Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Article: How to Tell Whether You've Got Angst, Ennui, or Weltschmerz

As I read through the article, I realized that each corresponds to a different type of rejection of God.

Angst:
Angst is the word for fear in German, Dutch, and Danish. It comes from the same Indo-European root (meaning tight, constricted, painful) that gave us anguish, anxiety, and anger. In the mid 19th century it became associated with a specific kind of existential dread through the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He talked about a type of anxiety that arises in response to nothing in particular, or the sense of nothingness itself. It’s not exactly fear, and not the same as worry, but a simple fact of the human condition, a feeling that disrupts peace and contentment for no definable reason.
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...Angst foregrounds dissatisfaction, a complaint about the way the world is.
Angst is a result of the rejection of God as the God of the peace that passes understanding. If God is not there to fill our lives, nothing (that is, nothingness) will. If real peace, the peace that passes understanding, does not fill our lives, we are going to experience that fear of angst. And it will express itself in complaint.

Ennui:
Young people at that time, feeling that the promises of the French Revolution had gone unfulfilled, took on an attitude of lethargic disappointment, a preoccupation with the fundamental emptiness of existence.
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By the middle of the 19th century, ennui became associated with the alienation of industrialization and modern life. Artists and poets suffered from it, and soon a claim to ennui was a mark of spiritual depth and sensitivity. It implied feelings of superiority and self-regard, the idea being that only bourgeois people too deluded or stupid to see the basic futility of any action could be happy.
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Ennui also has connotations of self-indulgent posturing and European decadence.
Wow, segments of our population (academics, pundits, and celebrities) are stuffed full of moral "superiority and self-regard" and unsubstantiated claims of "spiritual depth and sensitivity."

Ennui grows out of a rejection of God as the One who has good plans for our lives, who "works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose". If life is empty, it is because God does not fill it.

Weltschmerz:
Weltschmerz, German for “world pain....” It describes a world weariness felt from a perceived mismatch between the ideal image of how the world should be with how it really is.
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Though weltschmerz and ennui are pretty close synonyms, ennui foregrounds the listlessness brought on by world weariness (it can also be a term for more simple boredom), and weltschmerz foregrounds the pain or sadness. There is perhaps a greater sense of yearning in weltschmerz (part of the pain is that the sufferer really wants the world to be otherwise).
Weltschmerz is a rejection of God as the "Paracletos." The One who walks along side. The Counselor. The Healer. Life as a fallen human being, among fallen human beings, is going to be painful. God alone is one who brings healing and consolation (Well, "God alone," also through the people willing to serve.)

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