A sympathetic theme threaded throughout…
Romano Guardini:
Indeed man has always known anxiety, and even if science and technology succeed in giving him the appearance of security he will continue to know anxiety. But the causes and the nature of anxiety differ with differing times.… Modern anxiety … arises from man’s deep-seated consciousness that he lacks either a “real” or a symbolic place in reality. In spite of his actual position on earth he is a being without security. The very needs of man’s senses are left unsatisfied, since he has ceased to experience a world which guarantees him a place in the total scheme of existence.
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Most intensely modern man sought for answers within his own soul. The loss of the old, accepted vision of the world denied to man his chance of coming to terms with himself, of answering the questions posed by existence. He was shaken, insecure, exposed to the mystery of limitless realities. As occurs during all crises the depths of human nature were excited. Anguish, violence, greed, rebellion against order—more compellingly than ever these primitive drives stirred the soul of man. Both word and deed had been stripped bare by the new vision of man, shaking his deepest-held convictions. Enigmatic powers awoke out of the religious spirit; the force of the numinous impinged itself directly upon the human spirit, either from within the spirit itself or from the world at large. Not only was the numinous beneficent now but also bewildering, even destructive in its impact. Every fundamental question shook man with a new intensity: salvation and damnation, man’s just relation to God, the true ordering for human life. As time passed the tensions within man’s soul between the will to truth and the drive toward error, between good and evil, increased and weighed down his spirit. As the age moved on even the probity of human existence itself struck against the oppressed soul of man.
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Assuredly the world as a whole no longer encompasses and shelters man as once it did; it has become a far different thing. And it has gained thereby new significances for the religious life of man. […]
The modern era was fond of justifying technology and rested its defense upon the argument that technology promoted the well-being of man. In doing so it masked the destructive effects of a ruthless system. I do not believe that the age to come will rest with such an argument. The man engaged today in the labor of “technics” knows full well that technology moves forward in final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the race. He knows in the most radical sense of the term that power is its motive—a lordship of all; that man seizes hold of the naked elements of both nature and human nature. His action bespeaks immense possibilities not only for “creation” but also for destruction, especially for the destruction of humanity itself. Man as a human being is far less rooted and fixed within his own essence than is commonly accepted. And the terrible dangers grow day by day. Once the “autonomous” state has broken all bonds, it will be able to deliver the last coup de grâce to human nature itself. …
Within this area of choice an emotion partaking of the religious seems to penetrate again. This religious feeling has no link with the natural piety of Giordano Bruno or of Goethe; rather, it is bound up intrinsically with the dangers for himself and for his earth which man has found locked up with his technological power. The new religious emotion wells up from a sense of the profound loneliness which man knows in the midst of all that is now summed up by the term “the World”; man’s emotion grows out of the realization that he approaches his ultimate decision, that he must face it with responsibility, with resolution and with bravery.
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If we understand the eschatological text of Holy Writ correctly, trust and courage will totally form the character of the last age. The surrounding “Christian” culture and the traditions supported by it will lose their effectiveness. That loss will belong to the danger given by scandal, that danger of which it is said: “it will, if possible, deceive even the elect” (Matthew xxiv, 24).
Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world (Matthew xxiii, 12), but the more precious will that love be which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ. Perhaps man will come to experience this love anew, to taste the sovereignty of its origin, to know its independence of the world, to sense the mystery of its final why? …
These eschatological conditions will show themselves, it seems to me, in the religious temper of the future. With these words I proclaim no facile apocalyptic. No man has the right to say that the End is here … If we speak here of the nearness of the End, we do not mean nearness in the sense of time, but nearness as it pertains to the essence of the End, for in essence man’s existence is now nearing an absolute decision. Each and every consequence of that decision bears within it the greatest potentiality and the most extreme danger.