Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Sandro Magister has posted a very interesting article on the parallels in the thought of Romano Guardini (1885-1968) and of Pope Benedict XVI, written by Silvano Zucal, a professor of philosophy at the University of Trent and a Guardini expert. Guardini, as many know, was a seminal influence on the thinking of the Holy Father. Indeed, Benedict, when still Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote a seminal book on the liturgy that was modelled on Guardini’s “The Spirit of the Liturgy.”

But the influence of the great theologian Guardini on the Holy Father goes beyond the question of liturgy. One can also see the imprint of Guardini’s thinking on the Holy Father in the areas of eschatology, the crisis of modern Europe, the end of the modern age, and on faith and reason.

The article by Zucal makes many important parallels, but there is one issue that he raises that struck me as particularly interesting. Both Guardini and Ratzinger were born academics who could not feel at home in the modern university, given its “methodological canon.” The German university, according to both men, had become closed to the question of truth. Indeed, Ratzinger went so far as to argue that the rise of Nazism was enabled by the failure of the universities to live up to their vocation to seek truth.

The article ends with some very revealing paragraphs in regard to the failure of the universities that are illuminative of our current situation in the West, in the Americas as well as Europe:

On March 14, 1978, the Bavarian Catholic Academy awarded the “Romano Guardini Prize” to the prime minister of Bavaria, Alfons Goppel, and according to custom, the head of the Bavarian bishops’ conference – Joseph Raztinger – was asked to deliver the “Laudatio.” It was a text of extraordinary density, in which he reviewed the various dimensions of the “political”: politics as art, the grounding of politics in territory, responsibility toward the state, the relationship between truth and conscience in the political realm.

In this last passage, Ratzinger once again took up Guardini’s teaching: “In Germany, we have experienced that kind of tyranny which sentences to death, prohibits, confiscates. The unscrupulous exploitation of words is a particular kind of tyranny which in its own way sentences to death, prohibits, confiscates. Today there are certainly sufficient reasons to express similar warnings and to remember the forces that are capable of preventing this kind of tyranny, which is visibly increasing. Romano Guardini’s experience of Hitler’s bloody tyranny and his vigilance before new threats led him, during his last years and almost against his own temperament, to issue dramatic warnings about the destruction of politics through the annihilation of conscience, and drove him to call for a proper interpretation, not a merely theoretical one, but a real and effective interpretation of the world according to the man who acts politically on the basis of faith.”

Guardini proposed important themes like these to the German academic world from Berlin to Tubingen to Munich. According to the future pope, the thinker had a controversial relationship with the German universities, which beginning with his professorship in Berlin made him suffer “because of the impression that he was outside of the methodological canon of the university, and that quite clearly he was not recognized by it. He consoled himself with the fact that, with his own struggle to understand, interpret, and give form, he might be the forerunner of a university that did not yet exist.” Ratzinger here makes a note that brings to mind the recent controversy over his canceled visit to the University of Rome “La Sapienza”: “It is to the credit of the German university that Guardini was able to find room there, with all of his experience, and was able to feel it increasingly as the place of his specific vocation.” Only Nazism temporarily took his teaching post away from him, and, in the memory of that tragic event, following the war – the future pope highlights – in an intense academic address on the Jewish question, Guardini passionately defended the university as the place for investigation into the truth, where human affairs and events are measured according to the full scope of the past, without the onslaught of the present, where responsibility for the community should be vigilant.

The Third Reich would not have come to power, Ratzinger reminds us in the words of Guardini, if the German university had not met its “downfall” due to the removal of the question of the truth on the part of the dominant academic models: “At that time, Guardini stated his position with a heartfelt appeal that ordinarily seemed entirely foreign to him, opposing the politicization of the university and its infiltration by party leadership, political chatter, the noise of the streets, and he cried out to his listeners: Ladies and gentlemen, do not permit this! This concerns that which is common to all of us, our future.”

There is much to consider in this quotation. The connection of failed universities to failed politics — to tyranny and mass bloodshed — is one of the untold stories of the twentieth century. The connection is pertinent to our own age. If the universities fail in their mission to seek truth, politicians who are ideologically aligned to the professorial class will not be called to account. The failure of the universities is, in fact, the root cause of the failure of the journalistic class, whose ideological precommitments have rendered them accomplices in the progressive destruction of religious and political freedom. We are thus left in a perilous situation where tyranny has become a real possibility. The confluence of hegemonic political control by a single political party, a likely result of the upcoming election, with the sympathetic propagandizing by professorial and journalistic classes, bears much scrutiny and open discussion in coming years. The question remains whether the political forces will allow there to remain any public forum where such scrutiny and discussion can be carried out and inspire an effective religious and political counterresponse. The Bush Administration, contrary to the hysterical or disingenuous rantings of the socialists, did not hinder these public forums in any way. But the Barack Obama Administration might very well do so.