Courage

Throughout the book, Tillich examines the strength of courage from both an ethical and an ontological point of view. In the first chapter he argues that both ethics and ontology are inextricably intertwined. As it pertains to courage, this means that courage is bound up with the entirety of the human experience, i.e., the full breadth and depth of existence, what it means to “be” generally, and what it means to be as a human being in particular. This necessarily leads to moral considerations, to be sure, but Tillich claims that the ontological situation of the individual must be considered before the move to ethics. Ontology (what it means to be) therefore precedes ethics (what it means to act). Courage, then, is rooted in the structure of human existence and is, at the most basic and rudimentary levels, the assertion of being over and against its opposites...