This chapter unearths a genealogy of biological life from Hannah Arendt’s works. In contrast to Michel Foucault’s analysis of the Christian pastorate as a prelude to modern biopolitics and Mika Ojakangas’s reading that perceives biopower as an essentially Greek phenomenon, Arendt argues that modern biopolitics has its historical backdrop in Greek philosophy and its reappropriation by Christian theology. While Plato and Aristotle prioritize and contrast the life of the mind and contemplation with all forms of worldly activity, Christianity radicalizes this division into a fully developed theological system that perceives worldly human life as a mere preparation for an after-life. From an Arendtian perspective, biopower is born when this “weird game of materialism and idealism” comes to an end in the modern era and life itself is seen as the highest good that forms the ontological backdrop for the emergence of human superfluity, most clearly produced by twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.