Tillich and the Anxiety of Guilt and Condemnation

Continuing my blogging of my favorite theological book, The Courage to Be, Tillich next tackles his third form of Anxiety - "The Anxiety of Guilt and Condemnation." (Courage on 51.)

Here Tillich says that human beings are not just given being, but our being is also demanded of us. We have responsibilities that are born simply from the fact of our being. And, this is the important point in terms of the ontic nature of this anxiety, we are the judges of ourselves in this. We stand against ourselves in a sense. In relative terms Tillich identifies this with the anxiety of guilt and in a more universal sense the anxiety of self-condemnation. (Courage on 51-52.) The human, in every act taken, contributes to the fulfillment of her or his potential. But each act can also contradict or go against her or his "essential being." We each have that power as well. And even in our best actions, non-being is always present and so it is never perfect. There is a powerful ambiguity in everything we do - good is present with evil and being with non-being. It is the awareness of these ambiguities, Tillich says, that lead to the anxiety of guilt. (Courage on 52.). As he states it, again on page 52:

The judge who is oneself and who stands against oneself, he who "knows with" (conscience) everything we do and are, gives a negative judgment, experienced by us as guilt.

This is present at all times of moral awareness and can take us to the slippery slope leading to complete self-rejection and condemnation and despair. To me this is the Eden myth. Animals probably cannot have this sort of anxiety - they do not judge themselves. This self-judgment comes with knowledge of "self." It comes from Rimbaud's "I is another." In order to judge yourself, you have to stand outside yourself in some way and pronounce judgment. The concept of the "self" is a prerequisite. The awareness of the self (the discovery that "I is another") was probably a historical society development. It is not clear at all that it is natural or obvious to us in the absence of social learning. It seems to me that the knowledge that comes with the eating of the apple in the myth is something like this. It does create a kind of Original Sin. Once you get to the point of being the judge of oneself, you are never "perfect" again. And once that concept was developed it became a part of the human condition and got passed down through all the generations even to us. Every since that apple moment, when we gained knowledge of the self and could condemn ourselves (as well as praise ourselves) we are, at every moment, aware of our moral failings - of our not living up to the ideal goals of self - because we cannot rid ourselves of the presence of non-being, so linked to our existence it is.

To try and avoid this, Tillich says, we try and transform this guilt into moral action. The two ways he identifies this as happening: the first way can lead us to reject the morals upon which the judgments are based and the second way can lead us to moral rigor and self-satisfaction (he identifies the ways as usually anomism and legalism). Neither is satisfactory as the anxiety of guilt always pushes through either system and pushed us towards self-condemnation. (Courage on 53.) The anxiety of guilt, Tillich says, is connected to the anxiety of non-being. He points to Paul's reference to sin as the "sting of death" as an example of this point being made in a Christian text. The contingencies of fate, as Tillich sees it, get a moral interpretation - moral self-condemnation gets linked with non-being. The forms of anxiety "provoke and augment" one another. (Courage on 54.) He also links Spiritual and Moral non-being, declaring them interdependent. Following your "essential being" or a moral code can stave off emptiness and meaninglessness in their strongest forms. The disintegration of the moral consciousness leads to an attack on spiritual being and existential doubt (by throwing into doubt all moral principles and even the "meaning of moral self-affirmation") undermines moral self-affirmation. "In this case the doubt is felt as guilt, while at the same time guilt is undermined by doubt." (Courage on 54.) Next Tillich integrates these anxieties beginning with a discussion of the meaning of despair. But that will have to wait for another day.