The sacrum imperium was forced to give way to the saeculum mundum

Romano Guardini and the Dissolution

 of Western Culture

by Wayne Allen

The End of the Modern World, by Romano Guardini;

 with an Introduction by Frederick Wilhelmsen.

The appearance of this new and expanded edition of Romano Guardini’s book is both timely and helpful. Guardini (1885-1968) writes partially in the spirit of a theologian and partly with the critical eye of the philosopher. And he rightly sees no inherent hostility between the two, which itself is a modern prejudice, and one often held by both camps. Indeed, too many members of each camp have embraced modernity without flinching and abandoned their true calling. Guardini rightly treats modernity as less of an “age” and more as an idea, or distillation of ideas, that shapes and misshapes man according to the ascendant mundane preoccupations that are prevalent at the time. We have become accustomed to thinking unquestionably that modernity is as good as mother’s milk; that it is by definition a good, and that any force (reaction) or idea (conservatism) that impedes modernity is no different than poisoning mother’s milk. Guardini is not a sentimentalist, calling for some return to Eden. But he is more than mindful that modernity’s fascination with its own advent deserves more questioning than it has received thus far. He is one in this interrogation with Christopher Lasch (The True and Only Heaven, Progress and Its Critics), and demonstrates some of the poetic insight of a T.S. Eliot.

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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