Sitting on the Lakeshore: Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como Retold

In his Letters from Lake Como, Romano Guardini distilled the characteristics of a cultural shift from a rural community to an industrialized society. Decades later, he would complete and refine his vision of that shift in The End of the Modern World. In the two books, but especially in Letters, Guardini argued for the possibility of a conciliation between a Christianity that differs from medieval Christianity, or Christendom, and an artificial, technologically infused culture that is no longer rooted in the rural life of pre-modern civilization. In this essay, I return to Guardini’s concept of a Christianized industrialism, a modern culture that is embedded in technology and yet open to transcendence. I show the groundlessness of such a concept in continuity with Hans Urs von Balthasar’s concise assessment of Guardini’s work, which Balthasar saw as firm and groundless.