We are shaped by “the age of reason” and the deeply held belief in historical progress. Those who lived before the idea of progress became the dominant Western conviction and preoccupation were more directly in touch with the numinous—more present, less distracted, and perhaps, in that sense, saner. But there are times that call the belief in progress into question. Times when we stand as directly before the mysterium tremendum et fascinans as those who lived under the stars and slept in caves.
North Korea’s young leader Kim Jong-un threatening the world with nuclear holocaust abruptly challenges the optimistic view that history is an upward course of inevitable progress. We tremble once again at the fearfulness of mortality, but this time it is the tremble at what our own hands have made in the name of progress—the power of extinction.
The power of death is enticing, a sin to which Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, later confessed. The human will to power becomes evil when real soldiers, real nuclear bombs, real missiles, and real threats of destruction are mistaken for childhood toys and computer games where human folly can be erased by hitting a reset button.
Looking at the young North Korean leader, psychiatrists might see an Oedipal complex, the son outdoing the father at the game of nuclear threat, the boy who played with matches, determined that if his father was afraid to light the fuse, he would step out from his father’s shadow onto the stage of world power in a way the world would never forget. We are all children inside, for both good (remaining childlike) and ill (remaining childish).
But deeper and more encompassing than any Freudian analysis is Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
The philosophical-theological debates about modernism and postmodernism are interesting. They deserve attention. But neither modernism’s rationalism nor postmodernism’s deconstructionism is equipped to address the most basic reality underlying the human condition: the mysterium tremendum et fascinans and the horror of its demonic distortion in the shrinking of it by the madness of the human will to power.
Whenever we take the ultimate trembling and fascination of the self into our own hands, the world is put at risk. In the prehistoric world of our evolutionary ancestors, the consequences were limited to a neighbor’s skull broken with a club. In the advanced species that has progressed from those primitive origins, we have fallen in love with our own toys of destruction. The technical achievements and manufactured mysteries have become deadly surrogates for the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, sending shudders down the spine in terror and in joy before what is Real.
Our time is perilously close to mass suicide. Unless and until we get it straight that I and we are not the center of the universe, the likes of Kim Jong-un—and his mirror opposites but like-minded opponents on this side of the Pacific—will hold us hostage to the madness that lurks in human goodness.
Progress isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The ancient shudder of the creature—the human cry for help in the face of chaos and the heart’s leap toward what is greater than the self or our social constructs—unmasks every illusion of grandeur in a world increasingly put at risk by little boys with toys.
10. Zuurdeeg, Man Before Chaos, 140.
11. Rudolf Otto’s seminal work was first published in 1917 under the title Das Heilige—Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (English: The Holy—On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational).
Our Anxious Time
A toad can die of light!Death is the common right Of toads and men,—Of earl and midge The privilege.Why swagger then?The gnat’s supremacy Is large as thine.
—Emily Dickinson (1862)12
Ours is an anxious time, a fearful time, an insecure time. We feel it in our bellies.
Anxiety, fear, and insecurity were the subject of philosophical theologian Paul Tillich13 and philosopher of religion Willem Zuurdeeg,14 for whom the questions were passionate and all-consuming over their lifetimes. Even so, they were not the best of friends.
Zuurdeeg was a critic of Tillich’s attempts to create a philosophical-theological system. He saw every system as a flight from finitude and ambiguity into what he called an “Ordered World Home” that makes sense of, and defends against, the anxiety intrinsic to finitude. For Zuurdeeg, to be human is to be thrown into chaos, and every philosophy from Plato to Hegel to Tillich is “born of a cry”—the cry for help, for sense, for protection, for a security that lies beyond one’s powers.
But rereading Tillich’s Systematic Theology after perusing the morning news leads to the conclusion that Zuurdeeg and Tillich were very close, as is often the case between critics of one another. One thinks, for example, of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in a similar manner.
For all their differences, Zuurdeeg and Tillich were joined at the hip by their shared experience with madness in society and the demise of the once-trusted foundations of Western civilization. The rise of the German Third Reich led them to lifelong searches not only for answers but for the questions that might lead to insight into the existential situation that tilled the ground for the flowering of Hitler’s collective madness, which threw the world headlong into chaos and destruction.
Tillich distinguishes between anxiety and fear. Fear has an object. We fear an enemy. We fear Iran; Iran fears us. Israel fears the Palestinians; the Palestinians fear the Israelis. “Objects are feared,” said Tillich.
A danger, a pain, an enemy, may be feared, but fear can be conquered by action. Anxiety cannot, for no finite being can conquer its finitude. Anxiety is always present, although often it is latent. Therefore, it can become manifest at any moment, even in situations where nothing is to be feared . . . Anxiety is ontological; fear, psychological . . . Anxiety is the self-awareness of the finite self as finite.15
Anxiety is the self-awareness that we are mortal. We know a toad can die of light—death is the common right of toads and men—and that our supremacy is no greater than the gnat’s. We are excluded from an infinite, imperishable future. We were born, and we will die, and we know it. Despite every flight into denial, we know it in our bones. We have no secure space and no secure time. “To be finite is to be insecure.”16 In the face of this insecurity, said Zuurdeeg, the individual and the human species seek “to establish their existence” in time and space, though we know we cannot secure it. The threat we experience in the second decade of the twenty-first century is the threat of nothingness. Politicians pander to it. Some preachers pander to it. Advertisers prey on it. They and we eat anxiety for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Again, Tillich, writing as if for our time, “The desire for security becomes dominant in special periods and in special social and psychological situations. Men create systems of security in order to protect their space. But they can only repress their anxiety; they cannot banish it, for this anxiety anticipates the final ‘spacelessness’ which is implied in finitude.”17
I sip my coffee with Emily Dickinson aware of, and thankful for, this moment of finitude, determined that I will not turn over my anxiety to the hands of those who promise security from every fear. Emily, Willem, and Paul looked directly into the heart of human darkness and saw a light greater than the darkness, remembering that a toad can die of too much light! I want to live by the light of such humility, courage, and wisdom.
12.