Paul Tillich

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul Tillich arrived in the United States in 1933 at age 47, without fluent English, his university post stripped by the Nazi regime, his first marriage long collapsed, his nerves still frayed from years of burying soldiers in the mud of France. He had ten days' notice before he was dismissed. Yet within two decades he would appear on the cover of Time magazine, teach at Harvard and then the University of Chicago, and produce a body of work that Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, and a generation of other thinkers would carry into their own thinking.

  Tillich was born on the 20th of August 1886 in the small village of Starzeddel, in the Province of Brandenburg. His father, Johannes Tillich, was a conservative Lutheran pastor. His mother, Mathilde Dürselen, came from the Rhineland and brought a more liberal sensibility into the household. The tension between those two inheritances, the orthodox and the questioning, would run through everything Tillich later wrote.

  He would eventually pose a question that made both devout believers and declared atheists uncomfortable: what if the God most people argue about, the all-powerful being in the sky, is not God at all? What would it mean to speak of a God who is not a being among other beings, but the very ground of all being? And what would courage look like for someone who can no longer believe in that conventional God but cannot simply dismiss the hunger for meaning?

• 2. War and Its Aftermath

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  On the 28th of September 1914, Tillich married Margarethe Wever, and within weeks he had joined the Imperial German Army as a chaplain. He was not a soldier in the ordinary sense. He moved among the dying, officiated at burials in the mud of France, and watched his closest friend perish alongside numerous other soldiers. He was hospitalized three times for what the source calls combat trauma, and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery under fire.

  What the trenches did to Tillich was not merely psychological damage. His theology of anxiety, which he would develop across decades of subsequent writing, traces directly to his sense that human beings live permanently at the edge of nonbeing. He came home, as the source plainly states, shattered. His marriage did not survive; Grethi deserted him in 1919 after an affair that produced a child not fathered by Tillich.

  Back in Berlin, Tillich became a Privatdozent of Theology at the University of Berlin, a junior academic post he held from 1919 to 1924. On his return he also met Hannah Werner-Gottschow, who was then married and pregnant. In March 1924, they married; it was the second marriage for both. She would later write a book about their life together, including what she described as their open marriage, titled From Time to Time. Some found their lifestyle troubling. They remained together into old age.

• 3. Frankfurt and Forced Exile

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  At the University of Frankfurt, where Tillich served as professor of philosophy and sociology from 1929 to 1933, the intellectual environment around him was unusually charged. He succeeded Max Scheler, who had died suddenly in 1928. Among his assistants during those years were Harald Poelchau and Theodor Adorno; in 1931, Leo Strauss had applied for the same position but was rejected. Tillich was also instrumental in bringing Max Horkheimer to the directorship of the Institut für Sozialforschung, and the two men team-taught a course on John Locke in the winter term of 1930-31.

  Tillich also traveled throughout Germany during this period, giving public lectures that brought him into open conflict with the Nazi movement. His book The Socialist Decision, published in the early 1930s, characterized Nazism as a form of political romanticism rooted in three origin myths: blood, soil, and social group. He argued that these myths served to legitimate existing hierarchies by treating the past as sacred and denying the possibility of progress. The Nazi regime censored the book immediately.

  On the 13th of April 1933, ten weeks after Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor, Tillich was dismissed from his tenured position along with Karl Mannheim and Max Horkheimer. They were described in the official action as being among the first batch of prominent academic enemies of the Reich to be removed for ideological and racial reasons. Reinhold Niebuhr, who had known Tillich since 1919 and visited Germany that summer, learned of the dismissal and urged Tillich to come to Union Theological Seminary in New York. Tillich accepted.

• 4. Rebuilding in America

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  The faculty of Union Theological Seminary agreed to a five percent pay cut, at the height of the Great Depression, to bring Tillich and his family to the United States. Tillich began there as a visiting professor of philosophy of religion and during 1933-34 also served as a visiting lecturer in philosophy at Columbia University. He acquired tenure at Union in 1937 and in 1940 was promoted to professor of philosophical theology and became an American citizen.

  His reputation grew through a series of books that combined Protestant Christian theology with existential philosophy. On the Boundary appeared in 1936. The Protestant Era, a collection of his essays, came out in 1948, the same year as The Shaking of the Foundations, the first of his three volumes of sermons. Those collections of sermons opened a broader audience than his academic writing had reached.

  The pivotal publications came in close succession. Volume one of Systematic Theology appeared in 1951 from the University of Chicago Press, followed by The Courage to Be in 1952 from Yale University Press. The Courage to Be grew from his 1950 Dwight H. Terry Lectureship and was written for general readers. Its success earned Tillich an invitation to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1953-54. H. Richard Niebuhr described reading the Systematic Theology as a great voyage of discovery into a rich and deep vision of human life in the presence of the mystery of God.

• 5. God as Ground of Being

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  Tillich's most fundamental theological claim was that the familiar debates about whether God exists ask the wrong question entirely. Traditional philosophical theology, in the work of figures such as St. Anselm, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, had treated God as the highest existing being, to which attributes like omnipotence and omniscience could be assigned. Tillich called this mode of thinking theological theism and argued it was, in his own word, bad theology.

  The problem, for Tillich, was structural. If God is a being, even the greatest possible being, then God is a part of the whole of reality, subject to the same ontological structure as everything else. God would be finite in some sense. Instead, Tillich proposed that God is being-itself, the ground of being, the power that empowers existence as such. Since this ground ontologically precedes the distinction between subject and object, it cannot be perceived as an object of knowledge.

  He traced this view back through Christian intellectual history, noting affinities with Hellenistic and Patristic notions of God as the unoriginate source of all being, particularly in the thought of Origen, and back further to middle Platonism. A dynamism in his concept of the living God also reflected some influence from Spinoza. Tillich quoted Martin Luther to explain why God cannot be placed at a distance from the human self: there is no place to which man can withdraw from the divine thou, because it includes the ego and is nearer to the ego than the ego to itself.

  For those who have lost faith in the God of conventional theism, Tillich did not offer a return to that God. He offered instead what he called the God above God: the power of being that works through those who have no name for it, not even the name God. He wrote that this was an apologetic statement, not a dogmatic one. It took radical doubt seriously, and gave courage to those who could no longer believe in traditional terms but had not abandoned the search for meaning.

• 6. The Courage to Be

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  Tillich defined courage, in The Courage to Be, as the self-affirmation of one's being in spite of a threat of nonbeing. He laid out three distinct forms of anxiety that correspond to three ways human beings experience that threat.

  The first is the anxiety of fate and death, which he called the most basic and universal form. It arises from the simple recognition of mortality. Nonbeing, he wrote, threatens human ontic self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate and absolutely in terms of death. The courage that responds to this anxiety he called the courage of confidence.

  The second is the anxiety of guilt and condemnation, which attacks moral self-affirmation. A person feels responsible for what they have made of themselves and fears the verdict of their own conscience. The courage to be, in this case, is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.

  The third is the anxiety of meaninglessness and emptiness, which Tillich considered the defining anxiety of the twentieth century. It attacks a person's sense of purpose and ultimate concern. The courage to face it draws on what Tillich called the power of being, which is his name for God in this context. Absolute faith, for Tillich, meant accepting acceptance without anyone or anything doing the accepting; it was faith stripped of every concrete content by doubt, yet still faith. Rollo May, the psychologist who studied under Tillich, was directly inspired by The Courage to Be when he wrote his own book, The Courage to Create.

• 7. Legacy and Reception

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  In 1959, Tillich appeared on the cover of Time magazine. In 1964, he became the first theologian honored in Kegley and Bretall's Library of Living Theology. Georgia Harkness offered what became one of the most quoted assessments of his place in American intellectual life: what Whitehead was to American philosophy, Tillich has been to American theology. John Herman Randall Jr. called the Systematic Theology beyond doubt the richest, most suggestive, and most challenging philosophical theology of the day.

  His influence spread in unexpected directions. The New Age phrases describing God as the Ground of Being and as the Eternal Now were renovated by Tillich, even if they originated with Christian mystics and early theologians such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Eckhart Tolle invoked them repeatedly throughout his career. Tillich's chapel sermons at Union were enthusiastically received; he was, the source notes, the only faculty member there willing to attend the revivals of Billy Graham. Along with Rollo May, he was an early leader at the Esalen Institute.

  Criticism came from multiple directions. Malcolm Diamond, a disciple of Martin Buber, argued that Tillich's approach reduced God to an impersonal necessary being. Barthian theologians accused him of collapsing the Christian message into anthropocentric terms. Some conservative evangelical thinkers concluded that his thought bordered on pantheism or atheism. Tillich's defenders replied that critics had missed his distinction between God's unknowable essence as the Ground of Being and God's self-manifestation to humanity in existence.

  Tillich died on the 22nd of October 1965, ten days after a heart attack. In 1966, his ashes were interred in the Paul Tillich Park in New Harmony, Indiana, beneath a gravestone bearing a verse from Psalm 1:3: and he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season.