The Courage to Be

A book by the German-American theologian Paul Tillich, based on his Terry Lectures at Yale and published in 1952. Tillich treats courage as the self-affirmation of being in spite of the threat of non-being, and begins with how Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Spinoza and Nietzsche understood it. He then distinguishes three forms of anxiety: about fate and death, about emptiness and meaninglessness, and about guilt and condemnation. Each dominates a period: fate and death at the end of the ancient world, guilt at the end of the Middle Ages, and meaninglessness in the modern age. He separates such existential anxiety from neurotic anxiety. Two kinds of courage answer it: the courage to be as a part, which finds security in a group, and the courage to be as oneself, which reaches its extreme in existentialism. Neither is enough alone. Tillich ends with absolute faith, the courage to accept oneself as accepted, and the 'God above God' who appears when the God of theism has disappeared in doubt.

It is a clear bridge between existentialism and theology, and its map of anxiety about death, meaninglessness and guilt still helps readers name what troubles them.