Hans-Christoph Askani develops an anthropology that does not inquire about a timeless essence of humanity, but rather about how a person lives out their humanity. The focus is on the experience that human existence is characterized by imbalances that cannot be eliminated. The unrest arising from this becomes the starting point for theological reflection. The author examines how the human being - in this case, the Christian - engages with what eludes their grasp and how they respond in forms of life that faith has given itself to withstand what surpasses it. These life forms articulate answers to questions that cannot be avoided but have no definitive solution. The author interprets this discrepancy in five chapters, focusing on the tensions between: poor and rich, man and woman, power and powerlessness, day and night, life and death. In each of these areas, it becomes evident that human action and thought do not catch up with the surplus of existence but at best expose themselves to it. Theology participates in this process. It engages with what it can never fully exhaust. To enter into this challenge, the present volume (the first of two) chooses the monastic way of life for orientation, which presents a spiritual restlessness assumed here to be characteristic or potentially characteristic not only of the monastic response but of human existence in general.