The affaire Guardini. Secularization and Legitimacy of the Modern Age in Romano Guardini

Abstract

This contribution proposes a reading of Guardini’s Das Ende der Neuzeit aimed at revealing the theory of modernity that it presupposes. Guardini embodies a third way between secularization and legitimacy. On the one hand, he recognizes a single sphere of the modern that can be explained with the paradigm of secularization. On the other hand, he empties this paradigm of meaning regarding other aspects of modernity, and this by virtue of an original reading of Christianity as a relationship between Revelation and the world - and not as an immutable and defined conceptual block.