FORTHCOMING ARTICLE IN STUDIES IN SPIRITUALITY. PLEASE CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE USING THE CORRECT PAGE NUMBERS. JOSHUA FURNAL THE KIERKEGAARDIAN SHAPE OF ROMANO GUARDINI’S RESILIENT SPIRITUALITY INTRODUCTION The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and Protestant theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) had a great impact on Romano Guardini’s intellectual formation and proved to be an important theological resource for Guardini’s resilient spirituality. 1 Guardini owned many copies of Kierkegaard’s books in his library and Kierkegaard’s influence on Guardini spanned four decades, leaving a distinctive life-long trace across Guardini’s signature ideas – both philosophical and theological. 2 Between 1925 and 1927, Romano Guardini taught a course on Kierkegaard in Berlin that examined the relationship between Christianity and Culture, which formed the basis for Guardini’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’s writings. One of his students, Hans Urs von Balthasar, observed that Guardini was ‘profoundly affected by Kierkegaard’. For example, Guardini’s philosophical anthropology is also known as personalism, a European movement that is in- debted to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on understanding the primacy of human dig- nity in terms of ‘the single existing individual before God’. 3 Kierkegaard scholars like Peter Šajda have detected Kierkegaardian echoes in Guardini’s notion of the ‘living concrete’ person, which Guardini deployed to emphasize the primacy of freedom as an inalienable feature of human personhood. 4 1 For more on Guardini’s contribution to Kierkegaard’s wider European reception, see Joshua Furnal, Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Also see, Heiko Schulz, ‘A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard’, in: Jon Stewart (Ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, 307-419. 2 For more, see Hanna-Barbara Gerl, Romano Guardini, 1885-1968: Leben und Werk (2 nd rev. ed.), Mainz: Grünewald, 1985, 133-134, 253-257, 281-290, 308-310. See also, Stephan Pauly, Subjekt und Selbstwerdung: Das Subjektdenken Romano Guardinis: Seine Rückbezüge auf Søren Kierkegaard und Seine Einlösbarkeit in der Postmoderne, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000 (Forum Systematik). 3 Juan Manuel Burgos, An Introduction to Personalism, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2018, 19-21, 137-142. 4 Peter Šajda, ‘Romano Guardini: Between Actualistic Personalism, Qualitative Dialectic and Ki- netic Logic’ in: Jon Stewart (Ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Catholic and Jewish Theology, ed. Jon Stewart, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012 (Kierkegaard: Research Sources, Reception and Resources 10:3), 45-74. For example, Šajda traces this Kierkegaardian influence in ‘Über Sozialwissen- schaft und Ordnung der Personen’ (1926), ‘Lebendiger Geist’ (1927), ‘Der Ausgangspunkt der Denkbewegung Sören Kierkegaards’ (1927), and ‘Freiheit, Gnade, Schicksal’ (1948).