The Un-Human Man Predicted By Guardini Is Here
Nearly every week brings evidence of how prophetic was the priest-philosopher Romano Guardini in his classic work The End of the Modern World. The analysis in this set of professorial lectures puts in perspective the mounting question, "What has gone wrong with things in the time in which we live?"
Romano points out that modern man resents authority as "slavery" because his age has "made revolution a perpetual institution." And with the destruction of authority has come "its burlesque — force."
This is evident in that every day brings word of disturbances in the streets of our cities when force used by criminals asserting autonomy from authority is met by force used in the name of public order. Jails are packed by the outcome of this conflict. Courts cannot keep up with cases resulting from the attempt to keep some sort of civilized order, an order that once reigned, perhaps not perfectly but at least as a tolerable substitute for the perfection that the Kingdom of God will bring.
This, of course, more and more challenges the optimism once given to "progress," one modern attitude that we should not regret losing. The question is what may replace it. Guardini presented more than 50 years ago the possibility that man will throw off any understanding of what he is, and deny his human responsibilities. Thereby man puts himself at the disposal of "demons," who appeal to us to use power with no reference to a distinction between good and evil. This frightening possibility is being realized these many decades after Guardini suggested it in the new experimentation with the very elements of the human biological makeup — in moves to clone ourselves, to manipulate human procreation, to cannibalize fellow humans for the benefit of the more powerful, that is, the already born.
Guardini foresaw this situation thus:
"The new danger arises from a factor intrinsic to the work of man, even to the work of his spirit. The new danger arises from the factor of power . . . Man today holds power over things, but we can assert confidently that he does not yet have power over his own power."
We only in the past few months have seen moves to invade the very humanness of others by experimenting with the very sources and natural development of human beings in the name of research aimed at serving human needs. In other words, we will act un-humanly in the name of humanity. Surely the un-human man mentioned by Guardini has arrived.
He accurately charted that possibility even as it was not fully in view, as it is now:
"With the denial of Christian Revelation genuine personality had disappeared from the human consciousness. With it had gone that realm of attitudes and values, which only it can subsume.
"The coming era will bring a frightful yet salutary preciseness to these conditions . . . As the benefits of Revelation disappear even more from the coming world, man will truly learn what it means to be cut off from Revelation."
What for Guardini was a "coming era" is now our time, and it has dawned with a terrible hideousness that is possibly worse than even the priest-philosopher foresaw. Even those presumed to be "good men" in our time are defending the use of technological force brought against our true humanness, and doing so in the name of serving man. Thus we are seeing the un-human man of the laboratory and the clinic being given not only power over human life, but praise and support in its exercise. Nazi eugenics was merely an appetizer for this cannibalistic feast.
Guardini put this in an optimistic light, but it cannot be said such light is yet within sight. Perhaps it waits for today's believers to bring it out from under the bushel where it is hidden:
"As unbelievers deny Revelation more decisively, it will become more evident what it really means to be a Christian."
Guardini foresaw a cleansing effect of this "upon the new Christian attitude, which in a special way must possess both trust and courage." Unfortunately, there is little indication this is taking place, even among many calling themselves Catholics. This gives even greater necessity to the "new evangelization" called for by Pope John Paul II. This evangelization may accomplish what Guardini foresaw:
" . . . The new age will declare that secularized facets of Christianity are sentimentalities. This declaration will clear the air. The world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean."
Has the prophetic power of Guardini here broken down? We will have to wait and see, though waiting doesn't mean we should be inactive in trying to bring about such cleansing. That responsibility of faith is daunting in Guardini's vision:
"Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world (Matt. 23:12), but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ."
Meanwhile, we are living in the ruins of the modern world. And here we have only two choices, Guardini tells us: " . . . To match the greatness of [man's] power with the strength of his humanity, or to surrender his humanity to power and perish."
Recent incidents of immorality by public figures confirm something Guardini had to say about ethics, or rather the corrosion of that field of human understanding:
"Ethical norms are valid by their own inner truth, but they become historically effective by taking root in man's vital instincts, inclinations of the soul, social structures, cultural forms and traditions. The process we have been studying breaks these ancient rootholds. They are replaced — at least temporarily — by formalized rules and regulations and by various techniques known as 'organization.' But organization does not create an ethic.
"Thus the importance of ethical norms in men's lives gives way to stress on mere expediency. This is true above all of those norms which protect the person."
All the practices of lust so prevalent today, including adultery, strike at personhood. They all dehumanize those who indulge in them, and tend to make victims of that lust viewed as somehow the proper objects of the power that is abused in that practice. Guardini sees many accepted practices of our time as the result of the disappearance of a former respect for the human body that was once so sensitive it was considered a sacrilege to dissect a human corpse:
"Trace the connecting line which leads from control of human conception to interrupted pregnancy; from race-breeding to the destruction of undesirable life. What may one not do if by 'one' we mean the average man we encounter everywhere, in the street, in our newspapers, on the screen, radio and television, in literature and drama, and, most ominous of all, in our statesmen, lawmakers, military and economic leaders?
"When man drops the ethical reins, he places himself utterly at the mercy of power . . . In the long run, domination requires not only the passive consent, but also the will to be dominated, a will eager to drop personal responsibility and personal efforts."
Guardini correctly diagnoses what is afflicting us as the modern age falls apart, and a postmodern world arrives — a sickening of the spirit. And he presents the only antidote for such sickness:
"On what does its [the spirit's] health depend? First Plato and later in the fullness of Revelation St. Augustine made this clear: The health of the spirit depends on its relation to truth, to the good and holy. The spirit thrives on knowledge, justice, love, adoration — not allegorically, but literally."
And when this happens, the only remedy is the desperate one of conversion. Guardini tells us. Thus the new evangelization becomes an enterprise not just of religion, but literally to save the postmodern world from one devoid of the living human spirit which seems sick to the point of death. We must redirect present man's hunger for change to being changed toward that, which feeds and medicates the spirit.
"What will count will be not details or elaborations, but fundamentals: dignity or slavery, growth or decline, truth or lie; the mind or the passions . . . Here is the prerequisite for the greatest task he [this man] will face: that of establishing an authority which respects human dignity, of creating a human authority in which the person can exist . . . What real command and real obedience are must be rediscovered. This is possible only . . . when God is acknowledged as the living norm and point of reference for all existence. Ultimately, one can command only from God, obey only in Him.
"The new man . . . appreciates asceticism again. He knows that there is no authority, which does not begin with the command of self . . . Faith in the so-called goodness of nature is cowardice. It is the refusal to face the evil that is there, too, along with the good. Thus the good loses its depth and earnestness."
But is that not what our Catholic Church has been telling us and the rest of mankind all along for the past two millennia, and still tells us now at the beginning of the third? The crimes done against history and a genuinely human culture are done by those who will not listen. The fate of mankind in the new times that are upon us depends on either those who do hear the Catholic Church and act upon what they hear, or those who refuse to listen and thereby shape "the new man" into the un-human of Guardini's fears.
(Quotations from Guardini in this column are all from The end of the Modern World, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, Del., 1998.)
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