Letters from Lake Como: Explorations on Technology and the Human Race

By Romano Guardini

This book collects a fascinating series of letters written by theologian-philosopher Romano Guardini in the mid-1920s in which he works out for the first time his sense of the challenges of humanity in a culture increasingly dominated by the machine. With prophetic clarity and unsettling farsightedness, Guardini's letters poignantly capture the personal implications and social challenges of living in the technological age — concerns that have now come to fruition seventy years after they were first raised.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 10, 1994
• ISBN: 9781467466783

Romano Guardini

Romano Guardini (1885–1968) is regarded as one of the most important Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century. He lived in Germany most of his life and was ordained a priest in Mainz in 1910. The focus of Guardini’s academic work was philosophy of religion and he is best known for such works as The Lord, The End of the Modern World, and The Spirit of the Liturgy. Guardini taught at the University of Berlin until he was forced to resign for criticizing Nazi mythologizing of Jesus and for emphasizing Christ’s Jewishness. After World War II, he taught at the University of Tubingen and the University of Munich. While Guardini declined Pope Paul VI’s offer to make him a cardinal in 1965, his prolific status as a scholar and teacher heavily influenced the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, especially liturgical reforms. His intellectual disciples are many, including Josef Pieper and Pope emeritus Benedict XVI.

Book preview

FIRST LETTER

The Question

Dear Friend,

Do you think of the afternoon on the edge of the forest where the buzzards had their nest? They glided off into the blue distance. The eye focused on their circlings. The inner life was concentrated upon the eye and carried aloft by the force of the clear and soaring power; our whole being had a vision of the fullness of space. In the far distance the mountain ranges rose up in clear outline, and behind them the land that I had not seen for twenty years was waiting. I realized that if I now went back there as a man it would mean a great deal for me.

We spoke about so many things; our own lives and what had taken place on a general and universal scale merged into one another. I also made an attempt to lay hold of a question that I was running into on every hand. For a long time I had been aware of it, of the way it was gaining force, and I saw that upon our finding an answer to it, a vital answer of being and not just of thought, much would depend for our lives.

When I came to Italy the question had become very severe. All its beauty filled me with sorrow. I am now there for the second time, and I must now try to put it all together. There is so much to this question. It seeks the meaning of what is taking place before us. Its answer confronts us with a decision, and I do not know which will be the stronger, what takes place with its ineluctable thrust or insight and triumphant creativity.

We have considered so many things together over the long years. And thus you know what is behind these many words. That will help me. Nothing can be definitive. It is as if I were in the middle of a wave. It is everywhere breaking and rolling and sinking and rising again. I want to see if I can find direction and a path. I want to know what is happening in the thousand forms and events of our day. I feel that I have a part in it so profound that I was terrified when this first became clear to me. I must know what is at issue. You know the saying of Oedipus when he was questioned by the Sphinx and his life depended on finding the answer. It is as if we were being questioned in that way, I, too, in person. I do not know where the question will lead. I will begin and go forward step by step.

I had hardly reached Italy before I felt that I was being addressed by something very significant, including an element that made me very sad. What Europe is was before me; what membership of a people is — blood, no doubt, but also loyalty and spirit; what humanity and the world are. Often it was as if these things were real ground on which I moved, real air, real space, as necessary to life as the space outside and the air I was breathing are for the body. All this was great and strong, not the sad part. The sad part was that I felt as though a great process of dying had set in around