Love and Saint Augustine

Arendt's dissertation centers on a tension internal to Augustine's thought: the believer who loves God and directs his heart toward heaven must nevertheless love his neighbor, who exists in the worldly here-and-now. How can a self defined by its craving for the immutable also sustain a meaningful relation to mortal others? Arendt traces this problem through Augustine's accounts of appetitus, caritas, and cupiditas, showing that the desire for self-sufficiency pulls against the love of neighbor. The editors argue this question—'the relevance of the neighbour' to a self absorbed in its own relation to truth—remains the driving question of Arendt's mature political thought . The dissertation is thus less a work of Augustinian scholarship than a phenomenological investigation of the conditions of social existence.

Arendt carried the battered manuscript of her 1929 dissertation with her into exile—through France and eventually to New York—and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while completing The Human Condition and other major works, she annotated and revised it extensively, amplifying its argument with the concepts she was then developing . The University of Chicago Press edition, edited by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, is the first English translation to incorporate these substantial revisions, making visible the dialogue between the young Heidelberg scholar and the mature New York political theorist. The editors' interpretive essay argues that this dialogue demonstrates how Arendt's early work on Augustine provides the key to her later critique of modernity .

Although Arendt had commissioned an English translation of her dissertation in the early 1960s and annotated it heavily, the English manuscript was never published during her lifetime . Scott and Stark's 1996 edition made this early work accessible for the first time, and reviewers recognized it as a major contribution. Kirkus Reviews called it 'a revelation that may force us to reconsider the traditional interpretation of Arendt's work,' while Jean Bethke Elshtain praised it as 'a major contribution to our understanding of the philosophical and theological roots of Arendt's work' . The volume includes the editors' extensive commentary recording Arendt's marginalia and revisions, allowing scholars to trace which concepts—particularly natality—became more congealed for her in the American years .

Natality is the concept for which Arendt is most famous, and the editors of Love and Saint Augustine argue it was already present, in embryonic form, in her reading of Augustine. For the young Arendt, the fact that humans are born—that each person arrives as a newcomer capable of initiating something new—distinguishes human existence from the cyclical repetition of mere life. The review in The Review of Politics notes that Arendt's later revisions show how certain ideas, 'notably her emphasis on natality,' became more congealed for her in the years after she came to the United States . In The Human Condition, natality becomes the ontological condition of action itself, the capacity to begin that makes politics possible.

According to the editors and reviewers, she did not. The Review of Politics observes that 'despite Arendt's return to this earliest work after the Holocaust, after her immigration to the United States, and in the midst of the controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem, she did not change her mind substantially about what she had written as a young woman in Germany on the subject of love and Saint Augustine' . Her revisions were amplifications rather than retractions: she clarified and deepened the argument with concepts from her political works, but the fundamental question—how the self turned toward eternity can also love the neighbor in the world—remained constant. This continuity is what justifies the editors' claim that the dissertation is a key to her mature thought.

The dissertation was published in German in 1929 as Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation . An English translation by E. B. Ashton appeared in 1963, but Arendt revised it extensively without publishing the revision. The Scott and Stark edition is a 'completely corrected and revised English translation that incorporates Arendt's own substantial revisions' . This layered textual history matters because the book we read in English is not simply a translation of the 1929 German text; it is a composite shaped by Arendt's later interventions. Readers should be aware that the voice they encounter is neither purely the young Heidelberg student nor fully the mature political theorist, but a dialogue between them across four decades.