Tillich

Works

One systematic theology and two short books that reached everyone else.

• The Courage to Be (1952) sets out the three anxieties — of fate and death, of emptiness and meaninglessness, of guilt and condemnation — and the self-affirmation that meets them.
• Systematic Theology (1951–1963) contains the method of correlation and the argument that God is not a being but the ground of being.
• Dynamics of Faith (1957) is where ultimate concern is stated most usably.
• The Socialist Decision (1933) was banned by the Nazi regime and is the reason he was dismissed and emigrated.

Central ideas

Four, and the first is the one that travels furthest from theology.

• Ultimate concern: whatever a person is unconditionally concerned with functions as their ultimate, so faith is a structure of concern rather than a set of beliefs. The category applies to a nationalist or a careerist as readily as to a believer, which is what makes it analytically usable.
• God as the ground of being rather than a being: a being among beings would be one more item in the world, and he took that to be idolatry rather than theism.
• The courage to be: self-affirmation in spite of what negates it, including the anxiety of meaninglessness, which he took to be the characteristic anxiety of his century.
• The God above God: what remains when the God of theism has been dissolved by doubt, reached through the courage to be rather than around it.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose ordinary readings soften or theologise them.

• Ultimate concern: an unconditional concern that functions as a person's ultimate. Not a strong preference and not a spiritual disposition.
• Ground of being: what makes beings possible, not the greatest of them. Not a metaphor for God and not a being at all.
• Courage: self-affirmation in spite of negation. Not bravery and not resilience.

Debates and disagreements

The generality is both the achievement and the objection.

• Whether a category that applies to anything anyone is unconditionally concerned with says anything determinate. Critics hold it dissolves religion into seriousness; defenders hold that is the finding rather than the failure.
• Whether the ground of being is theism, atheism, or a third thing. Both traditional theists and naturalists have claimed the account collapses into the other side.
• The method of correlation — philosophy asks and theology answers — is charged with rigging the questions so the answers fit.

Intellectual relationships

He works between German idealism, existentialism and depth psychology.

• Schelling is the philosophical ground, and the ground-of-being language comes from that tradition rather than from scripture.
• Kierkegaard and Heidegger supply the analysis of anxiety, and he is the member of this work's existential lineage who translates that analysis into a category usable without a confession.
• Otto, in this work's theological lineage, keeps the religious and non-rational framing Tillich generalises.
• The psychoanalytic culture of mid-century America, and his exchanges with it, shaped how The Courage to Be was written and read.
• Barth is the opposing theology: revelation against correlation, and the two are the century's standing alternative to each other.

How it changes this reading

Tillich is named in two lens lineages, Existential and Theological-spiritual, and he does the same job in both.

• Ultimate concern is the borrowing, and its usefulness is that it names a structure without requiring a metaphysics. Asking what someone is unconditionally concerned with is a question about the shape of a commitment rather than about belief.
• For the existential lens he is the member who makes Kierkegaard's category available to a reader who does not share Kierkegaard's faith — which is also exactly what Kierkegaard would have objected to.
• For the theological lens he supplies the one term in the lineage designed to be used without confession, which is why a work that is not making a religious claim can use it at all.
• The limit is that identifying an ultimate concern requires knowing what someone is unconditionally concerned with, and no record shows that. The category is a question to ask, not an answer a document can give.
• They are not evidence about anyone's faith, concerns, or courage.

Useful comparisons

He appears in two lineages and is the translator in each.

• Existential: Kierkegaard on the single individual and the leap, Tillich on ultimate concern and courage, Camus on the absurd held without resolution, May on the same vocabulary in clinical practice.
• Theological-spiritual: Tillich on ultimate concern, Otto on the numinous, Marion on saturation and the icon, Stace on a common core across mystical reports.
• In both he is the member whose category is built to be portable, which is a different kind of contribution from the others'.

Where the ideas meet

Across both lineages the same refusal recurs.

• None of these positions treats a life as a problem a system can solve on the person's behalf.
• All hold that something is encountered or confronted that exceeds the categories available for it.
• Each treats first-person report and lived situation as data rather than as symptom.

Where they part

Portability is exactly what the others in each lineage do not want.

• Kierkegaard's category is specifically Christian and specifically scandalous, and making it available without a confession is the generalisation he would have objected to most. Citing the two together as one existential position runs a position into its own domestication.
• Otto keeps the religious and non-rational framing that Tillich secularises, so in the theological lineage the two are moving in opposite directions from a shared starting point.
• Camus holds the absurd without resolution and Tillich's courage arrives at a God above God; the difference is whether anything is reached.

Limits

• An ultimate concern is identified by what someone is unconditionally concerned with, which no document establishes. The category poses a question rather than supplying an answer.
• Courage in his sense is an act of self-affirmation and cannot be read off behaviour or a record.

Criticisms

The objections are about determinacy and about method.

• Ultimate concern is broad enough that critics hold it names seriousness rather than religion, and therefore does not discriminate between cases.
• The ground of being has been read as collapsing into naturalism by theists and into theism by naturalists, which suggests the position is harder to occupy than to state.
• The method of correlation is charged with shaping the philosophical questions so that the theological answers fit them.
• The mid-century synthesis of theology, existentialism and depth psychology has aged unevenly, and the psychological material in particular reads as of its moment.

Common misreadings

Four uses these placements do not license.

• Using ultimate concern for a strong preference or a deeply held value, which drops the unconditionality that makes it a structural claim.
• Attributing an ultimate concern to a person from a record.
• Reading the ground of being as a metaphor for God, when the point is that it is not a being at all.
• Citing him and Kierkegaard as a single existential position, since portability is precisely what the earlier writer refused.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about anyone's faith, concern, or courage.
• It cannot identify what any person is unconditionally concerned with.