Tillich Extra Resources

WeirdWildWeb | Tillich Home | ST Readers Guide | Tillich Images | Tillich Extra Resources

Book Review

The Courage to Be. By Paul Tillich. Second Edition. New Haven, Yale University, 2000 (1st ed. 1952). 197 pages.

Paul Tillich’s book, The Courage to Be comes from a series of lectures he presented between 1950-51 at Yale University as part of the Terry Foundation lectures. The aim of these talks was to address religion in light of science and philosophy, a task Tillich responds to by an analysis of the human situation through the examination of the concept of “courage”. His claim is that as courage is an ontological condition of existence it points to the nature of being itself.

Tillich begins by separating courage into two parts: the ontological concept and the ethical reality. As is typical of his systematic approach, he claims that it is the separation of these two from one another that leads to a distorted understanding of courage. He tracks this development from Plato to Nietzsche showing at each step along the way how the contemporary philosophers and society at large viewed courage in relation to the conditions of the world around them. Of particular interest to Tillich are the Platonic ideas aligning courage and spirit with the phylakes or armed aristocracy of ancient Greece and the development of these ideas up through Thomas Aquinas, and the competing view of the Stoics, a group he sees as ultimately choosing the path of cosmic resignation in the face of the anxieties of existence. In Spinoza and Nietzsche, Tillich finds kindred, but incomplete definitions of “courage” to the one he espouses: affirmation of one’s being when faced with the threat of nonbeing.

Anxiety, its origins, form and character, are Tillich’s next point of exploration. Anxiety for Tillich is the recognition of the threat of non-being; it is ontologically necessitated and is the counterpart to courage. Following his pattern of creating dialects between external and internal, universal and particular, Tillich differentiates between anxiety, the response to being faced with non-being, and fear as an object-specific response. Fear inherently is “fear of” something, while anxiety is always directly resultant from facing the threat of non-being (a true nothingness). He differentiates between three kinds of anxiety (ontic - anxiety of fate and death; spiritual - anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness; and moral - anxiety of guilt and condemnation) and then dissects each of these to show how they result from a recognition of the human condition, and how the specific milieu of different historical periods leads to a prevalence of particular types of anxiety. He next applies the categories of anxiety to the neurotic and pathological to gain better understanding of their character. The neurotic, recognizing the danger of non-being builds a false castle of security when faced with anxiety, and can exhibit intense bouts of creativity, but at the cost of full human potential, while pathological anxiety by contrast is a result of people’s total inability to face their existential anxiety, and results in a certitude that leads to fanaticism. Healthy anxiety is that which leads to the courage to absorb the threat of non-being into oneself through an act of courage.

Having laid the groundwork for his book through his exploration of courage and anxiety as ontological concepts, Tillich makes his final move to an examination of the dialectic ontological categories of participation and individuation and their relation to courage and anxiety. For Tillich, it is in the alignment and unification of these concepts of being that we find true “courage to be.” Tillich takes us through the manifold ways in which we can fail to hold these two together. Beginning with participation, or “being a part of”, he gives examples of Eastern and Western societies which exemplify the complexities and failures of finding courage in one’s participation within a group, the primary problems being the inherent falseness of such a position, and the danger of completely subsuming the self within the group and thus a loss of one of the poles of existence. The inverse, an emphasis on individualization is examined through the modes of romanticism, naturalism and existentialism. While both romanticism and naturalism aim in the right direction by emphasizing the importance of the individual self, they do not attain the level of resistance to dehumanization and self-affirmation realized in existentialism. This too can be taken to the extreme and a loss of the world can result.

Tillich has revealed a problem that can only be solved through transcendence: to face the anxieties of the self-world split one cannot look to either the self or the world as these are within the realm of existence and therefore subject to the split. Courage demands looking beyond this to being itself which transcends the divide. Courage is the faith that one is acceptable even in the face of unacceptability. Tillich calls this “absolute faith”, and in the closing chapter of his book he outlines how this meets and conquers the three forms of anxiety that run throughout existence.

This biggest strength of Tillich’s Courage to Be is his analysis and presentation of the human condition. Tillich’s book speaks to the very real human condition of anxiety in the face of death, meaninglessness and condemnation while simultaneously capturing the breadth and depth of human attempts to escape this anxiety. We all encounter death in our lives but few of us truly “face” it, often losing ourselves in communities of faith who “deal” with the icky parts for us, or else ignoring it completely as Western culture does so well in the complete sanitization of death and dying. We don’t see a corpse until it is drained, filled, starched, pressed and in full make-up. To see it otherwise would bring us face-to-face with our own mortality and limits. So it is with Tillich’s book, for readers on either path (participatory or individualistic), Tillich’s book can be a harsh experience as he confronts the reader time and again with the contradictions implicit in their actions and beliefs.

In rooting his theology in ontology Tillich is able to escape the problems of a theistic God, but it is not clear that he replaces this with something equally comforting. Confronted with the great abyss of meaninglessness, Tillich proposes that we are faced with a decision between courage and despair and that we should choose courage, that is we should live in a meaningful way in spite of being unsure. Several times throughout the book he notes that Stoicism with its decision for resigned defeat is a plausible alternative. While Tillich does show the benefits of choosing courage over despair, his admitted inability to know for certain that faith is more “true” does ultimately leave open the possibility for making the opposite choice. This reader for one remains uncomfortably stuck on the contingency of a choice for courage.

Shelby L. Condray
Boston University
Fall 2010

The information on this page is copyright ©1994 onwards, Wesley Wildman (basic information here), unless otherwise noted. If you want to use text or ideas that you find here, please be careful to acknowledge this site as your source, and remember also to credit the original author of what you use, where that is applicable. If you have corrections or want to make comments, please contact me at the feedback address for permission.