One of the
great theologians of the 20th century was Reinhold Niebuhr. This passage is from his The Nature and
Destiny of Man, vol. 1. It considers
the nature of Anxiety, and its role in all of our lives. In these days of economic crisis,
unemployment and under-employment, terrorism, desire for security and great
anxiety for many people this passage is particularly appropriate.
It is not
possible to make a simple separation between the creative and destructive
elements in anxiety; and for that reason it is not possible to purge moral
achievement of sin as easily as moralists imagine. The same action may reveal a creative effort
to transcend natural limitations, and a sinful effort to give an unconditioned
value to contingent and limited factors in human existence. Man may, in the same moment, be anxious
because he has not become what he ought to be; and also anxious lest he cease
to be at all...
The
statesman is anxious about the order and security of the nation. But he cannot express this anxiety without
assuming unduly that only the kind of order and security which he establishes is
adequate for the nation’s health. The philosopher is anxious to arrive at the
truth; but he is also anxious to prove that his particular truth is the
truth. He is never as completely in
possession of the truth as he imagines.
That may be the error of being ignorant of one’s ignorance. But it is never simply that. The pretensions of final truth are always
partly an effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human
knowledge. Man is afraid to face the
problem of his limited knowledge lest he fall into the abyss of
meaninglessness. Thus fanaticism is
always a partly conscious, partly unconscious, attempt to hide the fact of
ignorance and to obscure the problem of skepticism.
Yours & His,
DED
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