These three forms of anxiety are three modes of response to various kinds of threats from nonbeing, threats to which existence as such is subject. As a practical solution to this practical problem, theology presents God. By participating in God, who is the infinite power to resist the threat of nonbeing, man acquires the courage to exist fully, even in the face of such anxiety. Similarly, when a person becomes deeply aware of historical existence as full of ambiguities, he becomes filled with perplexities and despair. The Christian answer is the notion of the Kingdom of God, which is the meaning, fulfillment, and unity of history.
Knowledge of Reality
Tillich's concern was with the religious significance of the "human situation," and he held that religious questions arise out of human problems. In a similar vein, the only basis for an understanding of the ontological structure of reality is the analysis of human existence, of man's encounter with his environment. We can grasp the being of other things only by analogy with man. Tillich, in the first volume of his Systematic Theology, sees man as "that being in whom all levels of being are united and approachable." But man is not merely "an outstanding object among other objects." He is the "being who asks the ontological question and in whose self-awareness the ontological answer can be found." Man can proceed in this way "because he experiences directly and immediately the structure of being and its elements"—because "the interdependence of ego-self and world is the basic ontological structure and implies all the others." Man is a self; "therefore selfhood and self-centeredness must be attributed … to all living beings and, in terms of analogy, to all individual Gestalten even in the inorganic realm." In accordance with this view, Tillich takes concepts that he supposes to have their primary application to human existence—individualization and participation, dynamics and form, freedom and destiny—and designates them as the elements constituting ontological structure, applying them to being as such.
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