What is The Courage to Be about?

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.

The courage to be is the affirmation of one's own being in the face of non-being — not the denial of anxiety but the taking of it into oneself and affirming existence despite it. This is not heroic resolve in the ordinary sense but a structural feature of selfhood: every act of self-affirmation is an instance of it. Tillich distinguishes three forms: the courage to be as part (participation in a larger community), the courage to be as oneself (the individualism of self-affirmation), and the courage that affirms both.

The book's most memorable section is on mysticism and the "God above the God of theism." When the conventional concept of a personal God — a supreme being among beings — collapses under the weight of doubt and meaninglessness, a deeper ground remains: the ground of being itself, which Tillich calls God beyond God. This is not atheism but a reconception of the divine that survives the death of the conventional God. Tillich describes this as absolute faith: the courage to affirm existence even without the assurance of a personal God.