The Courage to Be

Book Overview

The Courage to Be, published by Yale University Press in 1952, grew out of the Terry Lectures that Paul Tillich delivered at Yale University in 1950-1951. It is a short book — barely over a hundred and fifty pages — but it became Tillich's most widely read work and one of the defining philosophical statements of the twentieth century's "age of anxiety." The book is at once an ontology, an analysis of modern culture, a history of philosophy, and a piece of apologetics: it asks what it means for a human being, threatened by death, guilt, and meaninglessness, to affirm his or her own being at all, and it answers with an account of courage as the self-affirmation of being in spite of nonbeing.

The argument moves in a deliberate spiral. Tillich begins with the phenomenon of courage itself, showing that the philosophical tradition — from Plato and Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas and Spinoza to Nietzsche — has always treated courage as something more than one virtue among others: courage is the affirmation of being in the face of its negation. He then asks what threatens being, and answers: nonbeing. Anxiety is the awareness of this threat, and Tillich distinguishes its three fundamental forms. Finally, he asks where the courage to be is rooted, and answers in a striking climax: in the "God above God," the power of being itself that is present even when every concrete image of God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. The book is unusual among works of existentialism in that it is genuinely constructive: it does not stop at diagnosis but attempts to name the ground on which a threatened existence can stand.

Author Context

Paul Tillich wrote The Courage to Be at the height of his American career, while teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he had taught since emigrating from Germany in 1933. He had been formed by three worlds: German academic philosophy, with its deep engagement of Kant, Hegel, and the tradition; the crisis experience of the First World War, in which he served as a chaplain and which convinced him that the question of meaning could no longer be answered by cultural optimism; and the Weimar debates about religion, socialism, and culture, from which he carried the conviction that theology must speak to the secular world in its own terms. In America he addressed a culture that was prosperous and confident on the surface but anxious beneath it — the world described by W. H. Auden's poem The Age of Anxiety, the world of the Cold War, of conformism, and of what social critics called "the lonely crowd."

Tillich brought to the book his distinctive method, the "method of correlation": the questions are formulated by philosophy and by the situation of the age, while the answers are offered by the symbols of the religious tradition. The Courage to Be therefore moves freely between secular analysis and theological claim. It is not a work of confessional theology; it is addressed to anyone who has experienced the threat of meaninglessness, believer or not. This is why the book has been read as an introduction to existentialism as well as to theology, and why it remains accessible to readers with no religious commitment.

Historical Background

The book appeared in 1952, in a decade dominated by the memory of the Second World War, by the nuclear standoff of the Cold War, and by a widespread cultural sense of emptiness beneath material prosperity. The "anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness," Tillich argues, had become the characteristic anxiety of the modern period. In earlier epochs, the dominant threat had taken other forms: antiquity, he holds, was dominated by the anxiety of fate and death, and the late Middle Ages and Reformation by the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. Modernity, by contrast, has dissolved the frameworks — religious, communal, metaphysical — within which meaning was once securely located. The result is a civilization that has lost the ability to experience anything as ultimately important, a condition Tillich describes as the "emptiness" of a culture whose values have become relative and replaceable.

The philosophical background is equally important. Tillich wrote in dialogue with the existentialist tradition — Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety and despair, Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism and his celebration of self-affirmation, Heidegger's account of being-toward-death and of anxiety as the disclosure of the nothing, and Sartre's atheistic existentialism, which Tillich takes seriously even while contesting it. His own move is to reinterpret the existentialist diagnosis in ontological terms: anxiety is not merely a psychological state but the awareness of nonbeing, and courage is not merely a character trait but the self-affirmation of being itself. The book is thus both a summing up of the existentialist critique of modern life and an attempt to show that the critique can be answered from within the tradition of philosophy and religion.

Core Ideas

Nonbeing and Anxiety

The foundation of the book is the claim that finite being is constitutively threatened by nonbeing. Everything finite is limited, and limitation is a form of negation: every thing could be otherwise, and every thing will some day cease to be. Nonbeing is not absolute nothing — absolute nothing would mean the total absence of anything, which is unthinkable as a state — but "the negation of every finite thing," the shadow that belongs to existence itself. Human beings, because they are finite and self-conscious, are the beings in whom nonbeing becomes present as a threat. Tillich's definition is precise and famous: "Anxiety is the state in which being is aware of its possible nonbeing." Fear, by contrast, has an object; anxiety does not. This is why anxiety cannot be eliminated by securing ourselves against this or that danger: its object is the ground of our being itself.

The Three Types of Anxiety

Tillich distinguishes three types of anxiety according to the three ways in which nonbeing threatens being. The first is ontic anxiety, the anxiety of fate and death: the awareness that our existence is contingent, that we can be destroyed by circumstances we do not control, and that death is the ultimate expression of this contingency. The second is moral anxiety, the anxiety of guilt and condemnation: the awareness that we are responsible for our lives, that we can fail to fulfill what our own being demands of us, and that this failure can harden into a condemnation we cannot undo. The third is spiritual anxiety, the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness: the threat that the ultimate concern that gives life its point will lose its object, that the question "what for?" will receive no answer. Tillich stresses that these anxieties are not merely neurotic disturbances; they belong to the structure of finitude itself. Neurotic anxiety arises when the self refuses to face its existential anxiety and defends itself by a rigid, self-limiting pattern. The existential anxieties, in their proper place, are the condition of courage, not its enemy.

Courage as Self-Affirmation in Spite of Nonbeing

Courage, for Tillich, is "the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of nonbeing." It is the power of the self to affirm its own being, its meaning, and its worth in the face of the threats of death, guilt, and meaninglessness. The classical definitions of courage — as endurance in battle, as the mean between fear and recklessness — are not so much wrong as too narrow: they treat courage as a property of particular acts, whereas the courage to be concerns the affirmation of one's whole existence. Following the tradition from Plato to Nietzsche, Tillich shows that courage always involves risk and the "in spite of": the courageous act is possible only because the threat is real. The courage to be is therefore not the absence of anxiety but the affirmation of being that includes anxiety and moves through it.

The Courage to Be as a Part and as Oneself

Tillich develops the dialectic between two poles of courage. The courage to be as a part affirms the self through participation in a larger whole — the group, the nation, the church, the movement. The courage to be as oneself affirms the self in its individual uniqueness, standing alone against the collective. Historically, Tillich traces these poles through their manifestations: the medieval collectivism of the church, the modern collectivisms of communism and Nazism, the individualisms of liberal humanism, romanticism, and Nietzschean self-assertion. Each pole, pursued alone, fails. The courage to be as a part collapses into the loss of self, when the group becomes an idol that demands the sacrifice of the individual. The courage to be as oneself collapses into despair, when the isolated self finds itself empty and without ground. The task is not to choose one pole but to hold them together: genuine self-affirmation is both individual and participatory, and Tillich argues that the courage that can sustain this tension must be rooted in something beyond both the individual and the collective — in the power of being itself.

Absolute Faith and the God above God

The climax of the book is Tillich's account of "absolute faith" and the "God above the God of theism." The courage to be as a part and as oneself both fail in the end, because both depend on finite supports that can be lost. The only courage that cannot be undercut is the courage that affirms being itself, without any particular content. Absolute faith is not faith in a specific doctrine or image of God; it is the unconditional acceptance of the power of being, an affirmation "in spite of" that survives even the loss of all concrete symbols. Tillich calls its object the "God above God": the ground of being that remains when the objectified God of popular theism — the being who can be doubted, argued about, and lost — has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. This is not atheism, Tillich insists; it is the deepest point of theism, the point at which faith rests not on an image but on being itself. "The courage to be," he writes, "is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."

Key Themes

The book weaves together several themes that recur throughout Tillich's work. One is the relation between anxiety and courage as an ontological dialectic rather than a psychological opposition: they are two sides of the same relation to nonbeing. Another is the critique of idolatry: every finite object of ultimate concern — nation, class, success, even a particular image of God — becomes demonic when absolutized, and the Protestant principle of protest against such absolutization is a structural theme of the book. A third is the relation between vitality and intentionality, which Tillich introduces to explain the dynamics of self-affirmation: vitality is the power of being in the self, intentionality is the directedness of the self toward meaning, and courage requires the union of both. A fourth is the distinction between existential and neurotic anxiety, which anticipates the concerns of existential psychotherapy and explains why the book has been so influential among psychologists: the answer to anxiety is not the elimination of all anxiety but the acceptance of existential anxiety in the power of self-affirmation.

Philosophical Meaning

The philosophical meaning of The Courage to Be lies in its claim that the ethical and psychological problem of courage is, at bottom, an ontological problem. By defining anxiety as the awareness of nonbeing and courage as self-affirmation in spite of it, Tillich transforms the existentialist diagnosis of modern culture — from Kierkegaard's despair, through Heidegger's being-toward-death, to Sartre's radical freedom — into a positive doctrine of being. The book also offers a distinctive answer to the question of meaning that dominates modern philosophy: meaning is not something we invent or discover as a property of objects, but something that is affirmed in the very act of self-affirmation, in the courage that says "in spite of." Finally, the book reinterprets the religious question for a secular age. The "God above God" makes the courage to be available even to those who cannot honestly affirm the God of traditional theism, while the doctrine of absolute faith keeps the religious dimension open as the ultimate ground of that courage.

Influence

The Courage to Be has been continuously in print since 1952 and has influenced theology, philosophy, and psychology. In theology, it made Tillich one of the most widely discussed religious thinkers of the century and shaped the way twentieth-century theology engaged existentialism; its concept of the "God above God" became a reference point for both radical and revisionary theologies. In psychology, the book's distinction between existential and neurotic anxiety and its account of the courage to be were taken up by existential and humanistic psychotherapy, especially through the work of Rollo May, whose The Meaning of Anxiety and The Courage to Create carry Tillich's categories into clinical practice. In philosophy, the book remains a standard point of entry to existentialist thought and to the question of meaning, and its analysis of the three anxieties has become a common framework for discussing the malaise of modern culture. Within this archive, the book belongs with the existentialism philosophy, the courage and anxiety wisdom entries, and the existentialist wisdom collection.

Related Quotes

"Anxiety is the state in which being is aware of its possible nonbeing."

— Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952). The book's central definition, developed against the background of Kierkegaard's account of anxiety as "the dizziness of freedom," treated in Kierkegaard on Anxiety.

"The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."

— Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952). The book's conclusion, which reformulates Kierkegaard's leap of faith, explored in Kierkegaard on Faith.

"The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence."

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, section 9. The existentialist background of Tillich's claim that being is affirmed in existence, not defined in advance; see Heidegger on Being.

"Man is not ultimately concerned with pleasure or power but with meaning: the will to meaning is the primary motivational force in human life."

— Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning. The psychological heir of Tillich's analysis of spiritual anxiety as the anxiety of meaninglessness; see Frankl on Meaning.

Sources

1. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952; 2nd ed. with an introduction by Peter J. Gomes, 2000). The primary text; citations in this archive follow the 1952 first edition pagination.
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Paul Tillich." Scholarly context for the book and its place in Tillich's system.
3. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Paul Tillich." An accessible overview of the courage to be and the method of correlation.
4. Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall, eds., The Theology of Paul Tillich (Library of Living Philosophers, New York: Macmillan, 1952). A contemporary critical assessment, including Tillich's replies to his interpreters.