Arendt and Augustine A Pedagogy of Desiring and Thinking for Politics Transforming Political Theologies Series

This book addresses a lacuna in scholarship concerning Hannah Arendt?s Augustinian heritage that has predominantly focused on her early work. It de-canonises the sources that political theology has appealed to by shifting the interpretive focus to her mature treatment in The Life of the Mind. Arendt?s initial criticism of Augustinian desiring is that it generates 'worldlessness'. In her later works, Arendt develops a more nuanced reading of the movements of thinking, desiring, and loving in her engagement with Augustine. This study attends to these movements and inspects the spatio-temporal framework which structure Arendt?s conception of the political. The author assesses the claim that Arendt?s conception of the political is drawn from a pedagogy of desiring and thinking from Augustine severed from his mystagogy. Although respecting the method of political theory, the author contends that Arendt?s severing of Augustinian pedagogy from mystagogy brings her to an insurmountable aporia. Instead, the author embeds these pedagogical practices within Augustine?s theology and suggests how that aporia might be overcome and used to develop a mystagogy for contemporary political life. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of political theology, as well as political theory, and political philosophy.

Introduction; Chapter 1 What Does it Mean to be Political?: Arendt’s Augustinian Odyssey and its Significance for Theology; Chapter 2 Taxonomy and Trajectory of Desire: Hannah Arendt’s Early Reading of Augustine; Chapter 3 Hannah Arendt’s Criticism of Augustinian ‘Worldlessness'; Chapter 4 Movements of Thinking and Loving in Augustine: Rereading Augustine in the Light of Hannah Arendt ; Chapter 5 A Grammar for a Political Mystagogy: Re-reading Augustine’s City of God with Arendt’s Concept of Time; Chapter 6 Mystagogy for Political Life: Tracing the Influence of Augustine’s City of God in Arendt’s Conception of the ‘Political’; Chapter 7 ‘Christian Harps on Babylonian Willows’: An Augustinian Ecclesiology In Response to Arendt; Conclusion

Mark Aloysius is a postdoctoral instructor in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, USA.