DRAFT

Liturgy, Antagonism, and Freedom. Guardini's Phenomenology of Religion

Holger Zaborowski, Vallendar

I.

When, as in the title of this conference, the years after World War I are referred to as time after

the cataclysm, a distinct feature of this period comes into the foreground. The late 1910s and the

1920s are, indeed, cataclysmic years; catastrophe, crisis, change, and revolution are its

characteristics; life, death, and decision are key words for an understanding of this short, but

significant era.1 Some historians speak of the "inter-war" period, thus—rightly—suggesting that

the term "post-World War I" fails fully to acknowledge that these years after 1918 follow World

War I as much as they lead to World War II. There is, therefore, a considerable difference

between the period after World War I and the years after World War II. After World War II—

even more, if such a comparison makes any sense at all, a cataclysm—Germany eventually found

its position within the West. This post-war period and thus Germany's "way to the West" found

its end in the peaceful reunification in 1990 while the time after World War I can, at best, be

interpreted as an interruption—as years of a ceasefire.

With respect to Germany's cultural history, too, there are important differences. The years after

1918 were culturally and intellectually perhaps the most vivid years—full of tensions and

1 Cf. Stephan Loos / Holger Zaborowski (eds.), Leben, Tod und Entscheidung. Studien zur Geistesgeschichte der Weimarer Republik, Berlin 2003.

contradictions—of recent German history. The reasons for this are as simple as complex. It was

clear that it was no longer possible simply to follow the modern trajectory. The narratives of the

Enlightenment tradition, of progress, reason, and freedom, became deeply questionable. Kurt

Flasch has reminded us of the very fact that many leading scholars, that is, scholars who still

represented the spirit of the 19th century, initially—or even longer—welcomed and justified the

war.2 After the war, a younger generation of thinkers, writers, and scholars (and, of course, poets,

composers, and artists), had to come to terms with the troubling statements and behavior of their

teachers and intellectual predecessors. Their worldviews seemed deeply shocking and

problematic, not only guilty of supporting or at least of not helping to avoid the war, but also

incapable of providing any kind of orientation. New points of reference and of meaning became

important—Kierkegaard, the fideist, rather than Kant, the rationalist; St. Paul, read as a radical

decisionist, rather than the gospels; Augustine, the early Christian existentialist, rather than

Aquinas.

In 1918, the modern world came to an end, not just for Oswald Spengler.3 What began is much

more difficult to label because, to a certain extent, it is still our contemporary period and because

it still shares many features of modernity and continues the modern project as much as it brings

something new. It may be best to speak of the late-modern condition that took its beginning in the

1910s. The number of thinkers and writers who belong to this period—most of them were born in

the 1880s—is vast. One of them is Romano Guardini whose life and thought reflects the

catastrophic time of the early 20th century—not visible at first sight, but clearly detectable under

closer scrutiny.

2 Kurt Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung, 3 Oswald Spengler

II.

Guardini was born in 1885 in Italy. His family moved to Mainz a year later. There is no doubt

that Guardini's life is, first of all, characterized by a significant tension between a southern

Catholic and a northern Protestant culture. Mainz was deeply Catholic, of course. The cultural

and religious climate in Germany, however, was defined by Protestantism with a nationalistic and

an anti-Catholic bent. Guardini who first studied in Tübingen, Munich and Berlin experienced

with no doubt the consequences of the late Kulturkampf.

There seem to have been other tensions, too. Guardini's early life is by no means straightforward.

He first studied chemistry and economics and only after a couple of years found his spiritual

vocation to become a priest and his scholarly vocation in the fields of philosophy and theology.

For him, the years of his early adulthood were years of struggle. And when he turned to Catholic

theology and philosophy, new tensions came into his consciousness. For the Catholic church was

radically opposed to modernity at the beginning of the 20th century. Guardini, to be sure, took

himself a position critical of modernity and of what considered its extremism. Later in his life, he

would write a book entitled The End of Modernity in which he not only diagnosed the end of

modern times, but also provided the possible outline of the epoch after its end. There is, however,

also no question that he regarded critically the specific kind of anti-modernism—provincial, anti-

intellectual, authoritarian—that was prevalent in early 20th century Catholicism. He was also a

deeply modern figure, shaped by a distinctly modern focus on human existence and freedom and

interested in exploring and reformulating the spirit of Christianity, of the Catholic world view, in

dialogue with the full Western tradition from Socrates and Plato through Augustine, Aquinas, and

Dante to Pascal, Nietzsche, Rilke and many modern thinkers.

As we will see further below, Guardini recognized tensions so much that the antagonistic

structure of reality became the founding principle of his thought. Contradiction, he argued,

characterizes concrete life. Like many others who were influenced by Nietzsche, Bergson,

Dilthey, Simmel, Klages, and early 20th century life philosophy in particular and by a focus on the

concrete life world in general, Guardini abandoned any kind of thought that put abstract

principles and formalistic rationality at its center. Very early in his career, he formulated his

philosophy of contradiction which he applied, transformed, and developed until his death in

1968.

In 1916, he sent Martin Heidegger (whom he first met a couple of years before in Heinrich

Rickert's seminar) his book Gegensatz und Gegensätze. Entwurf eines Systems der Typenlehre

(Freiburg 1914; Contradiction and Contradictions. Sketch of a System of Typology). A short time

later, Guardini responds to Heidegger's letter in response and summarizes his philosophical and

theological intention. "But I believe", he writes, "that we really work side by side. I would like to

recognize and say what the mysterious 'Spirit of Catholicism' consists of, and I almost believe to

be able to find it in the lively identification or relation of highest or rather empirical reality and

ideality."4 This statement is the key to understanding both Guardini's thought and how he reacted

to the cataclysmic experiences of his generation. First of all, he turns to the "spirit of

Catholicism" and, secondly, he develops an intellectual framework that allows him to overcome

the strained tensions of reality, not by dialectically synthesizing contradictions, but by

acknowledging their fundamental nature.

Guardini further developed the first sketch of his philosophy of contradiction. In 1925, he

published Der Gegensatz. Versuche zu einer Philosophie des Lebendig-Konkreten (The

Contradiction. Approaches to a Philosophy of Concrete Life). In the following, I will not focus

4 HJB 4, 70.

on this book, but rather examine a book that was published in 1918 and that made Guardini

famous: The Spirit of Liturgy. It shows perhaps even better or at least more immediately

Guardini's reaction to, and position after, the cataclysm.

III.

This book, rather a booklet, now comprised of seven more or less connected chapters, has

become a classic of Catholic theology. It was first published as the first volume of a new book

series, called Ecclesia Orans. Schriftenreihe zur Einführung in den Geist der Liturgie and edited

by Ildefons Herwegen, abbot of the important abbey of Maria Laach in the Eifel. It is one of the

most widespread publications in this field. In the year if its publication, another two editions were

published; until 2013, it has seen 23 editions. This book, however small it is, has had an impact

on 20th century church history that can hardly be overestimated. It has been translated not only

into English, French, Italian and Spanish, but also into Danish, Czech, Dutch, and, indeed,

Japanese. The liturgical movement and the liturgical and theological renewal leading to the

Second Vatican Council and its aftermath, can not be understood without taking into account

Guardini's writing about the spirit of liturgy (which is, because of its dense style, quite difficult to

read for contemporary readers).

Before I go on to explain how and to what extent a short book about the spirit of liturgy exhibits

also the spirit of its own time, I have to explain its background a little more. Guardini wrote this

book with another book in mind or, to put it differently, as one element of a set of two books,

written by two different authors. While Guardini focused on the liturgical life of the church, his

friend Karl Neundörfer, to whom he dedicated Der Gegensatz. Versuche zu einer Philosophie des

Lebendig-Konkreten should have written a book about the spirit of canonical law. This project

was inspired by Rudolf von Iherings impressive four-volume Der Geist des römischen Rechts auf

den verschiedenen Stufen seiner Entwicklung. Neundörfer, who first studied law and then

theology and who was later the director of the "Caritas" in the diocese of Mainz and pastor of St.

Quintin, died in a mountaineering accident in 1926 and, therefore, did not write the book about

canonical law. Guardini's The Spirit of Liturgy remained a fragment, as it were.

At first sight, the two topics—liturgy on the one hand and canonical law on the other—look very

different indeed. Yet, there is a close connection between them. The intention of the two friends,

to be sure, was "to present the essence of the church through its two basic elements". Their main

interest was, therefore, ecclesiological. However, the two young men—both were in their earl

thirties—did not take a merely theoretical interest in the church. It was a practical interest in

shaping the church and in thus providing meaning for a disoriented generation. Already the fact

that both of them studied something else before they turned to theology and were ordained priests

can exhibits the deeper dimension of their interest in the nature of the church.

This interest clearly stands in the context of the post-war period. It was the thorough-going crisis

of the secular world that made them turn towards the spiritual or sacred world. One can,

furthermore, argue that ecclesiology, the focus on the church is itself a sign of crisis. This

theological discipline only developed in the post-reformation era when it became necessary as

never before to think about the nature of the (Catholic) church. Ever since then, a specific focus

on the social form and essence of church can be read as indicative both internal and external

crises. This is true, too, of the religious and, more specifically, ecclesiastical renewal in the late

1910s and early 1920s.

Guardini's interest in liturgical questions has deep roots. When he was a student at Tübingen, he

first encountered the world of monastic liturgy in the Archabbey St. Martin in Beuron in the

upper Danube valley, close to the city of Messkirch where Martin Heidegger was born. The

Benedictine monastery was not only incisive for Guardini, but also for Martin Heidegger, Edith

Stein and Max Scheler and many others who encountered in Beuron genuine religious practices

and a counter-world to late modernity so that some interpreters speak of a "Beuron syndrom".

Before I go on to focus more on the content of Guardini's early thought, I would like to address

briefly its method a little more. Guardini is, first of all, a deeply hermeneutical thinker. He knows

that the message of Christianity is in constant need of interpretation and translation, not just of

texts, but also of practices such as the liturgical ones. Therefore, he tries to build a bridge

between the century-old liturgy of the church and modern believers, not focusing on the mere

external appearance of the liturgy nor on its historical development, but on its inner essence or

spirit. Because he focuses on the "thing itself" of Catholic liturgy, leaving behind possible

prejudices, and thus provides a rich description of the very performance of the liturgy, one can

also characterize his method as phenomenological. Guardini is also an existentialist thinker, thus

focalizing on human existence and the relation between the human being and God without

neglecting the primacy of God's revelation. Unlike neo-scholasticism which declared eternal

truths with no significant reference to its own time and with no sensitivity for the historically

concrete and particular situation, Guardini's thought is deeply historical, too. His thinking reflects

the turn towards the contingent as well as towards human existence as finite, mortal, broken, and

fragile that characterizes much of post-World War I thought.

IV.

In The Spirit of Liturgy, Guardini approaches the liturgy and its spirit by showing how the

liturgical life of the church always already overcomes the tensions, contradictions, or

antagonisms that define human life. In the following I would like to focus on the antagonisms of

the individual and the communal, of the particular and the universal, of the spiritual and the

corporeal, and of gravity and playfulness in order to show Guardini's philosophy of

contradictions at work. It is important to note that he does not provide the theoretical foundation

for this philosophy in this book.

As far as the first antagonism is concerned—the one of the individual and the communal—,

Guardini argues that prayer is, first of all, the prayer of the individual. Guardini knows how

important it is that the individual him- or herself prays—free as far as form and content is

concerned and with considerable leeway (15). Yet, for Guardini who always thinks

ecclesiastically, that is, with respect to the church as a given entity established by God, the prayer

of the individual is not sufficient or, to put it differently, the life of the Christian is not limited to

solitary prayer. There is, he argues, the "regular spiritual life of a community" (15) that is subject

to other laws than any private prayer in the chamber. This is where liturgy finds its proper place.

Its subject is, therefore, the "whole of a faithful community as such, a plus that transcends the

more total number of individuals, the church" (17). It is clear the Guardini develops this idea with

a critical view to Protestantism (a little later, he will explicitly refer to it). Guardini however, does

not limit himself to a religious or theological argument or to empirical observation. He deepens

his position anthropologically. For in the higher unity of a community, he argues, human beings

do not get lost, but "are actually internally liberated and shaped" (17). The reason for this lies in

the "both individual and social nature of the human being" (17).

What characterizes liturgy as a communal way of praying? Guardini holds that for the liturgy, the

unity of lex orandi and lex credendi plays a significant role. How one ought to pray is

intrinsically related to what one ought to believe—and vice versa. This is why liturgical prayer is,

unlike the prayer of the individual or folk forms of prayer, particularly characterized by thought

and ideas, not by emotion nor feeling: "It is fully pervaded with the truth of the revelation." In so

arguing, Guardini does not defend some kind of liturgical rationalism (22). According to his

interpretation, the forms of liturgical devotion must be interwoven with a "warm life of emotion"

(22). Liturgy, he argues, is "tamed emotion", that is, an emotion that is limited by the truth of

revelation. This explains, he maintains, the "wonderful reluctance" (24) of the liturgy, its

discretion in which the human being can "express his inner life in its whole fullness and depth,

while at the same time knowing that its mystery is being preserved" (24).

Guardini acknowledges the tension between the individual human being and the community of

humans. He does not, however, lean towards one side, preferring one over the other. He tries to

find a position in between extremes—that is, in between individualism and collectivism. This

meditating tendency is also evident in his dealing with the particular and the universal.

In his explanations of the liturgical style Guardini puts emphasis on an important parallel

between liturgy and Holy Scripture (45). The biblical texts display the supernatural truth of Christ

in particular historical situations, he argues, and the same happens in the liturgy even though "it

shows, because of its specific intentions, more the transtemporal or eternal in its shape" (46).

Historical and transhistorical truth are also mediated in the liturgy. The particular is raised to the

level of the universal. Guardini knows that particularly modern human beings have difficulty

with this. For they desire the particular rather than the universal, the concrete rather than the

abstract, and practical action rather than contemplative life. Where modernity has, according to

Guardini, led towards extremes, he provides an attempt at mediation without neglecting or even

playing down the urges of modern people. He knows that he—with all the tensions that he

experienced—is one of them so that whenever he talks about "modern human beings", he also

talks about himself. There is, therefore, an underlying autobiographical dimension of this book,

too. He always speaks about himself and his own difficulty with, and relation to, the liturgy.

The spiritual and the corporeal, too, are united in the liturgy so that one cannot conceive of one

without the other. For Guardini, materialism is as wrong as any kind of "spiritualism" that

neglects the corporeal world. For him, the symbols of the liturgy show the unity of the corporeal

and the spiritual. He knows that some people criticize the use of symbols in liturgical contexts.

They argue that in order to worship God who is himself incorporeal, there is no need for anything

corporeal. Mere thoughts suffice. Yet, the corporeal, as Guardini notices, plays a significant role

in the liturgy. Guardini explains this once again anthropologically. In his argumentation, he

makes an effort to avoid dualism, be it in its ancient Platonic or in its modern Cartesian form, but

he also endeavors to evade any form of identification of the spiritual and the corporeal. He knows

about the danger of loosing sight of the difference between one and the other. For if the spiritual

and the corporeal are too closely identified, the soul could simply be taken as the body's internal

side or the body, reversely, as the outer side of the soul. Even though this view may have a much

closer relation to the liturgy, it seems to him deeply problematic. It makes it impossible, Guardini

argues, to develop a real understanding of what a symbol is because the inner life is in constant

flux so that no static relation between an object or a gesture and the inner life of a person can be

established. This, however, is necessary for any kind of symbol. In the following passages,

Guardini further develops his anthropology of the symbol as the "natural expression" of a

"specific state of the soul". Symbols, he argues, show the deeper unity, not the identity, of the

spiritual and the corporeal. However, as Guardini claims, there remains a primacy of the spiritual.

One can argue that this must be the case, because only the spiritual realm can provide deeper

meaning to the corporeal and, even more, meaning at all.

Guardini's quest for meaning is also detectable in his attempt to combine the contradictions of

gravity and playfulness. He rightly interprets the liturgy as a play. But he realizes that this can

easily be misunderstood which is why he wrote an additional chapter devoted to the "gravity" of

the liturgy. His intention is to avoid the danger of aestheticism, of merely focusing on the beauty

of the liturgy while at the same time neglecting its relation to truth and, therefore, to the very

meaning of one's own life (77). What stands at the core of the liturgical play is for Guardini not

the pleasing of the senses nor any kind of futile entertainment. It is a matter of the utmost

significance—the salvation of one's soul, "ultimately the only real life". The Spirit of Liturgy does

not only examine the meaning of liturgical practices. It focus on the meaning of human life.

V.

At fist sight, Guardini's The Spirit of Liturgy does not betray its time of composition. It could

have been written, it seems, 10 year earlier or 10 years later. There is with no doubt a critical

engagement with modernity on Guardini's side. But the question needs to be asked to what extent

Guardini's small book—or, for that matter, his thought—is indicative of the catastrophic situation

after World War I? Is Guardini not in fact avoiding any kind of deeper dealing with his own

time? This is clearly the case. However, this is also not the full truth. For Guardini's not dealing

with his own time is rooted in his very dealing with his own time. This is the reason why he even

speaks of his "war essays".

As has become clear, Guardini's interest in the liturgy is deeply ecclesiastically oriented. He aims

at understanding the church, first of all, but he also wants to reappropriate and justify it against

the background of chaotic times. His generation of thinkers experienced that there was no

certainty at all. Theirs was the experience of living in ruins—the ruins of traditional ways of life

and of all too common worldviews, were they religious or philosophical. Guardini's friend

Heidegger radicalized this experience of meaninglessness in his early hermeneutics of facticity.

Philosophy, he argued, was not only the very act of philosophizing, it was also the radical

experience and "performance" of "questionableness". After a short "Protestant period", that is, an

approximation to, and reading of, the Protestant tradition, Heidegger broke not only with

Catholicism, but with Christianity in general in the 1920s. For him, there is only left an "either-

or"—either to be religious or to be a philosopher. All similarities notwithstanding, Guardini

follows a very different trajectory. In times of chaos, he finds a place of certainty or, in other

words, a tradition, an institution, and a practical performance that provides certainty and

meaning. Whereas the merely secular word of politics has become deeply questionable, the

sacred world of the church has taken on new significance.

In his reassessment of the church, Guardini is not alone. He belongs to, and has himself greatly

influenced a movement that was liturgical and at the same time ecclesial. In 1923, Guardini

published another short book, entitled Vom Sinn der Kirche "Of the Meaning of the Church".

Even the title shows neatly the difference between Heidegger and Guardini. While the former

aimed at the meaning of Being, the latter discussed the meaning of the church. The fact that

Guardini dedicated this book "to the Catholic youth", shows once again that his interest is not

merely theoretical. He intends to shape young people in providing them with meaning. For he

knows that "the question what the church means for religious life, has become ever more

pressing". The reason is, that, as the famous first paragraph of the book runs, "a religious event of

unpredictable consequences has begun: The church awakes in the souls."5 Guardini, to be sure,

deals again with modern individualism and subjectivism and with what he considers the "decline"

5 Romano Guardini, Vom Sinn der Kirche, Mainz 1923, 1.

of the understanding of the church since the middle ages. He holds that in the recent past the

"mystical" side of church, "all that stands behind tangible purposes and institutions, what

expresses itself in the concept of the kingdom of God and of the mystical body of Christ, was not

experienced directly".6 When he now speaks of the "reawakening of the church in the souls", he

refers to the rediscovery of the mystical dimension of the church. This, he argues, shows a new

kind of "religious life" that is no longer focused on the individual subject, but encompasses the

two poles of the objective and of the subjective, of the individual and of the world, of the singular

person and of the community of believers. Life, he argues, is again what it should be, the "unity

of contradictions" (Spannungseinheit).

There are many ways of explaining Guardini's concept of a "unity of tensions". But one important

way of explaining it is the historical and, indeed, biographical context. As I said in the beginning

of this paper, not just in the case of Guardini, the experience of World War I has led to a

pervasive crisis of modernity and its ideals. The war entailed a new discovery of anything that

transcends the limits of the individual and also an emphasis on communal forms of life. The

"liturgical movement" which was greatly inspired by Guardini was just one of so many other

movements. Reason was not replaced, but complemented by an emphasis on the irrational or the

superrational. Not only Guardini rediscovered the mystical and the medieval world. There was a

significant neo-medievalism in the 1920s. As in similar movements in the 19th century, the

medieval world appeared as an ideal world, not yet corrupted by the principles of modernity that

would eventually lead to the catastrophic beginning of the 20th century. Heidegger, too, spent

quite some effort in interpreting the medieval mystics in the early 1920s. And in 1922, Paul

Ludwig Landsberg published his Die Welt des Mittelalters und wir. Ein

6 Romano Guardini, Vom Sinn der Kirche, 5.

geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über den Sinn eines Zeitalters, thus looking for another kind

of meaning in deeply troubled times.

So far, I have spoken a great deal about liturgy and antagonisms, or the "unity of contradictions".

Freedom, the third word in the title of this paper, has not yet played a significant role. It has,

however, implicitly been present. However critical of modernity Guardini appears to be, he

remains deeply indebted to key principles of modernity. His use of reason—his dealing with

philosophy in general and with anthropology in particular—as well as his specific focus on

freedom is deeply modern. Given the key principles of thought, he does not want to bypass

modernity. He wants to complement it and, therefore, takes the pre-modern experience, as it

were, as seriously as the modern and late modern. This is particularly true of the experience of

freedom. Full freedom, he argues in the last chapter of The Spirit of Liturgy, is only possible in

the act of contemplation. For there is a primacy of logos over ethos, of theory over practice, of

the contemplative live over the active life. So after the cataclysm, Guardini finds himself praying

before God. "Adoration", he writes, "is the ultimate" (86).