From God in Exile to I See Satan Fall Like Lightning: Cornelio Fabro, Romano Guardini, and René Girard

Time and again Cornelio Fabro returned to the defence of the Thomistic doctrine of participation against the attacks from immanentist philosophies and atheism. Fabro’s great study of 1964, God in Exile: Modern Atheism, is a mammoth historical account in which his engagement with Nietzsche is at its most explicit. Both “liberal theology” and “dialectical theology” faced the same crisis emerging from two failures: the failure of the “historical turn” and the failure of “subjectivism.” Against the backdrop of the “death of God,” working one’s way out of the dilemma between liberal theology and the movement known as Ressourcement became the defining framework of the challenges facing Catholicism. Romano Guardini identified three “enemies” of Catholicism: Kant, Nietzsche, and Bolshevism (or Marxism). Yet there exists a profound affinity between Nietzsche and Guardini in relation to their attitude to play (Spiel)—an activity identified in Thus Spoke Zarathustra with the third form into which the spirit is transformed, a child. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999), René Girard defines his own position against Nietzsche’s, whose “heritage” is described as “twofold.” Yet the moment of Nietzsche’s supreme insight into the nature of the Dionysian is said also to mark the moment of his descent into insanity.