Hannah Arendt’s Marranic Evasions and the Truth of Her Cryptotheology
Hannah Arendt’s Marranic Evasions and the Truth of Her Cryptotheology

Author(s): Rafał Zawisza
Subject(s): Philosophy, Psychology, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Hannah Arendt; Augustine of Hippo; philosophical anthropology; natality; birth; gnosis; secularity
Summary/Abstract: The text is a re-reading of The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt with emphasis on the concept of natality, showing connections between this book from 1958 and the author’s dissertation written three decades earlier. The linking point is the thought of Augustine of Hippo, whose topics Arend tre-wrote into modern language, aiming to ultimately overcome gnosis, of both Christian and modern provenance. The era of nihilism as a modern type of gnosis reduced life to a biological process, a fact Arendt counterbalanced with “the divinity of birth” and, more precisely, with the latent sacredness of spontaneity. However, the operation of overcoming gnosis can only be grasped through careful research on Arendtian language, which is full of nuances. The hypothesis that Arendt worked on concepts as a “philosophical Marrano” helps elucidate the assertion that her secular anthropology is at the same time a cryptotheology.

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