658721

research-article2016
SCE0010.1177/0953946816658721Studies in Christian EthicsRajčáni

Article

Studies in Christian Ethics

Good, Truth and Being:

2016, Vol. 29(4) 424–436
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0953946816658721
Romano Guardini sce.sagepub.com

Jakub Rajčáni
Nanzan University, Japan

Abstract
In this article, I present one view of Guardini’s ethics, to which he dedicated his late academic life.
Christian ethics for Guardini is only a natural consequence of the whole Christian existence and
thus unique. Therefore, it is fundamentally a christocentric ethics but it affirms also the being of
man as creature and hence realistic. It is indeed based on the nature of man, but not natural in the
biological sense. I focus on the interpretation of the good that is never in Guardini’s eyes a mere
concept, but objectively existing and concrete. I point out that ethics is always connected with
the personal dimension, that man’s doing is radically a working-with-God, and that in and through
action man grasps and perfects himself. Christian ethics is a participation in Christ’s properties
and conformity to him, who is the personal and living norm of the new life.

Keywords
Christocentrism, conscience, ethics, good, morality, Personalism

Introduction
Romano Guardini belongs to those theologians—albeit only with difficulty definable as
a real theologian—that most influenced the development of Catholic thought in the
twentieth century, as well as its major event—Vatican II. His ideas simply stand behind
the teaching of such thinkers as Pieper, de Lubac, von Balthasar, Ratzinger and so on,
although they were not directly his disciples.1 In many cases he was more a kind of a

1. We may trace his influence to a Jewish female philosopher H. Arendt, who participated in
his classes in Berlin in the 1920s and after a distance of years visited one of his lectures in
Munich. Moreover, the moral theologian par excellence of the twentieth century, B. Häring,
attended Guardini’s lectures in Tübingen and admitted to have known him personally.
Guardini’s importance for the Church life in the twentieth century is manifested also in the

Corresponding author:
Jakub Rajčáni, Nanzan University, S.V.D. Residence, 11–15 Minamiyama-cho, Showa-ku, Nagoya 466-0835, Japan.
Email: rajcani@ic.nanzan-u.ac.jp