Why was Hannah Arendt, a secular Jew, so concerned with a Christian saint?
Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish political theorist, born of quite secular parents in Hannover Germany in 1906. She is the author of such monumental works of political theory as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. But here is an interesting fact that should surprise us. She wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Heidelberg on St. Augustine’s understanding of love. The Nazis were firmly in power by then, and she was prevented from graduating because she was Jewish. She escaped first to France, and then to the United States (becoming a naturalized citizen in 1950). She had smuggled her dissertation on St. Augustine out of Germany, and began working on it again in the 1950s and 1960s. Obviously, she remained passionately concerned with Christian caritas, charity, love. Why was this secular Jew so concerned with a Christian saint? Arendt saw in St. Augustine’s account of the will, and its love of G
