ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors try to understand what exactly Guardini meant when he observed that the church was awakening in the souls. The idea that the Catholic Church was able to offer an alternative to the situation was not some private idiosyncrasy of Guardini's. Guardini describes how modern individuals felt enclosed in themselves. They experienced a distance between themselves as subject and the ‘external reality’ as object. In earlier modern times, it was simply expected that the state, the social order, and the sciences would last: they were somehow perceived as timeless and stable realities. Guardini thus locates the essence of truth in a concrete historical reality, that of Christ and his mystical body, the church. Guardini's turn to the church is thus fundamentally related to epistemological insights which are elaborated in Der Gegensatz: Guardini draws the attention of theology to the life of the church, but immediately understands that this means qualification and reorientation of epistemology in general.
