Quotes from book
The Courage to Be

Name: The Courage to Be
Author: Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich

“Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be

“The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 120

“Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 127
Source: Systematic Theology, Vol 2: Existence and the Christ
Context: Plato … teaches the separation of the human soul from its “home” in the realm of pure essences. Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas.

“The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God disappears in the anxiety of doubt.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

The Courage to Be (1952)

“The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. “Existential” in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), pp. 123-124

“Pietism and methodism reemphasized personal guilt, personal experience, and individual perfection. They were not intended to deviate from ecclesiastical conformity, but unavoidably they did deviate; subjective piety became the bridge of the victorious reappearance of autonomous reason. Pietism was the bridge to Enlightenment. But even Enlightenment did not consider itself individualistic. One believed not in a conformity which is based on biblical revelation but in one which should be based on the power of reason in every individual. The principles of practical and theoretical reason were supposed to be universal among men and able to create, with the help of research and education, a new conformity.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 114

“In a man like Friedrich von Schlegel the courage to be as an individual self produced complete neglect of participation, but it also produced, in reaction to the emptiness of this self-affirmation, the desire to return to a collective. Schlegel, and with him many extreme individualists in the last hundred years, became Roman Catholics. The courage to be as oneself broke down, and one turned to an institutional embodiment of the courage to be as a part.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 117

“The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 116

“One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word "spirit" was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in “spirit” was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality. The middle ground between them, the spiritual soul, in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 82

“The second element in absolute faith is the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience on being and the dependence of the experience of meaninglessness on the experience of meaning. even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 177

“[American] conformism might approximate collectivism, not so much in economic respects, and not too much in political respects, but very much in the pattern of daily life and thought. Whether this will happen or not, and if it does to what degree, is partly dependent on the power of resistance in those who represent the opposite pole of the courage to be, the courage to be as oneself.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 112

“The anxiety about death is met in two ways. The reality of death is excluded from daily life to the highest possible degree. The dead are not allowed to show that they are dead; they are transformed into a mask of the living. The other and more important way of dealing with death is the belief in a continuation of life after death, called the immortality of the soul. This is not a Christian and hardly a Platonic doctrine. Christianity speaks of resurrection and eternal life, Platonism of a participation of the soul in the transtemporal sphere of essences. But the modern idea of immortality means a continuous participation in the productive process.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 110

“Even loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the universe are in him.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 121

“Enthusiasm for the universe, in knowing as well as in creating, also answers the question of doubt and meaninglessness. Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. And meaninglessness is no threat so long as enthusiasm for the universe and for man as its center is alive.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 121

“Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 125

“Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 113

“In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 133

“At the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p.57

“A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 124
Context: There are realms of reality or — more exactly — of abstraction from reality in which the most complete detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. Everything which can be expressed in terms of quantitative measurement has this character. But it is most inadequate to apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. But by participating you change it. In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing.

“There is a third element in absolute faith, the [[acceptance of being accepted.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 177
Context: There is a third element in absolute faith, the acceptance of being accepted. Of course, in the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. But there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the "power of acceptance". To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by [[doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be.