Romano Guardini Makes Lemonade

Gedenktafel-Guardini-Heppenheim–Bremond – CC BY 3.0

When two separate projects converge in unexpected ways the convergence can be exhilarating.

Two projects I’m currently working on:

-A re-reading of the dissatisfaction soldiers feel upon returning to the civilian world, not as a pathology or wound, but as a moral indictment of our dime store culture and how it fails to nourish us as deeply as more communitarian modes of living.

-Background reading to better understand Laudato Si, which necessarily includes Romano Guardini.

Reading The End of the Modern World, I came across a passage that eloquently expresses the connection between these two projects. Specifically, it better articulates the positive aspects of “mass conformity” – and yes, they exist – than I ever have. Guardini was nothing if not an anti-polemic, his mind a scale sensitive to even the most subtle variations and half-concealed values of every human endeavor. The End of the Modern World is studded with caveats. Guardini makes certain that the reader wont mistake his criticisms of the modern world as a yearning to return to a perfect Medieval past. The past wasn’t perfect. And the present isn’t without positive attributes. The following passage is specifically related to Guardini’s conception of “mass man” (too complex to get into here, an idea that deserves it’s own post), but the observations are easily transposed to a reclamation of the positive attributes of military experience:

“The work of dominating the world calls for a union of skills and a unity of achievement that can only grow from quite a different attitude. The new attitude is revealed by the evident fact that the coming man renounces an idiosyncratic life for a communal form, that he surrenders individual initiative for a given order of things. The process of conformity has profaned so many areas of life and has done so much violence to man that we are apt to neglect its positive meaning, a meaning which it does possess. It lies behind the immensity of the work to be done; it lies in the corresponding greatness of man’s position as he faces his task, in his sense of solidarity with it, in his comradeship for his fellow workers. When all other substantial values have disintegrated comradeship remains.”

Of course there’s a tension between the assumptions of the two projects, between my own interpretation of our contemporary culture as riddled with nihilistic narcissism and Guardini’s concern that the Romantic Personality (best exemplified, in his estimation, by Goethe) has been completely decimated – but the fragment above bridges the gulf in applying to both concerns equally.

Comradeship remains.

My doctor recently asked me if I regretted joining the Army and deploying twice to Iraq as an Infantryman. It was such a large and complex question, a simple “yes” or “no” answer just wasn’t possible. Leave it to Guardini to eloquently suss out the redeemable qualities of an otherwise terrible scenario: comradeship remains.