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Guardini saw the dissolution of the modern as it moved farther away from its unconscious dependence upon the Christian tradition that emerges within it as a parody. He saw that the human person, separated from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, will eventually become a commodity, a tool of technology for a supposed greater good – whether it is the sacrifice of Iraqis for the sake of “democracy and freedom” or the starvation of persons for the cause of global socialism. Guardini saw, like Aquinas, that humanity needs revelation because our end is beyond human reason by itself; with Revelation lost, the world collapses into itself into a continual play, deathly play, for utopian agendas within immanence. As Guardini wrote, “In truth, all human values find their root in Revelation; everything immediately human is related uniquely to Revelation. . . . . Man might then become conscious of values which, although evident in themselves, only take on visible manifestation under the aegis of Revelation” (pp. 97-98). In words of Vatican II, in God’s Revelation in Jesus Christ, God simultaneously revealed humanity to our selves. In Jesus we see “Personality is essential to man. This truth becomes clear, however, and can be affirmed only under the guidance of Revelation, which related man to a living, personal God, which makes him a son of God, which teaches the ordering of His Providence” (p. 98).

In the closing reflections at this point of the dissolution of the modern, Guardini saw rightly that “An affirmation and a cultivation of the personal can endure for a time perhaps after Faith has been extinguished, but gradually they too will be lost” (p. 99). Perhaps he didn’t see how long it would endure as transformed through sentimentalism, through the romantic impulses deeply embedded in Western culture. Slowly, however, the personal becomes identified with status or “value” that undercuts the personhood of the poor such as children or those without homes. Thus we feel that we will become less a person unless we “make a difference” or “do something meaningful”. Guardini writes, “A similar loss reveals itself in contemporary man’s feeling that personal values inhere in special talents or social position. Gone is that reverence toward the person qua person, toward his qualitative uniqueness which cannot be conceptualized or repressed for any man even if he has been typed and measured in every other respect” (p. 99).

Perhaps surprisingly, Guardini did not think that the decoupling of the modern from the Christian was solely negative: “It is good that modern dishonesty was unmasked. As the benefits of Revelation disappear even more from the coming world, man will truly learn what it means to be cut off from Revelation . . . As unbelievers deny Revelation more decisively, as they put their denial into more consistent practice, it will become the more evident what it really means to be a Christian” (pp. 100—101). Perhaps, however, Guardini did not again see adequately how humans would attempt to turn revelation into an idol within human experience to sustain it. Perhaps he did not see how the modern could produce a simulacra of revelation by collapsing it within a range of immanence, moving revelation within human consciousness as an experience, how this would both capitulate to the loss of the human person while attempting vainly to sustain it at the same time. Formed deeply by the evangelical, catholic, and orthodox faith, Guardini perhaps could not imagine a non-revelatory sense of Revelation, a concept of revelation found within the human subjectivity. He wrote, “Since Revelation is not a subjective experience but a simple Truth promulgated by Him Who also made the world, every moment of history which excludes that Revelation is threatened in its most hidden recesses” (p. 100). It is this objective sense of Revelation, not a subjective human ‘value’ or “purpose” or “meaning”, that Guardini wrote, “To be a Christian, however, demands an attitude toward Revelation” (p. 104).

It is this Christological center of all things, the “simple Truth promulgated by Him Who also made the World” that distinguishes, in the slow dissolution of the modern, the objective value of the human person, because in Jesus, God has taken on the human person and sanctified it forever. The human person cannot be reduced to a means for a greater end; it cannot be sought to be “engineered” into a unified system of the mass consumer or the proletariat. In the human person, each human person, we meet that which God has taken on completely and fully into God’s own Life without annulling it in any way, regardless of “value” or “status” conferred on to the person by others within the world. Indeed, we refuse to devalue, to de-personalize those who are actively engaged in the de-personalizing project of the dissolution of the modern.
Guardini saw this rightfully as the pass away from Christendom, an opportunity for the uniqueness of the witness of the church to come apparent: “The Faith of Christian men will need to take on a new decisiveness. It must strip itself of all secularism, all analogies with the secular world, all flabbiness and eclectic mixtures” (p. 104). The dissolution of the modern means that the historical Christian tradition, as embodied in contemporary settings, will make the witness of the church that stands within this tradition evident. Long before Hauerwas and Willimon wrote Resident Aliens, Guardini likewise saw: “This danger within the new world will also have its cleansing effect upon the new Christian attitude, which in a special way must possess both trust and courage” (p. 105). It is not the accommodated congregational parish life that holds the future. As the modern dissolves, so will it fade into the color of the surrounding environment. Thus, “we can surmise that the character and conduct of coming Christian life will reveal itself especially through its old dogmatic roots. Christianity will once again need to prove itself deliberately as a faith which is not self-evident; it will be forced to distinguish itself more sharply from a dominantly non-Christian ethos. At that juncture the theological significance of dogma will begin a fresh advance; similarly will its practical and existential significance increase. . . . The absolute experiencing of dogma will, I believe, make men feel more sharply the direction lf life and the meaning of existence itself . . . . In this manner, the Faith will maintain itself against animosity and danger” (p. 106).

Guardini concludes by showing the fundamental “illiberalism” of the church, not in terms of fascism such as emerges today of either the right or the left, but an “illiberalism” that does not seek self-authenticity, but rather obedience: “Knowing that the very last thing is at stake, that he has reached that extremity which only obedience could meet—not because man might become heteronom but because God is Holy and Absolute—man will practice a pure obedience. Christianity will arm itself for an illiberal stand directed unconditionally toward Him Who is Unconditioned. Its illiberalism will differ from every form of violence, however, because it will be an act of freedom, an unconditional obedience to God; nor will it resemble an act of surrender to physical or psychic powers which might command one. No, man’s unconditional answer to the call of God assumes within that very act the unconditional quality of the demand which God makes of him and which necessitates maturity of judgment, freedom and choice. . . . This trust is not based at all upon an optimism or confidence either in a universal order of reason or in a benevolent principle inherent to nature. It is based in God Who really is, Who alone is efficacious in His Action. It is based in this simple trust: that God is a God Who acts and Who everywhere prevails” (p. 107).

This week I had a dear friend who has moved away tell me that I had “messed” the person up, making the person unfit for either the right or the left in American culture. I mourned and understood. Even sixty years ago Guardini could see this coming: “Loneliness in the faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world (Matthew xxiii, 12), but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ” (p. 108-09). Tomorrow morning in our distribution that lonely love will appear bodily, visible in the world. For several hours the saints and other friends who gather will work hard. Something humbling will happen as each person in their uniqueness receives from God gifts for life in this temporal world. The list is amusing: 7 pallets of paper towels, Cheezits, sparkling Welch's white grape juice cocktail, potatoes, vitamin water, and snack crackers from Second Harvest Food bank and 3 pallets from St. Vincent's of onions, raspberries, plums, juice, to go with the bread from Von’s and the assorted goods from two Albertson’s stores – last week we even had meet some types of meet for the first 400 through the line. There will be problems, I know – there always are. But there will be joy as we receive those who God brings to us as Christ, who by the Spirit sanctifies us in these gifts of persons that God has already sanctified by creating them in God’s image, an image fulfilled in Jesus, for us to receive, give thanks, and love.

Posted by johnwright at 11:06 PM | Comments (1)

I’m back to Guardini, I hope. The summer has been much more intense than I hoped – of course, I should expect this from life now. The latest challenge has been completing notes for an upcoming Wesleyan Study Bible on 1 and 2 Chronicles. I got the contract late, and then, mistakenly though it would be a week or so of work. Always behind because of teaching pressures, I turned to it at the beginning of summer. It turned out as an extensive project – I wrote over 25,000 words – I need to edit some down. The publishers have rightfully pushed because of necessary publication deadlines. I wrote on it 17 hours on Wednesday and have been since getting caught up on my class work. So much for Guardini.

But I have not forgotten. The third move in the “dissolution of the modern”, after nature and the person, and “a culture self-created out of norms intrinsic to its own essence” (p. 50). Perhaps before turning to this it is important to hear his intent is not “conservative” in a reactionary sense. He writes at the beginning of “The Dissolution of the Modern World and the World which is to Come," “My hypothesis has nothing in common with that cheap disposition which revels always in prophesying collapse or destruction. It has nothing in common with that desire which would surrender the valid achievements of modern man. Nor is my hypothesis linked with a longing for a romantically envisioned Middle Ages or with an advance into a glorified utopia of the future. But this hypothesis has its crucial importance; it will enable us both to understand and to master the meanings implicit to the new world that is upon us” (pp. 50-51). “To understand and to master the meanings implicit” is the goal of his work. It is what Charles Taylor would call to uncover the “social imaginary” or Wittgenstein the “background” or Michael Polyani, “implicit knowledge.” The analysis is to help us see, to help us be prudent within the contemporary situation, not reactionary or nostalgic or even revolutionary. It is to help us live faithfully. For this reason it is important.

Guardini senses that what was going on was not merely a change in cultural order; the change “seems to consist chiefly in an alteration of the entire concept of ‘culture.’ (p. 74). He describes how deeply embedded the implicit meanings were embedded in a notion of progress: “modern faith in progress was the doctrine which manifested these aspirations, and man’s faith in progress grew confidently, based in a logic of human nature and its accomplishments” (p. 76). Guardini boldly states, “We do not hold this doctrine any more. On the contrary, we recognize with increasingly clarity that the modern world deceived itself” (p. 76). Perhaps we understand this right now in the middle of environmental devastation, basic commodity shortage, oil prices and peak oil, economic uncertainty and recession, and war – some of the same characteristics that Guardini saw in Europe after WW II. Yet the modern idea of progress still remains resilient within wider public discourse. Still there is a cynicism about culture and progress that Guardini saw developing decades ago. He writes, “the doubts and criticisms of culture today come from within culture itself, for we no longer trust it. . . . No one today can trust the work of man as the modern world trusted it. No one today can trust the work of man any more than he can trust nature (pp. 77). He recognizes the dangers inherent in a world without trust: “And these dangers menace culture even as they menace the men who bear within themselves the cultural order” (p. 82). As a belief in “progress” falls to the side, what is left instead is just the modern sense of power – power over nature, over humans, over culture. Almost predicting the analysis of Michel Foucault, “the development of power has created the impression that power objectifies itself; that is, power cannot really be possessed or even used by man; rather, it unfolds independently from the continuous logic of scientific investigations, from technical problems, from political tensions. The conviction grows that power simply demands its own actualization” (p. 83).

This is a remarkable analysis of the coming “postmodern”, seen in its underlying nihilism before its theoretical advocates in the 60s and beyond. Guardini even notes, “We may express this psychologically by saying that being is then governed by the unconscious. The unconscious, however, is a chaotic disorder in which the possibilities for destruction are at least as strong as those for healing or consolation” (p. 84) – again, one hears premonitions of Lacan. He descriptively writes, “Many men now suspect that ‘culture’ is not at a realm of beautiful security but a game of dice. Its stakes are life and death, but nobody knows how the last die will be case” (p. 87).

He the turns prognosticator: “The coming order by which man will be related to his own works differs radically from the older one. . . . The new culture will be incomparably more harsh and more intense. It will lack the organic both in its sense of growth and of proportions; for the new culture will have been willed into being by the spirit of man, built up abstractly by his own hands. The new culture does not promise that breath necessary for a secure life and free growth; on the contrary it presents a vision of factories and barracks to the eyes of the mind” (pp. 88-89).

Guardini’s historical perspective allows him to peer into our current social background.: “A single fact, we must emphasize, will stamp the new culture: danger. Previously the simplest need for, and meaning of culture has always been that culture created security . . . . the danger confronting man today arises from within culture itself. From the efforts he expanded and from the fortresses he built to conquer that ancient danger, man has created new dangers. . . . The new danger arises from the factor of power” (p. 89-90).

Would we have to worry today about those who have tried to undercut the rationales and propaganda that have led to the decimation of Iraq without the technological power of surveillance that “progress” has devised? We still live in a fallen world, governed by human beings distorted by sin, a distortion that is not eliminated through democracy or socialism, but only in Christ. Guardini saw this past the dropping of the atomic bombs by the United States and the decimation of Germany and the technical efficiency of the Holocaust, and the millions of dead on the eastern front. Power has been unleashed without understanding how power relates to a true understanding of freedom. Ironically, human freedom undercuts human freedom: “so it is that the dangers facing human freedom mount ominously day by day. Science and technology have so mastered the forces of nature that destruction, either chronic or acute and incalculable in extent, is now a possibility. Without exaggeration one can say that a new era of history has been born. Now and forever man will live at the brink of an ever-growing danger which shall leave its mark upon his entire existence” (pp. 90-1).

Guardini does not surrender to the nihilism, but instead calls for the responsible freedom of the person. The new cultural order demands three virtues to achieve the possibilities of good in this culture: (1) earnestness; (2) gravity; and (3) asceticism. He writes, “earnestness must will to know what is really at stake; it must brush aside empty rhetoric extolling progress or the conquest of nature; it must face heroically the duties forced upon man by his new situation.” Gravity “will be spiritual, a personal courage devoid of the pathetic, a courage opposed to the looming chaos. This gravity or courage must be purer and stronger even than the courage man needs to face either atom bombs or bacteriological warfare, because it must restrain the chaos rising out of the very works of man. Finally it will find itself . . .opposed by an enemy, the mass, ranged against it in public organizations clotted with catchwords” (p. 93). The first two require a third to keep them from romantic illusions and self-righteousness: asceticism. “May must learn again to become a true master by conquering and by humbling himself. In no other way will he achieve the lordship of his own power” (p. 95). No victimhood; no demonization of the other on the Left or the Right; asceticism by humbling and conquering one’s self.

Guardini wants to return to the dignity and responsibility of the human person, not found in one’s autonomy or rights, but in the image of God in which the person is created, as seen in Jesus Christ. This takes one far beyond the sloganism of the right and the left, because both presuppose humans are their own masters, that they rule to bring about the cultural order that they project as good. They produce in the process an anti-person humanism, the ability to sacrifice the person in the name of an abstraction called “humanity”. Guardini saw this. He also saw Revelation. But that’s another post. I need to get up in the morning for the food distribution at church.

Posted by johnwright at 11:56 PM | Comments (1)

Guardini continues his analysis of the “dissolution of the modern world” by discussing how our concepts of the human person have changed. His analysis bears much analysis. A profound gift that I receive at Mid-City is “personalities” – interesting persons who often society doesn’t have the skills to appreciate. I think of the late Crazy Mike, or Monty, or the late Bear. Such persons don’t fare well in the disciplinary society in which we live, but bring a vibrancy to life. I remember when Crazy Mike dumped about 500 pennies in our offering plate – his gift from his begging. Or when “Captain America” read our Scriptures and, as he walked down back to his seat, expressed, “I did it!!” Tremendous gifts. It just struck me today that yesterday we had two “disruptions” during the sermon – and I didn’t even realize it, but incorporated the gifts of those whom God brought to us into the flow of things. As Guardini recognizes, the “dissolution of the modernity” leaves us without personality, substituting “mass man” for “personality.”

The movement from the middle ages brought to bear a new type of human consciousness – the formation of autonomy, when humans “became Lord of his being” (p. 57). As modernity has continued, however, the forces of being “self-created” became technologized and shifted outside the individual to the social engineering, taken out of a local context of family and friends and history and placed within a society governed by “experts.” Guardini calls this “mass man”: “The mass was fashioned according to the law of standardization, a law dictated by the functional nature of the machine. Moreover, the most highly developed individuals of the mass, its elite, are not merely conscious of the influence of the machine; they deliberately imitate it, building its standards and rhythms into their own ethos” (p.59). Do you remember a decade ago when the CEO of MTV said, “We own America’s teenagers”? A leveling of human being takes place – one is defined by one’s organization, or place within the wider social order. “The new leader is co-ordinated by the very masses he leads; he does not possess a creative personality in the old sense; he is not that former individual who always flowered under exceptional circumstances” (p. 61). Personal responsibility slides into oblivion; one learns to live and conform to “what is”: “With the loss of personality comes the steady fading away of that sense of uniqueness with which man had once viewed his own existence, which had once been the source of all social intercourse” (p. 62). Remember that Guardini wrote as one who had suffered imprisonment as a German critic of Hitler and watched the German society conform to the agenda of the Third Reich. I wonder why there has not been a deeper reaction to the known manipulations of information and media of the public toward the Bush administration -- what Scott McClellan criticized as continuous "campaign mode" rather than "governing mode". Of course, in so doing, he implied that media manipulation and untruthful image production is legitimate during campaigns!

Guardini looked forward and saw two possible consequences of this change: “The individual will either disappear in the collective mass as an empty means for a mechanical function . . .. . or he will appear to accept the standardized patter of social life, adjusting to his loss of liberty both for free decision and for open growth as a person. . . . If he takes the latter course, he will do so for the sake of consolidating his own inner life, of conserving—at least for a time—the core of his spiritual existence” (p. 62). He predicted Oprah’s spiritual turn years before it happened!

We live in a world that demands increasing conformity, run by an increasingly small number of people – the leaders of the G8, for instance; the head of the Federal Reserve; those overseeing the Chinese economy. “This new attitude is revealed by the evident fact that the coming man renounces an idiosyncratic life for a communal form, that he surrenders individual initiative for a given order of things. The process of conformity has profaned so many areas of life and has dons so much violence to man that we are apt to neglect its positive meaning. . . . When all other substantial values have disintegrated comradeship remains” (p. 66) – what we have come to call our “community”. “Community” becomes a good in itself, rather than asking whether it is truthful, good, or for what end it exists -- community becomes “life-style enclave” to connect us with the like minded.

Guardini finally sees the political fall-out of such a shift. He argues, “democratic values presumed a small population. It is evident that a genuine democratic spirit, in that sense, is only possible in small countries or in the large country which possess great space of open land. The effectiveness of democratic values for the new age is problematic. . . . . Without those values another and terrible possibility could emerge; man might succumb to the power of the anonymous” (p. 67), those spin-masters who control mediate outlets to convince society where “clear and present dangers” exist so that the “leader” might “save them” from danger. One looks to find the “tipping point”, the sociological density for a phenomenon so that others might conform to it.

This is no real humanism; it presents a false freedom; it turns the Incarnation of Jesus into a “type” or “abstraction” of life to help the “mass man” cope with the general social engineering of the experts within a self-chosen “community.” To read Guardini here presages Foucault, but without the nihilism.

Posted by johnwright at 6:58 PM | Comments (0)

Guardini's next chapter after "The Birth of the Modern" surprisingly is entitled "The Dissolution of the Modern and the World which is to Come." Guardini gave these lectures in the ashes of Germany, after he had been arrested for not supporting Hitler; images of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki hung in human minds. The situation seems to have given him extraordinary insight into what we have come to call "the postmodern" -- but as a repetition within the modern, rather than a liberating presence, as seems evident now.

Guardini writes, "The intellectual consciousness of modern Europe as commonly delineated and accepted even in our day proclaimed those three ideals: a Nature subsisting in itself; an autonomous personality of the human subject; a culture self-created out of norms intrinsic to its own essence. The European mind believed further that the constant creation and perfection of this 'culture' constituted the final goal of history. This was all a mistake" (p. 50).

These ideals still endure, particularly in the United States. Nonetheless we understand when Guardini speaks of how these ideals quiver in the contemporary culture.

Romanticism put forth the modern view of Nature with which Guardini interacts. We hear Romanticism in contemporary comments like, "I worship God better watching the surf than in the Lord's Supper." Behind this is a sense of nature as "a rich source bestowing harmony on all things, as wisely ordered of itself, as benevolent with its favors" (p. 53). Nature is the Whole, the Infinite, that deepest Reality with which we share our being. We intuit its whole as a particularity, the finite, within this Infinite. Thus you read "spirituality" surveys that ask if you ever feel "connected" to all the world. We "'commune" with Nature, in this sense.

Guardini sensed a different experience of nature: "Today man experiences his world as finite, but a finite world cannot inspire the devotion which was inspired by the limitless cosmos of the recent past" (p. 54). Contemporary cosmology suggests that the universe is big -- very big -- but finite -- we can peer back into the past to the early days of the universe.

Closer to home, however, we experience the world not necessarily as benevolent: "Since the world is finite, it is fragile; since the cosmos is expanding, its very being is a venture. It is menaced and endangered on every side and becomes the more glorious and precious. Man now feels responsible for his universe; man must now take care of being" (p. 54). This was long before the environmental movement or speaking of peak oil or global warming and higher percentages of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere (or variations in solar spots).

Nature is to be "managed" now, not adored -- "the tendencies within that outlook refuse to venerate nature" (p. 55) -- the tide is now a possible source for electric production than an opportunity for an intuitive connection to the Absolute: "The technological mind sees nature as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere 'given,' as an object of utility, as raw material to be hammered into useful shape. . . . Technological man will remold the world; he sees his task as Promethean and its stakes as being and non-being" (p. 55).

Guardini foresaw the problems of this utter utilitarian approach to nature; he had watched the United States explode two atomic bombs on civilian populations: "In doing so it masked the destructive effects of a ruthless system . . . The man engaged today in the labor of 'technics' knows full well that technology moves forward in final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the race. He knows in the most radical sense of the term that power is its motive -- a lordship of all; that man seizes hold of the naked elements of both nature and human nature. . . . Man as a human being is far less rooted and fixed within his own essence than is commonly accepted. And the terrible dangers grow day by day. Once the 'autonomous' state has broken all bonds, it will be able to deliver the last coup de grace to human nature itself. Mans crisis: man will either succeed in converting his mastery into good -- then his accomplishment would be immense indeed -- man will either do that or man himself will be at an end" (p. 56).

We live between these two images of Nature simultaneously: the Romantic/Modern and the Technological World Subjected to the Will to Power. What we have lost is a sense of Nature as Gift, as Sign, as a form of what is Good, Beautiful, and True that signals its own transcendence as created by the Word of God in Whom it still dwells as its beginning and end.

Posted by johnwright at 6:14 PM | Comments (0)

The past month has been filled with various unanticipated activities. I should know by now. But I still want to return to the task of working through the three books on the birth of modernity – Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World; Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and Michael Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity. There are interesting common themes that the books share, as well as complementary differences. The purpose is to understand the deep shifts that affect us in what we presuppose as “normal”, but really are not.

In the medieval work, humanity saw the world as an ordered cosmos that reflected the depths of transitions by a the play of signs within it. “Although seen as a whole and limited in size and finite in extension, the finiteness of the world pictured by the older theory was balanced, so to speak, by an infinity in depth. This it gained by the symbolic meaning which shown through the whole of reality. The eternal exemplar of the world was the Logos; every part of the world was a manifestation of this inexhaustible source. Each distinct thing in being was both itself and a related part of a symbolic hierarchy which inked all tings in a rich and diversified unity” (p. 31). To put a precise Christological spin on it, absent but implied in Guardini, all creation witnessed to the Word through which God the Father created, incarnate in Jesus Christ, experienced in the worship of the Church culminating in the Eucharist. Reality existed not only as a “thing in itself”, but also as a sign which pointed beyond itself to the surplus of meaning given it objectively in its existence. Life was inherently meaningful; the human job was to participate in the meaning as given in the world.

In modernity all this changes. Rather than a depth in the world, humans create a depth within their own subjectivity. “man began to find his own individuality an absorbing object for study, for introspection and psychological analysis. The extraordinary in human life, the dignity of man at the height of personal development, both were seen with a new awareness. Genius became the most important measure of human value. Genius was identified by analogy with a universe now expanding to infinity, with a history now without limits. Genius becme the standard for all human judgments” (p. 34). Human subjectivity becomes the point for human guidance through the world. “With freedom or liberty of personal action the self-governing, creatively daring individual seemed a man carried forward by his own self-mastered genius. Thus he was led toward his destiny by fortune to be crowned in the end by fame and glory. This positive experience, however, was countered by man’s loss of his objective sense of belonging to existence. With the breakdown of the old world picture, man came to feel now only that he had been placed in a life of strange contradictions but also that his very existence was threatened. Modern man awoke to that anxiety which menances hm to this day, an anxiety never found in the medieval world. . . Medieval anxiey resulted from the tensions experienced by the soul which although set in a limited universe . . . was bent upon leaping into infinity. Yet medieval tensions were resolved as the soul anchieved an ever new and greater transcendence. Modern anxiety, by contrast, arises from man’s deep-seated consciousness that he lacks either a ‘real’ or a symbolic place iin reality. . . . The very needs of man’s senses are left unsatisfied, since he has ceased to experience a world which guarantees him a place in the total scheme of existence” (p. 35). Human subjectivity, unhinged from a world of inherent meaning, becomes a source of a negative concept of freedom – freedom from – and the anxieties that arise with it. Personality becomes a crucial point.

Guardini thus writes: “Insofar as modern man saw the world simply as ‘nature,’ he absorbed it into himself. Insofar as he understood himself as a ‘personality,’ he made himself the Lord of his being, and insofar as he conceived a will for ‘culture,’ he strove to make of existence the creation of his own hands” (p. 42). “No longer standing everywhere under the eyes of a God Whose glance enclosed the universe, man became an autonomous creature. Although removed from the very center of creation and merely a part of the world, he did have a free hand to hew his own road through life. Curiously, the new conception both exalted and debased man: he was raised up against God, exalted at His expense, he was reduced through a deep desire to an object of nature no different fundamentally from an animal or a plant” (pp. 46-7).
We still live in this world. This shift both constituted and produced a revolt against orthodox Christianity, now seen as restrictive, authoritarian, and irrational. The “autonomous self” – the basic social category created by simultaneous and violent rise of the European modern nation-state—exists to criticize the church in order to shift unchecked balance to the state. We face a culture with a profound new sense of anxiety – economic and environmental concerns seem to confront us with limits to our autonomy; the market choices by which we create our own meaning seem to have called into question humanity’s long term ability to fit within the world. Beginning with human subjectivity to create seems to have objectively endangered the possibility of sustaining life, even as the boundaries of life begin unwinding at its peripheries toward non-life through technological advances.

Posted by johnwright at 8:44 AM | Comments (1)