ABSTRACT
Romano Guardini’s reception of Kierkegaard’s philosophical and theological legacy is in several aspects quite exceptional. Guardini represents a key figure in the interwar wave of Catholic Kierkegaard reception in Germany and belongs to its most productive authors. In the second half of the 1920s, when Guardini published a series of works exploring Kierkegaardian ideas and concepts, Kierkegaard’s philosophy was in the German Catholic circles-and especially among theologians-still a terra incognita. Although the form of Guardini’s literary confrontation with Kierkegaard changed over time, the reception stretches continually over more than four decades and concerns subjects central to Guardini’s thought. The presence of most of Kierkegaard’s works in Guardini’s personal library is yet another piece of the mosaic documenting Guardini’s profound interest in Kierkegaard. Guardini’s ambition to interpret Kierkegaard from the very core of his doctrine made him examine some of Kierkegaard’s most complex works: what results this ambitious project yielded is to be demonstrated in the following analysis.
