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.