ARENDT, AUGUSTINE, AND THE NEW BEGINNING
by Stephan Kampowski
Eerdmans, 364 pages, $50 paper
This scholarly study relates Hannah Arendt’s early dissertation on St. Augustine to her mature thought. Stephen Kampowski, professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Rome, exposes the prevalence of two pervading themes: human temporality and human conditionedness. These motifs, he shows, are fundamental for understanding Arendt’s action theory and moral thought. Action can be a new beginning in time, breaking the eternal chain of cause and effect, only because the human creature is a temporal being who lives his life from some beginning to some end. Kampowski also shows the importance of the term natality , by which Arendt refers to our birth as the origin of our spontaneity. The fact of human conditionedness, in turn, confronts the human creature with an alternative: choosing between grateful acceptance and resentful refusal. For Arendt, to be able to choose the former, it is essential that the human creature be a thinking, and hence remembering, being who is reconciled both with his past and with the fundamental conditions of the life given to him.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.
Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.
Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Why the Death Penalty Is a Sore Point for Papal Authority
Pope Leo XIV marked World Day Against the Death Penalty, observed on October 10, with the following…
AI Child Porn and the Libertarian Lie
On August 25, Judge John Z. Lee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit…
Government’s Sex Abuse Hypocrisy Comes Due
I worked in senior staff positions in Catholic dioceses for twenty-seven years. For nearly all of them…
