The Courage to Be

Paul Tillich, a German-American philosopher and theologian, originally delivered the material in this book as the Terry Lectures at Yale University in 1950. The lectures required speakers to address "religion in the light of science and philosophy," and Tillich chose courage because he saw it as the point where theological, sociological, and philosophical problems converge. Published in 1952, the book argues that courage is not merely a moral virtue but is rooted in the structure of being itself, and that understanding courage opens a path to understanding both human anxiety and the nature of God.

Tillich begins with Plato's dialogue Laches, in which Socrates and his companions fail to define courage. This failure, Tillich argues, reveals that understanding courage requires understanding human existence and the structure of being. He defines courage as the ethical act in which a person affirms his or her own being despite those elements of existence that conflict with essential self-affirmation. He traces this concept through Western philosophy: Aristotle links courage to the noble; Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian, holds courage in tension between broad "strength of mind" and the narrower virtue of fortitude. Over time, the ontological dimension of courage was absorbed into the Christian virtues of faith and hope, while its ethical dimension was absorbed into love. Tillich's book takes an alternative path, preserving the larger meaning of courage and using it to reinterpret faith.

Tillich presents Stoicism, the ancient school emphasizing reason and self-mastery, as the only real alternative to Christianity in the Western world. Stoic courage rests on reason understood not as mere logic but as the Logos, the meaningful structure of reality. Tillich then turns to Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher, whose central proposition holds that every being's striving to persist in its own existence is identical with its essence and virtue. Drawing on Jewish mysticism, Spinoza answers what the Stoics could not: The power that makes the conquest of anxiety possible is participation, the soul's intellectual love for its eternal ground. Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, extends this line of thought with his concept of "will to power," which designates the self-affirmation of life as life, including both self-preservation and self-transcendence. Tillich identifies Nietzsche as the most important forerunner of Existentialism because of his willingness to confront the abyss of nonbeing in accepting that "God is dead" (29-30).

In the second chapter, Tillich develops a systematic ontology of anxiety. He defines anxiety as the existential awareness of nonbeing, the impression of finitude on one's own awareness of having to die. He distinguishes anxiety from fear: Fear has a definite object that can be faced through courage, while anxiety has no object, making struggle and participation impossible. The two are interdependent, however, and anxiety strives to become fear so that courage can have something to address.

Tillich identifies three types of existential anxiety, each corresponding to a dimension of self-affirmation threatened by nonbeing. The anxiety of fate and death threatens ontic self-affirmation, or basic concrete existence. The anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness threatens spiritual self-affirmation, one's creative participation in the sphere of meanings. The anxiety of guilt and condemnation threatens moral self-affirmation. These types map onto Western history: The end of the ancient world was dominated by the anxiety of fate and death; the end of the Middle Ages by guilt and condemnation; and the modern period by doubt and meaninglessness. When the three types converge, they produce despair, a boundary situation in which nonbeing feels absolutely victorious, yet the very feeling of despair presupposes enough being to feel it. Tillich distinguishes pathological anxiety from existential anxiety, defining neurosis as "the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being" (61). He proposes that existential anxiety is the minister's concern, while neurotic anxiety is the physician's, and argues that vitality must be understood in correlation with intentionality, the distinctly human capacity to relate to meanings. Courage, he concludes, cannot be produced by moral effort; religiously speaking, it is a matter of grace.

The fourth chapter introduces two forms of the courage to be, grounded in the polarity of individualization and participation. The courage to be as a part is self-affirmation through participation in a group or reality larger than oneself. Tillich traces its manifestations from primitive societies, where self-affirmation is entirely mediated through the group, through medieval semicollectivism held together by the Church's authority, to twentieth-century neocollectivism, including fascism, Nazism, and communism. He analyzes democratic conformism, particularly in America, as another form: American courage affirms the self as a participant in productive, creative development, expressed in pragmatism and the ethics of growth. Yet Tillich warns that growing conformism could approximate collectivism if unchecked.

The courage to be as oneself, traced in the fifth chapter, develops from the Enlightenment's courage to follow reason, through Romanticism's emphasis on individual uniqueness, to Existentialism's courage of despair. Tillich distinguishes the existential attitude, a mode of participatory knowing, from Existentialism as a philosophical content. The Existentialist recognition of human estrangement from essential being was progressively lost as René Descartes, the French philosopher, reduced the human being to a pure epistemological subject and G. W. F. Hegel's idealist system resolved existence into essence. The nineteenth-century revolt, from F. W. J. Schelling through Karl Marx and Nietzsche, reacted against this loss, driven by the threat of a society that transformed persons into things. Twentieth-century Existentialism represents the most radical form of the courage to be as oneself. Tillich surveys its expressions in works by Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus, and presents Sartre's proposition that "the essence of man is his existence" as "the most despairing and the most courageous sentence in all Existentialist literature" (138). Yet this courage has limits: The self cut off from participation becomes an empty shell, and historically, Existentialist protest turned into oppressive collectivism.

The final chapter asks whether a courage exists that unites both forms by transcending them. Tillich argues that every courage to be has a religious root, because religion is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself. He examines mystical courage, which strives for identification with the ground of being, and the courage of personal confidence, exemplified by Martin Luther, whose direct encounter with God produced a new courage transcending both being as a part and being as oneself. At the center of Protestant courage stands the paradox of justification by faith, the doctrine that one is made right with God not by works but by faith alone: The courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable, independent of any moral or intellectual precondition.

Yet when confronting the anxiety of meaninglessness, even Luther had to draw on the mystical tradition, raising the question of whether the two types of courage can be united. Tillich answers with "absolute faith," defined as the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself. This faith can coexist with doubt and meaninglessness because the acceptance of despair is itself faith: Every negation presupposes an implicit affirmation. Tillich argues that all forms of theism must be transcended, particularly theological theism, which makes God into a being beside other beings and is "the deepest root of atheism" (170). The book culminates in the concept of the "God above God," the ultimate source of the courage to be. The courage rooted in this God unites the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself: The self that participates in the power of being-itself receives itself back without being lost in collectivism or emptied in individualism. A church that raises itself to the God above God can mediate a courage in which one neither loses oneself nor loses one's world. Absolute faith is not a separate state but a movement always in, with, and under other states of mind, moving in the depth of all words, concepts, and theologies as the power of being in which they participate. "The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt" (175).