The Philosophy of Anxiety



ONE of the favorite psychological descriptions of modern man is to say that he has an anxiety complex. Psychology is more right than it suspects, but for a more profound reason than it knows. There is no doubt that anxiety has been increased and complicated by our metropolitan and industrialized civilization. An increasing number of persons are afflicted with neuroses, complexes, fears, irritabilities, and ulcers; they are, perhaps, not so much "run down" as "wound up"; not so much set on fire by the sparks of daily life as they are burning up from internal combustion.

But modern anxiety is different from the anxiety of previous and more normal ages in two ways. In other days men were anxious about their souls, but modern anxiety is principally concerned with the body; the major worries of today are economic security, health, the complexion, wealth, social prestige, and sex. To read modern advertisements, one would think that the greatest calamity that could befall a human being would be to have dishpan hands or a cough in the T-zone. This overemphasis on corporal security is not healthy; it has begotten a generation that is much more concerned about having life belts to wear on the sea journey than about the cabin it will occupy and enjoy.

The second characteristic of modern anxiety is that it is not a fear of objective natural dangers, such as lightning, beasts, famine; it is subjective, a vague fear of what one believes would be dangerous if it happened. That is why it is so difficult to deal with people who have today's type of anxieties; it does no good to tell them that there is no outside danger, because the danger that they fear is inside of them and therefore is abnormally real to them. Their condition is aggravated by a sense of helplessness to do anything about the danger. They constantly sense a disproportion between their own forces and those marshaled by what they believe to be the enemy. These people become like fish caught in nets and birds trapped in a snare, increasing their own entanglements and anxieties by the fierceness of their disorderly exertions to overome them.

Modern psychologists have done an admirable service in studying anxieties, revealing a phase of human nature which has been to some extent closed to us. But the cause of anxiety is deeper than the psychological. Anxiety may take on new forms in our disordered civilization, but anxiety itself has always been rooted in the nature of man. There has never been an age, there has never been a human being in the history of the world without an anxiety complex; in other times, it was studied on all the levels of life. The Old Testament, for example, has one book which is concerned solely with the problem of anxiety - the Book of Job. The Sermon on the Mount is a warning against the wrong kind of anxieties. St. Augustine's writings center around what he called the restless soul. Pascal wrote about human misery. A modern philosopher, Kierkegaard, bases his philosophy on dread, or Angst, and Heidegger has told us Dasien ist Sorge, "Self-existence is worry".

It is important to inquire into the basic reason and ground of anxiety, according to man's present historical condition, of which the psychological is only one superficial manifestation. The philosophy of anxiety looks to the fact that man is a fallen being composed of body and soul. Standing midway between the animal and the angel, living in a finite world and aspiring toward the infinite, moving in time and seeking the eternal, he is pulled at one moment toward the pleasures of the body and at another moment to the joys of the spirit. He is in a constant state of suspension between matter and spirit and may be likened to a mountain climber who aspires to the great peak above and yet, looking back from his present position, fears falling to the abyss below. This state of indeterminacy and tension between what he ought to be and what he actually is, this pull between his capacity for enjoyment and its tawdry realization, this consciousness of distance between his yearning for abiding love without satiety and his particular loves with their intermittent sense of "fed-up-ness," this wavering between sacrificing lesser values to attain higher ideals or else abdicating the higher ideals entirely, this pull of the old Adam and the beautiful attraction of the new Adam, this necessity of choice which offers him two roads, one leading to God and the other away from Him - all this makes man anxious about his destiny beyond the stars and fearful of his fall to the depths beneath.

In every human being, there is a double law of gravitation, one pulling him to the earth, where he has his time of trial, and the other pulling him to God, where he has his happiness. The anxiety underlying all modern man's anxieties arises from his trying to be himself without God or from his trying to get beyond himself without God. The example of the mountain climber is not exact, for such a man has no helper on the upper peak to which he aspires. Man, however, has a helper - God on the upper peak of eternity reaches out His omnipotent hand to lift him up, even before man raises his voice in plea. It is evident that, even though we escaped all the anxieties of modern economic life, even though we avoided all the tensions which psychology finds in the unconsciousness and consciousness, we should still have that great basic fundamental anxiety born of our creatureliness. Anxiety stems fundamentally from irregulated desires, from the creature wanting something that is unnecessary for him or contrary to his nature or positively harmful to his soul. Anxiety increases in direct ratio and proportion as man departs from God. Every man in the world has an anxiety complex because he has the capacity to be either saint or sinner.

Let it be not believed that man has an anxiety complex "because he still has traces of his animal orgin"; indeed, animals left to themselves never have anxieties. They have natural fears, which are good, but they have no subjective anxieties. Bird do not develop a pschosis about whether they should take a winter trip to California or Florida. An animal never become less than it is, but a man can do just that, because a man is a composite of both spirit and matter.

When we see a monkey acting foolishly, we do not say to the monkey, "Do not act like a nut"; but when we see a man acting foolishly, we do say, "Do not act like a monkey". Because a man is spirit, as well as matter, he can descend to the level of beasts (though not so completely as to destroy the image of God in his soul). It is this possibility that makes the peculiar tragedy of man. Cows have no psychoses, and pigs have no neuroses, and chickens are not frustrated (unless these frustrations are artificially produced by man); neither would man be frustrated or have an anxiety complex if he were an animal made only for this world. It takes eternity to make a man despair. "Man is both strong and weak, both free and bound, both blind and farseeing. He stands at the juncture of nature and spirit; and is involved in both freedom and necessity. It is always partly an effort to obscure his blindness by overestimating the degree of his sight and to obscure his insecurity by stretching his power beyond its limits".

Dread arises because man becomes aware, however dimly, of his contingency and finiteness. He is not the absolute, though he wants it; he is not even all that he is or all that he could be. This tension between possibility and fact, this oscillation between wanting to be with God and wanting to be God is a deeper side of his anxiety. Alfred Adler has always emphasized that back of neuroses is the striving of man to become like God, a striving as impotent as the goal is impossible. The root of every psychological tension is basically metaphysical.

Despair and anxiety are possible because there is a rational soul. They presuppose the capacity of self-reflection. Only a being capable of contemplating itself can dread annihilation in face of the infinite, can despair either of itself or of its destiny. Despair, Kierkegaard tells us, is twofold. It is a desperate desire either to be oneself or to be not onself; man wants either to make himself into an absolute, unconditioned being, independent, self-subsistent; or he wants desperately to get rid of his being, with its limitation, its contingency, its finiteness. Both these attitudes manifest the eternal revolt of the finite against the infinite: Non serviam. By such a revolt, man exposes himself to the awareness of his nothingness and his solitude. Instead of finding a support in the knowledge that he, though contingent, is held in existence by a loving God, he now seeks reliance within himself and, necessarily failing to find it, becomes the victim of dread. For dread is everywhere and nowhere, all around us, terrible and indefinite, threatening man with an annihilation which he cannot imagine or even conceive. Such fear is man's alone. Because an animal has no soul capable of knowing perfect love, because it has to render no account of its stewardship beyond the corridors of the grave, because it is not like a pendulum swinging between eternity and time, it is devoid of those eternal relationships which man possesses; therefore it can have only a sick body, never a sick soul. Thus a psychology which denies the human soul is constantly contradicting itself. It calls man an animal and then proceeds to describe a human anxiety which is never found in any animal devoid of a rational soul.

Since the basic cause of man's anxiety is the possibility of being either a saint or a sinner, it follows that there are only two alternatives for him.. Man can either mount upward to the peak of eternity or else slip backward to the chasms of despair and frustration. Yet there are many who think there is yet another alternative, namely, that of indifference. They think that, just as bears hibernate for a season in a state of suspended animation, so they, too, can sleep through life without choosing to live for God or against Him. But hibernation is no escape; winter ends, and one is then forced to make a decision - indeed, the very choice of indifference itself is a decision. White fences do not remain white fences by having nothing done to them; they soon become black fences. Since there is a tendency in us that pulls us back to the animal, the mere fact that we do not resist it operates to our own destruction. Just as life is the sum of the forces that resist death, so, too, man's will must be the sum of the forces that resist frustration. A man who has taken poison into his system can ignore the antidote, or he can throw it out of the window; it makes no difference which he does, for death is already on the march. St. Paul warns us, "How shall we escape if we neglect... " (Heb 2:3). By the mere fact that we do not go forward, we go backward. There are no plains in the spiritual life; we are either going uphill or coming down. Furthermore the pose of indifference is only intellectual. The will must choose. And even though an "indifferent" soul does not positively reject the infinite, the infinite rejects it. The talents that are unused are taken away, and the Scriptures tell us that "But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth" (Rev 3:16).

Returning to the supreme alternatives, man can choose between an earthly love to the exclusion of Divine Love, or he can choose a Divine Love which includes a healthy, sacramental, earthly love. Either he can make the soul subject to the body, or he can make the body subject to the soul. Consider first those who resolve their anxiety in favor of Godlessness. They invariably end by substituting one of the false gods for the true God of Love.

This god can be the ego, or self. This happens in atheism when there is a denial of dependence on the true God, or when there is an affirmation of one's own wish and pleasure as the absolute law, or when freedom is interpreted as the right to do what one pleases. When such a false god is adored, religion is rejected as a rationalization or an escape, or even as a fear to affirm one's own self as supreme.

Atheists commit the sin of pride, by which a man pretends to be that which he is not, namely, a god. Pride is inordinate self-love, an exaltation of the conditional and relative self into an absolute. It tries to gratify the thirst for the infinite by giving to one's own finitude a pretension to divinity. In some, pride blinds the self to its weakness and becomes "hot" pride; in others, it recognizes its own weakness and overomes it by a self-exultation which becomes "cold" pride. Pride kills docility and makes a man incapable of ever being helped by God. The limited knowledge of the puny mind pretends to be final and absolute. In the face of other intellects it resorts to two techniques, either the technique of omniscience, by which it seeks to convince others how much it knows, or the technique of nescience, which tries to convince others how little they know. When such pride is unconscious, it becomes almost incurable, for it identifies truth with its truth. Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals. It is rarely cured when the person himself is vertical - i.e., healthy and prosperous - but it can be cured when the patient is horizontal - sick and disillusioned. That is why catastrophes are necessary in an era of pride to bring men back again to God and the salvation of their souls.

The false god of the atheist can be another person, cherished, not as a bearer of human values, but as an object to be devoured and used for one's own pleasure. In such a case, the vocabulary of religion is invoked to solicit the object, such as "adore", "angel", "worship", "god", and "goddess". From it is born the sin of lust, or the adoration of another person's vitality as the end and goal of life. Lust is not the inevitable result of the flesh, any more than a cataract is directly caused by eyesight; it is due, rather, to the rebellion of the flesh against the spirit and of the person against God. As St. Augustine says:
If any man say that flesh is the cause of the viciousness of the soul, he is ignorant of man's nature. This corruption, which is so burdensome to the soul, is the punishment for the first sin, and not its cause. The corruptible flesh made not the soul to sin, but the sinning soul made the flesh corruptible; from which corruption, although there arise some incitements to sin, and some vicious desires, yet are not all sins of an evil life to be laid to the flesh, otherwise, we shall make the devil, who has no flesh, sinless. (De Civitate Dei, Book XIV, chapter 3)
Flesh in revolt (or lust) is related to pride. The conquest of the one desired may serve the indiviual's need of excessive self-exaltation; but consummated lust leads to despair (or the opposite of self-exultation) by the inner tension or sadness resulting from an uneasy conscience. It is this effect which divorces it from a purely biological phenomenon, for in no creature except man is there any act which involves such an interactivity of matter and spirit, body and soul. It need hardly be noted that lust is not sex in the ordinary sense of the term but, rather, its deorientation - a sign that man has become ex-centric, isolated from God, and enamored of the physically good to such an excess that he is like the serpent which devours its own tail and eventually destroys itself.

The unbeliever's god can be things by which he seeks to remedy his own sense of nothingness. Some men seek this compensation in wealth, which gives them the false sense of power. External luxury is pursued to conceal the nakedness of their own souls. Such worship of wealth leads to tyranny and injustice toward others, and thus is born the sin of avarice.

Avarice is the materal expression of one's own insufficiency and a challenge to the subline truth that "our sufficiency is from God". Filling up its own lack at the storehouse of the earthly, the soul hopes to find at least a temporary escape from Divinity itself. All intense interest in luxury is a mark of inner poverty. The less grace there is in the soul, the more ornament must be on the body. It was only after Adam and Eve fell that they perceived themselves to be naked; when their souls were rich with original justice, their bodies were so suffused with its reflection that they felt no need for clothes. But once the Divine-internal was lost, they sought a compensation in the material, the external. Excessive dedication to temporal security is one of the ways a society's loss of eternal security manifests itself. The quest for wealth and luxury can be infinite, and for the moment it satisfies the godless souls. A man can reach a point of marginal utility in the accumulation of ice-cream cones, but not in the accumulation of credits, for there is an infinity to these ambitions. Thus does man seek to become God in gratifying limitless desires for riches, when he impoverishes himself from within. "Life wants to secure itself against the void that is raging within The risk of eternal void is to be met by the premium of temporal insurance....social security, old age pensions, etc. It springs no less from metaphysical despair than from material misery" (Werfel, Between Heaven and Earth, p. 71)

Pride, lust, avarice; the devil, the flesh and the world; the pride of life, the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes - these constitute the new unholy trinity by which man is wooed away from the Holy Trinity and from the discovery of the goal of life. It was these three things Our Lord described in the parable of those who offered excuses for not coming to the banquet; one refused because he had bought a farm, another because he had purchased a yoke of oxen, and the third because he had taken unto himself a woman. Love of self, love of person, and love or property are not in themselves wrong, but they do become wrong when they are made ends in themselves, ar torn up from their true purpose, which is to lead us to God. Because there are some who abuse love of self and love of person and love of property, the Church has encouraged the three vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty to make reparation for those who make gods out of their opinions, their flesh, and their money. Anxiety and frustration invariably follow when the desires of the heart are centered on anything less than God, for all pleasures of earth, pursued as final ends, turn out to be the exact opposite of what was expected. The expectation is joyous, the realization is disgust. Out of this disappointment are born those lesser anxieties which modern psychology knows so well; but the root of them all is the meaninglessness of life due to the abandonment of Perfect Life, Truth, and Love, which is God.

' The alternative to such anxieties consists in letting oneself go, not by a surrender of the spirit to the world, the flesh, and the Devil, but by an act of proper abandonment, in which the body is disciplined and made subject to the spirit and the whole personality is directed to God. Here the basic anxiety of life is transcended in three ways, each of which brings a peace of soul that only the God-loving enjoy: (1) by controlling desires; (2) by transferring anxiety from body to soul; (3) by surrender to the Will of God.

1. By controlling desires. Anxieties and frustrations are due to uncontrolled desires. When a soul does not get what it wants, it falls into sadness and distress. In other generations men's desires were less numerous or else were controlled; today even luxuries are considered necessities. Disappointment increases in direct ratio and proportion to our failure to obtain the things we believe essential to our enjoyment. One of the greatest deceptions of today is the belief that leisure and money are the two essentials of happiness. The sad fact of life is that there are no more frustrated people on the face of the earth than those who have nothing to do and those who have too much money for their own good. Work never killed anybody, but worry has. It is assumed by many reformers that the principal and major cause of unhappiness is economic insecurity, but this theory forgets that there are economic problems only because men have not solved the problems of their own souls. Economic disorder is a symptom of spiritual disorder.

To conquer anxiety does not mean eliminating our desires but, rather arranging them in a hierarchy, as Our Lord reminded us when He said that life is more than the raiment. This pyramid of values places things at the bottom - and things include everything material in the universe, from a star that inspires a poet to wheat used for the baker's bread. Above things comes man, and at the peak of the pyramid is God. A religious man orders his life by the pattern of the pyramid. He overcomes anxiety by making all material things subject to the human, by disciplining the body until it is subject to the spirit, and by submitting the whole personality to God. "For all are yours; and you are Christ's; and Christ is God's (1 Cor 3:22-23). Once the soul recognizes that it is made for God, it abandons the bourgeois idea that every person is to be judged by what he has. There follows, not only a renunciation of evil, but even a voluntary surrender of some things that are lawful, in order that the spirit be freer to love God. When the sacrifices of Our Lord become the inspiration of a life, then its burdens are borne with more than resignation - they are accepted as providential calls to greater intimacy with Him.

But quite apart from Christian motivations - even viewed from a purely natural point of view, it is wise for man to renounce some desires, simply because the soul cannot find satisfaction in fulfilling them. The desire for wealth is one of these. There are two kinds of wealth: natural wealth, which takes the form of the necessary food, clothing, and shelter to sustain the life of the individual or family; artificial wealth, which is money, credit, stocks, and bonds. It is possible for a man to satisfy his desires for natural wealth because his stomach soon reaches a point where it can consume no more food. But there is no limit to the desire for artificial wealth. A man who has a million is never satisfied with that million. There is a certain false infinity about artificial wealth because a man can always want more and more of it. Because natural wealth imposes its own limitations, farming and gardening are among the most satisfying experiences of human life.

If we desire possessions, we never have enough of them. We become frustrated. There is a psychological difference between "frustration" and "renunciation". Frustration occurs only when man feels himself a passive victim of extrinisic forces, against which he is powerless; renunciation springs from man's own free decision. Parents recognize this difference: a child who has got hold of something he is not allowed to have is told by his parent, "Give it to me, or else I shall have to take it away from you". Often the child will renounce the thing rather than be compelled. The words addressed to the child have left him this way to safeguard his dignity and independence: he does what he must do in any case, but he does it with at least the semblance of freedom. And this freedom makes all the difference. If man can convince himself that he does not truly need this or that (although he may desire it), to abandon his striving will not frustrate him. It is only if he is forced to renunciation that he feels frustrated.

Uncontrolled desires grow like weeds and stifle the spirit. Material possessions bring a relative pleasure for a time, but sooner or later a malaise is experienced; a sense of emptiness, a feeling that something is wrong comes over the soul. This is God's way of saying that the soul is hungry and that He alone can satisfy it. It is to such modern, frustrated, starved, and anxious souls that the Saviour extends the invitation, "Come to me, all you that labour and are burdened, and I will refresh you" (Matthew 11:28).

2. The second way man can transcend unhealthy anxiety is by transferring his concern from the body to the soul - by being wisely anxious. For there are two kinds of anxieties, one about time, the other about eternity. Most souls are anxious about the very things they should not be anxious about. Our Divine Lord mentioned at least nine things about which we should not worry: about having our body killed; about what we shall say in days of persecution when we are called on the carpet before commissars; about whether we should build another barn (or another sky-scraper); about family disputes because we accept the faith; about mother-in-law troubles; about our meals, our drinks, our fashions, our complexion (Luke 12). He did tell us that we should be very anxious about one thing and one thing only - our souls (Matthew 16:24-28).

Our Lord does not mean that worldly activities are unnecessary. He only said that if we were anxious about our souls the lesser anxieties would dissolve: "Seek ye first [not only] the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you" (Luke 12:31). It used to be that the true Christian was set apart from others by the intensity of his healthy anxiety about his soul. (Now he is differentiated by the mere fact that he believes he has a soul to save) Anxiety is present in all love. And every human being must love or go crazy, because no man is sufficient for himself. Direct love toward God, and peace comes over the soul: turn it from God, and the heart becomes a broken fountain where tears fall, "from the sighful branches of mind". The nobler the heart that breakes, in its refusal to be anxious about God's love, the meaner it becomes in its lovelessness and ungodliness. But there is hope: the greater the frustration, the more complex the anxiety of the godless heart, the more capable it is of being metamorphosed to a saint.

There is hope for everyone. The things he has done pass away; the doer remains, responsible for his future acts. He can begin to cultivate healthy anxiety now. If the modern souls did but know it, the things they have been most anxious about are only trashy substitutes for Him Who alone can calm their spirits. Charlatans advise man to forget eternity and to satisfy his bodily desires - but what man would want to be a contented cow? The Lord's way to be happy is to concentrate on the narrow gate: "Enter ye in at the narrow gate; for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there are who go in thereat. How narrow is the gate, and strait is the way that leadth to life, and few there are that find it" (Matthew 7:13-14).

3. The third way to transcend anxieties is by increasing our trust in God. Love is reciprocal; it is received in proportion as it is given. We generally trust only those who trust us; that is why there is a special Providence for those who trust in God. Contrast two children, one child in a happy family, well provided with food, clothing, and education, the other a homeless orphan of the streets. The first child lives in an area of love; the second is outside of that area and enjoys none of its privileges. Many souls deliberately choose to exclude themselves from the area of the Heavenly Father's Love where they might live as His children. They trust only in their own resourcefulness, their own bank account, their own devices. This is particularly true of many families, who consider the rearing of children solely an economic problem, never once invoking the Heavenly Father's Love: they are like a son who in time of need never called on his wealthy father for assistance. The result is they lose many of the blessings reserved for those who throw themselves into the loving arms of God. This law applies to nations as well as individuals: "Because thou hast had confidence in the king of Syria, and not in the Lord thy God, therefore, hath the army of the king of Syria escaped out of thy hand" (2 Par 16:7). Many favors and blessings are having from heaven to relieve our temporal anxieties if we would only cut them down with the sword of our trust in God. Relief from all wrong anxiety comes, not from giving ourselves to God halves, but by an all-encompassing love, wherein we go back, not to the past in fear of to the future in anxiety, but lie quietly in His Hand, having no will but His. Then the former shadows of life are seen as "The shade of His Hand outstretched caressingly". (Francis Thompson, The Hound from Heaven)

Everyone has anxiety. A complex according to the usage of contemporary psychology is a group of memories and desires of which we are not conscious but which nevertheless affect our personality. An anxiety complex would be a system of unhappy memories submerged in the unconscious and producing many kinds of symptoms. Everyone has anxiety; fortunately, everyone does not have an anxiety complex.. The difference between peace of soul and discontent comes from the kind of anxiety we have; the broadest division of all is between anxiety over the things of time and the values of eternity. Of the first, Our Lord said, "Be not anxious, for your Heavenly Father knoweth you have need of these things" (Matthew 6:8) The second kind of anxiety is normal because it is bound up with human freedom and is a a result of our creatureliness. This anxiety is a restlessness with anything short of the perfect happiness which is God.

Ultimately, anxiety, or dread, is related to man's finiteness and to his vague awareness of an infinite being in comparison with which he is almost nothing. Man, it has been said, may falsely try to overcome his finiteness either by denying his creatureliness (which is pride) or by escaping into an idolatry of sensuality. Then his anxiety still remains in the form of dread - which is not the same as fear. For fear is a response to a human danger and, as St. Thomas says, is always mixed with a certain degree of hope. But dread knows no hope; it expresses itself in purposeless ways, for it has no obvious cause and comes from man's half-conscious sense of the precariousness of his being. In this way dread is related to the idea of death, the great unknown, the one inescapable thing of which man has no experiential knowledge. When this dread is poperly resolved by recognizing our dependency on God, it becomes the pathway to peace of soul. But no one in the world, even then, escapes the fact of anxiety or outgrows a feeling of the tension between the finite and the infinite. Such normal anxiety may be covered over, but it will break out somewhere and somehow. Alfred Adler had a glimpse of this truth when he said that neurotics are animated by an unruly ambition to be "like God". The various tensions which psychology studies are very often the reflections of the deeper metaphysical tension, inherent in every human being, between his contingent and limited being and the Infinite and Absolute Being. This tension would not be felt unless man were free and had the responsibility of choosing between self-frustration and self-perfection through the use of creatures as a means to God.

Peace of soul comes to those who have the right kind of anxiety about attaining perfect happiness, which is God. A soul has anxiety because its final and eternal state is not yet decided; it is still and always at the crossroads of life. This fundamental anxiety cannot be cured by a surrender to passions and instincts; the basic cause of our anxiety is a restlessness within time which comes because we are made for eternity. If there were anywhere on earth a resting place other than God, we may be very sure that the human soul in its long history would have found it before this. As St. Augustine has said, "Our hearts were made for Thee. They are restless until they rest in Thee, O God."

excerpt from Fulton Sheen's Peace of Soul, McGraw-Hill, 1949


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