To Be or Not to Be

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Summer after summer it was the same. As soon as the tall Herr Professor arrived at the Baltic seaside for his vacation, he began to pace the beach methodically, studying the terrain. Then, in coveralls, armed with an enormous shovel, he started to dig. Hour after hour, day after day, he labored, heaping up the sand in a big, flat-topped pyramid some twelve feet square, the sides banked at just the right angle to avoid cave-ins, the corners smoothed to knife-edge symmetry, a system of ditches carefully plotted to drain off the ground water, a ramp from the beach to his plateau of sand. When the pyramid was about seven feet high it was finished, and the sweating professor toted to the top one of the hooded wicker chairs that are popular on European beaches. There on his sand castle he would sit overlooking it all--the scampering children, the courting couples, the endless rhythm of the waves and tides, the ultimate horizon.

Professor Paul Tillich came to the U.S. in 1933 and gave up building sand castles. But he has succeeded in erecting a towering structure of thought from which he currently commands the littoral of theology. The concepts which are his raw material may be as hard to grasp and hold as a handful of dry sand, but the edifice he has built with them is densely packed and neatly shaped against the erosion of intellectual wind and wave.

Though Harvard's University Professor* Paul Tillich is a rarefied philosopher and theologian, speaking and writing in a language he had to learn at the age of 47, in a country noted for its impatience with theology, he has come to be regarded by the U.S. as its foremost Protestant thinker. And though his working vocabulary is viscous with such terms as ontology, theonomy, numenous and the Gestalt of Grace, he is now devoting most of his time to teaching any Harvard or Radcliffe undergraduate who signs up for his highly popular courses.

"A Unified Meaning." Traditionally, the U.S. has imported new theological thought from Europe. Tillich's thought is now moving the other way. His books are rapidly being translated into German (he is too busy to do the job himself) as well as French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. Fellow theologians are increasingly coming to view his work as a monumental and unique effort to match the insights of Christianity with the predicament of modern man.

Last month Paul Tillich, 72, received a special kind of present--a book entitled Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Paul Tillich (Harper; $7.50), whose 25 contributors include such groundbreakers as Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, Philosopher Karl Jaspers. Theologians Karl Earth, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Reinhold Niebuhr. Even Roman Catholic theologians are recognizing Tillich as the most challenging Protestant mind of his time. "The sustained brilliance of Tillich is amazing," writes U.S. Theologian Gustave Weigel, a Jesuit, "and his incredibly wide knowledge matches his brilliance. Any witness of the Protestant reality looks for someone to give a unified meaning to the whole thing. I believe that I have found that man [in] Professor Paul Tillich."

The man thus acclaimed is also denounced by some orthodox Christian believers as not a Christian at all and possibly an outright atheist. Faith, according to Tillich. is not belief in God but "ultimate concern." Hence an atheist is a believer, too, unless he is wholly indifferent to the ultimate questions. Doubt is an in evitable part of faith. Sin is not some thing one commits, but a state of "estrangement" from one's true self. "The importance of being a Christian is that we can stand the insight that it is of no importance." says Tillich; the religious man can "fearlessly look at the vanity of religion." Tillich can rejoice with Nietzsche that "God is dead"--the God of theism--and write of looking beyond him to "the God above God."

Yet for all the razzle-dazzle paradox of his ideas, Paul Tillich is a solid, serious, dedicated thinker. If his critics say that his theology comes close to draining the meaning from all traditional Christian concepts, he replies that, for all too many Christians, these concepts lost their meaning long ago. What Tillich has been trying to do all his life is to make the Christian message meaningful for 20th century man in all his "estrangement." Tillich's greatest appeal is not to full-fledged believers but to the seekers after faith.

His complex pyramid of theology can be regarded from many angles, but the best way to approach it is through Tillich's own life. For his thought was molded by his time.

The Battleground. It is significant that Paul Tillich was born a German, not only because Germany seems to produce philosophers and theologians as Australia produces tennis players, but because few countries in the world have been so shaken by the 20th century. Tillich's parents came from the two main strains of the solid, stolid German middle class: the stark, authoritarian Prussians on his father's side (he was a prominent Lutheran clergyman), the sentimental, gemuetlich Rhinelanders on his mother's (she was a schoolteacher). Tillich has been acutely aware of the two temperamental traditions at war within him. "In the East [of Germany]," as he has described it, "a meditative bent tinged with melancholy, a heightened consciousness of duty and personal sin, a strong sense for authority and feudal traditions . . . while the West is characterized by zest of living, sensuous concreteness, mobility, rationality and democracy . . . These contradictory qualities were rooted in me--my life, inward and outward, to be enacted on their battleground."

In the little (pop. 3,000) north German medieval town of Schoenfliess, where Paulus Tillich grew up, "one lived from Advent to Christmas to Pentecost. At Easter we children walked through the town with bundles of birch rods. It was the custom to beat the adults to get Easter eggs from them. Oh, how well I remember the wonderful fragrance of the fresh leaves!" At eight, Paul had his first brush with his future when "I encountered the conception of the Infinite." By the time he was 16, he knew he wanted to be a philosopher, and to this chancy calling the ministry seemed the most convenient opening wedge. "I was interested by the whole theological system, the drama of God and man."

Faith & Doubt. Tillich's views of that drama were decisively shaped by Wingolf, a national fraternity of university stu dents, dedicated to combat with Christian principles the paganism of German fraternity life, which was built around the cult of dueling and the cult of getting drunk.

Wingolf was highly authoritarian in structure; absolute rulers of each chapter were three charges, and when Tillich became the First Charge of Wingolf at the University of Halle, he says, "it was, and is, the proudest achievement of my life." But despite authoritarianism, discussion was absolutely free, and it was there ("in the dinner and drinking sessions") that Tillich began to hammer out the problems that later were to become his life work.

A crucial time for him came when the fraternity was torn by a threatened schism over the question of whether belief in the Apostles' Creed should be a requirement of membership. "After a hard-fought battle, we agreed that these traditional articles of faith could not be made obligatory for the individual. Specific doubts on the part of the individual should be allowable--and even necessary. From this controversy I realized that if Christianity is a man's ultimate concern, he can still be a minister, though he may have many doubts. For doubting is part of being a man, and his own doubts will make him more effective in bringing other doubters to faith."

This paradoxical relationship between faith and doubt is a keystone of Tillich's theology. From it he derives what he calls "the Protestant Principle," the necessity of challenging the claim to pure, "unbroken" truth by any institution or church, including Protestantism itself, or even by Scripture. From it he derives his all-important distinction between religious "heteronomy," which is imposed upon the individual, and religious "autonomy," in which the individual continually seeks and hopes to find. The situation of doubt, says Tillich, is "existential"--that is, inevitably part of the predicament in which man leads his human existence--and this existentialism, he feels, is where the Christian Church is grounded.

The Night Attack. In August 1914 Paul Tillich was a 28-year-old Lutheran minister in Berlin. The intellectual life seemed the way to truth. "It still seemed possible then to sit in the center of the world and be able to understand everything." But with the outbreak of World War I, the world exploded.

Having married the girl he was going out with (the hasty marriage later ended in divorce), young Tillich marched off to the front as a chaplain. What he saw, he says, "absolutely transformed me." First there was the impact of the "lower classes," with whom he was dealing for the first time; he began to think about their exploitation at the hands of the powers he had taken for granted--the landed aristocracy, the army and the church. "But the real transformation happened at the Battle of Champagne in 1915. A night attack came, and all night long I moved among the wounded and dying as they were brought in--many of them my close friends. All that horrible, long night I walked along the rows of dying men, and much of my German classical philosophy broke down that night--the belief that man could master cognitively the essence of his being, the belief in the identity of essence and existence . . .

"I well remember sitting in the woods in France reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, as many other German soldiers did, in a continuous state of exaltation. This was the final liberation from heteronomy. European nihilism carried Nietzsche's prophetic word that 'God is dead.' Well, the traditional concept of God was dead."

Religious Socialism. In the chaos of postwar Germany, Tillich and a group of his fellow intellectuals gathered in Berlin's cafes to discuss the positive possibilities behind the ecstatic iconoclasm of Nietzsche, and to discover new meanings for religion in the great Danish Christian existentialist, Soren Kierkegaard. They saw the uncertainty and ferment around them as a time of kairos--a Greek word for the Scriptural "fullness of time" in which the eternal could penetrate the temporal order. Their prescription for the world was "Religious Socialism." Without a religious foundation, they insisted, "no planned society could avoid its eventual destruction." Not surprisingly, such highflown talk had little appeal either for practical politicians or practical church men. "If the Social Democrats had accepted us," muses Tillich wistfully today, "or if the churches had put their influence behind our movement rather than at tempting to retrieve the old traditional orthodoxy, perhaps Hitler would not have come to power."

Berlin in the '20s was perhaps the gayest capital in the world, and Paul Tillich was no stranger to night life. During one of the art students' fancy-dress balls, at which he turned up in a cutaway and turban, he met a handsome girl in long green silk stockings, named Hannah Werner. As Tillich put it recently: "Things went on from there."

Gathering Darkness. Things went on to marriage and a three-month walking trip through Italy, where Art Student Hannah introduced her fascinated husband to the wonders of medieval and Renaissance painting and architecture. "For years afterward," says Tillich, "I dreamed of the 24 hours we spent in Ravenna." Tillich built up an increasingly fruitful career of writing and lecturing; between 1924 and 1933, he taught theology and philosophy at the universities of Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig and Frankfurt. But darkness was closing in: "Gradually life changed around us, became rigid and timid."

One day in the winter of 1931-32, a gang of 300-odd storm troopers invaded the university in Frankfurt and beat up leftist students. Tillich stood horrified in the midst of the melee, and in the investigation that followed took a vociferous part against the Nazi thugs. As soon as Hitler came to power the following year, Tillich read in the newspaper that he had been dismissed from the faculty.

Impressed by some of Tillich's writings on Religious Socialism, socialistic-minded Reinhold Niebuhr of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary had offered him a post at Union, but Tillich hesitated. He called on the Minister of Education in Berlin. "For a full hour," remembers Tillich, "we discussed the Old Testament and the importance to Christianity of the Jewish tradition. At the end of that hour I knew it was over."

In the U.S. his appearance under the sponsorship of the scholarly Reinhold Niebuhr earned Tillich considerable attention both in and out of the classroom--even though his formidable German accent and even more formidable concepts left hearers with an impression which U.S. Theologian Walter M. Horton has described as "respectful mystification." (It was hours after first listening to Tillich, recalls Horton, "that I realized that the word 'waykwoom,' many times repeated, and the key to the whole lecture, was meant to represent the English word 'vacuum.' ") But gradually, Tillich learned to communicate with America's would-be believers. Gradually, Tillich's massive theological system began to take shape.

Existential Anxiety. Tillich expounds his theology in two forms: his three-volume Systematic Theology (of which the third volume is still in the writing), and what he calls the "dialectical conversation" of his more popular books--The Protestant Era*, The New Being, The Shaking of the Foundations, The Courage To Be, and others. But in both his systematic theology and his other writings, he deals with the same key themes.

Man, says Tillich, exists in a state of "finitude." He does not know what he is or where he is going. He feels estranged from some great, unknown thing that is demanded of him. He is filled with wonder at the phenomenon of "being," simple astonishment that things are. This wonder presupposes a darker knowledge that they might not be; being is threatened, always and everywhere, by nonbeing.

Therefore Tillich, like Kierkegaard, sees man's existence a state of anxiety. This "existential" anxiety is not to be confused with fear, for it has no object, and fear must have an object. Nor is it to be confused with neurotic anxiety; the neurotic attempts to "avoid non-being by avoiding being."

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."

The New Being is Tillich's replacement for the old symbol of "salvation," and he can take off his theologian's mortarboard and write about it with evangelical passion. "We should not be too worried about the Christian religion, about the state of the Churches, about membership and doctrines, about institutions and ministers . . . [These] are of no importance if the ultimate question is asked, the question of a New Reality . . . We should worry more about [this] than about anything else between heaven and earth. The New Creation--this is our ultimate concern; this should be our infinite passion . . . In comparison with it everything else, even religion or non-religion, even Christianity or non-Christianity, matters very little . . .

"The message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a New Reality. A New state of things has appeared, it still appears; it is hidden and visible, it is there and it is here. Accept it, enter into it, let it grasp you."

System of Correlation. In his three-volume Systematic Theology Tillich fits these ideas together into a kind of working model of the universe. He calls the structure, the method of "correlation," by which he means the correlation of human questions arising from the conditions in which man finds himself, with divine answers provided by the symbolism of Christian revelation.

The great questions arising from man's "ultimate concern" he groups under three headings: Being, Existence, and Life. Man's Being is his essential nature, from which he is estranged as Adam was estranged from Eden. Existence encompasses the situation in which estranged man finds himself. Life is the combination of Being and Existence.

The theological answers to these existential questions are: (to problems of Being) God, (to problems of Existence) the Christ, and (to problems of Life) the Spirit. The three answers correspond with the triune God of Christian dogma--Father, Son and Holy Spirit, just as Being, Existence and Life may be combined to form a picture of man.

Preceding the central pairing of three questions and three answers is a preliminary correlation of Reason and Revelation, to deal with the epistemological (i.e., how-do-you-know) problem. And following the central grouping is the correlation dealing with the earthly consequences of the divine-human encounter: the question of History, answered by the Christian symbol of the Kingdom of God.

Content & Form. The varieties of specific questions that can be asked within the three categories of Being, Existence and Life determine the form the answers will take, but not their content. The content of the answer is established by the data of Christian revelation. But the form in which the revelation is expressed derives from the form of the question asked.

For example, God is the answer to the question implied in human finitude; but if the question is posed in the context of the threat of non-being that is implied in human existence, God, says Tillich, "must be called the infinite power of being which resists the threat of nonbeing. If anxiety is defined as the awareness of being finite, God must be called the infinite ground of courage . . . If the notion of the Kingdom of God appears in correlation with the riddle of our historical existence, it must be called the meaning, fulfillment, and unity of history. In this way an interpretation of the traditional symbols of Christianity is achieved which preserves the power of these symbols and which opens them to the questions elaborated by our present analysis of human existence."

The Critics. Switzerland's Karl Earth, the only other system builder among the leading contemporary theologians, completely rejects Tillich's coupling of existential question and religious answer. God did not wait to be asked, maintains Barth; he spoke and acted, and the whole twelve long volumes (in progress) of the Barthian system are based solidly on the record of what he said and did--the Bible. To Barth the Biblical message is "thrown like a stone" at man, not accommodated to his existential agonies. Tillich's "Unconditional" term for God, Barth has called "a frigid monstrosity." And U.S. Theologian Nels F.S. Ferre feels that Tillich's vuse of traditional Christian dogma makes him "the most dangerous theological leader alive."

Tillich rejects his critics' "supranaturalistic" view that "takes the Christian message to be a sum of revealed truths which have fallen into the human situation like strange bodies from a strange world." Man, he holds, "cannot receive answers to questions he has never asked." Tillich also considers his system superior to the "humanistic" systems of liberal theology, which derive the Christian message from man's natural self-development and the unfolding of human history. He also attacks the combination of natural and supranatural theology found in Roman Catholicism, with its "socalled arguments for 'the existence of God'" (although in another context he is appreciative of the Catholic Church's preservation of the sacraments, which he feels have virtually disappeared in Protestantism).

Questions Wanted. Tillich's theological critics may be appalled by his unorthodoxy, but most of his students at Harvard find it stimulating. He takes his work with the undergraduates as a task of first importance: in the 3 1/2 years he has been at Harvard, he has not missed any of his lectures. The students are notably impressed by the seriousness with which he takes their questions. Says one of his graduate students: "He doesn't click with those who have no questions. He thinks people who affirm or deny are missing the boat, because it's necessary to find new meaning."

Tillich lives with his wife in a cluttered, 3 1/2-room apartment on Chauncy Street in Cambridge (his son Rene Stephen, 24, is a Harvard student, his daughter Erdmuthe Christiane Farris, 33, a Manhattan housewife). At 72, Tillich has all his old intellectual vigor, though he may doze off for moments during a conversation, and he goes through a regular, 10-minute "yawning period" every day at 6 p.m. An occasional stimulant at that time: cognac, which is kept in his office filing cabinet under "H" (for Hennessy). Tillich is likely to be on the road lecturing three or four days a week, but he loves nothing better than a serious bull session, and will do his best to join any group of students who invite him. He sits with them, his big hands playing constantly with the large square paper clip that he refers to as "my fetish." The talk does not necessarily stay on theology; Paul Tillich believes that religion is "the substance of culture and culture is the form of religion." He has long been concerned with the insights of psychiatry; Psychoanalyst Rollo May, leading U.S. exponent of "existential analysis" (TIME, Dec. 29), studied under Tillich at Union Seminary, and continues to keep in close touch with him. He is also keenly interested in modern art, and has written and lectured extensively on how art manifests "ultimate reality."

On the Fence? What does Theologian Tillich have to offer to the millions of Protestants who believe themselves secure in their faith and their churches? He offers at least three things: 1) an impressively designed theological system that tends to order and clarify Protestant ideas, even for those who do not accept Tillich's interpretation; 2) a kind of shock treatment for the complacent, who are apt to be driven, by Tillich's unorthodoxies, to re-examine the basis of their own faith; 3) a passionate, contagious concern for the human condition and for faith as an essential element of that condition.

What can Protestantism do in the present crisis of modern man who "no longer possesses a world view in the sense of a body of assured convictions about God, the world, and himself"? Protestantism, says Dr. Tillich, cannot offer such a world view: "it must fight from above this level to bring everything under judgment and promise." This cannot be done, he says, simply by asserting theological truth, or by going back to the Reformation's theme of justification by faith alone. It can only be done by, in effect, driving man to the painful extremity of accepting the ultimate threat confronting his existence, and yet to affirm life in the face of this very threat. "The one thing needed--this is the first and in some sense the last answer I can give--is to be concerned ultimately, unconditionally, infinitely . . . If, in the power and passion of such an ultimate concern, we look at our finite concerns, everything seems the same and yet everything is changed . . . The anxiety is gone! It still exists and tries to return. But its power is broken."

This precarious perch for man's soul is a long way from traditional Christian belief. Paul Tillich. Reinhold Niebuhr said once, "is trying to walk a fence between man's doubts and the traditions of man's faith. He walks the fence with great virtuosity, and if he slips a bit to one side or the other, it is hardly noticed by us humble pedestrians." There are many humble and not-so-humble pedestrians who think that no man who calls himself a Christian has any business on the fence in the first place. A fence is a risky place to spend much time. But to Paul Tillich, taking risks is perhaps the safest thing a Christian can do.

* The title is reserved at Harvard for a small group of distinguished scholars who work "on the frontiers of knowledge" without being limit ed to any particular school or department.

*This book, published in 1948, gave him a lesson in the semantics of U.S. publishing. His original title, The End of the Protestant Era?, was vetoed by the publishers on the grounds that no book with a question mark in the title sells well. "Then leave off the question mark," said Tillich. "That would be giving too much comfort to the Catholics," said his Protestant friends.

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