Paul Tillich and “The Courage to Be”
By Shea Stevens. Last edited 5/30/25
"Tillich and Martin Buber, who was another teacher of mine in Frankfurt, had more influence on me than any other psychologists or psychoanalysts. I was impressed with the way they respected people."
-Laura Perls, 1977“Tillich and Buber were much more than what one usually thinks of as theologians. They were really psychologists… They were interested in people, they were not talking about subjects. Listening to Buber and Tillich, you felt they were talking directly to you and not just about some thing. The kind of contact they made was essential in their theories.”
-Laura Perls, 1992
Early Life
Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in Starzeddel, then part of Germany (modern-day Starosiedle, Poland). Tillich switched to a Berlin school in 1901 and graduated in 1904. In September of the preceding year, his mother died of cancer; Tillich was 17. He attended the University of Berlin, the University of Tübingen, and the University of Halle-Wittenberg. He received his PhD at the University of Breslau in 1911 and his Licentiate of Theology at Halle-Wittenberg in 1912. His dissertation was on Schelling and the history of religion. During his time at university, he became a member of the Wingolf Christian fraternities.
Ministry and Army Service
Tillich became a Lutheran minister. In September 1914, he married Margarethe ("Grethi") Wever, and in October he became a German Army chaplain (World War I). His marriage with Grethi was not to last.
Tillich served in the trenches during the war, in France. He was hospitalized for combat trauma, and was awarded the Iron Cross.
“Man as man in every civilization is anxiously aware of the threat of nonbeing and needs the courage to affirm himself in spite of it.”
-Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be
Academic Life in Germany
After the war, Tillich became a Privatdozent of Theology at the University of Berlin from 1919 to 1924. He met Hannah Werner-Gottschow (then married and pregnant). In March 1924, they married; it was the second marriage for both. She later wrote about their life (and their open marriage). They remained together into old age.
From 1924 to 1925, Tillich served as an associate professor of theology at the University of Marburg. While at Marburg, he knew Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Heidegger. From 1925 until 1929, Tillich was a professor of theology at the Dresden University of Technology and the University of Leipzig. Then, succeeding Max Scheler, Tillich got the position of professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt from 1929 to 1933. While at Frankfurt, Tillich's two assistants were Harald Poelchau and Theodor Adorno. Tillich and Horkheimer together taught a course on John Locke, and taught other joint seminars on Simmel, Lessing, and Hegel.
Other contacts included Mircea Eliade, Erich Fromm, Adolph Lowe, Hannah Arendt, J Robert Oppenheimer, Erik Erikson, Karen Horney and Rollo May (Farris, T., 2024).
While at the University of Frankfurt, Tillich traveled Germany giving public lectures that brought him into conflict with the Nazi movement. Ten weeks after Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor, on 13 April 1933, Tillich, Mannheim and Horkheimer were some of the first German academic "enemies of the Reich" to be fired.
Life and Work in America
Reinhold Niebuhr urged Tillich to join the faculty at New York City's Union Theological Seminary. Tillich accepted. From 1933 until 1955 he taught there, where he began as a visiting professor of philosophy of religion. In 1933–34 he was also a visiting lecturer in philosophy at Columbia University.
Tillich published books featuring his unique synthesis of Protestant theology and existential philosophy. On the Boundary in 1936, The Protestant Era in 1948, The Shaking of the Foundations also in 1948. Tillich's most widely known works were his 1951 Systematic Theology vol. 1, and his 1952 The Courage to Be.
He was appointed professor at Harvard Divinity School in 1955, until he moved to the University of Chicago in 1962. He remained there until his death in 1965.
“[T]he concept of the boundary might be the fitting symbol for the whole of my personal and intellectual development. At almost every point, I have had to stand between alternative possibilities of existence... Since thinking presupposes receptiveness to new possibilities, this position is fruitful for thought; but it is difficult and dangerous in life, which again and again demands decisions and thus the exclusion of alternatives.”
-Paul Tillich, On the Boundary
The Courage to Be
In Paul Tillich's work The Courage to Be he defines courage as the self-affirmation of one's being in spite of the threat of non-being. He relates courage to anxiety. Tillich lists three types of existential, universal anxiety:
Anxiety of Fate and Death
This is the the most basic and universal form of anxiety. It rises from the recognition of our mortality and the contingency of our existence. There is a disorder, an absurdity to the events of our life and there is no guarantee of protection from such contingency while we are living.
“Contingently we are put into the whole web of causal relations. Contingently we are determined by them in every moment and thrown out by them in the last moment. Fate is the rule of contingency”
Anxiety of Meaninglessness and Emptiness
This anxiety comes from the loss of an ultimate meaning and, relatedly, the temporary nature of things we create and in which we find meaning. Tillich speaks particularly of meaningful creation, being able to be creative “spiritually” in creating things we find meaning and value in. He describes “intentionality” as “being directed toward meaningful contents.” He says intentionality is what allows people to transcend their situation and grow as a person.
“Man’s being includes his relation to meanings. He is human only by understanding and shaping reality, both his world and himself, according to meanings and values.”
“…one is driven from devotion to one object to devotion to another and again on to another, because the meaning of each of them vanishes and the creative eros is transformed into indifference or aversion. Everything is tried and nothing satisfies.”
He speaks of the need to balance on the one hand, finding meaning as “part,” part of a bigger picture, and on the other hand, to retain a sense of self, “the courage to be as oneself,” so that we do not abandon ourselves in our search for a meaning greater than ourselves.
Anxiety of Guilt and Condemnation
This anxiety affects moral self-affirmation. We realize that we are imperfect; limited; we don’t live up to what we want to be. We then rely on the idea that we are accepted regardless, and we choose to accept that acceptance.
“A profound ambiguity between good and evil permeates everything he does… The awareness of this ambiguity is the feeling of guilt.”
"The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable"
Tillich spoke of this solution in spiritual terms, saying that accepting acceptance can only happen through a kind of faith in God’s acceptance of us. His definition of the words “faith” and “God,” however, were not traditional and this is where the idiosyncrasy of his work comes out. He is so committed to the definition of God as the ground of being, being itself, that he does not even want to say the sentence “God exists” because it portrays God as one “being” among many, instead of God as the ground of being itself. Likewise he says faith is complicated and he speaks of a general and existential kind of faith in ourselves. So his words on this “acceptance” might not be received with complete agreement by most people unless you have a spirituality very similar to his. Still, I think his core message has important points for anyone to consider.
“…he who has the courage to affirm his being in spite of fate and guilt has not removed them. He remains threatened and hit by them. But he accepts his acceptance by the power of being-itself in which he participates and which gives him the courage to take the anxieties of fate and guilt upon himself.”
Courage Coexisting with Anxiety
I appreciate Tillich’s existential focus on the universality of anxiety. There is a difference between pathological/clinical anxiety and the universal experiences of anxiety which we all must face as humans. At the time I’m writing this, we are in a time period where anxiety is talked about primarily as a disease, as an oddity, instead of acknowledging the universal existential condition of anxiety. I think Tillich, an existentialist himself, covers this topic well and reminds us of the complementarity of courage and anxiety.
“Anxiety and courage have a psychosomatic character. They are biological as well as psychological. From the biological point of view one would say that fear and anxiety are the guardians, indicating the threat of nonbeing to a living being and producing movements of protection and resistance to this threat.”
“Without the anticipating fear and the compelling anxiety no finite being would be able to exist. Courage, in this view, is the readiness to take upon oneself negatives, anticipated by fear, for the sake of a fuller positivity.”
References:
Farris, T. 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/my-grandfather-paul-tillich-the-unbelieving-theologian
Tillich, P. 2014. “The Courage to Be” Third Ed. Yale University Press.