Suchergebnisse

Monsignor romano guardini, preeminent professor in the University of Munich, has had an enormous influence upon generations of German students and citizens. Now, after the steady and effective translation of his works during the past three decades, he has made a profound impact upon the minds and souls of young American scholars and intellectuals, changing, with the strength of conversion, their ways of dealing with knowledge, with ideas and human realities. In an article written for the twentieth-anniversary issue of The Review of Politics, I pointed out ("The Thinker in the Church: The Spirit of Newman," January, 1959) that Guardini is a Newman type of thinker in the twentieth century. This is quite true. Certainly the range of his concerns is reminiscent of Newman's: literature (for instance, his studies of Dante, of Dostoevski, notably the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, and of Rilke's Duino Elegies): history (particularly revelation as history); subtle reflections upon theological questions as well as the critical problems of the contemporary political and social scene.

RecentReports reach us from England that a notable element in support of the cause of Cardinal Newman's canonization is the unusual extent of American devotion to him and to his thought. Certainly the name of Newman is great among us. Most American Catholic thinkers would agree with Otto Karrer, writing in April, 1947, for The Review of Politics on Newman and the spiritual crisis of the Occident, that Newman is probably "the most illustrious religious mind in the modern Anglo-Saxon world." It is clear that he is the truly great eminence at the start of the Catholic intellectual renascence of the past hundred years. In our devotion to him and in our praise of him as a foremost thinker in the Church, it is well to consider what is the justification for the esteem in which we hold him.

Waldemar Gurian was a presence—physically, intellectually and spiritually—at Notre Dame. In the many years he was with us, a daily wonder of the campus was the sight of Dr. Gurian ponderously proceeding from his office to the library to the post office to the dining halls and back again, bearing with him as he passed—so it seemed to a number of us—all the light of the world as well as a large part of its darkness. He came to Notre Dame during a period—the middle and later thirties—when President O'Hara (now Archbishop of Philadelphia) was inviting to the university as visiting or regular faculty members a variety of scholars and writers from England, Ireland and the Continent: among others, Shane Leslie, Arnold Lunn, Christopher Hollis, Archbishop David Mathew, Robert Speaight, Desmond Fitzgerald, Charles Du Bos, Yves Simon, Karl Menger and Arthur Haas. Of all these Dr. Gurian, who was on friendly terms with most of them, remained; and his impact upon the life of the university has been the greatest and the most enduring. Among his achievements here, The Review of Politics is undoubtedly his most lasting. When he arrived at Notre Dame, a proper intellectual climate, created by not a few teachers and priests, existed, a climate which made possible the founding, the sustenance and the continuance of a broad cultural journal like the Review. Professors of philosophy, literature and history as well as of political philosophy and science—interested in generating what Professor Nef calls "the new scholarship of synthesis"—could understand the reasons for and the necessity of the Review's coming into existence at Notre Dame; and could and did cooperate in its founding, in its formation and in its growth to eminence. But the great and active form was provided by Waldemar Gurian. And the Review surely stands today as the embodiment of his genius and knowledge and immensity of spirit.

Among the preparatory prayers of the Mass, there are these words from Psalm 42: "Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy." However inadequately accomplished, the purpose of this essay is to affirm and distinguish our cause as Catholic minds and human beings from the nation and from the world that are not holy—to affirm the strength and meaning of the world of the Church for our varied worlds of living and working. As Christopher Dawson points out in a remarkable essay, there is, even in the modern world, "a tradition of sacred culture which it has been the mission of the Church to nourish and preserve"—and to nourish and preserve it even in the nation that is not holy. "However secularized our modern civilization may become," Dawson continues, "this sacred tradition [this sacred life] remains like a river in the desert, and a genuine religious education can still use it to irrigate the thirsty lands and to change the face of the world with the promise of a new life. The great obstacle is the failure of Christians themselves to understand the depth of that tradition and the inexhaustible possibilities of new life that it contains."

The rationalist is the acknowledged enemy of the spirit. The enmity is notably murderous when the object is the mind that has been scripturalized, the mind that draws its sources of value and discernment and power out of the energy of the Old and New Testaments, the mind that, refusing to show cause or prove or analyze, delivers judgment and damnation with the utmost conviction, the conviction of prophetic vision, of spiritual intuition. The system-maker, inveterately hunting after a coherent method or formulation, will find none; rather he may be expected to find only a violent assertiveness indifferent to all pattern and organization. So he may cry, "Fraud!" or "Fool!" Or if he, in his pure objectivity, has to respect the visionary's evident belief in his task, he may, subsequently, summon the psycho-analyst, who, at a loss for any other explanation, may attribute the whole outpouring of the prophet's soul to a neurotic condition. But this is, I think, a cheap evasion of the responsibility of any serious examiner.

The question is: how can you put a prophet in his place when, by the very character of prophecy, he is eternally slipping out of place? William Blake was not an eighteenth century or nineteenth century mind or a typically modern mind at all. What I mean to say, right at the start, is that, although well aware of his time and of time altogether, he was not in tune with the main tendencies of his or our own time. Indeed time was a barrier he was forever crashing against. Blake's talent raved through the world into the fastnesses of die past and dramatically confronted the abysses of the future. His age did not confine him. As a poet he does not seem finally to have had real spiritual or artistic rinship with any of the rationalist or romantic writers of England. As a thinker he came to despise the inadequacy of the limited revolutionary effort of the political rebels of the Romantic Revolution. Blake's name is not to be seen mounted first with that of Paine or Godwin, of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Wordsworth or Shelley or Byron or Keats. With these he has, ultimately, little or nothing in common. At any rate, his voice and mood and impact are thoroughly different from the more publicly successful voices of the period of his life, older and younger generations alike.