—Ink and Echoes—

Letters from Lake Como (II)

Romano Guardini

c. 1924  

Translated by Fr. Anthony Giambrone

My Dear Friend!

The first impression remains.  It grows ever deeper.  The people are delighted by the progress.  Admittedly, it brings them work and bread.  Many, who otherwise would have to emigrate, stay in the country.  Much indigence, much disadvantage in the basic comforts and needs of life is disappearing.  Car after car drives along the lake; factory after factory pops up; everything is wired with electricity; everything is set up and works.  As I explained to someone what this means for one who comes from the North, he understood it very well.  But he took the destruction as a necessity.  “It is simply so!”  Indeed, he ultimately got mad: “Our land must remain poor and our people must emigrate so that your romantic needs can here be met!”  I must admit that he is right.

Yet, what is advancing is nonetheless horrible.  Am I boring you?  You know, if someone has a deeply personal question on his heart, and suddenly sees it before him in objective, historical form, he is not quickly done with the matter!  The problem of culture is here becoming ever clearer to me!  You see, there is a nature, entirely untouched, even wholly “Nature” in the special sense of the word.  To this we have from the outset no relation.  Carl Schmitt, in his brilliant book on Roman Catholicism – I read it on the trip down – saw correctly: the desire for an entirely untouched nature is itself already a result of culture, springing from the excess of an artificial existence.  Nature first starts really to concern us when it begins to be inhabited; when culture begins within it.  It then strides forwards; piece by piece nature is shaped.  Man creates his own world within it, formed according to his thoughts, ruled not by natural drives, but by set goals serving spiritual beings: a world created as an environment that is based upon him, interwoven by him.

How does this human world stand relative to the world of nature?  It distances itself inevitably from it.  It raises up the natural things and relationships into another sphere, the sphere of the thought-out, the willed, the regulated, the created, always somehow far from nature: the sphere of the cultural.  Man lives in this world of culture.  In the first nature, that order in which the animals live, man cannot be.  To be human is to be interwoven by spirit and mind.  But the spirit can only create when it has taken from nature its . . . I would like to say, its penetrating reality.  The spirit can therefore only create when the sphere of the natural-real is in some measure loosened up, called into question, diluted, through the sphere of the conscious and the unreal-ideal.  I raise for myself the objection: spirit is indeed reality and must be capable of grasping un-weakened nature-reality.  All the same, all spiritual creation seems to presuppose a sort of asceticism: a kind of breaking up, loosening, unrealizing of nature.  Only then can man set up his work.

Thus, culture appears from the very outset to have something alien to nature about it; something unreal, artificial.  That increases until a certain limit is reached: a maximum mass of spirit-and-mind-saturated culture.  It is estranged from nature, as belongs by essence to the relationship; but it is nonetheless so close to her, so elastically bound to her, that this culture remains “natural” and the natural saps can course through it.

I want to look for an example, so that what is said will not remain void.  Take a sailboat.  Here on Lake Como they sail along, heavy, fit for great cargo.  Yet the mass of wood and canvas and the power of the wind are so perfectly formed that the load is made light.  When such a boat pulled its path before the wind, my heart laughed, as it laughs when, by a perfected form, something is made light and bright from within.

When such a boat pulled its path before the wind, my heart laughed, as it laughs when, by a perfected form, something is made light and bright from within.

I do not know what the historians might think, but it seemed to be entirely believable when someone told me that boats were the same in the time of the Romans.  An ancient inheritance of form is here.   Can you feel what a wonderful fact of culture it is, when man becomes lord over wind and water with a bit of bent and jointed wood and some spread-out canvas?  Into my very blood I sensed the creation; the primordial work of mankind’s creative power.  So full of spirit and mind, this perfectly worked-through movement, by which man masters nature!

Certainly, he already paid for this with a distance.  Mankind is no longer so immersed in the realm of wind and water as are the birds and fishes.  The Dionysian handing-over of oneself is already undone.  I once read how the people of some fisher folk in the south sea, rising on a bare board, throw themselves into the surf, simply for fun, for pleasure!  What an infinite rapture of connection to nature must come over such a person!  As if he were a water creature or a piece of wave!  Compared to him, the perfected sailboat here is already consummate sobriety.  Man has already distanced himself from nature.  He has renounced it; the threads are cut; he has overcome.  The relation to nature has grown cooler, more alien.  Only so could culture, the work of the spirit, be created.

Yet, is it not true, do you not even sense how natural the work remains?  The canvas of the boat and its proportions remain in deep consonance with the power of the wind and waves and the living measure of man.  And he rules the boat, remains closely bound with wind and waves.  He stands breast to breast against their power.  Eye and hand and the entire body are tense.  Real culture, elevation over nature, and yet still in a decisive way so close to nature.  Mankind remains within, entirely alive, a spiritual ensouled body.  He overcomes nature by the strength of the spirit, but he himself remains “natural.”

Yet, allow the distance from nature to grow.  It pained my heart as I was in one of these boats, these noble creations, and suddenly saw a gas motor built in.  The thing struck out across the waves with a clattering, upright mast, all naked without a sail, like a ghost of its very self!  Allow the distance to go still farther, out of the sailboat comes the steamboat, then the great ocean liner – “culture” indeed, the lustrous work of technology!  Yet such a colossus moves through the sea, insensible for wind and weather.  It is so immense that nature no longer has any power over it.  Within it, man no longer senses nature.  The people eat and sleep and dance; they live as if in the houses and on the streets of some great city.

Do you sense how something decisive has been lost?  How here something is not merely incrementally advanced, simply made bigger, but rather that some wavering border has been crossed, a border that one cannot precisely indicate, a border that one senses once it has long been crossed.  Beyond this border the living nearness to nature has been lost.  Every primordial phenomenon of human culture, which we have designated by “boat” and “ship”, constructs of the human spirit, yet entirely inserted within nature — “culture,” yet still always created through the living movement and activity of the entire person — this is no longer there.  In the sailboat, alongside the whole spiritual/intellectual character of the situation, humanity had a natural existence.  He dwelt in a natural culture.  In the modern steamship, he stands in an entirely artificial situation.  Nature is turned off as far as possible.  That does not yet say enough.  Nature, measured by elastic and living human limits, is decisively shut down.   Nature is conclusively pushed off into the distance.  There was an order, a habitat, that made possible a “humane” existence in a very special sense.  With the steamship it is no longer present.  The sailor in the serious and true sense of the word, as a fundamental form of human being, filled with a special stuff of existence, is no longer possible.  The people aboard the giant steamboat are no longer essentially different from the mechanics and operators employed in a factory.

The sailor in the serious and true sense of the word, as a fundamental form of human being, filled with a special stuff of existence, is no longer possible. The people aboard the giant steamboat are no longer essentially different from the mechanics and operators employed in a factory.

Do you understand what I mean?  Take another example.  In the old Italian houses, especially in the country, you find everywhere the open hearth.  Here again is a process, intertwined with the deepest roots of human existence.  The open fire is tamed, that the flame might be made serviceable and provide warmth.  Thus, spirit and mind at work, a humanly wrought nature.  A simple, forceful element of human existence is actualized.  Again, surely, paid for by a distance from nature.  I know of fire’s frenzy, of the primitive violence of the untamed flame.  Here all is subdued, moved to a distance, diluted.  So must we pay for the work of culture.  Yet nature remains near.  It is real, flaming fire, ignited and kept alive by men.  One feels the enclosure of the hearth, the capturing and shielding walls, the living draught, the organic build of the room and of the home.  That is humane existence.  Permit me to exaggerate: to be human means to ignite a fire in a protected room, so that it might be lit and kept warm.  The sphere of primitive man – Prometheus!

But do you sense it, how it is abandoned as soon as we have the modern coal furnace, which one turns on in the fall and which burns along like clockwork until the spring?  Or steam heat, which entirely anonymously, out of some cauldron, brings the temperature of the house to some determined degree?  Or electric heating, where nothing at all burns anymore — where a wire simply runs through the house and makes it hot, wherever some heating device sits?  The phenomenon of culture has disappeared, the binding with nature has been cut, an entirely artificial situation has been created.  And everything that before the open fire was made real in human existence and life has now been lost.

Think of the plow.  It too is an ancient construct of culture.  The equipment, before it the draft animal, behind it the man steering, all together turning over the earth.  Merely in following along I, a city person, have sensed the secret in this form of humanity, when a plowman drew it over a field and loosened the earth.  Proud culture and nature so near!  Creative spirit, woven together with nature and with purest humankind within.

But when out of the plow, led by the hand, a motorized plow emerges?  Certainly a wonder-worthy work of technology.  It generates more bread and a higher standard of living.  Yet, if behind the hand-plough he could still be human, the farmer riding atop the seat of a tractor can be no more!

One could similarly name many other things.  Think of light: an open, flickering flame.  Recently I was in Munich.  There we had some lectures in the refectory of an old monastery building.  It was lit only by candles, which hung from the ceiling on a broad ring, or were held in people’s hands, or were placed in stands, as needs may be.  Then I saw the great, beautifully formed baroque room come to life.  And the people were standing there so properly, in their brilliant, all-embracing, absorbing surroundings.  Then it became clear to me: now, after gas and electric light have come, the finest quality of an old building awakes no more.  How the room becomes a living thing in living light!  In a light that constantly fights with the darkness, that has warm color within itself, and movement in the wavering flame.  In such light the room emerges again and again ever new.  The power of the light grades off from the bright nearness of the flame to the room’s still-dark heights and corners.  And when a person strides through it, then all these levels and grades move about, and one observes how little a building is something that simply stands completed, but is rather something that becomes ever new.

And when a person strides through it, then all these levels and grades move about, and one observes how little a building is something that simply stands completed, but is rather something that becomes ever new.

In all handwork we find such primordial phenomena and near-to-nature human culture.  By the smith – set next to him the electrically driven machines of our factories.  By the carpenter and mason – our houses are poured into molds and stamped out.  By the joiner, who makes utensils, and by the cartwright, who creates wagons – read in Ford, how now every industry sector daily makes one part of the device, always exactly the same, down to the hundredth of a millimeter, and in countless numbers of units.

Invariably a sphere of spirit-drenched culture, and yet close to nature.  Therein is man a creative being and he stands breast to breast against the things and forces of nature.  He is human in the deepest sense of the word.  This humane culture is nearly entirely sunken.  We no longer have rolling wagons with the animal that pulls it, and with all the life within and around it, but the automobile.  The doctor for a long time now no longer stands in living, feeling contact with that nature, from whose forces health and strength are created in the body.  Think of the wonderful picture of the doctor in Adalbert Stifter’s story “From the Map of my Great-Grandfather,” or the old veterinarian, Halunke Schnarrwergk, in Wilhelm Raabe’s “Lar”!  Now medical thought and practice moves so often only in the chemical, mechanical sphere of formulas, pharmaceutics, and prescriptions.  Our food is entirely artificial all the way down the line.  We have withdrawn ourselves from out of the living order of the times and tides, with morning and evening, day and night, work days and Sundays, the phases of the moon and the seasons.  We live now in an order of fabricated time, with clocks and hours of business and pleasure determined. . . .

The sphere in which we live is growing ever more artificial, ever less human, ever more — I cannot help myself, barbaric!

And over Italy hangs the deep melancholy of this downfall. 

"Lake Como" by Clarkson Frederick Stanfield. Oil paint on oak. 1825.

Romano Guardini (1885 – 1968) was a Catholic priest and prolific author.  He was born in Verona, Italy, but spent most of his life in Germany.  He wrote extensively on topics relating to Christianity, nature, and the modern, rapidly changing world.  His writings have been highly influential on many philosophers and theologians, including the current and previous popes.

Fr. Anthony Giambrone, OP, PhD, is a professor of New Testament at the École Biblique in Jerusalem. He is the author of many academic works and a frequent contributor to popular Christian publications.  He is also versed in various languages and a noted translator of ancient and modern texts.    He is the chaplain of Hearth & Field.

Editors Note About the Translation:  A powerful, poetic grace and conceptual precision are present in the original German text that merit a new English translation at this time.  The subtle relationship between Guardini’s prose and his subject matter is itself part of the power of his message and unique genius.  We hope this translation effectively captures and expresses the spirit and aesthetic of this  — once again — timely work.

Feel Less FRANTIC and More Grounded

One to two newsletters from Hearth & Field per month.
100% excellent content, worthy of your time (and therefore, we would venture to say, your inbox).