On Easter, Jesus, Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was Jewish, although not openly religious. She tended to be skeptical of most -isms, as her experience growing up in and around and then escaping Germany during the Nazi period left her so.

Still, in her book The Human Condition, she talked about and Jesus and what he represented, religiously and symbolically. Metaphysical after-life questions or historical-realism questions aside, Jesus represents an appreciation of the power of man to act and forgive, as well as the capacity to take action to change the course of history. Quoted from the book:

“The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.”

In some sense, Jesus narratively represents this kind of new possibility, of being risen-again in the sense of being-forgiven and having a second chance, a redemption. This forgiveness is important because it gives us the opportunity to act again. We take these notions religiously but they also have secular significance aside from the religious.

From an article on the topic, which also quotes The Human Condition:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/07/14/hannah-arendt-forgiveness/

So in some sense, Easter is about Jesus and Christianity but is also about being born-again inasmuch as finding forgiveness or giving it and obtaining new hope following that redemption, which is what action does: it gives us the possibility to change the course of things in history and be freed, to some extent, from what has happened and been done.

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