| This dissertation examines the role of religious ideas in the work of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a German-Jewish refugee and leading twentieth century political theorist. It shows that Arendt not only sustains a thoroughgoing critique of Christian-Platonism for its complicity with political violence---the standard reading of her work---but also selectively extracts and reworks biblical and theological sources in rendering her constructive political theory.;Arendt's return to biblical and religious sources as a means of unsettling the Greek metaphysical tradition is informed by other modern German intellectual efforts, both philosophical and theological. Heidegger and Jaspers in particular taught her to delineate her use of Christian sources from traditional "theology" and "religion," narrowly construed, yet exploit religious sources when expressing her political anthropology.;Arendt challenges the anti-worldly and anti-political biases that she finds in Christian-Platonism through multiple strategies of immanent critique. In giving her account of the worldly life of action, she imbues theological language with the distinctively worldly significance that she considers appropriate to public life. Arendt also appeals to creation myths as a means by which to present conditions of possibility for political life. She finds the means to articulate human plurality through the second Genesis creation story, and cites Augustine's City of God to claim the human capacity for free, creative action. Through this employment of religious resources to theorize and illustrate the life of action, she displaces the Christian-Platonic legacy of which she is so critical and establishes an alternate religious imaginary for democratic life.;Because Arendt's uses of religious texts, language, and ideas neither claim the status of revelation nor make metaphysical speculations, they are not "theological" in the narrow sense in which she understands the term. However, an ambiguous theology can be found in both Arendt's depictions of the human condition of plurality and capacity for action as either divinely given or as "free gifts from nowhere, secularly speaking," as well as her assertions that the proper response to such gifts is gratitude. |
