Romano Guardini, the renowned German priest, theologian, and writer who held university posts in Berlin, Tübingen, and Munich, wrote this book at seventy-two. He had endured Nazi persecution and been forced to abandon teaching; after the war, he resumed his work and saw his writings published again. Now, in old age, he could look back with detachment and balance, embodying the finest quality we find in the elderly: wisdom.
A man of deep religious conviction, always bent on articulating a Catholic vision engaged with the pressing questions of the modern world, Guardini seemed in this book to distill the best of his life experience. His thought and prose are lucid and clear. Nothing strikes us as excessive or wanting. He invites us to observe the character and meaning of the different seasons of human life, presenting them in all their distinctness, always pointing toward the moral task that unites them all: the pursuit of good. "Now," he writes, "good cannot be realized in just any way. It must take shape and define itself, and this happens through concrete circumstance. Then good appears in its particular urgency—as demanded here, now, in the present conditions—and it is a good we can know, name, and realize."
So in Guardini's splendid portrait, from childhood to youth, from adulthood to maturity and old age, each season has its own possibilities, its own riches, and its own duties. Each must be lived fully, with all the joys and difficulties that belong to it.
The passage from one season to the next can take the form of crisis—we might note the moment when we first grasp our own limits in early adulthood, or the moment of letting go at the threshold of old age. Yet these are crises that can be met with serenity. They are necessary if we are to find our footing in the new season and learn to live its abundance to the full.
Romano Guardini seems to invite us to repeat the prayer of Psalm 89: "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."
- Natalia Livi, 1993
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