Religion: Faith Is the Center

• Share

A slight, white-maned old man with large, dark eyes was working steadily last week amid masses of congratulatory mail, which had come to him from all over the world on his 78th birthday. His three-room apartment in the quiet Munich suburb of Bogenhausen is a center of Roman Catholic intellectual life in Germany, with an almost equally strong attraction for many Protestants. Just out of the hospital (where he underwent surgery for an ailment described only as neuralgia), Monsignor Romano Guardini again presided over his "Laboratory of Ideas," with its long refectory table, its delicate Gothic Madonna standing against red velvet, its record collection, and its thousands of books, including three shelves of his own writings on everything from theology to movies.

Romano Guardini's hand was speeding its tiny writing over page after page of foolscap to complete his major work, a study of Dante, on which he has been laboring for some 40 years. He was also jotting down notes for a new book on the problems of faith and ethics. To his thousands of German followers, the best news of all was that he plans to resume his lectures at Munich University when the next term begins in May, and that this spring he will once again mount the pulpit of Munich's Ludwigskirche to preach to his perennial audience of Roman Catholic intellectuals, society bluestockings, young people, and aging playboys who come to ogle the pretty girls—said to be found in greater numbers at a Guardini sermon than at a Fasching party.

Said one of his fans last week: "Guardini is like a Renaissance humanist—he seems to have the key to everything. If he speaks about atomic science, one feels he knows all there is to know about modern physics. He can plumb the depths of Freud or analyze the mysticism of Paul Klee's paintings; he can throw new light on the obscure poetry of Hölderlin and Rilke, or expound the strengths and weaknesses of Communist dialectic. Guardini seems to control the bridges that lead from art, from literature, from philosophy —to religion."

Silence & Dancing. Romano Guardini was born in Verona, Italy, but he was taken to Germany at the age of three, where his Italian diplomat father was posted at the consulate in Munich. He grew up in Mainz, attended the University of Tübingen, where he first began to specialize in biology and physics. But, as he wrote later, "the deeper I went into the study of science, the more I became convinced that there was not the full answer." His parents reluctantly gave him permission to study for the priesthood; he was ordained in 1912, received his doctorate in theology three years later.

His first book, published in 1918, was titled The Spirit of the Liturgy. Its theme: "To play a game before God. to perform a work of art; not to create, but to be—that is the deepest meaning of the liturgy." In the '20s, as professor of Christian philosophy at the University of Berlin, Father Guardini was one of the luminaries of an intellectually glittering city that included such disparate men as Producer Max Reinhardt, Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, Boxer Max Schmeling.