The Miracle that Saves the World

In which Hannah Arendt explains the power of new beginnings

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 men 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, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored… It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”

(Source: The Human Condition, p. 247, conclusion of Chapter V “On Action”)

Tomorrow I want to say more about this wisdom from Hannah Arendt. For now, I invite you simply to read it through a couple times and turn it over in thought. Keep in mind the present season and the beginning of a new year.