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Humboldt, and Heidegger's loved Holderlin. In addition to this
classicism she appears to have been drawn to Roman Catholicism in
those years. Perhaps remaining unbaptized or a pariah was a real
struggle for her. She was often in the company of her old Catholic
friend, Waldemar Gurian, a liberal baptized Jew; lectured for sev–
eral years in the neo-Thomist atmosphere of the University of
Chicago; and published a great many of her essays in
Commonweal
and in Notre Dame's
Review of Politics.
One would like to hear more
about her Chicago associations than Young-Bruehl tells us.
In any case, we know that her first introduction to philosophy
came from the Catholic theologian Romano Guardini and that she
attended many courses on Christian theology, always making sure
that there would be no anti-Semitic talk . Her Ph.D . thesis was on
Saint Augustine's concept of neighborly love, considered philosoph–
ically, not theologically.
It
was, nevertheless, a study of a Christian
thinker who regarded love as an expression of man's relation to
God. In
The Human Condition
the medieval Church is seen as the
great preserver of classical values, and Jesus as one of the great
heroes of the" active" life. Eventually she wrote a cloying and senti–
mental essay on John XXIII, "The Christian Pope." This, as well
as the preoccupations of
The Human Condition
and of some of her sub–
sequent essays, may well have contributed to her remoteness (in the
very middle of Manhattan!) from the actual
I
ife of American Jewry.
Remote may be too feeble a word, for
Eichmann in Jerusalem
is set in a
cultural vacuum.
The Human Condition
is likely to remain Arendt's most widely
admired book.
It
is very closely modeled on Hegel's
Phenomenology
and its main arguments owe much to his
Lectures on the History of Phi–
losophy.
This debt is passed over in silence and Hegel is presented
only as one of the precursors of Marx's philosophy of history, an
enterprise that Arendt thought political theory should abandon,
although, in fact,
The Human Condition
itself belongs to that genre.
The argument is a "then" and "now" contrast, the ancients against
the moderns. In Greek thought and practice, labor, man's natural
effort to survive, was despised. Fabrication-the creation of artifi–
cial objects out of nature-and action-the realm of human
exchanges and of history-were separated from labor and placed on
a higher level. At the top of the moral hierarchy was contemplation,
man's highest end. This view was adopted by Christian theologians
and philosophers, though their contempt for the world was more
