"The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt"

Paul Tillich suggests that true courage, the "courage to be", is not a simple absence of fear but emerges from grappling with profound existential anxieties, especially those related to doubt and the seeming absence of God. Human existence is fraught with uncertainties, doubts about meaning, about one’s place in the universe, and about the reality or nature of the divine. Tillich understands that these existential crises often involve the feeling that God, ultimate meaning, or absolute ground is absent. The anxiety of doubt can be overwhelming, threatening to undermine the very foundation of faith and being.

Yet, paradoxically, Tillich claims that courage is rooted precisely in the experience where God "has disappeared" in the midst of doubt. In such moments, all traditional images and concepts of God may fail; people may not feel the comfort or certainty they once associated with divine presence. However, it is precisely here that a deeper, more authentic experience of God can emerge. God "appears" not as an object among other objects, not as a simple answer to questions, but as the ground of being itself. The courage to affirm one’s own existence and meaning, to continue being in the face of despair and uncertainty, is sustained by this ground, a divine presence that transcends specific doctrines or images and reveals itself amid the anxiety of doubt.

Tillich is pointing toward a faith that is not the absence of doubt but is made possible by integrating and confronting doubt. Faith becomes an act of courage, the willingness to persist and to affirm being even when the old securities have vanished. God, as the ultimate ground, is encountered not at the periphery of anxiety but at its core. The courage to be, then, is a profound trust in the ground of one’s being, which is encountered most authentically when all superficial certainties have withdrawn, and the mystery of existence stands naked and unguarded before us.