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The End of Loneliness: Guardini, Rilke, and the Communion of Saints

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2022

Leonard J. DeLorenzo
Leonard J. DeLorenzo*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, USA
*
delorenzo.2@nd.edu
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Abstract

Romano Guardini read Rilke's Duino Elegies as a compelling eschatological vision for the modern world, but one that must be rejected. I argue that in Rilke's writing, Guardini detected the secular analogue to the substantial image at the end of the Christian eschatological imagination—that is, the communion of saints. Rilke's vision is coherent in that the end he perceives follows from the beginning he assumes; therefore, understanding Rilke's end requires his commentator to see all that precedes that end, beginning with Rilke's own beginning. In a time of increasing loneliness, Guardini's response to Rilke rings with renewed contemporary relevance to guard against the ultimate erasure of the human person.

Keywords

Rainer Maria RilkeRomano GuardiniDantesaintscommuniondeathpersonhood
Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , December 2022 , pp. 333 - 356
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Copyright
Copyright © College Theology Society 2022

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References

1 I later learned that this book was Patterson, James, Crazy House (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2019)Google Scholar. I have not read this book.

2 See Guardini, Romano, Rilke's Duino Elegies: An Interpretation, trans. G., K. Knight (London: Darwen Finlayson, 1961), 302Google Scholar.

3 According to Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, Guardini wondered if he had worked too hard on Rilke's poems and taken them too seriously (see Gerl-Falkovitz, Hanna-Barbara, Romano Guardini: Konturen des Lebens und Spuren des Denkens [Kevelaer: Topos Taschenbücher, 2017], 258Google Scholar). Meanwhile, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that Guardini took Rilke seriously in the wrong way because he had “an exaggerated interest in the question of truth” which he applied, inappropriately, to Rilke as poet; see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Rainer Maria Rilke's Interpretation of Existence: On the Book by Romano Guardini,” in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, trans. Robert H. Paslick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 141. Gadamer continues his point in the form of a rhetorical question: “Is it not precisely the privilege of the poet—a privilege denied to him by his interpreter—not to be obliged to have a complete philosophical and theological system, but rather to make statements, true in themselves, but the conceptual verification of which, in the sense of universal meaning, is no longer his concern?” (148).

4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Rainer Maria Rilke's Interpretation of Existence,” 14; see also Mor, Lucia, “‘La parola di un uomo onesto significa ciò che dice’ Romano Guardini Lettore Di Rilke,” L'analisi Linguistica e Letteraria 26, no. 2 (2018): 52–53Google Scholar.

5 Romano Guardini, The Last Things: Concerning Death, Purification After Death, Resurrection, Judgment, and Eternity, trans. Charlotte E. Forsyth and Grace B. Branham (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), 12.

6 Gerl-Falkovitz, Romano Guardini, 236.

7 Kuhn, Helmut, “Romano Guardini: Christian Existence,” Philosophy Today 4, no. 3 (1960): 164–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Cited in Gerl-Falkovitz, Romano Guardini, 251.

9 Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World, trans. Elinor Briefs (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1998).

10 For more on the distinction Guardini makes between “medieval man” and “modern man,” along with his conception of the poles and axes of human existence, see Kuhn, “Romano Guardini,” esp. 161 and 166–69.

11 See especially Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 1–7 (quotation from p. 1); cf. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 11.

12 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 8.

13 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 19.

14 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 12.

15 Saint Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), VII.1:173.

16 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 12.

17 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 22.

18 Dante accentuates how Ulysses persuades his companions, whom he calls “Brothers” (v. 112), to move beyond the given boundaries of their world by the sheer force of their will to “win experience” (v. 116). The true motivating force in this voyage according to Dante, however, is Ulysses's untutored desire, “burning to understand how this world works, and know of human vices, worth and valour” (vv. 97–99); see Dante Alighieri, Inferno, ed. and trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (New York: Penguin, 2006), 231–33 [26.90–142]. One of the most stunning retellings of this canto occurs, paradoxically, as a protest to the suffocating world of “progress” that has wrapped itself around previously free human beings in Auschwitz, in Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987), 115–21.

19 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 33.

20 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 46.

21 To close one of his letters from Lake Como, Guardini writes, “The sphere in which we live is becoming more and more artificial, less and less human, more and more—I cannot help saying it—barbarian” (Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como: Exploration in Technology and the Human Race, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley [Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994], 17).

22 Guardini describes the distinctively modern person using other words in his commentary on the Book of Revelation, where he writes: “When we ask a man today what he considers life, the answer will always be more or less the same: Life is tension, flinging oneself towards a goal; it is creation and destruction and new creation.… For him [the modern man] life is linked to the flow of time. It is change, crossing over, the constantly new. Life resting in permanency and bordering on the eternal is beyond his comprehension”; Romano Guardini, The Lord, trans. Elinor Briefs (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2013), 573.

23 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 56. The influence of Guardini on Pope Francis becomes most evident in positions such as this, and becomes foundational, for example, in the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home), May 24, 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.

24 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 57; see also Guardini, Letters from Lake Como, 77–96; cf. Gerl-Falkovitz, Romano Guardini, 249.

25 Lucia Mor's recent study of Guardini's sustained engagement with Rilke's poetry helpfully presents Guardini's fascination and concern with Rilke as poet of the modern world in “‘La parola di un uomo onesto significa ció che dice’ Romano Guardini Lettore Di Rilke”; see also Krieg, Robert, “Romano Guardini's Theology of the Human Person,” Theological Studies 59 (1998): 468–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Guardini calls this person “mass man,” whom, he says, “has no desire for independence or originality in either the management or conduct of life” (Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 60). Elsewhere, Guardini speaks of the “destruction caused by the masses,” which may give rise to something else but at present brings only “devastation” (see Guardini, Letters from Lake Como, 63).

27 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910–1926, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1969), 316. See also the Tenth Elegy, where Rilke names the “ready-made consolations of the church.”

28 Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?. Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Mitchell, Stephen (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 2Google Scholar. Mitchell's volume provides side-by-side the German original and his English translation of Rilke's poem. When I have translated on my own, I include the original German text in the note, along with a citation of Mitchell's volume, as I have done here. When I rely on and employ Mitchell's translation, I merely cite his work without including the original German text.

29 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 11.

30 Rilke discloses this intention in a letter written on October 27, 1915, to Ellen Delp (see Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910–1926, 145–46).

31 See Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910–1926, 145–46.

32 Jacob Steiner, Rilkes Duineser Elegien (Bern: Francke, 1989), 18; cf. Hollender, Christoph, “The Angels in Rilke's Duino Elegies: Theological vs. Ontological Interpretations,” History of European Ideas 20, no. 1–3 (January 1, 1995): 305CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gadamer, “Rainer Maria Rilke's Interpretation of Existence,” 143–44.

33 Über uns hinüber spielt dann der Engel. Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, 24.

34 Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, 11, emphasis in original.

35 Rilke calls the land of the living the “strip of fruitful land between river and rock” (Second Elegy, 14): Streifen Fruchtlands zwischen Strom und Gestein.

36 In the poem “To the Angel” in 1913, Rilke expresses this same drama in condensed form. The end of the poem brings into view the relationship between the Angel and the one who seeks to speak to it: “Yes, I am crying, and two sticks I am beating, / for I perceive not to be heard at all. / And my noises leave no mark on you / unless you acknowledge that I do exist. / Shine bright, so the stars will look at me! / I have nearly dissolved into mist” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Pictures of God: Rilke's Religious Poetry, trans. Annemarie S. Kidder, Bilingual edition [Livonia, Michigan: First Page Publications, 2005], 106–07).

37 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 17. Elsewhere, while commenting on the Book of Revelation, Guardini names angels as the personalizing powers of the cosmos (Guardini, The Lord, 565–68); cf. Romano Guardini, Dante, 4th ed. (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1999), 38–39. In his spiritual reading of Genesis 1, Augustine presents angels as unceasingly gazing upon the divine face and reading the divine Word. They are, in other words, filled by what they heed; they are not fullness itself (see Confessions XIII.18); cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1, q. 50, 1 (hereafter cited as ST).

38 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 21. For more on Guardini's view of angels, see Silvano Zucal, Ali dell'invisibile: l'angelo in Guardini e nel ’900 (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1988), and Silvano Zucal, L'angelo nel pensiero contemporaneo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2012). For his part, Hans-Georg Gadamer contends that “the Angel … is a supreme possibility of the human heart itself—a possibility never fully realized” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Mythopoietic Reversal in Rilke's ‘Duino Elegies,’” in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, trans. Robert H. Paslick [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], 157). Christoph Hollender is critical of both Guardini and Heidegger in regard to their interpretations of Rilke's angels, averring that “their own completed systems of thought are very much present, highlighting their own differences with Rilke's poetry, and thus erecting a barrier for understanding Rilke” (Hollender, “The Angels in Rilke's Duino Elegies,” 308). Hollender further argues that the proper interpretation of Rilke's angels necessitates that one account for the ongoing historical development of intellectual and artistic thought, both leading up to and following Rilke's own period. In making his case, Hollender too swiftly pronounces judgment on at least Guardini, whom he says “allows as context nothing but the Bible and the church fathers.”

39 Aquinas, ST 1–2, q. 28, 1–2.

40 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 24.

41 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies. Intriguingly, Krieg makes a similar observation about Guardini's own life and personality: “Guardini knew the loneliness of which Rilke spoke. He struggled throughout his life with introversion and depression” (Krieg, “Romano Guardini's Theology of the Human Person,” 470).

42 Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, 3.

43 “Strange to no longer desire one's desires,” Rilke writes in the First Elegy (Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, 7).

44 Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, 37.

45 See Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 177–78.

46 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 179.

47 It is interesting to juxtapose Rilke's image of the hero with someone like Francis of Assisi. As read in the Christian tradition—from Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure on down—Francis charges ahead in zeal, wholly open to God, and in that openness to God open, too, to all of the world, which he refers back to God. As Lee Patterson aptly put it, “Indeed, for Francis nature represented a realm of being that relates to God in a way that is unaffected, spontaneous, and authentic—an ideal to which fallen man could only aspire”; Lee Patterson, Acts of Recognition: Essays on Medieval Culture (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 242. Compare this to Guardini's own essay on St. Francis, entitled “St. Francis and Divine Providence,” in The Human Experience, trans. Gregory Roettger (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2018), 1–32.

48 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 273, emphasis in original.

49 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Genealogy of Morality,” in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Duncan Large (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 24.

50 Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1926, 316.

51 Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1926, 373.

52 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 288.

53 See Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910–1926, 316.

54 Translation provided in Guardini's commentary (see Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1926, 270).

55 Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1926, 270–71.

56 For more on the dissolution of the person in the Tenth Elegy, see Mor, “‘La parola di un uomo onesto significa ció che dice’ Romano Guardini Lettore Di Rilke,” esp. 64–65. Guardini criticizes Rilke precisely for depersonalizing the person in Sprache, Dichtung, Deutung (Germany: Werkbund-Verlag, 1962), 43.

57 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 272.

58 Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, 63.

59 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 269.

60 Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, 67.

61 Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, emphasis in original.

62 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 297.

63 Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, 7.

64 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 17.

65 Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 303; cf. Kuhn, “Romano Guardini,” 264–65, and Gerl-Falkovitz, Romano Guardini, 251.

66 Quoted in Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies, 273.

67 Harmut Heep celebrates Rilke's accomplishment as a liberation, or what he calls “the transcendence of the immanent” (837). Needless to say, he does not sense what Guardini senses regarding the collapse of the integrity of the human person in this achievement. See Heep, Hartmut, “Rilke and Religion: A European Battle,” History of European Ideas 20, no. 4–6 (February 1, 1995): 837–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 See, for example, Guardini, Letters from Lake Como, 97–113.

69 See, for example, Guardini, Letters from Lake Como, 77–96.

70 This point is reminiscent of Ratzinger's articulation of the relationship between “standing” and “understanding” in the nature of belief; Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 2nd. ed. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2004), 69–74.

71 Regarding Guardini's theological anthropology, see Krieg, “Romano Guardini's Theology of the Human Person,” and Alfons Knoll, Glaube und Kultur bei Romano Guardini (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1993), 338–73.

72 Guardini studied the angels of Dante's poem deeply, and even commented on them in relation to Rilke (e.g., 39). His major work on Dante's angels is in Guardini, Dante, 11–130. Bringing Rilke's angelology into contact with Dante's via Guardini would be a fascinating and fruitful study, which, alas, exceeds the bounds of the present study.

73 See Guardini, Dante, 11–12.

74 Guardini, Dante, 16. All the translations from this Italian work are my own.

75 See Guardini, Dante, 264. For a thoughtful essay about the relationship between cosmological models and human perception of reality, see John Brungardt, “Ah, to Live in a Cosmos Again!,” Church Life Journal, September 19, 2018, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/ah-to-live-in-a-cosmos-again/.

76 Guardini wrote and lectured on Dante from the 1930s through the 1950s, which includes the time he was working on Rilke's Duino Elegies. At the end of his collected works on Dante, Guardini provides a personal epilogue in which he recounts his own intellectual and spiritual relationship to Dante's work. That personal account shows Guardini himself becoming more conformed to what he learned in Dante: that true progress in the deepest human matters is never attainable from study alone, but must be matched by the ordering of the will and the transformation of desire (see Guardini, Dante, 367–72).

77 Guardini, Dante, 370.

78 Guardini, Dante, 17.

79 The act of seeing a “cosmos” at all should not itself be taken for granted. To see a whole—a unity—is already itself an act of interpretation. As Seth Benardete put it, “We see heaven and earth, but we do not see their unity, which we call cosmos. ‘Cosmos’ puts a label on an insight about the structure of the whole that is simply not available to sight” (The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: On Plato's Philebus [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 162–63). Rilke does have a cosmological vision (a vision stretching to what is endless precisely because the “averted half” is death as perpetual loss) and is thus engaged in an act of interpretation, which begs the question of what informs his interpretation. What I have sought to show previously is the basic assumptions—and denials—that ground the sort of vision of the cosmos that Rilke projects. Cf. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 18.

80 Guardini, Dante, 174.

81 Guardini, Dante.

82 Guardini, Dante, 111.

83 Guardini, Dante, 102–03; cf. Paradiso 30.109–123; see also Hans Urs von Balthasar, Romano Guardini: Reform from the Source, trans. Albert Wimmer and D. C. Schindler (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1995), 15, 69.

84 For more on Dante's eschatological imagination and the life of the saints, see Leonard J. DeLorenzo, Work of Love: A Theological Reconstruction of the Communion of Saints (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), esp. 142–52. For his part, John Thiel works to show the importance of the connection between the beatific afterlife and the promises, sins, and events of life, especially in terms of how we conceive of purgatory; see Thiel, John, “For What May We Hope? Thoughts on the Eschatological Imagination,” Theological Studies 67 (2006): 517–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Thiel, John, “Time, Judgment, and Competitive Spirituality: A Reading of the Development of the Doctrine of Purgatory,” Theological Studies 69 (2008): 741–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Guardini, The End of the Modern World, 108–09.

86 Guardini, Dante, 178.

87 Guardini, Dante, 174–75.

88 For one illuminating account of Dante's vision in terms of the priority of redeeming time, see Matthew Treherne, “Beginning Midway: Dante's Midlife, and Ours,” in Dante, Mercy, and the Beauty of the Human Person, ed. Leonard J. DeLorenzo and Vittorio Montemaggi (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 83–97.

89 Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. Ada Lane (New York: Herder and Herder, 1998), 95.

90 Guardini, The Last Things, 12.

91 Among the classic modern accounts of what is meant by “person” and where this notion comes from is, of course, Ratzinger, Joseph's “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17 (Fall 1990): 439–54Google Scholar.