382 - Tillich The Person: A Review Article

Tillich The Person: A Review Article
By Seward Hiltner

WITH his increasing popularity as a writer about the problems of meaning in our time, appealing perhaps equally to those who are still primarily oriented to at least liberal versions of the Judeo-Christian heritage and to those who set that heritage aside in favor of "becoming human," it is probable that Rollo May would eventually have written some kind of long article or book about the teacher be most revered, Paul Tillich. So far as I know, no other student of Tillichs retained such close and long-lasting contact over many years as May. In his preface, he says that Hannah Tillich urged him, ever since her husband's death in 1965, to write a biography of him. His decision, May continues, was to write only about the area where his life and that of Tillich "overlapped." Whether even this self-limited account would have been written and published now, bad it not been for Hannah Tillich's book, is doubtful. The latter was published on October 1, while May's book appeared on October 31.

Although May mentions Hannah Tillich at several points, he never alludes to her book or manuscript, although the manuscript had been in existence for some time and bad been read by some of her friends. Almost without exception, these friends attempted to persuade Hannah Tillich not to publish her book. It seems a reasonable inference that May's book is, in a sense, an attempt to provide another kind of picture of Tillich to counteract the effect that Hannah Tillich's book may have on at least many readers. But he does not so say; and I can only make this comment as a deduction. But the inference is supported by the complete omission (unless some cryptic reference escaped me) of reference to May in From Time to Time, even though the Mays and the Tillichs were long-term family friends over and above the long relationship between May and Tillich.

This is a review article of the two recently published books dealing with the private life of Paul Tillich: From Time to Time, by Hannah Tillich, New York: Stein & Day, 1973, 252 pp., $7.95; and Paulus, by Rollo May, New York: Harper & Row, 1973, 113 pp., $5.95.
Seward Hiltner is Professor of Theology and Personality at Princeton Theological Seminary. He has served as Consultant in Religion and Psychiatry for the Menninger Foundation. He is a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY and the author of many books, the most recent being Theological Dynamics (Abingdon, 1972).

383 - Tillich The Person: A Review Article

Just as Rollo May must have written at least some sections of his book with reluctance, and wisely decided to focus on that "area" where his life and Tillich"s "overlapped," I have decided, with a reluctance I confess quite openly, that I must write something, that it must be limited to those areas that overlap between my life and the lives of Paul and Hannah Tillich and of Rollo May, and that of course it must be far more abbreviated than May's 113 pages. The reason for the compulsion upon me is that I am now one of the few living persons concerned to relate theology and psychology who knew both the Tillichs and the Mays since, the late 1930s.

I

I first met Paul Tillich in a course at the University of Chicago in 1935. When I found that he was not yet really committed at Union Theological Seminary, I used my post as head of the Student Council to propose that the faculty try to get him full time. The silence from Dean Shirley Jackson Case and his colleagues was complete. After moving to New York in 1935 for what was to prove a fifteen-year stay, I met Tillich. But we did not become really acquainted until the so-called "New York Psychology Group," which met monthly for about five years beginning in 1940, got under way. Erich Fromm had been a guest at the annual "Week of Work" of the National Council on Religion in Higher Education. Some of us had found discussions with him so interesting that we wanted to continue, and Fromm agreed. I found myself chairing meetings that included Fromm, Tillich, Ruth Benedict, Gotthard Booth, David E. Roberts, Rollo May, Frances G. Wickes, and a number of others who have become distinguished in various ways. Many of our meetings were held in the Tillich apartment, and others in the apartment of Harrison and Grace Elliott-all at Union Seminary. I still have the summarized notes of those meetings.

During my last five years in New York, until 1950, I was a lecturer at Union; my wife and I lived in the Union area; and we and the Tillichs became family acquaintances. Even earlier, we bad become friends of the Mays. I talked with Tillich on occasion; and one summer, when he was away and I had no place to do the writing I wanted to do, be loaned me his Union office. Three or four years after I went to the University of Chicago, and for a brief time served as Acting Dean of the Federated Theological Faculty, I was Tillichs principal host as he gave us the month of January. I was able to persuade higher powers to let us use the University's largest lecture hall for week-day lectures by Tillich at 11:30 a.m., something unprecedented for a series. Of course people came from all over the University, which was also unheard of. Since Tillich was about to retire from Union, I proposed that Chicago offer him a contract with appropriate compensation. I was turned down-and

384 - Tillich The Person: A Review Article

then remembered this was a repeat performance. Tillich did return to Chicago, but only after his five years as University Professor at Harvard.

My first book was Religion and Health, published in 1943. Tillich studied it carefully, and referred to it frequently in a long article published about a year later in the Review of Religion. Although acknowledging appreciation for the practical matters he said he had learned from my book, he took me to task (with considerable justice at that time) for not having worked through the basic theoretical concerns. Shortly afterward, I included a study of part of Tillichs thought in my own doctoral essay; he read the copy and gave it his blessing. So he did teach me even though I was not his student as May was.

II

Rollo May's primary way of conveying his understanding of the complexity of Paul Tillich is through the preoccupation with "ecstatic reason or "transcendent reason." This approach rejected, in philosophy, the two strong trends of the time, either positivism or linguistic philosophy on the one side (which Tillich called "toolsharpening"), and unqualified existentialism in reaction. May correctly sees Tillich as having, in attitude, more kinship with the Greek philosophers before Plato than with Plato and Aristotle. He recognizes of course the immediate source of his philosophical roots in Schelling particularly and German idealism generally. Since Tillich began to teach theology as such only after coming to the United States (a point May does not make), May's theological comments about him are principally to suggest that his is a genuinely Christian theology, against the appraisal of some critics, and that his "God above God" is a meaningful concept.

May correctly emphasizes Tillichs attempt to relate theology to virtually everything, to universalize it so far as possible, not by imposition but by showing that it contains, at least in principle, answers to the questions of ultimate concern as asked by any reflective culture in any age. But May himself went largely the existentialist route; and so he can quote without critique, from Tillich, about God, "If he is existence, be cannot be essence." Of course some religious people were disturbed when Tillich said God did not "exist." But alleging that God is "being itself" in the philosophical mode, and our inevitable "ultimate concern" in the religious mode, may really say nothing at all unless one's philosophical presuppositions are essentialist to begin with. I myself see Tillich as, in one way, the last of the great essentialists both philosophically and theologically; and a bridge to what must be, whether under the largely misunderstood "process" label or some other term, the basic substructure of such thinking from now on.

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May's principal concern is with understanding, so far as his contacts and wisdom could make possible, some of the complexities of Tillich the person. Without doing so mechanically, what May emerges with is a man of paradoxes, in virtually every realm of life and thought. He likens Tillich to Faust and believes Tillich sometimes thought of this analogy himself. Highly disciplined in the logic of his thinking, he was nevertheless an emotional open book. May says he would have been a poor poker player. He had a unique "Presence," which popular jargon would call "charisma," yet he was seldom without anxiety and even depression. An adult who could be "psychiatrist to the psychiatrists," Tillich nevertheless remained in some respects emotionally "at the twelve-year-old level." He made every one with whom he talked feel that his uniqueness was being perceived and often brought out; and yet, in showing that Tillich was not at home with any closeness that involved real extension of time, whether sexual or otherwise, May implies (I assert more strongly) that it was the "universal" potential more than the particularism that Tillich saw in people.

III

At one point in her book, Hannah Tillich says that her husband, during his later years, complained when he could not remember his own telephone number. He once told me that he had trouble remembering anything that did not lead to generality, and that, in his doctoral examination of 1912, even though he knew all about the man on whom he had written, he bad, for a time forgotten the name. May records Tillichs insistence, when helping on May's doctoral essay on anxiety, that he study everything about the subject. Mays book on anxiety was and remains a genuine contribution; but in locating anxiety so closely with loss of love, as against Freud's more comprehensive conception of anxiety as an alarm (thus valid all the way from very small things to those most ultimate), May presaged what seem to me the distortions of Tillichs understanding of anxiety in The Courage To Be, which sees "neurotic anxiety" as "ontological anxiety" under "special conditions." Verbally, this offers a unified theory of anxiety; but dynamically, it leaves the important questions untouched.

No doubt because a considerable part of Hannah Tillichs book is about the sexual life (behavior, fantasy, motivation, and much else) of herself and her husband, May offers a theory about Tillich in this realm. It begins by showing the channeling of Tillich's eros and libido, until after his mother's death when Tillich was eighteen, as focused around the quest for knowledge, with all Tillichs brain power for learning plus his creative imagination. Tillich first married an older woman, who was found, upon his return from the

386 - Tillich The Person: A Review Article

first World War, to be pregnant by another man. For several years be was a bachelor. The social conditions of the pre-Hitler period became worse; and in Tillich's kind of circle, part of the compensatory reaction was more decadent than even an American Scott Fitzgerald could have understood. It is clear that, until his late years, Tillich was involved with a multitude of women, most of them sexually as well as in other ways (philosophic and passionate love letters seem to have been a regular feature). May suggests several reasons for this kind of activity, such as trying to live out a delayed adolescence, expressing more "sensuality" than sexuality (the many references to touching, etc., are like the left-wing of the modern encounter movement), his actually having very strong sexual drives, his capacity to attract women like flies, but above all his "seeking his lost mother." May has the courage even to mention Tillich's sadism when confronted by a recalcitrant woman.

I am sure May must be right on most counts. But even if May is correct, it may be more important that Tillich approached women "ontologically," as he did everything. Although May once mentions "archetype," he does not draw the conclusion that (as Carl Jung might have seen it) Tillich was attracted by the "generality" or "archetypical" in women, and could thus genuinely give more depths of himself in even a brief relationship than most men can in a whole married life; but that, at the same time, very little that is concretely particularistic in any woman (except his wife) was actually being attended to. Both May and Tillich's wife confirm Tillich's secrecy and privateness about his affairs. But Hannah Tillich can hardly be doubted that he would deny flatly in the morning what he had readily admitted at midnight.

IV

Except for indicating that there might be some truth in what one of Tillich's woman friends said, "He had enough eros for all," and suggesting that Tillich's wife and children suffered most just because of this, May does not discuss Hannah Tillich. In the sexual parts of her book, a not inconsiderable segment of her revelations, there is the suggestion that she had had more experience and fewer inhibitions in the sexual realm than be at the time she met Paul. Her first introduction to genitality was homosexual; and the reader is never quite sure whether she is boasting, confessing, or actually saying something much more than sex-namely, that she fought from the start of her life to be a genuine individual, that at rare times she became such, but that complexities of the man she married (Paul was her second husband) tended to thwart her creativity. The Tillichs never engaged in group sex in the modern sense of foursomes and the like. But Hannah reports having bad lovers until later years of her life, her relation with a few of them lasting

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over considerable periods of time, which seems to have been true of her husband in only one or two instances.

In the Union summer school of 1949, both Tillich and I were teaching courses. Hannah came to several of my lectures. On the day I presented my lecture on sex, both Tillichs appeared. My intent then, as now, was to construct a Christian sex ethic faithful to the basic freedom and love motifs of Christian thought, but brought up to date by modem knowledge, and above all not so encompassed in don'ts and legalisms that the holistic element Christianity inherited from the Jews would obscure the joy, positive depth, and genuine humanity to be found both in the development of sexual identity and in actual sexual experience itself when responsibly undertaken. After the lecture, I managed to ask Tillich if he had any comment or criticism. His reply was, "What pleased me most was what you did not say." May reports him as asking in later life, "Was my erotic life a failure, or was it a daring way of opening up now human possibilities?" May opts for the latter. I am a little less sure that a fresh flower, even in a crannied wall, every day, is an effective way to break the unduly prurient and legalistic bonds of our theological past.

Hannah Tillich's book, as a whole, is much more about Hannah Tillich than it is about her husband. It leaves me with, above everything else, a sense of pathos. Strongly implying that her influence was large in breaking down the superego of her husband's strict upbringing on matters like sex, she nevertheless never felt that he was wholly with her until their very latest years together. Believing all her life that she had creative talents for writing poetry and prose and for painting, she presents here both prose and poetry.

The book is such a mèlange that I find any attempt to evaluate it blocked by this unlived part (until after her husband's death) of her potentiality. Both May and Hannah Tillich underscore the tremendous effort Paul Tillich put into his work. If he read little in his last twenty years or so, it was because his astonishing memory already had the materials he needed; and his work was organizing and getting them down. Except for her systematic cultivation of her body through methods that included yoga, Hannah Tillich gives the impression of lack of the self-discipline that would have been needed to make her into a first-rate creative writer. She clearly had the brains. Perhaps it was the culture in the country of her youth that prevented her from working, all along, at her own kind of creativity while her husband worked at his. If she had done so, this book would have been better than it is. Although it opens a Pandora's box about her husband which, without this, might never have been put on paper by any one, it actually reveals more about her than about her husband. And the center of that revelation is not sexual, marital, or anything else in particular-but the ambiv-

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alent emotions of a woman of genuine talent who, although not without happy and even ecstatic periods in her life, makes here an ambiguous effort at expressing the creativity that remained so long undisciplined and unexercised.

V

On "the boundary" as he always was about everything, Tillich is rightly shown by May as consistent in his life with what he said and believed including the approach of death. On the morning of the day he died, Tillich said, "This is dying day." I am not surprised that Hannah Tillich avoids reference to the grandiose tomb and memorial erected by a wealthy woman friend in New Harmony, Indiana. I am a bit shocked that May notes only that Tillich had approved the enterprise.

Both Tillichs and May seem to me to share a common characteristic (of which we all have some); and I am afraid I must be a bit Freudian to name it-narcissism. May says Tillich had a "high degree of centeredness in himself." What May means is that, because he was transparent, Tillich was open to others. I am afraid the companion meaning cannot be omitted, that things and people and institutions can be ignored if they do not point toward one's own centered interest. In Tillich, that meant something archetypal, ultimate, ontological. But while this may produce a broad spectrum, it can rule out many things important to most people. Imagine Tillich at a routine faculty meeting! Hannah Tillich was impatient with the church, and indeed most institutions, from her adolescence. May's institutional connections have always played a minor role in his life.

If both theology and philosophy do have some right to say that, rightly understood and felt and experienced, concreteness and universality are indispensable to each other, then under what conditions can inattentiveness to either, or to the relation of one to the other, produce a "demonic" effect? In different ways, Tillich, Jung, and Whitehead have all wrestled with this question, each with some assumptions not shared by the others. It is possible that May is right, that Tillich's ideas may go into hibernation for a time, to be revived later on. Or he may become a victim, as Whitehead already is, and Jung never had a chance to be, of our basic American anti-intellectualism, which persists even in the realm of academe no less than in the church and other institutions of our society. But when fighting anti-intellectualism is confused with fighting or ignoring the inherent needs for structure through human institutions, then we are in danger of fighting a war only with snipers. Theologizing and philosophizing need churches, universities, seminaries, and other institutions, as well as thinkers, researchers, lecturers, and writers.