The Courage to Be was published by Yale University Press in 1952, based on Tillich’s Terry Lectures delivered at Yale the previous year. It became — remarkably for a work of existential theology — a bestseller, read not only by theologians and philosophers but by psychologists, artists, and educated general readers seeking to understand the pervasive anxiety of the postwar, nuclear era.
Tillich’s argument proceeds through a historical survey of courage (from Stoic fortitude through Aquinas to Nietzsche) before arriving at his own existential analysis. He identifies three forms of anxiety that threaten human existence: the anxiety of fate and death (finitude), the anxiety of guilt and condemnation (morality), and the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness (spiritual). Each era emphasizes one: the ancient world was dominated by fate-anxiety, the medieval by guilt-anxiety, the modern by meaninglessness-anxiety.
Courage, for Tillich, is not the absence of anxiety but its incorporation: the self-affirmation that takes anxiety “into itself” rather than fleeing from it through neurosis, conformity, or fanaticism. This “courage to be” has three forms: the courage to be as a part (participation in community, accepting social identity), the courage to be as oneself (individualism, self-creation, accepting isolation), and — transcending both — “absolute faith,” which Tillich defines as the acceptance of being accepted despite being unacceptable.
The book’s final chapter introduces Tillich’s most provocative concept: the “God above God” — a ground of being that appears “when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.” This is not atheism (Tillich insisted) but a form of faith that transcends traditional theism: when the personal God of religion fails (as it must, under the pressure of modern doubt), the ultimate ground of reality remains — not as a being but as being-itself.
Collecting The Courage to Be
First edition (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first edition: $100–$250
- Without jacket: $10–$20
One of the foundational texts of existential theology and one of the few academic philosophical works to achieve genuine popular readership. Continuously in print since 1952.