Hannah Arendt's Political Theology

Abstract

Notwithstanding her vast engagement with theology, Hannah Arendt is considered an outsider to the intellectual milieu most readily associated with political theology. Arendt thus refrains from the Schmittian all-encompassing characterization of modern political institutions as containing a hidden theological legacy. Peter E. Gordon argues that in contrast to Carl Schmitt, who held that politics is essentially theological, “among Arendt’s most salutary insights was that political theology only holds us in its grip if we bring to politics an expectation of metaphysical or ‘eternal’ peace of a sort that worldly politics seems forever unable to satisfy” (874). While Arendt depicts theology’s impact on politics as contingent, the following essay demonstrates that her thought holds a steady reference to theology, describing its impact on politics affirmatively. According to several of her main works, religious notions facilitate individuals’ access to political power even as they do so in sporadic and ever-changing manners. An overview of several of Arendt’s works—with focus on her Love and Saint Augustine, Origins of Totalitarianism, and Eichmann in Jerusalem—demonstrates two threads that envelop the connection of politics to religion: first, a conceptualization of theological notions as evocative of political action and second, an examination of Jewish history that exerts a critique of the European nation state. These two threads encapsulate Arendt’s divergence from liberal thought because they challenge the liberal endorsement of secularism and, correspondingly, protective depictions of religious minorities.