12/13/2023 – Tillich vs. Panikkar

"Let’s do an episode on Tillich versus Panikkar."

"Tillich versus who?"

"Exactly."

Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. If you like religion and philosophy content one thing I really need you to do is to smash that sub button because it really helps out the channel. The transcripts are available at TenOnReligion.com and new episodes are posted about every two weeks, around noon, U.S. Pacific time, so drop me some views.

Okay, try to ignore my cheesy dual intro. The American Academy of Religion is the largest professional organization for religious scholars in the world. A little over a year ago I went to their annual meeting in Denver in November 2022 and delivered an academic presentation on Paul Tillich and Raimon Panikkar. I made a few minor changes to fit this YouTube format but the main ideas are all there. This is a little bit longer than most of the episodes here but there’s some great stuff going on here so stick with it and I hope you enjoy it.

In the year 2010, the famous University of Chicago religion scholar Jonathan Z. Smith published an article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion titled, “Tillich[’s] Remains.” This article suggests, among other things, that Tillich was largely responsible as an unacknowledged source for the framing of the academic field of religion in the West. Earlier in my career I focused a lot of research on Raimon Panikkar, a super important religious figure who is admittedly more popular in Europe and India than in North America. So, this article got me thinking if Tillich was also a largely unacknowledged source of influence for Panikkar as well. By unacknowledged, I mean that there are few places where Panikkar specifically references or credits Tillich in his writings, yet there still seems to be a lot of Tillich’s fingerprints all over Panikkar’s writings, so to speak. Here’s the plan today. We’re going to talk about Tillich, then Panikkar, and then get comparing. There’s a lot of important ideas in this episode so stick with us so you can get the full enchilada. Let’s go.

First, Tillich. Story time. In 1963, around nine years before Panikkar came to UC Santa Barbara to become a professor there, Tillich was invited there for a series of guided conversations with students and faculty. These sessions were tape recorded, edited, and published as eight dialogues by Donald Mackenzie Brown in early 1965, mere months before Tillich died. The beginning of the final conversation started with a question from one of the participants asking if Tillich was a “dangerous man.” Have you ever been called “dangerous” before? The concern was that Tillich’s interpretation of religion broke down people’s confidence in religious symbols with not enough to replace it. If the breaking down of such symbols caused a loss of those symbols’ power, did they not then become empty if one could not comprehend the reasoning explaining how religious symbols work? Or would this cause people to misunderstand what he was really trying to communicate? Tillich’s response was nothing short of fascinating. He referenced Karl Barth, who dominated the theological discourse in the early to mid-20th century after Ernst Troeltsch. Those who saw past Barth’s theology “from above” and realized that he never took Troeltsch’s historical arguments seriously had nowhere to turn. Tillich wanted to be their voice both speaking to, and speaking for, them. His work was for those who asked the hard questions while he philosophically and psychologically explained why and how symbols and myths operated in religion. I have a lot of episodes on this channel about this.

For Tillich, the situation in which humans find themselves was significantly influenced by Heidegger’s formulation of “thrown into existence” as he continually stressed the phenomenon of anxiety. Anxiety is the experience of one’s own finitude for this is when a being becomes aware of its possible nonbeing. Anxiety is not only in reference to physical nonexistence, or death, but also to meaninglessness and condemnation. In his work titled Systematic Theology II, Tillich described the existential nature of this anxiety as a result of being a finite creature. For example, Tillich thought that the theological interpretation of “the Fall” in the Genesis creation narrative was nonsense unless interpreted symbolically. It referred to the awareness of finitude and such awareness was anxiety resulting in a feeling of estrangement and a longing for the unconditional. What Tillich referred to earlier in his career as the unconditional he later called the “ground of being,” which was a symbolic term as an object of ultimate concern. Later in his career Tillich mentioned that he preferred the term “being-itself” which manifested his clear appreciation for, and/or dependence on, Heidegger, but he felt this term was even more disliked, so he decided to just use “ground of being” and stuck with that instead.

Now to get the heart of the matter, Tillich made an important distinction between a sign and a symbol. Signs do not have any necessary relationship to that which they point, but symbols do. Since a sign does not participate in the reality to which it points, the relation between the sign and the reality is essentially an arbitrary relation. For example, a red traffic light at an intersection is a sign pointing to the necessity of stopping, but neither the light fixture nor the color red has anything to do with the idea of stopping. They are 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. When the situation changes, symbols lose their functioning power.

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. For instance, any concrete assertion about religious beings such as 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? For Tillich the answer is it can because that which is infinite is being-itself and everything participates in being-itself. In fact, Tillich asserted that whatever people say about that which concerns them ultimately has symbolic meaning in that it both participates in that meaning while simultaneously pointing beyond it. Symbols express such ultimacy in a concrete way using a segment of finite experience. They arise and grow in religious language and culture. They become expressions of self-interpretation as answers to questions of existential predicaments. Tillich reasoned that if the symbolic language still represented the ground of being, any incompatibility could ultimately be overcome. Tillich’s explanation regarding the truth of religious symbols was explored further by Robert Neville and his many works, especially in his 1996 book titled, The Truth of Broken Symbols, where he demonstrates why and how religious symbols can be broken and yet still true.

Tillich then traverses from symbols to myths and argues not for a demythologization, contra Rudolf Bultmann, but a deliteralization. In short, Bultmann’s objective was to push back against literal interpretations of symbols and myths in New Testament texts, primarily in the canonical gospel narratives. One must identify which passages possess a symbolic or mythic quality and after such recognition, either reinterpret them accordingly, dismiss them as unimportant, or in some cases excise them altogether replacing them with something else such as science or morals. For example, the understanding of a three-tiered geocentric universe in which the biblical writers wrote is no longer tenable today, thus a contemporary literal interpretation seems nonsensical. In the New Testament book of Acts, Jesus ascended up into heaven. Where is he – in geocentric orbit? From our standpoint that’s a ridiculous question which is precisely Tillich’s point. Tillich thought that the myths and symbols played a vitally important role and could not be so easily discarded or in any way deemed as insignificant. Rather than a demythologization, Tillich called for a deliteralization. Symbols and myths did lose their meaning when taken literally, but could still be analyzed as symbols and myths and as such they remained legitimate vehicles of religious expression. They could not be criticized nor removed solely on the basis of their nature as symbols and myths.

In Tillich’s final lecture he described this as a dynamic-typological approach and his position can ultimately be defined as an existential interpretation of religion in correlative form. Questions of existence arise out of the human situation and are correlated, or explained, through theological answers found in religious symbols. His stress on retaining the religious symbols and accompanying religious language but deliteralizing them such that they should be taken spiritually was enthusiastically received by many as evidenced by his popular best-selling books.

Now, Raimon Panikkar. What’s important here is Panikkar’s mythic understanding of being, the flow from myth to symbol, and the reality of symbol as multivalence (an important word). Again, I have a few episodes which explain these in more detail, but here’s a brief overview.

In multiple writings Panikkar spends a great deal of time differentiating between logos and mythos as two modes of accessing reality. They work in concert together whereby mythos is the subjective frame which houses the objective logos. Myth is what one takes for granted and is something that one is unaware of, some sort of unseen aspect of one’s existence. In religion, when myths transform into something entirely rational, they lose their mythic quality and become demythicized, or reduced to simple moral statements. Like Tillich, this might be a play on Bultmann, but what’s different about Panikkar’s perspective is that myths often just don’t go away. They get replaced. Without realizing it, in the process of myth deconstruction, people birth other myths out of the former myth’s ashes. Old myths transform into new myths, which then become transparent with the old myth often remaining unrecognizable within. When religion (or the old myth) is explained, it is explained away. In the same way, innocence, once lost, cannot be replaced or regained. The myth then searches for a new innocence and gets reborn in a new form.

Panikkar explains the connection between myths and symbols. Religious symbols are the external manifestation of myths. Religious symbols represent a relationship. This relational character, however, does not mean it devolves into a total relativism, which is marked by a lack of any criteria for discernment. Rather, Panikkar preferred the term “relativity” as the best way to describe the relationship between religion and symbol. The relationship which religion as symbol possesses is a particular relationship with a particular myth. Each particular religious tradition can understand the term “religion” in slightly different ways because religion as symbol possesses the feature of multivalence, more than one connecting point, rather than univocality, or a single representational meaning. This might sound kind of strange, but it is best described as a linking of reality from within itself. A symbol is in the domain of this “in-between” space, expressing belief and passing from within a myth to logos. A religious referent such as YHWH (or the tetragrammaton), the Trinity, Allah, Shiva, or the Buddha is real in the sense that the reality of the appearance is already in, and inherently part of, the symbol.

One does not simply see a part of another tradition’s symbol through their religious symbol such that all the religious symbols could be brought together to gain the complete image. We cannot combine all the colors in the world to create some sort of a supercolor. That makes no sense. The ancient metaphor of the blind men and the elephant does not apply here. A religious symbol cannot be just one among many else one would cease to be a genuine adherent of any tradition. What would be the point? A tradition’s symbol is the totality. Adherents of other traditions see it differently and may provide a different interpretation from their vantage point. But the trick is, other traditions initially have to be discovered in one’s own religion while simultaneously not do any violence to them, either conceptually or physically. Not an easy thing for most religious people. So what’s the answer? When one realizes that the reality of their religious symbols can never be fully exhausted, they then can become aware that there is space for more than one religious tradition to engage it. Religious faith is a “both/and” in that a religious believer is both in this world and believing in a beyond, some form of transcendence. Mythos and logosin concert together provide the reality of the symbolic difference. If one experiences a certain feeling of spiritual disequilibrium when one has a positive encounter with a religious symbol outside of one’s own tradition, this is due to the character of relativity inherent in all religious symbols. Panikkar states that in religion we don’t really compare, as in comparare – to treat on an equal “par” or basis. We can only imparare – or learn from the other. There is always more space for others. When this happens, the new innocence can emerge by a changing of the old myth resulting in a new reinterpretation of the symbol. This is not a demythicization, which Panikkar believes does not really exist, but a transmythicization. The myth is transformed into another myth. And so the cycle continues. This is how religious symbols can be understood as multivalent, meaning they can have more than one connection to transcendence.

So now what happens when we put Tillich and Panikkar side by side? First, both are indebted to Heidegger. The specific point that I want to make is that both utilize a hermeneutical circle. This comes directly from Heidegger’s Being and Time whereby in interpretation one possesses a fore-structure comprised of a fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception. Suffice it to say that I don’t have time right now to unpack all of Heidegger’s Being and Time, but with each new interpretive experience, one’s fore-structure is further illuminated. Or, in Gadamer’s terminology, one’s horizon is expanded. This fore-structure was a way of looking at the world which was a pre-understanding that did not require explanation. The point was not to progress toward some greater objectivity, but rather to reveal the truth of one’s own be-come-ing – the revealing of one’s own existence, or in a word, existentialism.

For Tillich the hermeneutical circle was exemplified like this: from the ground of being to symbol to myth. For Panikkar the circle was exemplified like this: from myth to symbol to religion. Tillich and Panikkar utilized the same words but they represented different concepts and different functions in the circle. The first movement in the circle Tillich called ground of being but Panikkar labeled it myth. The second movement in the circle was called symbol by both. The third movement in the circle Tillich called myth and Panikkar called religion. They are similar in that they both have a hermeneutical circle with related functional concepts but they utilized different terminology for each of the movements in the circle.

Second, both stress openness. The cycle is not a closed-circle – far from it. Panikkar, however, was considerably more open than Tillich, although the gap closed a little bit towards the end of Tillich’s life. His journey to Japan and his subsequent conversations with people and experiences really had a profound effect upon his views which is reflected in his later writings and lectures. Tillich’s openness was in the connection between religion and many other expressions and realms, such as art, literature, and politics. Panikkar’s openness was in the connection with and among multiple religious frameworks.

This leads to the third comparison, which is more of a negative one and thus is really more of a contrast rather than a comparison, and that is, the difference in sources. Tillich was largely confined to Western sources. This included the whole of Western philosophy from Ancient Greece to Late Antiquity to the Protestant Reformation to the Modern era of Enlightenment to Romanticism and eventually to Husserl and Heidegger in the early 1900’s. Panikkar’s sources included not only all of those, but also Roman Catholic sources, ancient Buddhist sources, and a significant amount of Hindu ideology. This is clearly a chief difference between these two figures which is why Panikkar had a far more open perspective in framing his ontology and hermeneutics as well as why he had the background to engage and incorporate ideology from multiple religious and philosophical traditions in his thought.

Summary. Tillich’s dynamic-typological approach was an existential interpretation of religion in correlative form. Panikkar’s mythic understanding of being, the flow from myth to symbol, and the reality of symbol as multivalence led to a transmythicization and a new innocence. Both are indebted to Heidegger and hermeneutical circle, and both stress openness, yet their difference in sources manifested a much wider horizon of ideology to draw from for Panikkar. If Tillich was indeed a “dangerous man” as I mentioned earlier in the story near the beginning of this episode, this means that Panikkar was an even more “dangerous man.”

So, what do you think about the Tillich and Panikkar? How do you like their explanations of myth and symbol in religion? Which one had the correct understanding of the hermeneutical circle? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.

Based on: “Religious Symbols and Myths in Tillich and Panikkar.” Presentation for Panikkar Symposium by Mark Banas, Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Denver, November 18, 2022.