As an emerging leader in a religious context, I have often been faced with one specific question: how does one make sense of justice and construct values and goals that engage the greater society in light of modernism and globalization?
While I do not plan to answer that question in the span of one, seven-hundred-and-fifty-word, blog post—I do not think I will be able to answer that question in a lifetime—my goal is to scratch the surface of the question throughout my time in the 2018-2019 cohort of the State of Formation Fellowship and to develop a few public theological constructions that can assist others in discerning faithful steps toward engagement with this question. My goal is to construct a theology and ethic of courage. The reason? I aim to provide a basis for engagement in public discourse from my perspective as a Christian, a Protestant, an existentialist, and a religious naturalist. The courage I see expressed in the cross enables me to engage in challenging situations, look to places in our society where oppression is rampant, and stand as a presence of courage and hope to others as part of the hands and feet of Christ.
My favorite theologian, Paul Tillich, relates anxiety to fear ontologically. In The Courage to Be, he claims that “anxiety is the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing”1 and fear is anxiety with “a definite object that can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured.”2 To Tillich, anxiety brings the threat of nothingness and “has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase,… [has as its object] the negation of every object.”3
Tillich defines courage as “the affirmation of one’s essential nature…[which] has in itself the character of ‘in spite of.’”4 There is immense value in his definition of courage because he is grasping at an aspect of the reality of our experience of courage. All the same, I want to define courage differently. In doing so, I am also going to veer away from his definition of love.
It has often been said that hate is not the opposite of love, but fear is. While this is often a call to inspire empathy, I would argue that this statement is in reality grasping at something deeper about the nature of love. In my view, love and fear are related ontologically through their states of needing an object. I also believe love relates to courage in the same way that fear relates to anxiety.
Love, in my view, is the outpouring of oneself for an object. For the love of art, one works extra hours to complete their works, often losing sleep; they outpour themselves for art. In higher forms of love, this object becomes another being. For the love of a sick spouse, the lover will outpour themselves and take care of their beloved. In all cases, love has an object, just like fear.
Courage, like anxiety, has no object; it simply stems from being. Courage is the outpouring of oneself for Being-itself, just as anxiety stems from the nonbeing existent in Being-itself. This tapping into Being-itself is linked to how we perceive the concept of infinity and reflects, to some degree, our ethical attitudes and behaviors. In highlighting the experience of negative perceptions of infinity in our modern culture, I am going to point to some of the destructive aspects of capitalism.
In his book Capitalism and Desire, author Todd McGowan attempts to make sense of some the destructive aspects of modern capitalism through an analysis of the Western societal psyche. He relates some of the destructive aspects of capitalism’s nature to Hegel’s understanding of infinity. To McGowan, the self-destructive natures of modern capitalism stems from the Hegelian bad infinity, which he metaphorically likens to a line that moves infinitely forward, as “the bad infinite focuses the subject on the future and the possibility of a form of satisfaction that will never be realized.”5 This infinity—the bad one—tries to overcome all limits and all negativities. It both avoids and pursues to go past pain, tension, awkwardness, and hurt. It pursues an impossible perfection and always tries to transcend itself. McGowan contrasts this with the Hegelian true infinity, which takes the limit into itself—which he metaphorically calls a circle. In capitalistic economics, the bad infinity attempts to ignore the very real limits that exist on the economy, like the environment or ethical reasoning. The bad infinity tries to simply commodify or pass all limits set upon it. The true infinity reaches a point where it takes on the limits put on itself. In his circle reasoning, this appears to be like a sort of perpetual motion device, which does not exist. I believe he was trying to imply that an economy that understands the true infinity knows the limits that exist and reaches a point where it does not grow in unethical or destructive ways in order to continue growing. While this is particularly useful in explaining a myriad of topics in economic ethics, I am going to apply his analysis of the true infinity back to its philosophical theological underpinnings.
Other than the fact that perpetual motion devices don’t exist, I don’t like his circle metaphor for one reason: the two-dimensional space both the line and the circle are on is more infinite. In fact, three-dimensional space is still more infinite than that. Existence still is more infinite than that. Recursively, one can at least try to imagine something more infinite than the previously imagined infinity. The Hegelian true infinity is not a circle; it is more. It is what takes in everything. It is everything, all of existence and more together. In this regard, it approaches Being-itself.
In approaching Being-Itself, courage ceases to have a definite object, for Being-Itself is beyond an object. Being-Itself, or existence, is. It encompasses everything. Thus, courage takes on the everything, the good and the bad, and approaches Being-itself. In doing so, it brings us closely to experiencing Being-Itself and thus has ultimate existential and spiritual value.
In my own religious tradition, the cross is an example of an expression of courage. The act of courage brought on by Christ on the cross is what drives us to interpret divinity into his humanity, and it is what we also then interpret as an intensely high form of divine love. In the act of outpouring oneself for Being-itself, we interpret it as an expression of the outpouring of oneself for all of humanity, and that makes sense in some regards. If, according to Tillich, anxiety is the negation of all objects, then courage is the affirmation of all objects. If Being-Itself is existence itself, and encompasses all, including the true infinity, then all objects are affirmed in the affirmation of the objectless, all-encompassing existence. Human language fails to completely grasp at what this meaningful human experience is, and that is why courageous moments like the cross apply divinity to the courageous being and describe the act as all-loving. Love, being the outpouring of oneself for another object, becomes the immediate way we often interpret acts of courage. The divinity is applied to the courageous being because such a being is tapping into the Divine by outpouring themselves for the sake of the divine Being-Itself. We can only grasp that experience for moments, and the result is we see the outpouring that occurs on the edges of the outpouring for Being-Itself; we see only the outpouring for all objects that we can fathom in our finite consciousness.
Thus, this ethic, the ethic of courage that arises from my theology of courage, is—in my limited view—a good first step toward engagement with our cultures and the greater public. It is where we engage with the Divine. The first step toward engaging with all of our modern societal and personal existential challenges is to conclude that there is infinite, immeasurable value in the outpouring of oneself.
Image: “Pentecost,” original artwork by author.