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. Dickinson, “A toad can die of light!”
13. Born and raised in Germany, Paul Johannes Tillich (1886–1965) was the first professor dismissed from his teaching position in 1933 for his outspoken criticism of the Nazi movement. At the invitation of Reinhold Niebuhr, he and his family moved to New York where Tillich joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary.
14. Born and raised in the Netherlands in a family that served as part of the underground resistance to Hitler’s pogrom, Willem Frederik Zuurdeeg (1906–1963) spent his life asking how Western civilization’s most sophisticated culture (Germany), could fall so easily into the hands of a madman.
15. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:191–92.
16. Ibid., 195.
17. Ibid.
The Common Ground Beneath the Gun Debate
Who can endure permanently Plato’s uncertain, unsafe balance on the brink of the abyss of chaos?
—Willem Zuurdeeg18
If ninety-nine percent of reality is perception, analytical philosopher Willem Zuurdeeg argued that perception is the expression of something deeper and far more powerful.
Zuurdeeg, author of An Analytical Philosophy of Religion and Man Before Chaos: Philosophy Is Born in a Cry, spent his life listening to human speech for what lay beneath the surface of the language.
Homo loquens (“man-who-speaks”) is homo convictus (“man-who-is-convicted/convinced”), the creature who establishes her/his finite existence in time by powerful, unshakeable convictors who anchor us against the chaos.
What we often describe as irrational speech, is, in fact, “convictional language,” the hidden power of which can only be understood by a kind of “situational analysis, i.e., the life “situation” (historical-convictional context) of the one who is speaking. Our varying perceptions are determined by the less conscious hidden convictions of implicit needs and unquestioned cultural traditions.
What is missing in the national debate is public expression of the nonrational perceptions of the word “gun” and the unspoken convictions that shape our different perceptions.
We not only hear the word “gun” differently; we hear different things differently.
Until we come together to discuss what we hear when we hear the word—our nonrational (not unrational, as in opposed to reason, but nonrational, as in beneath the presumptions of reason) convictional worlds—the gun debate will be a shouting match that finds no common ground.
A simple exercise of word association demonstrates the difference.
Say the word “gun” and listen for what it evokes in the hearer. In the ears of some, the word means safety and protection. In the ears of others, it means without protection or threat.
But if we listen carefully to the apparently opposite responses, we discover a common ground they share: The threat of insecurity. The threat of chaos.
Whenever we hear a scream, something powerful is under assault. Chaos threatens. We cry out against the chaos. We cry out against death and extinction.
In Man Before Chaos, Zuurdeeg claims that, from its very beginning, Western culture has been bound up with a powerful dread of chaos. Even Plato’s philosophy, argues Zuurdeeg, is born of a cry.
Socrates has died. He himself does not fit very well into Athens’ political life. He is naked and defenseless and is not ashamed of it. He has the courage to cry against chaos and for Being and Goodness. All this has been smothered by the comfortable, although often quarrelsome, classical and medieval philosophy and theology. Who can live by a cry? Who can stand to hear such disturbing noise? Clear and calm reasoning under the guidance of venerable old philosophical schools (or just as respectable church fathers) enables us to live, make church and civilization possible. Who can endure permanently Plato’s uncertain, unsafe balance
