"The Ultimate Concern"

"With Dewey, Whitehead, Russell, and Santayana stands a man whom future generations probably will pronounce no whit their inferior..."; "like Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Schleicrmacher, he gathers up the strands of all that is best in secular thought, and unites them with the truths of God's self-disclosure"; "he has my vote for possessing one of the most enormous brains in the world"; these statements--the first two by editors Charles Kegley and Robert Bretall and the third by the Rev. George A. Buttrick, Preacher to the University--all refer to Paul Johannes Tillich, Protestant theologian and one of Harvard's six University Professors.

Tillich hardly looks like a theologian. A stocky man with long steel-gray hair, clear-rimmed eye-glasses, and square features, he has an emphatically this-worldly air. He might be a lawyer, a businessman, or, with his soft but colorful accent, a German diplomat.

Tillich's refusal to look like a theologian does not surprise his professional colleagues, however. Throughout his career, many of them contend, he has refused to act like a theologian either.

Most Protestant theologians, for example, are not out-and-out existentialists. Most have not actively indulged in politics on behalf of socialist causes. And most will not nonchalantly remark, when asked about such unusual interests: "Oh yes, I've always been quite unorthodox."

Actually it is just these far-flung secular interests, drawn together in an attempt "to relate all cultural realms to the religious center," that make Tillich's theology as appealing as it is to modern America. His emphasis on existentialism, expressed in such sermons as "Man Against Mass Society" and in his undergraduate course on "Religion and Culture," has particularly attracted college students who, as the Professor says, "have been disillusioned by science." And in his four months at Harvard, according to the Rev. Frederic Kellogg of Christ Episcopal Church, "Tillich has crystallized the great religious interest that was already here."

Yet for a long while--67 years, to be exact--it looked as though Tillich and the University would never get together. Born in 1886 in Starzeddel, Prussia, the theologian recalls that as early as the eighth grade it was "my dream" to be a scholar. He studied theology and philosophy at various German universities, became both a Ph.D. and an ordained minister of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, and then in 1914, caught up by the excitement of war, he volunteered to serve as a chaplain in the German army. About two weeks in the front lines were enough to quench his enthusiasm. He remembers writing his father that "this is a new type of war that will mean the end of present European civilization." Tillich now sees in that letter "a moment of vision," for he believes that the First World War did ruin the then-existing civilization of Germany and France.

Weltschmerz was not the only new attitude that Tillich derived from his four years of war service. Class conflict within Germany was becoming more and more pronounced, and within the young minister there "broke out ecstatically" a sympathy with the cause of social revolution. This feeling led him, during the twenties, to participate actively in political affairs. Meanwhile, he held several chairs of theology and philosophy, and developed his interests in psychology, the visual arts, and existentialism. In January, 1933, at the University of Frankfurt, he one day gave a lecture entitled "Heil Hitler," in which he analyzed the psychological appeal of the rising Nazi party. The next day Hitler came to power, and Tillich, fired immediately, took refuge on an island off the coast of Denmark.

Months later, at the invitation of Reinhold Nicbuhr, he came to New York to join the faculty at Union Theological Seminary.

Tillich's physical immigration to America was accomplished easily, but his linguistic transition was more difficult, since he arrived in New York at the age of 47 with virtually no knowledge of English. During his first year at Union he took English lessons twice a week from one of his students and wrote his lectures first in German. "The man really went through torture," Nicbuhr says. He recalls that since Tillich's theology is quite abstract, when one student complained that he couldn't understand Tillich's English lectures, another would reassure him: "That's all right. He can't be understood in German either."

In time, of course, Tillich conquered the language, and otherwise adjusted himself to American life. In 1954 he had reached Union's retirement age, and was about to withdraw to his Long Island home. President Pusey stepped in, however, and with the offer of a University Professorship finally succeeded in bringing Paul Tillich to Harvard.

Tillich's faculty associates here, like everyone who knows him, are constantly amazed by the scope and energy of his mind. "It's a marvel that interests as diverse as his can be united in one mind without pulling it apart," one colleague has said. The point is, however, that for Tillich such interests as psychology, politics, art, and philosophy are not diverse. According to his theology they are all vital aspects of religion, and in studying them he is actually concentrating on just this one subject--the "ultimate concern" of his life.

With the spirit of the true existentialist, moreover, Tillich not only thinks about these aspects of life, but throws himself as actively as possible into each of them. Even in the area of food and drink, he has little patience with the ministry's traditional attitude of teetotaling and asceticism, and is, in fact, something of a gourmet. As one young faculty member admiringly puts it, the eminent theologian is "a good man to share a bottle of wine with."

Tillich remains generally unaffected by all the praise he has received. "If someone charged him in public with having an intellect," Buttrick has said, "he'd be terribly embarrassed." His sense of humor usually remains latent, but it erupts perhaps once a month with some such example of quiet Tillichian humor as: "In Germany the parents bring up the child; in America the child brings up the parents. I moved from Germany to America, so I lose both ways." Or, there was the slightly irreverent remark that Tillich made after the death of an eminent religious philosopher: "Such a shame. And he understood my theology!"

Though modest, Tillich is not self-effacing. Like any man devoted to his work, he draws happiness and inspiration from the knowledge that he is appreciated. Last Monday, for example, he delivered a speech at Princeton before more than 500 undergraduates, and returned to his Semitic Museum office the next day in an obviously exhilarated state. He kept talking about the "wonderful enthusiasm" that the audience had shown. Yet when his secretary tried to pin him down by asking just what kind of enthusiasm, Tillich could only hesitate. Finally he admitted in an unconscious summary of his whole life: "Well, they started applauding in the middle of the speech and just kept on applauding."