FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Anxiety

Rant Number 510       18 October 2012

Is there a universal aim, an object, a goal all people desire? Ibn Hazm, a theologian of Moorish Spain, thought he had found it. Rather a negative one: repelling anxiety. According to Professor Fakhry, Ibn Hazm taught that since the creation of Adam and Eve there is no single human action or word whose purpose is not to deter anxiety. The rich are anxious about losing their wealth, lovers their beloved, workers their job, celebrities about becoming obscure, students failing their exams. Add anxiety about fate, old age, illness, loneliness, imprisonment, death, terrorism, immigration, national identity, drones, internet viruses, taxes, the environment, economic sanctions, war...and so on. Dismal list but real, all too real.

Ibn Hazm’s anthropology of anxiety was rooted in his own experience. His was an age of insecurity. The political unity of his state, the Umayyad Caliphate of Andalusia, was collapsing, to be replaced by many smaller, petty polities. As a partisan of the ancien regime, the scholar experienced prison, exile, ostracism and vilification. But of course many intellectuals have suffered far worse, without giving worries any paramount place in their system. The key that unlocks the meaning of Ibn Hazm’s theory is in the remedy he provided.

Granted, types of anxiety are not all fixed, they vary over time. Triumph of Communism was the overwhelming dread of Western Europeans after WWII – now vanished like a ghost at night’s end. The Cold War also engendered anxiety over a possible/probable nuclear holocaust. (To ward that off, some foolish people installed ridiculously ineffective anti-nuclear shelters in their back gardens.) Grave theorists wrote treatises about how many millions of its citizens the West could afford to have incinerated in a thermonuclear exchange. The rationality and ethics of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – was a strategy expounded and defended by dignitaries like the Bishop of London, the late Graham Leonard. Well, as he ordained a glorious oddball like Fr Frank to the Anglican priesthood, St Graham naturally was a little odd himself!

It seems that Islam has now partly replaced Communism as a major anxiety of the West. Irrational phobia? Future will tell...

Mosques and minarets, however, do not make ordinary people spend sleepless nights. When I was in parish ministry, many came into my church anxious for help of manifold kind. Ministering unto them was a privilege – what is a priest for if he doesn’t help people? However, maybe 50% of callers wanted money. Cock-and-bull stories abounded. (E.g. “Father, I need 40 pounds to get my cat back from the vet.”) I cannot disclose cases learnt under the seal of Confession but, in general, depression brought on by frustrated love and financial problems predominated.

Yes, depression. A parishioner was a GP. He confided to me that one thing that depressed him was that all he could do for many depressed patients was to prescribe drugs of various types. ‘I am no healer’, he sighed, ‘just a procrastinator. The mood-altering medications don’t solve anything. Often they make things worse.’ But he knew, like all doctors do, that treatment and cure are often quite distinct things.

Philosophical anxieties were rare. A young man believed himself to be demonically possessed. There was no actual devil inside him. It was an unconscious way he desperately sought to make himself interesting, to overcome his own inadequacy and insignificance. A sad delusion.

On one occasion, however, a pretty Cambridge student walked in, dressed in Gothic fashion. She announced she had decided to commit suicide. I won’t say why but I’ll say how - she would drown herself. She coolly demanded reasons – not just pious religious gaff – why she should not. I believe she was sincere. We spent hours in conclave. Bible apart, I ran through my Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, Marcel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, all the eggheads I knew from my undergrad philosophy days. She shook her head at the arguments but they made her puzzled. ‘I am going to read them, then I will decide whether to kill myself or not’, she promised. Well, it gained her some time. Glimpsed her again months later on Kensington High St, looking pretty much alive.

Implausible that all men should share this creepy thing, anxiety, as a common aversion? Yet, in the immortal words of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus acknowledges the evil of anxiety: ‘Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on...do not be anxious about tomorrow...’ (St Matthew, 6). Too impractical, ethereal and other-worldly? No way.

What Jesus came to earth for, what Christianity arose to do, was to forge a new, better type of human being. The anthropology created by the New Testament first fashions a personality radically different from that of paganism. Community, solidarity, brotherhood and pax become key values. Christ shapes and prepares the new anthropos, the new human type fit for life in a better world, a better type of human community in the realm of space-time. That is not world-denying but world-affirming. Second, the New Testament orientates the new man towards the world to come. The sublime promise and vision of the New Jerusalem, not in space-time but in Eternity, rejoicing back in the loving bosom of the Creator.

Ibn Hazm’s remedy for anxiety – not that I mean to compare him to Jesus – was also the orientation of the soul towards the Hereafter and its substantial beatitudes. The illusory nature of worldly pursuits and the anxieties they generate he conveys by a nice Platonist image. They are like shadows projected by puppets, dummies on a continuing revolving carousel. Unreal and deceptive. Of course, Ibn Hazm was simply re-proposing what early Islam, like Christianity, also wanted to effect: a new type of man.

Our stupid Zeitgeist shuns any reference to Eternity. It is certainly absent from all the media, politics and public discourse. There is a reason, I suspect. The dummies that rule us deep down are anxious about what awaits them.

They jolly well should.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli