''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.

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[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.”