II. The Christian and Anxiety
It cannot be denied that something like vertigo can come over a man, even a believer, in this transitional state between fear and hope; after all, it is a routine fact. But Christianity cannot be blamed for this loss of footing; it has to be laid at the door of the man who does not want to take Christianity seriously. Christianity offers man, not a bottomless pit, but solid ground--grounding in God, of course, and not in self. To place oneself on this solid ground involves relinquishing one's own ground. The sinner wants to stand on his own, not on God. And whoever tries to stand both on God and on his own is sure to fall into the bottomless space in between. The realization, or even just the experience, that one is standing in this bottomless pit presupposes that tone has stopped walking--walking on God's ground or making the passage from one's own ground to Gods. Living, efficacious faith means to walk, to be under way. Everyone who walks has ground under his feet. Faith, love, hope, unceasingly offered to man, are the ground that is constantly being pushed off under his feet. Sin refuses this ground in order to take a stand on one's own; yet even between sin and the repentant return to God, speaking now as a Christian, a momentary loss of footing does not necessarily intervene. Whoever believes, whoever reaches out for faith, takes a real step, and while he steps he cannot simultaneously philosophize about the possibility of stepping, cannot reflect introspectively upon the passage from himself to God and have it in his grasp. In the first place, that would be a contradiction, and the outcome of such reflections could be nothing other than contradictory, merely verbal dialectic. From a Christian perspective, once there is a possibility of passing over to God (and God makes this possible by grace), the job of mastering this passage, still from a Christian point of view, is no longer in man's hands. When a man is really walking, God has already provided for the possibility of walking and solved the problem of continuity, and so all the paradoxes of the mind, about Achilles and the tortoise, are passe'. The uneasy conscience that many Christians have, and the anxiety based on it, do not come about because they are sinners and backsliders but because they have stopped believing in the truth and efficacy of their beliefs; they measure the power of faith by their own weakness, they project God's world into their own psychological makeup instead of letting God measure them. They do something that Christians are forbidden to alll: they observe faith from the outside; they doubt the power of hope; they deprive themselves of the power of love; and they lie down to rest in the chasm between the demands of Christianity and their own failure, in a chasm that, for a Christian, is no place at all. Is it any wonder that anxiety seizes them on account of this placelessness? (pp. 100, 101)
III. The Essence of Anxiety
Indifference means letting go of the sheltering, supporting difference: stepping out without guardrails. Climbing over the gunwale and stepping out on to the water. Transcending, while trusting solely in what lies beyond, from which the power and possibility of transcending come. The attitude in which the act of transcendence takes place is not this power; if that were the case, the power would be finite and differentiated, and by clinging to this attitude, by summoning forth this attitude, by reflecting on this attitude, everything could be bent back out of genuine transcendence into false, philosophical transcendence, into "philosophical faith". The attitude is nothing in the absence of that which makes this attitude possible: God present in Christ. In reflecting on his belief ("How can I be doing this?"), Peter is already back in unbelief and sinks, and within transcendence is uncovered what had been swallowed up and drowned while transcendence was advancing step by step: anxiety. One cannot simultaneously go and cling to the letting go. Faith, love, hope must always be a leap for the finite creature, because only in that way does it correspond to the worth of the infinite God. It must always mean taking a risk, because God is worth staking everything on, and the real gain lies, not in a "reward" for the daring leap, but in the leap itself, which is a gift of God and thus a share in his infinitude. In the daring leap, something of the limitless self-giving of the Divine Persons to each other becomes visible in a flash--at the point where all ground, which is limitation, is relinquished and where man can actually sense that being in the Absolute means--hovering. Lifted up in the arms of grace, carried on the wings of love, he feels a tremor, which, in and of itself, bestows on him precisely the security needed to stand no longer on his own or on the earth but to be able to fly by a new power. (pp. 144, 145)
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In standing outside of eternity and entering into time, the Son of Man has known anxiety and therein, as in everything he was, did, and suffered, he has translated something incomprehensible and divine into human language (that is, after all, what revelation is): God's fear and trembling for the world, for his creation, which is on the verge of being lost, Anyone who tried to object that such a thing cannot be reconciled with God's eternal happiness would have a rather narrow concept of God. (p. 146)
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In standing outside of everything as to place himself unconditionally at the disposal of God's totality, the believer hands over to God, along with everything else, his emotional disposition as well: faith that loves and hopes is ultimately indifferent even to anxiety and nonanxiety. In and of himself he can presume nothing, hence he must await even this form God. It is God who, as absolute Transcendence, has the creature's anxiety and sense of security at his disposal. If faith is really indifferent, than any anxiety that is placed within it, as well as the complete dispelling of anxiety in a shower of consolation and sensible certainty, can only be a gift granted by God himself. Whatever reasons a man, as a natural-fallen creature or as a Christian (in his detachment from the world and in his solidarity with all others, yet to be redeemed) might have for being anxious are surpassed by another reason:loving and hoping faith, which, as such, is indifference to God. For faith says Yes to every truth of God, seen or unseen (affirming the latter even more); it says Yes to the truths that console and to those that do not, to the truths of divine joy as well as to those of the divine Passion, and waits for God to dispose and differentiate....[O]nly he who has left the anxiety [i.e., fear of God's judgment] of sin behind attains the fullness of faith and thus true indifference, and the entry into the realm of complete is unconditional joy, consolation, overwhelming light. When God bestows Christian suffering, including Christian anxiety, it is, viewed from his perspective, fundamentally an intensification of light and of joy, a "darkness bright as day:, because it is suffering out of joy, anxiety out of exultation: it is a sign of God's ever-greater confidence in the one who believes. (pp. 147, 148)
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The actualization of supernatural indifference by God, however, possesses two aspects, just like natural indifference: abstraction (all the way to pure Being) and conversion (to the appearing image, to the phantasma), or, to put it in Christian terms, _detachment from everything (all the way to God) and turning back with a mission to the world)_....Christian detachment must precede Christian mission (logically, psychologically, and temporally), if the resulting mission is to be Christian at all and not merely worldly-religious. (p. 148)
[this detachment does not see God as a means to an end, even when the end is beneficial, e.g., strong families, security, close friends, etc.)
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Accordingly, there is Christian anxiety before the mission -- at the point where the soul is being cleaned out -- and, if need be, again while the mission is being carried out (if having anxiety belongs to the mission), but not in the act itself of being sent: here clarity, certainty, and agreement necessarily and unconditionally rule. (p. 149)
[this idea of the soul being cleaned out is common in contemplative teaching such as William of St. Thierry's The Golden Epistle.]
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Now God has not only offered man the invisible help of grace to make this leap [of faith], but also, by becoming a visible man and founding he visible Church, he has made accessible to man an abundance of visible helps as found in the organs and functions of the Church: ecclesial office and the men who exercise it; Sacred Scripture as a tangible word; the sacraments as definite forms and vessels of the salvific encounter between man and God; tradition, which enables the believer to align himself with the past; the example of the saints and of all fellow Christians who have a living faith; the firmly established order of the Church year, which takes the believer in and leads him gently from mystery to mystery. These are but so many supports and handrails with which to teach and train him for that one leap away from all handrails. [p. 150]
[the above excerpt is reminiscent of Ephesians 4.7, 11-16:
But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift. 8 Therefore He says:
“ When He ascended on high,
He led captivity captive,
And gave gifts to men.”
And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ— from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.]
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