Seite - 81 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Band 2:2

82 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom rather is grounded in relational experiences entailing the presence of the other. According to this very same line of argument, Hannah Arendt inter- prets Jesus of Nazareth’s power to do miracles, which he identifies as acts of forgiving. Such a deed interrupts the necessary chain of things, suspends natural legality, “derails” the order that everyone expects and corresponds to a true act of freedom. Christian and Ancient Greek traditions are invoked by a secular contemporary philosopher to rescue the self-centred modern experience of freedom from its present destructive features. Conclusions Within the “untimely Greekness” of Arendt’s philosophy the negative liberty of the moderns and the positive liberty of the ancients seem to find a fruitful point of intersection, which is able to interrupt the natural fall of human experiences towards insignificance and evanescence. Action is interpreted as the gift of humans to begin something new and as the possi- bility to redeem the experience of freedom as the very essence of politics. In her perspective, the dimension of vita activa as re-enactment of the miracle of the birth has the power to interrupt both the authoritarian organicism of the ancient communitas and the paradigm of immunization of the mod- ern individualistic freedom to reconcile the essential equality and distinc- tion that define human beings in the public sphere. Looking for this form of plurality is the task of a politics concerned with the question of liberty and democracy, in the resolute conviction that one cannot sacrifice one for the other.