Review of Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning

Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning:
The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of Her Dissertation on St. Augustine
by Stephan Kampowski
Eerdmans, 364 pages, $50 paper

n

This scholarly study relates Hannah Arendt’s early dissertation on St. Augustine to her mature thought. Stephen Kampowski, professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Rome, exposes the prevalence of two pervading themes: human temporality and human conditionedness. These motifs, he shows, are fundamental for understanding Arendt’s action theory and moral thought. Action can be a new beginning in time, breaking the eternal chain of cause and effect, only because the human creature is a temporal being who lives his life from some beginning to some end. At this juncture in the book emerges the importance of the term natality by which Arendt refers to our birth as the origin of our spontaneity. The fact of human conditionedness, in turn, confronts the human creature with an alternative: choosing between grateful acceptance and resentful refusal. For Arendt, to be able to choose the former, it is essential for the human creature to be a thinking, and hence remembering, being who is reconciled both with his past and with the fundamental conditions of the life given to him.

n

”Romanus Cessario, O.P.