Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object (as most authors agree), which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured. One c...an act upon it, and in acting upon it participate in it--even if in the form of struggle. In this way one can take it into one's self-affirmation. Courage can meet every object of fear, because it is an object and makes participation possible. Courage can take the fear produced by a definite object into itself, because this object, however frightful it may be, has a side with which it participates in us and we in it. One could say that as long as there is an object of fear, love in the sense of participation can conquer fear. But this is not so with anxiety, because anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object. Therefore participation, struggle, and love with respect to it are impossible. He who is in anxiety is, insofar as it is mere anxiety, delivered to it without help.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not difficult to see the analogies and contrasts of the Christian view of man to that of the Marxist. What Marx calls aliena...tion is in Christian conceptualization the fall of man from his essential innocence into a situation of conflict with himself and his creative ground. Man is not what he could and should be. That holds for the individual as well as for society; and it is true also of the universe, which participates in the fate of man. Man stands against man, group against group, being against being. Schism characterizes everything that exists in the soul of the individual, in humanity, and in the universe. The contrast with the Marxist view of man, however, is clear in spite of all these analogies. The "fall" in Christian conception is universal; "estrangement" in the Marxist view is bound to a special period of time. The Christian symbol of paradise is transhistorical; the Marxist symbol of primitive communism, historical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and whi...ch itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday's weather, but in the wa...y of the great "in spite of" that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relationship can endure healthily. I don't refer to a solemn act of asking for and offering forgiveness. Such rituals as sometimes occur between parents and children, or friends, or man and wife, are often acts of moral arrogance on the one part and enforced humiliation on the other. But I speak of the lasting willingness to accept him who has hurt us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man's being alone. It has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of b...eing alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Symbols have one characteristic in common with signs; they point beyond themselves to something else. The red sign at the street c...orner points to the order to stop the movements of cars at certain intervals. A red light and the stopping of cars have essentially no relation to each other, but conventionally they are united as long as the convention lasts. The same is true of letters and numbers and partly even words. They point beyond themselves to sounds and meanings. They are given this special function by convention within a nation or by international conventions, as mathematical signs. Sometimes such signs are called symbols; but this is unfortunate because it makes the distinction between signs and symbols more difficult. Decisive is the fact that signs do not participate in the reality of that to which they point, while symbols do. Therefore, signs can be replaced for reasons of expediency or convention, while symbols cannot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Out of the element of participation follows the certainty of faith; out of the element of separation follows the doubt in faith. A...nd each is essential for the nature of faith. Sometimes certainty conquers doubt, but it cannot eliminate doubt. The conquered of today may become the conqueror of tomorrow. Sometimes doubt conquers faith, but it still contains faith. Otherwise it would be indifference.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is ... a difference between the Protestant and the Catholic doctrine of the natural law. Catholicism believes that the natur...al law has definite contents, which are unchangeable and are authoritatively stated by the Church (e.g., the fight of the Roman Church against birth control). Protestantism, on the other hand, at least today and in this country, determines the contents of the natural law largely by ethical traditions and conventions; but this is done without a supporting theory, and therefore Protestantism has the possibility of a dynamic concept of natural law. It can protest against each moral content which claims unconditional character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Paganism can be defined as the elevation of a special space to ultimate value and dignity. Paganism has a god who is bound to one ...place beside and against other places. Therefore, paganism necessarily is polytheistic.... Space means more than a piece of soil. It includes everything which has the character of "beside-each-otherness." Examples of spatial concepts are blood and race, clan, tribe, and family. We know how powerful the gods are who give ultimate dignity and value to a special race and to a special community of blood. In all of them the "beside-each-otherness" is dominating. Human culture is rooted in these realities, and it is not surprising that they always have received adoration, consciously and unconsciously, by those who belong to them, and consequently that they always have claimed universal validity. Modern nationalism is the actual form in which space is ruling over time, in which polytheism is a daily reality. Nobody can deny the tremendous creativity of national community. Nobody would be willing to deprive himself of the physical and psychological space which is his nation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, i...s that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »