the Courage to Be

This book by Paul Tillich is what I wanted Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety to be - a philosophically coherent and spiritually compelling discussion of anxiety, fear, and existential dread, as these are psychologically dissolved in the ontological freedom of faith which gives us "the courage to be".

   Tillich is always an interesting theologian to read in large part because he starts off seeming to not be doing theology at all. The first five chapters of this book are all grounded in philosophy and psychology, and only in the final chapter does he tie everything together into points immediately apparently relevant to the religious life of a believer. The first chapter is a rough introduction to the concept of courage in relation to being, walking briskly through Plato to Aquinas, the Stoics, Spinoza and Nietzsche; the second constructs a conceptual framework for anxiety through the interrelation of being and non-being (alongside this ontology he also sketches the three main types of anxiety natural to humankind - that is death, meaninglessness, and condemnation); and the third briefly deals with pathological anxiety and the circumstances that cause it to arise - also making a rough delineation between what needs treating pastorally and what medically. Chapters four and five then take the plunge into applying these foundations to two different manifestations of the courage to be: firstly the courage to be as a part of a larger whole, having a confident identity as a member of a collective (with a deeper inspection of conformist tendencies in Western democratic societies); then the courage to be oneself as the unique individual one is - unsurprisingly reflected to a great degree in the cultural and intellectual developments of existentialism. The final chapter then offers a third model of the courage to be, one which absorbs and transcends the previous two - this is a model only attainable by faith in the grace of God: when humankind encounters the divine and knows it is accepted by it, we are presented with a heavenly acceptance of who we are, and by accepting this acceptance we can start to grow in a confidence of our individual and collective identities, which as they develop give us an ever deeper penetration into the relationship with God that makes such courage to be possible.

   This was a very insightful read. Tillich's breadth of applicable understanding in both philosophy and psychology make for some very unexpected avenues of thought that nevertheless find their fruition in the conclusions. I'd highly recommend this book to readers of any faith who want to dive deeper into the means of avoiding despair at the human condition.