In the late 1950s, theologian Romano Guardini gave an address at the Munich College of Technology, a talk published later under the title “The Machine and Humanity.” The address resonated with many of the themes that Guardini pursued in Letters from Lake Como, originally published in periodical form between 1923 and 1925.

“Every technical action involves the possessing, using, and shaping of nature. Nature becomes culture. Nature is what is there on its own; culture is what we humans make of it. In the course of history, the culture factor in existence has become stronger, while the natural factor has become weaker.

“With the coming of the machine this process has reached a new stage. Nature has been seized and made ready for use. Human beings take a cultural attitude to nature when they go to it. We need only think of photography, which has become the way travelers encounter things, or of the way in which we organize travel and vacations and furnish them with all the amenities of city life.

“The process seems to be unavoidable. Still, this question arises: What will be the effect of this constant weakening of the natural factor that still remains in human existence? Each new machine means that something we previously mastered with the help of our organic intellectual equipment is now left to a technical construct. We thus make an object of something that used to be subjective, part of life’s initiative. This means release — we are freed. But it means also that we have lost a possibility of creating, of experiencing the world, and of self-development. So long as we had only sailing ships, sea journeys were often dangerous, but they also brought to life the enhancement that goes along with risk. Modern ships have greatly reduced the dangers. They give travelers a few peaceful days in floating hotels. Relative to existence as a whole, is that a gain or a loss?

“The fact that the machine brings a measure of freedom hitherto unknown is in the first instance a gain. The value of freedom, however, is not fixed solely by the question ‘Freedom from what?’ but decisively by the further question ‘Freedom for what?’ Every social pedagogue knows what problems arise regarding use of the time that is made free by machines. If we do not succeed in making meaningful use of the free days, then the result of such ‘freedom’ is negative.

“Finally, we need to say something about that which concerns our innermost life. The ongoing intensification of science and technology, with all that this means in economic life, communications, and public consciousness, seems to be a hindrance to our ability to have immediate religious experience or to our receptivity to religious motivation. Some time ago in Westphalia, or so I am told, a motto was in parlance that where the railroad comes, second sight disappears. In an incidental way this seems to point to what I have in mind. Our attention today is claimed for rational and utilitarian tasks in such a way that we can no longer pay attention to that other dimension of our existence.

“It is no accident that the worldview which sees in the machine the symbol of fulfilled culture — namely, materialistic communism — is trying systematically to destroy the religious life. It proceeds on the premise that science and technology are the only foundations of existence and that they demand such a level of empirical concentration that everything religious has to be harmful. For positivists who think in terms of Comte’s formula for historical progress — lowest stage = religion, second stage = philosophy, third and true stage = science — the disappearance of the religious element is a gain. Those who look deeper realize, however, that this means a loss, not only of an essential part of the human, but of the innermost part.”

—from Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1926, 1994)

Related reading and listening

Related reading and listening

Links to posts and programs featuring D. C. Schindler:

Links to posts and programs featuring Junius Johnson;

Links to posts and programs featuring Reinhard Huetter;

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P.:

Links to posts and programs featuring Louis Markos:

Links to posts and programs featuring William C. Hackett:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Albert Howard:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Pfau:

Links to posts and programs featuring Hans Boersma:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bruce Hindmarsh:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Budziszewski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steve L. Porter:

Links to posts and programs featuring Norman Wirzba:

Links to posts and programs featuring Timothy Larsen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bruce Herman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Rod Dreher:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kevin J. Vanhoozer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Esther Lightcap Meek:

Links to posts and programs featuring Alan Jacobs:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kimbell Kornu:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Lyle Jeffrey:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Setran:

Links to posts and programs featuring Peter Bouteneff:

Links to posts and programs featuring Francis J. Beckwith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marianne Wright:

Links to posts and programs featuring David W. Fagerberg:

Links to posts and programs featuring William T. Cavanaugh:

Links to posts and programs featuring Michael Ward:

Links to posts and programs featuring Michael Dominic Taylor:

Links to posts and programs featuring Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung:

Links to posts and programs featuring Robin Phillips:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jonathan McIntosh:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marian Schwartz:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Kaethler:

Links to posts and programs featuring Donald B. Kraybill:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas Storck:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jonathan Chaplin:

Links to posts and programs featuring James W. Skillen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Richard Stivers:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Regnerus:

Links to posts and programs featuring Emma Mason:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Noll:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Ney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Greg Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring David I. Smith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Paone:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kelly M. Kapic:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric O. Jacobsen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jessica Hooten Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring James Turner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Rubery:

Links to posts and programs featuring Simon Oliver:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Blakely:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kathryn Wehr:

Links to posts and programs featuring Holly Ordway:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Tyson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew D. Stewart:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Sehat:

Links to posts and programs featuring John Durham Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring Oliver O'Donovan:

Links to posts and programs featuring Nigel Biggar:

Links to posts and programs featuring Margaret Harper McCarthy:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Paul Davison:

Links to posts and programs featuring Alison Milbank:

Links to posts and programs featuring Brian R. Brock:

Links to posts and programs featuring Scott Newstok:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fiona Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring R. Jared Staudt:

Links to posts and programs featuring Grant R. Brodrecht:

Links to posts and programs featuring Antonio López:

Links to posts and programs featuring Brent Hull:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew B. Crawford:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kerry McCarthy:

Links to posts and programs featuring Robert P. George:

Links to posts and programs featuring Christine Rosen:

Links to posts and programs featuring Scott Cairns:

Links to posts and programs featuring Diana Pavlac Glyer:

Links to posts and programs featuring O. Carter Snead:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steven D. Smith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeremy Beer:

Links to posts and programs featuring James K. A. Smith:

Links to posts and programs featuring Richard Weikart:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Evan Bonds:

Links to posts and programs featuring Perry L. Glanzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Dana Gioia:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thomas E. Bergler:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Srigley:

Links to posts and programs featuring J.A.C. Redford:

Links to posts and programs featuring Carl Elliott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Victor Lee Austin:

Links to posts and programs featuring Sørina Higgins:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steve Wilkens:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gilbert Meilaender:

Links to posts and programs featuring Martin X. Moleski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Brendan Sweetman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Allan C. Carlson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason M. Baxter:

Links to posts and programs featuring Barrett Fisher II:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Weston:

Links to posts and programs featuring Steven Knepper:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan M. Felch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fred Turner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Dickerson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jack R. Baker:

Links to posts and programs featuring W. Bradford Wilcox:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bill Vitek:

Links to posts and programs featuring Adam K. Webb:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Bauerlein:

Links to posts and programs featuring Felicia Wu Song:

Links to posts and programs featuring Joseph E. Davis:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thaddeus Kozinski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Craig M. Gay:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark T. Mitchell:

Links to posts and programs featuring Karen Dieleman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Tim Clydesdale:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Mark Bertrand:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mathew Levering:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark G. Malvasi:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kirk Farney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bradley J. Birzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ralph C. Wood:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Heintzman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gil Bailie:

Links to posts and programs featuring Zygmunt Bauman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Lee Anderson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mike Aquilina:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bishop Robert Barron:

Links to posts and programs featuring Frederick Buechner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeffrey Bilbro:

Links to posts and programs featuring James A. Herrick:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Cain:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marilyn McEntyre:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Spencer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Albert Borgmann:

Links to posts and programs featuring Catherine Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Maggie M. Jackson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Garret Keizer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andy Crouch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kyle Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring Philip G. Ryken:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric Miller:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ted Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Landon Loftin:

Links to posts and programs featuring Barry Hankins:

Links to posts and programs featuring Quentin Schultze:

Links to posts and programs featuring Dale Ahlquist:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Walker:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Damian Ference:

Links to lectures and commentary by Ken Myers: