Life requires different kinds of courage, but the late psychologist Rollo May argued that none is more important than the courage to create. For May, courage is the fountainhead of all virtues, and imagination, far from simply icing on the existential cake, is the source of human achievement and meaning in our lives.

In our time, we are witnessing dramatic changes in family life, marriage preferences, religion, technology—just about every dimension of life is undergoing an upheaval. And beyond the minutiae of daily life, there is lingering in the back of modern consciousness the omnipresent threat of global unrest tilting us toward nuclear war. An old era is dying and its replacement is still nascent, its contours still fuzzy. Navigating this age of cultural transition is impossible without courage.

There’s a choice before us. We can retreat in a spasm of panic and fretfulness, and then mask that fretfulness with cynicism and apathy. This is the decision to surrender ourselves to blind historical forces, and relinquish any and all opportunities to shape society’s trajectory. Our apathy compounded over time inevitably becomes cowardice.

The other option is to commit to alert and conscientious behavior even in the face of such turbulence. This is a harrowing prospect, because it involves traversing cultural no-man’s land with eyes open rather than shut. It requires courage. Few take this leap into the unknown, but if we want to shape society in even minute ways, this is the path we have to take.

What do we mean when we talk about “courage”? Courage comes from the French word for “heart.” In the same way that the heart pumps blood to all of the body’s organs, allowing those organs to function properly, courage gives true substance to all other virtues. Without courage, our most cherished values and character qualities are absurd imitations and aren’t really “part” of who we are. Our love is mere dependency; our loyalty, blind compliance.  Thus, courage allows us to be ourselves and become more ourselves.

If the self is to be truly substantive and not just a lifeless shadow, we must embrace the fact that we are beings with the capacity for choice. This requires exercising the will, something that we routinely avoid. As long as we make the choice to avoid making choices, we avoid life itself and we sidestep our dignity. By choosing to choose and staying committed to those choices we make, we become real. Courage is what makes this all possible.

Courage is different from rash action. Oftentimes the brash and pugnacious are compensating for their terror of nothingness within themselves. True courage means facing that nothingness.

Neither does courage mean invulnerability to despair. True courage is choosing to move forward in the face of despair.

Courage is not stubbornness, either. We often have to create with others, rather than in isolation. But we also must bring forward our original ideas. Failure to voice those ideas that come from within is an act of treason to self, and to those around you who might have benefitted had you been committed to authenticity.

There are different kinds of courage. There’s physical courage, moral courage, social courage, and creative courage.

Each is important, but none is more important or profounder than creative courage. Unlike moral courage, which helps people right wrongs, creative courage gives a society new norms to replace or reinvent norms that no longer resonate. Creative courage is where new symbols and patterns emerge.

The greater the amount of change taking place in a profession, the more creative courage will be required. It’s possible to show creative courage in any profession: medicine, education, law, politics, commerce, and so on. The people who engage most directly with new symbols and patterns, however, are the artists.

By artists, we refer to poets, musicians, visual artists, dramatists, and religion’s poets—the saints. Artists convey profound human experiences that reach into our depths better than mere intellectualism. Their work gives us a foreshadowing of coming societal attractions and horrors. Artists of our own day are capturing the intense isolation that’s increasingly a feature of modern life. But amidst the disorientation they portray, there is hope interwoven into the despair, goodness amidst the nastiness, and love commingled with the hatred.

It is not just for artists to be creative or courageous. Creativity is the natural next step following from being. It’s a call each of us must take up. We don’t have our being outside a particular context, and so we must find the courage to create within that context, whether that’s creating sculptures and murals or cures for disease. It’s more helpful to speak in terms of creative acts than creative people. The language of “creative people” implies that people fall into two buckets: the creative and the uncreative. But there are plenty of artists who fail to be creative, and many people who do not consider themselves artists, but they show creative courage regularly. Thus, the goal is to engage in genuinely creative acts and remove anything artificial from our process of creating wherever we can.

We’ve established that people can lay hold of creative courage regardless of their vocation. We need lawyers and physicists and plumbers who have the courage to create within their worlds. It’s also important to note that, even if you are not an artist, you demonstrate creative courage by appreciating and engaging with the art that others have made.

Engaging with works of art requires creative courage because it forces us beyond the world we take for granted and asks us to consider new ideas. Logic and intellectualizing form the task of making sense of something, making it fit better, integrating it into the mental schemas we already have in place. We are often attached to these and strive to defend them. When we genuinely engage with art of any form, we risk internal upheaval, because the relationship between self and world gets rocked. We could emerge on the other side of that engagement different than we were, and that can be a frightening prospect.

Consider what Shakespeare has to say about the perils of love in Sonnet 64:

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That time will come and take my love away,

this thought is as a death, which cannot choose

but weep to have that which it fears to lose.

From a purely rational standpoint, these lines are nonsense. Why would a person weep when he has love? Isn’t that something to be enjoyed? We employ our rational faculties to make the dissonance more consonant with our personal beliefs and experiences, to minimize life’s chaos. It’s important that we allow ourselves to experience the lines and the emotions they evoke, that we don’t—with a tidy bit of logic—cut ourselves off from the fullness of life. Art is the invitation to step beyond the purely rational. This isn’t an embrace of irrationality but suprarationality, which doesn’t needlessly pit logic against experience but brings them together.

Logic divorced from experience not only removes us from a fuller experience of life—it can make us cynical. In contemplating Shakespeare’s poetry about weeping for love, the cynic could ask why, in a life already full of pain and eventually death, would someone expose themselves to excessive pain through love? Art provides an important countermeasure to such cynicism and cowardice. It allows us to transcend logical conclusions like death—even if for brief moments.

In religious life, it is the saints and prophets who have always shown the greatest creative courage. But these people were not always viewed as saints or visionaries while they lived. In their own times, they were often reviled as heretics and rebels. Socrates was forced to down the poisonous hemlock. Jesus of Nazareth ended up nailed to a cross. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. All were rebels; all were saints. But their names are now revered and their wisdom integrated into not just our legends, but our political and ethical systems.

Of course, the religious and societal orders of the day resent the rebel-saints’ challenges to the status quo. That’s why history has been full of so many martyrs. But their deaths tend to elevate the spiritual and ethical capacities of those they leave behind. Prometheus’ theft of divine fire taught a preference of compassion over Zeus’ pettiness. Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah challenged the older idea of a Yahweh thirsty for Canaanite blood with a God who is just and merciful. The picture of godliness they showed was more loving than previous generations had been able to conceptualize. To borrow Paul Tillich’s language, these saints “rebel against God in the name of the God beyond God.”

For many people, creativity connotes a kind of unboundedness. The stereotypical artist chafes at constraints. But limitlessness exhausts and enervates more than it frees.

Limits are an incontrovertible part of life. They are also quite useful and vital to creativity. The best of thought and art and action would not have been possible without it. Without limits, what would the artist explore? Without conventions, how could one attempt anything original?

It is the dialogue between limits and possibilities that fuels our lives and our ongoing process of becoming increasingly self-aware. Without limits, our consciousness would never increase. In the Edenic legend, Adam and Eve were unaware of their nakedness or right and wrong. Their rebellion against God’s instruction not to eat of forbidden fruit brought greater understanding. With it came new limitations of guilt, anxiety, and shame, but these, in turn, brought about opportunities to come to a deeper understanding of love through the pain of loneliness.

At the heart of creativity is the tension between spontaneity and boundaries. Both are necessary parts of art, and of life, more generally. We find this tension at play in therapy, where many adults are angry at their parents and continue to rebel against the rigidity they encountered growing up. For such individuals, it becomes easier to embrace spontaneity than boundaries. 

We see the preference for spontaneity at a societal level in our culture’s growing taste for children’s art. Art that imitates the bold, unselfconscious spontaneity of children has its place. It reveals a distaste for rigid artistic conventions and sources of political and social authority, more generally. Whether through therapy or enjoying children’s art, it seems people are seeking what they lost in childhood under a mountain of inhibitions and rules. Recapturing what was lost from childhood through child-like art and trying a  different approach to life are examples of a type of dialectic between spontaneity and boundaries. But these practices are just stages in that process. The dialectic can’t stop there. The truly great art—and genuine, creative acts, more generally—always hold the tension between the spontaneous and the boundaries. Such art and behavior neither totally eschew nor fully embrace boundaries and traditions. Limits give us something to push against. But the point is not simply to push off, but to push off in search of something new. Yet to accomplish this, you have to understand and respect the limits for what they are. 

There is an elegant poise in mature art, such as in Michelangelo’s sculptures or van Gogh’s impressionist depictions of nature. That poise is born of the tension between spontaneity and limits. Tension is what makes a piece of art interesting; it is also what makes a life interesting.