Hannah Arendt, the Fear of Hell and the Disappearance of Authority

Para-Theological Reflections for Secular Politicians

Hannah Arendt in 1933 (source)

The Challenge of Totalitarianism

Confronted with the horrifying prospect of the extermination of her own nation at the hands off Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, the student of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers dedicated the most significant part of her work to explaining the emergence of the unthinkable monster that was totalitarianism.

To clarify how political abominations such as Bolshevism and Nazism were possible, Arendt proposes a specific explanation in her article “Authority in the Twentieth Century,” published in 1956:

The rise of fascist, communist and totalitarian movements and the development of the two totalitarian regimes, Stalin’s after 1929 and Hitler’s after 1938, took place against a background of a more or less general, more or less dramatic breakdown of all traditional authorities. Nowhere was this breakdown the direct result of the regimes or movements themselves, but it seemed as though totalitarianism, in the form of regimes as well as of movements, was best fitted to take advantage of a general political and social atmosphere in which the validity of authority itself was radically doubted.¹

This is the same conviction which she expounded in greater detail in the monograph The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). To prove it, she started her investigations from the foundations of human society in every age: the family and the school, institutions which are undermined through the collapse of that invisible power that is their basis: authority. Still more concretely, Arendt states that, in the context of modern culture, we helplessly observe “the gradual breakdown of the one form of authority which exists in all historically known societies, the authority of parents over children, of teachers over pupils and, generally of the elders over the young.”² And this is not merely an accidental and partial phenomenon. No, it is a total destruction of any kind of authority that begins with the authority of parents over their children, and ultimately leads “even to the neglect of obvious natural necessities.”³

By analyzing the American context, towards which she manifested a constant skepticism that was received with some critical reactions (including the label of “anti-feminist”), Arendt showed that even the so-called “neo-conservatism,” very dynamic on both cultural and educational levels, “appeals to a mood and concern which are direct results of the elimination of authority from the relationship between young and old, teacher and pupil, parents and children.”⁴ The stunning conclusion that she draws throughout her works is that the modern world has ruined any institution based on authority.

Arendt observes that the erosion of authority has its roots in the very history of modernity. Thus, in the 1956 essay already quoted, she rhetorically asks:

Who can deny ... that disappearance of practically all traditionally established authorities has been one of the most spectacular characteristics of the modern world?⁵

From Luther to Lenin: the Revolutions

If we follow the historical thread of those events considered by Arendt to be responsible for the birth of modernity, including the Protestant reform and the erroneous philosophy of authors like Thomas Hobbes, we cannot help but notice that they all rested on deeply anti-traditional premises. In one of her most challenging essays, “What is Authority?,” included in her collection Between Past and Future in 1961, Arendt holds nothing back in her criticism of these revolutions:

It was Luther’s error to think that his challenge of the temporal authority of the Church and his appeal to unguided individual judgment would leave tradition and religion intact. So it was the error of Hobbes and the political theorists of the seventeenth century to hope that authority and religion could be saved without tradition. So, too, was it finally the error of the humanists to think it would be possible to remain within an unbroken tradition of Western civilization without religion and without authority.⁶

Of course, the disappearance of authority is not a phenomenon that happened overnight. On the contrary, it is a long historical process that unravels through a series of major events. In order to understand both the nature and the consequences of this process, we must first understand the key point of Arendt’s perspective.

Authority is necessarily related to other two cardinal values: religion and tradition. This trinity of essential values represents the heritage received by the Roman Catholic Church from the Roman tradition:

Thanks to the fact that the foundation of the city of Rome was repeated in the foundation of the Catholic Church, though, of course, with a radically different content, the Roman trinity of religion, authority, and tradition could be taken over by the Christian era.⁷

This assimilation of the very substance of Roman authority by the Catholic Church prompts her to say that “up to now one authentically authoritarian institution has managed to survive the onslaught of the modern age, the Catholic Church.”⁸ But her main point is that the strongest foundation for the manifestation and preservation of authority is religion.

Tyranny and Authoritarianism

Without mincing her words, in a precise conceptual language, she criticizes the error of liberal thinkers (and nowadays even “conservatives”) who mistake, on the one hand, the tyrannical rule for authoritarian rule, and on the other hand, the legitimate use of force for any form of violence. With accuracy, she explains the essential difference between these things:

The difference between tyranny and authoritarian government has always been that the tyrant rules in accordance with his own will and interest, and even the most draconic authoritarian government is bound by laws. Its acts are tested by a code which either was not made by man at all, as in the case of the law of nature or God’s Commandments or the Platonic ideas, or at least not by those actually in power. The source of authority in authoritarian government is always a force external and superior to its own power; it is always this source, this external force which transcends the political realm, from which the authorities derive their ‘authority,’ that is, their legitimacy, and against which their power can be checked.⁹

Here is the root of the difference between an authoritarian leader and a tyrant. The former, who governs under the guidance of a power based on a transcendent set of principles, is therefore in possession of a legitimacy that the latter, who acts by following only his will and his own personal (or familial) interests, will never have. In a word, the source of any legitimate form of authority is always superior to the individual will of the one who wields authority.

The Metaphysical Source of Authority

But what is it that motivates such a leader to follow a transcendent constellation of values (like the Ten Commandments)? The answer proposed by Hannah Arendt is nothing short of astonishing: the fear of hell (which is, as Solomon's sapiential texts in the Old Testament tell us, the beginning of Wisdom). This is the last and absolute foundation of the traditional and religious principle of authority. Without this metaphysical-religious fear, based on the existence of hell described by Plato in his myth of Er from Politeia (usually and wrongly translated as The Republic), or by the Gospel of Saint Luke in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the disappearance of authority is unavoidable. Thus, it became possible for the terrifying dictatorial regimes of the 20th century to emerge.

It became possible to exterminate of millions of people without anyone or anything being able to prevent such acts of genocide. As Arendt writes, “the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.”¹⁰ As if to impress on us the exceptional importance of this idea, she further writes:

However that may be, the fact is that the most significant consequence of the secularization of the modern age may well be the elimination from public life, along with religion, of the only political element in traditional religion, the fear of hell. We who had to witness how, during the Hitler and Stalin era, an entirely new and unprecedented criminality, almost unchallenged in the respective countries, was to invade the realm of politics should be the last to underestimate its ‘persuasive’ influence upon the functioning of conscience.¹¹

Indeed, confronted throughout the epoch of the so-called “myth of progress” with the most terrible manifestations of arbitrary power, none of the thinkers who tried to propose relevant explanations could avoid religion. That is because nothing is more evident, in the context of political life, than the disastrous consequences of secularization, including the separation of Church and State. The disappearance of the fear of hell, Arendt tells us, leads directly to the institutionalization of immorality and the transformation of the deviant will of a Hitler or a Stalin into state policy, to be executed by automatons who blindly follow them down the path of destruction.

Hannah Arendt’s texts are marked by a deeply metaphysical, and even theological, understanding of history. Modernity’s descent is ultimately explained by nothing other than its departure from the Christian ideal of authority. A simple but profound conclusion follows from this perspective: without the restoration of the immutable, eternal, and revealed convictions (i.e., supernatural Faith) of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the souls of today’s citizens, no existing political leadership will be able to bring wise resolution to current political crises.

1. Hannah Arendt, “Authority in the Twentieth Century,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Oct., 1956), pp. 403.

2. Ibidem.

3. Ibidem, p. 404.

4. Ibidem.

5. Ibidem, p. 414.

6. Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?,” in Between Past and Future. Six Exercises in Political Thought, New York: Viking, 1961, p. 128.

7. Ibidem, p. 126.

8. Hannah Arendt, “Authority in the Twentieth Century,” op. cit., p. 405.

9. Ibidem, p. 406.

10. Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?,” op. cit., p. 135.

11. Ibidem, p. 133.