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.