The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

In her works of the 1950 s, Hannah Arendt proposed an original concept of mass, which cannot be understood without considering the broader context of her work, including writing of her book on the origins of totalitarianism and discussions with colleagues. This article attempts to reconstruct Arendt’s ideas in light of another line of thought that greatly preoccupied her at the time but remained largely unnoticed by scholars for many years. This is political theology. Today, we are willing to classify publications whose authors avoided using such term as political theology. Arendt did not use it either. However, the comparison of the argumentative approaches found in her works, as well as those of Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, Karl Löwith, and others, allows us to incorporate her understanding of the mass into a series of fundamental political-theological reflections related to the unique complexity of human existence. Human condition is agency, and this is possible only in a context of plurality and diversity of humans in politics. God created them distinct from one another, and precisely for this reason, a unifying mass, ready for extreme solidarity, cannot, contrary to popular interpretations, be viewed by analogy with any religious movements, and totalitarian ideologies that attract the masses cannot and should not be treated as a kind of secular religion.