07/28/2021 – Summer Philosophy Series Part 2: Tillich

Do you have an ultimate concern? Do you have anxiety (in the German philosophical sense)? Are you a finite creature? (laugher) Maybe… Tillich answers all of these questions. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. This video is closed-captioned here on YouTube and the transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com. This is the second of a three-part summer philosophy series on three German thinkers: Martin Heidegger, Paul Tillich and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Heidegger set the stage with establishing Dasein as the ground of being. Tillich applied it to religion, and Gadamer applied it to hermeneutics. Are you ready for some dope stuff? Wait, boomers aren’t allowed to say that word. Technically, I’m a Gen-X’er, not a boomer, so it’s allowed.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Tillich is really a theologian and not a philosopher, so why is he in this philosophy summer series? The answer is that a lot of his theology is based in philosophy as well as in psychology, so I thought it was a natural fit to talk about him now. There is a clear connection between the last episode on Heidegger and Tillich and we’re going to mention the connection at several points through this episode. We got a lot of things to talk about so let’s get into it.

Tillich’s most well-known writings are The Courage To Be, Dynamics of Faith, Theology of Culture, and his three-volume Systematic Theology. Not surprisingly, these are the sources for this video.

Paul Tillich is known as a correlationist because he held that religion moves back and forth between two poles: the eternal truth of its foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received. The truth needs to be correlated with any given historical situation. This is why he wrote that fundamentalism fails to make contact with the present situation because it speaks from a situation of the past. It elevates something finite and transitory to infinite and eternal validity.

Tillich’s main premise is that the most important thing is what concerns us ultimately. Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. The only statements which qualify as being religious are those which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us. For Tillich, this method of correlation explains the contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence. Later interpreters and scholars follow Tillich’s lead and reinterpret and apply his ideas to all religions, not just Christianity and so I’m basically taking that approach as well.

So, what’s the deal with correlation? The correlation is in the sense of correspondence between religious symbols and that which is symbolized by them. There is a correlation in the logical sense between concepts denoting the human and those denoting the divine. The method of correlation makes an analysis of the human situation out of which the existential questions arise, and it demonstrates that the symbols used are the answers to these questions. According to Tillich, religious leaders should emphasize the symbolic character of all concepts which are used to describe the divine actions. Tillich’s main term for this is the “ground of being.” The Western religious word for what is called the “ground of being” is God.

Now let’s unpack this a little bit more with Tillich’s idea of finitude. Humans must be completely separated from their world in order to look at it as a world. Remember Heidegger’s “self” in a “world,” or Dasein from the last episode? The root meaning of “to exist,” in Latin, existere, is to “stand out” or to “emerge.” Things that exist stand out or emerge from nothingness. Finite things are not self-caused; they have been “thrown” into being (again, Heidegger). Because of this, God is not a finite being and therefore one cannot talk about the “existence” of God but only the reality, the validity, or the truth of the idea of God. God does not exist because God is being-itself beyond essence and existence. By the way, I have a quick philosophical comment about this a little bit further, but I put in the description instead because this is going to be a long video. [*see note below]

Humans are not only finite, as are all creatures, but they are also aware of their finitude. And this awareness is “anxiety” [point up to text on screen: “more Heidegger”] So what is the human condition? Tillich’s background is German Christianity and thus he uses images and language which is very familiar to Christians but reinterprets them in a rather captivating way. He says that “Adam before the Fall” and “nature before the curse” are states of potentiality. They are not actual states. The actual state is that existence in which humans finds themselves along with the whole universe, and there is no time in which this was not the case. The notion of a moment in time in which humans and nature were changed from good to evil is absurd for Tillich. The state of existence is the state of estrangement. Humans are estranged from the ground of their being, from other beings, and from themselves. To be a “self” and to have a “world” constitute the challenge.

Anxiety is the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing, a direct experience of one’s own finitude. Fear has a specific object which love can both confront and conquer, but the ultimate possible implication of the anticipation of fear is the fear of dying, the state of nonbeing. This basic anxiety cannot be eliminated because it belongs to existence itself. When a finite being exists, it means at points both past and future, it will not exist. The three main types of anxiety are death, meaninglessness, and condemnation. As a side note, terminating one of these, such as death by suicide, does not terminate or end the others. Tillich asks in his book, The Courage To Be, is there a courage to be, to affirm oneself in spite of the struggle against these threats? As long as the “courage to be” lives, it successfully resists the anxiety of “not-having-a-place.” It courageously faces the occasions when “not-having-a-place” becomes an actual threat. It accepts its ontological insecurity and reaches a security in this acceptance. This is why he describes forgiveness as accepting acceptance though being unacceptable. Interesting, no?

One of Tillich’s key concepts is ultimate concern. Ultimate concern must transcend every preliminary finite and concrete concern. It must transcend the whole realm of finitude in order to be the answer to the question implied in finitude. But in transcending the finite the religious concern loses the concreteness of a being-to-being relationship. It tends to become not only absolute but also abstract, provoking reactions from the concrete element. Here Tillich argues against another philosopher named Feuerbach and projection theories. Tillich says that what these theories disregard is that projection is always a projection on something. A screen is not projection; it receives the projection. The realm against which the divine images are projected is not itself a projection. It is the experienced ultimacy of being and meaning. It is the realm of ultimate concern. No human being is without an ultimate concern because to exist is to be ultimately concerned. What does religion have to do with all of this? Religion is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself. Ultimate concern = concern about the ultimate. But this equation only works if this is not about God as a personal being, which…leads us into symbols.

The statement that God is being-itself is a non-symbolic statement. It does not point beyond itself. However, after this has been said, nothing else can be said about God as God which is not symbolic. Symbols and signs point to something beyond themselves but there is a difference between them. A sign does not participate in the reality to which it points, while the symbol participates in the reality of that for which it stands. For instance, a red traffic light at an intersection is a sign pointing to the necessity of stopping, but neither the light nor the color red have anything to do with the idea of stopping. It is completely arbitrary and could be replaced with other things or other colors. The idea of a king, however, is more like a symbol because a king not only symbolizes power but also can actualize that same power. Signs can be replaced but symbols cannot. Symbols develop and die according to the correlation between that which is symbolized and the people who receive it as a symbol. The main function of symbols is the opening up of levels of reality which otherwise are hidden and cannot be grasped in any other way. In this way any concrete assertion about God must be symbolic, for a concrete assertion is one which uses a segment of finite experience in order to say something about what it means to be God. Can something in our finite reality become the basis for an assertion about that which is infinite? The answer is, it can, because that which is infinite is being-itself and everything participates in being-itself.

A religious symbol is true if it adequately expresses the correlation of some person with a religious reality. A religious symbol can die only if the correlation of which it is an adequate expression also dies. The moment in which the inner situation of the human group to a symbol has ceased to exist, then the symbol dies. The symbol does not “say” anything anymore and it becomes obsolete. Religious symbols are double-edged. They are directed toward the infinite which they symbolize and toward the finite through which they symbolize the infinite. For example, in using “king” to symbolize God something is being said about what kind of God it is, and also the character of kinghood as worthy of being a symbol for the divine.

Now let’s circle back. This is why “personal God” can be a confusing symbol because “personal God” does not mean God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal and that carries within the ontological power of personality. Likewise in religion, symbolic use of language is the only use of language which is not idolatrous. Faith is expressed through language, but language is a finite construct, and thus is ultimately incapable of expressing the ultimate. Symbols allow the abstractness of being-itself to be existentially known to the individual connecting the finite to the infinite through symbols. It both includes, and transcends, the concrete. Whew…deep breath. Lotta stuff going on there in Tillich’s ideas.

Existentialism is an analysis of the human predicament. And the answers to the questions implied in the human predicament are religious, whether open or hidden. For Tillich, the symbol of “the Fall” is a symbol for the human situation universally, not as the story of an event that happened “once upon a time” in past history. But what about religious texts and scriptures? One can see in the interpretations of many religious scholars that scientific honesty, devotion, and religious interest have usually worked together. In others, critical detachment and even outright rejection are obvious. People who are not familiar with the methodological side of historical research and are afraid of its consequences for faith like to attack historical research as being prejudiced. If they are consistent, however, they will not deny that their own interpretation is also prejudiced, or, as they would say, dependent on the truth of their faith. Still, the historian can never reach certainty in this way, but can reach high degrees of probability. This clear distinction is often confused by the obvious fact that the understanding of the meaning of a text is partly dependent upon the categories of understanding used in the encounter with texts and other surviving written records. Understanding demands one’s participation in what one understands, and we can participate only in terms of what and who we are, including our own categories of understanding. That was a not-so-subtle teaser for the next episode on Gadamer by the way.

So, what does history have to do with faith? Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. Therefore, there is not faith without risk. The risk of faith is that it could affirm a wrong symbol of ultimate concern, a symbol which does not really express ultimacy. It is wrong, therefore, to consider the risk concerning uncertain historical facts as part of the risk of faith. The risk of faith is existential; it concerns the totality of our being, while the risk of historical judgments is theoretical and open to correction. Here are two different dimensions which should never be confused according to Tillich. A wrong faith can destroy the meaning of one’s life while a wrong historical judgment cannot. Remember, you cannot kill a symbol with scientific evidence or historical research. That’s not how symbols work.

Religious symbols, either historical or contemporary, must be understood as symbols, but they will lose their meaning if taken literally. In dealing with such symbols, some German Christian writers such as Rudolf Bultmann especially, asserted a “demythologization” of religion. Tillich says we should not be talking about a “demythologization” but instead a “deliteralization.” What’s the difference? Demythologization can mean the fight against the literalistic distortion of symbols and myths, but in some cases, demythologization can also mean the removal of myth as a vehicle of religious expression and the substitute of science and morals in its place. But this is a misunderstanding of what religious myths both are and do. Symbols and myths cannot be criticized simply because they are symbols. They must be criticized on the basis of their power to express what they are supposed to express.

Lastly, this why Tillich was a huge advocate for finding religion in culture, specifically, creative representatives of religious existentialism in all realms of culture. The main idea of this many-sided attempt is that in every cultural creation – a picture, a system, a law, a political movement (however non-religious it may appear) – in all of these, an ultimate concern is expressed, and it is possible to recognize the unconscious religious character of it. The test of every concrete expression of our ultimate concern is the degree to which the concreteness of the concern is in unity with its ultimacy. The danger exists, though, of elevating something conditional to ultimacy such as a symbol, an institution, or a movement. But every religious act, not only in organized religion, is culturally formed. The fact that every act of religion is encased in language, spoken or silent, is proof enough for this assertion. Language is the basic cultural creation.

So, how do we wrap up one of my longer episodes in over a year? Divine Beings are not beings beside other beings. They are the power of being conquering non-being.

Okay, my quick take on all of this. On the one, hand Tillich does a good job of explaining why literalistic interpretations are deeply problematic and an especially needful clarification of the symbolic function of language and its relation to religion. On the other hand, I didn’t really get into this a lot in this video, but he does not do a good job of addressing the issue that the language of Christianity is inherently exclusivistic. Exclusivistic…is that even a word? How about octopai? But later interpreters of Tillich do deal with this issue in a very productive way, such as Robert Neville and John Thatamanil who reinterpret Tillich in a more non-exclusivistic way.

In our next episode, Gadamer, one of my favorites, on philosophical hermeneutics which is interpretation and understanding. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.

[*note] - While an ontology which claims to have knowledge of Being a priori is problematic, an ontology which restricts itself to the structure of finitude is possible. The way to finitude is itself finite and cannot claim finality. Tillich says this is why Heidegger concludes his analysis with the statement that the fight against Kant’s doctrine of the Ding-an-sich was a fight against the acknowledgement of the finitude of our human experience in knowing.