This is a splendid book, among the best in this series and representing a high-water mark for this genre of theological analysis. It spans the range of Arendt’s considerable corpus (from the densely theoretical and systematic to the popular and occasional) and presents its diversity in a marvelously integrated and engaging fashion. This is no small achievement because as with any mind as protean and nuanced as Arendt’s, we are talking about a corpus that both developed over time and sustained certain motifs and commitments over the course of its long life. To do what he has done, Professor Kiess had to get a handle on both facets, in turn requiring mastery of not only the primaries but also the vast secondary literature. The result is a text that is impressively effortless in its handling of notoriously difficult concepts. For example, the book’s presentation of Arendt’s singular theoretical contribution of natality is handled with finesse, situating that concept within a host of neighboring concepts (for example in relation to Heidegger’s “being toward death” and Augustine’s creation ex nihilo) so that both its genesis and genius are clearly evident for the reader.

When I say that the book represents a high-water mark for this kind of analysis what I mean is that any attempt to relate some important thinker to the grammar of Christian theology should do at least three things, all of which Hannah Arendt and Theology does in spades. First, it should not only introduce readers to the thinker and help us understand her but also invigorate and inspire a return to the primary texts. I have been reading Arendt for nearly two decades, yet so often while reading Hannah Arendt and Theology, I went to my shelf and pulled an Arendt book, having forgotten, apparently, just how interesting and important is her work. Kiess helped me understand things I hadn’t before, invited new connections I would have never made on my own, and encouraged new questions previously unentertained or unformulated.

Second, theological works in this genre should make careful judgments of where and when to bring the theology in. The usual mistakes from this genre stem from bringing in the theological bits too early, and not allowing the thinker her own integrity of thought, or too late, and so giving the naive impression that readers come to texts without prior questions and interpretive lenses and detrimentally allowing the philosophical text to set the criteria and agenda for theological analysis. Hannah Arendt and Theology steers clear of either mistake, markedly allowing Arendt’s thought to be hers, while still allowing Kiess’s agenda to set the stage for the presentation of that thought. What results is a set of patient, careful, and fine-grained arguments where Kiess engages, contends with, and advances Arendt’s work for the cause of Christian faithfulness. All of this is done with a light touch (as I said, seemingly effortless) made possible by Dr. Kiess’s exceptionally lucid and beautiful writing (this, I cannot emphasize enough).

Third, and related, the work should put significant pressure on both respective discourses, so that, in this case, Arendt presses theology into new zones of understanding (including self-understanding), making theology do “work” in ways unimagined prior to running into Arendt, and making Arendt accountable to theology’s own logical and experiential constraints and entailments. Done well, one gets not just theology and Arendt running parallel to one another (“compare and contrast” in the older vernacular) but a whole new thing, a type of conversation that profits the relevant parties in ways they themselves never anticipated, in a sense creating a new discursive public. As a brief example of how Hannah Arendt and Theology accomplishes this sort of thing, consider how Kiess’s offering of Arendt’s amor mundi presses into service, rather than simply puts into conversation, tensions that arise whenever a mature Platonist rendering of bodily desire confronts the out-and-out rejection of material life that Arendt had to contend with in the Nazis. Theologians like Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter have shown us how the latter can outstrip all other considerations as the former gets appropriated. What Kiess does is: (1) Acknowledge the problematic tendencies of a thusly outstripped Christianity, locating them in the long inheritance of one of its chief progenitors (namely, St. Augustine); (2) Allow that acknowledgement to generate alternatives that answer the concern; and (3) By pushing Arendt’s thought toward an account of hope it did not already possess or imagine, make it do new things. What is accomplished is an account of material qua political life that travels through these specific concerns and arrives at totally new conceptual territory. As a Christian theologian who has written some about radical democratic theory it never occurred to me that such work could illumine for us those kinds of matters (closing the gap between the practical and the metaphysical). Or more precisely, it was through Hannah Arendt and Theology’s constructive vision that I came to realize how important such work is.

Now, as a way deeper into the book, which I obviously think highly of, let me pick up on what Professor Kiess calls “Arendt’s theory of action” and ask him to develop a thought he begins but does not, from what I can tell, complete; or, at least maybe he can identify for us where in the book he does complete the thought.

As the point where he is working out his interpretation of Arendt’s natality concept, that which I already said he finesses to great effect, John leaves us hanging, doubly so. At the time, he had been refuting Charles Mathewes’s critique of Arendt, namely that Arendt’s conception of freedom fashioned freedom as fancifully undetermined. To answer the charge, Kiess shows how for Arendt freedom is determined precisely in the two ways Mathewes thinks so important: the push forward from the conditioning determinants of the past and the future’s realization of the self through action. This answer to that specific charge of Mathewes I find to be convincing and decisive. It is, from my own reading, the whole point of Arendt’s Between Past and Future.

But there is something else raised by Mathewes that I don’t know if John quite gets to. And this critique is similar but not quite the same. Let me quote from, as John does, Mathewes’s Evil and the Augustinian Tradition: “Arendt recognized that for Augustine the ‘outside’ force of natality was not ultimately human will, but always human will under the direction of divine providence. She thought that interpretation of natality was not essential to the structure of willing; so she sought in her own work to ‘demystify’ it, to strip it of its theological pretenses and show it to be solely a human capacity—properly miraculous, to be sure, but not in need of any supernatural powers to back it up” (167). Notice how John’s answer to the first critique will not satisfy this second critique, which I think ultimately illumines the stakes of the initial critique. The first is that Arendt is committed to that fanciful notion of action as undetermined, and John answers it by showing how for Arendt action is determined. But this second critique is different, and charges Arendt’s notion of human action with leaving God out of the list of things that determine human action. So even if John showed how for Arendt action is determined, both from the past and toward the future, he hasn’t quite answered the second charge. Indeed, the way he answers the first critique, by showing the determining conditions of the past to be things like birth or memory and alluding to an account of being as becoming, he actually adds fuel to the fire of Mathewes’s second charge, that human action for Arendt seemingly has only confirmed Mathewes’s worries. Read from the perspective of that second critique, John seems to be saying, “God really doesn’t have anything to do with us; you know this because we cannot be expected to be ‘blameless and innocent’ or ‘without blemish’ as scripture calls, and we cannot love neighbors or forgive as discipleship demands, and we should not be motivated by love of an otherworldly God.” So he leaves Mathewes hanging.

But then, as if we weren’t already so rudely stood up, he goes on to leave us hanging! That is, when he seemingly addresses the second critique in that section called “The Grace of Natality” he hints at something that would not only answer Mathewes but as importantly develop something quite original. In this section, he first shows how even in the conditions of sin, human action can still do some pretty cool things; this is what the “grace” of this section indicates, that sin will not stop us from doing cool things. He then qualifies this with the old Augustinian adage that even the cool things turn out to be disordered things. Again, confirming Mathewes’s second worry. And then, and this is the teaser part, he invokes Aquinas, “who can better account for the dignity of such actions” (197; Kiess references his earlier mention of Aquinas, but that only relates Aquinas’s belief in a non-vicious self-love to “imperfect virtue”). Here I think John is hinting at something like a natural theology of action that shows how God is present in human action—hence bestowing a residually divine dignity to human activity—by hard-wiring nature so that human action is continuous with God’s action. This would to my mind not only exposit Arendt’s theory of action, not only answer Mathewes’s second charge, but more so help us to see how human action, which Arendt does so well to lay out, shows us something about God. This theology of action would delineate how created nature—which would on this score become the necessary architecture of human action—is graced for human action. But John doesn’t ever get to fully developing it, and so I am hoping he will do so just a little more fully.

I should say, I don’t think it’s just a passing or throwaway point for John. There are other clues for it in the book. The closest he gets to relating the natality of human activity to graced nature is when he quotes Arendt saying, “If the creation of man coincides with the creation of a beginning in the universe . . . then the birth of individual men, being new beginnings, re-affirms the original character of man in such a way that the origin can never become entirely a thing of the past” (Kiess, 152). Following, he talks about the idea of miracles, and quotes Arendt, “It is a ‘counsel of realism,’ she observes, ‘to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect ‘miracles’ [in the realm of human affairs]’ (170)” (160). Would at this point Kiess venture past what he sometimes refers to as Arendt’s immanentism and advance Arendt’s notion of natality toward a conception that envisions human action qua creaturely action as having to do with God and the way God has made the world? Rather than go the way of those who, as he describes, “dismiss miracles in the realm of nature as superstition,” might John describe the realm of nature as the site of God’s miraculous activity? He seems to hint at this, and I wonder if he intends it, or whether I am just wanting him to, especially as I see this as one of the big forward edges of Christian theology, the ability to engage and theologically describe discovered features of natural life (e.g., human action, but many other things besides, including discoveries that force us to reformulate what we believe about humans). Given all that I already like about the book, maybe asking for this in addition just makes me a beggar and a chooser. Or maybe not.

“She is the intellectual companion who challenges us not to be content merely to repeat what our predecessors have said but to do the thinking that our predecessors now demand of us” (8). John Kiess thus concludes his introduction to Hannah Arendt and Theology. The book engages Arendt as public philosopher for whom thinking has the power to condition us against evil, to play a gadfly role with respect to all established criteria, values and measures, and to direct how we befriend fellow citizens whilst together tending our world. Weaving biographical and contextual factors into the weft and warp of every chapter, this book puts the lie to any who suppose an unproductive opposition between Arendt and theology.

The main suggestion that I take from John Kiess is that Arendt’s work on thinking remains one of the most suggestive, if still largely unexplored, areas of her thought (212), and that Augustinian practices of meditation inform her contemplation. We find in Arendt, says Kiess, someone “profoundly invested in healing divides between theory and practice . . . a voice that is eminently public and engaged” (8). A theme runs throughout, namely, what is entailed for Arendt in thinking and its absence, thoughtlessness. “No man can keep his conscience intact,” Kiess cites, “who cannot actualize the dialogue with himself, that is, who lacks the solitude required for all forms of thinking” (204, citing LMT, 25). Kiess’s concluding foci in “In the Region of the Spirit: Thinking between Past and Future” include the spirit of wonder that opens the self to nature, and how Arendt seeks to extend this wonder to the realm of human affairs, notably with respect to plurality amongst humankind. Thinking, for Arendt, says Kiess, can unfreeze our minds from all established criteria, values, measurements of good and evil, etc. (203), and is necessary for a well-functioning political community. Kiess’s portrayal of Arendt is as public philosopher for whom thinking frees us to judge, which then frees us to act (41).

But how for the Christian ethicist and political theologian is Arendt a public philosopher for whom thinking frees us to judge, which then frees us to act (41)? In a book called Hannah Arendt and Theology, my question is how to engage with Kiess’s portrayal of Arendt as public philosopher for whom thinking frees us to judge, which then frees us to act (41, emphasis added)—when Arendt herself is not optimistic about Christianity being able to grasp or function with such an understanding of the political life and the responsibilities it entails.

As Kiess reminds us, Arendt cites Tertullian more than once:

Nec ulla magis res aliena quam publica—“no matter is more alien to us than what matters publicly.”1

Early Christianity refused to become associated with the public affairs of Rome, she says, because rival gods were operative, and because of expectations of the eschaton. Early Christianity took a step back from practical, political concern for the world. Kiess mentions behavior does not labour Arendt’s repeated statements about Christian morality, from earliest times, urging everyone to mind their own business whilst regarding political responsibility as a burden to be shouldered by some to ensure the well-being of the people.2 Jesus’ exemplifying of goodness was that it should be hidden from the world:

A community of people that seriously believes that all human affairs should be managed according to goodness; that is therefore not afraid at least to attempt to love its enemies and repay evil with good; that, in other words considers the ideal of holiness to be its standard of behavior, not only to save their individual souls by turning away from mankind, but also to manage human affairs—such a community has no choice but to retreat from the public arena and avoid its spotlight.3

As Kiess is aware, Arendt does not perceive early Christianity as turning away altogether from the realm of human, political affairs but is alert to the charge of hypocrisy that will inevitably fall against a community that strives for holiness. The Christian focus on privacy and the inner life, the call to love neighbor does not lend itself to public observance. While, for Augustine, a few might be called to honorable public service and the ordering of human affairs, the main concerns of Christian life unfold amongst the society of the faithful. For Arendt, the Christian message was always ambiguous with respect to politics and its followers poised to flee into seclusion where the life of love can at least be attempted meaningfully. In the Augustinian tradition, political responsibility is envisaged in patriarchal terms as analogous to the head of a household providing for the welfare of those in his care:

Obviously, this kind of responsibility resembles the responsibility of the household head for his family more than political responsibility, properly speaking. The Christian precept to mind one’s own business is derived from I Thess. 4:11 “that ye study to be quiet and do your own business” (prattein ta idia, whereby ta idia is understood as opposed to ta koina [“public common affairs”]).4

The Reformation, she says, represents a success in removing everything connected with public affairs from the appearance and display of churches, turning churches into places of assembly for seclusion, and was itself a preparation for the secularization of public life that followed in its wake.5

How, then, is the theologian to read Arendt as public philosopher for whom thinking frees a person to judge, which then frees them to act (41)? Kiess’s reminder is that, for Arendt, “our very ability to remain political actors depended upon our willingness to continue to think” (190). Do not Arendt’s observations about the patriarchy, individualism, apoliticism, and focus on the private of Christianity preclude this? What options does Kiess find for the theologian to serve the good functioning of the polis? Kiess’s book has no chapter on responsibility, and relatively few sections on thinking the political, the relationship between ethics and politics, theory and practice, plurality, human rights, empowerment and freedom, and so on. The one subheading in this area, “Political Freedom and the Limits of Action,” is about action as an ongoing relationship of the thinker with “‘who’ we are” (168), becoming what we are, beginning something new, and as antidote to the tyranny of thoughtless know-how (176). Can we, then, put the “and” in Kiess’s title to work with respect to the meaning and practice of responsibility?

Three answers emerge from Arendt and Theology and I propose to add two more.

The first is Kiess’s reminder in the final pages of the book that Arendt deems Augustine to be one of the most astute observers of the representational nature of thought that facilitates healing between theory and practice (205). Augustine’s account of “vision in thought” (206) explains how the person who thinks is at least two steps removed from the immediacy of the world and its objects of sense, which creates space for the work of imagination to increase, diminish, alter and put together differently. “It is this distance” for Arendt, says Kiess, “that gives thinking its character of being ‘out-of-order,’ not entirely in step with common sense, which is what enables it to disrupt our established routines and open up the possibility of critical distance” (206). This mode of thinking yields the power “to make present what is absent, to summon individuals or places from across vast distances . . . to move from this deed to Justice, from a courageous person to Courage” (207). Future and past operate as active forces weighing upon the ego in the present, or the question of “the Now” (208). Arendt uses a range of theological metaphors to describe this kind of thinking, including Augustine’s notion of hodiernus or “lasting ‘todayness’” that distinguishes God’s eternity from human temporality and allows expressions of the three tenses of time to be co-present in the mind that thinks (209). She learned this representational thinking at least in part from Christian tradition and so can, perhaps give back the gift to Christian theology again.

The second answer is Kiess’s recalling of Arendt’s notion of natality and how, in the process of thinking, ontological newness manifests itself “as the unique point at which past and future meet” (210). This too is a phenomenon available as much to the theologian as to anyone else. The mind’s dis-ease and irritation about the present opens a space into which the new may be born. Again, Kiess shows that Arendt draws upon Christianity when giving voice to this miracle that saves the world (138, citing HC, 247). He further shows how Arendt is mindful of Augustine’s reflections upon every moment of the human’s life being present in God when explicating her own account of willing and wonder (216). Kiess’s Arendt appreciates how prayer, and the particular kind of dialogical thinking that it entails, is the kind of activity from which newness can emerge.

The third answer is a greater challenge for some aspects of Christian tradition today. Here there is more friction. But it is a point that she makes well and needs to be heeded. Arendt locates responsibility beyond the personal life of individuals in the public realm. Neither freedom nor responsibility is reducible to an attribute of thought, quality of the will, or property of the soul but demand public space to make their appearance. Critical of early Christian suspicion of and hostility against the public realm as such,6 Arendt expounds the interdependence of freedom, responsibility, and politics. Witness her writings on education, authority and personal responsibility under dictatorship. Responsibility for children is inseparable from a wider sense of responsibility for the world.

Anyone who refuses to assume joint responsibility for the world should not have children and must not be allowed to take part in educating them.7

Responsibility must be understood in political terms if to mean anything in individual, personal terms. Individuals support governments unless they take a stand against their policies and actions. Even under dictatorship, it is not enough to claim obedience to orders.

These three answers emerge clearly from Kiess’s book but two further points might be ventured.

First, Arendt problematizes traditional, Western philosophical emphases on freedom as a phenomenon of the will, with its focus on both inner motivations and outer influences that can cause a person to act in a particular way, and shifts attention toward the freedom to act. In her 1961 essay “What Is Freedom?” Arendt writes:

In its simplest form, the difficulty may be summed up as the contradiction between our consciousness and conscience, telling us that we are free and hence responsible, and our everyday experience in the outer world, in which we orient ourselves according to the principle of causality.8

Freedom, as commonly understood in Western philosophical and theological traditions, is a mirage. Each of us is subject to a host of forces and motivations that are hidden to onlookers and to ourselves, but that bear upon our actions. Responsibility cannot be thought apart from the realization that mere attention to human motives is inadequate to access the truth of agency. Merely the will to freedom does not effect freedom. Freedom is not an attribute of thought or quality of the will but, rather, something relational and demanding the company of other people.9 In contrast to the social theories of the modern world in which the will to act is primary, Arendt’s claim is that freedom is not predominantly intercourse with oneself, whether as a quasi-Socratic inner dialogue of the mind, Pauline-Augustinian reflection of heart and soul, or Nietzschean will-to-power.

Second, Arendt employs the concept of vicariousness when describing the responsibility that citizens bear for acts they have not themselves committed:

This vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but . . . in one of the many and manifold forms of human community.10

Familiar to Jewish and Christian traditions, Arendt’s insistence that the person who lives publicly in community is never excused their part in the collective responsibility of that community is clear. Responsibility is exercised in the public arena, if only by refusing to support the exploitation of others and having the courage to accept whatever follows from taking a stand because one simply cannot support the continuance of evil. The individual reaches a point of saying “This I can’t do” rather than “This I ought not to do.”11 Only the former is likely to result in this individual’s holding of a moral line. To fail to accept this responsibility whether from sheer thoughtlessness, fear, or a sense of powerlessness is, says Arendt, to despair and live in impotence. Arendt has a knack, as Kiess implies, for “calling theology back to its true self” (221). This is especially true, I suggest, in connection with vicarious responsibility.

If developed along these lines, Christian thinking with Arendt about theology and responsibility would resonate with curious similarity to writings by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (born in the same year as Arendt). Such a line of thought would understand responsibility in political terms as for the tending, care and protection of our planet, and be mindful of “the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil.”12 Such an understanding of responsibility—if lived ecclesially in our societies—would show Arendt’s critique of Christianity to be outdated and no longer applicable. Her complaints against Christianity as apolitical would be overcome in the living. But my fear is that Arendt’s critique of Christianity might still be correct. Thoughtlessness in the church as elsewhere remains one of the most pressing threats of our time. John’s book renews the challenge of Hannah Arendt, theology and responsibility, however, and for this I am grateful.

It feels a bit strange to be publicly joining this conversation, as my familiarity with Arendt is partial at best and my familiarity with theology as a discipline is even more minimal. Despite this, when John Kiess first mentioned his book to me, I was immediately drawn to it. As a scholar of American politics and public opinion, with a deep interest in political theory, I’ve known for years that I would be the richer for spending time wrestling with Arendt’s thoughts on democracy.

In the rare moments when I’ve been able to carve out a little time for Arendt—reading half of On Revolution in grad school, perusing sections of Origins on Totalitarianism, delving into the first hundred pages of The Human Condition while on the beach one summer—the experience has felt rewarding, but I’ve never been sure exactly what to take away from it. Additionally, as a progressive Catholic, I’ve yearned to better understand the theological resources within Christianity for developing responses to the marginalization and alienation that so many experience in society today.

Add to these two motivations the challenges of the current political context—the risks inherent in Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency and the threatening racist and xenophobic energies unleashed by it—and you may begin to see why I in fact desperately wanted to read this book as soon as John asked me, and have read it twice through since. The political questions that haunt us these days seem to demand that we reencounter and reengage with much of what we thought we knew about democracy, modernity, inclusion, and morality, and Hannah Arendt and Theology is ideally suited to help us do just that.

While Arendt may liken her method to pearl diving, here we have a veritable farm of pearls shimmering just below the surface. John brings these pearls closer to our reach and carefully illuminates a few of the brightest. Hannah Arendt and Theology offers a remarkably clear and thought-provoking discussion of Arendt’s thought in four key areas: the problem of evil, the profound importance of worldly belonging, the concept of natality (the human capacity to make new beginnings), and the nature of thinking.

For me, the most powerful lesson of this book has to do with the deep challenges to worldly belonging and the ways that Christian churches can orient and channel responses to those challenges. Other key insights that shone through pertain to the underappreciated power of what Arendt calls “the fearful imagination,” the intrinsic value of political action, and the particular kind of thinking that we strive to promote in college classrooms. Let me take each of these in turn.

As I read John’s analysis, Arendt seems to offer us a deeply needed language for thinking through problems related to worldly belonging and alienation. This is apparent first in her analysis of the problems of statelessness and lacking citizenship. The “paradoxical nature of human rights” means that in the absence of a citizenship claim on a state, many refugees are in a sense denied “the right to have rights,” as “there is no framework in which these rights are binding and no one who feels obligated to enforce them” (Kiess, in part quoting Arendt, 23).

This insight can be directly applied to the deepening refugee crises in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa today, but this part of Arendt’s thought also bring to my mind the related challenges we face when the rights of some are overlooked or rejected by the very institutions expected to enforce those rights, as in the case of African Americans shot by police or the victims of extrajudicial killings under Duterte’s rule in the Philippines.

I found it especially interesting that for Arendt, the problem of citizenship is only one facet of the broader problem of worldly belonging. As she writes, “What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved . . . but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them” (Human Condition, as quoted in Kiess, 104). Challenges to worldly belonging thus include not only the disintegration of previous forms of social capital and the turnover and disposability enforced by consumer society, but also the clear risk that we may become habituated to non-worldliness through the many distractions available through the Internet, including social media and ever-proliferating entertainment media.

Through this lens, crises that previously appeared barely related—the refugee crisis, police killings of civilians, the opioid epidemic, and the rise in death rates among middle-aged whites in the United States—now seem to be at root deeply linked. Human beings suffer in myriad ways in the absence of worldly belonging. The essential protections of citizenship, the tangible assurance of an enduring material world, the ease and trust that comes with sustained communal relationships—these not only protect us and beat back loneliness, but motivate us to provide “the ongoing care that the world requires that it is to last” (97).1

On the question of how precisely we can motivate this care, Kiess affirms critiques made by several theologians of Arendt’s rejection of Augustinian love. Because “the love of God plays a mediating role between self, others, and world” by promoting a certain kind of “neighbor-love,” Arendt’s failure to appreciate this role means that she “excludes the very motivational dispositions that are required to fund her commitment to the public world” (115).

As Kiess argues, such motivational commitments are indispensable given the scope and nature of the difficulties we face. The kind of worldly belonging we require is not only not self-sustaining but is also undermined in various ways by institutional injustice, global capitalism, inequality, and consumerism. As such, it is an uphill battle to fight “the varieties of worldlessness that can exist within modern society—unemployed workers, pariah peoples, and the growing alienation of most citizens from public life in general” (123). It is precisely because the challenges are so overwhelming that the contributions of Christianity are so needed. Arendt’s writings on amor mundi, worldly belonging, and plurality suggest a “vision of political community that is inherently open to the arrival of strangers and newcomers” (123), and this vision aligns with and draws strength from the call of the Gospels.

Kiess offers a few inspiring examples of how our churches can “contribute to the civic task of world-building” (126), pointing to the physical space of cathedrals, the configuration of inclusive worship practices, the Sanctuary movement, and the work done in coalition with community organizations like the Industrial Areas Foundation and the Christian Community Development Association. However, the question of “who is denied a place in the world today” (129) pushes us to look more broadly at barriers that constrict the role of Christian churches in inclusive world-building.

First, there are the institutional impediments—many churches are subject to the same social patterns that undermine belonging in society, including racial segregation, consumerism, and habituation to non-worldliness. Then, there are the theological complexities—including the resistance in some denominations to seriously grappling with certain forms of human plurality, including plurality in sexual orientation and gender identity. Just as “Arendt’s work can teach us how the resources of the Augustinian tradition can be fruitfully developed and extended to meet these new challenges” (77), so too can this book inspire us to dig deeper to faithfully develop and extend the resources of the Christian tradition to welcome and fully include all in the life of the church, especially refugees, immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.

In addition to these institutional and theological factors, there are also psychological factors inhibiting how we respond to injustice. In our increasingly networked, interconnected, and globalized world, we have more access than ever to information about the many evils threatening human life all over the globe, including state oppression, ethnic cleansing, torture, and genocide. And yet, rarely does it seem that this increased access to information leads to more action in defense of those who are threatened. Kiess shows us that Arendt’s psychological insights can help guide us here. He writes, “For Arendt, it is the imagination that allows us to entertain new solidarities beyond the boundaries that regulate our affections, and the fearful imagination that enables us to do so beyond the specific disciplines that regulate our horror” (83–84).

Pointing to the role of the imagination is a critical contribution. Often when discussing political psychology, we talk about the role of emotions, motivations, and moral judgments in provoking action, but without recognizing the role that imagination plays in generating, binding, and giving life to these components of ethical engagement. A greater awareness of the power of imagination encourages us to pay more attention to richly textured narratives, whether in the form of fiction or nonfiction, audiovisual or the written word, that can draw in readers and viewers and guide them toward grappling meaningfully with the world’s many injustices. This raises the question: what models can we find for communication strategies, literary works, and dialogical interactions that effectively trigger the fearful imagination?

When it comes to confronting injustice through political action, Arendt has lessons for us as well. Political action in an Arendtian sense has “revelatory power” as citizens are revealed to one another through their actions in the public sphere (158). Kiess points out that “for Arendt, this means that action may realize its internal end even if its various external aims (say, bringing about a political reform) are not successful” (158).

This emphasis on the intrinsic significance of political action seems right, but may not be widely appreciated by many who seek to participate in the political realm. What would a corresponding political psychology look like? That is, what sorts of beliefs and attitudes do people need to hold in order for the internal goods of action to be made manifest? Would a broader appreciation of the internal end(s) of action help minimize cynicism and burnout? What lessons might this hold for, say, the various resistance movements that have sprung up in reaction to Trump administration policies?

Finally, regarding my own academic specialty, I found that Kiess’s discussion of Arendt’s theory of thinking helps remind us of a crucial element in political science education: we do not just want our students to learn facts about the world, or develop a new conceptual vocabulary, or master a body of literature, or become adept at inductive and deductive reasoning. We want to teach our students to think deeply and seriously about the political world.

Kiess, drawing on Arendt’s discussion of Socrates, emphasizes “thinking’s role in interrupting our established routines and questioning our unexamined judgments, loosening the hold of reified concepts and getting our minds moving again” (200). With the novelty that humans constantly bring into the political realm, our minds must be moving, stretching, straining, and turning over again and again to keep up. This is a wonderful fleshing out of the much-vaunted “critical thinking” that we hear so much about. Social science is perhaps more commonly associated with “the more instrumental activity of knowledge production” (200), but ultimately our deeper and more essential contribution may be in what we do to equip our students to regularly engage in the “sheer activity” of thinking (201).

Now more than ever in American politics, we are called upon to truly think about our political and social world, to move outside our established routines, to uncover our unquestioned assumptions, to push and prod our intuitions, to speak and listen and build and act together, and to “think what we are doing” (Arendt as quoted by Kiess, 189). This book is an immensely valuable spur to all of the above.

John Kiess has given those of us who try to think about Christian theology and ethics an important gift—and one that I, at least, did not know how much I needed. It is all the more valuable a gift for that. The most fruitful Christian theological engagements with Hannah Arendt in recent decades, I think, have come on the way to other projects. Arendt’s own work is not the subject matter of these books and essays. Her work is important rather because it helps illumine some issue or figure along the way to the real goal, which is thinking about Augustine, or church-based community organizing, or the nature of authority in contemporary life. I think this is a fine way to proceed. It’s the mode in which I have engaged Arendt myself when I have done so.

But reading or writing in this mode has often left me unsettled. We do Arendt a great injustice if we read her as a Christian theologian, as if she wanted to do the same thing that Christian theologians do. And yet Arendt writes not only on questions that migrate across many traditions—like the nature of evil, or the right shape of political life—but also (and quite a lot!) about figures and questions that are specific to Christian traditions. This is a great boon to those of us who identify with those Christian traditions. But what should we make of it? How should we receive it?

To answer that question we need to shift our focus, for a moment, to what Arendt herself is doing. To understand what to make of her project, we need to understand what that project is. And John Kiess has given us an essential resource for that task. Kiess’s book promises to offer a “comprehensive overview of her thought, surveying her major influences, the key political experiences that shaped her constructive outlook, the relationship between her various works, and the distinctive method that unites them” (3).1 It does all of this and more. And so it helps frame the question of how Christian theologians should engage her work.

Full Fathom Five

A good first toehold for thinking through these questions comes in Arendt’s introduction to Illuminations, the collection of Walter Benjamin’s essays that Arendt gathered together in 1968. Kiess’s book offers an excellent reading of this essay, and I have learned from it (see esp. 24–25). In the final section of the essay Arendt develops an extended metaphor that illumines what Benjamin was doing, how he worked, and why he worked in the way he did. The metaphor grows out of an epigraph that she takes from The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made,

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.2

Shakespeare’s metaphor describes an ancestor, long dead, whose body lies deep beneath the sea. Long immersion and the pressures of the deep have transformed the body of this ancient parent. Bones have been changed into corals, eyes into pearls. There has been a “sea-change / into something rich and strange.” And Walter Benjamin, Arendt writes, is like a diver who goes down into the depths of history, finds the body given up for dead, and returns to the surface with pearls.

Arendt unpacks the metaphor like this: “Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past.”3 With modernity—and with the cataclysms and horrors of the twentieth century—has come a break with the past. Thinkers like Augustine are not accessible to us as they might have been to past generations. They have been covered over with history.

Arendt continues:

In this [Benjamin] became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of “peace of mind,” the mindless peace of complacency. “Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions.”4

The transmissibility of the past has been replaced by its citability. And the authority of the past has been replaced by its ability to disrupt our ways of thinking and unsettle settled minds. The body of the past can do this work, Benjamin thought, but not through its careful historical reconstruction. Such resuscitation is no longer an option for us now. But the body can exert its influence even in its death and dismemberment. For the sea change has turned living eyes into glorious pearls—pearls so rich and strange they have the power to shock us out of the complacency of our assumptions.

In this view the pearl-diver might go down into the corpus of Augustine and return with a quotation. But the contexts in which that quotation had its first life—not just the context of late antiquity, but the context of Christianity as a concrete tradition that connects us to Augustine—is gone. And so, in Benjamin’s language, the meaning of the quotation cannot be transmitted. But still the quote can be cited. The pearl can no longer see like the living eye. It cannot be revived or restored to that role. But it can shock us with its beauty. And, in shocking us, in robbing us of idle convictions, it can help us see in new ways.

It is important to note two different negative qualities of Benjamin’s citations. First, they depend on a text or figure being dead and buried, full fathom five. This kind of burial happens in time, but the simple passage of time does not accomplish it. It rather depends on a break in which a text or author loses the ability to connect to contemporary readers in genuinely authoritative ways. Benjamin sees that modernity has made this kind of break with figures like Augustine. His authority negated, his transmissibility has been replaced by his citability.

A second negative quality to Benjamin’s citations arises in the ways that they function. They do not establish the basis for an argument. They are not foundation stones. They are rather robbers who steal complacency. They are shocks that disrupt prevailing patterns of thought. They are interjections, not arguments. As Arendt saw, Benjamin’s citations arise from a negation of the past. And then they perform a negation of the present.

Arendt’s Dives to Augustine

Kiess joins Seyla Benhabib and many other commentators who see Arendt as something of a pearl-diver herself.5 Seeing this helps make sense of her relationship to Christian sources. She takes a thinker like Augustine as a body long buried, a body to which no tradition can now connect us. Augustine therefore has no authority, in Arendt’s precise sense of the term. His meanings are not even transmissible. But they are citable. They interrupt a prevailing way of thinking—one that can imagine nothing really new emerging in history, say—and create the space for different kinds of constructive projects. These projects might cite sources identified as Christian, but this does not mark the projects themselves as Christian, nor does it make them continuous with some Christian tradition. For the citability of someone like Augustine for Arendt depends exactly on the death of the world in which he once made sense and the discontinuity of that world from the world into which she is now citing him.

Seeing Arendt’s relationship to Christian theology helps us understand what she is doing when she quotes Augustine as saying “that a beginning be made, man was created.” As Kiess notes (2), the quote is central for Arendt. If once it was Augustine’s eye, a part of his living body, he has been buried for so long—he is so lost to us, and we to him—that it has been transformed into a pearl. The richness and strangeness of this pearl can create a shock that makes new kinds of thinking possible.

Seeing the way Arendt uses Augustine helps us sort through some of the reactions to those uses. Kiess quotes George McKenna’s criticism of Arendt for her lack of fidelity to Augustine’s larger worldview: “Augustine was not talking about any ‘capacity of man,’” McKenna writes, “but the capacity of God to start something new in the universe. . . . To find in his celebration of man’s capacities or even a glimmer of hope for some sort of secular renewal is to find something that is not there.”6 McKenna is right on one level, of course. Even if we cannot perfectly reconstruct the Historical Augustine, it is clear that Arendt is citing him into a very different kind of argument. Arendt, as McKenna says, “find[s] something that is not there.” Exactly. But to think that this observation counts against her argument is to mistake what she is doing. For Arendt is not trying to reconstruct an eye that has ceased, at least for her, to be an eye. She is rather prying loose a pearl, rich and strange.

Thus to seek to discount Arendt’s project by making the historical claim that it has more in common with that of Pelagius than Augustine would reflect a category mistake. It would be like saying that the argument is somehow too orange, or not useful for helping us get from Poughkeepsie to Kalamazoo. For historical fidelity is not her goal. But to say that her project has more in common with Pelagius than Augustine as a rhetorical or normative claim—as part of an argument about human capabilities to break with deep historical patterns, say—could begin to gain some traction. That kind of claim argues against the constructive use to which Arendt plans to put her Augustinian pearl. It argues against a project that stresses human capacities and for one that does more to stress that God alone is the author of new things. It’s not a historian’s argument about what Augustine meant. It’s shorthand in a philosopher or theologian’s argument about divine and human capabilities. But then noting the break with Augustine is not the conclusion of the argument, but the beginning.

Citing Arendt

Arendt’s essay on Benjamin gives insight into her citations of Christian thinkers like Augustine. It also provides a vocabulary for thinking about how Christian theologians ought to engage her work. Her ideas cannot be simply transmitted into Christian projects without doing violence to them. I will leave to others the question of her relationships to Jewish traditions.7 But however she understood herself, she certainly did not think she was doing Christian theology. She surely would have resisted narratives that tried to force her assimilation to that project. Her citation of Christian sources depended on the prior fact of discontinuity.

If Arendt’s arguments should not be transmitted into Christian theology, they can, in the sense Arendt attributes to Benjamin, be cited. In citing them, I think it will be important to preserve the second negative function that Benjamin identifies, letting them function not as building blocks, but as interruptions. They can rob Christian theology of complacency. They can relieve it of superficial convictions. But they do not authorize new lines of Christian argument. The distinction is important not for the sake of preserving some imagined purity of Christian theology, but for the sake of honoring Arendt’s integrity. Her arguments—even her readings of Augustine—should not be subjected to forced conversion.

This distinction between transmission and citation provides a kind of hermeneutical key for reading Kiess’s book. In the introduction he promises to “consider the unmet challenges of her work and how they can help set a constructive agenda for theology moving forward” (3). The book keeps this promise. In keeping it, the book sometimes seems in between transmitting Arendt’s main ideas into Christian theological projects and citing Arendt in ways that interrupt those projects and demand something more, something new. The best reading of Kiess’s book will stress this latter mode, using his excellent exposition of Arendt to open up fresh, critical thinking in Christian theology. That thinking is not authorized so much as provoked by Arendt. It is, as she sees, something new.

When read in ways that stress this dynamic of citation, Hannah Arendt and Theology makes a crucial contribution to contemporary Christian theology. In the present moment Arendt seems more relevant than ever. And Kiess’s book makes possible the kind of smart citations of Arendt that the time demands.