Guardini's Gegensatzlehre

Guardini's method – or perhaps better, attitude – in all of this was his ‘Gegensatzlehre’, or theory of oppositions. It was Guardini's way of understanding and explaining concrete living realities, which, he believed, are invariably complex, made up of contrasting elements in vital tension with one another. He himself states that his central early works, such as The Spirit of the Liturgy, Sacred Signs and The Church and the Christian have the Gegensatzlehre as ‘their ruling direction and measure’.Footnote ² These works (and many more of Guardini's writings in these areas) show how body and soul, individual and corporate body, freedom and commitment, are opposing realities which actually need one another and enrich us by entering into dialogue with one another.Footnote ³ The Gegensatzlehre is also exemplified in the topic of this essay: Guardini's call for the integration of faith and life, where he also seeks a living tension which can nourish both poles. For instance, in the preface to Freedom Grace and Destiny, given as a lecture in 1943, Guardini worried that ‘the conscious unity of existence has been to a large extent lost even by believing Christians. The believer no longer stands with his faith amid the concrete, actual world, and he no longer rediscovers that world in his faith.’Footnote ⁴ The ordinary rule of life, as Guardini points out, that to which most members of the Church are called, is that in which ‘natural and supernatural values and demands are brought into an harmonious balance’.Footnote ⁵ This conscious unity had been lost, and with it the ability to reflect one's faith in the secular world. Michael Novak offers a telling quotation from Guardini's writings, to the effect that anybody should be able to tell that you are a Catholic even by the way you climb a tree!Footnote ⁶

Faith and Life – Only Connect

‘Only Connect’ was the epigraph of Howards End by E.M. Forster, a novel published in 1910, the year of Guardini's ordination: it is a matter of linking the prose and the passion, the beast and the monk: living, as individuals and society, in fragments no longer, but reconciling poetry and perspiration in a synthesis which enriches both. Forster's ‘sermon’ as he called it, was delivered in the era of rampant capitalism and urban squalor, and a growing middle class. Guardini appealed for a similar reconciliation: he called on Christians to forge a unity in their existence, bringing the inspiration of faith to bear on a world which seemed to be fleeing from God, but nevertheless thirsted for his Word and healing. Guardini had a pivotal role in many areas of Catholic thought in the twentieth century, and his vision of unity, both – and: life and reason, ethos and logos, inwardness and action, etc, was a powerful witness to the ability of faith to integrate aspects of human life which modernity had split into false dilemmas.

These ideas are echoed closely by the Second Vatican Council, in particular by Gaudium et Spes, 43: ‘One of the gravest errors of our times is the dichotomy between the faith which many profess and the practice of their daily lives.’ Unlike many other councils in the history of the Church from her beginning, Vatican II had no major theological matter to clarify, no rampant heresy with which to deal, but the practical error or difficulty which is summed up in those words, rather similar to Guardini's, was at the heart of its mission and is reflected in Paul VI's well known remark that the rupture between the Gospel and culture is ‘without a doubt the drama of our time’.Footnote ⁷

Faith and World in the Council

One of the most famous passages of the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes 36, in its analysis of the autonomy of earthly affairs, offers an analysis of the problem and a possible solution.Footnote ⁸ It addresses the fear that bringing faith to bear on earthly realities will lead to a theocracy or at least to a loss of an equilibrium between the things that are Caesar's and those that are God's, and points out that this fear is misplaced. The passage is key, for it seeks to achieve a balanced unity between what it sees as the rightful God-given autonomy of creation (culture, science, humanity) and its dependence on God:

Guardini and Autonomy

This paragraph has given rise to many interpretations. Tracy Rowland, in Culture and the Thomist Tradition, on the treatment of culture in Gaudium et Spes, points out that while it is perfectly clear that all things have their own autonomy, that is, their proper laws and order, stability, truth and goodness, it is not so clear that the process of secularisation will respect these laws and values. She also quotes David Schindler's view that paragraph 36 probably needs to be interpreted from the perspective of Christ who reveals man to himself (Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 22) and that this would suggest that Christ's message and followers are called to inform, from within, everything in the cosmos, ‘every act, every relationship, every cultural or social or economic order’. But she also mentions Bernard Lambert OP, a writer close to the drafting of Gaudium et Spes, who saw it as a baptism on the Church's part of autonomy (‘society now is constituted as an autonomous society and finds in its own consistency, methods, structures and laws for its own organisation’) and of secularisation, the process whereby society frees itself from religious notions, beliefs or institutions which used to order its existence, which he defines as part of the logical development of creation.Footnote ¹⁰

How does this compare to Guardini's approach? At first sight, it falls foul of his repeated criticisms of modernity's drive towards autonomy, particularly in the ethical sphere. He often claimed that ‘the whole modern view of the autonomy of the world and of man… seem to rest ultimately on the notion which made of God the “other” ’.Footnote ¹¹ He applies this view to Kant, for example, in Conscience (1932):

He believes that when it comes to God, heteronomy is just as wrong as autonomy, for God is not ‘the other’, but he is God. As Roland Millare has pointed out, the ‘autonomy alluded to by the Council was precisely the problem that Guardini was trying to overcome with his prophetic insight’.Footnote ¹³

Guardini diagnosed the gulf between faith and life in a neglect of the theology of creation: ‘to save redemption by the Son, [man] has been forced to abandon creation by the Father’.Footnote ¹⁴ Religion had taken refuge in inwardness and left the world to its own devices. Faith had lost contact with the world and grown increasingly incapable of grasping and fashioning it, of saving it from the perils which continually threaten its objects and values. ‘The riches of revelation are inexhaustible, but we have to put our questions to them, and these questions come from the reality of the world.’Footnote ¹⁵

Guardini's Theology of Creation

The theology of creation allows the believer to understand St Paul's words: ‘All is yours, but you are Christ's’ (1 Cor 3:23). Gaudium et Spes 22 declares that Christ reveals man to himself; Guardini claimed that Christian revelation also offered modern man a new relationship to creation, an ability to exercise his stewardship in a free and powerful way:

Creating means that God places man in a relation to Himself in which reason first says ‘God is not I’ and then adds ‘but He is not another’ either, by this seeming contradiction pointing to something inexpressible which is beyond conceptual thought. But this inexpressible something can be immediately apprehended by the religious consciousness. ‘Indeed it is likely that religious consciousness consists in this very apprehension.’Footnote ¹⁷

For Guardini, the ‘supreme quality of creation’ is the fact that God releases that which he has conceived that it may stand and act freely.Footnote ¹⁸ As Herbert McCabe has remarked, creation is simply ‘leaving the world to be itself’.Footnote ¹⁹ In this way, creation possesses the complete seriousness of validity, an inevitability of fact and law which, for example, determines the experience and character of modern science. The idea of autonomy, for Guardini, is a misunderstanding and misuse of this status, it takes creation too seriously and thus turns it into an idol. As Guardini put it, ‘the world does not wish to become an idol. It desires that charming lightness of touch which finds its final expression in the “freedom of the children of God”,’ who take neither the world, themselves nor nature seriously, and thus share in that divine ‘letting be’.Footnote ²⁰ Our task is to recognise the will of God which ‘does not hang above the world, but lies within it, lies in its being what it is’.Footnote ²¹

In a commemorative essay on the anthropology of Gaudium et Spes, written in 1996, Walter Kasper also draws attention to the need of a deepening in the theology of creation and its emergence from that of redemption if the Church is to be able to articulate her relation to the world: ‘[t]he background of Gaudium et Spes is a theological conception which assumes the unity of the orders of creation and redemption’Footnote ²² But this, for Kasper, showed up a weak point of the document: there is a ‘certain lack of clarity…with respect to the relationship between man's character as God's image according to Genesis 1:26 and that of Jesus Christ according to Colossians 1:15’, that is, between the orders of creation and redemption. Both are involved in Gaudium et Spes: ‘without the creator, the creature would disappear’ (Gaudium et Spes 36) and ‘Christ reveals man to himself’ (Gaudium et Spes 22), but are not successfully integrated. Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger were both intimately involved in the drafting of Gaudium et Spes and came to remarkably similar assessments, believing that creation and redemption, nature and grace had not been successfully interrelated.Footnote ²³

Kasper suggests that this is a task for theology rather than for councils: ‘[U]ltimately, we cannot expect a council to define systematically the relationship between these terms; this is a task for subsequent theology’Footnote ²⁴. Time would be needed for Guardini's linking of creation and redemption, the world and faith, nature and grace to mature in the life of the Church, in her theology and in her living experience.

Subsequent Developments

And indeed in the years after the Council a development of its doctrine has emerged, echoing Guardini's prophetic phrase: ‘the unity of Christian existence’. This feature emerges in official documents and other reflections and has been most commonly expressed as ‘unity of life’. Here is one of the clearest examples: ‘[T]he unity of life of the lay faithful is of the greatest importance: indeed they must be sanctified in everyday professional and social life. Therefore, to respond to their vocation, the lay faithful must see their daily activities as an occasion to join themselves to God, fulfill his will, serve other people and lead them to communion with God in Christ.’Footnote ²⁵ In recent years, since the Synod, this has become a commonly repeated phrase in magisterial and unofficial spiritual exhortation.Footnote ²⁶

While this development, still in an embryonic stage, reflects Guardini's desires and work, it goes deeper than that, calling on Christians to welcome the values of the world, seen as good in its creation – and seen as better still in its re-creation in the Word made flesh, who ‘has broken down the dividing wall’ (Eph 2:14). St Thomas, echoing the Patristic tradition, had after all remarked that the second creation was fittingly also brought about through the Word, in order that restoration should correspond to creation: “For God indeed was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).Footnote ²⁷

I mentioned at the outset that Guardini's liturgical writings contributed to liturgical renewal; he believed that the liturgy had a special ability to express faith and particularly stressed the power of the ancient collects of the Roman Church in this regard: they rest on a bedrock of truth, possess an unrivalled concision and polish as inheritors of the Roman rhetorical style and also harmonise with the disposition of the person who is offering them.Footnote ²⁸ So the last word goes to one of those venerable prayers, taken from the Easter Vigil meditation on the book of Genesis, which reflects Guardini's desire to blend the theology of creation with that of redemption, the new creation: