For those most in the grip of the doubt and meaninglessness of our age, we have seen that none of the answers which served in past eras offer respite from despair. To take seriously our limitations, our ignorance both collectively and individually, our weakness, and human finitude, is to enter the darkness of existential anxiety.
If we are in this state, classic arguments fail to convince, appeals to authority lack credibility, classical theism is questionable, and all calls for belief all are subject to doubt. To simply ignore the questions and doubts will not relieve us of the anxiety, but only repress it.
Tillich suggests that in this era we need a faith in which we accept and incorporate the doubt and meaninglessness we experience. Rather than giving in to despair, he says that we need to take in our doubts. He points out that when we do, we are affirming something that transcends meaninglessness because we actually act meaningfully.
Notice what Tillich is saying, that when one declares “there is no meaning,” that is itself a meaningful statement. As vexing and far-reaching as our doubts may be, we can find a place to stand, a truth we can hold to, by accepting our doubts for what they are.
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This may at first seem like a simple play on words, a rhetorical trick, but for those afraid that everything is meaningless it can be the realization of meaning. It can be the beginning of how to find a courage for living despite persistent doubts.
Similarly, if I were to say “I do not exist,” it raises the question of who is the “I” who denies my existence? I cannot successfully doubt my own being, and existence itself can be a place to find meaning in meaninglessness.
Herein lies the possibility of how doubt and meaninglessness can be embraced as lived realities, but overcome by a new kind of faith which affirms life, and offers one a courage to be, though it does not deny those experiences.
To say it a little differently, when everything seems meaningless, one can realize that one’s own self, our being-itself, is beyond doubt. This faith, “the courage to be,” is different from the faith of previous ages. We rebut doubts not with intellectual certainty, denying that the questions are real and ever-present, but with a faith affirming existence and our own self within it. We trust in the ground of our being, this existence itself, which is a way of naming God.
Though this faith does not look like that of those who have had a mystical experience, nor like that of those for whom modern doubts can be kept at bay because they choose a framework which for them is meaningful, this courage to be in the face of existential anxiety is nonetheless faith. Tillich calls this absolute faith, not to say it is better somehow, but that it is faith stripped of content other than the affirmation of being within beingness itself, which is God.
This is for some the paradoxical nature of faith in the modern era of doubt and meaninglessness. When all can be questioned, given our awareness of our finite state, we can nonetheless affirm being-itself. Tillich asserts we can have faith in God beyond the concept of God as understood in previous eras, that is, God who is pure existence and being itself even when other assertions about God seem uncertain. We can have the courage to be despite doubt and meaninglessness.