The Courage to Be

Paul Tillich, writing from lectures delivered at Yale, argues that anxiety is not a personal defect or a symptom to be cured but an inescapable feature of being a finite creature aware of the possibility of its own nonexistence. He distinguishes this existential anxiety, which has no fixable object, from ordinary fear, which can be confronted and overcome, and identifies three permanent forms it takes: dread of fate and death, dread of emptiness and meaninglessness, and dread of guilt and condemnation. Different historical periods, he suggests, have been dominated by different forms of this anxiety, with the modern era increasingly gripped by the anxiety of meaninglessness as older religious and social certainties eroded.

Tillich's answer is "the courage to be" — the act of affirming one's own existence despite everything that threatens it, whether by participating in something larger than oneself or by standing as an individual against convention. He argues neither mode of courage alone is sufficient, and that genuine courage ultimately requires connection to what he calls the power of being itself, a ground of reality that transcends conventional images of a personal God without dismissing the religious impulse behind them. Writing in the shadow of two world wars and psychoanalysis, Tillich offers a bridge between existentialist philosophy, depth psychology, and theology that neither fully rejects nor fully embraces traditional religious language.

Who should read it

Anyone wrestling with pervasive anxiety who wants a rigorous, non-clinical framework for understanding it will find this rewarding, as will readers interested in existentialism or the intersection of theology and psychology. It rewards patience with somewhat dense, abstract prose.

About the author

Paul Tillich was a German-American Protestant theologian and philosopher who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and taught for decades at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard, and the University of Chicago.