“Initium ergo ut esset, creatus est homo” – “that there be a beginning, man was created” (HC, 177). These words of Augustine's, from The City of God, recur as a leitmotiv in the writings of Hannah Arendt, where they invariably are associated with a concept of great importance to her: natality, the condition of having come into the world through birth. Augustine's dictum appears in this way in numerous essays and books of hers over a two-decade span, from the mid-1950s to the end of her life – from the time of The Human Condition (1958), where the idea receives its most elaborate exposition, to that of The Life of the Mind, left incomplete at her death in 1975. On each of these occasions, Arendt tends to make it sound as if Augustine's point in this statement were closely connected with her own idea that our having been born into the world is a condition for the human capacity for action, “whereby we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance” (HC, 176). Augustine's actual point is about something different: He is referring specifically, and solely, to God's creation of the first man, from whom all humankind was descended. Arendt cannot have been unaware of this, but it did not keep her from quoting the line in this context. Apparently she found it congenial with her more general point that “men, though they must die, are not born in order to die, but to begin” (HC, 246). It is an interesting question why she did.

Arendt's involvement with Augustine's thought goes back decades before she picked up the habit of quoting him in this connection. Augustine had been the subject of her first book, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (Augustine's Concept of Love, 1929). Based on her doctoral dissertation, it is a slender volume, dense with Latin quotations and recondite philosophical categories. Arendt was only twenty-three when it was published, and it would be many years before Augustine's name would appear in her writings with any frequency. Even so, her reading of Augustine from that time had a profound and lasting impact on her. It was still reverberating in her mind twenty years later, when she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism (published in 1951, but completed in 1949). In The Human Condition, too, there are traces of Liebesbegriff – but their pattern is very different from that in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The differences between The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition in this regard are significant and instructive, in that they betoken a basic reorientation in Arendt's thinking between the writing of those two works. The concept of natality belongs to the later period only.