Talk to The Courage to Be like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
What it argues
The Courage to Be originated as the Terry Lectures at Yale in 1950 and was published in 1952. Paul Tillich, a German-American theologian who had fled Nazi Germany, sets out to analyze the concept of courage as a response to the anxiety that is inseparable from human existence. The result is one of the most important works of 20th-century theology and existentialist philosophy — a synthesis of classical philosophy, existentialist thought (Heidegger, Kierkegaard), and Protestant theology that addresses the crisis of modern culture with unusual directness.
Tillich identifies three types of existential anxiety that correspond to three aspects of non-being threatening human existence: the anxiety of fate and death (the threat to existence itself), the anxiety of guilt and condemnation (the threat to moral integrity), and the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness (the threat to spiritual existence). Each era of history, Tillich argues, has been dominated by one of these anxieties. The 20th century is the age of meaninglessness — not primarily death-anxiety or guilt-anxiety, but the collapse of the frameworks through which life was organized and valued.
What it gets right
- 1.
Existential anxiety is not neurotic fear of a specific threat but the structural awareness of non-being — death, guilt, and meaninglessness — that belongs to finite existence.
- 2.
The three forms of existential anxiety correspond to three threats: fate and death (to existence), guilt and condemnation (to moral integrity), emptiness and meaninglessness (to spiritual life).
- 3.
The 20th century is primarily characterized by the anxiety of meaninglessness — the collapse of the frameworks through which life was organized and valued.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Paul Tillich (1886–1965) was a German-American Protestant theologian and philosopher who became one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the 20th century. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and spent decades teaching at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. His three-volume Systematic Theology and shorter works including The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith synthesized existentialist philosophy and Protestant Christianity into a theology of culture. He is widely considered the most significant Protestant theologian of the mid-20th century alongside Karl Barth, with whom he disagreed fundamentally about the method of theology.
