'THE ANXIETY OF GUILT AND CONDEMNATION': OUR LIBERTY IS LIMITED; NO FISH CAN SWIM OUT OF WATER.

 

The anxiety of guilt and condemnation responds to the question, “What have you made of yourself?”  The individual is both the questioner and the questioned.  Tillich says this situation (1952, 51-52), “produces the anxiety which, in relative terms is an anxiety of guilt; in absolute terms, the anxiety of self-rejection or condemnation.”

In some sense you are like one standing or approaching the peripheries of the end of a journey and taking stock.  To this question, one either responds, “Nothing” or “Something.”  And the “Something/Nothing” dichotomy is often determined relative to the norms of the environmental context in which it is made.  In the corporate world all I ever heard was production, tons, bottom-line, objectives and many other measurements of success.  You have achieved something if you measure up to the icons established and determined by your environment.  Everybody heard those voices, and they determined your remuneration in a bottomless pit that never filled.  It was not what most people wanted to do but it was the only voices we heard and measured by.  Nobody said you would never join the ‘Billionaires Club’ if you kept listening to those voices.  Nobody said anything about intuition; that voice that guides you to do what you want to do and are passionate about.

That question is determined in the context of our finitude.  We do not have forever to actualize.  Being human also implies accepting the reality of our finiteness.  We are free to actualize to our highest possible and yet that freedom can only be pursued within the limitations of our liberty.  If we act in accordance with what we believe to be the demands of destiny we are affirmed but nonbeing continues to undermine every action every step of the way, even the best of our performance.

As in ontic and spiritual self-affirmation, death ultimately stands in the background of whether we succeed in making something or nothing of ourselves (moral self-affirmation).

In the Genesis narrative, Adam and Eve were given authority over all creation but their liberty was limited.  They were not to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  Anxiety is introduced when we choose to explore beyond the liberties we are given in the divine scheme of things.

There is a problem!

Tillich’s (1952, 54-57) categories of anxiety reach their zenith in despair.  Despair is the dynamic confluence of the ontic, spiritual, and moral ways in which nonbeing seeks to disaffirm being.  There is no hope beyond despair.  However, there is enough being left in us to recognize our state of hopelessness.  Research on human anxiety can only reveal that there are more questions than answers.  The dark corridors of the human soul grow darker with every dawn of new understanding on the subject.  As Frankl (1984, 126-127) said; 'an existential homeostasis is not possible.' 

Despair suggest the surrender of being to nonbeing.  The awareness of that suggestion adds another element to despair which Tillich calls “despair within despair.”  It is one’s awareness of surrender and the inevitable and ultimate prospects of absolute surrender (Tillich 1952, 21-22).

Despair hits the ceiling, and it cannot see its way into the future.  What do you do if you cannot see your way into the future?  A lot of people have been there; like the financier who jumps off the highest skyscraper because his/her investments were wiped out overnight.  Joseph Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six children and committed suicide because they could not imagine life without the Fuhrer (Patin 2009).

A psychiatric observation to this effect was made by Frankl when writing about the situation in the Nazi death camps (1984, 95):

'The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—his faith was doomed.  With his loss of belief in the future, he lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.'

Tillich’s analysis of anxiety leaves us with a feeling of doom and gloom.  That is typical of all existentialism and that mood has been decried from philosophical, psychological, and theological directions.  Yet Tillich is presenting two sides of the same coin.  The one side (nonbeing) is perennially feeding on the other (being).  In the thought of Tillich being has a priority over nonbeing yet nonbeing relentlessly seeks to undermine being.  Nonbeing has no life of its own because it feeds on the life of being.  If being did not exist, then nonbeing would be a hollow misnomer.  Being is something and nonbeing is nothing.

How is this priority of being over nonbeing a leverage in dealing with human anxiety?  Tillich argues that whole point convincingly in his comparison of existential and pathological anxiety.  The fact that there is a dark side to human existence means that there is a bright side.  Self-affirmation is not a denial of nonbeing, in it being takes the parasitical nature of the nothingness of nonbeing into itself.  Nonbeing would be nothing if being was not something.  The courage of being to withstand the forces of nonbeing must take that reality into consideration.  Unlike some panaceas to pathological anxiety which seem to suggest the possibility of an emotional or existential equilibrium or elimination (Tillich 1952, 64-70).

For the pathological neurotic, self-affirmation is available but only in a limited sense.  The neurotic is affirmed but is surrendered to the things they fear.  A reappearance of their fears—if they have been removed—may drive them into despair. The neurotic is partially affirmed because he/she finds affirmation in the denial of being’s relation to nonbeing (Tillich 1952, 70-78).

For Tillich, these pathological attempts in the medical and social sciences do not go far enough.  The solutions are often shallow because they ignore the ontic structure of anxiety.  They treat the symptoms and leave the sickness intact. In this way the problem is not solved because it usually will resurface in another form and another place and will finally result in emotional exhaustion and finally despair.

'THE EMPTY TOMB AS A SYMBOL OF THE RESSURRECTION' Matt 28:1-8pp; Mk16:1-8; Lk 24:1-10; John 20:1-8

 

The anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness

Nonbeing threatens our spiritual self-affirmation of being in two ways, “relatively in emptiness and absolutely in meaninglessness.” In the thought of Tillich, one is “Empty” if one is unable to participate meaningfully in the expressions of one’s cultural symbols; it is that emptiness that ultimately becomes meaninglessness.  Spiritual affirmation is the meaning drawn from the connection and correlation that one attaches to the symbols, whether they are created by him/her or by others. A poem or music lyrics for instance may articulate in language and sound a person’s unfathomable spiritual deep.  Art is indeed one way in which these expressions are made.  The best-selling song on the market touches a nerve that may have been dormant otherwise.  The creator of a poem or song is spiritually fulfilled with his/her work but so are the rest of us who participate in it in different ways.

Meaninglessness is introduced when the symbol loses its original meaning.  If someone would hoist a flag of the old apartheid regime in South Africa today, I am sure it would invite a lot of criticism, even violence in some quarters.  For many the piece of cloth has lost its meaning, while for others it provokes memories. 

If a symbol loses its historical meaning it is rendered obsolete unless it is reinterpreted.  

The teacher in Ecclesiastes observed that when symbols lose meaning they become miserable business, one begins the futile adventure of chasing the wind.  Ecclesiastes is a journey of reflection.  King Solomon had tried everything and discovered its hollowness, much like the Easter egg.  He had possessions, experience, wisdom, power, and pleasure but in the end he cried out, “Meaningless!”  As Tillich says, ‘Everything is tried but nothing satisfies.’  These symbols of success in human culture still attract much attention; the travesty is not in the symbol itself but the spiritual meaning we attach to it.  We stand or fall, not with the symbol, but with the meaning we attach to the symbol.

“Spiritual” in the context of Tillich is not the schizophrenic and dogmatic sense it is often presented by religious fundamentalism.  It is a way the human spirit progressively and creatively participates in the various spheres of meaning in human and cosmic experience (1952, 46).  Einstein (2010) was religious in this sense, he did not believe in a personal God, but his formulas convinced him of something or someone greater and beyond what he called the “the arts and the impenetrable objective.”  To that extent he had a sense of the eternal.

The human spirit is religious; it is on the “Augustinian” perpetual search for God (Augustine 1960, 43).  Anthropologists agree that this is a universal phenomenon, it may be expressed differently in different contexts, but it is as universal as hunger and the myriad of ways in which people respond to the challenge.  “Religion is the way in which the human spirit must express itself,” says Tillich (1959, 3-9).

In Africa there is empirical evidence everywhere, from the majestic organs in cathedrals of ebony and ivory to the beat of cowhide drums and blowing of horns under the trees in indigenous religion.  The human spirit will always device and design ways to express itself in religious ways.  Even the atheist is religious because he/she must believe there is no God.

Mandela’s well known closing statement during the Rivonia Trial implied that he was consumed by the “Ideal” with religious tenacity (Mandela 1990).  Everything else had to have some implications for the “Ideal” otherwise it was contemptuously dismissed.  In Tillich’s words the “Ideal” was his “ultimate concern.”

For Martin Buber (1937), God is the irreplaceable “Thou.”  The crisis is when the ‘It’ becomes a ‘Thou.’  The “Augustinian” restlessness is neither an event nor a project but a spiritual evolution in perpetual process.  Our tragedy is seeking to express that process in events and projects.  That partly accounts for our busyness, we are on a frantic chase for spiritual fulfilment, but our emptiness is resurfaced at the zenith of every symbolic achievement.

Teilhard de Chardin (1959, 292-294) in his “omega point” espoused an evolutionary notion of “spiritual.”  Meaning is not static but is dynamic and derived in the formation and continuous transformation of that which is spiritually meaningful.  “Spiritual” is a journey in and into a universe in process.  “The human spirit” de Chardin said (1964, 6), “is still in process of evolution”.

If Augustine and de Chardin are right, then the rigidity of religious dogma is the worst crisis of the human spirit.  This is precisely the point—as many have lamented— where religion in the name of religion renders religion empty.  Religious absolutes or dogmas—like symbols of culture—stifle the ability of the human spirit to progressively actualize into the “omega point” where God is finally “all and in all” (Ibid, pp. 1-15).

If religious dogma insists on its static state, then it loses the role it ought to play in the dynamic evolution of the human spirit.[1]  Meaninglessness is a natural consequence of an empty spirit.  Tillich called it the “loss of a spiritual center.” (Tillich 1952, 47). 

Some prisoners in the Nazi death camps developed an “intensification of inner life” which helped the prisoner find refuge from the emptiness, desolation and the spiritual poverty of his existence” (Frankl 1984, 54-59).  While the spiritual connection may not have averted impending death, the prisoners “were able to retreat from their surroundings to a life of inner riches and freedom.”  In this way a dynamic spiritual center offered sustenance in difficult times.

Religion in the dogmatic sense loses this dimension, it becomes the futile effort to be innovative, determine or adapt divine revelation to the human situation (Tillich 1955, 2).  While the effort may be good and even relevant for its generation, it becomes a widow in the next.  Those who derived ontic, spiritual, and moral meaning from it are thrown into an abyss of emptiness and ultimately meaninglessness.

God as “ultimate concern” is a perpetual and dynamic journey of exploration.  We try to capture the divine in structures and institutions more for cerebral convenience; not that it is possible, but it serves a purpose in time.  When these structures and institutions take the place of God, the God who is God breaks through in fresh beginnings.  In that way symbols of religion and culture must keep up with God and not God with symbols.  Thus, Tillich spoke of a ‘God beyond God.’

Essentially the spiritual journey is a permanent tug-of-war between the divine and the demonic, the struggle between being and nonbeing.  The human spirit as an exploring spirit in search of a home is homeless until it finds meaning in God who stands within and above the human situation.  This sentiment is expressed in the Confessions of St Augustine (Augustine 1960, 43): 

'Yet man, this part of your creation wishes to praise you.  You arouse him to take joy in praising you, for you have made him for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.'

The call of biblical scripture is none other than a call back to God.  It is a reconnection of the “Estranged” to God as the ground of all being.  The word “Repent” is not so much religious as it is pedagogical; it is the beginning of a journey with God because God is a journey.  As we explore, we learn, and new meanings of spiritual affirmation perpetually unfold and we understand God in new and dynamic ways.

---

[1] Evolution here is used in the spiritual sense employed in the context of Teilhard de Chardin, and not the biological sense in Charles Darwin.  A correlation between the two may be valid, but that dialogue is the subject of another paper, and I suspect another discipline.

''TO BE OR NOT TO BE,' THAT IS STILL THE QUESTION.

 

The anatomy of fear and anxiety

Fear and anxiety deliver us at the juncture of courage and choice.  What is the nature of this curse or blessing we are dealing with?  That question comes naturally in an environment pegged on the five senses.  Can we see it, touch it, smell it, hear it coming or even taste it?  Do fear and anxiety have a form?  Something we can work with or a target we can hit?  Biblical Israel’s greatest anxiety was fearing the unseen.  They were repeatedly often reminded to, “Fear the Lord your God.”[1]

There is a general agreement in the human sciences that fear, and anxiety are two heads of the same dragon.  While they are independent, they co-exist and feed into each other.  Tillich affirms the clinical analysis of fear and anxiety (Tillich 1952, 36).  While anxiety has no face, fear is usually represented in some physical form.  Fear allows participation because it can be confronted but anxiety is faceless.  In anxiety we fear the unidentifiable and unknowable unknown.  We sense the threat, but we cannot identify the source.  Even worse the threat or source may be nothing.

It is this inability to confront the formless and faceless in anxiety that makes it dreadful.  Paul the apostle spoke to something similar when he wrote, ^{Eph 6:12} “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

This is the apprehension that characterizes our persistent efforts to give anxiety a face.  If I can identify my enemy, I can also call up the courage to confront it.  Those efforts give rise to two problems; on the one hand, the problem in giving anxiety a face is that it may be a wrong face and that is the basis for cruelty in human history.  We see that all the time when weapons of mass destruction hit the wrong targets.  On the other if I don’t know my enemy then everybody is a suspect.  Even my closest associations become my enemy if I can relate them to my anxiety.

I may be right, but I may be wrong too and my problem is not solved.  Hitting the right target is a surface solution to the problem of fear, not anxiety.  I may hit the angel of death, but death still stands at the horizon, all I did was remove the messenger.

Tillich discussed three types of anxiety “according to the three ways in which nonbeing threatens being.”  These are three ways in which our ability to affirm ourselves is threatened. Whether these ways are the only ones is not clear, but his analysis does offer a three-dimensional framework in which the structural design of fear and anxiety may be understood.

He wrote:

Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate, and absolutely in terms of death.  It threatens man’s spiritual affirmation, relatively in terms of emptiness, and absolutely in terms of meaninglessness.  It threatens man’s moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of guilt, and absolutely in terms of condemnation (Tillich 1952, 41).

The anxiety of fate and death

Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic (real as opposed to phenomenal existence) self-affirmation relatively in terms of fate and absolutely in terms of death.  If fate and death pursue our being how real are we?  If we follow Tillich’s definition of fate it means there is something about fate that we cannot control.  The Encarta English Dictionary defines fate as a “force predetermining events.”  There is very little about what is coming that we know or have control over.  The choice to drop good or bad on us is not ours, it belongs to fate.

There is something of “doom and chance” that is connected to these dictionary definitions.  In fate we are anxious about tomorrow because are afraid.  Biblical scripture says, ‘Don’t worry about tomorrow;’ but how could we not?  In some way we wish we could gain some insight into the unknown, to see the unseen and unknowable.  Many people resort to astrology, fortune-telling, psychics, traditional seers, or present day ‘charismatic’ prophecy just to get an optimistic word about tomorrow.  That in fact has become a serious goldmine in Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches around the world simply because it is our ‘Fear and anxiety.’  People will travel the furthest distance or give till they drop to the last dime if a situation promises to resolve for them the anxiety of ‘fate and death.’ 

Religious ‘prophets’ and Seers everywhere, especially in Africa, tap into people’s anxieties and fears for financial profit and personal aggrandizement because they claim to have the ability to know something about fate or destiny.  Their promises are as misleading as the promises of the pharmaceuticals who are in it for the same reasons as the prophets.

The feeling was prevalent even in the times of Christ.  He warned the crowds, ^{Mt 6:34} “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”   The exegesis and hermeneutic of that passage will be taken up later; suffice it for now to say fate often drives us to search for a higher power with the ability not only to see through fate but to change the cause of a negative destiny. 

That feeling, Tillich says, threatens our “ontic self-affirmation.”  For every “I can” there is a deep sense of “I cannot.”  Your ability to achieve is threatened by your fear to fail.  The courage to be always stands in juxtaposition to the doubt to be.

Maslow (1999) has argued the point of “Self-actualization” at length; beyond the “lower needs” we all have the desire to reach out—not for more—for higher.  More is quantity but higher is quality.  When we have reached all there is to achieve fate says there is more beyond where we now stand.  Fate threatens the reality of our being because it keeps reminding us that the future is open and inviting, worst of all it is fleeting.  In our desire to be all we were intended to be, death says you will never be all that you were intended to be.  For each one of us, death stands summoning on the horizon.

In the wider scheme of things, we have been given to a ‘force’ beyond our control.  We live but we shall surely die; alternately, it is in living that we ultimately embrace the reality of death.  Our finitude is ultimately defined, not in the fleeting nature of things but in the infinitude of the Divine. We are the finitude that participates in the infinitude we are denied.

Even the bravest person among us is afraid to die.  Tyrants of history know that and that is why the best way to preserve themselves is to attack their fears by eliminating others.  But fear, because it is anxiety with a face we put on it will always surface elsewhere in another form.

If pushed far enough, we all have a tyrant latent in us.  We are afraid of death because we know it is the fate of all humanity.  Biblical scripture speaks more to the question of ‘Fear’ than it does of ‘Sin.’  We are often reminded, ‘Don’t be afraid…’  Not because there is nothing to be afraid of but because there is nothing we can do about it; it is decreed in the greater scheme of things.

We know we are going to die but we do not want to die.  That explains why millions of money worth is spent in research in the attempt to delay—not eliminate—death.  Death is the one thing we cannot undo even with the ingenious of scientific resources and research at our disposal.  We are more innovative in the invention of gruesome killing machines and sicknesses than eliminating death.

How then do we affirm ourselves in the face of fate and death?  Tillich argued that the anxiety of our finiteness cannot be eliminated because it belongs to human existence itself (Tillich 1952, 39).  We may shorten or prolong it, but it cannot be eliminated; thus, biblical scripture is right, ‘Just as people are destined to die once and after that to face judgement.’ ^{Hebrews 9:27}   That dreadful feeling is not going away it is given to us with life itself.  We have been thrown into the ocean already, and we either swim or drown.  Perhaps that moth-eaten cliché is right, “You either sink or swim,” but you will ultimately sink.

Self-affirmation in the face of fate and death is like the Salmon fish swimming against the fierce flow of a river, always in the opposite direction.  There are many dangers upstream, but the death-defying journey must be taken.  The fish, if it survives the hazards upstream, will ultimately return, go with the flow downstream to the point where it started, lay many eggs, and die.  Every fish is assigned only one swim upstream and downstream.

That is a cause for anxiety.  Those incompatibilities are on a parallel and perpetual journey that cannot be separated.  They are going in different directions but forever coiled.  We affirm ourselves despite the ambiguities of nonbeing’s perennial attempts to deny us this affirmation.  Affirmation assumes a negation of what is affirmed.  We affirm life because death stands at the horizon.

‘To be or not to be?’ That is still the question, and it is the source of our anxiety.

---

[1] Dt 10:12 ^(NIV) “And now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”