A B S T R A C T
What St.
Augustine Taught Hannah Arendt about "How to Live in the
World": Caritas, Natality and the Banality of Evil
Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott
Professor, Department of Political Science, Eastern
Michigan University
Website
Arendt’s doctoral dissertation on Augustine’s
“strange dialectics” launched her academic
career in Germany. It also propelled her lifelong concern
with “the actual problem of how to live in the
world.” A battered copy of the manuscript stayed with
her in Parisian exile, internment in Vichy, and escape to
New York City in 1941 where, in the early 1960’s, she
had planned to publish it. Re-reading the dissertation,
with her American additions and revisions, shows Arendt at
work pearl diving for the Augustinian treasure trove which
had caught her eye in 1929. This paper argues that her
central organizing concepts-- caritas, natality and their
opposites in the banality of thoughtless evil--originated
in the original text and were further enhanced by her
American additions. It is no accident that she was at work
on the Augustine dissertation in English translation at the
precise moment that she journeyed to Jerusalem for her
fateful encounter with Adolph Eichmann in 1961 as a
journalist for The New Yorker. [Quotations taken from:
Scott & Stark. Hannah Arendt: Love and Saint Augustine.
1998. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press]
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