Guardini Is Simultaneously Right and Wrong
Ekaterina Polyakova, Associate Professor at SFI and Candidate of Philological Sciences, delivered a lecture entitled “Romano Guardini’s Anthropological Forecast and the Future of Christianity in the Era of the ‘Mass Man.’”
Ms Polyakova reminded the audience that for Guardini, the new worldview characteristic of our time was linked not merely to atheism but to a rethinking of the concept of the individual as it had been known in European culture since the Renaissance. This individual, she explained, is being replaced — using the terminology of José Ortega y Gasset and Hannah Arendt — by the “mass man,” while ideologies take the place of the cult of freedom and the autonomy of the subject. At the same time, philosophers proclaim humanity’s total dependence on anonymous social forces, which are even more formidable and inescapable than the forces of fate that dominated the pagan world at the dawn of European history and from which historical Christianity liberated humanity two thousand years ago.
“In one respect, Guardini was undeniably right: humanity has managed to subdue certain irrational forces, but they threaten us again — no longer as the forces of nature, but as a danger stemming from our own power over nature. This power becomes the new monster that humanity cannot control, and Guardini poses a different task: to gain power over power and learn to control it. And in a certain sense, we have learned to do so… Ideology is precisely this power over power itself, but it is not, as Guardini thought, the power of humanity over itself; rather, it is a faceless power — the anonymous power of the masses. The new forces that rule the world are far more terrifying than, say, the forces of fate in the pagan world. Now, humanity sacrifices its humanness — its dignity — to these new anonymous forces: it is not only the person who disappears, but even the face,” said Polyakova, commenting on the philosopher’s views.
Guardini’s central thesis is that in the era of the masses, a person can no longer save themselves as an autonomous personality but can become a “face” — i.e., mature into adulthood, become a subject of responsibility integrated into a shared order, ready for cooperation and fellowship in a spirit of solidarity, understanding, and justice, standing before God and accepting his modest yet unique and irreplaceable place in history as allotted by God. The participants of the session discussed the extent to which Guardini’s anthropological vision has proven valid today and sought to identify still-unexhausted possibilities for interpreting his view of the future of Christianity.
“Guardini makes his anthropological forecast by pointing out the traits of the new human being who preserves himself within the masses without opposing them in the dichotomous pair of ‘genius versus crowd.’ He names three qualities: serious honesty, courage in the face of new, unprecedented dangers, and asceticism — a will to self-restraint — all of which are not particularly characteristic of the modern person. Above all, Guardini’s hopes are tied to Christianity and to its distancing itself from the humanism of the modern era. He sees the future of Christianity in a shift from the person to the face, in a certain sense a rejection of pathos and even of mysterious religiosity. Christianity, too, must become something modest and simple, yet radically distinct from the non-Christian worldview of its time,” emphasized Polyakova.
“Guardini’s forecast has not come true because Christianity has not yet become, in the words of Vladimir Solovyov, ‘a living, societal, and universal Christianity,’” argued Viktor Granovsky, Associate Professor at SFI and Candidate of Philosophical Sciences. “To this day, Christianity across all confessions has not fully manifested itself as a ‘civic and culture-creating’ force. When you read Guardini’s text, you realize that he is simultaneously right and wrong.”
“At the heart of Guardini’s focus is the mass man. Here, two different modalities of discussion somewhat converge. On the one hand, he brilliantly and subtly describes the new mass man and the new situation of massification. But this is not a mass as an elemental force or a crowd; it is a mass as an externalized, rational organization of life into which this person is ‘inserted.’ Then Guardini speaks of what we might expect from this mass man — and it turns out that, in this sense, we cannot expect anything from him as a person described in and inserted into a sociological projection. We might expect something from any person of any era or society when taken in a different aspect or viewed differently, even if sociologically that person belongs to the era of the masses,” noted Victoria Faibyshenko, Associate Professor at SFI and Candidate of Philosophical Sciences.