The World and the Person; translated by Stella Lange
Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965. First edition. Octavo, original tan cloth, gilt spine, original dust jacket. Book fine, slight edge-wear, chip to upper rear panel of price-clipped dust jacket. A near-fine copy. Item #1598
"MAN IS A PERSON ONLY BECAUSE GOD'S LOVE FOR HIM IS SUCH AS IT IS"
First edition in English of essays by Romano Guardini embracing "a decidedly personalist approach" (Robert Royal) to the meaning of Christian existence. Complete with the original dust jacket designed by Robert Borja with Guardini's work described as "For the 'aware' Christian" on the back panel.
First published (as "Welt und Person") in Germany in 1939, the same year that Guardini was asked by the Nazi Minister of Education to step down from his position as the University of Berlin's professor of Philosophy of Religion and Catholic Worldview. The World and the Person did not appear in the United States until long after Guardini had established himself with American readers. The rear flap recalls the popularity of Father Guardini's The Lord ("an American religious bestseller immediately upon publication"). Henry Regnery, "though not a Catholic, promoted his work with fervor in North America in the 1940's and 1950's, publishing thirteen of the German’s works. Many of these books, as Regnery understood them, were not as much academic and scholarly as they were descriptions of 'encounters.' That is, they described the relations between Guardini and Socrates or between Guardini and Jesus or between Guardini and Pascal" (Bradley J. Birzer).
At odds with "the individualism and evolutionary doctrines," Guardini, in his brief Preface, defines his Personalism: "Fundamentally, it is one idea that shall be examined—that man does not exist as an enclosed block of reality or a self-sufficient figure evolving from within, but rather exists for that which he encounters from without." The text is divided in two sections: The World ("the relations of man with reality") and The Person ("an outline of the Christian portrait of man"). Guardini's concluding chapter, in five parts, "is intended to show...how one can conceive of the Christian unity of man and the world, Christian 'existence.'" The text is supplemented with a collection of end Notes and a bibliography ("Books by Romano Guardini"). Approbations. Robert Royal. A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century; Robert A. Krieg. Romano Guardini's Theology of the Human Person. Theological Studies, 59 (1998); Bradley J. Birzer. Romano Guardini and the Personality of Man. The Imaginative Conservative (October 14th, 2023).
Price: $150.00