The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
Published 1952 · 192 pages · 55,076 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Courage to Be to read?
The Courage to Be scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Theological and existentialist vocabulary; more accessible than Heidegger.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- High-level ontological argument; theological abstraction.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Dense with philosophical and theological argument.
- Narrative indirection: 16 out of 100
- Systematic theological argument with historical illustrations.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- Being-itself, non-being, and courage as organizing symbols.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Earnest theological seriousness throughout.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The resolution is offered—courage grounded in being-itself—but deliberately leaves the theistic question open.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Three parts building from the analysis of anxiety to the solution.
How The Courage to Be is regarded
The Courage to Be holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.