Love and Saint Augustine

By: Hannah Arendt, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott - editor, Judith Chelius Stark - editor

Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley

Hannah Arendt, the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, began her scholarly career with an exploration of Saint Augustine's concept of caritas, or neighborly love, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger. After her German academic life came to a halt in 1933, Arendt carried her dissertation into exile in France, and years later took the same battered and stained copy to New York.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Arendt was simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts she was using in her political works. The dissertation became a bridge over which Arendt traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine's question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change.

In Love and Saint Augustine, political science professor Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and philosophy professor Judith Chelius Stark make this important early work accessible for the first time. Here is a completely corrected and revised English translation that incorporates Arendt's own substantial revisions and provides additional notes based on letters, contracts, and other documents as well as the recollections of Arendt's friends and colleagues.

©1929 Julius Springer; English translation copyright 1996 by The Literary Trust of Hannah Arendt Blücher; Copyright 1996 by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (P)2023 Tantor

Excellent

A Critical Review of Hannah Arendt's Love and Saint Augustine (Audiobook Edition)

Rating: 4.5/5 Stars

Narrative Scope:
To encounter Hannah Arendt's Love and Saint Augustine in audio format is to engage with the philosophical equivalent of watching a master sculptor chisel her own foundation stone. Published originally as her doctoral dissertation in 1929 under the German title Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, this work is not a biographical sketch of the Bishop of Hippo, nor is it a devotional guide to Christian piety. Rather, it is a dense, unflinching phenomenological excavation of how the human will operates within the structures of time and desire. For listeners expecting the Arendt of Eichmann in Jerusalem or The Origins of Totalitarianism, this volume offers the raw intellectual marrow from which those later works would draw their strength.

Content Analysis:
The text is structured around a central dialectic that Arendt identifies within Augustine's vast corpus: the tension between craving (appetitus) and neighborly love (caritas). Arendt argues that the "craving" for temporal goods—wealth, reputation, even other humans when possessed as objects—inevitably leads to anxiety and isolation, as these things are perpetually threatened by the contingency of the future and the finality of death. The listener is guided through Augustine's bleak diagnosis of the social world as a collection of individuals bound only by their shared, yet competing, appetites. The philosophical turning point arrives with Arendt's analysis of "memory" and "anticipation." She posits that for Augustine, the human capacity to remember one's own creation (and thus one's dependence on a Creator) allows for a radical reorientation of love. When the soul directs its desire toward the eternal God—a source that cannot be lost or consumed—it is paradoxically freed to encounter other humans not as rivals for finite goods, but as fellow "pilgrims" sharing the same origin and destination.

The Audiobook Experience:
This is a demanding listen. The prose is characteristically Arendtian: dense, layered, and operating on multiple registers of philosophical discourse simultaneously. Unlike popular history or narrative nonfiction, this text requires the listener's full attention; it is best absorbed in quiet, digestible segments rather than during a commute through rush-hour traffic. The narrator (depending on the specific edition, often a calm, measured voice appropriate to the gravity of the material) must navigate sentences that twist through German academic syntax translated into English, carrying concepts of "natality" and "world-alienation" that were still being formed in the author's mind. Where the audio format truly excels is in its ability to convey the rhythmic incantation of Arendt's central thesis: that authentic human plurality is founded not on what we have, but on the recognition of a shared condition of having been created.

Critical Assessment:
While the work is indispensable for understanding the genealogy of Arendt's later concepts—particularly her theory of "natality" (the idea that action is possible because each birth introduces something new into the world) and her suspicion of the social realm—it is not an entry-level text. Listeners coming to this book hoping for a clear summary of "Rent's" (R.C. Sproul's) theological Augustine will find themselves in entirely different waters. Arendt, a Jewish student of Heidegger, is not interested in defending doctrine; she is interested in dismantling and reassembling Augustine to answer existential questions about how to live in a world that is inherently transient.

Final Verdict:
This audiobook is a treasure for the serious student of political philosophy or existential theology. It captures the electric moment of a young Hannah Arendt thinking through the problems that would define the 20th century. The format serves the content well, allowing the weight of Augustine's questions—and Arendt's audacious answers—to settle into the mind of the listener with the gravity they deserve. Approach it with patience, and you will hear the foundation stones of modern political thought being laid, one heavy Latin concept at a time.