Background
Romano Guardini was born on February 17, 1885 in Verona, into the family of a merchant. His family moved to Mainz when he was one year old and he lived in Germany for the rest of his life.
Romano Guardini was born on February 17, 1885 in Verona, into the family of a merchant. His family moved to Mainz when he was one year old and he lived in Germany for the rest of his life.
Guardini attended the Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium. After studying chemistry in Tübingen for two semesters, and economics in Munich and Berlin for three, he decided to become a priest. After studying Theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Tübingen, he was ordained in Mainz in 1910.
Although he was born in Verona, Italy, Romano Guardini moved early in life to Germany. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1910, and throughout the remainder of his life he became widely known as one of the most respected theologians of the twentieth century. He wrote in German, but much of his work is available to English-speaking readers through translations, many appearing years after the books’ original German publications.
Guardini fulfilled many roles during his life: chaplain, professor, literary critic, and film reviewer. His reputation rests, however, on his profound erudition and the wisdom he consistently brought to the theological and moral problems he explored — in an elegant, meditative style — in his writings. Although he used his influence to help bring about the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, with its far-reaching reforms of the Catholic Church, he was regarded as somewhat of a reactionary, a throwback to an era when the doctrines, teachings, and traditions of the Catholic Church had profound meaning and influence in the day-to-day lives of Catholics.
In his book "The Virtues: On Forms of Moral Life" Guardini writes not a treatise but a series of reflective essays on how to practice such virtues as “disinteredness”, “courtesy”, and “justice before God.” The Virtues is recommended by a Choice critic “for anyone concerned with the deeper qualities of man.” In "The Wisdom of the Psalms" he offers a series of near-mystical meditations on selected Psalms, providing the reader with a guide for devotion based on the scriptural texts.
In 1923 he was appointed to a chair in Philosophy of Religion at the University of Berlin. In the 1935 essay "Der Heiland" (The Saviour) he criticized Nazi mythologizing of the person of Jesus and emphasized the Jewishness of Jesus. The Nazis forced him to resign from his Berlin position in 1939. From 1943 to 1945 he retired to Mooshausen, where his friend Josef Weiger had been parish priest since 1917.
In 1945 Guardini was appointed professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and resumed lecturing on the Philosophy of Religion. In 1948, he became professor at the University of Munich, where he remained until retiring for health reasons in 1962. Guardini died in Munich, Bavaria on October 1, 1968. He was buried in the priests’ cemetery of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Munich. His estate was left to the Catholic Academy in Bavaria that he had co-founded.
In 1952, Guardini won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Guardini's book "The Lord", published in English translation in the late 1940s, remained in print for decades and, according to publisher Henry Regnery, was "one of the most successful books I have ever published." Father Guardini has been highly praised by both Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.
(You've matured, but have your prayers? Has your understan...)
(A treasury of spiritual wisdom on how to prepare your min...)
1956(This book collects a fascinating series of letters writte...)
(You may have read the Catechism of the Catholic Church an...)
Yet while Guardini lamented the erosion of Christian Revelation in people’s lives, he remained confident that men and women could find a way to retain faith despite the turmoil and rapid change of twentieth-century life.
Guardini's books were often powerful studies of traditional themes in the light of present-day challenges or examinations of current problems as approached from the Christian, and especially Catholic, tradition. He was able to get inside such different worldviews as those of Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostojevski and Nietzsche, and make sense of them for modern readers.
It is difficult to summarize such a rich and varied body of work, but at least three broad themes can be identified in the author’s many books. One theme concerns the role and place of man in modern, technological society. He recognizes even at this early date that the twentieth century is profoundly different from the past. Guardini, however, remained optimistic in the face of the changes, believing that it was possible to create “a new virtue, a new skill in intellectual government in which... we can break free.”
A second broad theme that emerges in Guardini’s work is the problem of faith. He explored this problem most effectively in "Pascal for Our Time", a book that examines the spiritual life of the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. A final broad question that Guardini’s work attempts to answer is less philosophical and theological and more pastoral: What role does the Church play in people’s lives, and how can individuals become better Catholics?
Quotations: “People become saints for who they are, not for what they write.”
