by Wayne Allen
The End of the Modern World, by Romano Guardini;
with an Introduction by Frederick Wilhelmsen.
Of course the sanguine view of modernity is testimony to the propagandist’s success in establishing modernity as the end of history in which “progress” was trying to assert itself against the dark forces of religious and philosophical repression. Hence the Greeks are not only classified as “ancient” but also as “archaic,” which is not a time-line judgment, but a moral indictment. Both seem to suggest that which is worn out, spent, or merely quaint. The “Middle Ages” conveys a transitional phase preparatory to the era of light and progress. This is more clearly implied in the chronological epithet, “Dark Age,” to elicit a reaction against the superstition of religion, which inhibited the growth of science whose purpose is the “relief of man’s estate” (Francis Bacon). That these sciences have been used to push man to the brink of a new “dark age” only confirms the fear of the romantic poets, that the tree of science kills the tree of life. But it also confirms the fear of the “ancients” who warned us about spiritual disorder in the first place.
Among the things this disorder means is the alienation of man, from God as the author of the world, and also of man in the world. Man is homeless in the only refuge he has left once he abandoned the cosmological abode formerly provided by God. Formerly situated in the world that was God’s making, and part of God’s purpose for man on earth, man-in-the- world is the source of his own alienation because he cannot find anything that transcends his moment in it. The shrinkage of the cosmological principle of human self-understanding did not merely conclude in materialism, but in a respiritualization of the world itself. This is where Guardini enters the human drama, the Great Story.
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