Hannah Arendt and the nostalgia for GodSearching, recollection... The value of silenceWhy do philosophers have a patron and not a patron?The first biography of Hannah Arendt originally published in Spanish is due to Teresa Gutiérrez de Cabiedes ("The Spell of Understanding. Life and work of Hanna Arendt"Encuentro, 2009) and comes from the doctoral thesis directed by the Spanish philosopher Alejandro Llano. It is really worth reading.
In it we delve into the exciting life of this German Jewish thinker (1906-1975) who lived in first person the hottest historical vicissitudes of the twentieth century: persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, World War II, flight to France and participation in Zionist movements, emigration to the United States, intervention in decisive intellectual controversies over the decades, intense university life, high-risk committed journalism, courageous criticism of the serious political errors that took place in her adopted homeland, constant philosophical reflection in personal dialogue -charged with emotion- with thinkers of the stature of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers?
Renewed interest in his thought
After decades of neglect, interest in Hannah Arendt has exploded in recent years and publications about her have multiplied. Many of her works and insights are astonishingly timely in illuminating some of today's major problems.
From his early doctoral thesis on love in St. Augustine, through his famous works "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (where he explains how totalitarian regimes take over worldviews and ideologies and can turn them, through terror, into new forms of state), "The Human Condition" (how human activities should be understood - labor, labor and action - throughout Western history), "On Revolution" (in which he compares the French, American and Russian revolutions), "Truth and Politics" (on whether it is always right to tell the truth and the consequences of lying in politics) and "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (with its courageous and politically incorrect discourse on the banality of evil and other issues).
The question of God
A topic little frequented so far in the bibliography on Arendt is her possible openness to transcendence. The little that can be found in her published work is compensated by the multiplicity and relevance of allusions to God and religion that can be found in personal writings such as her diaries, confidences to her intimates, the funeral of her husband Heinrich Blücher, etc. These allusions overcome the self-interested vision of a supposedly agnostic thinker and alien to Christianity.
Hannah Arendt's birth certificate specifically states, among the data of filiation, place and date of birth, that she was the offspring of parents of "Jewish faith". Her parents had had a close relationship with the rabbi of Königsberg, with whom they also shared an affiliation to social democratic ideas. Arendt's religious instruction was reduced to individual lessons from this rabbi and, in Parisian exile, to a succinct study of the Hebrew language.
In the difficult years of the paternal illness, her mother would note in the diary about the child that Hannah "prayed for him in the morning and at night, without anyone having taught her to do so". Also upon Blücher's death, his wife wanted to say a Kaddish, the traditional Hebrew funeral prayer, in that case initiated at the funeral of a non-Jew.
Written testimonials
In an article on religion and intellectuals Arendt wrote: "As in all discussions of religion, the problem is that one cannot really escape the question of truth, and that the whole matter cannot therefore be treated as if God had been the idea of a certain particularly clever pragmatist who knew what the idea was good for and what it was good against. It happens, quite simply, that this is not so: either God exists and people believe in Him - and this then is a more important fact than all culture and all literature - or else He does not exist and people do not believe in Him - and there is no literary or any other imagination which, for the benefit of culture and for the sake of intellectuals, can change this situation."
On another occasion, he had also written bitterly, noting the link between religion and Judaism: "The greatness of this people once consisted in the fact that they believed in God and believed in Him in such a way that their trust and love for Him was greater than their fear. And now this people only believe in themselves? What profit can be expected from this? Well, in this sense I neither love the Jews nor believe in them; I am simply part of them as something self-evident, which is beyond discussion."
Biblical knowledge
This "something evident" involved a Jewish cultural heritage, which at times was capable of marrying a transcendent God with an immanent approach, which would cause him multiple headaches. In a writing entitled "We Refugees" he would write: "Raised with the conviction that life is the supreme good and death the greatest affliction, we became witnesses and victims of terrors greater than death, without having been able to discover an ideal higher than life".
That Jewish woman came to know perfectly not only the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible but also the Jesus of the Gospels. She frequently quoted words of the Jewish Prophet, represented in her writings scenes of his life and gestures of his language, as well as studied the novelties brought by his doctrine. She never concretized a proposition of faith in Jesus of Nazareth, although her teacher Jaspers and her husband Blücher did. Her Jewish heritage, her study of scripture, her familiarity with the work of St. Augustine, the lessons of Bultmann, Guardini and Heidegger, brought her face to face with Christianity.
The author of "The Human Condition" would state: "Undoubtedly the Christian emphasis on the sacredness of life is an integral part of the Hebrew heritage, which was already in striking contrast to the activities of antiquity: pagan contempt for the sufferings that life imposes on human beings in labor and childbirth, the envied image of the easy life of the gods, the custom of abandoning unwanted children, the conviction that life without health is not worth living (so that, for example, the attitude of the physician who prolongs a life whose health cannot be restored is considered a mistake) and that suicide is a noble gesture to escape from existence that has become burdensome."
In an opinion column he wrote: "The fact that Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christianity considers a savior, was a Jew can be for us as for the Christian people the symbol of our belonging to the Greek-Judeo-Christian culture".
God and life
In a portrait of Pope John XXIII, he said: "To tell the truth, the Church has preached the Imitatio Christi for almost two thousand years, and no one can say how many parish priests and monks there have been who, living in obscurity over the centuries, have said like the young Roncalli: This is my model: Jesus Christ, knowing perfectly well, already at the age of eighteen, that to resemble the good Jesus meant to be treated as a madman... Entire generations of modern intellectuals, insofar as they were not atheists - that is, fools, pretending to know what no human being can know - learned from Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and their countless followers, to consider religion and theological questions interesting. No doubt they will find it difficult to understand a man who at a very young age took a vow of fidelity not only to material poverty, but also to spiritual poverty... his promise was for him a clear sign of his vocation: I am of the same family as Christ, what more could I want?".
And in a letter to her husband on May 18, 1952, she told him after listening to Handel's Messiah played by the Munich Philharmonic OrchestraThe Alleluia can only be understood from the text: To us a child is born. The profound truth of this account of the legend about Christ: every beginning remains intact; for the beginning, for that salvation, God created man in the world. Each new birth is like a guarantee of the salvation of the world, like a promise of redemption for those who are no longer a beginning".
Many years later, Arendt would write in another of her notebooks: "On revealed religion: we are presented with the God who reveals himself and makes himself ostensible, because we cannot represent to ourselves that which does not manifest itself as presence, describing itself. If God is to be a living God, so we believe, he must necessarily reveal himself". And he added the following poem:
"The voice of God does not
saves us from abundance,
He only speaks to the miserable,
to the anxious, to the impatient,
O God, do not forget us."
