influence, then the events of 1776 must be intelligible only as a
restoration of the old Roman wisdom, and nothing new in the bargain.
(On Revolution, 44, 180-81). On the American revolutionaries, she
wrote:
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“Their sound realism was never put to the test of compassion, their
common sense was never exposed to the absurd hope that man, whom
Christianity had held to be sinful and corrupt in his nature, might still be
revealed to be an angel.” (On Revolution, 95)

In short, Arendt often insists that Christianity either has no influence

or its politicization (secularization) in America hopelessly adulterates
its content. Even in the case of the Puritans at Plymouth Rock, their
devotion to politics was more secular than religious: “even the
Puritans were no longer mere pilgrims on earth but ‘Pilgrim Fathers’—
founders of colonies with their stakes and claims not in the hereafter
but in this world of mortal men.” (On Revolution, 230)

What is fascinating and paradoxical about Arendt are her often

dramatic admissions that the Bible is the true foundation of politics,
history, and freedom.[1] Arendt did not always consistently adhere to
her own view that religion should be completely kept out of the
political realm. In recognizing the American revolution as a new
beginning in history, Arendt finds it impossible to locate the idea of
beginning again (or being born again) in classical Rome. For the
pagan belief in cyclical time—upon which the Aeneid and every other
great work of classical literature builds—has no way of explaining the
events of 1776. Indeed, cyclical time has no way of explaining history,
as she admits:

“Antiquity was well acquainted with political change and the violence that
went with change, but neither of them appeared to it to bring about
something altogether new.” (On Revolution, 21)

Cyclical time is focused on repetition, not the novelty of historic

change. Whereas the Aeneid is premised on the eternal regeneration
of kingdoms which rise and fall (On Revolution, 210-11), the revolution
offered the hope of “arresting the cycle of sempiternal change, the
rise and fall of empires, and establish an immortal city.” (On

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Revolution, 231). Ultimately, her thesis of indebtedness to Rome
collapses when she admits that tradition (at least in the classical
sense) offered no precedent to the men of 1776:

“Hence, it seems, the men of the American Revolution, whose awareness of

the absolute novelty in their enterprise amounted to an obsession, were
inescapably caught in something for which neither the historical nor the
legendary truth of their own tradition could offer any help or precedent.”
(On Revolution, 212)

What, then, explained the possibility or actuality of a new beginning?

Arendt ultimately had to conclude that the Christian notion of natality
was the foundation of new beginnings in history. Arendt deeply
appreciated how the New Testament contained “an extraordinary
understanding of freedom, and particularly the power inherent in
human freedom.” She went on to write: “the human capacity which
corresponds to this power, which, in the words of the Gospel, is
capable of removing mountains, is not will but faith.” The real
“miracle” is freedom inspired by faith. “The work of faith…is what the
gospels called ‘miracles,’ a word with many meanings in the New
Testament and difficult to understand.” Miracles are not supernatural
events. Rather, they are “interruptions [new beginnings]” which
disrupt the “natural series of events, of some automatic process, in
whose context they constitute the wholly unexpected.” (Between Past
and Future, 167-168)

Why was this understanding of history as the miracle of freedom, of

beginning again, so important to not only grasp but put into practice?
In The Human Condition, she writes that Jesus of Nazareth was the
“discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs.”
(214-15) The fact that she calls Jesus the “discoverer” is telling, which
strongly implies that forgiveness is a new beginning in history. The
power of forgiveness is akin “to the more general power of
performing miracles.” (Human Condition, 222) Forgiveness is neither

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natural nor inevitable to the human condition. It is a miracle, a new
beginning, to the otherwise tortured, inauthentic, and sinful relations
in which human beings entangle themselves.

“The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its
normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty
of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men
and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being
born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human
affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human
existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the
keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and
counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith
in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most
succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced
their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’” (Human Condition,
222-23)

How does this narrative of love explain history, including the history
of the church, which has so often been influenced by Greek antiquity?
After all, the church has not always acted in the spirit of love. More
often, the motivation has been one of fear or tyranny encouraged by
the belief in hellfire. Was this truly biblical? In her essay “What is
Authority?”, Arendt attributed the origins of this belief in hell to Plato,
not to Christ, a belief that served political authority at the expense of
the true Christian focus on love. ‘Nothing perhaps in the whole
development of Christianity throughout the centuries is farther
removed from and more alien to the letter and spirit of the teaching
of Jesus of Nazareth than the elaborate catalogue of future
punishments and the enormous power of coercion through fear
which only in the last stages of the modern age have lost their public,
political significance.” Was Arendt then welcoming the demise of the
belief in hell as it applies to the political realm?

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Once again, her experience with totalitarianism and the death of the
Enlightenment led her to make a cautious qualification here: “the fact
is that the most significant consequence of the secularization of the
modern age may well be the elimination from public life, along with
religion, of the only political element in traditional religion, the fear of
hell. We who had to witness how, during the Hitler and Stalin era, an
entirely new and unprecedented criminality, almost unchallenged in
the respective countries, was to invade the realm of politics should be
the last to underestimate its persuasive influence upon the
functioning of conscience.” (Between Past and Future, 132-33) (Arendt
went on to note that even the heirs of the Enlightenment, including
the French and American revolutionaries of the 18th century, made
belief in an “avenging God” part and parcel of the new body politic.)
Arendt was too aware of the banality of evil, or the fallenness of all
human beings, to dismiss a teaching that in some respects had
restrained the worst inclinations of human nature.

In closing, Arendt was that rare secular philosopher who actually

appreciated the truth of revelation, without being religiously
observant. Her keen interest in the misuse of language reveals a
certain debt to the theological tradition. More importantly, her
unforgiving view that all human beings are capable of evil, whether in
a position of religious or secular authority, and can misuse language
for their own self-serving ends, is a truth that all regimes, including
democratic ones, dare not forget.

Notes

[1] See Christopher Irwin, “Reading Hannah Arendt as a Biblical

Thinker,” Sophia 54 (2015): 545-61.

The author presented this paper for the panel “What Philosophy Owes to
Women,” hosted by the Gender Studies Institute (Trinity Western
University) on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2017.

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