Religion (2000) 30, 69–107doi:10.1006/reli.1999.0205, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Book Reviews

Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine,edited and with an Interpretive Essay byJoanna Vecchiarelli Scott and JudithChelius Stark. Chicago, University ofChicago Press, 1996, xx+233 pp., r22.50ISBN 0 226 02596 9.Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and theLimits of Politics. Notre Dame, Universityof Notre Dame Press, 1995, xiv+143 pp.,r21.95 ISBN 0 268 00645 8.

Love and Saint Augustine began life asHannah Arendt’s 1929 Heidelberg disser-tation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. ‘Fol-lowing the bread-crumb trail of letters,contracts, oblique references and therecollections of her friends at the NewSchool’ (p. x), Joanna Scott and JudithStark mount a case for the continuity ofArendt’s pre-war study of Augustine andher later writings against those who main-tain that ‘a clear break between Arendt’spre- and post-Holocaust writings is funda-mental and necessary’ (p. 127). For Scottand Stark, ‘marginalizing the dissertation. . . distorts as well as contracts the scopeand nature of scholarly discourse on hercontribution to political thought’ (pp.128–30). In some sense, Scott and Starkare surely right. But when they attackMargaret Canovan’s claim that ‘Arendt’sresponse to the crises of her century wasa ‘‘thoroughgoing rejection of anythingresembling his approach’’ ’ (p. 131), theymislocate the problem, which is notCanovan’s reading of Arendt but Arendt’sreading of Augustine.

Arendt opens her discussion ofAugustine with the claim that ‘dogmaticrigidity steadily increased as Augustinegrew older’ (p. 3). Nonetheless, it is poss-ible to glean from works of various periodswhat is essential to understanding his keyconcepts. Since hers is to be a purelyphilosophical inquiry, this ahistoricalapproach to the saint is justified as a means

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of recovering ‘the impulse of philosophicalquestioning’, since ‘Augustine never extir-pated this impulse from this thinking’(p. 6). The ‘philosophical’ Augustine, forArendt, is a neoplatonist looking at theplay of phenomena and attempting toreconcile the individual desire to achievethe flight of the alone to the alone withthe Christian injunction to love thyneighbour. Even though the ChristianAugustine must break with this self-divinising intellectualism, it remains theparadigm of philosophy (p. 22). In partone, Arendt develops the notion of ‘loveas craving’, to which she juxtaposes, inpart two, the memory of the happy life‘given in pure consciousness prior to allexperience’ (p. 47). Because the origin ofeach individual is in God, and becauseknowledge of this is found in the memory,‘memory transforms the past into a futurepossibility’ (p. 48). What might have beenself-serving desire becomes a recognitionof dependence.

The influence of Heidegger seemsclosest to the surface when Arendt intro-duces the notion of ‘natality’ as the ‘decis-ive fact determining man as a conscious,remembering being’ (p. 51). Natalitypoints to our beginning in time, and ‘it isnot just perishability but also temporalitythat stands as the stigma of all createdthings’ (p. 54). Memory transforms pastjoy into a future possibility, overcomingthe stigma of temporality in the promisethat the individual can succeed in ‘thequest for his own being’, and that theindividual can, despite the fact of mor-tality, annihilate ‘time and man’s subjec-tion to it’ (p. 57). The very Heideggeriandiscussion of ‘creature and creator’ (seeparticularly pp. 66–74) is dealt with in theeditors’ interpretive essay, but the layers ofrevision are hard to separate in the trans-lation, and the historian will have to con-sult the original dissertation to assess the

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impact of Heidegger on Arendt’s thought.The same holds true for the discussion ofcaritas and cupiditas (pp. 77–97) and itsrelation to the debate over agape and eros inthe following decade.

Augustine has yet, however, to providea philosophical account of the role of theneighbour in Christian love. What hadmade human equality, and thus the dutyto the neighbour, paramount in societywas precisely our sinfulness. When we areredeemed, it would seem that we leavethat sin, and with it our interdependencewith the neighbour, behind, ‘becauseevery beloved is only an occasion to loveGod . . . No individual means anythingin comparison with this identical source’(p. 97). Original sin was a matter ofcorporate identity and manifested itselfin ‘a society from and with the dead’(p. 103). Without it, there is no depen-dence and therefore no neighbour. Thereare no politics in the Eternal City.

According to Arendt, Augustineresolves this dilemma by insisting that‘redemption occurs without merit on thepart of any individual’ (p. 105). Individualsremain equal because of their shared past.‘Death shows that the past has not beeneradicated by salvation. Mortality remainsthe common fate’ (p. 107). What haschanged is that death is no longer the lastword about life. ‘Death can now meansalvation for the good’ (p. 110). The pastis a story of sin, but faith make the wholeof our being ‘explicit’. ‘To bring one’sneighbour to this explicitness of his ownbeing . . . is the duty to his neighbour thatthe Christian assumes from his own pastsin’. Consequently, ‘flight into solitudeis sinful’ (p. 108). Interdependence istransformed into Christian love becauseredemption makes explicit humanity’stwofold source in both Adam and God(p. 112).

This ending reads, even after forty yearsof reflection, annotation and translation,like the ending of a dissertation: puzzle isposed, mastery of the texts is demon-

strated, and the puzzle is given a tidy andsatisfying conclusion. The original disser-tation was an exercise in reuniting thephilosophical and the political, and in thissense the theme remains. Augustineemerges as a precursor in Arendt’s pursuitof ‘the revaluation of politics’ (Canovan,Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of HerPolitical Thought, Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992, p. 275) Canovansees a break between Arendt andAugustine because she and Arendt bothsee him as swinging between a world-indifferent neoplatonic individualism anda world-denying Christian dogmatist.

To turn from Arendt on Augustine toJean Bethke Elshtain’s Augustine and theLimits of Politics is to encounter anotherAugustine altogether. Elshtain’s CoveyLectures, delivered at Loyola University ofChicago in 1995, begin by identifyingArendt and Augustine as thinkers ‘living ina ‘‘gap’’ between past and future’ (p. 1). Itis true, as she writes, that ‘Augustine’sConfessions have long been a stumblingblock to American liberal theology’(p. 7), but this difficulty reflects the in-adequacies of the theology more than thefailures of the saint. After a withering, andvery funny, survey of some of his recentinterpreters, Elshtain makes a powerfulcase for Augustine as an inveterate criticof ‘self-esteem—a high regard for one-self where one is the sole estimatoror appraiser of the self ’ (pp. 11–12).Augustine’s observations on the self-absorption of babies and the growth ofadolescent lust record the facts about thedevelopment of the self in society. Cain’sfratricide, in which Augustine sees thefounding of the earthly city, stems directlyfrom the older brother’s pique at beingslighted by God. This would be comic ifthe consequences were not so sad and sobloody.

According to Elshtain, those who thinkthe earthly city is sufficient are kiddingthemselves, in Augustine’s time and ourown, for as long as we try to make

Book Reviews 71

humanity the centre of our world ‘noopen hearted action nor loving dialoguecan come, only the insistencies of aclamorous, triumphalist self ’ (p. 18). In theintellectual world as in the political one,the quest for power and control seemsnatural to those captured by pride but willinevitably lead them astray because it isbased on the ‘presumption that one canmaster knowledge and attain epistemiccompleteness and certainty through one’sown, unaided efforts’ (p. 51). Augustine’scritique of the worldly self and its societyis a product not of pessimism but rather ofan optimism found in the Christian storyof redemption. Unlike the neoplatonist,Augustine loves the world, which is brightwith delights for the senses and theintellect, all realised by the creative act of aloving God.

Although she appears throughout,Hannah Arendt takes centre stage inchapter four, ‘Augustine’s Evil, Arendt’sEichmann’. Here Elshtain focusses onArendt’s shift from talk of ‘absolute evil’in The Origins of Totalitarianism to thenotorious ‘banality of evil’, whichcharacterises Adolf Eichmann. Elshtainsees in Arendt’s shift a parallel toAugustine’s struggle with Manicheaeism.In Augustine’s mature thought, evil isnothing, no thing, but rather the failure toachieve or sustain what is real. ‘Evil is not’,Elshtain writes, ‘a free-standing activeprinciple of creation but, instead, aprivation, a diminution’ (p. 77). Seen forwhat it is, evil has no point. It achievesnothing. Faced with Eichmann, ‘Arendtwas determined not to permit Eichmannor any like him to attain the stature ofdramatic or romantic demiurges; no, thesewere limited, hollowed-out, pale andempty men’ (p. 84). Thus the ‘banality ofevil’ becomes, for Elshtain, Arendt’s wayof deconstructing the Manichean roman-ticism of ‘radical evil’. While the hor-rors and the suffering are real, for bothAugustine and Arendt they are notachievements but the grotesque defects of

an ignorant, thoughtless pride, abetted bycowardice.

One consequence of giving up theManichean vision is the ability to see thefacts about sin. ‘Even in our good works’,Elshtain writes, ‘we are dislocatedcreatures, torn by discord, but striving toattain some measure of concordia’. We arenot pawns in a cosmic battle, but respon-sible agents, who know what we shoulddo, even when we can’t do it. But limitsshould not give rise to despair, for ‘themore we try to emulate God’s love, thestronger will be our hope; the moredecent our lives with and among oneanother’ (p. 89). In articulating a ‘politicsof limits’, Augustine provides us, asElshtain puts it, ‘a complex moral map thatoffers space for loyalty and love and care,as well as for a chastened form of civicvirtue’ (p. 91). This is not a guidebook toUtopia but a solid critical discipline fornegotiating the affairs of the day.

Elshtain charts a middle path betweenRobert Markus, who finds in thelater Augustine a critic of any imperiumChristianum, and John Milbank’s appro-priation of Augustine ‘in his quest for a‘‘true Christian metanarrative realism’’ ’(pp. 92–3). It is true that Augustine, asMilbank sees him, perceives the Church as‘a community with a notion of trans-formed citizenship’, over and against theself-directed pride of the classical polis(p. 99). At the same time Elshtain insiststhat ‘the importance of plurality, of themany emerging from a unique one, can-not be underestimated in Augustine’swork’ (p. 103). Plurality and separatenessinhere in life in the saeculum. The earthlycity will always be motivated by the libidodominandi, and its attempts to imposeunity, whether in the name of Marx orJesus, will be demonic temptations thelogical end of which can only be totali-tarianism. In Elshtain’s final pages, Arendtand Augustine come together again inrepudiating ‘a teleology of violence’ that,particularly in the twentieth century,

Dar-al-Islam, the psychocentric (soul-centred) in Hinduland and the Buddhistorbit, the cratocentric (rule-centred) inConfuciana, and the now defunct thana-tocentric (death-centred) in the Pharaoniccivilisation of ancient Egypt (p. 11). Likemost of the contributors, he distinguishesrights from duties or responsibilities. Fur-ther distinctions are drawn between therights of different individuals; the ‘normal’and the ‘deviant’; individuals and collec-tivities; present and future generations;religious and secular ideologies whichimpose incompatible duties; differentcollectivities; humans and animals; victimsand violators of rights; and the geopoliticalconcept of the state, membership in whichindividuals acquire by birth, and theethnic nation, identified by culture(language, historical tradition and re-ligion), membership in which is acquiredthrough one’s parents. Lack of coin-cidence between ethnic and nationalidentity can lead to either conflict orassimilation.

In a useful discussion of relative anduniversal rights, John Clayton discusseswhich of the two can trump the other inthe hierarchy of priorities. He also suggeststhat, given the diversity of assumptions tobe found when rights conflict, it shouldnot be assumed that those with whom one

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‘introduces an element of remorse-less moral absolutism into politics. Thedelectation of mounds of bodies stackedup as our handiwork, the riveting possi-bility of salutary bloodletting, grips theimagination’ (p. 114). The Holocaust, theGulags, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Srebrenica:the saeculum will reenact Cain’s fratricideuntil the end.

Writing of Bertolt Brecht in her Men inDark Times, Arendt identifies a ‘yearningnot so much for gravity as for gravitation,for a central point that would be rele-vant within the setting of the modernworld’. That same yearning characterisesAugustine’s Confessions, but unlike Brecht,Augustine found that central point, or itfound him, in a garden in Milan. Havingbeen turned right around, Augustineneither flees the world nor attempts toremake it into paradise but instead insists atevery turn that, as Elshtain puts it, facedwith the personal tragedy and publichorror of life in the world, ‘a human beingcan yet strive to maintain or to create anorder that approximates justice, to preventthe worst from happening, and to resistthe seductive lure of imperial grandiosity’(p. 111).

SCOTT DAVISUniversity of Richmond

doi:10.1006/reli.1999.0206, available online athttp://www.idealibrary.com on

Jaroslav Krejcí (ed.), Human Rights andResponsibilities in a Divided World. PragueFilosofia, Institute of Philosophy of theAcademy of Sciences, 1996, 143 pp.,ISBN 80 7007 086 2.

This book is basically a collection of con-tributions to a workshop held in Praguein 1995. The Convenor, Jaroslav Krejcí,opens the proceedings by charting thehistorical shifts among five paradigmaticapproaches to the human predicament: theanthropocentric (man-centred) in Euro-America, the theocentric (god-centred) in

disagrees in a debate are not themselvesconcerned about rights; a resolutionshould be sought within a common dis-course of human rights. Thus, those pro-moting individual rights could argue thatpromoting the individual gives rise toeconomic advancement, which in turnbenefits the group, while those interestedin promoting group rights could arguethat pluralism protects the individual fromthe tyranny of the majority. Kent Weekswrites about rights and responsibilities inhigher education, and the tensions raisedover such issues as academic freedom,political correctness and affirmative action.

Some of the potential problems of turn-ing to religion for one’s concepts of

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