Thomas Aquinas Against Your Digital-Age Anxiety
A recent study found that “more Americans [are] suffering from stress, anxiety, and depression” than ever recorded. An article in Psychology Today described this increased anxiety as contributing to the fact that “between 1999 and 2014, the suicide rate increased [by] 24 percent.” Nistsu Abebe attempted to diagnose “America’s New ‘Anxiety’ Disorder” in a recent article for the New York Times Magazine. The usual suspects have been rounded up: We are anxious thanks to “social media,” thanks to “Trump,” thanks to the lingering effects of the “Great Recession,” and so on.
But before we gulp down another round of meds and launch into hazy rants lambasting Trump for our digital-age jitters, we ought to be clear on what, exactly, anxiety is. This is the vocation of philosophy in the modern age — to plod behind popular discourse and puzzle over the terms it casts away like so many cigarette ends on a beach.
Anxiety is a kind of fear. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas describes fear in his great textbook, the Summa Theologiae: Fear is a “passion of the soul” characterized by a bodily “contraction” that occurs whenever one “regards a future evil which surpasses the power of him that fears, so that it is irresistible.” Let’s break Aquinas’ definition into its parts.
