Reading through Goethe’s Faust over the years, I’ve gradually understood more of what the octogenarian poet was bringing across in the second part of his play, a work of his lifetime, begun in his twenties. Faust is increasingly agitated over the divide between his everyday concerns and the underlying realities that continue to plague him. This section of the play could be summed up in the commonplace notion that we envy the gods because they can’t die, but the gods want man’s attention because we can. This messenger from the gods, this notion of our dark mortality against the bright sun of immortality, is anxiety. We pay attention when our lives are threatened, but not when we are merely alive. It seems that we must be alive to death in order to understand anything important at all. For this reason, our current indisposition of masked concealment for the purpose of alleviating the anxiety of death so that we may remain merely alive is an illegitimate anxiety. I knew this when I heard a medical witness at a county supervisor’s meeting insist she was not afraid when merely asked ‘what she was afraid would happen should the county not go into lock down’. “I’m not afraid!”, she stipulated angrily. This seemed odd, that the idea of the slightest shadow of anxiety being voiced might be something to irrationally shut down. Don’t we really make all preparatory choices in order to avoid things that are to be in some sense feared? Yet we mustn’t admit it. I can only think it is because of where it leads, to the great anxiety, the one of being. That anxiety about death, about being dissolved, is the most rational thought of all, but the one that must not be entertained, so threatening is it to our state of diversion.
Perhaps it is helpful to think of one of the greatest heroes of literature: Achilles. Achilles famously had two paths: he could live in obscurity surrounded by his flocks and family, or he could go to his eternal glory in the songs of men by meeting his early death in glorious combat. Why would Achilles choose what he did? He was spurred on by the death of Patroclus, his closest friend, by way of a simple answer. Perhaps a more disturbing answer is there, in the conversation that Achilles has with Priam, the father of Hector, the man whom Achilles brutally killed and dishonored in order to achieve his everlasting fame. He proposes that the deathless gods mete out both the fortunate and unfortunate events in a man’s life, and it is no good to grieve for what has passed. Further, Achilles threatens the old father with death should he continue to entreat for the return of Patroclus’ body, the sole purpose of Priam’s embassy to the slayer of men. He does this because he knows that the gods have decreed that Hector’s body be returned, and that Priam was brought through the heavily guarded camp of the Myrmidons by Hermes himself, the messenger of the gods. The gods have not let Achilles ignore them, because he is so intensely mortal. Achilles will not let the knowledge of his furious mortality subside, and so it rests with the pagans. Anxiety when confronted must become despair, it is the only rational response.
How did this Trojan War start? It began with a trial, a trial of Paris, another son of Priam, when Eris, the goddess of strife tempted three goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena with a golden apple. Paris was asked by each to judge among them, by the attraction of their proposals, which should receive the golden apple. Their proposals ran this way: Hera offered to make Paris the Lord of Europe and Asia, Athena offered to make him the victor over the Greeks as the commander of the Trojans, and Aphrodite offered what Aphrodite always offers, that he would possess the fairest woman in the world. Of course Eris, the originator of the golden apple, wins in any case (the house always wins) and Priam takes Aphrodite up on her offer, stealing Helen away from Menelaus, and starting the Trojan War. The three offers represent the distractions of ownership, spirited victory, and satiated appetite. We might call these pride of life, lust of the eye, and lust of the flesh. These are distractions that take us away from strife itself, the strife of mortality that underlies all of man’s life. Of course the curse of Achilles arises from this decision. The distracted son Paris causes the death of Hector at the hands of despairing Achilles. This symmetry is characteristic of the Iliad.
What of another trial, which is better known as a temptation? Christ was led away into the wilderness to be tempted in three ways. He was first, as we read in Matthew, tempted to turn stones into bread, and thereby satiate the flesh, never worrying again about need or famine. In the second trial, he was told to hurl himself from a high place, where, as scripture had foretold, he would not be suffered to bruise even his foot against a stone, but would be born up by the hosts of God, victorious at the head of his Father’s army. Finally, he was told that if he would prostrate himself before the devil, he would be given all the cities of the earth for his kingdom, a finalization that would have satisfied many as to the reality of his anointing. He refused, un Paris like, and kept in each instance the anxiety of earthly existence against the finality that would cloud his real condition. Man does not live by bread alone, you shall not tempt God as in confusing your will with his as to victory, and finally, the adoration of God alone is the destiny of man, as well as the Son of Man. Idolatries of appetite, victory and ownership are all avoided in the one who calls us brother, and we are thankful reflecting on the butcher’s bill that accompanies failure in these matters by the avoidance of real concern, or real anxiety.
But aren’t we to be anxious for nothing, as Paul writes? This is the position of the one who accepts the choices of Christ as his own. We also know that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and we are not to fear those who may only kill the flesh, but Him who may bring about the ruin of the body and soul. To what purpose is this anxiety, then, if not to produce what it ultimately must, that being despair? Blaise Pascal, a contemporary of René Descartes and observer of the great wars of religion in the seventeenth century observed that there were only three kinds of people: Those who serve God, having found him, those busy seeking God, not having found him, and finally those who do not seek him and have not found him. The first are happy, and properly not anxious, the last are foolish and unhappy, and the second are rational, but unhappy. Pascal was constantly remarking on the supernatural distraction of mankind, beings who were so sensitive to trivialities, so blind to great things, involved in an uncanny inversion of concern. This is true, however, due to the unbearable heaviness of being, to turn a famous phrase.
Soren Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death, brings this threefold division into startling clarity. Anxiety must occur, a sickness must be caught, the resistance to the contagion is a distraction that will lead to eradication of being. Despair is necessary because of the condition of man, but despair in the way of living it out is also sin. This last part seems right to the contemporary therapeutic man, the one who actualizes rather than disappears. Do not commit the sin of despair. What we would reply is that you don’t commit the sin of despair, you catch it. The threefold response to the world’s bargains that Kierkegaard points out are these: The despair of not being conscious of Having a Self, the despair of Not Willing to Be Oneself, and the despair of Willing to Be Oneself. In the first, we see the focus on trivialities, the eternal distraction, the type of person who hasn’t found but does not seek. In the second, we see the despair of seeking and never finding, a perpetual wandering in unhappiness. In the third, we see the possibility of surrender, serving God rather than oneself, substituting the will of the Father for one’s own, thereby becoming anxious for nothing. Despair is the sickness that one catches from properly experienced anxiety. We should all expose ourselves to this disease and embrace the idea of mortality, as Christ did.
Now, thinking of the insistent attention of the gods, the call of immortality, the impossibility of mortality, we see ourselves correctly. We are the immortal animal, the dying immortal, and neither world can hold us. It is no wonder that we can be stampeded when something threatens us to think of this paradox. It is unbearable, through engagement with anxiety, that we tend toward despair, which must not be if we intend to be trivially entertained with the things of the world. But trivial engagement is not the life we are called to live. Like Achilles, we should resent this condition. Like Christ, we should submit to the cross in order to experience the resurrection.
Names and terms in this piece are gathered in the Glossary.
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