Sermon by Rev. Charles Eddis, 11 October 2009
Two weeks ago, on September 30, the Montreal Gazette published an eight-column obituary on a Unitarian minister in New York City. I was surprised and pleased that the Gazette should take such notice of one of my colleagues. It was about Forrester Church, minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan. The obituary ended quoting two definitions Forrester Church gave. The two definitions could be taken as summing up the essence of Paul Tillich in two sentences.
Here they are:
Religion is "our human response to the dual realities of being alive and having to die."
"God is not God's name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present on earth."
This morning I want to share with you a bit of Paul Tillich, known as Paulus by his friends. Tillich was, likely, the leading German-American theologian of the 20th century. Of late, he has come to mean more to me and speak to me more than any other thinker. He is a challenge for Unitarians. He can sound so Christian many Unitarians would dismiss him out of hand. That is a mistake. Tillich had no belief the whole world has been or ever will be saved by Jesus as the mediator between God and man. Other religions are just as valid as Christianity. He was close to the Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson. He believed revelation was not sealed. He believed every person should experience and think for himself or herself. Revelation was ongoing. His leading interpreter was the leading Unitarian theologian of the last century, James Luther Adams. Tillich once took Adams's daughter Eloise to lunch and confided to her, "I am the pope of the heretics."
Sophisticated Christian theologians are not always what they seem to be. And when you get to the core of Tillich's message, when he could wax eloquent and let his enthusiasm show, it was not about Christianity. It was about Thanksgiving, as I hope you will realize.
I begin, as I shall end with a Tillich story. One summer two Unitarian ministers I knew in Portland, Oregon, George McDonough and Ralph Barber, went back to San Francisco to take a summer course with Paul Tillich. Ralph Barber returned to Portland overwhelmed by Tillich. That November, Tillich appeared as the speaker for religious emphasis week at the University of Oregon. Barber, full of enthusiasm, dragged a reluctant McDonough off to hear his new-found idol.
Barber took in the lecture with adulating enthusiasm. George was impressed, but not transported. When Tillich finished speaking, nothing would do but that Barber had to linger to speak to Tillich. He got his chance. He fawned all over the man. "Dr. Tillich, you cannot imagine how great an influence you have had upon me," he told him. Tillich made some reply. Barber went on. McDonough cut into the conversation and said Tillich,
“Dr, Tillich, all this talk of reason and systematic thought is well and good, but I still like the song I sang as a child in my Catholic Sunday school: Jesus wants me for a sunbeam."
Tillich drew himself up, scowled, and, looking straight at George, said: "Jeshush duzz not vant you for a sunbeampf. Jeshush is daid."
Who was Tillich?
Paul Tillich grew up in a little medieval town in north Germany, Schoenfless. His father was a prominent Lutheran minister and a stark, intellectual, authoritarian Prussian. His mother was a sentimental gemuetlich schoolteacher. She seemed soft and gentle, but she was the head of the family.
Paulus grew up, a first child with younger sisters, emotionally attached to his mother. When he was sixteen, his mother suddenly died of cancer. Tillich felt abandoned and betrayed. In his grief he wrote the following poem:
Am I then I? who tells me that I am?
Who tells me what I am, what I shall become?
What is the world's and what is life's meaning?
What is being and dying on earth?
O abyss without ground, dark depth of madness!
Would that I had never gazed upon you and were sleeping like a child!
He received a thorough university education. In August 1914 he was a 28 year-old Lutheran minister in Berlin. Looking back on those days he recalled, "It still seemed possible to sit at the center of the world and be able to understand everything."
Rollo May, my favourite psychologist, used to tell Tillich that his mind was developed magnificently, but that his emotions had been left behind at the twelve-year-old level. All his life he wore his emotions on his face. He did not conceal them, however formal the occasion. He could not hide behind language. His English was not good enough to be vague. Besides, life was too worth living to hide or conceal immediate reactions.
Rollo May, who knew him and family well, after his death wrote that Tillich was, emotionally, a small boy seeking his mother, her love and approval. He was drawn to women, and they to him. One could say he was spiritual seducer with an imagination that would kindle a spark in many a woman. Over the years he formed a secretive intimacy with many women who felt they had a special bond with him, and they did. To one of them he wrote, "My only hope is that I have never too much violated the principle of agape transcends the anatomy of love." When he was dying in the Billings Hospital in Chicago in 1965 many women phoned.
His second wife Hannah of more than forty years said of him that he liked to stir up a witch's brew. All his life he lived on boundaries, between reality and imagination, theory and practice, theology and practice, Lutheranism and socialism, religion and culture, idealism and Marxism, to name but a few. He took risks. He lived Dionysian and thought Apollonian. That included sex, where he lived on the boundary with women. He liked good pornographic books and pictures, towards which he had a reverent attitude.
World War I broke out. Marrying hastily an older woman, the mother of a friend, he marched off as a chaplain to the front. There he was an army chaplain for the four years the war lasted. When he came home, he discovered his wife was pregnant by some one else. They were divorced.
What he saw in the war, he told an interviewer, "absolutely transformed me." First there was the impact of the "lower classes," with whom he was dealing for the first time: he began to think about their exploitation at the hands of the powers he had taken for granted – the landed aristocracy, the army and the church.
He continued:
"But the real transformation happened at the battle of Champagne in 1915. A night attack came, and all night long I moved among the wounded and the dying as they were brought in – many of them my close friends. All that horrible, long night I walked along the rows of dying men, and much of my German classical philosophy broke down – the belief that man could master cognitively the essence of his being, the belief in the identity of essence and existence….
"I remember sitting in the woods in France reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, as many other soldiers did, in a state of exaltation. This was the final liberation from heteronomy [making a god of something that was not God]. European nihilism carried Nietzsche's prophetic word that 'God is dead.' Well, the traditional concept of God was dead."
(Tillich's concept of God was not one that many people would accept, but one that atheists could. Indeed, Tillich argued that atheists who felt they had found a great truth affirmed God. Believers who had arguments and believed in the existence of God lacked serious understanding. Tillich stated the issue this way: "God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.")
In the chaos of postwar Germany, Tillich gathered with intellectuals to discuss the positive possibilities of Nietsche's proclamation of the death of God, the existentialism of Kierkegaard, and religious socialism. He divorced, and married an art student. His wife, Hannah, opened up to him the wonders of medieval and Renaissance painting and architecture.
When Hitler came to power in Germany, Tillich was the first Protestant to lose his job at a Germany university. The faculty at Union Theological Seminary invited him to come to New York and teach at Union. They each contributed five percent of their salary so he would get paid for a year and until his salary could be included in the regular budget.
He arrived in New York, resolving never to speak in German. He was then 47, and did not speak English. This created much respectful mystification among his students, as when he discussed waykoom for a whole hour and no student knew what he was talking about. The word was usually pronounced vacuum. Tillich, in his dry academic way, was probing the meaning of the absence of meaning in the postwar world he had known.
Two decades later, a Professor at Harvard University, Tillich watched Joseph Fletcher, a professor of Christian ethics, coming down the long wide steps of Widener Library, his arms full of books he intended to read on summer vacation. Tillich waited for Fletcher at the foot of the steps, on the solid ground of the Harvard Year. When Fletcher reached him, Tillich said to him, "Ach, Joe, vy do you haff to read dem pooks? Vat ve must do is tink!"
If you read his books, or his formal lectures, you find all he did was "tink." He was the driest speaker and writer. He told no tales, mentioned no books or events or people. He broke all the rules of presentation. All he did was "tink." He did it hard and long, probing the depths of whatever thought he excavated.
He wrote a whole book on the relationships of the ideas of love, power, and justice. He never mentioned any concrete issues that arise from them. But he certainly dealt, for a whole book, on the interplay between them. And he knew them all deeply, at first hand, in the turmoil of Germany. Ever since, I have never been able to think of one of them without thinking of the other two. A warning sound goes off inside me. Whenever I hear some one speak of love being the solution to human problems, my first thought is what is the role of power in this? What that of justice?
He wrote a whole book on faith and belief, what they are, why the are far more different than we often know. He once gave a lecture to psychiatrists on the meaning of faith. A few evenings later, some forty psychiatrists crowded into his living room in New York on folding chairs to spend an evening with him and his wife Hannah. One psychiatrist told James Luther Adams, who arrived late, "If anyone had told me a month ago that I would spend an evening in the home of a theologian, I would have told him that I was still in possession of self-control, indeed that he was a little crazy." (Faith, Tillich wrote, is a state of being grasped, Adams would say, what makes you tick. It is being possessed by something. Belief is possession of, - an idea, a supposed truth.)
Tillich had a faith. It was sometimes expressed through Christianity. Christianity for him was not the end, but the means, indeed for him an invaluable means, to the end, where faith lay. The epiphany which set him on his course was his reading of "The Madman" in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra after the nightmarish night of the Battle of Champagne. God, the idea of God, the belief in a god, died that night. Death had killed the idea of God, as it had for countless men that terrible night. Well could Tillich ponder the words of Heidigger, "Man is that creature who dies, and knows that he dies. His success as a human being rests on his acceptance of this fact in the core of his being."
In a sermon, "The Eternal Now," Tillich began the thought this way:
We speak of time in three ways or modes – the past, present, and future. Every child is aware of them, but no wise man has ever penetrated their mystery. We become aware of them when we hear a voice telling us: you will come to an end. It is the future that awakens us to the mystery of time. Time runs from the beginning to the end, but our awareness of time goes in the opposite direction. It starts with the anxious anticipation of the end.
Our awareness, each of us, of our own death is awareness of nonbeing. We do not ask questions about where we were before we were conceived and born. We are content to live with the thought that we did not exist at all. We are not content to live with the thought that, again, when we die we shall not exist at all, that we are frail candles who shine for one brief night, and then flicker out. An afterlife, reincarnation, heaven and hell, - such were illusions, for Tillich, beliefs that are false. There was a time we were not. The time will come when we shall no longer be. That is the reality. That is the threat of non-being. Santayana put it simply when he said, "The mere fact of having been born argues against immortality."
Yet something there is which is there, which does not exist, because it cannot cease to exist, whose existence cannot be proven. Many Unitarians might call it the ground of being. Tillich called it Being itself. It is beyond existence. It is that which is truly holy. Tillich, a theologian thinking long and hard about Christianity, found that Christianity made sense to him in terms of the question of being and not being. Buddhism centred around the question of suffering. Christianity centred around the question of birth and death,- Christmas, Good Friday, Easter. It is not, and never was, literally true. It is, however, rich with symbols that point to the larger truth of being and nonbeing.
Theologians are less blinded by belief than you might think. Tillich, when pressed, called himself an ecstatic naturalist. As a naturalist, he fitted in with the humanist philosophers at Columbia University. Many Unitarians, though by no means all, are naturalists. Naturalism is new or revolutionary. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides as early as the 12th wrote,
"Let no one think that in the days of the Messiah any of the laws of nature will be set aside, or any innovation be introduced into creation. The world will follow its normal course. The words of Isaiah: "And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid" (Is. 11:6) are to be understood figuratively, meaning that Israel will live securely among the wicked of the heathens who are likened to wolves and leopards…."
At root, Tillich was a mystic. Raised and educated a Christian, Christianity was, for him, the storehouse that furnished symbols to give voice to the reality that confronted him directly. That reality was not Christianity. It was something else, existence, the being alive and having to die. Christianity was artistic poetry, myth for us to employ as we looked at something else. For him, there was no point in seeking answers in other religions. Better it was to plumb the depths of whatever happened by chance to be one's own.
Years ago, around 1955, Tillich gave the Terry Lectures at Yale University. They were published in book form as The Courage To Be, the best book to begin with if you want to read Tillich. A young philosophy professor from the University of Toronto was visiting Yale at the time. He was invited to a dinner party at which Tillich was the featured guest. Having heard the lectures, he was eager to meet Tillich and ask him a few questions.
The dinner took place. Tillich was seated beside a woman from Germany with whom he got engrossed in a conversation for the whole evening. (That may have been a mistake for the hostess.)
Before he was forced by the Nazis to leave Germany, Tillich used to spend his summer vacations on the Baltic, on a large beach. For half the day, he would build a large sand castle, a platform four or five feet square, with a flat top. With his shovel, he would shape knife-sharp corners. Then he would put a deck chair on top of his sand castle, and there, for the rest of the day, he would sit in his chair, and gaze at the sea.
He lived all his life close to vast expanses of water: the Baltic, the Atlantic, Lake Michigan. Of the watery expanses he wrote,
“The experience of the infinite bordering on the finite suited my inclination toward the boundary situation and supplied my imagination with a symbol that gave substance to my emotions and creativity to my thought.”
“…There is another element to be found in the contemplation of the sea: its dynamic assault on the serene firmness of the land and the ecstasy of its gales and waves….The sea also supplied the imaginative element necessary for the doctrines of the Absolute as both ground and abyss of dynamic truth, and of the substance of religion as the thrust of the eternal into finitude. Nietzsche said that no idea could be true unless it was thought in the open air. Many of my ideas were conceived in the open and much of my writings done among trees or by the sea.”
He discovered that his dinner companion, too, had spent her summer vacations on the Baltic and sitting still had contemplated sea roll. She and Tillich were soulmates. They took all the time they could to try to express to each other the feelings and insights the experience gave them.
Too soon the time came when the guests were leaving. In a desperate attempt to gain some enlightenment, the professor from Toronto said to the guest of honour, "Professor Tillich, I enjoyed meeting you. I just wish we had had time to talk about the god who appears when God disappears." Tillich looked at him in surprise and said, "But that is what we have been talking about all evening."
"God is not God's name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present on earth."
Being itself; the ground of being.
Religion is "our human response to the dual realities of being alive and having to die."
One saying of Rollo May keeps coming back to my mind: "The present is all we ever really have." The present is where we can be aware of the mystery of being, the mystery and anxiety of non-being. In the present, if we know how and where to look, we can sense the power of being itself. Tillich tells us the more we are aware, the more we can know take all anxieties into ourselves, and at the same time find peace. That is the courage to be.
We should be thankful to be alive, and, for our own times, to be. Then we can all say the shortest prayer of all: thanks.
