Weltanschauung
On his 70th birthday, Romano Guardini acknowledged a debt to Max Scheler. The philosopher had once told him: ‘You must do what is intrinsic to the word Weltanschauung [consideration of the world], that is you must look at things, people, the world, but do so as a responsible Christian with a view to articulating scientifically what it is you see.’ This, said Guardini, was exactly what he had ended up spending his life doing, methodically considering ‘the encounter of faith with the world. And not just the world in a generic sense, the way theologians approach it in various modes of questioning, but the world in the particular: culture and its forms of expression, history, societal life, etc.’ After several decades of such enterprise, he poignantly concluded (in 1955, only eleven years after the end of World War II), he had come to ‘appreciate how important this work is, and what happens when it is not carried out.’ Words worth pondering.