Paul Tillich

Biography

Paul Tillich was born on 20 August 1886 in Starzeddel, a small town in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, the first child of a Lutheran pastor. The parsonage, with its piety, its music, and its consciousness of eternity, left a permanent mark on him, even as he grew into a thinker who could not accept inherited doctrine at face value. He studied theology and philosophy at the universities of Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin, and in 1911 he received the licentiate in theology from the University of Halle; the following year he was ordained as a Lutheran minister. The decisive experience of his early adult life came in the First World War, in which he served as an army chaplain on the western front. The horror of the trenches, the mass death, and the collapse of the pre-war world shattered the comfortable assumptions of liberal Protestantism and made the question of meaning, anxiety, and the ground of being into the permanent center of his thought.

After the war Tillich taught at the universities of Marburg (1924), Dresden and Leipzig (1925-1929), and Frankfurt am Main (1929-1933), where he became a professor of philosophy and a prominent voice of religious socialism, associating with members of the Frankfurt School and publishing on the relation between religion and culture. In 1933, as the first non-Jewish professor to be dismissed by the Nazi regime, he was removed from his Frankfurt chair; with the help of American colleagues he emigrated to the United States. From 1933 until 1955 he taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he wrote his major English works, including Systematic Theology and The Courage to Be. He then held professorships at Harvard University (1955-1962) and the University of Chicago (1962-1965). His lectures drew enormous audiences and he became one of the most widely discussed religious thinkers in the English-speaking world. He died in Chicago on 22 October 1965, leaving the third volume of his Systematic Theology published only months before his death.

Historical Background

Tillich's thought was forged in the collapse of the nineteenth-century world. The First World War destroyed not only an order of states but a set of certainties: confidence in progress, in the moral goodness of civilization, in the self-sufficiency of reason. The existentialist literature of the early twentieth century — the writings of Kierkegaard, rediscovered as a prophet; Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God; and later the philosophies of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre — articulated the anxiety of an age that could no longer assume an ultimate meaning for existence. Tillich took this situation with complete seriousness. He refused both of the easy answers available in his day: the secular confidence that science or politics could supply meaning, and the theological retreat into a faith that simply ignored the questions of modern culture.

The Weimar period, in which Tillich produced his early programmatic writings on the "theology of culture," was a laboratory of crisis: political extremism, economic catastrophe, and cultural experimentation coexisted in a single generation. Tillich responded with the concept of the kairos — the fulfilled time, the moment of decision in which the eternal breaks into the historical — and with a religious socialism that sought to interpret the crisis of capitalism as a question of ultimate concern. After emigrating to America, he confronted a different but equally acute form of the age's anxiety: the anxieties of the Cold War, of conformism, of the "age of anxiety" diagnosed by W. H. Auden and the social critics of the 1940s and 1950s. The Courage to Be (1952) was his attempt to give an existentialist answer to that situation, an answer addressed not only to believers but to the secular heirs of the modern crisis.

Core Ideas

Being and Nonbeing

Tillich's philosophy of religion is an ontology. The question of God, he insists, is the question of being itself — not of a particular being among beings, however great, but of the power of being that underlies everything that is. God is "being-itself" (esse ipsum), and the relation between the human being and God is the relation between finite being and its ground. This is why Tillich could say that God is not "a being" and why he criticized both popular theism and classical proofs that try to make God into an object alongside other objects. Against the ground of being stands nonbeing: the threat of negation that is written into everything finite. Nonbeing is not simply nothing; it is the "not" that belongs to every finite thing, its vulnerability to death, decay, and meaninglessness. Human existence, because it is finite, is existence threatened by nonbeing — and this threat is the source of anxiety.

Anxiety and the Three Types of Threat

Anxiety, for Tillich, is not a psychological accident but an ontological fact. It is "the state in which being is aware of its possible nonbeing." He distinguishes three types of anxiety, corresponding to three ways in which nonbeing threatens finite being. Ontic anxiety is the anxiety of fate and death: the awareness that our existence is contingent, that it can be lost, and that we shall die. Moral anxiety is the anxiety of guilt and condemnation: the awareness that we are responsible for our lives and that we can fail — that we can miss the demands that our own being makes upon us, and that this failure can take the form of unforgivable guilt. Spiritual anxiety is the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness: the threat that our ultimate concern — whatever gives our lives their point — will lose its object, that the ground of meaning will disappear. Tillich argues that in different historical epochs different anxieties predominate: antiquity was dominated by the anxiety of fate and death, the late Middle Ages and Reformation by the anxiety of guilt, and the modern period by the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness. Modern secularism, he holds, has emptied the world of ultimate meaning, and this emptiness is the deepest form of the contemporary threat of nonbeing.

The Courage to Be

Against these threats, Tillich proposes courage. Courage is not, as the classical tradition sometimes suggested, simply a virtue among others; it is the self-affirmation of being in spite of nonbeing. To have the courage to be is to affirm one's own being — one's finite, threatened, questionable being — in the face of everything that negates it. This self-affirmation has two poles. There is the courage to be as a part: the affirmation of oneself through participation in a larger whole — a nation, a church, a social group, a cause. And there is the courage to be as oneself: the affirmation of oneself as an individual, standing alone, refusing to dissolve into the collective. Tillich traces both forms through their historical manifestations — from the collectivisms and the individualisms of the modern age back through the history of philosophy and culture — and shows that each form, taken alone, collapses into the other or into despair. The genuinely courageous self-affirmation must somehow hold both poles together: the individual who affirms the self without falling into the emptiness of isolation, and the participant who affirms belonging without falling into the loss of self.

Ultimate Concern

The central concept of Tillich's philosophy of religion is "ultimate concern." Faith, he writes, "is the state of being ultimately concerned": the state in which something matters to us unconditionally, with all the passion and seriousness of which a human being is capable. This is not primarily an intellectual assent to propositions; it is a matter of the whole person — what Tillich calls the "centered act" of the personality. Everyone has an ultimate concern, whether or not it is consciously religious: for some it is the nation, for others success, science, art, or a beloved person. Anything can become an object of ultimate concern, and this is precisely the danger of idolatry: when a finite thing — a nation, an ideology, a possession — is given the ultimacy that belongs only to the infinite, the result is a destructive absolutization that eventually fails. Genuine faith directs its ultimate concern to the truly ultimate, to being-itself; and because every finite symbol of the ultimate can become idolatrous, faith must always be accompanied by the critical awareness that no symbol exhausts the reality it points to.

The Protestant Principle and the God above God

Tillich's famous "Protestant principle" is not a set of confessional doctrines but a critical principle: the protest against every claim that any finite thing — church, creed, nation, moral system — is absolute. It is the religious expression of the refusal of idolatry, and it applies to the church itself, which stands under judgment no less than the world. From this principle Tillich derived one of his most discussed ideas, the "God above the God of theism": the ground of being that remains when the conventional, objectified "God" of religious belief — a being among beings who can be argued about and doubted — disappears in the anxiety of doubt. The courage to be, in its final form, is rooted not in confidence in a particular image of God but in "the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt." This "absolute faith" has no special content but is an unconditional trust in the power of being itself; it can be had even by those who cannot honestly believe in the God of traditional theism. Tillich intended this not as a concession to atheism but as a deepening of the religious question.

Major Works

Systematic Theology (3 vols., 1951-1963) is Tillich's magnum opus, built on the "method of correlation": philosophy asks the questions of existence, and theology answers them with the symbols of the Christian tradition, so that the two disciplines are interdependent rather than opposed. The Courage to Be (1952) analyzes the three anxieties and develops the ontology of courage that gives his philosophy of religion its existential bite; it remains his most widely read book. Dynamics of Faith (1957) offers the most accessible statement of his understanding of faith as ultimate concern, the dialectic of faith and doubt, and the types of faith. Love, Power, and Justice (1954) applies his ontological method to ethics and politics. The Protestant Era (1948) and Theology of Culture (1959) gather his essays on the relation between religion and culture, including his famous thesis that "religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion." The Shaking of the Foundations (1948) collects his most famous sermons.

Philosophical Influence

Tillich's influence extends across theology, philosophy, and the human sciences. Within theology he reshaped the engagement between philosophy and Christian thought, and his method of correlation became a reference point for twentieth-century Protestant and Catholic theology alike. His analysis of anxiety and the courage to be was taken up by existential psychotherapy and by the humanistic psychology movement; the psychologist Rollo May, who studied with Tillich and remained his close friend, applied Tillichian categories to psychotherapy in works such as The Meaning of Anxiety and The Courage to Create. Through his concept of ultimate concern, Tillich influenced the comparative study of religion, which took up his claim that every culture has a religion in this deep sense. His "God above God" has been discussed by theologians and secular critics ever since, and his insistence that the question of meaning is the question of being has kept his thought relevant to secular philosophy as well. Within this archive, Tillich stands at the meeting point of existentialism, the courage to be, and the philosophy of religion, in dialogue with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jaspers.

Famous Quotes

"Anxiety is the state in which being is aware of its possible nonbeing."

— Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 35.

"The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."

— Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952), concluding chapter.

"Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned."

— Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 1.

"Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith."

— Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (1957), p. 20.

"Religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion."

— Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 42.

Related Concepts

• Nonbeing: the threat of negation that belongs to every finite thing; the source of anxiety.
• Being-itself: God conceived not as a being among beings but as the power of being that grounds all existence.
• Ultimate Concern: the unconditional seriousness with which something matters to a person; the essence of faith.
• The Courage to Be: self-affirmation of one's being in spite of the threat of nonbeing.
• Ontic, Moral, and Spiritual Anxiety: the three forms of the awareness of nonbeing — fate and death, guilt and condemnation, emptiness and meaninglessness.
• The Protestant Principle: the critical protest against every absolutization of the finite.
• The Method of Correlation: the mutual interdependence of philosophical questions and theological answers.
• Kairos: the fulfilled moment in which the eternal breaks into history.

Learning Path

To enter Tillich's thought, begin with The Courage to Be, which introduces the three anxieties, nonbeing, and the ontology of courage with a minimum of technical apparatus; it is the natural companion to the book page on it in this archive. Then read Dynamics of Faith for his account of ultimate concern and the relation of faith to doubt. For the systematic architecture, work through Systematic Theology, Volume 1, with attention to the method of correlation and the doctrine of God as being-itself. Place him in the existentialist tradition by reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Anxiety, Heidegger's Being and Time, and Jaspers's Way to Wisdom; the dialogue among these thinkers is the context in which Tillich's own questions take shape. For the contemporary reception, the psychology of Rollo May shows how his concepts were carried into psychotherapy. In this archive, follow the existentialism topic, the existentialist wisdom collection, and the pages on courage, faith, and anxiety.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Paul Tillich." The authoritative scholarly overview of his life, method of correlation, and central concepts.
2. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Paul Tillich." An accessible introduction to his existentialist theology.
3. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (Yale University Press, 1952). His most widely read book and the source of the anxiety-courage analysis.
4. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (University of Chicago Press, 1951-1963). The systematic statement of his thought.
5. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (Harper & Row, 1957). His account of faith as ultimate concern.