Romano Guardini and Cornelio Fabro on Kierkegaard's Christian Humanism

Abstract This article examines how Søren Kierkegaard's theological anthropology furnished resources for reconstructing Christian humanism among mid‐twentieth‐century Catholic thinkers. Focusing on Romano Guardini (1885‐1968) in Germany and Cornelio Fabro (1911‐1995) in Italy, I demonstrate how each thinker creatively appropriated Kierkegaard's treatments of despair, interiority, and hope to address the fragmentation of modern Europe following the world wars. Guardini found in Kierkegaard an existential diagnosis of modern spiritual pathology, which he redirected towards a liturgical vision of Christian hope. Fabro, as Kierkegaard's major Italian translator, recovered metaphysical realism in the Dane's journals, which grounded existential subjectivity with a Thomistic framework. By concluding with Kierkegaard's own biblical reflections on hope from his Upbuilding Discourses , I argue that Kierkegaard's theological vision—centred on the God‐relation as constitutive of selfhood—offered both thinkers a foundation for a Christian humanism capable of resisting totalitarian collectivism and secular reductionism while affirming human dignity, freedom, and hope in divine transcendence.