Sitting on the Lakeshore: Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como Retold

Abstract

In his Letters from Lake Como, Romano Guardini distilled the characteristics of a cultural shift from a rural community to an industrialized society. Decades later, he would complete and refine his vision of that shift in The End of the Modern World. In the two books, but especially in Letters, Guardini argued for the possibility of a conciliation between a Christianity that differs from medieval Christianity, or Christendom, and an artificial, technologically infused culture that is no longer rooted in the rural life of pre-modern civilization. In this essay, I return to Guardini’s concept of a Christianized industrialism, a modern culture that is embedded in technology and yet open to transcendence. I show the groundlessness of such a concept in continuity with Hans Urs von Balthasar’s concise assessment of Guardini’s work, which Balthasar saw as firm and groundless.

“We must recover a sense of the sacred before the sacred name can be heard again.”

Louis Dupré (1994, p. xv)

1. Introduction

Romano Guardini (1885–1968) occupies a special place in the history of 20th-century Roman Catholic thinking: He in fact searched in culture, not in philosophy or theology, for an improbable rendezvous between religion and technologically infused modernity.

Guardini exposed his vision of the transformation of culture—namely, from a culture in friendly alignment with nature to another completely detached from it—in several of his works, but two books are particularly relevant: Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race (henceforth Letters) and The End of the Modern World (henceforth Modern World).1 Letters can be seen as an accessible antecedent to Modern World, an exercise of theological imagination held together by a strong sequential thread, whereas Modern World tends to grow according to serial logic. In the wonderful setting of Lake of Como, Italy, Guardini wrote Letters to confront the reassessment of the relationship between culture and nature. Classic culture blends in with nature. The modern culture, dominated by technology, jars against nature. The advent of a culture increasingly driven by the machine brings the rural (also, “ancient,” “old,” “classic,” “medieval”) world, metaphorically represented in Letters by Lake of Como, to an end. A replacement world arises, one that is “an artificial construct, both abstract and unreal.” Guardini added that, in this world, the things are no longer experienced directly but are felt, seen, grasped, perceived, and assimilated through intermediary factors, that is, through symbols and representations.2

In Letters, Guardini was reproducing—with the same degree of realism and a robust dose of philosophical profundity—the work of the later Victorian novelists such as George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy who were primarily concerned with the semi-pastoral England. They saw agrarian England being destroyed by industry and depicted the tragedy of the transition from a rural way of life to an industrial order. In the same fashion, Guardini’s central preoccupation in Letters is the prospect of the annihilation of the village and the community under the threat of scientific rationalism, utilitarianism, and industrialism. His intention, however, was religious: he believed that religion can save humanity from the excesses of industrialism. More specifically, he believed that Christianity—not the same Christianity of the past, but a renewed Christianity, a Christianity on amicable terms with modernity—could embrace the modern (also, “new,” “industrial,” “artificial,” “worldly”) world and change it. He trusted the redemptive force of faith to correct the more destructive tendencies within industrialism and its mechanistic culture and deliver a more humanized, technologically driven culture. In brief, Guardini invited Christians to embrace industrialism; yet, Guardini added, industrialism should be domesticated and reduced to a more human level. This is the role of Christians.

I believe it is beneficial to return to the celebrated Letters, written almost a century ago, because those letters not only defined the trajectory of Guardini’s later work on technology, particularly Modern World, but also because they have influenced many philosophers and theologians, including the current and previous popes.3 With the existing robust literature on Guardini, one must ask if scholars need another piece on his work.4 My answer is positive: His vision of a conciliation between Christianity and the modern world depicted in Letters is still fruitful today for the simple reason that it shows the level of complexity that is required to harmonize within Christianity the openness to the world, particularly when the world is inimical to Christianity, and the safeguarding of religious transcendence. In Guardini, in fact, one can detect not one but two sentiments: the first is that industrialism must be accepted; the second is that industrialism brings problems that Christianity is incapable of solving. Either Christianity forces industrialism to come to terms with transcendence, or industrialism ends up immanentizing Christianity, and this is a destiny that Christianity must resist. As a matter of fact, Guardini can be considered the progenitor of not one but two equally important lines of thought with reference to modern culture. He has been simultaneously celebrated as the theologian of the encounter with industrialism and the resistance to it. Probably the most obvious example of this second line of thought is Pope Francis’s Encyclical Letter Laudato Si where the pontiff, while showing Guardini’s direct influence on his conceptualization of the problem of technology, called to resist the assault of the dominant technological paradigm (Pope Francis 2015).

The problem with Guardini is that he embraced the option of a conciliation between Christianity and industrialism but proved unable to ground it. This is the argument of this article, the roots of which lie in a comment of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who argued that Guardini elaborated a synthesis that is not completely rounded up. In the first chapter of his book on Guardini, von Balthasar explored the potential contradiction between Guardini’s firm vision and the groundless ground on which he developed it.5 Guardini was conscious of the passage from a world of living reality to an artificial world. According to von Balthasar, Guardini dissected this accelerated separation from nature and “this alliance between technology and power, on the one hand, and between power and the omnipotent State, on the other” (von Balthasar 2010, p. 16). Guardini recognized that the old, human culture in which Christianity flourished was a lost country; he criticized the new technological culture of the “machine” as if another technological culture were possible. He navigated between the Scylla of a consummated past and the Charybdis of an unreceivable present in search of an alternative. This is his firm vision. Yet, the remedy he envisioned, namely a Christianized modern culture that would simultaneously accept and correct the deadly attributes of technology, lacks sustainable roots, which makes him more evocative than insightful. This is why von Balthasar framed Guardini’s vision in terms of groundless ground. While calling upon the coexistence of Christianity and the modern world, Guardini recognized the moving ground on which he was operating. Thus, the tone of his writings sometimes changes and assumes a lyrical instead of scholarly tone. For this reason, von Balthasar asked whether Guardini can be dismissed as a dreamer or utopian (von Balthasar 2010, p. 16).

This article parallels, localizes, and expands von Balthasar’s synthetic assessment. The aim is to investigate exactly the shortcomings of Guardini’s vision with reference to industrialism. How the criticism that von Balthasar directed to the entire corpus of Guardini’s work can be understood within the more narrowed boundaries of Guardini’s engagement with industrialism? For sure, Guardini’s vision was not an edifice or a theory, but exactly that—a vision, an organizing principle according to which that coexistence actually works. The tension between firm vision and groundlessness gives a general sense of contradiction, or at least ambiguity, to his writings on the passage from the rural to the industrial worlds. Guardini at once accepted industrialism and rejected it: He wanted a domesticated industrialism, a Christianized industrialism. Concurrently, he envisioned a post-Christendom Christianity, a modern form of Christianity that would amend industrialism. He wanted a new Christianity that would correct the rising, tech-saturated culture and reframe it in humanized terms. However, he rejected every attempt to eventually root Christianity in immanence. He shut himself inside transcendence because he thought that only a transcendental religion can do justice to the supernatural character of the Christian faith. Yet, von Balthasar protested, he neglected to ground this vision. Accordingly, his rendezvous between Christianity and technology-driven modernity was tentative and eventually precarious.

This article traces the thinking of Romano Guardini on technologized culture by bringing to life the times and places in which he lived when he visited the Lake of Como. During those visits, he developed his ideas on the topic that later became the book Letters from Lake Como. In brief, the argument is that Guardini saw as imperative a Christian correction of the rising industrialism. For this reason, he envisioned a mutual fecundation of Christianity and industrialization through the mediation of the sacred tradition: A modern form of Christianity and domesticated industrialism would be concurrently responsible for a culture that is both modern and Christian, that is, a Christianized culture that embraces technology and nevertheless is open to transcendence. Unfortunately, Guardini was unable to anchor such a vision of a Christianized culture to a viable tradition that was sympathetic to transcendence. He rather rooted it in the same modernity he wanted to domesticate. This is the unfounded characteristic of his vision. The present article is divided into three sections: a summary of Guardini’s vision as it was expressed in Letters; a few comments on his vision; and, finally, the ungrounded foundation of his vision.

First, I offer a few words on terminology. The term “tradition” is used in this article both as (1) Tradition (capital letter), that is, the sacred tradition: the theological sense of a process of transmission of the deposit of faith, and (2) tradition, a specific line of thought that has been dominant in premodern Christianity. According to that line of thought, there are supra-historical values, certain metaphysical and eternal values that must be transmitted from one generation to the next. I adopt the expression “new Christianity” as a shortcut for a post-Christendom form of Christianity. The reference is obviously to Jacques Maritain but not in the sense of integral humanism or the revival of Thomas Aquinas for modern times (Maritain 1936). I rather refer to Maritain’s vision of the necessity for a new relationship between the Church and society because the medieval structure that had previously existed was now gone. In the case of Guardini, this means reconciling the technologizing of culture with a renewal of Christianity. Both Maritain and Guardini, in their unsettling differences, embraced a position of substantial acceptance—in fact if not in principle—of the modern world, although conserving a philosophical, antimodernist perspective. In the last section, I used the terms “modern culture” and “modernity” as synonyms.

2. Guardini and the Lake

The influence of theologian Romano Guardini on Laudato Si, Pope Francis’s letter on the environment, has led to additional scholarly attention on the work of a little-known German philosopher-priest (Pope Francis 2015). Guardini was born in Verona in 1885. Though his parents were Italians, his father was a diplomat and Guardini grew up in Germany, where he became a priest and professor. His first major work, The Spirit of the Liturgy (1918), was published during the First World War. After the War, he was appointed to a chair in Philosophy of Religion at the University of Berlin but was forced to resign in 1939 after clashing with the Nazis. Following the Second World War, he became first a professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and then a professor at the University of Munich. He died in Munich on October 1, 1968. Guardini’s major works are The Lord (1937) and Modern World.

In Laudato Si, Pope Francis quotes several times from Guardini’s Modern World. He does not quote from Letters, a series of letters Guardini wrote to his friend, pastor Joseph Weikert, during a trip to the lake country in the north of Italy. The Letters were written as a series of articles, the first appearing at Pentecost 1923 and the last in 1925. In late 1926, they were first published in a book with the aforementioned title. Guardini wrote Letters during his visit to his mother who had retired to her family’s ancestral home in the beautiful mountain district of Lake Como in northern Italy. Guardini’s preface has the dateline “Varenna on Lake Como, September 1926.” Varenna stands on the eastern shore of the Lake. For those readers who never had the chance to visit Varenna, they are invited to imagine that long lakeside promenades with mountain views probably filled Guardini’s eyes, helping him to identify an evident asymmetry between the fate of a technologized humanity and the unchangeable springtime shores of the Italian lake. The quaint little town’s awe-inspiring scenery, the preserved medieval center, and more relaxed atmosphere make it a perfect landscape for reflection. Yet, its position facing west is not sunny and places Varenna among the most shadowed sections of Lake Como compared to Bellagio in the south and Menaggio in the north.

Time matters. Sitting on the lakeshore in Varenna, Guardini reflected on the late adoption of industrialization in northern Italy. “What has already taken place up in the North I saw beginning here,” he wrote.6 In Germany, an already fully industrialized country, Guardini was accustomed to being immersed in an artificial world. He noted that “I thus became aware of what I had not been in the North because previously I had accustomed to such thing (i.e., the new world).”7 In contrast to the fully developed modern industrial world of Germany, Lake Como struck Guardini as, in some respects, a world in transformation. The lake and the land surrounding it had for some time escaped the ravages of industrial modernity, which was slowly making its presence felt. Thus, the lake was an open-air laboratory in which an imperceptive passage from the pre-industrial to the industrial offered an opportunity to reflect on the proper relationship between Man and technology.8

Guardini’s first letter, titled “The Question,” raised the question of the significance of industrialism as it spread into a previously unindustrialized region of Lake Como. Guardini framed the problem in the following way: “I saw machines invading the land that had previously been the home of culture.”9 Significantly, he interpreted industrialism as less a corruption of pure nature than a transformation of human culture. The authentic culture understood as a healthy relationship between Man and nature was responsible for the “lines of the roofs” that merged “in different directions,” “integrated” and reached a “climax in the belfry with its deep-toned bell.”10 Against this world of “natural humanity, of nature in which humanity dwells,” the box shape of the factories represented less a contamination of a perfect state of being than the signal of a paradigm shift, a change of eras. Humanity has never had a relationship with nature in its untouched form. Regardless, Guardini invited his readers to consider the example of a boat that requires human beings to be aware of the natural elements for its operation. Then Guardini asks his readers to compare this with a steamer in which nature no longer has power over it. This is the artificiality of existence that technology brings.11 Guardini’s tone is soulful, more melancholic than nostalgic. “I cannot tell you how sad this made me.”12

Geography matters. One cannot imagine a more improbable landscape than Lake Como’s sweeping hillsides, crisp lakes, and imposing mountains to reflect on the rise of a technologized culture. Antonio Fogazzaro’s 1895 novel, Piccolo Mondo Antico, was set in 19th century Lombardy, but not at Lake Como, rather at Lake Lugano; regardless, no better name than Piccolo Mondo Antico, Little Ancient World, has the capacity to capture the sense of Lake of Como as an ancient place that fuses peace and tradition with such intensity, where time seems to have stood still. Surely, the expression “Mondo Antico” (Ancient World) refers to an age that is well and truly over and yet alive, an enclave, both physical and metaphysical, in which primordial contact with nature provides inner tranquility. Indeed, it is a “Piccolo Mondo” (a Little World) of ordinary people, who find serenity in their everyday life through contact with the natural landscape of the lake, which becomes an authentic model of spiritual values. Yet, this enclave was quietly under attack. Guardini saw the serene experience of life becoming increasingly abstract and distanced from nature.

For Guardini, the fundamental question in Letters was the replacement of a culture concerned above all with cultivating natural humanity with another driven by material progress through technology. In his fourth letter, titled “Consciousness,” Guardini alerted the readers that the price of mastery over nature is the abstraction of the new world in which things and people become concepts and formulas. The inevitable consequence of all that is consciousness and awareness of everything. The almost inevitable result is unnaturality: “We cannot perform an intellectual act and at the same time be aware of it.”13 If we attempt to reach the consciousness of all, we are forced into a constant interruption between our action and knowledge. “Thus all of life bears the distinctive character of what is interrupted, broken.”14 In the sixth letter, titled “Mastery,” Guardini argued that the possessive quest for knowledge in modern culture led us to concepts and formulas. Thus, “on the basis of a known formula, materials and forces are put into the required condition: machines.”15 In his seventh letter, titled “The Masses,” Guardini noted that everything in the old world “had roots.”16 But, he added, “masses have changed all this.”17 Masses lead the way to a dissolution of the organic (the title of the eighth letter). Whereas the old culture was natural and creative, the new culture is driven by a mechanical will. “Its starting point is the isolated, rationally understood power of nature, which works through the machine.”18

“The people are delighted by the progress,” Guardini added; “admittedly, it brings them work and bread … he [someone with whom Guardini is talking] took the destruction as a necessity. ‘It is simply so!’ Indeed, he ultimately got mad: ‘Our land must remain poor and our people must emigrate so that your romantic needs can here be met!’ I must admit that he is right.”19 There is no place for nostalgia either in Guardini and his conversation partner for a world that no longer exists. Simplicity, a slow pace, and inner tranquility did not come free; locals paid the price with poverty and migration. Guardini’s romanticism detected a state of serenity through contact with the everyday life of simple people, bearers of an authentic model of spiritual values. Those simple people, however, interpreted the preservation of the local tradition of the olden days as a curse. Thus, the progress was unstoppable and should have been embraced, although, in Guardini’s words, that “terrible machine” was “crushing our inheritance between the stones.”20

3. Guardini’s Vision

In his Letters, Guardini depicted a passage from one form of culture to another, from one world to another. It is easy to make an extrapolation and apply Guardini’s vision to the present, high-tech world. His mentions of the artificiality of existence and abstraction (the titles of the second and third letters) may lead some readers to that conclusion. But in his Letters, Guardini was not referring to robots and artificial intelligence; he was focused on the machinery mindset behind industrialization. In his seventh letter, for example, he mentioned Henry Ford and his automotive organization.21 Guardini’s vision is populated by factories, mass consumption, and economies of scale, that is, modern capitalism. In his words, unlimited consumption and unlimited production replace “the organic interplay of supply and demand,” while “every art of force and cunning must be used to produce unlimited consumption.”22 Guardini was a participant observer of the birth of Italian capitalism, an extension of the northern European capitalism that developed out of the industrial revolution and Adam Smith’s thought. He was not trying to interpret contemporary capitalism based on financial markets, global supply chain, and software. He rather envisioned that capitalism would cause pain to Italy: “The world of machines comes from the North, which also provides its motive force. In the South, it will bring naked barbarism.”23

Guardini provided complementary elements to this synthetic view on the rise of the modern world in Modern World. He first divided the history of the world into three ages: (1) the medieval world; (2) the modern world; and (3) the coming age after the modern world (what would now be described as post-modern or high tech).24 The periodization of history allows the readers to better locate the passage discussed in Letters between the medieval and the modern worlds. He also framed the genealogy of the current collapse of Christendom. The process began, according to Guardini, during the 14th century and reached its peak three centuries later.25 In the words of Millare, “whereas the medieval worldview was characterized by an orientation towards unity and harmony, the worldly world was overshadowed by division and autonomy. The view of society as a communal harmonious body was displaced by the individual autonomous subject” (Millare 2016, pp. 975–76). Finally, in Modern World Guardini characterized the medieval world as rooted in a relationship of unity between faith and the world. This medieval unity was mirrored in a variety of aspects of Christendom, including philosophy as the search for truth, history as history of salvation, and Tradition as permanent values. I will return soon to these subjects. The modern worldview departed from this unity, leaving faith on one side and the world on the other.

In his Letters, the religious theme seems downplayed. Rare references are offered to God, Christ, and the sacred as they lived and survived in the old and in the new worlds. But it is clear that, in Guardini’s opinion, the new scientific rationalism that emerges victorious against perennial philosophy (I will return to this term) and the replacement of communities with mass societies redesigned human relations with nature and God. These new forces placed human life in a distinct perspective, moving the world from the static biblical model rooted in the eternal tension of good and evil to a progressive process of human nature, society, and civilization. Civilization is no longer a creation of God, rather of humans who are makers of their own destiny. Since people are no longer part of the Kingdom of God, they are responsible for their actions. What is really at stake, in the end, is the transformation of the very spirit and structure of Christian cosmology. How is it possible to maintain the integrity of the sacred in a new world dominated by the changing nature of human existence, abstraction, total consciousness, mastery of knowledge, and the dissolution of the organic?

The crucial point is how the transformation occurred. The shift from the old world to the new world, in Guardini’s opinion, was the transformation of culture through the re-articulation of the relationship between ethos and logos. Guardini claimed that the primacy of logos over ethos, encapsulated by the Scholastic axiom “action follows being” (ager esequiter esse), then adopted in modernity with a slight adjustment, i.e., “action follows knowledge,” has reached a dead end. In modern culture, ethos drives logos. Thus, the movement consists of a passage from a classic worldview, with logos as the center of gravity, to a mechanical worldview centered on ethos. This is the first level of the analysis. The second implies a shift from a sacramental logos (a logos within the natural culture) to a modern logos driven by technological rationality as well as a shift from an ethos of love as self-gift to a modern ethos of power. The result of this double movement is the passage from an ethos of charity driven by the Eucharistic logos (in the old world) to a utilitarian logos governed by an ethos of domination (in the modern world).26 Unsurprisingly, a culture dominated by the ethos of power is irresponsive to the logos centered on revelation. In his diagnosis of modern culture, Guardini enlightened that it “is no accident that the worldview which sees in the machine the symbol of fulfilled culture-namely, materialistic communism-is trying systematically to destroy religious life.”27 Modern culture, left to itself without a transcendent end, led to barbarism. “Everywhere we see true culture vanishing, and our first reaction tells us that what is replacing it is barbaric. Only further reflection and a more profound reaction indicate the possibility of a new order in what is now chaotic in its effects, and order of different proportions and with a different basic attitude.”28 A new order, that is, a new unity of Christianity and the world, is needed. In his ninth letter, Guardini clarified the option: “We have to create a world again.”29 This “world” is the unity of a new Christianity and the new world of industrialism.

In Letters, two parallel narratives are at work. One is concerned with the emergence of a new Christianity distinct from Christendom—a new form of Christianity that, in continuation with the past, can enter into an entente cordiale with the modern world. The other is the engagement of this new Christianity, a “future Christianity” that he envisioned in Modern World, with modern culture so that a new unity of faith and industrialism is possible.30 In the same ninth letter, Guardini wrote a passage that remains rarely considered in the recent literature:

Nor is it true that what is taking place is not Christian. The minds at work in it may often be non-Christian, but the event as such are not. It is Christianity that has made possible science and technology and all that results from them.

31

The rise of the new world seemed to Guardini’s contemporaries not only the demise of the old rural world but also the end of Christianity as they knew it, for the old world was the Christian world. “What is taking place” comes to conclude a world that was intrinsically Christian—not a society with Christians but a Christian civilization rooted in the perennial philosophy, that is, perennial truths. These perennial truths took form in a specific earthly form, Christian civilization, or Christendom. Now “what is taking place” is bringing Christendom to an end. This is the invisible parallel present in Letters: The destruction of rural Italy occurred side by side with the collapse of Christendom. What, then, is the future of Christianity?

Like Augustine before him, Guardini did not waste time and severely cut the ties bringing together the welfare of the mundane and the welfare of the sacred. The collapse of rural Italy should not lead to doubts about the survival of Christianity. Sitting on the lakeshore, Guardini had only two options: claiming that the new world is anti-Christian and should be resisted until it will collapse under its own contradictions or arguing that the new world is as Christian as much as it was the old world and should be accepted. Guardini responded categorically to this alternative: “We must first say yes to our age.”32 There is no room in his mind for retreating into a nostalgic, impossible past. Despite being perceived as a revolution, as a dramatic break from the past, the passage from the old to the new world is, in Guardini’s opinion, in continuity with the Christian past. As a matter of fact, he claimed that Christianity itself is the invisible motor behind that passage. Not surprisingly, Guardini invited his readers to accept the transformation: “What we need is not less technology.”33 The transformation should not be opposed, rather embraced and guided.

The transformation must be guided. Guardini was clear on that:

More accurately, we need stronger, more considered, more human technology. We need more science, but it must be more intellectual and designed; we need more economic and political energy, … all of that is possible, however, only if living people … create a ‘world’ again.

34

In all this, therefore, exists a fundamental corollary to the second option: The passage from a natural culture to an artificial culture is paralleled with a passage from the old Christendom to a new Christianity. Guardini neither advocated nor considered possible a return to medieval Christendom. He was sure that Christendom is not the only earthly form of Christianity. In Letters, Guardini explicitly referred to “precursors” (plural), to show that the perennial truths of revelation manifest themselves in a variety of historical forms.35 As a matter of fact, the perennial truths have assumed over time different forms according to the historical circumstances in place. Consequently, a new Christianity is not a form of adaption to the new world, but rather the earthly embodiment of the perennial truths in the contemporary historical circumstances of industrialism. The new Christianity comes out from the patristic idea of reformatio, a return to Sacred Tradition in the historical circumstances of the present days. A new Christianity, or better, a renewed incarnation of Christianity, emerges so that the disunity between faith and the world is healed and the sacred is protected and proclaimed in the worldly world. To put it differently, a new Christianity restates the unity with a world that is no longer rooted in natural culture but a humanized, tech culture, and it yet conserves a sense of the sacred. In his seventh letter, Guardini cried: “How we long for an arcane discipline that will protect what is sacred from the marketplace, including the marketplace within;”36 or, in brief, how to protect the sacred in an industrial world? The protection, or recovery—as summarized in Dupré’s statement that functions as the epigraph of this article—of the sacred is the precondition of a new unity of Christianity and a new world.

Guardini was not afraid to engage industrialism. At the same time, however, he was not ready to accept industrialism sic et sempliciter. His position can be called one of a critical legitimization of industrialism: Industrialism should be accepted in a form that is compatible with Christianity. Guardini did not see industrialism as a response to certain social economic conditions of the modern world but as a formulation of these conditions for which the Church can and must offer guidance and sense. The sources of the Christian faith (i.e., Tradition) should be reinterrogated with the new questions raised by the appearance of industrialism. For Guardini, the engagement of Christianity with industrialism would mobilize what Cardinal Newman called the “virtualities” of Tradition, namely, the characteristic of Tradition to be inexhaustible (Newman 1989). Tradition produces historical formulations of eternal truths that are always contingent because they respond to the questions of the age. New questions empower Tradition to offer new answers and prevent the ossification of Tradition. Thus, the engagement of industrialism implies the interrogation of Tradition. In turn, the interrogation produces a double movement affecting simultaneously Christianity and industrialism: Christianity is reframed in full continuity with Tradition and in entente cordiale with a certain form of industrialism; industrialism is depurated from its disdain for nature and the sacred. The encounter of Christianity and industrialism, through the mediation of Tradition, involves an aggiornamento of Christianity, on the one hand, and the possibility of a Christian industrialism, on the other. “Christian industrialism” stands for a form of industrialism that accepts that in history there are meta-empirical principles, a transcendental horizon capable of directing human history. In that condition, that is, a form of industrialism that is compatible with Christianity, the passage from the old to the new culture is no longer perceived as a revolution, as a dramatic break from the past but in continuity with the Christian past. No conciliation is necessary with this Christianized form of industrialism because it is already always being Christian. In fact, Guardini claimed that Christianity itself is the invisible motor behind that passage from natural to artificial cultures.

It should be clear at this point the implicit assumption behind Guardini’s vision: the irreplaceability of Christianity. Guardini believed that without Christianity, a mechanized version of technological culture will bring desolation and darkness. Therefore, it is crucial that Christians stand up and embrace the world and change it, so that a more humanized form of technology can emerge. In his words:

Non-believers are incapable of properly administrating the world … Forces that would be strong enough to keep one’s power in check derive neither from science nor from technology … The truly salvific possibilities lie in the conscience of human beings who are connected to God in a living way.

(Guardini 1989, p. 78f.)

The salvation depends on Christians and their willingness to be in the world and deal with its historical structures. A humanized tech culture requires a modern form of Christianity. More precisely, only a modern form of Christianity can deliver a humanized tech culture. In a complex article, Roland Millare summarizes the therapy that Guardini suggested for re-enacting the harmony between faith and the world, Christianity and industrialism. He also shows how Pope Benedict XVI informed not only his own theology but also his magisterium with the main principles of Guardini’s theology. Millare recognizes that “Guardini imbued his work with a Christian worldview, which describes as “the perduring, that is the methodical encounter between faith and the world, not just the world in general, but in concrete, in culture and its forms, in history, in social life” (Guardini 1965, p. 9; Cf. O’Meara 1995, p. 102). In the meantime, as Guardini prophetically envisioned in Modern World, a world after the industrial world has come. In the end, however, Millare must recognize that despite all the efforts, “the West has seemingly abandoned the Christian worldview and forgotten the legacy of Guardini” (Millare 2016, p. 980). The new unity of Christianity and the industrial world has not yet materialized, and the world of industrialism has departed; accordingly, the sacramental transcendence at work in the medieval world has been replaced with secular immanence.

4. The Groundless of Guardini’s Vision

A careful reader easily detects a difference between Millare and von Balthasar: The former claims that the world did not follow Guardini. He implies that Guardini successfully developed a synthesis, namely a form of Christian industrialism that the world rejected. The specificity of von Balthasar’s criticism, however, is that he overturns the logic: Guardini failed to elaborate a grounded synthesis. Following von Balthasar, one can locate the vulnus of the missing composition of Christianity and industrialism not on the side of the world but on the side of Guardini. To put it differently, Guardini believed that industrialism is worth a life only if it is Christian. Alternatively, industrialism is only concepts and mathematical formulas—a piece of machinery that pulverizes everything. For Millare, Guardini offered a synthesis, but it was rejected; for von Balthasar, no synthesis was developed, and Guardini was left with the only option of resisting and hoping.

Guardini believed in the possibility of Catholic “modernity”, bridging a positive encounter between Roman Catholic Catholicism and modern culture. The old Christianity, the Christianity that Guardini observed dying, was rooted in tradition, that is perennial values. Tradition stands for the primacy of contemplation, the classic conception of a worldview founded on the preeminence of Being. One obstacle to a productive engagement of a new Christianity with industrialism is the incompatibility between tradition and artificial culture. Guardini mentioned tradition in Letters several times; in each instance, the conflict between the rampant new world and tradition is portrayed in harsh terms. In his seventh letter, he stated: “Tradition was in time what air and water and soil are in space.”37 In the old world, tradition was like the oxygen for the birds and the water for fish: a natural environment, so natural to result as invisible. The implication, of course, is that tradition is no longer so natural. Once upon a time, things “grew out of history” and tradition was at the same time the premise and the support of that growth.38 Tradition was, to paraphrase Guardini, the roots that are in the dark and yet make the plants grow.39 Tradition was vital, and as Guardini added, “vitally formed and produced.”40 Tradition was constancy and yet it was constantly coming to life afresh by the action of a vital humanity. Now the power that promotes growth comes from the machine. The rise of the new world is not only the ruin of the old world but also the extinction of tradition. Progress is bought at the price of remoteness from tradition.

The same rupture between past and present can be found in philosophy. In the Medieval Ages, philosophy was the search for truth and beauty, namely, of the absolutes. The different Summaes legitimized the harmony between faith and reason and revealed the “‘truth that reality itself was ordered harmoniously in being, that it could be formed and fashioned by the artistic genius of man,” as Guardini argued in Modern World.41 But modern philosophy does not limit itself to the speculative level; it is concerned with the transformation of the world. Modern philosophy reverses the hierarchy between theory and action so that speculation is inseparable from its practical results. Although classic philosophy was post factum, that is, conscience and cognizance, modern philosophy is ante factum, intent and purpose.

Finally, the medieval unity of faith and the world was infused by the Augustinian perspective of history as the history of salvation. In Guardini’s words, “The world, time, history had begun with Creation; they reached apotheosis in the Incarnation of the Son of God … and all shall end with the destruction of the world and the Last Judgment.”42 History of salvation was not, however, only a movement toward salvation; it was a movement driven by God of which human beings have an opaque command. In the modern world, instead, “we have become decisively aware of history as a total unit.”43 History is no longer a complicated web of mysterious forces and processes but rather “a total line with branches that we detect with increasing clarity.”44 We are conscious of and have conscience knowledge of history and not only that: time is mastered and transformed in subject as well as material and force.45 In brief, the opposition between the classic and the modern conceptions of history, the Platonic and the immanentist, is insoluble.

Modern culture challenges the classical understanding of culture through its rupture from previous tradition and its shift toward an ante factum philosophy and progressive history, as opposed to a post factum philosophy and history of salvation. The older world, and therefore its history as history of salvation, its philosophy as contemplation, and its tradition were withered away. Guardini portrayed the cultural transformation from an agrarian community to an industrial society as a revolution that severs its ties with the past. At the same time, however, he maintained that there is an element of continuity throughout the chain of cultures, so that modern culture, and this element of continuity is Christianity. More precisely, he identified a religious component that one might label “ontology of the sacred,” an inner principle or power of spiritual life that perpetuates itself through all times. Closer to Augustine than to Thomas Aquinas, Guardini did not share an Augustinian theology of history, rather an existential interpretation of Augustine’s conversion and the inner life of “God within” (Guardini 2020). The problem is—and this is the argument, too—that Guardini was unable to reconcile his vision of continuity with the past and his portrait of the transformation of culture as a revolution, a break with the past that supersedes tradition. Guardini struggled to find a mediation between tradition and revolution. In this sense, his synthesis is groundless. One may add that Guardini conceded too much to the revolution so that the option of an opening to the sacred vanished.

Guardini resisted the instinct to either oppose or accept modern culture as it was. He identified a narrow passage between these two options, a third option, a Christianized modern culture rooted in an existentialist Augustinianism—an alternative modernity open to transcendence. This “Catholic” interpretation of modernity does not go so far as to deny that there are no elements in industrialism to justify the criticisms raised in Letters. Nevertheless, this interpretation maintains that modern culture is not reducible to the idea of industrialism functional to those criticisms, and it opens up, intellectually, alternative concepts of modernity: in other words, a reconfigured modernity open to transcendence and to Christianity. This alternative modernity, built around an Augustinian ontology of the interiority, would save humanity from the mechanistic and utilitaristic end of modern culture. In his ninth letter, Guardini invited his readers to note “a sense of increasing profundity,” an ontological interiority, one may say. In his words,

people today are no longer so sure and arrogant in the sphere of physical and psychological reality as they were in the 1890s. It is as if an inner sphere were opening up and drawing us in. A yearning is there for the inward, for quiet, for leaving the mad rush and refocusing … I believe that technology, the economy, and politics need such quiet and inner fervor if they are to do their respective jobs.

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This component would domesticate or at least mitigate the immanentist tendency inherent to such a world. Guardini ultimately envisioned Christianity innervating the new world as it did with the old world.

Guardini refused to look back at Christendom and rather envisioned a new Christianity that may coexist with an industrial world. Guardini’s scope was not to reject modern culture but rather to condition it from the inside and prevent it from an immanent end. This required a deep philosophical-historical reconceptualization of modern culture, a project he pursued in other works. In such a reconceptualization, the ontology of interiority is the element that domesticates the inherent tendency of modernity to go immanent. But this element is more properly an organizational principle. Where did Guardini anchor, intellectually and historically, his alternative modernity? A more precise question is this: What exactly is Guardini’s alternative modernity rooted in so that it can be employed to offer a Christianized path into industrialism? It is rooted in modernity. Given the previous discussion, in fact, a Christianized culture is inevitably forced to uproot itself from any concrete historical and philosophical prescriptions of the past. It is a Christianized culture that seeks its intellectual foundation in the present and therefore in that same intellectual foundation of the culture of modernity that it wants, in effect, to correct. The tension between continuity and revolution was resolved through the assimilation of the former into the latter and the loss of the sacred. Guardini surrendered too much room to the revolution. To borrow a line from von Balthasar, “probably it will be impossible to spare Guardini from the accusation that, as a Christian, he ought to have rejected the bourgeois world more decisively” (von Balthasar 2010, p. 105). This, I think, is a possible interpretation of von Balthasar’s criticism of the groundlessness of Guardini’s vision. One cannot ground a Christianized modernity in the same “spirit of modernity” that one aims to correct.

Guardini foreshadowed a Christianized modern culture, that is, a culture that is modern as well as Christian. He affirmed the coexistence of Christianity and the modern world. At the theoretical level, the project consisted of the renewal of Catholicism so that it could engage modern culture and ground it within a transcendental perspective. One of Guardini’s merits is that he denounced the one-sidedness of that conception of industrialism as an indisputable path toward total immanence. He clarified that what appeared as an inevitability was instead the consequence of an option: Industrialism is not a destiny but a problem that Christianity can solve. To put it differently, in Guardini there are two forms of industrialism. One is described in Letters and is real: an industrialism totally immanent. With this form, Christianity cannot be conciliated. The other is envisioned by Guardini, an industrialism that comes to terms with transcendence and does not need to be conciliated with Christianity because it is already Christian. But his project of assimilation of industrialism remained groundless: He was unable to anchor his project of a Christianized culture to tradition, and quite inevitably, he anchored it to the same modernity he wanted to amend.

In the conclusion of his book, von Balthasar resolves to call Guardini a ‘resistent’ (von Balthasar 2010, p. 105). This is von Balthasar’s reasoning: profoundly convinced that Christians must embrace the world, including a technological culture that would bring disasters, and unable to articulate the remedy that would redirect such a technological culture to less mechanized and more humanized expressions, Guardini was left with only one option. More precisely, von Balthasar calls Guardini a man of resistance and hope. Let me quote von Balthasar, who summarizes Guardini: “Christian freedom is eschatological in nature: that is why it will always appear as an ‘ethical utopia’ within the worldly realm” (von Balthasar 2010, p. 106). From Christ, not from technological progress, arises the confidence in a better future. This ambiguity in Guardini’s work is reflected in the literature that has been built on his work. Although Guardini has been almost universally praised for his critical acceptance of modernity, he has also been appreciated for his call to resist technology.

5. Conclusions

In Guardini two different positions cohabit: on the one hand, there is the right perception that industrialism must be accepted; on the other, there is the notion that industrialism brings problems that Christianity is incapable of solving. If one is more sensitive to the first position, he/she celebrates Guardini as the theologian of the encounter with the modern world. If instead one is more sensitive to the second position, Guardini becomes the theologian of resistance. To put it differently, Guardini was unafraid to engage in industrialism; he showed no nostalgia for the rural and eventually premodern conditions of life. At the same time, however, he did not accept industrialism sic et sempliciter; his position can be called a “critical legitimization” of industrialism. Here the word critical is important. To accept industrialism critically, in fact, Guardini needed to identify a line of thought within industrialism itself that is compatible with Christianity. More specifically, he needed to detect a line of thought that is compatible with transcendence. Guardini, in fact, was ready to accept industrialism but not at the cost of delivering Christianity into the narrow limit of a mere immanence. As is, industrialism is pure immanence. In Letters, Guardini showed more and more evidence of that condition. So, the solution is not in industrialism as is, but in some other forms of industrialism that are compatible with Christianity. At the same time, Christianity needs to move from nostalgic remembrances of the past and engage industrialism so that Tradition can be revitalized, what Cardinal Newman called the “virtualities” of Tradition, namely, the inexhaustible character of Tradition. Tradition produces historical formulations of eternal truths that are always contingent because they respond to the questions of the age. New questions empower tradition to offer new answers and prevent the ossification of tradition. Thus, the acceptance of industrialism allows the interrogation of Tradition; in turn, the interrogation produces new answers. Finally, the new answers are instrumental in the discovery of a form of industrialism that is compatible with Christianity. In conclusion, the acceptance of industrialism, through the interrogation of Tradition, allows the discovery of a line of thought within industrialism that is compatible with Christianity. The sense of transcendence is safeguarded in a certain form of industrialism, or a form of industrialism is conceived that preserves and protects, rather than destroys, the sense of transcendence.

The cryptic comment von Balthasar made about the groundlessness of Guardini’s two-step critique of industrialization and revisioning of Christianity in industrialization presents a third possibility: a project of correcting the insufficiencies of Guardini’s synthesis and eventually grounding his vision of a Christian industrialism.