Romano Guardini read Rilke's Duino Elegies as a compelling eschatological vision for the modern world, but one that must be rejected. I argue that in Rilke's writing, Guardini detected the secular analogue to the substantial image at the end of the Christian eschatological imagination—that is, the communion of saints. Rilke's vision is coherent in that the end he perceives follows from the beginning he assumes; therefore, understanding Rilke's end requires his commentator to see all that precedes that end, beginning with Rilke's own beginning. In a time of increasing loneliness, Guardini's response to Rilke rings with renewed contemporary relevance to guard against the ultimate erasure of the human person.

In The Spirit of Liturgy, Romano Guardini argued that liturgy is a playful activity. But one may ask, can liturgy really be analysed in light of the experience of play? This question opens up different theoretical problems, which range from a fundamental understanding of play and its celebratory spirit to a consideration of liturgy as an event of the divine Mystery. In this paper, I will therefore explore the nature of Christian ritual performance, drawing on a phenomenological analysis of the connections between play and liturgy in the process, before concluding that the liturgy – from a transcendental perspective – is in fact a playful activity. The argument will thus include a study of the particularity and difference of the original ritual patterns and the universe of play, thereby bringing into focus the interplay between the sense of rite and the experience of play. In such a way, I will show that play provides us with one of the possible ways of approaching the essence of the Christian ritual celebration as a transcendental experience of Mystery, as well as shedding light on the interrelation between homo ludens and homo liturgicus.

There is significant correspondence between two phenomena that are very rarely treated together yet reveal intriguing similarities: liturgical theology and German Romanticism. The key shared concept is “organism,” a category expressing active life as well as coherence. It shows a way out of the deadlock caused by a simple opposition of objectivism and subjectivism. This article first of all presents an interesting kind of liturgical theology that was done by representatives of the Catholic Tübingen School, and then shows that the emerging Liturgical Movement was intrinsically Romantic in its theological approach to the liturgy.