I'm going to spend some time, hopefully each day or so, interacting with three works: Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age and Michael Allen Gillespies, The Theological Origins of Modernity. There is an amazing overlap in the works although the occur over 60 years from each other.

Guardini was a German Roman Catholic priest who lived from 1885-1968. Part of the "progressives" before Vatican II, Guardini is considered a "conservative" now. Though significant through his writings, he played no official role in Vatican II because of suspicions against him. According to Fergus Kerr in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians , "in March 1939, the Nazi regime abolished the post [Guardini's professoriate at the University of Breslau], forbade his ministry with youth, and in 1941 banned him from speaking in public" [p. 8].

The End of the Modern World combines two series of lectures in post-WWII Germany, one given in 1947-49 and the other in 1949, into one book. The first lectures, The End of the Modern World, provided background to lectures on Pascal; the other, "Power and Responsibility" provides reflections on the world in its post-WW II tensions between liberalism and Communism, amid the rubble of the destruction caused by Fascism. For Guardini, there is no nostalgic going back to the medieval; the only hope is that which lies in the future, and therefore, in God.

In Chapter One, Guardini engages "the Sense of Being and the World Picture of the Middle Ages" (pp. 1-27). He contrasts the difference Christianity made as it radically took up and transformed the heritage given to it from the classical Western world. The transformation occurred because of a new sense of, in a word, revelation. Guardini wrote, "Classical man knew nothing of a being existing beyond the world; as a result he was neither able to view nor to shapen his world from a vantage point which transcended it. With his feelings and his imagination, in his actions and all his endeavors, he lived witin his cosmos. Every project taht he undertook, even when he dared to go to the farthest bounds, ran its course within the arc of his world" (p. 3). In contrast, in the medieval world, "Above and beyond everything given man in this world Revelation was the absolute fulcrum. Set forth within the dogma of the Church, Revelation was accepted upon faith by the individual. From one point of view the Church bound and limited man by its authority; from another point of view the Church made it possible for man to surmount his world. She gave a vision which of itself was vast and liberating in scope. Revealed truth was conceptualized by means of a delicate logic which distinguished and then united all of reality" (p. 13).

Revelation explodes the immanence of being in a single process of re-cycling, even when it moves from the physical to the spiritual as in antiquity. Without Revelation humanity is caught in a hamster wheel, the endless sameness of the new as being moves into different stages of existence. Here is where the paradox of an authority like that of the church, an authority based upon its witness to and participation with Revelation, shatters the wheel and opens up to the genuinely different and new that is at the same time the Origin and End, the Alpha and Omega, the eternal breaking into the temporal. One senses in the medieval world the emergence of an authentic sense of freedom -- not the ability to do what one wants -- but liberation to allow one's wants to be formed to what is Eternal through the revelation of the eternal in the midst of the temporal in Jesus Christ.

With the loss of Revelation, the world/cosmos/universe collapses back in upon itself. This is the story of that which is to come in Guardini's work.