Vom Leben des Glaubens

by Romano Guardini

Concluding his Farewell Discourse, Christ tells his “The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” Thus does the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, per Romano Guardini, mark the formal beginning of Christian existence; it is “the first time we have that which is properly called faith.” Treating the mystery of faith, not as a concept, but as a living reality, The Life of Faith takes its cue from divine revelation (the “only means” by which faith is intelligible) and examines the essence of faith as the covenant between the God who speaks to man and the man who hears the Divine voice. Across ten succinct chapters, Guardini considers faith and its relationships to hope and love, to action and knowledge, and to the life of Church, in dogma and sacrament, as its ultimate fulfillment. A powerful aid to meditation, The Life of Faith also issues a stern challenge to subjective, spiritualistic conceptions of what it means to believe, staunchly affirming faith in Jesus Christ as the ever-ancient, ever-new foundation of life.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Romano Guardini was a Catholic priest, author, and academic. He was one of the most important figures in Catholic intellectual life in the 20th century.

Guardini was born in Verona, Italy in 1885. His family moved to Mainz when he was one year old and he lived in Germany for the rest of his life. After studying chemistry in Tübingen for two semesters, and economics in Munich and Berlin for three, he decided to become a priest. After studying Theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Tübingen, he was ordained in Mainz in 1910. He briefly worked in a pastoral position before returning to Freiburg to work on his doctorate in Theology under Engelbert Krebs. He received his doctorate in 1915 for a dissertation on Bonaventure. He completed his “Habilitation” in Dogmatic Theology at the University of Bonn in 1922, again with a dissertation on Bonaventure. Throughout this period he also worked as a chaplain to the Catholic youth movement.

In 1923 he was appointed to a chair in Philosophy of Religion at the University of Berlin. In the 1935 essay “Der Heiland” (The Saviour) he criticized Nazi mythologizing of the person of Jesus and emphasized the Jewishness of Jesus. The Nazis forced him to resign from his Berlin position in 1939. From 1943 to 1945 he retired to Mooshausen, where his friend Josef Weiger had been parish priest since 1917.

In 1945 Guardini was appointed professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and resumed lecturing on the Philosophy of Religion. In 1948, he became professor at the University of Munich, where he remained until retiring for health reasons in 1962.

Guardini died in Munich on 1 October 1968. He was buried in the priests’ cemetery of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Munich. His estate was left to the Catholic Academy in Bavaria that he had co-founded.