The Spirituality of Anxiety

The Preface to Baruch Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, which I began to read this week for the first time, concerns superstition and its relationship to anxiety. Advocating against the overly powerful ecclesiastical authority in 17th-century Dutch society, the Sephardic Jewish philosopher Spinoza writes that superstition and misguided belief are a result of doubt, passion, and desire. In the very first paragraph of this text, Spinoza writes that “if men were always able to regulate either affairs with sure judgment, or if fortune always smiled upon them, they would not get caught up in any superstition [...] when the mind is in a state of doubt, the slightest impulse can easily steer it in any direction.”

This dichotomy, between “sure judgment” and doubt that leads to “superstition,” is one that I have struggled with over several years of studying mysticism. First of all, the dichotomy itself is misleading: the tradition of Jewish mysticism demonstrates that reason and intellect can be applied to metaphysics, meaning that all philosophical or religious thought cannot be neatly divided between reason and the irrational. Moreover, this other side of the fence which philosophers label superstition is often associated with another privileged binary, that between men and women. Later in the Preface, Spinoza writes that “all humans when they find themselves in danger [...] implore divine assistance with pleas and womanish tears” (my emphasis.) Spinoza’s argument aligns belief, mysticism, and the feminine all on the side of irrationality and untruth. Moreover, it seems clear that this feminine superstition is not a productive or interesting opponent to rational thought. It’s strictly avoidable, problematic, and misguided.

Spinoza’s argument that fear leads us to be easily influenced, and thus inclines us towards superstition and belief, reminds me of a view of religion that I think was commonly held in my secular upbringing. We were always nominally atheists, but my father used to say that if and when catastrophe arrives—like a terrible illness, for example—then, he might become a believer.

I am deeply familiar with the axis of anxiety and belief, not through the experience of something genuinely threatening and traumatic such as illness, but in the much more mundane experience of fearing something indirect and unnameable. This year, and especially since the LA fires in January, I have come to consider my own anxiety to be a spiritual teacher. I find myself tense so much of the time, as if I am constantly anticipating someone walking through the door to tell me that a fire is nearby and it’s time to leave our house, which is what happened on January 8th (I returned 3 days later, and the house was untouched.) I find myself constantly expecting that message of danger to repeat itself, but the message never seems to come. I live in jittery, uncomfortable anticipation of some voice or event that is going to intercede and interrupt everything, threatening life and continuity itself. 

There is a tradition in philosophy which arises in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that tells us anxiety is our experience of negativity. What is it that our anxiety faces, what is its object? Heidegger writes that anxiety is fear without an object, because what we fear is death, our own non-existence. Anxiety is therefore our experience of awareness of death, the other side of life and existence itself. When I find myself afraid that something bad will happen, or that some divine disruption will end me or suspend the laws or break something, I try to transform my anxiety into awe for the thing that could cause what I fear. The fires in LA were close to what one might call divine violence, something irrefutable and immense that transforms the laws entirely, arising from nature itself. Where Los Angeles existed, there was, for a day, fear and disruption, total suspension of day-to-day existence and routine, a temporary end to all of the tiny invisible laws by which we live our daily lives. What could cause such transformation, other than the source of transformation itself?

Recently, when I re-entered the United States, I had to go through the standard checkpoint border control. Despite being a US citizen, I had felt tremendous anxiety about this moment for weeks, even months leading up to it. I didn’t fear anything in particular; I didn’t have reason to believe I would be locked up or given trouble at the border. Perhaps it’s just the knowledge that other people, people I know as well as complete strangers, have been and will continue to be harassed and endangered at checkpoints such as this. In a sense, it doesn’t matter whether it happens to me or not; my anxiety is perception of violence and risk which is present in the situation, for me or for someone else. I’ve also been much more anxious at checkpoints ever since reading Adania Shibli’s brilliant short story, “Dust,” about checkpoints in the West Bank. Despite being so far away from me, at least geographically, knowing what checkpoints mean in that part of the world makes me fear the ones near me so much more.

I was speaking with my grandmother about this, and she mentioned that her husband, my grandfather, also was plagued by anxiety at checkpoints. He was a Holocaust refugee who left Vienna in 1939. She was with him the first time he returned to Europe, and she described how afraid he was in that moment, despite knowing how much the circumstances had changed and that, of course, he was no longer fleeing Nazi persecution. It had already occurred to me that my own anxious preoccupation with checkpoints might be a form of haunting, or what some would call an “intergenerational trauma.” I have seen many of the documents pertaining to my grandfather’s immigration, looked at the ink pressed down onto the paper, certifying his entry was accepted and his survival ensured that much longer. I have thought deeply about the pivotal moments when he handed over paperwork to some official, a likely mindless bureaucrat who wielded power over life and death. Every time I hand my passport to someone, I am aware of all the times my ancestors did this, and were pleading for their life by that very motion. Even though my own survival does not appear to be in question, I am haunted by the risk and danger they experienced. This haunting manifests in my anxiety.

I have to believe that the fear that leads us to belief is not some hollow, “womanly” superstition as Spinoza suggests. It seems to tell us something. Anxiety connects me to the legacy of repetitions, the familial line of dangers closely avoided, miracles that happened and then the ones that didn’t. Anxiety transforms into awareness of negativity, of the thing that has the power to cause what we fear, and as such it is a meaningful source of faith.