Guardini, by Schall, S.J.

Guardini | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Ignatius Insight | December 17, 2010

"His (Romano Guradini's) key words were: 'you see...' because he wanted to guide us to 'seeing,' while he himself was in a common inner dialogue with his listeners. This was the innovation in comparison with the rhetoric of the old days; rather, that far from seeking rhetoric he talked to us in a totally simple way, and at the same time spoke of truth and led us to dialogue with the truth. And there was a broad spectrum of 'dialogues' with authors such as Socrates, St. Augustine and Pascal, Dante, Hölderlin, Mörike, Rilke and Dostoyevsky."
--Benedict XVI, Discourse to Congress on Romano Guardini, October 29, 2010. [1]

"This human nature (of Christ) had a full living experience of God, knew him, experienced him, willed him. He who said 'I', 'was' this unity. We cannot express it. What a statement that was when he said: 'I am'! What an act this 'I am'; what a being there, standing there, self-being, self-knowledge, self-act! No battle here against non-existence, none of the pain and danger of our uncertainty—he is inviolable, Lord in Being."
--Romano Guardini, The Humanity of Christ, 1958. [2]

I.

The name of the Italian Swiss-German philosopher, Romano Guardini (1885-1968), often comes up in the works of Joseph Ratzinger. The title of his 1999 The Spirit of the Liturgy is from Guardini. In the Preface of that book, then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: "One of the first books I read after starting my theological studies at the beginning of 1946 was Romano Guardini's first little book, The Spirit of the Liturgy. It was published at Easter 1918 as the opening volume of the Ecclesia Orans series edited by Abbot Herwegen, and from then until 1957 it was constantly reprinted. This slim volume may rightly be said to have inaugurated the Liturgical Movement in Germany." [3] Ratzinger's book is a tribute to and a carrying on the inspiration of Guardini.

And the passage that I cited above from Guardini's The Humanity of Christ about who Christ was finds perfect continuity with Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth, where we are confronted with the fact that the central act of our history is precisely that "I am" entered into our time. He was true man and true God. This very fact changes the world and our understanding of it and of what it means.

  With this background, it is not surprising that Benedict XVI would give a very personal and insightful discourse in the Vatican's Clementine Hall at a conference devoted to the work of Guardini.

Read the entire essay...

Comments

[Robert Miller]

"The End of the Modern World" (with its indispensable English language Introduction by my mentor and Triumph magazine co-editor, Frederick D. Wilhelmsen), is the key to Guardini's thought (and probably, in my opinion, to Ratzinger's).

There is a finality inherent in the passage of the "ages". We can't "go back" to classical Antiquity (as the men of the Renaissance hoped to do); we can't go back to the "early Church" (as so many Reformation-influenced thinkers -- Protestant and Catholic -- have hoped to do); we can't go back to the world of bourgeois Liberalism (as many contemporary "conservatives" hope to do). Indeed, Lord Acton ultimately is wrong: Not knowing history does not condemn us to repeating it; not knowing history condemns to the illusion that we can turn it in a "positive" direction. We cannot "repeat" history -- for good or for ill. As Pieper taught us, the world moves to a catastrophic ending in time -- and that, paradoxically, is our hope!

Guardini, in "End of the Modern World", announced, as he averred, "no facile apocalyptic", but he did not shrink from the vision of this time as more final, more inescapably end-time than any of the preceding centuries of the Christian era. (Indeed, the men of the 13th century would have judged our world "paltry", according to Guardini).

The "End of the Modern World" is also the time of Anti-Christ. We have a tendency, I think, to ignore this, in practical matters, and to talk as if the evils of this time were nothing more than what Christians "always" have been up against. In doing so, we do a disservice to Guardini's vision and to our children -- in whom we encourage a "'Catholic' humanism" that ignores the fundamentally anti-Christ orientation of all modern and post-modern enterprises.

And yet, we need to have hope and put our faith into the practice of caritas ... this, as both Guardini and Ratzinger teach us, is the continuing mission of Christians in a world culture informed by Anti-Christ.