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The victim of existential anxiety may try to sidestep it by frenetic activity, or by worshiping secular concepts, such as success or nationalism. Or he may try to bury his anxieties in a "heteronomous" religion that offers him readymade certitudes for his uncertainties. In either case, says Tillich, the individual commits idolatry. Against such idolatry, Tillich asserts the Protestant Principle, which considers it presumptuous of any "conditional" institution, such as church or state, to pose as spokesman for the "unconditional," i.e., God. According to the Protestant Principle, as he expounds it, every Yes must be coupled with a corresponding No, and the Protestant Principle "does not accept any truth of faith as ultimate, except the one that no man possesses it."
The Courage to Be. The only way man can cope with his existential anxiety is by having the "courage to be," which Tillich defines as self-affirmation in spite of the threatened possibility of nonbeing. This courage to be is like a spark across the gap between existential and essential, philosophy and theology, man and God. For this human, self-affirming courage—unlike Nietzsche's Will to Power—has its source and power in "the divine self-affirmation."
Tillich's term for God is the "Ground of Being" or "Being-Itself," and "every act of courage is a manifestation of the ground of being, however questionable the content of the act may be . . . There are no valid arguments for the 'existence' of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not . . . Courage has revealing power; the courage to be is the key to being-itself."
The traditional questions of theology, such as the existence or nonexistence of God, take on a bafflingly unfamiliar quality in Tillich's thought. For he sees such terms as "God," "the Christ," and "the Resurrection" as symbols. To Tillich, symbols (as opposed to signs, which merely point to something) are living, growing and sometimes dying things, which participate in the power of what they symbolize. But they are not to be mistaken for the real and unknowable thing behind them. God, therefore, cannot be spoken of as "existing" or "not existing," for this would imply the limiting of the unlimitable, the conditioning of the unconditional.
Man's Hope. Man approaches the ineffable reality that lies behind the symbol through the combination of longing and frustration, which Tillich calls "ultimate concern." Man's hope is the "New Being," a conception Tillich has derived from St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians (II Corinthians 5:17): "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold all things are become new."