Paul Tillich's Philosophical Theology

A Fifty-Year Reappraisal

George Pattison

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137454461
• eBook ISBN: 9781137454478
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Paul Tillich's Philosophical Theology takes up the challenge as to whether his thought remains relevant fifty years after his death. In opposition to those who believe that his writings have little to say to us today, this book argues that his thought is largely exemplary of open theological engagement with the contemporary intellectual situation.

1

‘God Is Being-Itself’

Abstract: Starting with Tillich’s definition of God as Being-Itself, the chapter traces this idea back to Tillich’s early study of Schelling and the latter’s move from a philosophy of identity to a philosophy of freedom. However, despite existential elements, Schelling’s thought remains fundamentally limited by the philosophy of identity. It is argued that the same can also be seen in Tillich’s own system. Although this is published 40 years after the early work on Schelling, it reflects the same basic structures of thought. This makes it problematic in the wake of postmodern philosophy, which (following Heidegger) emphasizes difference against identity.

Pattison, George. Paul Tillich’s Philosophical Theology: A Fifty-Year Reappraisal. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137454478.0005.

We begin with a word that is absolutely central to the thought of Paul Tillich, as well as to understanding what is at issue ‘on the boundary’ between philosophy and theology – the word: God. At first glance, what Tillich says about this seems very clear. God, Tillich says (and he says it in many places), is ‘Being-Itself’.¹ Furthermore, he insisted that this is a ‘non-symbolic’ statement and, in fact, the only non-symbolic statement we can make about God. Everything else we might say about God – such as that God is ‘Father’ or ‘Lord’ or ‘Creator’ or ‘Trinity’ – is symbolic, only not this. We shall come back to Tillich’s theory of symbolism at a later stage,² but I shall begin by attempting to clarify just what is at stake in this insistence on Being-Itself as a definitive claim about the meaning of the word ‘God’. For if Tillich is clear that God is Being-Itself, the claim itself is not as clear as the simplicity of its language suggests and many of Tillich’s readers have found it profoundly puzzling. What does it – what can it – mean?

First, strange as this formulation might seem to many believers and, for that matter, non-believers, Tillich is at this point reflecting a long-standing tradition of Christian thinking that goes back through medieval theology to Augustine and beyond. Thomas Aquinas, whose teaching is regarded as normative in the Catholic Church, asserts that ‘He Who Is’ is the best of the names we can give to God and his reason for saying this is that he too, like Tillich, regards ‘Being’ as definitive of the divine nature. In fact, both Thomas and Augustine use the same formulation ‘Being-Itself’ (ipsum esse) as Tillich.

If this seems remote from the language of living religion – and it is, undeniably, influenced by Greek philosophy as well as by biblical thought – it is nevertheless not hard to see that it does say some of the things that believers want to say about God. For if God is supposed to be the source of all that is, then God must surely be in some eminent sense? And – a point made by Thomas – the insistence on being also makes it clear that God does not come into being or pass out of being; God simply is as he is, eternally, without change. Only a God who truly is Being-Itself is a God we can rely on in all the changes and chances of life in this world. And, if a biblical proof-text is wanted, Augustine, Thomas and others pointed to the story of how God called to Moses out of the Burning Bush and, when Moses asked God to tell him his name, God (in the version made familiar by the King James Version) replied: ‘I AM THAT I AM’.³ As one hymn puts it, God is, simply, ‘the great I AM’.

In later chapters, we shall have occasion to revisit the religious and philosophical purchase of these claims. First, however, I want to look more closely at the philosophical background of the claim that God is Being-Itself and do so in the light of Tillich’s own intellectual context and development. Doing so will also throw light on the consistency of Tillich’s thought over many years and through many upheavals. It will also help to explain Tillich’s commitment to the idea that theology has to be systematic, in the sense that every theological statement had to make sense in relation to every other and that this requires theology to develop a specific structure and shape. This commitment is unusual in modern Protestant theology – not least when this theology also bears the epithet ‘existential’.

Tillich and German Idealism

If Tillich’s use of the expression ‘Being-Itself’ is connected to ancient traditions of Christian thought, his particular usage was more immediately shaped by his relation to German Idealism. This was a movement that developed in the 1790s, both influenced by and reacting against Kant’s critical philosophy. It flourished through to the 1830s before being overtaken by new movements in the 1840s (e.g., the ‘Left Hegelianism’ of Feuerbach and Marx and the proto-existentialism of Kierkegaard), although these often reflected some of the Idealists’ claims or methods. One of the most enduring aspects of his kind of Idealism was its sense that philosophy didn’t just drop ready-made from heaven and that doing philosophy involved reckoning with the history of philosophy. Indeed, it was central to the claims of Hegel and Schelling, two of its leading figures, that their thought summed up and recapitulated the preceding history of philosophy before moving decisively beyond it. Importantly, their idea of this history embraced not just philosophy in the narrow sense but also extended to great religious movements, such as the rise of Christianity in opposition to ancient Judaism and paganism or – another key example in their view – the Protestant Reformation. This entailed several significant differences in their approach compared to that of medieval thought.

First, they saw medieval philosophy as having failed to take fully seriously the subjective side of human knowledge. Thus, in the case of a universal term such as ‘goodness’ the medievals (on their view⁴) tended to think that this existed somehow independently of anybody actually choosing to do good (or not). Likewise in the case of ‘being’, ‘Being’ was ‘there’, so to speak, whether any individual actually existed (or not). But, the Idealists argued, we have learned (in different ways) from Descartes, Hume, and Kant (amongst others) that the structure of our minds always affects what we know. If there is a mind-independent reality out there, we can only know it in the prism of the human mind. And goodness, as Kant in particular argued, cannot exist independently of moral action itself – goodness is less something ‘there’ and more something we do. True knowledge is both objective and subjective and philosophy, therefore, must at least give an adequate account of both aspects – which medieval thought failed to do.

But the issue was not purely philosophical, it was also religious, and here the event of the Protestant Reformation loomed large in the minds of the Idealists. Even though Schelling would convert to Catholicism, he, like other important figures in the movement (including Fichte and Hegel), had been trained in Protestant theology and some of their theological assumptions continued to shape German Idealism as a whole. As they saw it, the early Protestant movement arose out of the disintegration of what has been called ‘the medieval synthesis’. In the late medieval period, a complex of changes meant that individuals became increasingly isolated and the modern spirit of subjectivity began to push to the fore. But, as Martin Luther experienced with particular intensity, this brought with it a massive sense of anxiety and guilt. When the authoritative teaching of the Church and the moral mechanism of the penitential system began to lose their grip, individuals came to experience themselves as isolated, worthless and, in theological language, desperately sinful. For Luther, the agony of this situation could no longer be eased by turning to the Church and making ritual acts of confession and reconciliation. The kind of assurance he needed could only be given by God himself, more specifically the God revealed in Jesus Christ, crucified as a sacrifice for human sins. No longer mediated by what has been called ‘the great chain of being’ or by the idea of gradually climbing the ladder of perfection up towards God, Luther’s faith involved something like a one-to-one confrontation between guilt-ridden sinners and a God who could move between a terrible, punishing righteousness and the self-sacrificing love revealed in Christ.

What all this meant to the German Idealists was that it was not enough to write subjectivity into their account of knowledge. Just as crucial was the need to recognize that the subject in question, the human being, was not just a knowing subject but also a feeling, suffering, yearning subject, a subject of desire whose life was exposed to the terrifying prospect of guilt and death. Philosophy had to take account of the whole human being and not just the mind. And if the term ‘system’ sounds abstract to our postmodern ears, part of the point of insisting that philosophy had to be systematic was to emphasize that, in Hegel’s words, ‘the truth is the whole’ – that is, the whole human being in the whole of its bodily, historical, intellectual, and religious development.

Being born when he was (1886) and educated in philosophy and theology in the German academic system it was inevitable that Tillich would be exposed to the thought of the German Idealists. Of course, as I have indicated, there were already strong contrary voices making themselves heard from the 1840s onwards, including Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, each of whom would have a significant impact on Tillich. Yet his own initial choice was to focus on Schelling – not least because he, like others, saw Schelling’s own later development as pointing beyond itself towards what Schelling himself already called ‘existential’ elements. In fact, Tillich wrote two major early works on Schelling, a doctorate in philosophy The Construction of the History of Religion in Schelling’s Positive Philosophy (1910), and a theological dissertation Mysticism and Guilt-Consciousness in Schelling’s Development (1911).⁵ We shall examine this latter work now, since, I shall suggest, it effectively offers a blueprint for Tillich’s own system, even if this would also go on to incorporate elements or be applied in ways that reflected Tillich’s distinctively twentieth-century experience and that would have seemed quite alien to Schelling himself.⁶ It will, in particular, help us to clarify what Tillich might have meant by defining God as ‘Being-Itself’.⁷

A further reason for beginning with this dissertation is that it will help us to see that Tillich’s existentialism was not just the result of encountering the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in the 1920s (as is often said), but that it had an independent source and, as a result, a rather different shape from Heidegger’s own ‘philosophy of existence’.⁸

Mysticism and Guilt-Consciousness in Schelling’s Development

A key term in the dissertation is ‘identity’, since Schelling’s early philosophy had been known as a ‘philosophy of identity’ and his later thought was generally seen as modifying this in significant respects. We shall therefore begin by briefly examining this term, which will, incidentally but importantly, establish a point of reference for assessing the relevance of Tillich’s own thought to some contemporary issues in the philosophy of religion.

So what is meant, in this context, by identity?

Think back to God’s disclosure of the divine name to Moses: I AM THAT I AM. Such a statement could well serve as an epitome for the philosophical principle of identity, namely, that something is simply what it is. In a formula favoured by the Idealists themselves, A=A. As Tillich put it in commenting on Schelling’s notion of identity, the absolute isn’t a syn-thesis, it’s just a thesis (GW1, 36). But if A=A seems self-evidently true, it also seems to be something of a cul de sac. Where might philosophy go from here? How does this tautology help us to solve or even understand actual questions about what it is to know something? If we are challenged as to how we know that this object in front of us is a tree, surely it’s the most unphilosophical attitude possible just to say ‘because it’s a tree: a tree is what it is’, which is what applying the principle of identity would seem to amount to. Nevertheless, the Idealists’ ambition was, starting from this self-evident formula, to deduce the entirety of the human system of knowledge.

This might seem a strange ambition. However, what was at stake was, in some respects, quite simple, namely, the very possibility of truth. If I want to say anything true about the world, then, it seems two conditions must hold. The first is that the propositions in which I make such statements must be free from ambiguity and internally coherent. In the statement ‘The dog is a star’ both terms are, potentially, ambiguous. I might be referring to the celestial body known as ‘the dog’, in which case (as Spinoza pointed out), the term ‘dog’ is being used metaphorically. On the other hand, I might mean that the dog (individual member of the species canis canis) has performed an action I regard as admirable. But, in either case, in order to decide whether what is being said is true my listener would need to translate the metaphorical elements of the statement into direct, unambiguous terms – what some philosophers refer to as the requirement of univocity; that is, saying just one thing and saying it without ambiguity. If, on the other hand, we once allow an element of equivocation we would never really know whether what was being said was true or not. The second condition is that what is said really is true. To vary the example, if I say that the dog is black, then this is only true if the dog really is black. Even if the statement ‘the dog is black’ fulfils the condition of logical possibility, it is not true if the dog in question is a Golden, rather than a Black Labrador. This is what medieval philosophers meant when they maintained that truth is the adequation (or correspondence) between what is in the mind (mens) and the thing at issue (res). What is said or thought must, in an important sense, be the same as what is being spoken or thought about. The double condition for anything at all being true is therefore that the totality of all possibly true propositions must submit to the logical requirements of consistency and univocity and that there is a fundamental conformity between the mind that thinks and the world that is thought about. The basic claim in any system of identity, then, is that philosophy can show that this is indeed the case, that is, that we can construct a system of knowledge that is logically seamless and that represents the world as it really is.

But there is a further element in the picture that was of crucial importance to the German Idealists. For although they deviated from Kant at a number of points they broadly accepted his emphasis on the primacy of practical reason, that is, the will to bring about the highest good. In terms of the formula A=A this meant that the challenge was not just to give an account of knowledge (A) as merely offering a truthful reflection of how things really are (A) but of how, when A=the will, this relates to A=the object of willing. In fact it was precisely this active aspect of thought that provided the Idealists with the key they were looking for and that helped them to establish the principle of identity. They suggest that when we realize that the absolute is not primarily identifiable with a contemplative mind or a static state of being but with an active will, then – precisely then – we can see that its unity is a free act of self-affirmation. It can be at one with itself because it freely wills to be at one with itself. I may be able to acquire a true knowledge of the tree outside my window, but I didn’t choose that it should be there or that there should be trees in the world at all – but I can (it seems) choose to think about what I want to think about. If knowledge of external objects always implies a certain gap between knower and known or subject and object, wilful self-affirmation simply is the affirmation of the self as it is: I AM THAT I AM.

However, in the world in which we human beings live and move and have our being, freedom seems to be limited in all manner of ways. What I want to do is blocked or inhibited by a manifold of phenomena that stand over against me and that Fichte collectively referred to as the ‘Not-I’, including even my own mental habits and dispositions. Consequently, the absolute will that wills itself and its world in unbroken unity and self-identity can only appear under material and historical conditions as an infinite or progressive approximation. On the whole, however, the German Idealists glossed this situation in an essentially optimistic manner, portraying history as a history of freedom progressively gaining mastery over the Not-I (i.e., its material and social environment), and thereby revealing the world to be ‘a moral world-order’ physically structured in such a way as to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  God Is Being-Itself
• 2  Revolution
• 3  Revelation
• 4  Love
• 5  The Shaking of the Foundations
• Bibliography
• Index