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Very little written since the end of the last European war has left so nearly unforgettable an impression as The End of the Modern World, a searing and prophetic work written in 1950 by a soft-spoken little man in a black suit in search of orientation “within the tangled situation which still marks our age.” Born in Verona of Italian parents, raised in Germany amidst the relics of a vanished world, Romano Guardini became one of that select company of universalists who, despite the compartmentalization of scholarship characteristic of our scattered age, sustained a commitment to the whole life of the mind. First published in this country in 1956 by Sheed and Ward, it was re-issued in 1968 by Henry Regnery with an introduction of haunting resonance by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, who saw in it something of “the apocalyptic vision of the New Testament.” However one receives Guardini’s thesis, concluded Wilhelmsen, “the book will cauterize the spirit of any man who reads it.” What follows is intended both as homage to the memory of a man “whose very existence,” lamented Catholic historian James Hitchcock, “has to a great extent been forgotten less than twenty years after his death,” and as meditation on the meaning of his most somber masterpiece, The End of the Modern World.

For all that the world owes to God for dying to redeem it—nearly twenty centuries during which we have all shone like the sun, “the very amazement of God,” exulted John Paul I—the world has grown unaccountably weary for so many that one might almost think that whatever native capacity men have to sit in wonder and awe, to marvel and take delight, can scarcely be said to exist any longer. More and more, we have become a jaded race, our horizons bounded by work, by sensate pleasures, by structures of overwhelming, oppressive secularity. A people—is it possible?—incapable even of taking notice of the numinous . . . yes, even were it suddenly to appear on nighttime TV. So glutted are we by the goods of this world that it has become very nearly impossible for great numbers to imagine how vastly, how frightfully different an unredeemed world would be.

RM

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Regis Martin

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Very little written since the end of the last European war has left so nearly unforgettable an impression as The End of the Modern World, a searing and prophetic work written in 1950 by a soft-spoken little man in a black suit in search of orientation “within the tangled situation which still marks our age.” Born in Verona of Italian parents, raised in Germany amidst the relics of a vanished world, Romano Guardini became one of that select company of universalists who, despite the compartmentalization of scholarship characteristic of our scattered age, sustained a commitment to the whole life of the mind. First published in this country in 1956 by Sheed and Ward, it was re-issued in 1968 by Henry Regnery with an introduction of haunting resonance by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, who saw in it something of “the apocalyptic vision of the New Testament.” However one receives Guardini’s thesis, concluded Wilhelmsen, “the book will cauterize the spirit of any man who reads it.” What follows is intended both as homage to the memory of a man “whose very existence,” lamented Catholic historian James Hitchcock, “has to a great extent been forgotten less than twenty years after his death,” and as meditation on the meaning of his most somber masterpiece, The End of the Modern World.

For all that the world owes to God for dying to redeem it—nearly twenty centuries during which we have all shone like the sun, “the very amazement of God,” exulted John Paul I—the world has grown unaccountably weary for so many that one might almost think that whatever native capacity men have to sit in wonder and awe, to marvel and take delight, can scarcely be said to exist any longer. More and more, we have become a jaded race, our horizons bounded by work, by sensate pleasures, by structures of overwhelming, oppressive secularity. A people—is it possible?—incapable even of taking notice of the numinous . . . yes, even were it suddenly to appear on nighttime TV. So glutted are we by the goods of this world that it has become very nearly impossible for great numbers to imagine how vastly, how frightfully different an unredeemed world would be.