The Courage To Read

Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be was first published in 1952, based on a series of lectures he gave at Yale University that same year. Reading Tillich’s masterful treatise on courage in the “age of anxiety” in the midst of Lent in the year 2023, with war raging in Eastern Europe and chemical disaster train derailments closer to home (in a rapidly fading American Empire), one is left with the feeling that Paul Tillich is reaching out to us through space and time with a prophetic diagnosis of the current “crisis of meaning” and the widespread existential anxiety everywhere apparent in our present moment. More importantly he is reaching through time to present to us a model of courage in the face of existential anxiety, with a way in which we can take this inescapable “anxiety of non-being” upon ourselves, to lift up our cross and have the courage to be.

I am not here, at this moment, to write a review of The Courage To Be, but rather I mention it here to entice you and to illustrate a point in a broader discussion. We are living in a new age of anxiety. A post-modern, presentist age where online algorithms push twenty-four hour news cycles and cultural binary gamification; it’s “fear of the other” and “what’s new” distractions, it’s mind games in the cyberspace pews of the Cult of Now. We are hooked to our digital devices, on a morphine drip of questionable (but rarely questioned) information. Passive receivers brainwashed into “true” believers, all fooled into the belief that we are thinking our own thoughts, forming our own opinions, mixing our own unique kool-aid. Instead, we have fallen victim to groupthink, to a narrowing of the cultural conversation, a limiting of the range of possibilities and an under-estimation of our human potential. But we are plugged in! We are in the know! We are in the Now! We are artificially intelligent.

Our mistake is that we have narrowed the focal point on our cultural lens to such a degree that we can not see the forest for the trees, as the old saying goes. We are under the strange and myopic impression that the human story that we are all partaking in is a Netflix series that just came out last week, and which we can binge watch while laying in bed and scrolling through our instagram, instead of what it actually is: a huge, intimidating, sprawling sacred book full of intertwining  stories and layers of meaning, hidden truths, strange parables, paradox and supernatural wonders. That is our story. The world that we are now living in wasn’t born yesterday. If we want to understand it, if we want to be equipped to deal with it, then we have to be willing to go back to the beginning and read the sacred texts of the ancient world, the philosophies and mythologies of the Greeks, the Torah of the Hebrews, the New Testament, The Bhagavad-Gita, the Diamond Sutra. We have to follow the line through the middle ages and the mystics and alchemists and esotericists. We have to read Shakespeare and Dante and Kempis and Darwin and Spinoza and William Blake. We would do well to engage with Walt Whitman and Dorothy Day and E.E. Cummings and Teresa of Avila and Flannery O’Conner and Adorno and Jacques Ellul and Guy Debord and Aldous Huxley. Read Twain and Emerson and Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver if you want to learn something about America. Read. Don’t listen to the audio book. In a time of mass confusion and mass distraction, we need to have the courage to unplug from the machine, the courage to broaden our view, the courage to explore the breadth of the human experience, the courage to read.