Retrieving the Radical Tillich: His Legacy and Contemporary Importance 9781137380838, 9781349677672, 9781137373830, 2014047626, 4820152300, 1137380837

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Retrieving the Radical Tillich

Radical Theologies Radical Theologies is a call for transformational theologies that break out of traditional locations and approaches. The rhizomic ethos of radical theologies enable the series to engage with an ever-expanding radical expression and critique of theologies that have entered or seek to enter the public sphere, arising from the continued turn to religion and especially radical theology in politics, social sciences, philosophy, theory, cultural, and literary studies. The post-theistic theology both driving and arising from these intersections is the focus of this series.

Series Editors Mike Grimshaw is associate professor of Sociology at Canterbury University in New Zealand. Michael Zbaraschuk is lecturer at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and visiting assistant professor at Pacific Lutheran University. Joshua Ramey is visiting assistant professor at Haverford College. Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism By Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins The Apocalyptic Trinity By Thomas J. J. Altizer Foucault/Paul: Subjects of Power By Sophie Fuggle A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought By Anthony Paul Smith On Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise: A Symposium Edited by Philip Goodchild The Counter-Narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music: Songs of Fear and Trembling Edited by Mike Grimshaw Theology after the Birth of God: Atheist Conceptions in Cognition and Culture By F. LeRon Shults Theopoetics of the Word: A New Beginning of Word and World By Gabriel Vahanian; Foreword by Noëlle Vahanian Economics in Spirit and Truth: A Moral Philosophy of Finance By Nimi Wariboko Retrieving the Radical Tillich: His Legacy and Contemporary Importance Edited by Russell Re Manning

Retrieving the Radical Tillich His Legacy and Contemporary Importance

Edited by

RUSSELL RE MANNING

RETRIEVING THE RADICAL TILLICH

Copyright © Russell Re Manning, 2015. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-38083-8

All rights reserved. First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-67767-2 DOI 10.1057/9781137373830

ISBN 978-1-137-37383-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Retrieving the radical Tillich : his legacy and contemporary importance / edited by Russell Re Manning. pages cm.—(Radical theologies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Tillich, Paul, 1886–1965—Influence. 2. Death of God theology. 3. Theology, Doctrinal—History—20th century. I. Re Manning, Russell, editor. BX4827.T53R48 2015 230.092—dc23

2014047626

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Series Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction The Real Tillich Is the Radical Tillich Russell Re Manning

1

Part I Tillich’s Radical Legacy 1 A Homage to Paulus Thomas J. J. Altizer 2

23

Paul Tillich and the Death of God: Breaking the Confines of Heaven and Rethinking the Courage to Be Daniel J. Peterson

31

3 God Is a Symbol for God: Paul Tillich and the Contours of Any Possible Radical Theology Richard Grigg

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4 The Nemesis Hex: Mary Daly and the Pirated Proto-Patriarchal Paulus Christopher D. Rodkey

65

5 Parataxis and Theonomy: Tillich and Adorno in Dialogue Christopher Craig Brittain

81

6

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Peacemaking on the Boundary Matthew Lon Weaver

Part II Tillich and Contemporary Radical Theologies 7 The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Radical, Impure Tillich Mike Grimshaw

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Contents Socialism’s Multitude: Tillich’s The Socialist Decision and Resisting the US Imperial Mark Lewis Taylor

133

9 Changing Ontotheology: Paul Tillich, Catherine Malabou, and the Plastic God Jeffrey W. Robbins

159

8

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Can There Be a Theology of Disenchantment? Speculative Realism, Correlationism, and Unbinding the nihil in Tillich Thomas A. James

179

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Depth and the Void: Tillich and Žižek via Schelling Clayton Crockett

193

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The Critical Project in Schelling, Tillich, and Goodchild Daniel Whistler

209

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Radical Apologetics: Paul Tillich and Radical Philosophical Atheism Russell Re Manning

233

Bibliography

249

Notes on Contributors

265

Index

269

Series Preface

Radical Theologies encompasses the intersections of constructive theology, secular theology, death of god theologies, political theologies, continental thought, and contemporary culture. For too long, radical theology has been wandering in the wilderness, while other forms of theological discourse have been pontificating to increasingly smaller audiences. However, there has been a cross-disciplinary rediscovery and turn to radical theologies as locations from which to engage with the multiplicities of the twenty-first-century society, wherein the radical voice is also increasingly a theologically engaged voice with the recovery and rediscovery of radical theology as that which speaks the critique of “truth to power.” Radical Theologies reintroduces radical theological discourse into the public eye, debate, and discussion by covering the engagement of radical theology with culture, society, literature, politics, philosophy, and the discipline of religion. Providing an outlet for those writing and thinking at the intersections of these areas with radical theology, Radical Theologies expresses an interdisciplinary engagement and approach that was being undertaken without a current series to situate itself within. This series—the first dedicated to radical theology—is also dedicated to redefining the very terms of theology as a concept and practice. Just as rhizomic thought engages with multiplicities and counters dualistic and prescriptive approaches, this series offers a timely outlet for an expanding field of “breakout” radical theologies that seek to redefine the very terms of theology. This includes work on and about the so-labeled death of god theologies and theologians who emerged in the 1960s and those who follow in their wake. Other radical theologies emerge from what can be termed underground theologies and also a/theological foundations. All share the aim and expression of breaking out of walls previously ideologically invisible.

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Acknowledgments

This volume is a collaborative enterprise, and I am primarily grateful to all those who have contributed chapters to the book. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with such an accommodating set of radicals. The original idea for this book came from a conversation with Mike Grimshaw following his contribution to a session of the Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion, and Culture group at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) Annual Meeting in San Francisco in 2011. In subsequent sessions, this same group has been the venue for earlier versions of a number of the chapters in the present volume. I wish to thank my co-chair Sharon Burch for indulging my predilection for all things “radical” as we planned these sessions. The AAR Tilllich group has been a rich resource for those Tillichians, and others, convinced that Tillich still has something to offer contemporary scholarship. I am grateful to Rob James and Mary-Ann Stenger for their vision in reviving the group and to Rachel Sofia Baard for serving with me for a term as co-chair. Jonathan Z. Smith has noted that Tillich is the “unacknowledged theoretician of [the] entire enterprise” of the AAR and it is, thus, fitting that its annual meeting act as the incubator for work on Tillich such as the present volume (and equally forthcoming work on the engagement with Tillich by Pentecostal theologians). This book finds its home in the Palgrave Macmillan Radical Theologies series and I am deeply grateful to the series editors, Mike Grimshaw, Joshua Ramey, and Michael Zbaraschuk, as well as to Burke Gerstenschlager, the editor for Philosophy and Theology. I also want to thank the anonymous readers, whose reports encouraged me to take the book on and pointed me in new directions; I hope the final result lives up to their expectations. I have been fortunate to discuss the ideas behind the book with colleagues and students at Aberdeen; in particular, I am grateful to Matt Burdette for his incisive and critical comments. The book is dedicated to Amelia Beatrice: a new beginning. November 6, 2014 Bath Spa University

Introduction The Real Tillich Is the Radical Tillich Russell Re Manning

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) is perhaps best known as a liberal theologian of mediation, whose famous method of correlation aims to respond to humanity’s existential questions with answers drawn from the Christian message. Key concepts such as ultimate concern, the New Being, and the sacred depths of culture have been influential and have powerfully informed the liberal theological agenda of mainstream developments in the second half of the twentieth century. Notable instances include theologians associated with Chicago (such as David Tracey and, more recently, William Schweiker), as well as a diverse range of thinkers in the fields of theological engagement with culture (e.g., much recent work in theology and film) and the sciences (including figures such as John Haught and Philip Clayton). Indeed, as Jonathan Z. Smith has recently noted, Tillich’s influence (albeit often unacknowledged) lies behind the very enterprise of the American Academy of Religion—the world’s largest forum for scholarly work in theology and religious studies. Nearly 50 years after his death in October 1965, Tillich has become an establishment thinker, a safe (albeit never entirely uncontroversial!) exemplar of mid-twentieth-century theological liberalism, untroubled by the social and intellectual developments that have provoked the most recent generation of philosophical theologians to take up increasingly extreme and polarized stances. From the reactionary theo-politics of post-liberalism and Radical Orthodoxy to the radical secular theologies of John D. Caputo and Mark C. Taylor (not forgetting the equally radical anti-theologies of the so-called “new atheism” and the “newer atheisms” of contemporary continental philosophy), the current theological landscape is dominated by the notion of radicality. Given his reputation, it comes then as no surprise that Paul Tillich is barely present in this new situation.

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This collection aims to address the absence of Tillich’s thought to contemporary radical philosophical theologies by retrieving the radical Tillich, whose explosive mix of prophetic critical Protestantism, revolutionary religious socialism, ecstatic rational mysticism, and avant-garde cultural progressivism mark him out as a truly radical thinker for today’s radical situation. In this Introduction I want to set the scene for the retrieval of the radical Tillich by returning to the central concerns of Tillich’s own thought and by re-revisiting some of his key works as those of a radical thinker engaged in a series of ambitious and unprecedented revisions and reformulations of the nature and task of Christian theology in the twentieth century. I mark four central moments of Tillich’s radical theology: his revolutionary manifesto for the reformulation of theology as theology of culture; his dialectical critical religious socialism (in particular, as he formulated it to confront the quasi-religion of Nazism in the early 1930s); his thoroughgoing overhaul of the idea of faith (in particular, as developed in his important works from the 1950s, The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith); and his increasingly pressing engagements with non-Christian religions (there are, of course, others, many of which are taken up in the chapters that follow). This Introduction—ranging from some of Tillich’s earliest to his final writings—will show forth Tillich as a radical theologian, strongly marked, but never fully determined, by the urgent critical demands of his time. From the crisis of German cultural and religious life in ruins after the horrific defeat of the First World War to the new realities of religious pluralism, Tillich’s theological responses were always profoundly ambivalent, impure, and disruptive, and never merely safely correlative. Far from the dominant image of Tillich as the lovable avuncular émigré with tremendous charisma and a terrible accent, whose thought collapses everything in to a comfortable liberal accommodation, in its place reemerges the troubled and troubling figure of the radical Tillich.

Theology of Culture Is the Real Radical Theology In 1919 Paul Tillich delivered a lecture to the Kant-Gesellschaft of Berlin, in which he made a revolutionary proposal for a revision of the nature and task of theology.1 Fresh from the horrors of the First World War, Tillich was struck by the increasingly polarized situation of religion and culture and by what he felt to be the mutually destructive consequences for both parties. In response to the “intolerable gap” between religion and culture, Tillich proposed the reformulation of theology as “theology of culture.” In

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this time of a widespread sense of crisis, Tillich’s proposal was a surprising one—and one that differed markedly from that of the self-proclaimed “theology of crisis” that has now come to dominate our historiographies of the development of twentieth-century theology.2 What marks Tillich’s desire for a “solution” to the fractured state of religious-cultural life as unique—and what makes it of such importance to our contemporary situation—was his radical assessment of the true challenge facing the future of theology: not, as we have come to accept, the loss of faith confronted by the challenge of assertive, autonomous, secular philosophy and science, but rather the rise of an excess of faith (in both its religious and cultural guises). Tillich’s early, radical project is designed precisely to combat this surging pietistic positivism in defense of a synthetic philosophical theology that blurs the boundaries between disciplines and disrupts the certainties of the tribalism characteristic of the modern world.3 Tillich’s project of theology of culture, first explicitly stated in its manifesto form in his Kulturvotrag and enacted throughout his theological career both before and after 1919, entails the displacement of theology, which no longer has an object of its own study. Theology, for Tillich, cannot be the study of “God” as this would imply that God were an object in the world amenable to investigation. Here, the importance of Kant’s rejection of the possibility of speculative knowledge of God is clear: God cannot be an object of knowledge and as a result, theology does not have God as its subject. At this point in most narratives of the progress of theology after Kant, reference is made to Schleiermacher and what has come to be designated the “liberal” tradition of Protestant theology in the nineteenth century. Schleiermacher, it is suggested, offers the only viable alternative for a genuinely critical postKantian theology (i.e., one that wishes to remain faithful to the philosophical developments of Kant’s thought while continuing to develop substantive theology) by accepting the rejection of speculative theology and embracing instead the so-called “subjective turn” of modern thought. No longer God, but faith (piety) is the subject of theology; no longer the science of God “in Himself,” but God “for us,” theology thus becomes equivalent to Glaubenslehre, or the teachings of the Christian religion. It is, it is assumed, a short step from Schleiermacher’s engagement with the “cultured despisers” of religion in the name of the “feeling of absolute dependence” to Tillich’s correlating theology of culture informed by his guiding notion of “ultimate concern.” The line from Schleiermacher, via Troeltsch and late nineteenthcentury Kulturprotestantismus, to Tillich is, it seems intuitive and unavoidable—and clearly distinguishable from the allegedly more radical assertive alternative of theological resistance to its Kantian restrictions, associated with the counter-cultural blasts of those such as Hamman, Kierkegaard, Ritschl, and most notably, of course, Karl Barth.

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Here is not the place to develop this argument in full, but my suggestion is that this “liberal vs radical” dichotomy that dominates the historiography of the development of twentieth-century theology is profoundly unhelpful.4 Yes, of course, there are lines of continuity from Schleiermacher through Troeltsch to Tillich and yes, of course, the assertions of theological independence that characterize the Kierkegaard-Ritschl-Barth line differ markedly from the desire for synthesis typical of the so-called liberals. Yet, the real picture is far more complex that this either-or portrayal allows for and central to this complexity is the vexed question of where the truly radical alternative lies. Part of the answer, I submit, can be found in Tillich’s proposal that theology become a theology of culture. Tillichian theology of culture is not the heir to Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre, which in fact finds a more obvious successor in Barth’s project of Church Dogmatics. For both Barth and Schleiermacher (both interestingly Reformed Protestant theologians), the key to the possibility of theology is faith and the fundamental task of the theologian is one of fidelity to the confessed piety of her church.5 By sharp contrast, for Tillich, theology of culture has no determinate subject—and certainly not “religion,” in any narrow sense. Instead of accepting the Kantian restriction on theological aspiration by turning inward toward the church and its confession, Tillich’s is the bold, assertive—radical—move to affirm the universal reach of theology in its relocation from religion to culture. If theology as theology of culture has no particular subject of its own, then everything becomes its subject. By moving it beyond God and beyond piety, Tillich takes theology into new and unchartered waters. Theology of culture is the real radical theological alternative of the twentieth century—and this is Tillich’s real theology.

Radical Religious Socialism In 1929, Tillich was appointed professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the young Goethe University in Frankfurt very much against the wishes of some, including Hans Cornelius, whom he replaced. Cornelius was highly critical of Tillich’s major publication to that point, his 1923 book The System of the Sciences, in which he had tried (with admittedly limited success) to present a defense of his revisionary account of the nature of theology within a comprehensive account of the scientific endeavor.6 Cornelius found the book “banal” and “unclear” and it has certainly not been one of Tillich’s most widely read works. The same fate, unfortunately, and for very different reasons, befell Tillich’s next major publication, written and published during his exceptionally fruitful time at Frankfurt. The Socialist Decision was published in 1933 and while its initial impact was significant

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(most notably in effectively bringing Tillich’s career in Germany to an end), it has not had the enduring significance it deserves.7 Perhaps, however, its time is now at hand. Certainly, The Socialist Decision is Tillich’s most developed work explicitly in political theology and is a clear testament to the radicality of his theological vision. What makes Tillich’s political theology of interest is, above all, his insistence, stemming directly from his conception of theology as theology of culture, that there can be no clear demarcation between the political and the theological. This is not to say that the two collapse into each other, but rather to affirm that there are, for Tillich, direct and unavoidable commitments entailed by his otherwise somewhat abstract seeming theology. His is a theology that provokes decision. Unlike so many theological ventures into politics, Tillich’s is far from an attempt to “baptize” a particular political stance or party with the aura and authority of religion. He does use the term religious socialism and, yet here again, the description is meant in the broadest possible sense (as indeed is his use of the term socialism). What makes Tillich’s religious socialism radical is neither that he took a left wing stance that synthesized political and theological analysis, nor indeed that he was courageous enough to do so in 1933, although both of these are significant. Rather, Tillich’s political theology of the socialist decision is radical—and remains radical for us today in very different circumstances—because it seems to have transcended the pieties of both the churches and the political parties. Tillich’s political theology subverts the certainties of both the political and the theological, showing, for instance, that the roots of the political protest of socialism lie in the prophetic tradition of theology and, at the same time, that the future of theological protest (what he calls the “Protestant principle” of commitment to the First Commandment that “there is no synthesis possible between God and the idols”) is to be found in the decision for socialism.8

The Crisis of Faith There is hardly a word in the religious language, both theological and popular, which is subject to more misunderstandings, distortions, and questionable definitions than the word “faith.” It belongs to those terms which need healing before they can be used for the healing of men. Today the term “faith” is more productive of disease than of health. It confuses, misleads, creates alternately scepticism and fanaticism, intellectual resistance and emotional surrender, rejection of genuine religion and subjection to substitutes. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that the word “faith” should be dropped completely.9

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Thus Paul Tillich begins his “Introductory Remarks” to his 1957 book Dynamics of Faith. Tillich goes on to aver that it is “hardly possible” to drop the word “desirable as that may be” and that he has no alternative “for the time being” but “to try to reinterpret the word and remove the confusing and distorting connotations.”10 Nonetheless, Tillich was willing to “transcend theism” (and in so doing to prick up the ears of the 1960s generation of radical death of God theologians) and to talk of “absolute faith” as a way of getting beyond to the “genuine meaning” of faith; it is but a short further step to drop the language of faith altogether in pursuit of a more radical (and, thus, arguably more traditional) alternative.11 Crucial here is the central Tillichian gesture of philosophical theology as critique in response, not to a positum of revelation (or faith), but to the ontological shock of being (and the nonbeing that goes with it).12 By recommending and adopting the critical stance as normative for theology, Tillich stands, to use one of his favorite and recurring images, “on the boundary,” which he identifies as “the best place for acquiring knowledge.”13 The boundary lies between two alternative possibilities without being committed to either; thereby provoking anxieties about “sitting on the fence” or more positively of enabling the possibility of a genuine freedom for thought and action. A boundary stance, such as Tillich’s, enables the liberal paradigm of dialogue and encounter (and no modern theologian better embodies the conversational model of theology than Tillich); yet it also, and more radically, is the predicament of a lonely thinker, beset by radical doubt and unable to settle for the enforced pieties of convention. It is in this sense that Tillich’s position as a boundary thinker is consistent with his passion for the Lutheran paradigm of justification—not by faith, of course, but by doubt. Indeed for Tillich, there is no difference—and certainly no contradiction—between the Kantian affirmation of autonomy and the Lutheran affirmation of justification, a point he makes in his early work in the formula that “autonomy is justification in the realm of thought.”14 It is this that lies behind his famous final sentence of The Courage To Be: “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”15 Tillich thus stands as the polar opposite to his fellow so-called “religious existentialist” Søren Kierkegaard: whereas Kierkegaard sought the absoluteness of faith in the leap for certainty and unflinching commitment premised on the strict separation of true religion from culture, Tillich’s quest rests on a decision for and out of doubt and a refusal ever fully to separate faith and reason. Tillich’s deliberate blurring of the boundaries between religion and culture, theology and philosophy, and faith and reason is all apiece with his occupation of the peculiar no-man’s land of the boundary. Neither one nor the other, Tillich’s thought is constantly, unavoidably

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always both/and; a synthesis that is as far from a liberal modern accommodationism as it is from the reactionary-revolutionary positivisms that have come to dominate twentieth-century thought and culture. Unlike his neo-orthodox theological contemporaries (and his phenomenologicalexistentialist philosophical contemporaries), Tillich’s theology is temperamentally resistant to ideas of purity, both in disciplinary and conceptual terms. Tillich’s instincts, rather, are fundamentally those of post-Kantian German Idealism, and especially the complex, restless thought-world of Schelling. With Schelling, Tillich resists all forms of positivism (theological and philosophical), with their characteristic mode of “positing” or naming the object of their inquiry at the outset (e.g., “God,” “Being,” or “faith”). For Tillich, this is simply to get things back-to-front for a “spiritual science,” such as theology or philosophy, in which the subjectivity of the enquirer is inseparably linked to the object of her enquiry (unless, as it may well be, the intention is to reduce theological or philosophical discourse to the level of an objective science, in which the positum attains an almost empirical status). While Barth and Heidegger seem to want to bracket the doubting human subject out of their understandings of the theological enterprise in their search for disciplinary purity (of das Wort Gottes or die Gläubigkeit selbst respectively), Tillich instead aims always to include the questing interdisciplinary human subject—with all her uncertainties and confusions. This, of course, introduces a deliberate instability to Tillich’s thought that renders it (surprisingly perhaps) thoroughly unsystematic at exactly the same time as it leads him (like Schelling) to create (and recreate) elaborate systems and taxonomic categorizations. In many ways, Tillich’s is a radically “multisystematic” theology. Indeed, it is precisely the multiplicity of systems within Tillich’s thought—its endless shaping and re-shaping architectonic—that confirms his indeterminacy. Among the confident assertive hedgehogs of early twentieth-century thought, Tillich stands out as an exception: not so much a fox as a spider—continually spinning and re-spinning his web of concepts and symbols into baroque (and shortlived) constructions.16

Theology Against Religions Tillich’s theology is fundamentally apologetic, in as much as he consistently aims to re-enchant the impoverished theological imagination of his contemporaries. This, surprisingly, is Tillich’s radical theological agenda. Tillichian apologetics aims not to convert the secular by translating biblical

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religion into ontological categories acceptable to “modern man”; but rather by exposing the excess of faith in modern society—in both its religious and its cultural (quasi-religious) forms—and by offering in its place a faithless theology of doubt. To understand this paradoxical formulation (which is not Tillich’s) better, it is instructive to turn to his seminal and, for his time, path-breaking encounter with non-Christian religions. For instance, late in life, Tillich delivered the Bampton Lectures at Colombia University, taking as his theme “Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions.”17 Striking as it may have been for a leading Christian theologian to attempt to continue his “process of deprovincialization” by addressing the “encounters among the living religions of today,” what really stands out in Tillich’s text is, in fact, quite how little interested in what he calls the “religions proper” he is.18 After a cursory acknowledgment of the question of defining “religion” in comparative terms, Tillich rehearses his own extended use of the term: Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life. Therefore this concern is unconditionally serious and shows a willingness to sacrifice any finite concern which is in conflict with it.19

A clear, if “seemingly paradoxical,” consequence follows for Tillich from such a definition of religion in the context of inter-religious encounters: The main characteristic of the present encounter of the world religions is their encounter with the quasi-religions of our time. Even the mutual relations of the religions proper are decisively influenced by the encounter of each them with secularism, and one or more of the quasi-religions which are based upon secularism.20

In other words, for Tillich, inter-religious encounter gains its “dramatic character” not from the dynamics of the interrelations of the beliefs and practices of the finite forms of the explicit religious traditions, but rather from the indirect presence within the secular autonomous culture of what Robert Scharlemann calls “a reines Ergriffensein, a pure being-grasped.”21 Thus, it is that in his final lecture, Tillich turns to the question (an inevitable one given his logic of “faithless critique”) of “Christianity judging itself in the light of its encounter with the world religions,” both religions proper and quasi-religions. Here, Tillich is unflinching: Christianity must learn from its encounter with the world religions (as well as from its own self-examination) to “struggle against itself as a religion.”22 Tillich laments Christianity’s “failure” in becoming a religion at all in the first

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place “instead of remaining a center of crytalization for all positive religious elements” but, nonetheless, takes some comfort from “the rhythm of criticism, countercriticism and self-criticism throughout the history of Christianity . . . show[ing] that Christianity is not imprisioned in itself and that in all its radical judgments about other religions some degree of acceptance of counter-judgments took place.”23

What Is Radical about Radical Theology? Thus far in this Introduction, I have made the case that Tillich’s theology might be thought of as “radical” by highlighting four features of his thought that, if taken seriously, give us pause for thought and unsettle our comfortable categorizations. Yet what is it, particularly, that means that these features (and others brought out in the chapters that follow) make Tillich’s thought radical, as opposed to simply unique and/or distinctive? The answer, I suggest, lies in a consideration of Tillich’s legacy and of his importance for contemporary theology that identifies itself as radical. Here I make six brief observations to help to contextualize the chapters that follow and to make sense of the attempt that this volume as a whole represents; namely to retrieve the radical Tillich. First, and perhaps most obviously, radical theology in its recent formulations is decisively indebted to the iconoclastic work of the 1960s now known collectively as death of God theology. Thomas J. J. Altizer, Gabriel Vahanian, Paul van Buren, William Hamilton, Harvey Cox, J. A. T. Robinson, and others should not be thought of as constituting a singular movement, of course, and yet between them they made a decisive contribution to the shape and destiny of radical theology in the latter half of the twentieth century. Two features stand out prominently: the first, of course, is their insistence that the question of the existence or otherwise of God is the least of concern for theology, which ought above all else to free itself from outmoded falsely literalistic models of God. From this perspective, then theology is far from the kind of descriptive enterprise that looms large in mainstream theological circles dominated by Barthian dogmatics and post-liberal interests in narrative. That theology is not (primarily) about God is, it seems a key lesson that recent radical theology has inherited from the death of God movement; and one that it could (should) have equally learned from Paul Tillich.24 Second, by invoking Nietzsche and the passionate atheist challenge to theology and all that it stands for, death of God theology invited radical theologians into dialogue with those “continental” philosophical atheists, for whom the very task of philosophical thinking

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is equivalent to atheism. Recent radical theology takes as its dialogue partners those philosophers who are equally situated in the shadow of the Nietzschean death of God and who are determined, each in their own way, to find new and radical alternatives to what we might call “theological modernity.” From Heidegger and Sartre to Derrida, and more recently Deleuze, Badiou, and Meillassoux, recent radical theology correlates to continental philosophical atheism in ways that are clearly in the spirit of Paul Tillich. A second observation follows from this directly. One of the most important voices informing contemporary radical thought, and radical theology in particular, is that of F. W. J. von Schelling. Almost uniquely among the major theological thinkers of the early twentieth century, Tillich engaged profoundly with Schelling and sought to rescue him from being sidelined as a brief footnote to Hegel (a fate that nonetheless befell him for much of the twentieth century). For those contemporary radical theologians who find in Schelling an alternative non-Hegelian critical post-Kantian thinker, whose philosophies of time, nature, and revelation are key resources, Tillich could (and should) be an indispensible mediating figure. Tillich can serve as an important case study of the tensions and difficulties inherent in adopting a neo-Schellingian philosophical theology, as well as the opportunities that such an approach offers in contrast, for example, with the predominantly Heideggerian frame of much continental thought. Furthermore, Tillich offers an intriguing option for contemporary radical theology: a radical Idealism. However, we need to change our standard frame of reference if Tillich is to be recognized as such. Indeed, surely one of the reasons for the relative neglect of Tillich in mainstream theology and philosophy over recent years stems from the widespread misapprehension that Tillich is a “liberal existentialist” and, thus, beyond the pale of any self-respecting radical.25 For recent radical thinkers, of any stripe, “liberal” and “existentialist” just do not cut the mustard. In a climate dominated by postmodernisms of all sorts, nothing has been considered more embarrassing than mid-twentieth-century existentialism. Along with Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Tillich’s The Courage to Be just no longer casts a spell over the formative teenage years of tomorrow’s radicals-to-be (who are more likely to be reading Slavoj Žižek or John Milbank). Tillich’s use of the question and answer formulation of his method of correlation, as well as his frequent references to existentialism itself, clearly does not help his case here and, indeed, it is probably unfortunate for the portrayal of Tillich as a radical theologian that many students encounter Tillich primarily (only?) through the lens of his Systematic Theology, in which he is arguably at his least radical as he

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addresses himself explicitly to the religious symbols of his own religious tradition. That said, even here it is possible to see how little Tillich really belongs to the school of existentialism, unless its definition is stretched beyond recognition to become equivalent to the mood of critical protest within thinking itself. One of the hallmarks of recent radical theology is the fluidity in its language and its willingness to use neologisms to reanimate the staid terminology of establishment theology. In this, Tillich is very much a fellow traveller. True, Tillich’s language has little of the lightness and playfulness of, say, John D. Caputo or Mark C. Taylor, but as Harvey Cox puts it: There is a quality of daring in Tillich’s thinking. He took risks, something a novice scholar in almost any field is rarely encouraged to do. One of the risks he took was to abandon any fetishism of particular words. He knew, both from his keen observation of modern culture and through his own spiritual struggles, that the words “grace” and “faith” and even “God” had not only lost much of their original power, but had also been so distorted that they had often been evacuated of meaning. So he boldly experimented with a new vocabulary. If the word “God” no longer speaks to you, he once wrote, say “depth.” Instead of “sin,” say “separation.” Instead of “forgiveness,” say “acceptance.”26

Tillich is a true radical in his willingness to venture against tradition and to betray inherited orthodoxies for the sake of a retrieval of what has been buried under the accretions of conditioned pieties. If radicalism in theology is about returning to the roots, then Tillich’s is exemplary in his commitment to the repeated exercise of “shaking the foundations” to return each individual again and again to the originary piety of the shock of (non-)being. To be, for Tillich, is to be ultimately concerned and as much as religion can reveal this it can also conceal it and it is the task of the (radically Tillichian) theologian to unsettle the certainties that distract from our orientation to the unconditioned. Finally, this brings me to another aspect of recent radical theology that resonates with Tillich’s: embodiment. Tillich is sometimes characterized as “the theologian’s theologian” or as the “apostle to the intellectuals” and it is undeniable that his tendency to categorization and abstraction can seem arid and impersonal at times. Indeed, it is a commonplace to critique Tillich for the non-personal character of his descriptions of God as “being-itself” or “the ground of meaning and being” and Jesus Christ as “Jesus as the Christ as bearer of new being.” Unlike the rich individualism of the names “God” or “Jesus Christ,” the thought seems to be, Tillich’s formulae are “frosty monsters” (to invoke Barth’s description of Tillich’s earlier favored term das Unbedingt), unable to do justice to the personal

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and material descriptions so prominent in the Christian tradition. On the one hand, Tillich will concur: any supranaturalism that imagines God as some kind of “super-being” or Jesus as some kind of semi-divine magician simply has no place in post-mythological theology. Here Tillich is uncompromising; such supranaturalism not only diminishes God by reducing God to a “supra-finite” object among others, it also contains the roots of what Tillich perceived as one of the most pernicious threats to the theological imagination of his time—namely, the temptation toward religious literalism. This is the basis for Tillich’s call to “deliteralisation” (in contrast to what he saw as the mistaken result of Bultmann’s call to “demythologisation”) and for his lifelong insistence that theology is symbolic. Both are radical moves and both emphasize the embodied and situated nature of religion and religious life. Thus, for Tillich, counter-intuitive though it may seem, it is the name “God” that is impersonal and that impoverishes the religious imagination. By contrast, to talk of—and pray to—God as the ground of meaning and being is to engage with the divine life with the whole of a person’s being.

Retrieving the Radical Tillich This book has been conceived and written in the conviction that Tillich’s voice rightly belongs in contemporary radical theological discussions and that the very contours of that discourse cannot be properly understood without reference to Tillich’s theology and his legacy. If it is successful, it will provoke further discussion and disagreement; hopefully shaking some more foundations and dislodging fixed pieties—even those of radical theology itself. Tillich’s is an unjustly neglected perspective in contemporary theology (radical or otherwise) and if this book makes a contribution to clearing up some of the myths and false assumptions about his theology, then it will not have been in vain. However, the conversation is not all one-sided and it should be clear from the chapters that follow that Tillich’s is not a theology easily pigeon-holed. Just as he can—and ought—to be recognized and celebrated as a more radical thinker than is commonly assumed, so too we should be cautious about attempting to co-opt Tillich and his unique theological perspective for any particular moment of radical theology. It is often remarked that it is Tillich’s particular genius to have been able to speak to his contemporaries and that this same strength is precisely the cause for the decline of his influence after his death. As John Clayton puts it, in a telling phrase, in what remains one of the best analyses of Tillich’s theological project:

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By incorporating the present cultural situation into his methodology, Tillich gave to his theology a planned obsolescence which precludes his system’s having direct relevance for any but the cultural context in which and for which it was constructed.27

This contemporaneity equally places limits upon the extent to which it is possible—and even desirable—to recruit Tillich in toto as a radical theologian. Yes, the real Tillich may be the radical Tillich; but the really real Tillich is quite simply just Tillich. To close this Introduction, I draw attention to an important sense in which Tillich’s radicality is constrained and in which this book in its attempt to retrieve the radical Tillich is itself limited. In his 1996 “Introduction” to Tillich’s 1963 Earl Lectures, delivered at the Pacific School of Religion and published under the typically Tillichian title The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message, Durwood Foster echoes Clayton’s concern that Tillich’s theology speaks to a cultural (and theological) moment that is now past—indeed, that may have already been past even as Tillich was still writing. Citing the two “theological storm fronts that graphically marked the situation of the 1960s— “death of God” and “theology of hope,” Foster concedes that Tillich “did not in fact anticipate either their idiom or their vitality” but nonetheless suggests that “far from being obliviously distant from the erupting trends of the sixties, Tillich was . . . profoundly interconnected and critically interactive with their rootage and their import.”28 The same judicious, dialectical judgement is applied to that which Foster identifies as the major upheaval in theology that Tillich did not foresee, namely “the erupting indictments of economic oppression, sexism, and racism.”29 The challenge is a serious one—especially for an engagement with Tillich that attempts to retrieve the radical Tillich. Forster goes some way to addressing the concerns, but there is clearly more to be said with respect to each of the three loci of liberation. Foster writes: Few if any Christian thinkers had done more than he to prepare for the erupting indictments of economic oppression, sexism, and racism. Had he been able to keep his appointment with the New School for Social Research to return to New York in the fall of 1965—instead of dying that October—doubtless his critique and encouragement would have thickened the plot of all the new movements. Much of his early initiative had flowed into religious socialism—one of the things that earned him the enmity of the Nazis—and a sense for Realpolitik registers steadily in his subsequent utterances . . . When the gender consciousness of Simone de Beauvoir began to stir Union Seminary in the early 1950s, it was Tillich again that alert women students first turned to, and his struggle against masculine onesidedness in the basic Christian symbols (of the Trinity, for instance) clearly

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Russell Re Manning influenced feminist/womanist thought. Moreover, while there is no way to excuse the theological establishment as a whole for compliance with institutional racism, Tillich not only consistently aroused “questioning from below,” but linked power with justice and love over against the dehumanizing management of persons.30

Foster is surely right to draw attention to some of those aspects of Tillich’s thought that can be of use in developing theological engagements with the realities of those marginalized by poverty, sexism, and racism and there are those in contemporary radical theology who have a distinct political and liberationist focus and who engage constructively with Tillich in that task (including, of course, contributors to this volume). However, it must also be admitted that awareness of the realities of economic, sex, and racial oppression was not absent from Tillich’s own cultural context and—with the important exception of his pre-emigration engagement with religious socialism—his theological project of a theology of culture is remarkably unaffected by these issues. It is, in the end, hard to escape the thought that Tillich’s lauded “deprovincialisation” had its limits and that there were certain boundary situations in which he himself did not (could not?) place himself.31 This, of course, does not mean that those who follow in the wake of the radical Tillich cannot and should not. However, here again, a certain limitation arises, as is demonstrated by this volume. It is noticeable that all the contributors to this volume are white male academics from the developed world. While there are chapters that engage Tillich’s radical politics and his influence on feminist thought, the absence of diversity among the contributors requires comment. I want to make three brief points. First, it is important to underline the scope and ambition of this volume as an exercise in retrieval. The book stems from a reconsideration of Tillich’s comment to Altizer that “the real Tillich is the radical Tillich” and is situated in the context of the trajectory of radical theology since the death of God movement. The focus of the book on the philosophically radical strands of radical theology was deliberately chosen to highlight a particularly prominent feature of Tillich’s radical legacy and more prosaically to make the project a manageable one. In addition, the overwhelming majority of contemporary work that takes up Tillich’s radical legacy or uses Tillich as a resource within contemporary radical theology is orientated toward this more philosophically radical strand. In short, this book aims above all to retrieve the philosophically radical Tillich; the retrieval of the politically radical Tillich would be the work of another volume (and I am pleased to say that discussions about the shape of such a book have already begun). Secondly, for all its avowed interest in the political concerns of those at the margins of society and the theological correlate of this oppression,

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there is too little work in radical theology that actually does engage with practical matters such as the realities of economic injustice, sexism, and racism. This is, of course, not to deny that there is such work, but simply to highlight the disjunction between theory and practice in the majority of radical theology.32 Such a complaint is a perennial one for any so-called radical program of thought, but it is important to recognize that recent and contemporary radical theologies (and the radical philosophies that they are so closely correlated to) cannot be exempted from the charge of ivory tower-dom. While the radical theologians are wont to be more likely than most to have read Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, they are equally likely to be guilty of falling into the trap of its mischievous paraphrase: “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to write books about how to change it.” To the extent that this book focuses its attention to matters methodological over above those more practical, it too falls foul of the temptation to this common vice of radical thought. Thirdly, it must also be admitted that the contributors to this book reflect something of the state of scholarship in both Paul Tillich and radical theology. Both have, ironically, become part of the theological establishment, even if not the dominant voices therein. The story of Tillich’s domestication by the academic and ecclesial status quo has already been told above, but a similar tale can be told of the history of recent radical theology. For all the scandal it provoked at the time, death of God theology has now been neatly folded into the narrative of the development of twentieth-century theology and its concerns (with kenosis and the apocalyptic, for instance) diverted into the orbits of more conventional, traditional theological styles. Even contemporary radical theology has a certain reassuringly conventional character to it, according to which it repeats a predictable cycle of correlation to whichever fashionable radical philosophy is currently stirring up most interest. From Heidegger to Derrida to Deleuze and now Meillassoux, the radical theological meme replicates without ever really challenging the academic and religious worlds within which it operates—environments that are still dominated by privileged white men. This is not to deny that there are significant exceptions—many of whom play a significant role in this volume—but the reality of the constitution of the scholarly community that the contributors to the chapters in this book represent is a striking one. To conclude, it is my hope that the essays collected here will not be the last word on the radical Tillich, his legacy, and his contemporary importance, but that they will provoke further work and that both Tillichian and radical theological will continue to develop critically and in mutual interaction. To retrieve the radical Tillich is to be reminded of the risk of

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theology and to be challenged by the demands of both the message and the situation. Perhaps, the real Tillich is the radical Tillich and the radical Tillich is the real Tillich; the Tillich for whom theological apologetics is never safely correlational but in the terms of his early lectures on Dogmatik, an attack (Angriff ).33 Or, as he puts it in his Systematic Theology: The answering theologian must discover the false gods in the individual soul and in society . . . He must challenge them through the power of the Divine Logos, which makes him a theologian. Theological polemic is not merely a theoretical discussion, but rather a spiritual judgment against the gods which are not God, against those structures of evil, those distortions of God in thought and action. No compromise or adaptation or theological self-surrender is permitted on this level. For the first Commandment is the rock upon which theology stands. There is no synthesis possible between God and the idols. In spite of the dangers inherent in so judging, the theologian must become an instrument of the Divine Judgement against a distorted world.34

Notes 1. See Paul Tillich, “Über die Idee einer Theologie der Kultur” in Paul Tillich, Main Works / Hauptwerke. Vol. 2. Writings in the Philosophy of Culture, ed. Michael Palmer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), 69–86. This text has been translated into English by W. B. Green in Paul Tillich, What Is Religion? ed. James Luther Adams (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 155–181. An alternative, improved, translation by Victor Nuovo is published as Visionary Science. A Translation of Tillich’s “On the Idea of a Theology of Culture” with an Interpretive Essay (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987). 2. See the representative texts collected in James M. Robinson, The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1968). 3. See also Paul Tillich, The Religious Situation, trans. H. Richard Niebuhr (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1932). 4. For more on this topic, see Russell Re Manning, Theology at the End of Culture. Paul Tillich’s Theology of Culture and Art (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 5–55. 5. For a persuasive defense of this contested claim, see Douglas Hedley, “Was Schleiermacher a Christian Platonist?” Dionysius 17 (1999), 149–168. 6. See Paul Tillich, The System of the Sciences According to Objects and Methods, trans. Paul Wiebe (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981). For Cornelius’ opposition to Tillich, see Werner Schüßler, “Tillich’s Life and Works” in The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich, ed. Russell Re Manning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 10. 7. Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision, trans. Franklin Sherman (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

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8. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–1963), 131–132. 9. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), ix. 10. Ibid. One might say that a glance at the current swelling body of literature on faith in the philosophy of religion would show that Tillich has not been entirely successful in this attempt. See, for instance, John Bishop’s article “Faith” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 edn.), ed. E. Zalta (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/faith/.), in which Bishop sets out seven broad categories of views of faith. 11. For “theism transcended” and “absolute faith” see in particular, Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be. 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 171–177 and 182–186. 12. For a typical account of the origin of theology in the response to being shaken or grasped by an awareness (or orientation toward) the unconditioned in the experience of shock, see Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, 113: “The threat of non-being, grasping the mind, produces the ‘ontological shock’ in which the negative side of the mystery of being—its abysmal element—is experienced. ‘Shock’ points to a state of mind in which the mind is thrown out of its normal balance, shaken in its structure. Reason reaches its boundary line, is thrown back upon itself, and then is driven again to its extreme situation.” 13. Paul Tillich, On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), 13. 14. The first of these is Thesis 115 from a presentation given by Tillich in 1911 at Kassel, in which he delivered 128 theses and a paper with the title “Die christliche Gewissheit und der historische Jesus”. See Paul Tillich, Main Works/Hauptwerke. Vol. 6 Theological Writings/Theologische Schriften, ed. Gert Hummel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992), 33. 15. Tillich, Courage, 175. 16. The reference is to Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 characterization of those, the hedgehogs, who know the world through the lens of one single defining “big idea” (including Plato, Dante, Hegel, and Nietzsche) as opposed to those, the foxes, whose perspective cannot be pinned down to a single notion (examples given include Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Goethe). Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox. An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953). This analysis of Tillich’s multisystematicity coheres well with his mastery of the essay and lecture format of theology. Indeed, there is something remarkably homiletic about Tillich’s style of theology, even when far from any biblical language. 17. Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (New York: Colombia University Press, 1963). The lectures were delivered in autumn 1961. 18. Ibid., 1–2, 2, 5. 19. Ibid., 4–5. 20. Ibid., 5. 21. Robert Scharlemann. “Tillich’s Religious Writings” in Paul Tillich, Writings on Religion / Religiöse Schriften, ed. Robert P. Scharlemann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988) = Main Works / Hauptwerke 5, 1–12; 5.

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22. Tillich, Christianity and Encounter, 84. 23. Ibid, 84; 89. For a very different theological critique of religion and religions, see Tom Greggs, Theology Against Religion. Constructive Dialogues with Bonhoeffer and Barth (London: T & T Clark, 2011). 24. For an alternative strand of radical theology—as hermeneutic theology— indebted more directly to Bultmann and Heidegger, see Ingolf Dalferth, Radikale Theologie (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2010). 25. For a comprehensive dismissal of the alleged “existentialist turn” in the development of Tillich’s theology, see Marc Boss, Au commencement la liberté. La religion du Kant réinventée par Fichte, Schelling et Tillich (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2014), 513–524, especially 521: “il nous paraît inutile de chercher un tourant existentialiste dans la trajectoire intellectuelle de Tillich” and repeated in Marc Boss, “Paul Tillich and the Twentieth-Century Fichte Renaissance: Neo-Idealist Features in his EarlyAccounts of Freedom and Existence,” Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society 36.3 (2010), 8–21, especially 15: “the very notion of an “existential turn” in Tillich’s intellectual trajectory seems highly doubtful to me.” Boss reaches this conclusion through close analysis of Tillich’s writings before and after the First World War notwithstanding Tillich’s own subsequent critiques of German Idealism and mythologizing of an embrace of existentialism as a result of the horrors of the War. 26. Harvey Cox, “Introduction” in Tillich, Courage, xxiv. 27. John Clayton, The Concept of Correlation. Paul Tillich and the Possibility of a Mediating Theology (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 5. 28. See Durwood Foster, “Introduction” in Paul Tillich, The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1996, 2007), xiii–xiv. Clayton raises a similar concern that “it might be reasonably asserted that the period for which Tillich was writing was already past or at least nearly so by the time he completed his Systematic Theology.” He continues, “There was perhaps a certain inevitability in this. Philosophical reflection of the sort in which Tillich engaged tends to come, as Hegel was keenly aware, at the end rather than the beginning or the zenith of an age.” Clayton, Correlation, 6. 29. Foster, “Introduction”, xii. 30. Foster, “Introduction”, xii–xiii. 31. The feminist critique of Tillich’s theology (and ethos) is the most developed. See Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace. Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (New York: University Press of America, 1980), Susan Lichtman, “The Concept of Sin in the Theology of Paul Tillich: A Break from Patriarchy?” The Journal of Women and Religion 8 (1989), 49–55, and the judicious assessment by Rachel Sophia Baard as “Tillich and Feminism.” In Re Manning, Cambridge Companion, 273–287. For a critical engagement with Tillich’s failure to engage race, see Elaine A. Robinson, “Paul Tillich.” In Beyond the Pale. Reading Theology from the Margins, ed. Miguel De la Torre and Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 151–160. After an overview survey of Tillich’s central theological themes, Robinson defends the claim that “Tillich was a German-born American theologian who became White in the context and culture of the

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United States,” specifically that “little evidence exists to suggest that Tillich attempted to understand the social and legal construction of race in the United States, despite the immense cultural implications present in the long history of racial injustice and genocide within the American borders. There is little evidence within his theological corpus that the question of racial injustice was taken seriously, despite the fact that elements of his system could provide openings for just such analysis (e.g., experience as a medium or culture as a source).” (156). For a nuanced discussion of Tillich’s potential and his limitations within contemporary political theology, see Gregory Walter, “Critique and Promise in Paul Tillich’s Political Theology: Engaging Giogio Agamben on Sovereignty and Possibility” Journal of Religion 90.3 (2010), 453–474. 32. Two notable exceptions—both by contributors to this volume—are Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology. Religion and Politics after Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) and Jeffrey W. Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), as well as their jointly written work in the Palgrave Macmillan “Radical Theologies” series, Religion, Politics, and the Earth. The New Materialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 33. Paul Tillich Dogmatik-Vorlesung, (Dresden 1925–27), ed. Werrner Schüßler (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 1. 34. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, 131–132.

Part I Tillich’s Radical Legacy

Chapter 1 A Homage to Paulus Thomas J. J. Altizer

Speaking as one who was initiated into faith by reading Paul Tillich, and who had many serious theological dialogues with him in his later life, I am called to pay homage to him as I have not before, and I do so with the conviction that it was Tillich who made radical theology possible in the twentieth century. Of course, Tillich himself was profoundly affected by Schelling’s radical theology, and it was Schelling who initiated Tillich into a radical understanding of both Being and the Nothing, including an integral relation between Being and the Nothing—making possible a history of Being itself, as recorded in the three differing editions of the Ages of the World. Tillich’s primal work can be understood as a renewal and reconstitution of Schelling’s philosophical theology for the late modern world, but it simultaneously demanded a deep confrontation with the radical imagination and the radical politics of that world—making Tillich unique as the genuine theologian of culture. While Tillich alienated many because of his own alienation from the Church, this made possible his own theology—the most nonecclesiastical theology of his world—and, with the exception of the theology of the Catholic von Balthasar, the only theology then grounded in the imagination itself. That in itself is a radical expression of theology; but unlike von Balthasar and the Catholic world, Tillich employed a radical philosophical ground, and this attracted many Catholics, and did so in the context of Tillich’s commitment to the integration of the Protestant principle and Catholic substance. This even had an impact upon the Second Vatican Council, and just as there are Catholic Tillichians, many Protestants

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became open to Catholicism through Tillich, whose own theology is the most ecumenical theology of our world. Above all, Tillich is committed to an integration of ontological thinking and the imagination, committed to a correlation of the being-itself that he knows as God with the deeper art and poetry of his world, so that it is that art and poetry that is the deepest witness to God, and one that must be shielded from every apologetic or ecclesiastical judgment. Barth and Tillich were united in their opposition to apologetics, even if they were absolutely opposed on every other theological issue, and if theirs was the deepest theological conflict of the twentieth century, it was one that truly energized theology itself. Indeed, Tillich’s pervasive influence is truly remarkable, and while Protestant evangelicals and conservative Catholics could ignore him, no one else could—not even militant secularists.

An Atheistic Theologian I remember my own teacher, Joachim Wach, urging Anglicanism upon Tillich, but Tillich replied that he missed the Protestant principle in Anglicanism. I suspect he would have missed it in any Protestant church, for what he understands as the Protestant principle is an expression of a radical chasm between the creature and the Creator that only becomes manifest in a uniquely modern world. While mystics such as Boehme and his circle can know that chasm, this makes possible a uniquely modern mysticism, one that deeply affected Tillich, but is nonetheless alien to all other expressions of mysticism, just as Tillich is alienated from all common expressions of religion. While it was Barth who first created an atheistic theology, knowing the established God of Christendom as being wholly illusory, Tillich, too, is an atheistic theologian by this criterion. This was a decisive source of his own enormous theological impact. While it is true that classical theism disappears in both Barth and Tillich, it does so more dramatically in Tillich and, as opposed to Barth, here virtually everyone can understand it, and Tillich became widely known as the first atheistic theologian. Ironically, this drew even more attention to him and, despite his thick German accent, Tillich was the most homiletic of all theologians—the one whose voice had the greatest impact, and could widely be heard as an atheistic and holy voice at once. Tillich is also truly distinctive as a theologian of the history of religions; perhaps his deepest academic engagement was in the famous Tillich-Eliade seminar on theology and the history of religions at the University of Chicago. I participated in that seminar for a year and, always

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at its conclusion, the three of us would meet for drinks and conversation at Eliade’s apartment, and it was there that I had my deepest theological encounters with Tillich. He was then not only wholly open but also wholly engaged, again and again declaring that the real Tillich is the radical Tillich, and actualizing that judgment in his own theological positions, which are more radical in his speech than in his writing. The truth is that Tillich could speak more effectively—far more effectively—than he could write, the only exception being his early writing, which was rewritten by James Luther Adams. Of course, his later writing was rewritten by many editors, and his must be the most edited of all theological writing; this makes it all the more difficult to hear the real Tillich, whom perhaps we can best hear by respeaking Tillich in our own voice. Tillich was a man of great passion, here reminding one of Augustine, whose Confessions is perhaps the greatest and certainly the most passionate of all theological works. While Tillich wrote nothing comparable to this, his own theology is deeply passionate, and perhaps most so in its all too minimal evocations of God. Absence can be a passionate absence and this is true of the absence or veiling of Tillich’s God: a God at once absolutely essential and absolutely peripheral in Tillich’s theology and a God absolutely namable and absolutely unnamable at once. Here, modern mysticism is a decisive source, and here, too, the Protestant principle is crucial, for it embodies an absolute critique of everything whatsoever that is total or religious. Tillich was deeply grounded in Luther, although alienated from Lutheran churches, and he deeply knew the early and radical Luther—that revolutionary Luther who had a greater effect upon the world than any other theologian and who created a truly new Christianity. Tillich, too, was committed to a new Christianity, and a truly new Christianity, not one that would be a return to primitive Christianity, but rather a genuinely new Christianity. This is perhaps the point at which Tillich had the greatest theological impact and innumerable Christians became committed to this goal: here lies Tillich’s greatest legacy, even if it is just here that Tillich is now most ignored. Any genuine homage to Tillich must renew this legacy—a renewal that could occur by way of a renewal of Tillich’s theology—but such a renewal could only be a Kierkegaardian repetition and thus not a return, but a radical movement into the future. Blake is the most revolutionary of all Christian visionaries, and while I was never able to lead Tillich to Blake—he was much too German for that—Blake does embody a great deal to which Tillich was committed. Blake was the first visionary to enact the death of God, in his first epic, America, engraved in 1793, and Blake enacted our most total and comprehensive vision of Satan, even in his late epics unveiling Satan as the

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Creator. Yet Blake is as far as it is possible to be from Gnosticism, enacting the totality of flesh and the body as has no other visionary, and calling for a total Energy that is ecstasy itself. Thus, Blake can be a decisive way into Tillich, giving concrete imagery to what Tillich seemingly only knew abstractly, thereby immensely strengthening Tillich’s theology. So, too, Tillich’s theology can be strengthened by being associated with the mystical theology of Simone Weil, a mystical theology that can be understood as an atheistic theology, as it is by Susan Anima Taubes, who knew the Tillichs, and who committed suicide near their home in East Hampton. And the greatest theological challenge to Tillich came from her husband, Jacob Taubes, in an article on Tillich, published in The Journal of Religion in January 1954.1 Taubes identifies Tillich as a Dionysian theologian, and Dionysian in the late Nietzschean sense, which Taubes identifies as an ecstatic naturalism, an existential intensity of existence in the immediate moment, which Tillich calls “ultimate concern.” While many secularists had long recognized Tillich as a theological ally, just as many theologians had assaulted him as an atheist, it was not until this article of Taubes that this position was articulated with real power, and, all too gradually, it had great impact. Yet, ironically, this enhanced Tillich’s theological power, making possible a genuinely theological atheism—one that Tillich could personally, but not publicly, accept—but it ushered in a new theological world, a world to which Tillich was profoundly committed. Now a rift was established between Tillich and all neo-orthodoxy, an uncrossable rift, and one impelling an ultimate decision among theologians, and not only among theologians but upon all committed to faith. However, this only occurred in America, or only occurred in depth in America, which did somehow give Tillich a genuinely American identity.

I Am an American Comparable movements were then occurring throughout America, and particularly so in the arts and poetry, as a truly new American music, painting, and poetry arrived, and this in the context of America becoming the dominant power in the world. Hailed as the new Rome, this new America could know Tillich as an American theologian, an American theologian challenging the world, and, above all, challenging the world of faith. While it is true that American fundamentalism was profoundly strengthened during this period, that at least partially can be understood as a deep reaction against a new and comprehensive atheism, a new secular

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world that was more powerful than ever before, and just, thereby, more profoundly atheistic. This is the context in which Tillich became our most influential theologian, giving us a theology that could truly address this new world, and address it as could no other theology. Accordingly, it was Tillich’s popular books—and he was successful in writing these—that had the greatest theological effect both upon the general public and upon the classroom and, for the first time in the twentieth century, theology entered our public discourse. It is odd to think that Tillich could write popular books, but this is a decisive sign of his power as a homiletic theologian and, for the first time since the Reformation, the gap was closed between critical and popular theology, as a new theological world was at hand. This is a legacy that Tillich has given us, and it is an ecumenical legacy, one going beyond our religious institutions, and beyond Christianity itself. Tillich is often thought of as a borderline theologian, a theologian at our borders, and, above all, at all of our ultimate theological borders. Thus, he is Catholic and Protestant at once, European and American at once, secular and religious simultaneously, and modern and postmodern altogether. Certainly, this has been his effect and, more than any other theologian, he is at home in all or most worlds. Yet, alone among major theologians, he did not establish his own school of theology. Why is that? Could that have been essential to his theology? Or does that bespeak a solitude that is uniquely his own? Tillich did not stand apart from the Church for nothing, nor did he ever find a real academic home and, despite being sought out by so many, he never became a genuine member of a community. Is he, therein, a talisman for us all? Are we called to a world that is beyond everything that we have known as community, and beyond everything that we have known as faith as well, so that it is just at this point that Tillich is our theologian? Without question, this is a genuine alternative to all church theologies, and even if there are only church theologies in the New Testament itself, these widely—if not profoundly—differ from each other, thereby opening a ground for a non-church theology, and even a non-church theology that is a biblical theology. Certainly, Tillich was in quest of such a theology and he not insignificantly had a greater impact upon the world of biblical scholarship than did any other systematic theologian: in his later years, it was he and Bultmann who had the dominant effect upon both secular and Protestant theology. Bultmann and Tillich make an odd couple, yet both are “existential” theologians and each engaged in “demythologizing.” For both Bultmann and Tillich, demythologizing is essential to faith and, apart from it, faith is simply an unengaged and unchallenged belief. Both deeply distinguish

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faith and belief, knowing each as the very opposite of the other. Just as Bultmann was inspired by and worked intimately with Heidegger, Tillich was one of the most powerful spokesmen of German Idealism and could even give German Idealism a genuinely American expression. Moreover, followers of Bultmann and Tillich are commonly united in the theological world, and this does distinguish them both from theological liberalism and from theological orthodoxy; but this is not a middle way, a middle way is alien both to Bultmann and to Tillich. Bultmann is a great New Testament scholar, perhaps the most influential New Testament scholar in history, whereas Tillich’s historical writing has had little impact and it is difficult to associate Tillich’s theology with the world of scholarship. This is, in large measure, because Tillich’s theology is so uniquely his own, and could not even be imagined as being in continuity with any theological tradition, or as being capable of founding its own school or tradition. While there are innumerable Bultmannians, there are apparently no Tillichians, or no Tillichians carrying forward a distinctively Tillichian way; a way that is so distinctively his own that it is seemingly incapable of being practiced by another. Yes, there are Tillichians in the sense that there are many theologians who have been deeply impacted by Tillich, but not in the sense that they are actually practicing a Tillichian way.

An Apocalyptic Tillich? Nevertheless, this may make possible a deeper impact than is possible otherwise—an impact not inducing a literal following or discipleship, but rather a following only possible by way of a genuinely independent path, one that Tillich himself pursued, but in such a way as to make it possible for others. Thus, there is no Tillichian school, but there is a Tillichian way, even if it is unnameable as Tillichian, and has no actual point of contact with Tillich’s writing. Tillich’s theological writing is strange indeed, at once the most popular and the most unknown of all theological writing, Tillich the most effective of all our religious apologists and yet the most unknown of all our theologians. At least there is ample room for controversy here and no room for an established or orthodox interpretation; and this is truer of Tillich than of any other theologian, perhaps because Tillich is more his own theologian than any other theologian. Is Tillich an apocalyptic theologian? Does his work embody or reflect an apocalypse that will absolutely transform everything whatsoever? An apocalypse that Jesus enacted and embodied but that was subsequently

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lost or reversed? German Idealism can be understood as a quest for such an apocalypse—one that is renewed in late-modern art and poetry. This is the context in which Tillich can be understood as an apocalyptic theologian, so that his quest for Jesus is not a quest for the literal or the historical Jesus, but rather a quest for apocalypse itself. Tillich is seemingly closed to all apocalyptic worlds and all apocalyptic vision, but he was, nonetheless, in quest of an absolutely new Christianity and an absolutely new Christ. This is manifest in the Christology of his Systematic Theology and in his references to Christ throughout his work. Tillich’s Christ is always a Christ apart from and opposed to every established Christ. Although so many judge Tillich to be an atheist, he was only an atheist as a Christian atheist—and a Christian atheist committed to Christ. Here, atheism is essential, an atheism making possible an absolute critique, an absolute critique essential to an opening to Christ or essential to an opening to that new Christ to whom Tillich is committed. This is the Christ to whom Tillich is a primary witness, it is the deepest ground of his own theological breakthroughs and the very way that led him to a new theology—a new theology that is primarily a theology of the new and apocalyptic Christ, or of that Christ who embodies the absolutely new.

Note 1. Jacob Taubes, “On the Nature of Theological Method. Some Reflections on the Methodological Principles of Tillich’s Theology,” The Journal of Religion 34.1 (1954), 12–25.

Chapter 2 Paul Tillich and the Death of God Breaking the Confines of Heaven and Rethinking the Courage to Be Daniel J. Peterson

Paul Tillich once confided to Thomas J. J. Altizer, the most famous of the radical “death of God” theologians, that “the real Tillich is the radical Tillich.”1 This confession is puzzling, especially insofar as Tillich openly criticized radical theology shortly before he died.2 The comment is all the more curious given the apparently conservative nature of Tillich’s understanding of God. As Keith Ward observes, when orthodox Christians deride “views like those of the twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich for saying that God is not a person, but is ‘being-itself’, the depth and power of being”—the nature of which remains unaffected by temporal processes—“they are in fact attacking the classical Christian doctrine of God.”3 Any attempt to explore the connection between Tillich’s perspective and radical theology must accordingly circumvent some of what Tillich says explicitly about God and consider the deeper layers of his thought. It must show how Tillich unnecessarily restricts the opposition he posits in God between being and nonbeing to eternity instead of allowing the conflict to play itself out historically as it does for Altizer—the Hegel-inspired radical to whom Tillich confessed the secret ground of his own theology. What did Tillich mean by the term “radical” when he spoke with Altizer? Nobody knows for sure. Fortunately, we can guess its usage based on how Altizer employs the term. For Altizer, being radical involves retrieving the “root” (radix) proclamation of biblical Christianity that finds expression in

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what commentators regard as possibly “the earliest Christian hymn still in existence,” namely, the Christ hymn of Philippians 2.4 There we read of how Christ, being in the form of God, emptied himself, presumably to assume human flesh.5 This means, as Altizer reads it, that in Christ the transcendent God “dies” to become immanent. No vestige of God’s primordial or heavenly mode of being remains. To be radical, then, is to rejoice in the shattering of otherworldly, vertical transcendence for the sake of finding the “Beyond in our midst,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer would say. The radical Christian makes a wager for the world by seeking the presence of Christ here instead of in heaven.6 In the flesh of Christ, Altizer claims, God enters history on a voyage to reconcile Himself to Himself, binding our destiny to His as He ventures toward the goal of His own “self-saving.”7

Tillich: Religious, Radical, or Both? The “religious” Christian (as Altizer uses the term) opposes the radical Christian. Rather than viewing God as a process that unfolds in the course of history, he worships what Altizer calls the dead body of God—the mere husk of transcendence that God, by descending as Spirit into flesh, has left behind.8 Tillich’s public or official portrait of God is undeniably “religious” in character. While he promisingly rejects the God of ordinary theism who exists as a being somewhere “out there” in the universe, he still pictures the divine as an “eternal process” that paradoxically completes itself above or beyond time.9 In more abstract terms, Tillich is saying that being-itself, which comprises the resolution of a polarity between fecundity and limitation outside of time, emits the stuff of the cosmos only as a by-product of its own eternal self-overcoming. God “lives” for Himself. Thus, while the dynamic component within God has an “outgoing character” that breaks through the barrier between eternity and time, finite being appears as the ostensibly unintended consequence of a divine process aimed at its own reconciliation.10 The world, it would seem, is just an afterthought. If Tillich’s doctrine of God is one where the divine process completes itself apart from time, why consider his thought to be radical in any way? The answer is that Tillich’s God has a dynamic quality that rarely appears in the thought of his orthodox predecessors. For Tillich, there is unrest at the heart of divine reality. Nonbeing limits the outgoing and creative urge of being, and although the polarity resolves itself eternally, God “lives” insofar as the tension exists. This tension, in turn, produces life along with everything else in the universe. The living God “boils over,” as Meister Eckhart would say, generating finite being as a result of a dialectical process. To read Tillich in radical terms, therefore, we simply need to unlock

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the pearly gates that restrict this process of divine self-reconciliation so that God can be freed to exist more fully for us, working out His own salvation (and ours with it) in history rather than beyond it. In so doing, the religious Tillich becomes the radical Tillich even as the substance of his thought remains unchanged. How, then, can we clear aside the dross of the orthodox Tillich to arrive at the truly radical nature of his doctrine of God—one which allows for the drama of creation and redemption to occur on the plane of history instead of primarily or even exclusively within divine life? First, we must more closely examine Tillich’s concept of the dialectic at the heart of being-itself to illustrate how he deviates from classical Trinitarian theology. Then, we must blur the God-world distinction to show how the dialectic might unfold temporally. This will involve challenging what makes Tillich orthodox, namely, his conviction that “God is his own fate,” that “he possesses ‘aseity.’”11 Fortunately, we can challenge Tillich by recourse to his own denial of objectified theism, a denial that discloses a clear prioritization of immanence over transcendence. Beyond that, we can appeal to his affirmation of the Infra Lutheranum, which opens the conduit between divine and human in Christ, subverting the classical God-world bifurcation that the orthodox Tillich otherwise champions. Once we have challenged the reasons Tillich offers for restricting the process of God’s self-overcoming to eternity with the theological commitments he explicitly endorses throughout his writings, we engage in the task of constructive theology by showing how Tillich’s notion of the courage to be can be recast in radical terms. The courage to be, it will be argued, is not an echo in finite human life of being’s victory over nonbeing in eternity, as the orthodox Tillich believes. Instead, a radical reading of the courage to be affirms that God gives Himself up to empower us, emboldening us to confront nonbeing and say “Yes” to life in the face of injustice, adversity, meaninglessness, and, finally, death itself. God dies in heaven only to be reborn in us as the courage to be—a power that fills those who lack power or find themselves empty. The empowering of our being has, in other words, its source in the self-emptying of God who occasions the courage to be as a consequence of His own self-sacrificial negation. This is the radical, self-divesting ground of existential courage that appears after the strictures of what John Dourley calls Tillich’s “controlled orthodoxy” have been lifted away.

The Orthodox Tillich According to Cyril O’Regan, Jacob Boehme was the first “postreformation” thinker to endorse a fully kenotic theology, one where the gates of

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heaven—or better, the floodgates of eternity—are opened and the waters of divine being flood into time.12 Boehme exercised an important influence on G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. He also exercised an important influence on Tillich even if, as Dourley points out, “the experience behind Boehme’s imagery may exceed the boundaries of Tillich’s theology and the orthodoxy in whose service it was performed.”13 Dourley supports his claim by providing three examples of Boehme’s heterodoxy: the necessity of evil in his doctrine of creation, the appearance of a divine will before Trinitarian distinction in God, and the role of the human person as the mirror of God created for the purpose of God coming to self-knowledge in, and through, finite consciousness. The last of these, he observes, constitutes an unbridgeable gap between Boehme and Tillich. For Tillich, God overcomes the conflict of opposites in His being above and apart from time. By contrast, Boehme sees the conflict as a struggle that occurs in history on the battlefield of human consciousness. God is reconciled to Himself through the act of human cognition—a position Tillich rejects as “religiously offensive and theologically untenable” because it ostensibly makes “God finite, dependent on a fate or accident which is not himself.”14 This is the axis upon which the orthodoxy of Tillich hinges.15 Remove it, and the radical substance of his doctrine of God appears. At this point, we should pause briefly to consider more fully Tillich’s reply to Boehme. The problem, he says, is not Boehme but those who interpret his depiction of God as living and dynamic in literal, non-symbolic terms. All statements about God changing or acting naturally reflect how we perceive God; we must regard them as metaphorical, however, because they point to a dimension of ultimate being or the divine life that transcends ordinary or finite being. We can compare God to a process, for instance, but we must recognize that as process involves duration, it cannot directly apply to beingitself, which resolves the tension between creativity and limitation within itself apart from time. To suggest differently, Tillich adds, would subject God to historical contingency and undercut God’s freedom. Other forces would determine the constitution of divine being and rob God of the power to do it Himself. Conditioned by other realities, God would not be free to choose His own fate. He would not be master of His own destiny. He would not be God. The problem of God’s “fate” and the attempt to safeguard it from compromise marks the first of several reasons Tillich supplies for restricting the process of reconciliation to a moment within the divine life apart from time or history. The second reason relates to his understanding of life as “the process in which potential being becomes actual being.”16 God must transcend the separation of potentiality (what could be) from actuality (what is) that constitutes finite life; otherwise, God would require redemption and

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reconciliation since the distinction allows for the possibility of a disruption within God. This means that God could not heal and reconcile us because God, too, would require reconciliation. It also introduces the problem of infinite regression—a third reason Tillich restricts the conquering of nonbeing by being to an intra-divine, eternal process. “The message of reconciliation is not that God needs to be reconciled,” Tillich writes. “How could He be? Since He is the source and power of reconciliation, who could reconcile Him?”17 To circumvent the problem of infinite regression and preserve God as the source of salvation (i.e., healing) in the world, Tillich proposes being-itself as the best designation for God. What, then, is being-itself? As distinct from the category of simple substance which the theologians of antiquity applied to God (an important clue indicating Tillich’s departure from classical orthodoxy), Tillich maintains that being-itself contains within it an element of resistance, the overcoming of which implies the existence of dynamism or movement at the heart of divine reality. As Andrew O’Neill observes, being-itself in Tillich’s theology “comprises two impulses: ‘being’, the impulse to create, to reveal, to be present; and ‘non-being’, the necessary limitation of that infinite potential.”18 Since the overcoming of nonbeing by being occurs beyond the temporal process, we can only speak of it as analogous to an event in time: something “happens” in God—something comparable to what happens when a person faces and overcomes a threat to her vitality or the fullest expression of her life. The victory of being over nonbeing in God accordingly supplies the source and exemplar of the courage to be as it appears in people. Existential courage is revelatory. It discloses, however dimly and fragmentarily, a victory that occurs in the very life of God. The difference, of course, between the archetype or exemplar of the courage to be (God) and its partial instantiation in human beings is that, in the exemplar, victory is final and decisive. God totally overcomes nonbeing within Himself, the result of which appears in the continual generation of finite being. Finite being, however, contains a deficit. It comprises a mixture of being and nonbeing because it stands out from its source in being-itself. Insofar as it stands out from being-itself, finite being remains susceptible to disintegration, decay, and, finally, death. Insofar as it shares in being-itself, on the other hand, it contains the power—again, fragmentarily—to resist nonbeing and death. Take away being-itself in Tillich’s schema and the world disappears. Being-itself (God) generates and sustains every object in the cosmos; in and out of Him every man, mite, and microbe lives, moves, and has its being. Nature “is the finite expression of the infinite ground of all things.”19 Its ground is God. Nonbeing, as noted, plays a crucial role in Tillich’s doctrine of God as well. Being provides the stuff of the material cosmos; nonbeing gives it its

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dynamism. It also has the task of curbing unlimited being.20 Without nonbeing there would be no distinction to being, no differentiation between objects or various beings. In God, being eternally overcomes nonbeing— the limiting factor or negation of itself—which is why Tillich refers to God as “the eternal process in which separation is posited and overcome by reunion.”21 Here “separation” refers to the limitation of being in God that God confronts and then incorporates into Himself. This resolves the opposition between being and nonbeing in God, the achievement of which results in the ongoing generation of finite being. It is also, to repeat, what makes God a living God. “Without the No he [God] has to overcome in himself and in his creature, the divine Yes to himself would be lifeless,” Tillich remarks. “There would be no revelation of the ground of being, there would be no life.”22 We can now summarize why Tillich restricts the process whereby being overcomes nonbeing to an intra-divine “moment” outside the temporal process: were God to depend upon anything other than God for God’s own redemption, God would be subject to a “fate” other than the one God determines for Himself. Secondly, God would not be the source of our redemption. Like us, He would require redemption from the split between potentiality and actuality that characterizes life. The “conflict,” to draw upon Boehme’s language and imagery, must resolve itself outside of time. The victory that God achieves within Himself generates finite being; it also answers the ontological question of why anything exists, for out of the eternal victory that being has over nonbeing emerges the “stuff” of world. The trouble with Tillich’s doctrine of God, however, is that it makes God’s self-reconciliation primary. Existence becomes an afterthought. Is material creation merely the by-product of a victory the divine life achieves within itself eternally? Why not affirm instead the outpouring of God into the world as an expression of God’s love for the world? Why not join the destiny of God with the world, making our mutual salvation a collaborative effort as well as the aim and goal of history? We know how Tillich answers these questions.23 Let us now give ours.

Rethinking Tillich on God In spite of the orthodox emphasis on divine aseity, several components of Tillich’s thought exist that reveal the deeper and more radical ground of his theology. The first of these involves Tillich’s reinterpretation of the Trinity in dialectical terms. “God’s life is life as spirit,” he writes, “and the trinitarian principles are moments within the process of the divine life.”24 These

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moments of distinction in the deep fabric of being ostensibly correspond to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in classical Christian theology although Tillich refers to them as “principles” (a designation he takes from Boehme) or starting points for subsequent reflection. The first principle, equivalent to the Father, refers to the depth and power of being. It is, Tillich explains, “the root of [God’s] majesty, the unapproachable intensity of his being, the inexhaustible ground of being in which everything has its origin.”25 The second principle, equivalent to the logos, “opens up the divine ground, its infinity and its darkness.” It gives the “fulness” [sic] of the first principle meaningful structure and form. Without it, Tillich says, “the first principle would be chaos, burning fire, but it would not be the creative ground.”26 Once again, the language (and imagery of the first principle as a burning fire) comes from Boehme who depicts the life of God in processive terms. The third principle marks the unity of the first and second principles (power and form, respectively) in their creative expression and actualization. This leaves the role of the third principle ambiguous. “It is,” Tillich remarks, “the Spirit in whom God ‘goes out from’ himself,” but how far does its procession extend? Does it reconcile the first and second principles within the divine life eternally or does it necessarily result in the production of finite being? However we answer the question of the third principle and its role in the self-reconciliation of God (see footnote 23), the dialectical nature of Tillich’s thought is what matters here. It signals Tillich’s deviation from classical orthodoxy. As Stephen Studebaker observes, Tillich’s Trinity requires the dialectical polarities of nonbeing and being, abyss and structure, which have no parallels in traditional trinitarianism . . . Traditional trinitarianism seems to posit something more about the divine persons. It maintains they are subsistencies of the divine nature and not only movements in the structure of being. The result is that you have three subsistent realities that define the Trinity and not Tillich’s dialecticaltrinitarian process within the nature of being.27

Tillich’s dialectical reconfiguration of the trinitarian nature of God, although it differentiates in orthodox fashion three presumably enduring moments in the divine life, ultimately departs from the classical perspective. The real Tillich is the radical Tillich insofar as he replaces a static conception of God (understood as a constellation of divine persons) with a portrait of God in fundamentally dynamic terms. Take away the restriction he imposes on the intra-divine process to protect God’s aseity and Tillich’s true identity becomes clear: America’s “most dangerous theologian,” as he was sometimes called, owes more to Boehme and Hegel than he does to Nicea. Now that the substance of Tillich’s thought is clear, we can challenge the restriction he imposes on God for the sake of protecting divine aseity. The

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basis of our challenge comes from several commitments Tillich endorses in his own theology. The first of these appears in his consistent rejection of objectified theism. Tillich’s language of being-itself for God belongs to a mighty stream of religious thought that guards against the reduction of the divine to something in the realm of space and time. It corrects what Fred Parrella sees as “the fatal flaw in Western philosophy and theology” from Tillich’s perspective, namely, “its objectification of God.”28 As an alternative to ordinary theism, which objectifies God by making Him into a being “out there,” Tillich speaks of God as the ground or depth of being, the pulse of creation that beats at the heart of all reality. The beauty of Tillich’s language for God is that it minimizes the distinction between God and world, making it ripe for radical appropriation. Mark L. Taylor summarizes the point nicely: Tillich was convinced . . . that no amount of talk about God’s caring for finite existence was effective or healing so long as God was conceived as “a Supreme Being” occupying the highest realm of a hierarchically structured cosmos. His own faith, as well as the intellectual challenges to classic belief in God posed by Immanuel Kant and the masters of suspicion like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, led him to risk tracing out God’s transcendence so deep in the fabric of existence (at times, even in the abyss) that the meaning of “transcendence” was stretched beyond recognition.29

Evidence for Taylor’s claim appears not only in the language Tillich uses to emphasize an alternative to objectified theism; it also registers in Tillich’s response to a speech on religion by Albert Einstein.30 In the essay, Tillich commends Einstein for speaking of “Reason” at the depth of finitude, insisting in the process that the Personal God is a symbol pointing to such depth—not a being who exists above and beyond the clouds. While Tillich’s reference to the depth of finitude retains a subtle distinction between God and world, it is difficult to see why this is a depth transcendence instead of a depth immanence. The accent on the divine in, with, and under the folds and creases of material reality suggests, at least to the present author, the latter. The close proximity of God and world evident in Tillich’s denial of objectified theism marks the first step toward undoing the restriction he places on the intra-divine life. It redirects our focus by turning our gaze from heaven to the world, inviting us to imagine anew how God works within the structure of His creation. God does not negate the structure, Tillich says. He does not intervene “top-down.” Instead, God works from the “bottom-up” as the wellspring of life and the renewal of being that appears in nature and history. As Tillich explains, “God does not need to

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destroy his created world, which is good in its essential structure, in order to manifest himself in it.”31 Of course, should God resurface in the world through a dialectical process, it might make better sense of Tillich’s claim that God becomes “manifest” in it! If the presence of God wells up in history, say, as the power of healing in human life (which Tillich would affirm), then, obviously, the separation between the source of healing and its manifestation becomes permeable. It is hard to distinguish a geyser or spring from the water it gives. The image lends itself to an easy modification of Tillich’s theology for radical purposes. If Taylor is right to suggest that “the meaning of ‘transcendence’” in Tillich’s thought “was stretched beyond recognition,” then why not speak (as noted) of depth immanence and locate God, as Andrew Hass does, on the cusp or tip of ontological becoming—that is, as a self-divesting ground that evaporates or disappears upon manifestation?32 Might this not evoke the same sense of finite being as rich, textured, or deep without risking a decoupling of God and matter as Tillich does in defending divine aseity so sharply? A second commitment in Tillich’s theology that works against his restriction of being-itself to eternity is his affirmation of the Infra Lutheranum. The Infra Lutheranum maintains, in contrast to the Extra Calvinisticum, that material reality abounds with the presence of God. Tillich traces his mystical view of God in nature to the Infra Lutheranum in an autobiographical reflection that was published shortly after his death. “A third cause of [my] attitude toward nature,” he observes, came out of my Lutheran background. Theologians know that one of the points of disagreement between the two wings of the Continental Reformation, the Lutheran and the Reformed, was the so-called “Extra Calvinisticum,” the doctrine that the finite is not capable of the infinite (non capax infiniti) and that consequently in Christ the two natures, the divine and the human, remained outside each other. Against this doctrine the Lutherans asserted the “Infra Lutheranum”—namely, the view that the finite is capable of the infinite and consequently that in Christ there is a mutual in-dwelling of the two natures. This difference means that on Lutheran ground the vision of the presence of the infinite in everything finite is theologically affirmed, that nature mysticism is possible and real, whereas on Calvinistic ground such an attitude is suspect of pantheism and the divine transcendence is understood in a way which for a Lutheran is suspect of deism.33

It also means that, while “orthodox reserves” exist in the confessional writings of early Lutheranism, the foundation was laid for speaking of God in processive, dynamic terms. Indeed, Luther himself argued that God could— thanks to the “exchange of properties” between Christ’s two natures—share

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in human suffering and death. Lutherans to follow—particularly Boehme and Hegel—would lift the reserves that restricted the early Lutherans from affirming that kenosis, and with it suffering and death, somehow belonged to God’s nature. The “danger” of the Lutheran perspective, as Tillich notes, is that it can identify God and world too closely. The ordinary theist might see the Infra Lutheranum as a precursor to pantheism. Nevertheless, Tillich endorses the Infra Lutheranum and, with it, at least the one-way transference of healing from God (inseparable from God’s presence) to the world through matter. The fact that Tillich does not explicitly see the transference of properties between Christ’s divine and human natures as two-way—one where God takes death and suffering into Himself from an outside, finite source while giving to that source divine salvation—shows that Tillich stops short of being a radically kenotic theologian.34 That said, by affirming the Infra Lutheranum that opens the conduit between God and world, Tillich implicitly subverts his own theology. The confessional documents of Lutheranism speak, after all, of an exchange, a communication, or the “mutual in-dwelling of the two natures” in Christ, as Tillich summarizes them. Does this not imply (pace Tillich) that God in Christ is affected by finitude? The Infra Lutheranum, in short, blurs the separation that Tillich posits between God and world; if it is truly a “real exchange,” then history participates in God and God participates in history. Taken together, the themes and commitments of Tillich’s perspective we have now highlighted (the denial of objectified theism, the affirmation of depth transcendence, and the endorsement of the Infra Lutheranum) work against his restriction of being-itself to eternity. How can God through Christ share in the human plight, which the doctrine of mutual in-dwelling implies, if we maintain with the orthodox Tillich that being-itself remains unaffected by temporal processes? Barring the brief attention Tillich gives to essentialization in the third volume of his Systematic Theology, it seems more consistent to blur the God/world distinction and bind God’s self-saving to ours than to retain a commitment to divine aseity and, thus, sever God off from the world.

A Rebuttal of Tillich’s Reasons Before we endorse a view of God more consistent with Tillich’s commitments, we must challenge the arguments he gives for denying the contingency of God. Tillich denies divine contingency, we recall, first to defend God’s freedom. To suggest that human beings or the accidents of history contribute to the determination of God’s being ostensibly undercuts the

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mastery God has over His own fate. But, we might ask, is this not the risk God takes by becoming incarnate in Christ? No wonder Tillich denies the incarnation as a metamorphosis of God in favor of seeing it as a mere “appearance” of the divine. To “condition” God would not necessarily mean, however, that God’s destiny ultimately belongs to the forces or powers of the world; it would mean that God takes the risk of joining history for the sake of God’s self-saving as well as ours. Faith trusts that the voyage of the divine process toward inner-worldly fulfillment will be victorious; the Kingdom of God symbolizes the conviction that the process will result in what Altizer, following William Blake, refers to as “the final comingtogether of God and man.”35 The faith that God’s risk of self-divestment for the sake of His own fulfillment and ours will be successful addresses Tillich’s second and third concerns as well. The kenosis of God generates a momentum that, by faith, moves toward reconciliation. It has a telos. God joins us in history because of our fallenness, redeeming us and reconciling Himself to Himself through us in the process. The movement is contingent insofar as it absorbs and accumulates the positive content of history into the being of God, but the telos, the goal, and the momentum come from God. It is the power of God’s descent into flesh that drives history—a descent that occasions being not by an atemporal victory in heaven, but by the emptying of heaven. This emptying or self-negation answers the ontological question: being arises out of a self-divesting ground—one that sacrifices itself for the sake of material existence to appear. God remains His own destiny in a process synonymous with general providence. For everything to come to pass as God wills it (special providence) would mean to ignore the contingency and freedom of history; yet to maintain that contingent history ultimately thwarts God’s desire for self-reconciliation would be to subject God to a greater power and, thus, as Tillich says, “undercut” His divinity. The truth is in the middle. Creation is not an afterthought; it is the stage upon which the drama of creation and redemption plays itself out, one that by faith culminates in the Kingdom where God, as Paul says, will finally be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).

The Courage to Be and “Hegel’s Basic Error” Talk of a self-divesting ground of being brings us, by way of conclusion, to Tillich’s concept of the courage to be. The courage to be, we recall, involves the affirmation of oneself in spite of nonbeing in its various forms. It undeniably constitutes one of the most provocative and powerful ideas in all of

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Tillich’s theology. A radical kenotic theology can easily appropriate it: the source of the courage to be is not the victory of being over nonbeing eternally; it is, rather, the kenosis of God that fills us with the power of being to resist threats inimical to the fullness of our lives. For those who lack the power to resist injustice, the courage to be occurs when God fill them with His presence—negating Himself in the process. It is the kenotic ground of endurance “in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger” (2 Cor 6:5). It is the ability to be “punished, and yet not killed . . . sorrowful, yet always rejoicing . . . poor, yet making many rich . . . as having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Cor 6:9–10). It is the power that enabled Paul to claim he could “do all things through him who strengthens me” in spite of persecution, rejection, and hardship (Phil 4:13). Such courage presupposes the self-sacrifice of God who negates Himself in order to be reborn as the power of being within us that enables us to “choose life” (Deut 30:19) instead of giving ourselves over to death. For those, on the other hand, who possess power, the kenotic courage to be can function prophetically to remind them to be “imitators of God” (Eph 5:1) by giving it up when it generates exploitation, abuse, or suffering on the part of others.36 Feminist theologians rightly caution against the language of self-negation when it comes to the plight of women, historically, the vast majority of whom have been forced to lead lives of diminished vitality due to patriarchy. The groundless kenotic ground of the courage to be, although not immune to such criticism, could be an ally of feminist theology insofar as it seeks to empower individuals to confront nonbeing and seek abundant life for themselves and others (John 10:10). Perhaps the biggest criticism of radicalizing Tillich’s thought would come not from feminist theologians but from Tillich himself. The experience of war as a chaplain coupled with the onslaught of Nazism taught him that history is not the “self-manifestation of the divine” but a “series of unreconciled conflicts threatening man with self-destruction.”37 Any thoughtful observer of history, particularly on the other side of its bloodiest century, has to wonder whether the process of God’s unfolding and selfsaving has an “omega point,” to use the language of Teilhard de Chardin. The unrelenting environmental destruction of our planet due to the consumption of fossil fuels should cause further hesitation. Might we thwart the Kingdom of God? Perhaps Tillich’s understanding of symbols can be helpful in response. The truth of a symbol consists, for Tillich, in whether it is self-negating. At a deeper level, however, the question is how it orients our lives. The third article of the original Nicene Creed, for instance, invites the people who recite it to “look for” the resurrection. Those who do so may discover

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by way of anticipation and heightened awareness the unfolding of God in their experience. They may notice what Altizer refers to as epiphanies of the Godhead—epiphanies of God’s reconciliation with Himself, the coincidentia oppositorum, in time. They may discover, now in Tillichian language, the appearance of the new being “here and there” in their lives. Whatever happens in the end, at the last moment of time, remains beyond the comprehension of us all, but the truth of radical theology could be in its pragmatic value. It redirects our gaze from heaven to earth where, again to cite the language of Bonhoeffer, the “Beyond” has come to reside. The reconciliation of divine reality with itself in history, in other words, constitutes an eschatological symbol that invites us ever more deeply into the reality of the world around us. While the religious Tillich would agree with the orientation, his insistence that the divine-life resolves an inner tension beyond history arguably undermines it. The religious Tillich, to be sure, is a boundary-thinker. In his doctrine of God, as the present chapter has shown, Tillich positions himself on the boundary between orthodoxy (by affirming God’s aseity) and heterodoxy (by reinterpreting the Trinity in dialectical terms). It is no surprise that commentators see his thinking as “controlled” or traditional (Dourley, Ward, Miller) yet also as heterodox (O’Regan, Studebaker, Thatcher).38 Both sides are right in different ways. But if we take into account Tillich’s confession to Altizer—that “the real Tillich is the radical Tillich”—then, while the strictures he places on the divine life certainly align him with the classical theism of antiquity, the deeper ground of his thought undeniably shares more in common with Boehme and Hegel. This ground, we have argued, is more consistent with Tillich’s denial of objectified theism, his identification of God with the depth of ordinary reality, and his commitment to the Infra Lutheranum. It gives us a better sense of how God is present in our lives, and it casts greater light on the courage to be as an apocalypsis or unveiling of God who empowers human beings by dying in His transcendent form only to be reborn as the power of being within us, enabling us, in the process, to resist oppression, to stand up for life, and to work for justice. Is this not the real theological basis of the politically radical Tillich as well, the Tillich of The Socialist Decision, the Tillich who affirms God’s participation in the historical-political process? Rethinking Tillich in radical terms provides an exciting opportunity for returning to the courage to be as a privileged site of divine disclosure. The courage to be constitutes the presence of God within us that empowers us to face existential and political threats to the fullness of our being. It is not merely an echo of something God has already done, but GodWith-Us in the struggle for life and liberation. Indeed, this is the God who accompanies us on the way to the promise of our mutual salvation in

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history, whatever that might ultimately mean. Creation, likewise, is not an echo or the afterthought of a victory God has achieved eternally; it is the context in which the dialectical unfolding of the divine life shares our fate and reconciles itself to itself through us instead of beyond us. In short, we participate in God’s life just as He participates in ours! This we can finally and fully affirm when we break the confines of heaven and unleash the substance of Tillich’s thought into the stream of time and history.

Notes 1. Thomas Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 10. 2. Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966, 1992), 247. For Tillich’s direct comments on the subject, see Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions, ed. Jerald Brauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 81–83. 3. Keith Ward, God: A Guide for the Perplexed (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002), 144. 4. ELCA Youth Ministry, Lutheran Study Bible (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2009), 1932. 5. The meaning of this passage is contested. Douglas Oakman maintains, for example, that the kenosis of Christ in Philippians is in relation not to his divine nature but to Adam who tried to seize equality with God. See Douglas Oakman, “The Perennial Relevance of Saint Paul: Paul’s Understanding of Christ and a Time of Radical Pluralism,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 39.1 (2009), 120–131. For a response to Oakman’s interpretation, see Daniel J. Peterson, “The Kenosis of the Father: Affirming God’s Action at the Higher Levels of Nature,” Theology and Science 11.4 (2013), 451–454. 6. Thomas Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), 157. 7. Thomas Altizer, The Godhead and the Nothing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 144. 8. Ibid., 154. 9. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:242. 10. Ibid., 246. 11. Ibid., 236. This is the reason why Ward (above) considers Tillich’s a contemporary version of the “classical Christian doctrine of God.” It may, likewise, be the source of William Robert Miller’s observation that, while Tillich “professed to despise orthodoxy as ‘intellectual pharisaism,’” his “monumental Systematic Theology represents in large part a vindication of classical Christian doctrines through philosophical reinterpretation.” See William Robert Miller, The New Christianity (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1967), 231. 12. Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 16.

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13. John Dourley, “Jacob Boehme and Paul Tillich on Trinity and God: Similarities and Differences,” Religious Studies 31 (1995), 432. The theme of boundaries is a classic Tillichian topos, one to which we will return at the end of the chapter. 14. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1: 246. 15. See Daniel J. Peterson, “Jacob Boehme and Paul Tillich: A Reassessment of the Mystical Philosopher and Systematic Theologian,” Religious Studies 42 (2006), 225–234. 16. Ibid., 242. 17. Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now, (Charles Scribner’s, 1963) 94. 18. Andrew O’Neill, Tillich: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 52. 19. Paul Tillich, My Search for Absolutes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 26. 20. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:189. 21. Ibid., 242. 22. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 180. 23. In fairness to Tillich, the question here may be one of emphasis rather than strict denial. David Nikkel argues, for example, that Tillich “threw in his lot” with Schelling by maintaining that “while God as infinite ground and abyss is not limited to any particular finite forms, neither does God achieve an absolute fulfillment apart from expression in and through some finite forms” (15). That said, Nikkel admits that in Tillich this “position is never fully developed in an explicit manner.” Indeed, the accent—at least in volume one of the Systematic Theology— falls much more on the side of preserving God’s aseity. See David Nikkel, “The Mystical Formation of Paul Tillich,” The Global Spiral (2006),1–18. 24. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:250. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 251. 27. Stephen Studebaker, “God as Being and Trinity: Pentecostal-Tillichian Interrogations” (unpublished essay, 2014), 10; italics mine. See also Adrian Thatcher, The Ontology of Paul Tillich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 28. Frederick J. Parrella, “Tillich and Contemporary Spirituality.” In Paul Tillich: A New Catholic Assessment, ed. Frederick J. Parrella and Raymond Bulman (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1994), 252. 29. Mark Taylor, “Introduction: The Theological Development and Contribution of Paul Tillich.” In Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries, ed. Mark Taylor (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 23. 30. See Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 127–132. 31. Tillich, Paul Tillich, 239. 32. See Andrew Hass, “Becoming.” In Resurrecting the Death of God: The Origins, Influence, and Return of Radical Theology, ed. Daniel J. Peterson and G. Michael Zbaraschuk (New York: State University of New York Press, 2014), 155–172.

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33. Tillich, My Search, 26. 34. Consistent with his position on divine aseity, Tillich denies that the incarnation is a literal metamorphosis of God or the Son of God. Instead, he says, it is symbolic of God’s appearance or “total manifestation in a personal life” (Tillich, Systematic Theology, 2:149). 35. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 107. 36. Mary Lowe, “Queering Gender, Sin and Power with the Help of Martin Luther,” Pacific Lutheran University Religion Department University Lecture, April 18, 2012. 37. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 2:25. 38. Dourley, “Jacob Boehme” Ward, God, Miller, New Christianity, O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse, Studebaker, “God as Being,” and Thatcher, Ontology.

Chapter 3 God Is a Symbol for God Paul Tillich and the Contours of Any Possible Radical Theology Richard Grigg

Given the title of this chapter, the reader could be forgiven for assuming that my claim here is going to be that Paul Tillich lays out the a priori conditions of the possibility of any radical theology whatsoever. But, of course, that would hardly be in the spirit of the many anti-foundationalist endeavors that go under the heading “radical theology.” My claim instead is a much more modest one—namely, that Tillich does an exemplary job of covering the bases in surveying what God-talk in the contemporary West is all about. Thus, almost any attempt at a radical theology can be discussed in Tillichian terms, or at least played off of Tillich’s perspective, without wholly misunderstanding that theology and in a fashion that provides useful theological insights.1 I identify the heart of Tillich’s mature theology with his claim that “God is [a] symbol for God.”2 Just how that formula illuminates the way in which radical theology is done will be revealed in stages by juxtaposing the formula with various radical theological undertakings.

The God-Symbol and Radical Theologies When Tillich says that “God is [a] symbol for God,” he means that the omnipotent supernatural personal consciousness of traditional Western

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theism does not actually exist, but that the God-talk associated with that notion can be used to speak symbolically of the real God—being-itself. In Tillich’s own words: If the word God, conveying the idea of the highest being, is used for the expression of our unconditional concern, the notions implied in the idea of a highest being make it adequate to stand for the ground and abyss of being.3

In order to avoid confusion, I shall refer to the first “God” in Tillich’s “God is [a] symbol for God” as the God-symbol and to the second “God” simply as God. As all Tillich aficionados know, Tillich’s God is not a being but, rather, being-itself—the power or ground of being that lets beings be.4 From the subjective perspective, anything that I make the object of my ultimate concern—an unconditional concern around which I organize my life—is God for me. This is the existential root of the notion of God, and it is tied up for Tillich with the Jewish Shema, which Jesus proclaims is the greatest of all the commandments: “The Lord, our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”(Mark 12:29)5 But, while I can make almost anything my God in this sense, there is only one proper object of ultimate concern—and here we are moving from the subjective, existential side of ultimate concern to the objective side—and that is being-itself. This is so because ultimate concern is, by its very nature, concern about my being and nonbeing, where my being means not just my existence but also the meaning and purpose of my existence. And being-itself is that which determines my being and nonbeing. When I am threatened with nonbeing—a threat given to consciousness in the form of anxiety (here Tillich is dependent upon thinkers from Luther to Pascal to Kierkegaard to Heidegger) —courage rescues me from this threat. Courage, says Tillich, is the “self-affirmation of being in spite of the threat of nonbeing.”6 In other words, courage is the negation of the negation of being, which is precisely what Tillich means by being-itself.7 Or, to put it slightly differently, “Being-itself is the source of courage.”8 For Tillich, then, both the threat of nonbeing and the power of being-itself are given phenomenologically.9 It is already possible to state in a preliminary fashion how Tillich’s “God is [a] symbol of God” will prove useful in studying radical theologies. By clearly separating the God-symbol, and hence traditional theism, from the “real” God, Tillich points to a distinction that almost any undertaking calling itself a radical theology will need to address. Further, by averring that a particular ultimate concern, a particular God, will bring with it an

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equally particular sort of being-in-the-world, Tillich provides us with a tool for evaluating the practical effects of a radical theology. Thanks to the exploration undertaken below in which we shall ask whether the notion of “ultimate concern” applies to individual radical theologies, we shall be afforded a new perspective on how that notion functions for Tillich himself and will find some reasons for skepticism about how well it operates even in his own thought. The death of God theology of the 1960s, the movement that first comes to mind for many readers in thinking about Tillich and radical theology, was, of course, a mixed bag. Thomas J. J. Altizer’s version of the death of God theology was not the same as William Hamilton’s, whose approach differed, in turn, from that of Richard Rubenstein or Paul van Buren. But to talk in the most radical fashion about the death of God is to suggest that one has no need for either the God-symbol in Tillich’s formula or for his concept of God. Tillich did, indeed, admonish Altizer always to remember that the real Tillich was the radical Tillich, but he also rejected the claim made by Altizer that Paul Tillich was the father of the death of God theology. Tillich wanted no part of killing off God. Yet it is easy enough to understand how Tillich can be seen as preparing the ground for the death of God theology. We have already noted that Tillich’s God as being-itself is not a supernatural personal consciousness. As such, he cannot freely decide to create the world, nor can he provide the individual person continued existence after death. And for many people, this is tantamount to saying that Tillich’s God is no God at all. If God is not a personal being who can enter into the various causal matrices that make up our world and cannot provide me with immortality, then there is no point in paying any attention to God. In short, if God is Tillich’s being-itself, then for many persons, God is as good as dead.

From Tillichian Symbol to Postmodern Paradox But to say that Tillich’s theology—because of its own provocative, if not thoroughly radical, predilections—prepared the ground for the death of God theology is not the same as demonstrating a connection between the death of God theology and Tillich’s “God is [a] symbol for God.” That such a connection can, in fact, be made becomes clear when we look to one of the direct heirs of the death of God theology, most notably, Mark C. Taylor and his postmodern “a/theology.” The term a/theology may suggest that Taylor’s undertaking has to do with theology only insofar as it plays itself off against the idea of God. But Taylor’s approach is, in fact, more

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subtle. In his book Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology, published in 1984, Taylor identifies the creative and abyssal ground of everything that arises and disappears with the phenomenon of writing. This is not a surprising identification, given that Taylor was, at that point in time, in dialogue with Jacques Derrida and his deconstructive compatriots. Taylor explains that “As a play of differences that establishes the relationships that constitute all that is and is not, writing is no thing and yet is not nothing.”10 Taylor borrows a felicitous phrase from Hegel to describe writing, namely, “the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away.”11 Moreover, what is especially telling for our purposes is that Taylor can go on to identify writing with the “divine milieu.” He explains that “The milieu embodied in word and inscribed in it by writing is divine insofar as it is the creative/destructive medium of everything that is and all that is not.”12 Taylor’s vocabulary is more radical than Tillich’s, more focused upon seeing to it that we do not mistake the divine as something within our grasp. He is more in tune with Tillich’s notion of God as abyss than he is with God as ground. Yet there are certainly some resonances with Paul Tillich’s God. Being-itself is the depth dimension of all that arises and passes away, but being-itself does not itself arise and pass away. Thus, while Taylor has no reason to avail himself of the God-symbol in Tillich’s sense—although we shall come upon an analogue of the God-symbol in his work—it is instructive to consider the relationship between his divine milieu and Tillich’s being-itself, in this case as much for the light it sheds on Tillich as for the light it sheds on Taylor. Tillich’s concept of beingitself obviously resonates with Martin Heidegger’s “ontological difference,” the all-important difference between being and beings. For being-itself, Tillich tells us, is not a being and thus cannot, strictly speaking, even be said to exist.13 But Tillich identifies being-itself with God, a move that Heidegger would energetically disavow. It is easy to make the mistake of supposing that Tillich is asserting more than he actually is when he talks about being-itself and that what he says about it lands him squarely in the doubly dreadful position of being an onto-theologian and an ontological foundationalist (I presume that one can be the latter without being the former, but not the former without being the latter). Now, there can be little doubt that one can find statements in Tillich’s vast oeuvre that would suggest that those derisory labels are valid. But it is not clear that they are valid if we look at the larger implications of his system. At several points, Tillich claims that the only non-symbolic statement that can be made about God is that God is being-itself.14 This means, first of all, that we are not going to learn anything about what Tillich means by being-itself by somehow looking directly at God as that

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with which being-itself is identified, by looking at God in a way that does not require the mediation of the concept of being-itself. What, then, do we know about being-itself? We know that it is beyond both the finite and the infinite, if only because the infinite is sometimes conceived as simply an endless series of finite realities. The infinite as the simple negation of the finite is Hegel’s “bad infinite,” and Tillich wants to avoid identifying being-itself with that.15 Surely the most important thing that we know about being-itself is the aforementioned fact that it is the negation of the negation of being, the negation of nonbeing. This is something we know, for Tillich, only phenomenologically. We encounter the negation of the negation of being in a phenomenon such as “revelation,” which uncovers for us the “depth” of reason. We encounter it in the experience of “New Being” that overcomes the existential distortion that we experience in the dis-relation of the polar elements of our being—elements such as freedom and destiny. We confront it in courage as the self-affirmation of being in spite of the threat of nonbeing. But perhaps most fascinatingly, we encounter being-itself in the experience that Tillich calls the “metaphysical shock” (or the “ontological shock”).16 The metaphysical shock is at the heart of Leibnitz’s famous question, a question with which Heraclitus and Parmenides wrestled centuries earlier, “Why is there anything at all, why not simply nothing?” As Tillich is quick to point out, the question as it stands makes no sense, for “nothing” cannot “be.” But the metaphysical shock is, nonetheless, very real: if both philosophy and science begin in wonder, there can be no more primal wonder than the wonder at the fact that beings are, that there is something rather than nothing. It is just this primal wonder that is at the heart of Tillich’s expression “being-itself.” After all, any attempts actually to describe beingitself by predicating qualities of it necessarily falter, for being-itself is not a being and, thus, cannot have predicates.17 In this regard, being-itself is akin to the Indian notion of Brahman without qualities.18 It seems to me that the primal wonder which Tillich calls the metaphysical shock can be linked to the possibility of wonder before Taylor’s divine milieu—that within which everything arises and passes away but which does not itself arise or pass away. I take it that the word “wonder” is not too strong a term here, for the role played by writing as divine milieu in Taylor’s book clearly plays a role in his a/theology not entirely unlike the role played in Tillich’s by being-itself and the fact that there is anything at all. It is out of writing, after all, that our world, in the fullest sense of that term, is created, just as it is writing that always threatens to swallow our world into the abyss. If we fast-forward from Taylor’s 1984 book Erring to his 2007 work After God, the parallels with Tillich, as well as the differences, are much

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the same.19 The title already tells us that he is talking about a world that is, in some sense, without God.20 But what, then, about the much ballyhooed “return of religion” seen, for instance, in the resurgence of conservative Islam in the Middle East and the renewed fervor of conservative Christianity in Latin America? Taylor reads these movements, rightly I think, as neo-foundationalist attempts to find something secure in a world that is, in fact, after God—the world of postmodern network culture. Rather than concentrating upon writing as the abyssal phenomenon, Taylor is interested in this more recent book in the complex network of networks out of which both the natural and social worlds emerge. In our networked world, “To be is to be connected,” and Taylor draws upon contemporary perspectives from information theory to the notion of selforganizing systems—both organic and inorganic—to lay out his vision of our current situation.21 With a nod to his earlier book, he is comfortable speaking of the mysterious neither/nor, the abyss out of which all arises, as the “divine milieu.” To pick out but one example of the sort of phenomena that Taylor explores in this book, it seems reasonable to ask whether a farfrom-equilibrium system that spontaneously brings the wholly new into being can become the occasion for the metaphysical shock. It seems likely that, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, it can indeed be such an occasion. Thus, we can once more locate Taylor vis-à-vis Tillich’s “God is [a] symbol of God” by noting that Taylor again has no need for the Godsymbol—the traditional Abrahamic notion of deity used as a symbol of the ultimate—but that he does want to put something in the place occupied by Tillich’s God, in this case, the sort of networks of networks within which all beings arise and pass away. Once again, to say that this placeholder exists is not, of course, the same thing as to claim that Taylor’s notion of what can be designated God, or more often in his case the “divine,” and Tillich’s notion of God are entirely consistent. From his early deconstructive days up to the present, Taylor has been scrupulous about avoiding any suggestion that the divine abyss out of which beings arise is stable or substantive. His reality is “the fluid matrix in which all possibility and actuality arise and pass away. Always betwixt and between, virtual reality is neither here and now nor elsewhere and beyond, neither immanent nor transcendent.”22 Now Tillich’s being-itself is not static; it is, on the contrary, the power of being, and, therefore, a “living” God. But if we compare the kind of being-in-the world produced by making Tillich’s God as being-itself one’s ultimate concern with the sort of being-in-the-world envisioned by Taylor, we see a difference that reflects back upon their differing notions of the divine. For Tillich, making God as being-itself my ultimate concern can,

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at least in redemptive moments wherein estrangement is fragmentarily overcome, issue in a genuinely centered self.23 It is difficult to read Taylor as suggesting that the divine abyss, the arising and passing away which does not itself arise and pass away, could ever provide the firm ground upon which a centered self must be situated. The self in postmodern network culture is most likely as “betwixt and between” as is the divine milieu out of which that self arises.24 While Taylor has no interest in the God-symbol pole of Tillich’s “God is [a] symbol for God” insofar as he is not interested in employing symbols taken from the language of traditional theism, there is an analogue in his own work to the God-symbol, and that analogue is the use of paradox. Consider, for instance, his aforementioned focus in After God on the “neither/nor.” With this formula, Taylor leaves us no choice, nothing, no-thing. That, of course, is precisely what he is after in writing about the divine milieu. In order to point us toward the divine milieu, he needs a way to stretch language beyond its normal limits, especially insofar as our language has been formed in our confrontation with entities that we take to be present-to-hand. What symbol does formally for Tillich, then, paradox does for Taylor, with the all-important reservation that Taylor does not construct paradoxes out of material provided by traditional theism. It is worth noting, if only as an aside, that less talented students of poststructuralist rhetoric sometimes forget that part of the power of paradox is its capacity for surprise. If one overindulges in paradoxical language, the surprise disappears and one is left with only tiresome postmodern jargon.

The God-dess Symbol? When we turn to feminist theology and consider thinkers such as Mary Daly, Carol Christ, and Rosemary Radford Ruether, we discover that a juxtaposition with Tillich’s “God is [a] symbol for God” again proves fruitful. These thinkers are radical not simply insofar as they advocate a social-political agenda on behalf of women that is radical in comparison to the dynamics of patriarchal Western society, but also in their thinking about the divine (obviously the two dimensions are inextricably connected). They clearly have no time for Tillich’s God-symbol, for that God-symbol is redolent of the patriarchal identification of the divine with the male. But both Christ and Daly actually make use of Tillich’s notion of God as being-itself, the power or ground of being, in the formation of their own concepts of Goddess. While they can certainly alter that notion for their own purposes, these thinkers are clearly attracted to

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the note of empowering immanence that is suggested by Tillich’s God as being-itself. They see such empowering immanence as of a piece with women’s own powers of self-affirmation. For Carol Christ, for example, the divine appears when women affirm their rootedness in finitude and nature, and this manifests “a deeply relational power, which comes from understanding the connection of my power of being to that of all other life.”25 As Rachel Sophia Baard has observed regarding Ruether’s influential approach to the divine, Ruether “expresses her feminist perspective on God in language quite evocative of Tillich: ‘The God/ess who is primal Matrix, the ground of being-new being, is neither stifling immanence nor rootless transcendence.’”26 Mary Daly is, in many ways, the most significant figure in the story of the formation of contemporary feminist theology. While Daly can excoriate Tillich for the patriarchal elements in his thought and the less-thanpraiseworthy incidents in his personal life, Tillich’s “God is [a] symbol of God” resonates powerfully with Daly’s thought.27 Of course, Daly is not interested in Tillich’s male God-symbol, but she is in agreement with him that speaking of the divine requires symbols, and she parallels him in suggesting, along with many other religious feminists, that goddess traditions can be the source of symbolic material: “Goddess is a metapatriarchal Metaphor for the Being in which we live, love, create, and are.”28 Indeed, Goddess is the “Quintessential Female symbol of the integrity, harmony, vitality, and luminous splendor of the Universe.”29 Of course, while Tillich has essentially only one god-tradition upon which to draw for his Godsymbol, Daly has many, including the well-known tales of goddesses found in Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt.30 As for the God pole of Tillich’s “God is [a] symbol for God,” Daly finds Tillich’s notion of being-itself an important resource. In her book Outercourse, she calls Tillich’s theology a “springboard.”31 In her early manifesto Beyond God the Father, Daly is so Tillichian as to speak of “the content of the intuition of being as experienced in existential courage.”32 Moreover, her later work retains a Tillichian flavor in its descriptions of the divine, as when she avers that “Be-ing is the verb that says the dimensions of depth in all verbs, such as intuiting, reasoning, loving, imaging, making, acting, as well as the couraging, hoping, and playing that are always there when one is really living.” For Daly, the divine, or Be-ing, is clearly manifest in how women live their lives. In this sense, there is a phenomenological cast to her ontology. To suggest that Be-ing shows itself, for Daly, in how women live their lives raises the question of ultimate concern as a way of being-in-the-world. In the exploration of Taylor above, we saw that Tillich’s notion of ultimate concern brings with it the suggestion of a unitary, centered self. One

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is supposed to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength, and every other concern in one’s life orbits this ultimate concern. On the one hand, Mary Daly is no postmodernist, and she wishes to affirm the possibility of women uncovering a strong personal center. “Self-Centering Spinsters,” she tells us, “whirl around the axis of our own be-ing, and as we do so, matter/spirit becomes more subtle/supple.”33 Daly’s concept of a robust personal center should not be equated with an isolated Cartesian subject: “Journeying centerward is Self-centering movement in all directions. It erases implanted pseudodichotomies between the Self and ‘other’ reality, while it unmasks the unreality of both ‘self’ and ‘world” as these are portrayed, betrayed, in the language of the fathers’ foreground.”34 Insofar as Daly affirms the possibility of the self being centered as opposed to always de-centered, then, she is in harmony with Tillich’s thinking. On the other hand, we can detect discordant notes as well. We have seen that Tillich’s notion of an ultimate concern and the concept of the centered self are correlative. Having God as one’s ultimate concern provides an unconditional commitment around which all else revolves. Daly affirms the possibility of women attaining centered selves. But it is not clear that the same correlation is in play as that which we find in Tillich: Daly’s notion of a productive relation to the divine cannot so easily be described as a function of an unconditional or ultimate concern. Why not? The idea of God serving as my ultimate concern tends to confer upon God a phenomenological singularity: while Tillich’s God as being-itself is obviously not an objective being standing over against the self—his God is the depth of the self-world structure of finite being—focusing on the one God as my unconditional concern to which all other concerns are subservient does at least threaten to make God a separate intentional object. Daly simply cannot see being-itself or Goddess as manifesting itself to us independently of all the multitudinous relationships with nature and other persons that make up the warp and woof of women’s existence. Recall what she says above about overcoming “pseudodichotomies.” For Daly, being-itself or Be-ing is known only insofar as we interact with the rest of creation, so much so that there is even a suggestion in her work that Be-ing is dependent upon such interaction: “Breathing in harmony with the Elements, we become Con-creators of the Expanding Presence of Be-ing.”35 Indeed, Daly is not averse to being called a pantheist.36 Daly is not alone in her emphasis on women’s finite relationships and the reality of the divine. Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ suggest that the authors represented in their anthology titled Weaving the Visions “agree that the self is essentially relational, inseparable from the limiting and enriching contexts of body, feeling, relationship, community, history and the web of life. The notion of the relational self can be correlated with the

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immanental turn in feminist views of the sacred: in both cases connections to what is finite, changing, and limited is affirmed.”37 As a result of this emphasis, I have suggested elsewhere that, in several important feminist theologies, one enacts a relationship to the divine, and that in these “enactment theologies” being-itself or Goddess is what it is only via such enactment.38

Tillich’s Proto-Radical Theology All of this brings us back to Paul Tillich and his radical, or at least protoradical, theology. We have seen that Tillich’s familiar concept of God as one’s ultimate concern is connected with the notion of a centered self. But Daly has shown us that one can have an idea of the divine that is connected with personal centeredness but that the piety arising out of that idea need not be as single-minded as Tillich’s avowal that God should be my unconditional concern, with all other concerns subservient to it. And this raises the all-important question, “In exactly what fashion is being-itself ‘intended’ by the human subject?” There appears to be both a phenomenological and a psychological challenge at this point in Tillich’s system. The phenomenological challenge is this: if being-itself has no predicates, no qualities that can be attributed to it, then how can it become a “something” of which I am conscious?39 The psychological challenge has to do with the likelihood that one could love something as abstract as Tillich’s being-itself with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. On this latter score, Tillich himself is fully aware of the Hegelian dictum that pure being and pure nothing are one and the same.40 The apparent solution to both the phenomenological and the psychological challenges is to return yet again to Tillich’s doctrine of symbolism. Phenomenologically speaking, the God-symbol stands in for beingitself—it represents being-itself and, thereby, provides a concrete content for consciousness. Psychologically speaking, the God-symbol provides the believer with the gracious, providential God of the Christian tradition as an attractive object of ultimate concern. It seems to me that, while Tillich’s doctrine of symbolism may solve the phenomenological challenge, it leads to difficulties where the psychological challenge is concerned. Tillich famously asserts in Dynamics of Faith that myths must be “broken,” and while he would never countenance the expression “only a symbol,” he consistently maintains that one falls into idolatry if one forgets that the symbol’s own finite content is not identical with the ultimate to which it points.41 This is why he praises the symbol of the cross as self-negating.42

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But if the believer can make being-itself the object of her ultimate concern only insofar as she is presented with a loving, personal God in the Godsymbol, while the God to which the symbol points is actually without any such qualities, then has she not, in fact, slipped back into traditional theism? We must keep in mind at this point that, while Tillich can employ the phrase, he has no doctrine of the analogia entis—the analogy of being—in the classical sense.43 If he did, then we could say that his God really did possess the qualities presented in the God-symbol, but did so in a morethan-human, perfect fashion that we cannot comprehend. But there is no analogy between beings and being-itself, no continuum of being with the simplest finite being on one end and God on the other. Once again, beingitself simply has no positive qualities.44 This has long been a concern of mine regarding how Tillich’s theology actually operates, or at least how it did operate at the high-point of Tillich’s influence within Protestant Christianity. The believer who imbibed Tillichian vocabulary in church, a church in which the pastor had been introduced to Tillich in seminary, could actually go right on believing in the same old God in which he had always believed, but feel that his grasp of God was somehow sophisticated and up-to-date if he called God “beingitself” or the “power of being.” It has even occurred to me that Tillich was aware of this difficulty, and that it was the occasion for his famous admonition to Altizer to remember that the real Tillich is the radical Tillich. But, of course, I am suggesting here that the problem is a systemic one, and that a vanishingly small number of persons (soul mates of Spinoza perhaps) could fully appropriate Tillich’s notion of God as being-itself and actually love being-itself with their whole heart, soul, mind, and strength. This is why, after all, Brahman without qualities must show itself in its many personal avatars, from Krishna to Kali. We should recognize, of course, that much the same problem seems to arise in this Indian case: If Brahman has no qualities, then how do its avatars genuinely represent it?

Fixing Tillich’s Monotheism The course followed in this essay may appear to lead to a wholly paradoxical result: we began with the suggestion that Tillich’s theology is a useful measure for investigating any attempt at radical theological thought and have now come to the conclusion that there is a weakness in his system that encourages a piety that brandishes a radical vocabulary while actually holding onto the venerable God of traditional Abrahamic religion. But there is no cause for despair, for Tillich’s theology can rather easily be fixed. The

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preceding sentence may hit the reader as an extraordinarily presumptuous claim. Does the author really believe that he has found a serious flaw in Tillich’s system and that, what is even more incredible, he knows how to fix it? My defense against the charge of presumptuousness is that the “fix” I wish to suggest flows quite naturally from Tillich’s own remarks; it does not involve a major make-over of Tillich’s theology but only—so I wish to argue—an almost inevitable development of that theology, a development already begun by Mary Daly insofar as she emphasizes the inextricable connection between being-itself and the concrete beings that participate in it. It is a fix too that can be facilitated by considering the contemporary radical theology that Laurel Schneider proposes in her Beyond Monotheism.45 That proposal actually serves two functions in the development of Tillich’s theology being suggested here. First, we can take from Schneider her recognition of the need to emphasize the appearance of the divine in, with, and under the multitude of bodies that make up the real world in which we find ourselves—bodies that are the concrete locus of injustice and suffering. Second, there are aspects of Schneider’s proposal that, if taken up into Tillich’s system, would make it no longer truly Tillichian, so that Schneider’s book also marks a boundary that we dare not cross in attempting to reconfigure Tillich. What cannot be taken from Schneider and incorporated into our rereading of Tillich is her post-structuralist insistence that visions of ontological unity, which are often ultimately rooted in the idea of monotheism, are almost inevitably totalizing, and that the scientific worldview is only one narrative among others, and a totalizing one at that. Any American who suffered through the 2012 election cycle cannot but be chastened by recalling that those candidates who most directly threatened women’s bodies were anti-science crusaders who claimed that, in the case of “legitimate rape,” a woman’s body would prevent conception and that global warming is a scientific hoax.46 The key to re-reading Tillich so that one can genuinely love his God is to emphasize his consistent avowal that everything that exists participates in the power of being-itself. While his famous “Protestant principle” puts Tillich on guard against any identification of beings with being-itself, of finite entities with God, the unavoidable implication of his theological system is that to love being-itself with all one’s heart, mind, soul, and strength is to love all those beings that participate in being-itself. Here it is useful to look to Schneider’s argument in favor of a logic of pluralism that, while it does not entirely deny the One, exposes its porosity and the fashion in which it is always overwhelmed by the diversity of the real world. It is a pluralism that, in the end, focuses on the ethical implications of belief. For Schneider, an uncompromising monotheism forces us to “split the evident manyness of bodies from the oneness of the divine.”47 Tillich maintains the

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absolute priority of the One in the form of being-itself—this is where his theology resists complete incorporation into Schneider’s project—but he connects this with an ontological plurality that can potentially acknowledge the sacredness of Schneider’s “manyness of bodies”: The power of being must transcend every being that participates in it. This is the motive which pushes philosophical thought to the absolute, to the negation of any content, to the transnumerical One, to pure identity. On the other hand, the power of being is the power of everything that is, in so far as it is. This is the motive which drives philosophical thought to pluralistic principles, to relational or process descriptions of being, to the idea of difference.48

Participation in being-itself belongs most directly to human beings, those beings to whom being-itself is phenomenologically present. Moreover, it is the bodies of human beings with which the ethical component of Schneider’s proposal is most concerned. But the self-world structure of finite being that is at the heart of human being can be applied, by analogy, to the other sorts of beings that make up the material universe of which we are a part.49 For instance, the polar elements of freedom and destiny apply by analogy to a tree, insofar as the tree is both a discrete being distinguishable from other beings and a being that is necessarily implicated in a larger causal matrix. This is where the real analogia entis shows itself in Tillich’s system: other beings share the structure of human being analogously. This analogia homini allows us to bring to the fore what is surely implicit in Tillich’s system. That task can be facilitated by embracing H. Richard Niebuhr’s observation that “Radical monotheism dethrones all absolutes short of the principle of being-itself. At the same time, it reverences every relative existent. Its two great mottoes are: “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before me” and “Whatever is, is good.”50 If we think of being-itself as necessarily encompassing every entity that exists, then we recognize God in Jesus’ “least of these.” (Matthew 25:40) It turns out that there is a second dynamic in Tillich’s system, in addition to his notion of the participation of all beings in being-itself, that allows us to emphasize the inclusion of a plurality of beings in our love of God. Tillich frequently points out that human beings belong to the world of nature but, under the conditions of existence, are estranged from it.51 It follows that when existential estrangement is at least fragmentarily overcome by making God my ultimate concern, my participation in the larger world of nature is also fragmentarily reestablished. In other words, not only do all existents participate in the power of being-itself, but at least where my essential being is concerned, I participate in all other beings.

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Tillich’s twofold emphasis on participation and the implication that loving God is not simply to love being-itself but to love being-itself and, in at least some derivative fashion, all existents, is given expression in a sermon of Tillich’s on the problem of theodicy, which he entitled “The Riddle of Inequality”: Only in the unity of all beings in time and eternity can there be a humanly possible answer to the riddle of inequality. “Humanly possible” does not mean an answer that removes the riddle of inequality, but one with which we can live. There is an ultimate unity of all beings, rooted in the divine life from which they emerge and to which they return. All beings, nonhuman as well as human, participate in it . . . The fact that others do not have changes the character of our having . . . In every death we encounter, something of us dies, and in every disease, something of us tends towards disintegration.52

In order to stay true to the dynamics of Tillich’s system, we must keep in mind that being-itself has priority over the beings that participate in it. That is, while I am arguing that it is legitimate to make Tillich’s notion of ultimate concern more appealing by recognizing that loving God entails loving the beings that are grounded in God, we do not arrive at love of God as being-itself by loving beings. Rather, if we want Tillich to remain Tillich, then we shall have to say that we love beings because we love God as being-itself.

Notes 1. “Radical theology,” as I will be employing the expression, refers to theologies that clearly disavow tenets of traditional Abrahamic theism often considered central to belief in God. Thus, a movement such as “radical orthodoxy” does not fall under the heading of what I am considering radical theology here. 2. Tillich, Dynamics, 46. 3. Paul Tillich, “Symbol and Knowledge: A Response,” Journal of Liberal Religion 2 (spring 1941): 204. 4. The main sources for my interpretation of Tillich’s notion of God as beingitself are the first volume of his Systematic Theology and The Courage to Be. This means that I shall largely be abstracting from the specifically Christian portions of Tillich’s theology, which may be unthinkable for some Tillichians, if only because Tillich holds that what is provided by the Christ event is given in history and not derivable from something such as the metaphysical shock. However, I take it that the universal phenomenological access to being-itself

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

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is the point of contact for receiving the Christ-event in an attitude of faith— what Karl Rahner would call the “obediential potency” for receiving the specifically Christian revelation. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I: 11. Tillich, Courage, 66. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 155–156 (italics mine). Consider what it would mean to read the identification of being-itself with the negation of the negation of being in non-phenomenological terms. The physical universe involves a continuous play of things coming into and going out of existence, and one might choose to see the process of things coming into existence, or even of things maintaining their existence over time, as the negation of the negation of being (in any closed system, there is of course no actual destruction or creation of energy-matter, but only reconfigurations of a constant amount of energy-matter). Could Tillich intend to identify the negation of the negation of being with this process? Certainly not, for then being-itself would be simply a general concept under which all instances of this physical process fit. But Tillich’s identification of being-itself with God, and his notion of God as my ultimate concern and as that which can rescue me from the threat of nonbeing, requires being-itself to be more than simply a name under which numerous physical phenomena can be collected. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 108. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 116. Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 204–205. Paul Tillich, “Reply to Interpretation and Criticism.” In The Theology of Paul Tillich, 2nd ed, ed. Charles W. Kegley(New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982), 379 and Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 238–239. Cf. note 44 below. Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 237. See Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 113; 163–164. One potential problem for Tillich is that, as we have seen, he wants to see being-itself as empowering existential courage. He calls being-itself the “source” of courage. But this suggests causality: if I say that a particular spring is the source of a lake, I mean that the spring is at least one part of the causal network that created the lake. But Tillich knows that causality is, in roughly Kantian terms, a category of “finite being and thinking” and thus not applicable to being-itself (Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 165). Therefore, when he proceeds more carefully, he acknowledges that causality can be applied to God only symbolically (e.g., Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 238). But how, then, can we understand the sense in which God as being-itself empowers existential courage? The solution to this potential dilemma is to recognize that symbols of being-itself can have motivating or causal power within consciousness. In other words, being-itself is not in and of itself involved in causation, but the symbol that represents being-itself within human consciousness does have causal

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18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

Richard Grigg power (in this case we might better say “motivational” power). This is at the heart of the interpretation of Tillich set forth in my Symbol and Empowerment: Paul Tillich’s Post-Theistic System(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985). Tillich identifies Brahman with “the principle of being-itself” in Systematic Theology I: 229. Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Taylor’s phrase “after God” is a double entendre. While its most obvious meaning is that we live in a time after God, a time in which God is absent, there is also the suggestion that we are still running “after God,” that is, still pursuing God. Taylor, After God, 7. Taylor, After God, 311. Taylor explicitly contrasts his own position with Tillich’s “monism” on 35–40. He nixes the idea of “being-itself ” on 311, although in this latter case he begins with the qualification that if being is inherently temporal, then being, or being-itself, is never present, a qualification that may apply more obviously to Heidegger than to Tillich. On p. 345 he writes, “God is not the ground of being that forms the foundation of all beings but the figure constructed to hide the originary abyss from which everything emerges and to which all returns. While this abyss is no thing, it is not nothing—neither being nor nonbeing, it is the anticipatory wake of the unfigurable that disfigures every figure as if from within.” For example, Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 169–170. For one take on what Taylor’s a/theology implies for our being-in-the-world, see Chapter 8 of After God where he talks about “ethics without absolutes.” Carol P. Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 105. Rachel Sophia Baard, “Tillich and Feminism.” In Re Manning, Cambridge Companion, 281. For works that deal in detail with Tillich’s influence on Daly, see Mary Ann Stenger, “A Critical Analysis of the Influence of Paul Tillich on Mary Daly’s Feminist Theology,” Encounter 43 (1982), 219–238; Laurel C. Schneider, “From New Being to Meta-Being: A Critical Analysis of Paul Tillich’s Influence on Mary Daly,” Soundings 75 (Summer/Fall 1992), 421–439; Michel Dion, “Mary Daly, Théologienne et Philosophe Féministe,” Etudes Theologiques et Religieuses 4 (1987), 515–534. For Daly’s critiques of Tillich, see Baard, “Tillich and Feminism.” Mary Daly, Quintessence . . . Realizing the Archaic Future(Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 95. Ibid., 175. We noted above that Taylor’s use of paradox is formally parallel to Tillich’s use of God-symbols. Now we have seen that Daly opts for Goddess-symbols in her attempt to speak of the divine. But, in addition to symbol, she finds another way in which to stretch language so that it might evoke something beyond the merely mundane. Rather than paradox, however, this important component in Daly’s work consists in the construction of neologisms and a subversively playful use of the English language. A brief example of this is evident in the quotations on pp. 11–12 above. Also, see Mary Daly, with Jane Caputi, Webster’s First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).

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31. Mary Daly, Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 159. 32. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 38. 33. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: the Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 391. 34. Ibid., 6. 35. Mary Daly, Quintessence, 54. 36. Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 400. 37. Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ, eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), 173. 38. See Richard Grigg, When God Becomes Goddess: The Transformation of American Religion (New York: Continuum, 1995). 39. Neither the assertion that God as being-itself is beyond both the finite and the infinite nor the claim that God as being-itself empowers the negation of the negation of being violates the dictum that nothing can be predicated of being-itself. The first assertion tells us only what being-itself is not—it is an example of the venerable via negativa—and the second assertion tells us only something about being-itself ’s relationship to human consciousness; it does not involve any claim about what being-itself “is” in and of itself. 40. Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 56. 41. See Tillich, Dynamics, Chapter III. 42. See Ibid., 97–98. 43. Tillich claims to embrace the analogia entis on pp. 239–240 of Systematic Theology I. But what he is saying is that, because all beings participate in the reality of being-itself as their unconditional ground, then anything can potentially become a symbol of being-itself. But in this sort of symbolism one learns nothing about the characteristics of being-itself. Rather, the symbol stands in for being-itself providing a concrete content of consciousness so that one can become aware of the mere presence of being-itself. Therefore, Tillich tells us that religious symbols “are not true or false in the sense of cognitive judgments” (“Existential Analysis and Religious Symbols.” In Contemporary Problems in Religion, ed. Harold A. Basilius[Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1956], 54) and that they “provide no objective knowledge, but yet a true awareness” (“The Religious Symbol.” In Religious Experience and Truth, ed. Sidney Hook[New York: New York University Press, 1961], 316). Note, furthermore, Tillich’s admission that “my understanding of analogia is more negative-protesting than positive-affirming.” Tillich’ reply to Gustave Weigel in Paul Tillich in Catholic Thought, revised edition, ed. Thomas F. O’Meara and Donald M. Weisser(New York: Image Books, 1969), 55. 44. Tillich’s seemingly essential claim that the one non-symbolic statement that can be made about God is that God is being-itself is, contrary to what one might assume, not a claim that is entirely ironclad. At one point in his career, Tillich could say that there are no non-symbolic statements that can be made about God. But, as Tillich himself confessed, “ . . . an early [1940] criticism by

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45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

Richard Grigg Professor Urban of Yale forced me to acknowledge that in order to speak of symbolic knowledge one must delimit the symbolic realm by an unsymbolic statement. I was grateful . . . [and] became suspicious of any attempts to make the concept of symbol all-embracing and therefore meaningless. The unsymbolic statement which implies the necessity of religious symbolism is that God is being-itself, and as such beyond the subject-object structure of everything that is.” (“Reply to Interpretation and Criticism,” 379.) Wilbur had charged Tillich with “pansymbolism,” meaning that if you say that there are no nonsymbolic statements that can be made about God, your assertion makes no sense: if I had no literal knowledge at all about the being of God, then I would not be able to recognize anything as a symbol of God; I would not be able to detect any affinity between God and the alleged symbol. (see Wilbur Urban, “Prof. Tillich’s Theory of the Religious Symbol,” Journal of Liberal Religion 2 [Summer 1940], 34–36.) Yet in the second volume of his Systematic Theology, which appeared in 1957, Tillich says that the one non-symbolic statement that can be made about God is “the statement that everything we say about God is symbolic.” (9). But this lands him in pansymbolism all over again. It provides no hook on which to hang symbolic statements about God. It should be obvious, then, why I have chosen to base my analysis of Tillich on his assertion that the one non-symbolic statement that can be made about God is that God is being-itself, an assertion that, as noted above, Tillich makes not only in his reference to Urban’s criticism but also in Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 238–239. Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (New York: Routledge, 2008). While Schneider follows the post-structuralist party line according to which unified notions of being are inevitably “totalizing,” Taylor accuses post-structuralists of having an outmoded “monolithic view of systems and structures.” (Taylor, After God, 12). Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 140. Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 231. See Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 169; 174–186. H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 37. (italics mine) Niebuhr’s theologically based assertion that everything that is, is good echoes Augustine’s Neo-Platonic principle of plenitude, which for Augustine is relevant to the problem of theodicy, Tillich’s response to which we shall touch on below. There is no more unjustly neglected theologian than H. R. Niebuhr. Schneider actually notes what she regards as essentially positive insights by both Tillich and Niebuhr that allow her to clarify her own post-monotheistic position. Ironically, given the aforementioned unfortunate neglect of Niebuhr, while Schneider mentions H. R. Niebuhr in her text (p. 192), his name is absent from the book’s index. For example, Tillich, Systematic Theology I: 168. Paul Tillich, “The Riddle of Inequality.” In Eternal Now, 45–46.

Chapter 4 The Nemesis Hex Mary Daly and the Pirated Proto-Patriarchal Paulus Christopher D. Rodkey

Feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly describes her overarching theological methodology—despite her disdain for methodologies as “methodologicide”—as “Piracy.” Among all of those influential on her thought—Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelle Morton, Susan Griffin, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nietzsche, and the death of God theologians—it is Paul Tillich who has the most enduring and significant impact on Daly.1 As a “Pirate” and “Alchemist,” Daly gives these figures some credit but acknowledges that she often appropriates and misappropriates their ideas for her own playful usage. A “Call to Piracy” for Daly is to poach and “accumulate” such intellectual “treasures of knowledge that had been hidden from my Tribe.” Although Daly simultaneously exhibits a disdain and respect for Tillich, she engages no other thinker so directly throughout her writing. She refers to Tillich in both Outercourse and Quintessence as a thinker “used” as a “spring-board.”2 In doing so, Laurel Schneider suggests, Daly has initiated “a profound and invaluable critique of the limitations and distortions embedded in his thinking.”3 While teaching at the now-defunct Cardinal Cushing College (Brookline, MA), Daly audited courses with Paul Tillich at Harvard Divinity School. She writes of this experience: I sat at the back of the Sperry Room where Tillich lectured. He had a powerful charisma but there was something about it that I did not like . . . But it

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Christopher D. Rodkey was important that I saw and heard Tillich in person—that my knowledge was not confined to his books.

Daly would write further that she felt Tillich’s “ghost” later when she herself would return to Harvard to lecture in the same room.4 Even though, as Daly admits in Pure Lust years later, the “vast scope and vigor of his thought . . . [i]s worth studying and criticizing by those who would embark upon the adventure of dis-covering Elemental philosophy,” Tillich is not to be altogether trusted; instead, his ideas should only be used “as springboards for our own original analysis.”5 She adds in a 1972 article that “Tillich’s insights . . . are very helpful” for the cause of women’s liberation, and thus “[h]is work provides a theoretical” groundwork “which can be extended and applied.”6 Daly’s most important and central criticism of Tillich is that his systematic understanding of the power of being for self-transcendence is not radical enough. Once one transcends oneself in Tillich’s theology, Daly suggests in Gyn/Ecology, “[t]here is no reason to change and no possibility of changing, only of wallowing.” Self-transcendence must be perpetually unfolding and truly radical for it to be “self-affirming” in the way that Tillich believes that it is. While this is not necessarily how Tillich presents the nature of the power of being in his theology, Daly sees the centrality of Christology and Tillich’s own personal life as examples of a life erroneously self-affirmed. Regarding Tillich’s sexual addictions, Daly suggests Paul Tillich exhibited the kind of “religious doublethink” of “mythic/theological self-deception” that manifests itself, reverses itself, as “self-acceptance.”7 She adds, such “sadomasochistic” reversals “are the juice/sap of his impressive theologizing.”8 While Daly writes in Gyn/Ecology that Tillich “deceives us with statements that are both true and untrue at the same time,” she refers to him in her earlier writing, in The Church and the Second Sex, as a “prophetic figure.”9 In Daly’s later work, Tillich’s influence has—intriguingly— become even more apparent, although he is discussed and credited far less. Wanda Berry suggests that Tillich’s is not only a formal influence upon on Daly’s writing, but that Tillich’s influence “was both conscious and unconscious.”10

Courage, Quintessence, and Ontological Intuition Perhaps the most obvious act of Piracy enacted by Daly on Tillich’s thought is her poaching/Pirating of his notion of existential courage. Just

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as Daly criticized Tillich on other elements of his theology, she charges once again that Tillich did not go far enough in his understanding of courage. More specifically, the patriarchal impulse unconsciously at work in Tillich’s thought as a Christian theologian prevented him from taking his good ideas to their logical ends. Daly writes in Outercourse: The idea of existential courage was initially inspired by Paul Tillich’s book, The Courage to Be. However . . . I took it into another context, that is, the context of the omnipresent sexual caste system of patriarchy, and applied it to the struggle to see through the basic/base assumptions of sexual hierarchy in theology and in popular culture. So the concept of existential courage was radically transformed. Tillich became the target of my criticism for encouraging detachment from the reality of the struggle against oppression in concrete manifestations.11

In Pure Lust, Daly calls this detached courage “potted courage,” as static and ultimately hegemonic, as not perpetually becoming. This potted courage can be present in Christian, non-Christian, or atheistic philosophical or theological settings. She explains, using Tillich as an example: Theologian Paul Tillich . . . maintains that “the courage to be” transcends the fortitude which is concerned only with specific fears, and that it confronts existential anxiety of nonbeing. However, patriarchal theological/ philosophical analysis of anxiety has no way to Name adequately the specific structures of “nonbeing”—mythic, ideological, or societal. It therefore cannot fully Name the way past these, which is the Elemental Realizing of participation in Metabeing. In other words, patriarchally named existential courage is described as “affirming being over against nonbeing,” and this is all it can do. It can only affirm one reified opposite over against another, but it cannot re-member the metapatriarchal Elemental intuition of be-ing. This the nebulous nothingness called “nonbeing” looms larger than life.12

For Daly, then, Tillichian courage is an authentic ontological courage, but it does not open the means for a truly dynamic self-transcending reality, instead it points toward a more singular self-transcendence.13 As such, Tillich’s conception of courage rejects the dynamism that is potent in the local “I.” To have the “Courage to See,” she writes, is a situation where the self recognizes “the unseeing—indeed eyeless—existential courage of Tillich [to be] I-less for women.”14 Dalyan Elemental Courage is ontological and Elemental; it requires subversive transgression and the ability to accept and love oneself.15 It requires an acknowledgement of différance by virtue of the rootedness of Courage in Metabeing. It is also connected to the life-itself that is Elemental, because we have an “intuition of be-ing.”

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Daly Names several different kinds of ontological, Elemental courage, and defines them in the Wickedary: Ontological Courage, Outrageous Courage, the Courage to Leave, Courage to Live, Courage to See, and the Courage to Sin.16 The Courage to Sin is later called “The Courage to Sin Originally,” “The Courage to Sin/Spin,” and, finally, the “Courage to Sin Big.”17 She elsewhere also mentions the Courage to Be, to Grieve, to Rage, to Laugh out Loud, and to Create.18 In all of these different kinds of ontological/Elemental Courage, the courageousness is always subversive as “Outrageous Courage,” which risks the charge of “tastelessness” but moves toward “reversing the reigning reversals” of patriarchy.19 The false empowerment offered by patriarchal sado-spirituality is called dis-couraging.20 To this end, Daly’s notion of the Courage to Sin is of some particular significance as the courage to live life. Early in Pure Lust, the Courage to Sin is directly connected to the process of self-transcendence, of “Realizing be-ing.” Later, she explains that women throughout history have been emphatically “wrong according to prevailing assumptions” of the patriarchy “may be said to Sin.” Since “the word sin is probably etymologically akin to the Latin est, meaning (s)he is, and that it is derived from the IndoEuropean root es-, meaning to be,” then Courage, that is, “our courage to be,’ must imply “the courage to be wrong.” In other words, “Elemental be-ing is Sinning; it requires the Courage to Sin.” She explains further: To Sin against the society of sado-sublimation is to be intellectual in the most direct and daring way, claiming and trusting the deep correspondence between the structures/processes of one’s own mind and the structures/ processes of reality. To Sin is to trust intuitions and the reasoning rooted in them. To Sin is to come into the fullness of our powers, confronting now newly understood dimensions of the Battles of Principalities and Powers.

The Courage to Sin is to revolt and reverse patriarchal pseudo-realities and to construct new ones. It “trusts the deep correspondence between the structures” and “processes of one’s own mind and the structures” and “processes of reality.” Ultimately, to Sin is to Re-member to Live and love Life. 21 It is to find meaning and value in life-itself; and to do this will always be a subversive activity, especially in a death-loving patriarchal society.22 While Daly would probably see herself on this point at her furthest extent away from Tillich, while still using his Pirated ideas, the connection to sin and Sin reflects a very Tillichian anthropology. If we recall Tillich’s sermon, “The Good I will, I do not,” Tillich memorably speaks of “Sin— Sin in the singular with a capital ‘S’—Sin as a power controlling world and mind, persons and nations.”23 First, it is interesting that Tillich shifts to a capitalized use of the word Sin here; spelling perhaps without realizing the

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gravity with which a future interpreter such as Daly might methodologically associate such a shift.24 Secondly, ironically, staying true to Protestant theological anthropology, to accept one’s own life as perpetually full of sin and grappling with Sin is a liberated, Christian life for Tillich. It is the means by which one “finds the courage to believe in a total acceptance of themselves,” to love themselves. A Dalyan reading of Tillich here suggests that Tillich is, in his sermon, partially unaware of just how his words expose deeper truths than he already intended. Clearly, for Tillich, we live in a sinful state. Daly would suggest that we do not live in a sinful (or “sin-fool”) state, but rather that we should live in a Sinful (Sin-full) state, that being Sinful is not a passive way of beingin-the-word. The small-letter-s sinful state is one imposed by a patriarchal religious system that defines sin with what its typically necrophilial agendas and is not biophilic. Small-s sin is something to be avoided, in as much as it is unavoidable; it apprehends self-transcendence unless, according to Tillich, it is simply recognized and accepted. For Daly, to acknowledge is not enough, and to genuinely Name sin would be to reverse it. “Sin-ful Courage,” she writes, “is furthered by the Pyrogenetic Power of Naming, which itself is an expression of the Volcanic Virtue of Courage.”25 Sinful Courage, then, as an active activity (rather than passive) requires one to have the Courage to Create. The phrase “Courage to Create” is taken from Tillich’s friend, Rollo May, who, in a book titled The Courage to Create poses human creativity as something that “provokes the jealously of the gods.”26 Calling such thinking laughable, Daly suggests that Godly jealousy has its origins in men’s deficiency to give birth themselves. The “Leaping/Expanding” of self-transcendence, Daly writes, “requires Ontological Courage, which manifests itself as the Courage to Create—to summon out of the apparent void New Be-ing,” to “push back the foreground, the nonbeing pompously parading as Be-ing.” This Spinning and Weaving subversively against the nothing of patriarchy sees this nothingness as a new creatio ex nihilo—Courageously Creating out of the nothing.27 In an earlier work, she calls this Courageous Creativity “ontological becoming,” which has “itself an alchemistic power” as “revolutionary and revelatory, revealing our participation in an ultimate reality as Verb, as intransitive Verb.”28 In her middle work, she calls the practice of living Courageously “Elemental Ontology” or even “Pyro-ontology.29 In her later writings, the state of living Courageousness is called “Quintessence,” which is living with “specific emphasis” on manifesting oneself “as a source of integrity, harmony, and luminous splendor of form.”30 Quintessence is active, Raging, be-ing, but it is rooted in the ontological intuition potently intuitive in women. It is natural and self-affirming. Latent ontological intuition is the “Spiraling process” to enact the courage

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to love oneself and the courage to self-transcend, the courage for a woman to “Discover Faith in herSelf” and Act by “Seeing and Breaking Out of bondage.” Ontological intuition transgresses against any notion of a “Supreme Being” that “just hangs ‘up there.’” The Shock of be-ing, then, is a genuine shock of the ultimacy in the Now, in the clover just saying “I am.” Ontological intuition “Unblocks/Shocks” the “Blocks” of patriarchy, opening oneself to “the way for infinite possibilities.”31 It is to this end that there are various expressions of this Quintessence punning on the Verb and the actions often associated with the Verb: Be-Dazzling, Be-Falling, Be-Friending, Be-Laughing, Be-Longing, Be-Monstering, Be-Musing, Be-Shrewing, Be-Speaking, Be-Spelling, Be-Thinking, Be-Tiding, Be-Wildering, Be-Wishing, and Be-Witching.32 Daly defines Be-Speaking as “Naming our interconnectedness.”33 Be-Laughing, for example, is defined by Daly as a “Primal Act of Power.”34 These words, prefixed by Be-, are for ontological/Elemental Spells. They “Name the interconnectedness which involves Transtemporal/Transspatial Consciousness, Communication, Sisterhood, Synchronicities, [and] Travels,” Daly writes, “[i]n other words, they signify active participation in the Harmony of the Universe.”35 They describe the complexity and simplicity (the is-ing, the be-ing) of living in Quintessence. Sometimes, this is lived in solitude but, more often and preferably, “in community with others.”36 In shifting away from God-language to Verb-talk, Daly has also shifted the tensions between transcendence and immanence latent in Tillichian thought to be less about the nature of the universe but toward the nature of our perceptions about the universe. Marilyn Frye and Sarah Hoagland write that this shift no longer defines “‘transcendent’ in the old sense of ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ the world of our lives, but transcendent in a new sense—a way of be-ing that we participate in that is completely transformative.”37 After the “Death of Daddydom,” living in the time after the death of God, where the patriarchy has begun to be silenced, a Copernican shift is emerging toward the authentic, ontological/Elemental Creation and Naming latent in the Selves of the oppressed.38 The shift is onto what she called in an 1969 essay “[t]he faith . . . of ultimate concern,” a religion of the concrete spirit where women may live more genuinely.39 To do so requires radical feminism to have the Courage to Leave, and to Courageously Live, in some respects, as an “exodus community.”40 A truly biophilic spirituality truly loves life as the highest value, subversively “living the process of transvaluing values” as a “revolutionary” being-in-the-world.41 In doing so, Daly, as Anne-Marie Korte writes, “sings and associates, speaks in different voices, places herself outside any system, shows anger, pleasure, and analytical depth, draws on and cites

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Western theology, philosophy, and mythology as well as contemporary culture; in so doing, she spins and weaves new tapestries of meaning.”42 Shifting away from Tillich’s method of correlation to Spinning a Piracy of voices, sources, and ideas, Daly has Alchemically Conjured a new philosophy through her linguistic Spellings.43 This radical shift, however, subversively begins in Tillich’s thought. Instead of rearranging and realigning Christian theology, as Tillich did with his method of correlation, Daly’s Piracy not only “recalibrates” a new theology or philosophy but offers an apocalyptic vision of “a new configuration of society itself.”44 Although Daly ultimately rejects Tillich as a “phallocratic . . . springboard,” clearly, for Daly, as Lauel Schneider puts it, “Tillich opens the door” for a radical feminist spirituality, and “Daly takes the lead.”45

Far-Out Faith While she has removed herself from the Christian tradition, she remains somewhat steeped in it, but she is not a Christian—at least in terms of theological content, although the preceding reading of Daly in terms of her Tillichian influences, I believe, suggests that she should be read or at least contextualized within a radical Christian framework, perhaps most directly understood through a radical reading of Tillich. Like Tillich, who proclaimed himself a “Christian atheist,” the “postchristian” Daly is certainly not an atheist; in fact, a careful reading will show that Daly would argue that her philosophical vision has more authentic divinity than patriarchal religions: in fact, they have Nothing. Radical theologian Richard Grigg calls Daly a “Nag-Gnostic Pantheist.”46 While I want to resist the term pantheism when it comes to Mary Daly, it will point to a better term. Anne-Marie Korte simply refers to Daly as having an “elemental faith.”47 In Quintessence, Daly refers to herself has having a “far-out faith”—far out, I impose as not in a sense of transcendence but as a radical faith (Q 113). I propose a succinct term for capturing the essence of Daly’s religion is Elemental ecstatic naturalism. I employ the term ecstatic naturalism in the same sense that I would to describe Paul Tillich, as basically having an immanental faith that is necessitated by the self-transcendence of humans, which brings about the New Being.48 By qualifying the term as an Elemental ecstatic naturalism, the living Elements, while wholly dynamic and changing, do not self-transcend in the same way that humans do and are not ontologically promoted as a New Creation through human self-transcendence. Rather, humans are catching up to—and becoming in synchronization with—Elemental

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reality through self-transcendence. The Elements, while dynamic, are fixtures of the Intimate/Ultimate Elemental Reality, or life-itself. Regardless of what one might call Daly’s ecstatic-naturalist, pantheistic, biophilic, Elemental, Nag-Gnostic faith, it is an implicit rejection and reversal of the patriarchal sado-religion. To be sure, this reversal is decidedly polemic. Daly writes that her Spelling of her manifesto Quintessence “is a Desperate Act performed in a time of ultimate battles between principalities and powers.”49 Be-Laughing cracks “the manmade pseudoreality” of the world of necrophiliacs and “nothing lovers,” who “continually attempt to negate us” and “replace our reality with robotized imitations.” Thus, Daly is Called to “move in the flow of Tidal Time, in harmony with the Fates,” Realize Elemental encounters,” experience “Uncanny coincidences,” and Re-Call “Happiness.” 50 If not the opposite of the patriarchal sado-religion, Daly’s faith is clearly a contrarian, affirming vision. Daly occasionally names the religious quest against the patriarchy in its highest, volcanic form Nemesis. Although she does not systematically treat the idea of Nemesis in any one place in her writing, from Pure Lust forward, and especially in her later work, Nemesis springs up as perhaps the highest Name for her spiritual project. she defines Nemesis in the Wickedary as follows: Nemesis . . . n [derived fr. L. Nemesis, goddess of divine retribution – Webster’s] 1 : Virtue beyond justice, acquired by Inspired Acts of Righteous Fury; Virtue enabling Seers to unblindfold captive Justice 2 : participation in the powers of the Goddess Nemesis; Elemental disruption of the patriarchal balance of terror; Passionate Spinning/Spiraling of Archaic threads of Gynergy51

Nemesis, in the Greek pantheon, is referred to by Plato in the Laws as the Goddess of “rightful indignation.”52 Pausanias’ Description of Greece in the second century ce describes Nemesis as “the most implacable deity to men of violence”; and both Pausanias and the Orphic Hymns describe her as a “slayer of braggarts, arrogants, and the proud” or “base.” The Byzantine Lexicon, the Suda, defines Nemesis as “Vengeance, justice, outrage, [divine] jealousy, fortune.”53 Nemesis, it would seem, is an apt Goddess to choose to venerate, given the tradition that she carries out Rage upon snools [Daly defines as “snool as a “cringing, tame or abject person”], bringing forth a truly divine justice against those men in power. But this justice is a justice dished out by virtue of retribution While Daly might not discuss the mythic basis of Nemesis directly in her work, she Pirates Tillich as a resource. In Pure Lust, Daly explains that she is doing more than Pirating Nemesis from ancient tradition:

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More accurate to name the object and process of Racy Righteousness is the term Nemesis. As Goddess of divine retribution, the Nemesis within Pyrosophical women wills to act/live the verb which is the root of her Name: nemesis, meaning to deal out, to dispense retribution . . . Nemesis, thus Named, is hardly irrelevant mysticism. Rather, this Names a relevant mysticism which responds to the tormented cries of the oppressed and to the hunger and thirst for creative being.54

The justice that Nemesis seeks is, according to Daly, taken from Tillich’s concept of “Creative Justice” from his book, Love, Power, and Justice, although she clearly disagrees with his conception of justice. She quotes Tillich’s Love Power and Justice: Creative Justice demands . . . that he be accepted who is unacceptable in terms of proportional justice. In accepting him into the unity of forgiveness, love exposes both the acknowledged break with justice on his side with all of its implicit consequences and the claim inherent in him to be declared just and to be made just by reunion.55

“Certainly,” Daly responds, “acts of forgiveness are necessary in any deep relationship,” adding, “[b]ut this is not all that Tillich is arguing for.” Daly suggests that one consider a male authority figure reciting Tillich’s above quotation to a woman who has been repeatedly beaten by a man or to a mother whose husband has sexually abused a child. “Imagine the woman trying to find moral support for her decision to leave,” Daly writes: Clearly, declaring the offender/criminal “just” and reuniting with him will not make him “just.” Rather, what happens in such a case is that the woman is “morally” bullied into forfeiting her right to judge. She is “morally” intimidated into Self-castration, into breaking her own Naming process. She is duped, guilt-tripped into separation from her own powers as Nemesis, blocked from re-claiming her life. Tillich’s moral verbiage in such a case, is worse than useless. It serves structures of oppression—notably those of the sexual caste system—which are not even taken into consideration.

Again, Daly deems that Tillich does not go far enough with his ideas, although he points toward the right direction in his failure. Though Daly likes the term “Creative Justice,” it does not adequately or appropriately signify the retribution of justice fueled by Creative Rage in Nemesis. “Nemesis is Passionate Spinning/Spiraling of new/ancient forms and connections of gynergy,” demanding “Shrewd as well as Fiery judgment and is therefore a Nag-Gnostic/Pyrognostic Virtue.” Its acts empower “victims of gynocidal oppression into Pyrospheric changes unheard of in patriarchal lore.”56 Participation in the Goddess Nemesis offers a more radical

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rebellion and self-transcendence than anything offered by Christianity or other sado-spiritual necrophilias. Nemesis is always subversive; Daly writes in Gyn/Ecology that Nemesis is the means by which women transgress against the hegemonic discourses of patriarchy.57 To be sure, Nemesis is not necessarily an act of getting in the president of the United States’ face, but Spins out of a reality that acknowledges that simple acts are direct confrontations that Name and exorcize the patriarchal evil. “It is about flying through the badlands . . . creating new cacophony, new concord, countering destruction with creation” and it requires “Outrageous Courage.”58 Nemesis is evoked through “sinister” acts of restorative justice, “not caught in reactive rage,” but “actively Raging, Racing.”59 It requires a Voyager to Travel through the Passion of Grief to understand the gravity of the Reversal that she enacts. When this is done, Daly writes, “Feminists are agents for the Goddess Nemesis.”60 Just as patriarchal sado-religion is a religion of reversals, Catherine Keller Names Daly’s faith—paying attention to the Spelling and capitalization—the “Religion of Reversals.” Spinning Creative, Restorative Justice in the Hexing of Nemesis, the Outrageous Retribution enacted in Reversing the patriarchy is the process of returning to the Archaic Past in an Archaic Future: bringing about a return of the Goddess. Re-Membering that the First Mother, Ti’amat, was slain as a primordial act, the Religion of Reversals wishes to return to an Elemental spirituality before the patriarchal-primordial act of violence.61 Daly writes that, while traversing through the Nothing, a woman is called upon by her ontological, Elemental intuition, that is, courageous grace, Amazon Grace. Whereas Christianity could name grace “a free gift of God to man for his regeneration or sanctification” Amazon Grace brings about Elemental, restorative healing, perhaps hinting at the Jewish notion of tikkun olam—restoring an Archaic Future that was stolen by sado-religion.62 Such a State is a tremendous paradigm shift for both the self and society. It demands, as Nietzsche did in his unfinished final project initiated in his The Antichrist, a tremendous metaphysical reversal, as Daly wrote in 1973: “The becoming of women can bring about a transvaluation of values.”63

Dis-Covering: Dalyan Apocalypse Catherine Keller calls Daly’s radical feminist apocalypticism an “antiapocalypse,” apocalyptically/archaically re-calling the countering of the Whore of Babylon (Rev. 17:1–8).64 Interestingly, Daly writes of the nature of patriarchal (small-r) reversal in her thought in the following way:

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Reversal is the fundamental mechanism in the process of the patriarch’s construction and maintenance of their world, which is mirrordom. Reversal is omnipresent within patriarchy. It is inherent in all patriarchal language, myths, ideologies, institutions, strategies, and behaviors. Reversal is closely associated with doublethink . . . Doublethinking is the internal/infernal nonthought process which continually generates reversals and which is itself sustained by the reversals that are embedded into all of the structures of the patriarchal world and into the psyches of all of its prisoners. This endless re-cycling of doublethinking and reversal is euxenite to maintain the plausibility and indeed the very existence of patriarchy.65

The patriarchal reversal is not a simple reversal or unveiling: how is one to discern which reversal is a Reversal? Daly proposes that patriarchal reversals occur through simple inversions, confusing the observer to what is truly Elemental, projecting “patriarchal male qualities onto women and nature,” and “by means of which patriarchal males appropriate capacities and qualities of women”—that is, “the usurping, arrogating, confiscating of women’s creative powers.”66 Although the methodology may be identified, however, these reversals are not always easy to discern. The sado-spirituality of one is “ontologically evil,” while the other Spirituality is life-loving and Elemental.67 Daly would, as I have shown with her critique of Tillich, point to patriarchal sado-religion and charge that it cannot go far enough in its personal commitment to self-transcendence, and that it preaches that a perpetual selftranscendence is not necessary or even impossible. In fact, sado-spirituality will point toward transcendence itself as transcendent, outside of space and time, eternal and unchanging, rather than having an anthropological transcendence—Tillich, and a few other Christian thinkers seem to be going in this direction, but for Daly the transcendence must be transcending. If self-transcendence leads to a “socially transformed system,” it must continue to point toward a socially transforming system to be truly biophilic.68 The Elements are ontologically prior to Be-ing inasmuch as the Elements participate in be-ing; when we self-transcend we are becoming in sync with or bring healing to the Elements. When self-transcendence happens, a New Creation is transfigured from the old; creation replaces Nothing. At the “shifting of the Morphic Field,” Daly apocalyptically writes, “at the same Time we heard the sounds of happy voices approaching from a distance . . . cheerful sounds of women singing, laughing, shouting, and talking blended with the chatting, hooting, barking, oinking, neighing, squeaking, twittering, meowing, roaring, honking, and howling of myriad animals and birds.” In this vision, we see a “huge multicolored banner that bear the words ‘Welcome to Lost and Found Continent!”69

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Christopher D. Rodkey Patriarchy doesn’t exist here, Now. . . . We can stop it Now. Look! It’s happening already! The harmonious/cacophonous sounds of music and pounding of drums are lifting our spirits. The animals, grasses, trees, and women are swaying and dancing. And, once again, we have overcome!70

Echoing the language of John of Patmos in Rev. 21 (as well as Charles Tindley’s famous gospel song), Daly’s vision is clearly apocalyptic, even when it appears at its most anti-apocalyptic, affirming the Be-ing of animals. Her Reversals Reverse the reversals of patriarchy; the Reversals Dis-Close the Elemental be-ing implicit in human nature. It not only transforms reality but also our entire anthropological paradigm; it brings us toward an apocalyptic unity with the Elemental. The writing style of Daly’s later writings—beginning with the very end of Outercourse and continuing in Quintessence and Amazon Grace—directly Weave in and out of narrative theological-philosophical and apocalyptic literature. The language does not commonly echo John of Patmos, as in the example above. Daly writes at the end of Outercourse: Now the Animals are intoning their own Nemesis Hex. I’d like to be able to translate it, but I don’t know how. Oh, it is so powerful, so beautiful, so harmonious, so cacophonous! The frogs, the tigers, the seals, the emus, the elephants, the canaries, the raccoons, the wolves, the whales, the bears, the bats, the squirrels . . . and the trillions of insects and birds. All are chanting their own Words. It must be hard to be Heard. But take my Word for it. Their combined Hexing is enough to grind the foolocrats to dust. And that isn’t all. They also harmonize with the Music of the Spheres. They Call and Call and Re-Call . . . Hope. Their Hexing is enough to Summon Life.71

And later, in Quintessence, Daly writes of a conversation she has in the third person: If I understand correctly, you’re telling me that a New Harmony has been Dis-covered. And I infer that since this is a nonhierarchical order, respect for all forms of be-ing must have absolute priority,” said Mary. “Now I understand better the feeling of complete ‘rightness’ that I felt when we were frolicking with the animals.72

When Daly peers into the future, she sees an apocalyptic triumph over good and evil, despite the rise of Nothing, “bushdom,” and necrophilia. This “New Harmony” Re-Calls its (biblically) apocalyptic roots but replaces the death-lusting and anti-feminine aspects of Revelation with biophilic feminism. Where the world is destroyed in Revelation, Daly’s

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Revelation is Elemental: the Earth is healed, restored, and in harmony with humans. Calling this vision a “New Harmony” is particularly of interest. New Harmony is the name of the famous utopian community in southern Indiana founded by the Harmonists—a Radical Reformation sect that could be described as both pietistic and theosophistic. Coincidentally, New Harmony is the home of Paul Tillich Park, the site where Tillich’s ashes were interred in 1965. Tillich had dedicated the park two years before on Pentecost Sunday. At his dedication, Tillich spoke: “I, Paul Tillich, give my name to this place . . . to a new reality, conquering what is estranged and reuniting what belongs to each other, in the power of the Spiritual Presence.” Tillich’s headstone there quotes Psalm 1:3, “And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water” (King James Version)—perhaps ironic for the Dalyan symbol of the tree as symbol of life as the marking place of the dead remains of a thinker that she accuses of being rooted in a lust for death. A relevant quotation of Tillich in the Park engraved in stone is “Man and nature belong together in their created glory—in their tragedy and in their salvation.”73 The words memorializing Tillich represent for Daly what is good and bad about Tillich’s thought. For Daly, to the contrary: humanity and nature belong together in their creating glory—it is in their estrangement that one finds tragedy. In Mary Daly’s apocalypse, the Second Coming of Christ is replaced with the Second Coming of Woman, and it is a multiple, perpetual Coming.74 Nietzsche’s Madman, who declared the death of God, “came too early”; Tillich’s self-transcendence implies that once is enough; for Daly, the Elemental Quest is one searching for euphoria.75 It is utopian and future-looking, but it can only be Realized by the ultimacy of actions in the deadtime of the present. As a critique of Christian apocalypticism, which is anti-feminine and lusts for both death and the destruction of the Elements, Daly implies in her critique that instead of Christ returning, necrophilia and sado-spirituality overtook the world. It “absolutized” men instead of loving the diversity of life, including the diversity of gender. The First Coming of Christian Theology, as Catherine Keller calls it, shifted transcendence away from an ecstatic naturalism that operates as a philosophical or theological anthropology to something transcendent, outside of space and time: dead, static, unchanging, and uninvolved.76 Daly is, at once, calling for a massive movement to (apocalyptically) “deliver us from evil” in her shift away from the transcendent toward an immanental, Elemental immanence.77 With this is a firm belief that radical feminism “will save the world.” 78 With such a Tremendous act, implicit in simple acts of Be-Laughing, Daly critic Marily Frye offers a responsorial incantation, singing “the syllables bi-ophil-i-a to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus.” 79

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Notes 1. Richard Grigg, Gods after God (Albany, NY: SUNY University Press, 2006), 15; Mary Daly, in an interview with Susan Brindle, “No Man’s Land,” What Is Enlightenment? 16 (1999), online; Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, ed. Harper Colophon (New York: Harper, 1975), 185; Daly, “The Problem with Speculative Theology,” The Thomist 29 (1965), 215. Other significant influences include Susan B. Anthony, Teilhard de Chardin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bishop James Pike, and Hildegard of Bingen (Linda Olds, “Metaphors of Hierarchy and Interrelatedness in Hildegard of Bingen and Mary Daly,” Listening 24.1 [1989], 65). 2. Mary Daly, Outercourse (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1992), 157, 129, 159; ibid., Quintessence (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 245–246 n. 25; ibid., Pure Lust (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1992), 29n. 3. Laurel Schneider, “From New Being to Meta-Being,” Soundings 75.2/3 (1992), 421. 4. Daly, Outercourse, 54, 148. 5. Ibid., Pure Lust, 29n. 6. Ibid., “The Spiritual Revolution,” Andover Newton Quarterly (1972): 176 n. 9, emph. add. 7. Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time (New York: Stein, 1973), 241; Daly, Gyn/ Ecology, 378. 8. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 1991 ed. (Aylesburg, England: Women’s, 1991), 94–95. It is also worth mentioning that Daly has a clear respect for Hannah Tillich and her courage to write about her own experiences after Paul Tillich’s death—Daly quotes Hannah Tillich several times and uses Rollo May’s smear campaign to prevent her from publishing her books as crucial examples of patriarchal power attempting to silence women (Daly, Outercourse, 101; Gyn/ Ecology, 435–436 n. 40, 442 n. 1; Mary Daly and Jane Caputi, Webster’s First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Boston, Beacon, 1987), 189–190; cf. Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (London: Routledge, 2000), 88; Rachel Baard, “Original Grace, Not Destructive Grace,” Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society 30.4 (2004), 8). 9. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 46; ibid., Church and the Second Sex, 185. 10. Wanda Berry, “Feminist Theology,” Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly, ed. Sarah Hoagland and Marilyn Frye (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2000), 34. 11. Daly, Outercourse, 136. Cf. Mary Daly, “The Courage to See,” The Christian Century 83 (1971), 1108–1111. 12. Daly, Pure Lust, 223. 13. Laurel Schneider, “The Courage to See and Sin,” Hoagland and Frye, Feminist Interpretations, 64. 14. Daly, Pure Lust, 223. 15. Schneider, “New Being”, 427–429. 16. Daly and Caputi, Wickedary, 69–70.

The Nemesis Hex 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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Daly, Outercourse, 198; ibid., Pure Lust, 223. Daly and Caputi, Wickedary, 284; Daly, Quintessence, 88. Daly, Pure Lust, 280. Daly and Caputi, Wickedary, 194. Daly, Pure Lust, 31, 151, 152, 223. Schneider, “Courage”, 64. Tillich, Eternal Now, 51. See, for example, Christopher Rodkey, In the Horizon of the Infinite (PhD diss., Drew University, 2008), 210–215. Daly, Pure Lust, 284. Rollo May, quoted in Daly, Quintessence, 90. Daly, Quintessence, 91, 89, 90. Daly, “The Courage to Leave,” John Cobb’s Theology in Process, ed. David Griffin and Thomas Altizer (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 90. Daly, Quintessence, 86, 159. Daly, Quintessence, 230. Ibid., Amazon Grace (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 45–46, 47, 49. Cf. Johnson, She Who Is, 239. Daly and Caputi, Wickedary, 65–66. Daly, Amazon Grace, 50. Daly and Caputi, Wickedary, 263. Daly, Amazon Grace, 13. Daly, “Abortion and Sexual Caste,” Commonweal 95 (1972), 417; ibid., “The Courage to Leave,” 85. Sarah Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, “Introduction.” Hoagland and Frye, Feminist Interpretations, 3. Darla Fjeld, Gender and Divine Transcendence (PhD diss., Drew University, 1974), 224, 240. Mary Daly, “Mary Daly on the Church,” Commonweal 91 (1969), 215; Schneider “Courage”, 69. Mary Daly, “A Short Essay on Hearing and on the Qualitative Leap of Radical Feminism,” Horizons 2 (1975), 121, 123; ibid., “The Spiritual Revolution,” 170. Ibid., “A Short Essay on Hearing,” 121, emph. add. Anne-Marie Korte, “Deliver Us from Evil,” trans. Micha Hoyinck, Hoagland and Frye, Feminist Interpretations, 96. Frances Gray, “Elemental Philosophy,” Hoagland and Frye, Feminist Interpretations, 233. Margorie Suchocki, “The Idea of God in Feminist Philosophy,” Hypatia 9.4 (1994), 59–60. Daly, Quintessence, 90; Schneider “Courage”, 61. Grigg, Gods after God, 18. Korte, “Deliver Us from Evil”, 94. Christopher Rodkey, “Paul Tillich’s Pantheon of Theisms: An Invitation to Think Theonomously,” Models of God and Alternate Ultimate Realities, ed. Jeanine Diller and Asa Kasher. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 489–490.

80 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Christopher D. Rodkey Daly, Quintessence, 1. Daly, Quintessence, 51, 105. Daly, Wickedary, 84. Plato, Laws 716c, from “Theoi Greek Mythology,” online, accessed March 19, 2008. Pausanias, Description of Greece (trans. W. Jones), Orphic Hymn 61 to Nemesis (trans. Taylor), and Suidas s.v. Nemesis, from “Theoi Greek Mythology.” Daly, Pure Lust, 275. Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), quoted by Daly in Pure Lust, 276–277. Daly, Pure Lust, 277. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 347. Daly, Pure Lust, 280. Ibid. 278. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 40. Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and the Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 78, citing Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 79. Grigg, Gods after God, 18; Daly, Wickedary, 133–134. Daly, “The Spiritual Dimension of Women’s Liberation,” 341. Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 86; Cf. ibid., Apocalypse Now and Then (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 246–247. Daly, Wickedary, 248. Ibid., 250–254. Daly, Pure Lust, 2. Berry, “Feminist Theology,” 30. Daly, Amazon Grace, 229. Ibid., 231. Daly, Outercourse, 410. Daly, Quintessence, 66. Clark Kimberling, “Paul Johannes Tillich (1886–1965),” online, accessed April 7, 2008. Kimberling has on this website photos, and links to sites with more photos, of the Tillich Park. Anne-Marie Korte, “Just/ice in Time,” Hoagland and Frye, Feminist Interpretations, 423–424. Nietzsche, Gay Science, §125. Keller, God and Power, 56; Berry, “Feminist Theology,” 48–49. Korte, “Deliver Us from Evil,” 100; Berry, “Feminist Theology,” 48–49. Daly, Wickedary, 284. Marilyn Frye, “Famous Lust Words,” The Women’s Review of Books 1.11 (August 1984), 4.

Chapter 5 Parataxis and Theonomy Tillich and Adorno in Dialogue Christopher Craig Brittain

A few weeks after Paul Tillich’s death in October 1965, Theodor W. Adorno stood before his class at the outset of a new series of lectures and paid tribute to his former postdoctoral supervisor. He says of Tillich, I owe him the most profound debt of gratitude for having approved of my Habilitation thesis in 1931 . . . It is a debt such as I owe to few others. Had he not exerted himself on my behalf, something he did despite the differences in our respective theoretical points of view . . . it is very questionable whether I would be able to speak to you today; it is even questionable whether I would have survived.1

Adorno suggests that Tillich’s support not only saved his academic career, but also his life. This is because his salvaged academic credentials were what enabled him to gain a position as an “advanced” researcher at Oxford University and secure an exit visa to leave Germany in 1934, which enabled the Jewish philosopher to escape the snare of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” This bond between Adorno and Tillich has gradually been recognized among scholars studying the Frankfurt School; however, such scholarship generally presumes that the “debt” Adorno says he owes to Tillich has nothing to do with his own intellectual formation, but only refers to a sense of gratitude and personal fondness. Many assume that Adorno’s reference to “differences in our respective theoretical points of view” signals decisively that his thought has little in common with that of Tillich.

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This chapter reexamines this assumption. It argues that considerable resonance is found between the thought of Adorno and Tillich, despite their mutually acknowledged differences. The chapter begins with an examination of some of the more prominent scholarly considerations of the relationship between Tillich and Adorno. This demonstrates how such accounts focus on the early writing of the two authors, principally during the early 1930s, and that those who defend the idea that a “mutual influence” existed between Tillich and Adorno generally focus on their shared roots in Marxian thought, or on their common interest in the Hebrew Bible’s tradition of “prophetic criticism.” Although the chapter acknowledges that, for much of their careers, there is little evidence that Tillich and Adorno engaged directly with each other’s work, it highlights the fact that there is some indication that this began to change near the end of their lives. As Adorno was writing Negative Dialectics, a series of letters between him and Tillich demonstrates that they had begun exchanging texts with each other, and that this led Adorno to consult volume three of Tillich’s Systematic Theology as a resource. Although what Adorno drew from this text can only be speculated upon, some clues are suggested in the exchange in two letters with Tillich over one of Adorno’s essay: “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry.” Tillich’s death cut short this intriguing discussion over the possible “parataxical” nature of theology, but this chapter shows that this concept shares some provocative resonances with Tillich’s concept of theonomy.

Tillich and Adorno? The Debate Over “Mutual Influence” The significance of Paul Tillich’s relationship with members of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt during the 1930s is frequently downplayed, if not completely disregarded. Yet Tillich played an instrumental role in enabling some of the principal scholars of the “Frankfurt School” to establish themselves in recognized academic posts. In 1929, Tillich was appointed professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt, replacing the Kantian logician Hans Cornelius. He soon made two decisive contributions to what would become known as the “Frankfurt School.” He met Max Horkheimer (then a Privatdozent) and Theodor W. Adorno (a former doctoral student of Cornelius) while teaching seminars jointly with each of them (on Locke with Horkheimer, and on Hegel with Adorno).2 Tillich’s support played a crucial role in securing Horkheimer his appointment to a new chair in Social Philosophy in 1930.3 In Adorno’s

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case, Tillich’s sponsorship was even more important, since the former’s academic career was in limbo after Hans Cornelius, his former doctoral supervisor, had rejected his second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift). Adorno was captivated by Tillich immediately upon his arrival. He recalls how Tillich’s sensitivity and powers of observation made it seem as though he was equipped with “permanently live antennae.”4 The significant role that Tillich played in Adorno’s life is brought into view by anecdotes like the one that recalls how Adorno, upon arriving in New York City for the first time in 1937, was in Tillich’s Manhattan apartment two hours later.5 The tribute that Adorno pays to Tillich after his death (referred to above) highlights again that a significant bond continued to exist between them. Scholarly accounts are divided over how to evaluate the relationship between Tillich and the members of the Institute for Social Research. Those seeking to establish a close link or “mutual influence” between Tillich the Christian theologian, and Adorno the atheist philosopher, have generally focused on their shared investment in Marxian socialism.6 Ronald Stone develops this line of interpretation to defend his view that Tillich should be understood as a “radical political theologian.”7 Highlighting Tillich’s early essays on “Religious Socialism,” Stone argues that Tillich’s social thought can only be understood if “placed within the social context of the institute [of social research].”8 In response to this interpretation, Terrence O’Keeffe contests the view that one can identify a “mutual influence” between Tillich and Adorno. He argues that, despite their shared interest in Marxian social theory, Tillich and the members of the Frankfurt School were in “almost total ignorance of each other’s writings at the scholarly level.”9 Moreover, O’Keeffe suggests that Tillich’s project was intent on defending the dependency of socialist politics on religion, whereas Adorno and the other critical theorists had little interest in such matters. O’Keeffe makes the latter point in opposition to Martin Jay’s suggestion that, “one might argue that the strong ethical tone of Critical Theory was a product of the incorporation of the values likely to be espoused in a close-knit Jewish home.”10 In his own interjection into the debate, Guy Hammond offers a helpful correction to O’Keeffe’s dismissal of the Jewish background of most members of the Frankfurt School, noting that the writing of both Adorno and Horkheimer display ongoing interest in religion. Hammond suggests that, “Though it remained true that Tillich was more influenced by the tradition of Christian theology than were the others by Jewish thought, the influence of the ‘prophetic tradition’ upon all of them was considerable.”11 Furthermore, Hammond argues that there is considerable overlap between the critique of modernity that is developed by both Adorno and Tillich, since both highlight the limits of Enlightenment rationality and warn of

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the threat of civilization’s decline into barbarism. The difference between Tillich and the Frankfurt School, according to Hammond, is that “Tillich affirmed redemption; Adorno and Horkheimer cannot.”12 James Champion makes a similar case for a mutually influential dialogue between Tillich and the Frankfurt School on the basis of their shared interest in what he calls “Prophetic Criticism.” Thus, rather than focusing on the nature of their differing accounts of Marxism, like Hammond, Champion argues that what was of principal concern to Tillich and the members of the Institute was “their common movement beyond rational criticism of culture and society to engage in prophetic critique.”13 According to this interpretation, Tillich and Adorno mutually influenced each other’s work in the way each drew from the prophetic tradition in the Hebrew Bible to resource their socialist politics and their critique of logical positivism. As Champion describes it, this deployment of the Jewish tradition often remained unacknowledged in the early work of the Frankfurt School, and it remained “a modern, thoroughly secularized version of the Jewish prophetic principle,” but it nevertheless represented a significant overlap of interest and approach between their intellectual positions and that of Tillich.14 Gary Simpson advances Champion’s “mutual-influence” thesis along similar lines. Simpson emphasizes Tillich’s and Adorno’s shared investment in the biblical prophetic tradition as a resource for criticism, but he challenges Champion’s suggestion that prophetic critique is somehow beyond rational criticism. As Champion presents it, in the thought of Adorno and Horkheimer, the prophetic remains hidden and covert, while it is overtly described and developed in Tillich’s work.15 The problem, as Simpson understands it, is that Champion presumes that prophetic criticism is totalizing by its very nature, which is to say he assumes that prophetism “entails a total consignment of reason to the status of power.”16 Simpson defends Tillich against such an interpretation, arguing that Tillich’s theological version of prophetic criticism does not jettison rational criticism. Simpson’s appreciative reading of Tillich’s political theology is developed by contrasting it against limitations perceived in the thought of Adorno and the other critical theorists. Simpson highlights, in particular, some critical remarks Tillich offers in a review of Herbert Marcuse’s work, particularly the former’s insistence that, “Even a critical social theory cannot avoid an ‘ultimate’ in which its criticism is rooted because reason itself is rooted therein.”17 According to Simpson, Tillich’s theology captures some of the best insights developed in the thought of Adorno and the Frankfurt School (their analyses of the Enlightenment and of logical positivism), while avoiding the limitations that many critics identify in the tradition of critical theory: a lack of any clear ground upon which they articulate their emancipatory criticism.

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Bryan Wagoner argues that debates over the extent of any mutual influence between Tillich and Adorno are “moot,” for there is insufficient engagement between each other’s published writing to permit any firm conclusions.18 Like Simpson, however, Wagoner suggests that both Tillich and Adorno offer similar interpretations of “diseased modernity,” and that Adorno’s critical theory and Tillich’s religious socialism represent two complementary theories of emancipation. Moreover, Wagoner highlights their common interest in the prophetic tradition. Following Simpson, he also argues that Tillich’s theology is more alert to the need for a foundational ground for emancipatory critique than is the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. According to Wagoner, Adorno’s reticence over articulating any normative grounds for engaged political action leaves critical theory without an adequately theorized subject, and threatens to leave philosophy in despair.19 In contrast to this limitation in Adorno’s thought, Wagoner suggests that Tillich’s position develops the view that only a critical social theory “fully aware of its “depth dimension” and an “ultimate” as its source and norm could overcome the oppression characteristic of modernity.”20 From Adorno’s perspective, however, any such demand for normative foundations is based only on wishful thinking. He argues that philosophy, “does not have answers to everything, but responds to a world that is false to its innermost core.”21 In this sense, Adorno’s critical theory is grounded only on a protest against what ought not to be. Thus, his approach to the biblical prophetic tradition is distinct from Tillich’s own, which includes a concern with the source of this prophetic stance. Adorno himself, therefore, would reject the premises that these interpreters of Tillich draw upon to distinguish the latter’s position from his own.

Late Interaction: On Parataxical Theology Wagoner’s suggestion that the “mutual influence” interpretation of the relationship between Tillich and Adorno is “moot” is based on the impression he shares with O’Keeffe, which is that both were largely ignorant of each other’s writing. With only a few exceptions, for much of their careers, this appears to be the case. Two points should be considered, however, which limit the assumption that this fact permits the conclusion that the two thinkers do not significantly influence each other. First, there remains some anecdotal evidence that Adorno in particular found Tillich’s work helpful for the formulation of his own thought. For example, Ralf Wiggershaus notes, somewhat obscurely, that “Tillich was the opportunity [for Adorno] to bring the theologically inspired materialism of his friends [chiefly Walter Benjamin,

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but also Ernst Bloch and Arnold Schoenberg] to bear, not just on music, but on philosophy as well, and to make the academic world accessible to it.”22 Although Wiggershaus does not elaborate on this point, he signals here that, for Adorno, Tillich’s thought did not merely represent a curious but also a largely unhelpful approach to philosophy and politics that he had little interest in engaging with. Moreover, Rolf Tiedemann has reported that Adorno asked for a copy of Tillich’s third volume of Systematic Theology while he was writing the last section of Negative Dialectics.23 This alone provides some reason to think that there may well have been more awareness between Tillich and Adorno of each other’s writings than is generally presumed. There is little direct evidence that Tillich and Adorno read each other’s work regularly after their mutual departure from Frankfurt in 1934. Wagoner analyses Adorno’s unpublished criticism of Tillich’s essay, “Man and Society in Religious Socialism,” but he notes that nowhere else does Adorno directly engage other works by Tillich.24 There is some indication, however, that this began to change near the end of Tillich’s life. In three letters preserved in the Adorno Archiv from 1964 and 1965, Tillich and Adorno exchange comments on each other’s work, and ask for copies of specific books they are interested in.25 Tillich mentions being aware of Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies, while Adorno reports that he has read Tillich’s The Courage to Be. Whether this is a new development in their relationship or not remains unclear, but a conversation begins in these letters regarding Adorno’s interpretation of Hölderlin and Tillich’s third volume of Systematic Theology. When this dialogue is cut short by Tillich’s death on October 22, 1965, Adorno writes to Tillich’s widow, Hannah (on October 25 and December 16), asking desperately whether Tillich had read the most recent work he had sent him, and, if so, whether he had offered any opinions about it before he died. This suggests that Adorno valued these discussions, and thought them significant for the ongoing development of his own work. One of these letters, in particular, offers some substantive indication of the nature of this mutual engagement. In an undated correspondence to Adorno (likely sometime in August or September 1964), Tillich mentions that he has read the former’s essay entitled “Parataxis.”26 Although he admits that he may not have “not understood everything,” he reports that the essay reminds him of “our old debates.” Tillich highlights, in particular, the following sentence from the essay, “The relation of his [Höderlin’s] poetry to theology is the relation to an ideal; the poetry is not a surrogate for theology.”27 Tillich then asks, “Is that also true for a theology that seeks to be ‘parataxical’?” He adds that, in his own reading of Hölderlin, “everything is theology.” This curious reference to parataxical theology will be revisited below, but to assist in explicating the concept, it is helpful first to consider the wider context in which this remark is made.

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Tillich’s letter concludes by querying Adorno’s view of recent developments in Christian theology, particularly the re-emergence of the concept of the “Word of God.” Tillich asks, What do you think about the new phrase in theology which—following Heidegger and Bultmann’s philosophy of language—replaces all ontology with the “Word of God”? I ask, What is it? No one answers. With Heidegger they let language be as the “house of being,” but without any “being” in the house!28

Adorno responds directly to this question in a letter on October 9, 1964, The word-of-God theology in the sense you refer to, which, by the way, has been prepared by Heidegger since his “turning point,” I reject no less than you do. The mystical conception of language of which it is so reminiscent has meaning only in the context of a positive theology. Otherwise the philosophy of language becomes something like a fetishism of language. What is the word of God supposed to mean without God? No, that won’t do, and not only will it finally lead to a resurrection of the liberal-secular moralization of theology, but these theologians will make common cause with the logical positivists, for whom language has a very similar function, namely to replace the subject.29

These remarks show not only that Adorno and Tillich discussed theological issues with each other, but more significantly, that they shared some similar basic inclinations. Both question the theory of language behind the concept of the “Word of God” as employed by Karl Barth, for the way in which they perceive it as being deployed as an alternative to ontology and metaphysics, and they question more recent deployments of the concept for the way in which they think it effaces human history and subjectivity. Tillich had engaged critically with Barth since early in his career. He notes with appreciation that Barth’s emphasis on a clear distinction between divine revelation and human culture helped to rescue Protestantism in the face of Nazi ideology. Yet Tillich also denies that Barth’s theology can be described as properly “dialectical.” Instead, in his view, Barth’s early work is merely “paradoxical,” while his mature work is “supernaturalistic.” Tillich summarizes the difference between Barth and himself as follows: Barth starts from above, from the trinity, from the revelation which is given, and then proceeds to man . . . Whereas . . . I start with man, not deriving the divine answer from man, but starting with the question which is present in man and to which the divine revelation comes as the answer.30

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Like Tillich, Adorno occasionally contrasts his understanding of theology to that of Barth. He considers the “Wholly Other” God described in Barth’s Epistle to the Romans as a concept that “effectively demonizes the Absolute” and “turns God into an abyss.”31 At the same time, like Tillich, Adorno also appreciates the extent to which Barth’s theology at least intends to distinguish the truth it seeks after from contemporary norms and presuppositions. As Adorno writes, “The theology of crisis . . . detected the fateful intertwinement of metaphysics and culture”, even though he concludes that the theological protest it presented is “abstract” and “impotent.”32 Elsewhere, Adorno associates Barth’s thought with limitations similar to those he finds in Kierkegaard’s work, namely, the insistence “with great feeling on placing the categories of theology in extreme opposition to knowledge” and the emphasis on “paradoxical concepts of faith.”33 This exchange demonstrates that some shared presuppositions regarding the nature of theology existed between Adorno and Tillich. But what Tillich is primarily picking up on in Adorno’s “Parataxis” essay is his criticism of Heidegger, since the first half of the article is largely devoted to challenging Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin.34 Before turning to this essay itself, it is instructive first to briefly summarize another essay that Adorno urges Tillich to read in his letter of October 9, which he thinks will help the theologian to understand his concept of parataxis. In “Why Still Philosophy,” Adorno argues that, after Auschwitz, Philosophy has to protect itself from the chatter of culture and the abracadabra of worldviews . . . Yet a philosophy forswearing all of that must in the end be irreconcilably at odds with the dominant consciousness. Nothing else raises it above the suspicion of apologetics.35

He adds that such a stance requires a less systematic and more humble approach to making philosophical claims; After everything, the only responsible philosophy is one that no longer imagines it had the Absolute at its command; indeed philosophy must forbid the thought of it in order not to betray that thought, and at the same time it must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.36

Setting out this basic approach, Adorno turns to a criticism of Heidegger’s postwar writing, suggesting that the aversion to ontology in the latter’s thought ends up making philosophical speculation the object of its attack.37 The result of Heidegger’s emphasis on truth as appearance (in the sense of having been received in occidental history) is such that “philology becomes philosophical authority.”38 By presenting Being as “pure self-presentation to

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passive consciousness” in an immediate fashion, Heidegger’s later thought suggests an immediacy of knowledge, such that “thinking loses its element of independence.” In other words, as the quote above warns, Heidegger “bargains away” any “emphatic concept of truth.”39 By way of contrast, Adorno describes philosophy’s ongoing relevance in terms of its critical stance. Through critical self-reflexivity, and by challenging the dominant assumptions and conventions of contemporary life, philosophy might “provide a refuge for freedom.”40 This requires a form of dialectical reflection that focuses on uncovering how what initially appears to be immediate is mediated. Adorno writes, A thinking that approaches its objects openly, rigorously, and on the basis of progressive knowledge, is also free towards objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organised knowledge . . . [It] rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.41

This perspective informs the complex analysis that Adorno employs in his “Parataxis” essay. The term “parataxis” refers to a literary form in which short statements are linked by coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions. The technique is often deployed in poetry, when different fragmentary statements or images are placed beside each other, while leaving the connection between them open to the reader to interpret. Adorno’s article focuses on how Höderlin employs this technique. Adorno challenges metaphysical interpretations of Höderlin’s late hymns, initially in reaction to the way in which such readings were adopted by National Socialist ideology. Adorno focuses his criticism on what he calls philological approaches to the poems, which claim to uncover the poet’s true intentions, but fail to acknowledge their own hidden philosophical commitments. He argues that Heidegger’s reading reduces poetry to the making of assertions, which reduces the utopian elements of Hölderlin’s vision to, as David Krell suggests, “something all-too familiar.”42 According to Adorno, this domestication of these poems allows Heidegger to keep his own presuppositions in place.43 To counter this tendency, Adorno highlights the difference between naming and meaning. This distinction, he argues, is brought into view by the way Hölderlin’s poems highlight and name concrete persons and places, rather than simply employing them as symbols. Moreover, according to Adorno, the very form of the poetry enforces an estrangement from immediate comprehension or affirmation. As such, the form of Hölderlin’s poetry enacts a certain kind of “hiatus” of meaning. It interrupts claims to immediate and direct comprehension. It is at this point that Adorno

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employs the term “parataxis” to describe the way in which this poetry gives little regard to grammatical ordering, with the result that every word and phrase is given equal weight; “set free, language appears paratactically disordered when judged in terms of subjective intention.”44 In Adorno’s reading, this dimension of Hölderlin’s work resists the drive to control and master interpretation, thus inviting a utopian opening up of thought and experience. When Höderlin writes, for example, “Names are as the morning breeze / Ever since Christ. Become dreams,” Adorno suggests that the poet is distancing himself from subjective expression, while opening up to the reader possible correspondences and resonance.45 He notes that, according to the poet, “the word [purpose (Zweck)] names the complicity between the logic of an ordering and manipulating consciousness and the practical, which . . . in Hölderlin’s line, is from now on no longer reconcilable with the holy.” In such a way, “the poetic movement unsettles the category of meaning,” and reveals the way in which the poet “attempted to rescue language from conformity.”46 Jay Berstein suggests that Adorno is interested in paratactic orderings because of how they “aim to present or express their objects, and in that way to let their objects be present to thought without implying that the meaning of the objects reductively derives from thought about it, from a theory which would explain all.”47 This understanding informs Adorno’s reference to Hölderlin’s “theology.” He relates this idea to what he understands to be the poet’s “intentionless language,” something he compares to Samuel Beckett’s attempt to articulate sentences “empty of meaning.” In his letter to Adorno, Tillich appears both intrigued by this deployment of the concept of theology, but also concerned. The essay leads him to ask whether Adorno thinks theology itself can be parataxical, and whether Hölderlin’s poetry might be thoroughly theological for the way in which it raises the question of the meaning of life and points towards answers through the deployment of symbols that call for interpretation. In this regard, he recommends Adorno read the third volume of his Systematic Theology, particularly for the way in treats the doctrine of eschatology. Adorno responds to Tillich’s letter with enthusiasm and appreciation, and urges him to send him a copy of the recommended volume. He adds that he considers the question that Tillich has asked of him to be philosophically and theologically significant, and notes that “We are in accord that the borders between theology and philosophy are more to do with the bourgeois scientific division of labour than with any division between immanence and transcendence.”48 Tillich clearly understands Adorno’s reflection in these articles to be eschatological in nature. As he writes in his Systematic Theology, for him,

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“Eschatology deals with the relation of the temporal to the eternal.”49 In order to discuss this dimension of the ultimate meaning of life, he continues, one must make reference to a tradition of some kind, to some form of symbolic cultural form, since by necessity all attempts to describe an experience relies on such forms in order to be expressed. Tillich emphasizes the concept of freedom in particular as a form of self-transcendence requiring such symbolization.50 Although a full discussion of Tillich’s eschatology is not possible here, highlighting a few elements of this dimension of his thought does bring into view how some of Adorno’s primary concerns resonate with Tillich’s basic approach and motivations. To describe the relationship between history and the eternal, and between the immanent and the transcendent, Tillich employs the term “theonomy.” Theonomy refers to the “self-transcendence of culture.”51 It describes a phenomenon distinct from heteronomy (whether rationalistic or political), as well as from autonomy, which can be defeated or might collide with the autonomy of others. For a “theonomous” or “spirit-directed” culture “turns humanistic indefiniteness about the “where-to” into a direction that transcends every particular human aim.” For Tillich, all things might be so “consecrated,” although the theonomous is always experienced as something fragmentary due to ongoing estrangement within human history.52 One observes at this point some resonance between Tillich’s description of theonomous language as “fragmentarily liberated from the bondage to the subject-object scheme,” and Adorno’s description of parataxis.53 It resists being reduced to subjective control. When Tillich employs the symbol of the “Word of God,” therefore, it is clearly distinct from the understanding of that same concept by those criticized by himself and Adorno in their letters. For Tillich, the “Word of God” takes the form of “the Spirit-determined human word.” It is not limited to a single revelatory event, or bound to a single tradition. Rather than describing an object that is somehow in opposition to the subject, “it witnesses to the sublimity of life beyond the subject and object” and “gives voice to what transcends” this structure.54 Granted, Tillich remains committed to systematicity in theology in a way that Adorno’s resistance to systems challenges, so theonomy and parataxis cannot simply be equated. Moreover, despite Tiedemann’s recollection that Adorno consulted this material while writing the last section of Negative Dialectics, it is impossible to identify conclusively what precisely he draws from Tillich’s thought. Adorno does not engage Tillich’s work directly in the text. Any discussion of the influence of Adorno’s reading of Systematic Theology in his section entitled “Meditations on Metaphysics” can thus only be speculative. That said, a reader of Tillich’s volume will

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note some common emphases, not least the aforementioned concern with giving voice to what transcends the domination of the object by the subject. Negative Dialectics develops the concern to shun philosophical systems that is found in Adorno’s previous work, and focuses on an approach to philosophy that “is obliged to ruthlessly criticise itself.”55 The complex text resists brief summary, but it is safe to suggest that a central concern of the argument is to defend and preserve an awareness of the “non-identity” of the object of rational thought. According to Adorno, what thought seeks to name, classify, and fit into a coherent system eludes the controlling grasp of the thinking subject, but this problem is generally supressed by the thinking subject’s drive to categorize the object of thought into a coherent system. The final section of the book reflects on the possibility of metaphysics after Auschwitz. Adorno notes that such events have paralyzed “our metaphysical faculty,” so that anything seeming to evoke a clear transcendent meaning from the immanence of human suffering is impossible.56 But he is not content to abandon metaphysics, for such resignation ideologically affirms the very negativity that drove the processes of the Final Solution. Adorno suggests that a philosophy that imprisons itself in immanence (he is thinking of Kant here) “brutally condemns the mind . . . [to] imprisonment in self-preservation.”57 In other words, such a stance reaffirms the dominating self-referentiality of “identity thinking,” thus fuelling the same domination of the object by the subject that encourages historical violence and the oppression of other human beings. It is such considerations that lead Adorno to explore the possible recovery of a sense of “metaphysical experience.” This is resourced, he suggests, by attending to the “negation of the finite which finiteness requires.”58 As was the case in Tillich’s writing on eschatology, one of the places Adorno focuses on as illuminating experiences that transcend present social conditions is the concept of freedom. He writes, “As soon as the mind calls its chains by name . . . it grows independent here and now. It begins to anticipate, and what it anticipates is freedom.”59 To be clear, this is not the same argument as that of Tillich. Adorno’s thought is not invested in a concept resembling an “ultimate concern,” nor does he think that the relationship between subject and object can be fully reconciled. Nevertheless, convinced of the irrationality of the status quo (for what could be “rational” about genocide or societies that erode themselves by continuously oppressing their citizens), Adorno concludes, “What is must be changeable if it is not to be all.”60 While Tillich affirms the eventual redemption of “old being” (present life) through its transformation into the New Being, symbolized by concepts

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like the resurrection and the Kingdom of God,61 Adorno limits any possible grasp of transcendence to brief fleeting glimpses of non-identity that emerge out of the criticism of existing “damaged life.” Wagoner argues that this distinction is due to the fact that Adorno emphasizes emphatic concepts like freedom to preserve the autonomy of non-identity, whereas Tillich focuses on a theonomy, which is alert to the ground of the possibility of freedom.62 The lack of foundation for Adorno’s emancipatory critique is indeed a significant problem (and one that has received considerable critical attention),63 but Adorno’s aversion to offering such a grounding is based on his view that no such foundation is possible. Moreover, as Wagoner also notes, Adorno might well ask Tillich how one can know that one’s own ultimate concern is not simply another myth created by the self-confident subject.64 The debate over possible grounds for emancipatory criticism is, however, beyond the scope of the discussion in this chapter. What is noteworthy here is how Tillich’s treatment of eschatology in his Systematic Theology resonates with Adorno’s account of metaphysical experience and the concept of theology. Tillich argues that all eschatological symbolism suggests that, “Past and future meet in the present, and both are included in the eternal ‘now’. But they are not swallowed up by the present.”65 He continues by suggesting that it is the task of theology to analyse this reality, to explore how it is that “the eschaton becomes a matter of present experience without losing its futuristic dimension.”66 Adorno’s concern to break open the ideological hold over present experience, through attention to the past sufferings of the object, as well as to yet unrealised future possibilities, follows this basic pattern described by Tillich. Moreover, for Adorno, just as Hölderlin’s parataxical poetry seeks to rescue language from conformity to existing conventions, the metaphysical experience that theology tries to articulate is one which seeks to uncover the possibility of human freedom and illuminate alternatives to present suffering caused by the oppressive domination of existing social conditions. In this sense, his critical philosophy can be described as having an eschatological interest. It is clear that Adorno’s version of theology is a weaker, more constrained, understanding than that of Tillich. Adorno describes theology in terms of brief glimpses of interruption in the syntax of Hölderlin’s poetry, but Tillich understands the whole of the poet’s vision as potentially theological. While Adorno thinks that anyone who “nails down transcendence” is guilty of “a betrayal of transcendence,” he also suggests that the denial of the possibility of redemption renders the concept of “the human spirit” illusory, and with it, concepts of freedom, justice, love.67 Tillich might argue that this position implies an appreciation of what he means by “ultimate concern”. For Adorno, however, such a conclusion is a step

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too far. Evoking the Jewish ban on images of the divine (Bildverbot), he argues that it is only by maintaining a consistently negative stance toward the limitations of present social life (a “negative dialectics”) that one can avoid the tempting propensity towards identity thinking. For him, naming something as divine is to claim possession of it; locating the source of transcendence is to domesticate it. He concludes, “This is why the one who believes in God cannot believe in God.”68 For Adorno, the divine is not something that can be possessed, identified, relied upon, or expected. There is, thus, a sense in which Adorno’s parataxical theology is more radical than Tillich’s, given how the former refuses to rest his theological vision within the foundational system of the Christian tradition. His ban on images stops short of the promise that ultimately lies behind Tillich’s affirmation of Christian symbols. He is unable to conclude that the possibility of transcending the immanent is ultimately grounded in the theonomous promise that human action is “spirit-led.” Nevertheless, the basic approach Adorno takes toward the hidden possibilities immanently contained in human history, and his emphasis on the fragmentary nature of theology and its grasp of the transcendent, share obvious affinities to Tillich’s theological project. One might describe Adorno as sharing a similar theological approach to human society and culture, while resisting Tillich’s own sense that Christian theology is able to symbolize and describe these phenomena.69 This final step, in Adorno’s view, risks imposing order on what can only remain elusive. Metaphorically speaking, there is a sense in which Tillich’s theonomy restores the structure of grammar to what otherwise remains for Adorno the parataxis of broken human experience. In that sense, Adorno thinks that even the radicality of Tillich’s theology still intends to rescue theology. It is that intent, according to Adorno, that risks rendering theology a tool of the controlling subject. For this reason, he insists that, to defend the concept of God, one must deny God. Critical thought, according to Adorno, “will have to cease to be apologetic and pointing to something one can hold on to and never lose.” 70 Granted, Tillich’s commitment to critical self-reflexivity, and the challenge his understanding of theonomy poses to individual autonomy, approximate Adorno’s position (indeed, one continues to wonder how influential Tillich was in shaping Adorno’s thought). But, in the end, it is Tillich’s ongoing commitment to apologetics that marks a significant difference between their respective approaches. Despite the significant theological differences between Tillich and Adorno, this chapter has demonstrated that both thinkers also share much in common. As the discussion of the debates over the “mutual influence” theory of the relationship between Adorno and Tillich illustrate, both men drew from similar sources to develop their individual positions. Moreover, it

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is clear that these mutual interests were not only present during their shared period at the University of Frankfurt, and there is even evidence that their engagement with one another’s work began to be even more direct shortly before Tillich’s death. Although this interaction was cut short, one can discern some intriguing similarities between Adorno’s approach to theology and that of Tillich. Both thinkers define their understanding of theology in opposition to Karl Barth and to later appropriations of Heidegger, as well as all forms of theological and philosophical positivism. Both explore the interconnection between transcendence and immanence, and seek to disrupt the dominance of the thinking subject over the object of theology. That Adorno’s parataxical approach to theology is not prepared to advance to the point of Tillich’s apologetic affirmation of theonomy is not a sign that the two colleagues had little in common. Rather, both are clearly of one mind regarding the limitations of the concept of transcendence that is associated with traditional understandings of theism. God is not an object for either Tillich or Adorno. But whereas Tillich argues that God is indeed the ground of being, Adorno invokes a radical version of the Bildverbot, as if to invert Heidegger’s famous line71 and claim, “Only the denial of God can save us now” (because only such a denial makes possible the experience of God). While this inversion is a theological vision that goes beyond what Tillich thought appropriate or advisable, it is also one that owes much to Tillich’s radical theology.

Notes 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 3. 2. Paul Tillich, Gesammelte Werk, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1959–1975), 301. 3. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 37. 4. Theodor Adorno, “Errinerungen an Paul Tillich,” In Werk und Wirken Paul Tillichs, ed. Wolf-Dieter Marsch (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1967), 26–28. 5. Wilhelm and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life & Thought, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 155. 6. John W. Murphy, “Paul Tillich and Western Marxism,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 5.1 (1984), 13–24. 7. Ronald H. Stone, “Tillich: Radical Political Theologian,” Religion in Life 46 (Spring 1977), 44–53. 8. Ronald H. Stone, “Tillich’s Use of Marx and Freud in the Social Context of the Frankfurt School,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 33 (Fall 1977), 3.

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9. Terrence O’Keefe, “Paul Tillich and the Frankfurt School,” Theonomy and Autonomy: Studies in Paul Tillich’s Engagement with Modern Culture, ed. John L. Carey (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), 67. 10. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little Brown, 1973), 35. 11. Guy B. Hammond, “Tillich and the Frankfurt Debates about Patriarchy and the Family,” Theonomy and Autonomy, 90 12. Ibid., 108. 13. James Champion, “Tillich and the Frankfurt School: Parallels and Differences in Prophetic Criticism,” Soundings 69 (Winter 1986), 514. 14. Ibid., 513. 15. Gary M. Simpson, Critical Social Theory: Prophetic Reason, Civil Society, and Christian Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 32. 16. Ibid., 33. 17. Ibid., 34. These remarks are found in, Paul Tillich, “Review of Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 9 (1941), 476–478. 18. Bryan Lee Wagoner, The Subject of Emancipation: Critique, Reason and Religion in the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Paul Tillich (unpublished PhD diss., Harvard University, 2011), 358. 19. Waggoner, Subject of Emancipation, 116. 20. Ibid., 130. 21. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995), 31. 22. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 91. 23. Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 194. 24. Paul Tillich, “Man and Society in Religious Socialism,” Main Works/Haupt Werke, vol. 3, ed. Carl Heinz Ratschow (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), 491. Adorno’s criticism is published in, Theodor W. Adorno, “Contra Paulum,” Briefwechsel: Theodor W. Adorno und Max Horkheimer, vol. 2, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 475–503. For an English translation, see, Waggoner, Subject of Emancipation, 378–401. 25. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main (also available at the Walter Benjamin Archiv, Berlin): Letter of Paul Tillich to Adorno (undated, likely September 1964); Letter from Adorno to Paul Tillich (October 9, 1964); Letter from Paul Tillich to Adorno (November 18, 1964). Quotations from these letters are my own translation. 26. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Höderlin’s Late Poetry”, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 109–152. 27. Ibid., 137. In the letter, “Nur als zum Ideal verhält seine Dichtung sich zur Theologie, surrogiert sie nicht”. Theodor W. Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11: Noten zur Literatur: Parataxis (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2003), 478. 28. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Paul Tillich to Adorno. Partially quoted in: Adorno, Metaphysics, 182.

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29. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Adorno to Paul Tillich (October 9, 1964). Quoted in: Adorno, Metaphysics, 182. 30. Paul Tillich, Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology (London: SCM Press, 1967), 242. 31. Adorno, Metaphysics, 121. 32. Ibid., 121. 33. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 6. 34. Adorno first delivered the paper to the Hölderlin Society in 1963. It caused considerable controversy, and led Heidegger himself to withdraw his membership from the society. See: Robert Ian Savage, Hölderlin after the Catastrophe: Heidegger, Adorno, Brecht (Rochester, NY: Camden, 2008), 98. 35. Adorno, “Why still Philosophy,” Critical Models, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 6. 36. Ibid., 7. 37. This account must leave aside consideration of debates over the relationship Adorno’s thought to that of Heidegger, and to what extent the former’s polemical writing against the latter masks significant similarities in their thought. See, Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek, eds., Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 38. Adorno, “Why still Philosophy,” 9. 39. Brief consideration of Adorno’s emphatic concept of truth will be offered below. For further discussion of this concept, see: Deborah Cook, ed., Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008). 40. Ibid., 10. 41. Ibid., 13. 42. David Farrell Krell, “Adorno’s Parataxis,” Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham, 2010), 197. 43. Heidegger lectured on Hölderlin’s late work in the summer of 1942. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 3: Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dictung (1936–1968), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2012). 44. Adorno, “Parataxis,” 135. 45. Ibid., 139. 46. Ibid., 136–137. 47. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 357. 48. Letter of Adorno to Tillich, October 9, 1964. 49. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, 298. 50. Ibid., 301–302. 51. Ibid., 249. 52. Ibid., 250. 53. Ibid., 253. 54. Ibid, 253–254.

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55. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995), 3. 56. Ibid., 362. 57. Ibid., 389. 58. Ibid., 392. 59. Ibid., 390. 60. Ibid., 398. 61. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, 414. 62. Wagoner, The Subject of Emancipation, 272. 63. For a prominent articulation of such criticism, see: Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 106–130. 64. Wagoner, The Subject of Emancipation, 278. 65. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, 395. 66. Ibid., 396. 67. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 400. 68. Ibid., 401. 69. Elsewhere I suggest that Adorno inverts Tillich’s notion of correlation. See: Christopher Craig Brittain, Adorno and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 163–168. 70. Adorno, Metaphysics, 115. 71. Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us Now,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6.1 (1977), 5–27.

Chapter 6 Peacemaking on the Boundary Matthew Lon Weaver

The concept of boundaries brings a range of images to mind, depending upon our life experiences. One set of pictures that arises is that of backyard fences or the absence thereof. My parents evolved from a mere decorative fence that would keep no one and no critter out of their yard to one that utterly isolated the yard from the outside world but where my mother created a mini floral paradise with her deft gardening skills. Another set of impressions relates to interpersonal space when the patterns and responsibilities of life bring us into close quarters with others. It brings to mind John Stuart Mill’s notion of the freedom to assert one’s will to the extent that it does no harm to another. Its glories are shown with creative and fruitful collaboration to achieve a significant goal: firefighters saving a family’s home; medical professionals bringing a patient back from the precipice of death; or students generously bringing their insights to a puzzle in this or that discipline, where “iron sharpens iron and one person’s wits sharpens that of another’s,” (Proverbs 27.17) all to accomplish the best the group can muster. The tragedies of violations of personal space are spread upon the world’s newspapers each day where violence and abuse of every kind imaginable symptomize our seeming incapacity as a species to acknowledge the innate dignity of everyone we encounter. A third set of thoughts relates to national boundaries. Perhaps the most iconic example of this is the Great Wall of China. The following are among the more controversial ones of recent years: the former Berlin Wall; the barriers erected by the Israeli government to separate Palestinian territories from Israeli ones; and, closer to my home, the contrasting borders

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between the United States and Canada in the north and the United States and Mexico in the south. The thought of Paul Tillich is helpful in contemplating the importance of boundaries: how to define them; how to navigate them; and, more particularly, how to function along them in ways that make for peace. Beginning with the autobiography that he wrote after being forced from the land of his birth, the discussion will then turn to a specific project Tillich undertook in order to see how boundaries functioned for him and how he may guide us as we consider an ethical path in a world that perpetually walks the tightrope between hostility and harmony. In the end, Tillich’s “belief-ful realism” can inform a creative and meaningful approach to seeking peace.

Tillich: A Life Crossing Boundaries Paul Tillich’s self-understanding was expressed in his autobiography, On the Boundary. The book’s title fairly represents his perspective in the preceding decade and in the decades that followed. Before becoming a US citizen, Tillich had spent six-and-a-half years in forced exile from his motherland. He collaborated with scholars in several fields. Tillich argued, “From almost every point, I have had to stand between alternative possibilities of existence, to be completely at home in neither and to take no definitive stand against either.”1 He believed this perspective to be “fruitful for thought” but “difficult and dangerous in life . . . determin[ing] both my destiny and my work.”2 He wrote On the Boundary to introduce himself to the English-speaking world that had offered his family refuge from Nazism. In the self-description this relatively short book provides, Tillich offered a dozen areas of life and thought as examples of the way in which his place on the boundary had had a governing significance. Tillich perceived a contrast between his father’s Prussian heritage and his mother’s Rhineland roots. The more authoritarian spirit of the former and the more liberating spirit of the latter came together in a way that “defined the scope and supplied the substance out of which critical decisions are drawn.”3 Throughout his life, Tillich appreciated a pattern of life alternating between the country or the sea, on the one hand, and the city, on the other. The country offered both a medieval earthiness and a context for the imagination to play. Whether contemplating the fearsome mysteries of the forest or considering the depth of the sea, each offered him much to savor. The dynamism of the city enriched his appreciation of a concentrated artistic and intellectual life, as well as the freedom of bohemian life.4

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Tillich’s childhood experiences as the son of a pastor and regional church official gave him his earliest experiences of existing between classes. He was the son of a member of the professional class while being close friends with children of working-class families. Yet, his father’s pastoral work gave him entrée into the homes of aristocrats—associations that led to a handful of lifelong friendships with those within the aristocracy. Thus, when he later embraced socialism, his treatment of feudalism and its role in German history was never one of outright rejection but of careful consideration of its positive and negative roles. Related to this was a sense of duty to tradition that was a part of his father’s Prussian influence upon him: this weighed upon him whenever he sought to break open new paths. At the same time, the bohemian lifestyle of friends he developed during the Weimar period offered a liberating alternative to a bourgeois mindset he observed in others.5 Imagination became an important coping mechanism for Tillich as he dealt with difficulties early on in life. He credited the affinity for creating imaginary worlds in adolescence for his subsequent development of a philosophical imagination, for the joy he took in play, as well as for his appreciation of literature and art, from Cezanne’s expressionism and Hamlet’s existentialism to Rilke’s mysticism.6 Tillich saw himself as one more comfortable with the inner world of theorizing than the outer world of practice. However, his participation and leadership in college student organizations was the start of a range of experiences forcing him into the zone of practice beyond theory. In the years after university studies, he worked in the church and served as chaplain in the army. Following World War I and the revolution soon thereafter, he grew to understand the relationship of social and economic structures to meaning in life. Thus, he declared, “When the call to a religious socialist movement was sounded, I could not and would not refuse to heed it.”7 Further, in both the relationship between church and politics as well as the divide between the sciences and classical humanistic training, he sought middle paths intended to preserve what was valuable on either side.8 For Tillich, the struggle between heteronomy and autonomy was one he experienced at both the individual and social levels. He experienced it as he sought to express his voice (autonomy) over against that of his father and those of his contemporaries in theology (heteronomy). He believed that culture experiences this tension when religious or political institutions make claims to truth or power without tolerating critique: heteronomy intolerant of autonomy. At the same time, he believed that autonomy was vacuous when it failed to acknowledge any truth in that which it criticized: autonomy blind to any substance in heteronomous—even if idolatrous— institutions. Thus, he sought the position of theonomy as the truer, deeper

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path than the antagonism of autonomy and heteronomy. Theonomy affirms that a basic power of being is required for existence per se (implied in heteronomy). Theonomy affirms that a creative and political freedom (an autonomy beyond humanity’s mere reasoning capacity) must ever push back against forces that stand against freedom and creativity under the false guise of the divine (idolatrous heteronomy).9 From early on in his education, Tillich sought answers to the question of meaning along both theological and philosophical paths, in particular, an existentialism that allowed him to consider “the Absolute as the ground and abyss of meaning.”10 Schelling’s thought was important in drawing his attention to this. Along the same line, Nietzsche’s life philosophy took on creative significance for him, particularly during his experience of war. His contemporary, Heidegger, illuminated “a doctrine of man that is one of freedom and finitude” that he found to be persuasive.11 Tillich’s existential identity was rooted in the church. Yet, his experience taught him that “Christian substance” was often present in past and present bearers of Enlightenment reason—thinkers simplistically marked as antiChristian by too many within the church institution. Further, he saw the importance of religious socialism in building bridges between the church and the working class. For him, religious socialism was a movement that took seriously the prophetic critique of a society’s power-holders. In both directions—the relationship with the intelligentsia and that with the labor movement—language was key to Tillich. Related to this was Tillich’s simultaneous appreciation of both the “manifest” church and the “latent” church, the latter being those alienated from the former. While Tillich saw the latent church as “a truer church . . . because its members did not presume to possess the truth,” he believed that only the “manifest” church was “capable of maintaining the struggle against the pagan attacks on Christianity.”12 Tillich’s best-known expression for the boundary between religion and culture is contained in the statement, “As religion is the substance of culture, so culture is the form of religion.”13 This conveys the inseparability of the holy from creative acts that take humanity beyond mere existence to the sphere of the transcendent. Thus, it is a fallacy to separate the sacred from the “profane.” As Tillich put it, “the unconditional character of religion becomes far more manifest if it breaks out from within the secular, disrupting and transforming it.”14 In the personalistic mysticism and vitalism of Lutheranism, Tillich found a contrast to the utopianism of socialism. The boundary Tillich saw between the two was a prophetic sensitivity to periods of kairos, the biblical notion of the “fullness of time.” He never saw such periods as fully manifesting the Kingdom of God. However, they were periods wherein the demonic can and must be confronted, periods wherein “the idea of the

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Kingdom of God” can function “as a judgment on a given form of society and as a norm for a coming one.” To Tillich, Lutheranism was wrong in underestimating social responsibility even as socialism was wrong in overestimating the potential for growth in social justice within existence.15 Tillich argued for an existential personalism as well as an existential socialism. This he set in contrast to an idealism that claimed to portray reality comprehensively and a Marxism that was caught up in scientific language. Yet, both Marx (at the social level) and Kierkegaard (at the personal level) understood the importance of existential context and crisis. Freud (for individuals) and Marx (for societies) were participants in movements that were effective “in shattering ideologies and revealing the realities of human existence.”16 Finally, the period of exile and emigration from Germany was one combining inescapable trauma with significant promise for Tillich. It reminded him of a quote of Nietzsche: emigration “means moving into ‘the land of our children’ and out of ‘the land of our fathers and mothers.’”17 As deeply as he felt his identity as a German, emigration strengthened his revulsion to nationalism and national sovereignty in favor of “mankind” or “humankind” as the fundamental concept for the self-understanding of humanity in the international realm.”18

Ethics for Challenging Boundaries The boundary perspective shows its importance to Tillich in the concepts of time, spirituality, and peacemaking. Tillich had an ever-present sense of human finitude: empirical existence is the story of bounded, finite existence—of finite freedom for human beings—in contrast to the infinite freedom of the divine.19 While chronos is quantitative, measured time, kairos is qualitative time. The dynamics of a period make it ripe for action (kairos) or not (akairos). Creativity is the practice of approaching the boundary between what is and what can become, sensing when the conditions are right for bringing potential into actuality, and mustering the courage to bring in the new: timing, discernment, and courage all play their part.20 Tillich’s approach to war and peace brings together the trio of kairos, boundary, and the dynamic. In his 1962 reception speech for the Frankfurt Peace Prize, Tillich argued for a competence on the boundary as key to lasting peace: Peace . . . is unity within that which comprehends, where there is no lack of opposition of living forces and conflicts between the Old and the sometime

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New . . . held in the peace of the Comprehensive. If crossing and reversing the boundaries is the way to peace, then the root of disturbance and of war is the anxiety for that which lies on the other side, and the will to eliminate it which arises from it.21

Perhaps the most striking—and extended—application Tillich’s ethics on the boundary were his Voice of America speeches. Along with other celebrated personalities from Germany and the lands occupied by Germany during the Nazi years, Tillich was invited by the US Office of War Information to write speeches for broadcast into Europe over the Voice of America. For more than two years, Tillich wrote these weekly speeches. While a majority of them are available in the German collected works of Tillich and while half of them are published in English translation, 15 speeches have not been published anywhere.22 I now turn to these comparatively unknown pieces to see how Tillich embodied his ethical approach in a very literal boundary project over the airwaves between the United States and Germany. Tillich repeatedly called his listeners to engage in resistance in his earliest speeches. In a speech from the late spring of 1942, Tillich noted a news report in which the chief-pastor of the Church of Scotland issued a protest against indoctrinating soldiers to have hatred for the enemy. In response, the commander-in-chief of British troops ended the use of this approach. The contrast to Nazi ideology was obvious: one was “moved by will-to-power, hatred, contempt, falsehood, hostility, dominion, and slavery” (the Man-Beast); the other recognized “that which is human in human beings: truth, the desire for freedom and equality” (the God-Man).23 In his next speech, Tillich distinguished the false national community prevailing under Nazism from true national community. Under the Nazis, “In place of community walks coercion; in place of love, fear; in place of free interrelation of free people, the forced arrangement of everyone into an enormous, all-entangling machine.”24 Early in the autumn of 1942, the Nazi leadership was essentially demanding the sacrifice of the very existence of the German nation to ensure their survival. In contrast to this, Tillich exhorted the German people to sacrifice—to end—their relationship with these leaders on behalf of their own freedom and dignity.25 Later in 1942, Tillich called the defeat of Nazism the key to reestablishing the moral order of the world, highlighting a “moral will-to-freedom” that was present at the time among the people of Serbia, the Netherlands, Norway, and France.26 A week later, Tillich made use of an ancient legend in which the tyrant bathed in the blood of the people to regain strength and delay the end of his life: this was the sacrifice Nazism was exacting from the people of Germany.27

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At the start of 1943, Tillich argued that the attacks of Nazism on the church were clarifying the contrast between the message of the Hebrew prophets and Christ on the one hand and that of nationalist paganism on the other. He argued for a theological basis for international community versus national identity. Over against “the pernicious results of national sovereignty,” he asserted that “God’s objective is humanity and not any particular nation.”28 Three weeks later, Tillich responded to Nazi attacks on atheistic communism by contrasting the blasphemous “godliness” of Hitler’s reign of terror with the devout “godlessness” of Russian communism.29 In the mid-summer of 1943, Tillich compared the destructive heroism of Nazism (in sacrificing the youth of the nation) and the creative heroism of laborers, peasants, and intellectuals.30 As summer’s end approached, Tillich posed a choice to the German people: the abysmal path of continued war or the hopeful, life-giving path of “community with others.”31 Two months later, Tillich argued for the inescapable unity of nations created by technology, spirituality, and the worldwide implications when peace is created at the local level.32 The following week, Tillich called Germans to end their inaction and to rise up against the tyrants.33 In November 1943, Tillich described the hatred of citizens of the occupied lands that they communicated without words to their Nazi occupiers. Within Germany itself there was the same wall of silence between Germans and slave laborers imported from the occupied lands. Even as the Nazis harmed their relationship with foreigners they oppressed, they implicated Germans in every sector of society through their crimes against humanity: absence of relationship on the one hand, total corruption of relationship on the other hand.34 With the approach the New Year, Tillich trumpeted his indictment against Nazism: “National Socialism means an attack on human beings themselves. Not upon individual people or groups, not upon individual ideas or systems, but upon the human being itself . . . upon the possibility of living on earth as a human being.” He saw the only true path for hope in the message of Advent: “hope in the indestructible, unique and eternal . . . embodied in the German nation, just as in every other nation.”35 As the winter of 1944 proceeded, Tillich called for the surrender of a childish fear and the embrace of a mature fear of the unknown. With this, “it would become evident that everything can be dealt with, that those who had the courage to lose battles . . . can also have the courage to risk political defeat . . . that a nation which wants to live can cope with such danger.”36 Thus, as this sampling from the speeches illustrates, Tillich called a German culture under siege by Nazism to navigate the boundaries facing them on many sides—all of them boundaries between deep brokenness and potential, if fleeting, hope.

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The Power of the Boundary Tillich placed his thinking on the boundary between 12 conceptual pairings or syntheses that captured some of the important contributions to his thinking. What this indicates is that Tillich’s identity—both his intellectual identity and his identity in toto—is the collection of voluntary and involuntary convergences: this is something he shared with every human being. These convergences are the countless points in time at which the mind processes the multiple sources of data that are a part of each unit of experience (i.e., convergence) on the continuum of life experience. This continuum of convergences assembles a bank of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual materials that are both conscious and unconscious, accessible and inaccessible. The content of these materials—if ever fully open to analysis—would be the autobiography of a person: as with any autobiography, it is a person’s interpretation of this bank of materials; as an interpretation, it cannot be strictly equated with truth. Tillich’s claim that the “boundary” is a “place” that is fruitful for thinking in a creative way but difficult and dangerous for living within day-to-day existence can be misleading. It may imply that he thought on the boundary but lived elsewhere. The Voice of America project is but one example that contradicts this assumption. Tillich believed that there is healing—what he called “saving”—action that can occur, and ever occurs, in the world.37 This is what he would interpret as the impact of the personal holiness of love and the social holiness of justice in the broader world.38 There is a self-evident harvest of good to be reaped in broader existence as humanity engages life as a whole. However, he asserted that we must understand the deeper, ontological structure of the world to bring a healing presence and healing action to the boundaries of existence. Tillich knew that the realm of thought—which he called a “fruitful” boundary—had its dangers and difficulties and that the realm of life— which he called “difficult and dangerous” for a boundary perspective— could be a fruitful one, as well. During the Weimar period, Tillich wrote perhaps his first significant work, The Religious Situation. There one finds the formulation, “belief-ful realism,” as his expression for “transcendent hope.”39 Tillich’s lessening of political activity and theorizing in the postWorld War II period symptomized a lessening of hope conveyed by his sense of the period as a vacuous time. One example of this that confronts Americans daily is a sort of multisport juggernaut that dominates American society. It anchors parental priorities in the nurture of their children and youth and drives an

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important—if vacuous—economy of professional sports within society. The pervasiveness of sports culture has an impact—a competitive “win-atall-cost”, “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” impact—upon the rest of culture. In education, there is a direct consequence of this that educators face every day. When the rare instructor begins classes with a period of mindful silence, it is a brief interruption to the vast majority of students’ competitive, in-perpetual-motion lives. The silence can provide undeniable refreshment, but it is generally a foreign “language”—a perspective on the day or on the task at hand that is a quaint contradiction to much of what the students experience. As a final example from international politics, consider two controversies in relations between the United States and Iran. The first one relates to Iran’s development of nuclear energy with the potential of producing nuclear weapons. The United States—the nation that possesses that largest stockpile of nuclear weapons—condemns Iran for taking this path.40 In the second, more recent, controversy, the US government is refusing entry to Iran’s newly appointed ambassador to the United Nations because this individual was a part of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Teheran during the overthrow of the Shah. In this situation, the US government has been silent about its multi-decade support and shielding of an oppressive ruler prior to the revolution.41 Returning to the idea of a “belief-ful realism,” Tillich believed that fruitful action in the world required an understanding of the fundamental structure of reality. He saw this structure as founded upon the building blocks of love, power, and justice. Tillich saw love to be that which reunites the separated. Further, “In order to exercise its proper works, namely charity and forgiveness . . . [and] in order to destroy what is against love, love must be united with power.”42 Power is “the self-affirmation of life, of the life which dynamically reaches beyond itself, which overcomes internal and external resistance.”43 At the boundary of every relationship, we experience “unconsciously or consciously a struggle of power with power, of potential with potential.”44 “Power is being, actualizing itself over against the threat of nonbeing.”45 Justice structures love and tames power. Thus, “A love of any type, and love as a whole if it does not include justice, is chaotic self-surrender, destroying him who loves as well as him who accepts such love.”46 Further, injustice is manifested in power “which breaks humanity and which breaks consciousness of truth.”47 Just as power-holders “are tools through which the Spiritual qualities of mutuality, understanding, righteousness, and courage can be mediated to us.”48 The essence of justice is “creative justice, and creative justice is the form of reuniting love,”49 founded upon forgiveness, and “genuine forgiveness is . . . reunion overcoming the powers of estrangement.”50

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Conclusion As I approached my tenth birthday in 1969, human beings landed on the moon for the first time. One of the gifts of the Apollo program’s moon travels was a simple picture: the picture of planet Earth. In it, the only boundaries are geographically defined: the oceans are distinct from the continents; the rivers and lakes and streams separate the larger landmasses into various parts. Apparent separation is also connection: land and water meet each other and feed each other and change each other. From space, boundaries that do not mirror the geography imposed by human beings are invisible. However, we have proven ourselves to be quite effective in conjuring boundaries, marking off territories, imposing wills, and asserting rights. Paul Tillich has put before us a life story and a life project that has addressed the issue of individual and collective self-definition captured by the metaphor of boundary. Tillich’s deeply realistic interpretation of the structure of life presents a framework upon which we might hang efforts to pursue the elusive solution to the enigma of bringing about peaceful coexistence. Heeding his counsel together may well help give us a strategy for enabling peace to evolve from an illusory and fantastic naïveté to a sane and sensible reality.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Tillich, On the Boundary, 13. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 16–18. Ibid., 19–23. Ibid., 24–29. Ibid., 30–33 Ibid., 34–35. Ibid., 36–45. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 53–57. Ibid., 59–67. Ibid., 69–70. Ibid., 71–72. Ibid., 74–80. Ibid., 83–89. Ibid., 92.

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18. Ibid., 92–96. 19. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, 189–192, 235–245. 20. Paul Tillich, “‘Boundaries,’ 1962 Frankfurt Peace Prize Address.” In Theology of Peace, ed. Ronald H. Stone (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1990), 162–173 and Paul Tillich, “Kairos and Utopia” (Rauschenbusch Lectures, 1959, Paul Tillich Archive, Box 408:026. 21. Tillich, “Boundaries.” 22. See An meine deutschen Freunde: Die politischen Reden Paul Tillichs während des Zweiten Weltkriegs über die Stimme Amerikas [1942–1944]. Vol. 3 of Ergänzungs- und Nachlassbände zu den Gesammelten Werken von Paul Tillich. Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1973; Against the Third Reich: Paul Tillich’s Wartime Radio Broadcasts into Nazi Germany. 1942–1944, trans. Matthew Lon Weaver (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1998). Paul Tillich, Voice of America Speeches, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School, 1942–1944), Paul Tillich Archive, Boxes 602A, 602B, 603A, 603B, and 604. 23. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 9, May–June 1942. 24. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 10, May–June 1942. 25. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 26, September 1942. See also Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 78, October 4, 1943. 26. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 33, November 1942. 27. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 34, November 1942. 28. Paul Tillich, Voice of America Speech 39b, January 1943. 29. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 42, January–February 1943. 30. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 66, July 1943. 31. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 73, August 1943. 32. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 80, October 20, 1943. 33. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 81, October 1943. 34. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 84, November 1943. 35. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 87, December 1943. 36. Tillich, Voice of America Speech, 94, January 25, 1944. 37. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, 166–168. 38. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 56. 39. Tillich, Religious Situation, 116. 40. “Timeline on Iran’s Nuclear Progam,” March 20, 2013 http://www.nytimes .com/interactive/2013/03/20/world/middleeast/Iran-nuclear-timeline.html. 41. “Iran to Challenge U.S. on Visa Denial for Envoy Pick,” April 12, 2014, http://time.com/59140/congress-iran-us-un-ambassador-hamid-aboutalebi/. 42. Tillich, Love, Power and Justice, 49. 43. Paul Tillich, “Die Philosophie der Macht,” 1956, in Die Religiöse Substanz der Kultur: Schriften zur Theologie der Kultur, vol. 9 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Renate Albrecht (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1967), 208, 209. 44. Tillich, “Die Philosophie der Macht,” 220. 45. Tillich, Love, Power and Justice, 47. 46. Ibid., 68. 47. Paul Tillich, “Protestantische Vision. Katholische Substanz, Protestantische Prinzip, Sozialistische Entscheidung” (Vortrag, gehalten am 8 Juli 1951

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im Robert-Schumann-Saal zu Dusseldorf) (Dusseldorf: Schriftenreihe des Evangelischen Arbeitsausschlusses Dusseldorf 3, 1951). Paul Tillich Archive, Box 4827, A1, #26. 7. 48. Tillich, “By What Authority?” The New Being (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 90. 49. Tillich, Love, Power and Justice, 71. 50. Tillich, “To Whom Much Is Given,” The New Being, 10.

Part II Tillich and Contemporary Radical Theologies

Chapter 7 The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Radical, Impure Tillich Mike Grimshaw

Walking the Boundary My response to Tillich is always mediated through that central trope of the boundary. As Tillich writes of himself: “At almost every point, I have had to stand between alternative possibilities of existence, to be completely at home in neither and to take no definitive stand against either.”1 In a world that often demands singularity, the boundary is a place of impurity: of being between and among options, claims, and possibilities. The modern quest for purity, singularity, and order is challenged by a boundary that notes there is always an alternative. The alternative occurs because purity requires the existence and challenge of that named impure to express its claim. The boundary between such claims signifies the chance and challenge of being not quite one thing or the other. The boundary can also, therefore, be encountered as the sight and site of a radical identity that deviates across and between: as the location where the option of an alternative to “what is” can be encountered. I, therefore, read and respond to Tillich as being on and between several boundaries that serve to express our ongoing hermeneutics as subjects, as moderns, as postmoderns, and as center and edge. These boundaries include being part of, and yet against, empire and part of, yet often against, Christian culture and history and the tensions and possibilities of the secular. In identifying with such boundaries and undertaking a self-engagement with and within them, Tillich and his work

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are not an end in themselves but rather a means to begin to undertake a variety of responses to these contexts wherein we find ourselves. The challenge is, in attempting in all of these, to undertake theological work in a series of boundaries with and against Tillich. To rethink Tillich, I want to re-imagine Tillich as a flaneur, that boundary walker against the crowds, a flaneur against both the secular and theological. As Walter Benjamin notes, doubt “seems to be the proper state” for the flaneur—it is part of their “peculiar irresolution,” a doubt Benjamin contrasts with the “waiting of the impassive thinker.”2 Jerald Bauer has pointed out that Tillich is both analytic and constructive.3 This arises, I would claim, out of Tillich’s position on the boundary. The analytic side is the theological and the constructive side is the cultural (of course, many would argue the inverse). However, the central point is that, out of this boundary situation, out of this boundary tension, Tillich acts a double flaneur, versus the crowds of both the secular and theological worlds. Further, Tillich is a type of cosmopolitan flaneur who engages in what can be a termed a “discrete syncretism” that moves against yet within Christianity and other religions while keeping a Christian distinctiveness. To engage in the spirit and wake of Tillich is, therefore, also to follow what, reading from McKenzie Wark, I could term “ flanerie knowledge”: “To refuse to develop knowledge within a category. Knowledge should be botched not batched. The discipline of indiscipline, making tracks, not monitoring borders.”4 Werner Schüßler notes that when we understand with Tillich that theology is necessarily a theology of culture, then everything becomes a theme for theology.5 I would argue further—through Gabriel Vahanian’s tracing of secular back to saeculum—the world of shared human experience—that under-sitting all of this is secular theology; and culture is both wherein and whereby theology is created and also what theology is created in response to.6 This is what makes Tillich so important; for in his secular apologetics (as I term them), especially in the non-systematic fragments, Tillich talks to a society after theology yet within modernity. In this way, Tillich can be said to undertake theology within the modern shift of Marx and Engels’ famous aphorism from The Communist Manifesto, in this case: “all that is solid -in theology- melts into air.” Yet Tillich’s writings leave open possibilities for readers to begin to construct their own secular apologetics and, in turn, build their own theologies of culture. The central issue is to get beyond seeing and reading Tillich as a systematic theologian—or indeed looking for a traditional type of systematics in Tillich. Rather, the response to and via Tillich is an insight into the possibilities, problems, and issues of being modern—where also, one sits “on the boundaries.” Therefore, Tillich is first and foremost a resource, someone and something

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to draw upon, in the issues and questions of “religion and modernity” and “theology and modernity.” The point is not to be Tillichian; therefore, the oft-noted weakness of his wide scope is also, somewhat paradoxically, his greatest strength and asset, for via Tillich we are forced to confront and engage with all of modern existence and cannot self-sectarianize. As Martin Leiner notes: “Tillich always remains true to two basic principles: knowledge of God is possible through God alone, and God is present everywhere, even and especially in those who are skeptical or desperate.”7 These claims are central to the use and reception of Tillich because, while accepting the modern turn that raises questions about much traditional theology, and because of his theology of culture, Tillich does not reduce God to the point of radical doubt that under-sits neo-orthodoxy. No Tillichian becomes a “death of Godder” to the extent of Altizer and Hamilton who were heavily influenced by and then rejected Barth, yet Tillich has enough neo-orthodox Protestantism to include the cultural critiques of Vahanian’s death of God position.8 Further, Tillich therefore offers the challenge that if nothing is potentially outside God, while we are modern we are not as modern as we may wish—or conversely, not modern in the way we may think or believe we could be. In this, Tillich reclaims theology as the central action and response of humanity. Therefore, Tillich speaks as theologian to the saeculum; however, in always being as one with the saeculum, he is constantly aware of the ambiguities of both what is asked and how what is given is both interpreted to be given, and then received. His method of correlation is, firstly, the move away from and also against (the two shifts and positions are different) the theological answers that serve to disconnect us from true being. Yet, on the other hand, such moves are understandable given not only the type of theological answer often given, but also the anti-existential position of much Christianity and especially much of the church. What is important to remember is that Tillich’s theology of culture—and all of its attendant parts—is an ongoing hermeneutic, even of itself; therefore, the theologies of culture, language, arts, Empire, and such-like are not singular but rather a series of ongoing theologies, arising out of the original hermeneutic. Therefore, the strength of Tillich is—as John Thatamanil notes—his “impurity”9; yet, because it is also his weakness, one should not stop with Tillich but rather use Tillich as the impetus and challenge from which to undertake our own theological hermeneutics. To be “within Tillich” is to give up, and even negate the boundaries that are so central to Tillich. So what Tillich via his Critical Theory links to the Frankfurt School reminds us is that modernity is itself an unfinished project that sits over, and yet within, the unfinished project of Christianity. Just as Christianity is impure in that that it is this-worldly and enculturated (not just Athens

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and Jerusalem—but also Paris, New York, London, and every other center and location), so is modernity impure. The continuous rupture and brokenness of modernity, theology, religion, Empire, language, and culture is a reminder and expression of not just the modern condition, but also that of humanity itself—but a rupture that is in turn broken and renewed by God. Therefore, I want to recover the notion of Tillich as modern flaneur for this is what sits, I believe, at the heart of Tillich himself. The engagement with Tillich is the call to and experience of walking against the crowds of modern life—of walking against the crowds of modernity, secularity, religion, and theology. The call is to a type of flanerie as a hermeneutics of protest that restates the centrality of the theological and the religious in modernity, but conversely (versus the retrenchment of Radical Orthodoxy) also restates the necessity of the secular in postmodernity. The flaneur, therefore, operates as a counterculture critique and position, which means through engagement with Tillich we are situated into a position whereupon, on one level, we can say anything and everything—for nothing is outside God, theology, culture or the saeculum. Yet if we are to be constructive, then we must become neo-, para-, and post-Tillichian; and all three positions are different. Firstly, a neo-Tillichian position is a form of Tillichian apologetics, the attempt to express Tillich anew in and for today. The neo-Tillichian is also as a type of enculturated theological kairos voice of the prophet—in effect a form that can be traced back to the three Isaiahs being correlated and collated into a single transgenerational voice of the book of Isaiah. Secondly, the para-Tillich voice is that which has occurred most today—an expression and series of engagements that occur in the twin senses of para as prefix; both “beside” and “beyond” Tillich (here I give homage to Victor E. Taylor).10 Here Tillich is the culture out of which the critique, challenge, and engagement arises, often in critical debate and engagement with Tillich. Thirdly, there is the postTillichian position that seeks to move on from, and sometimes even overcome, the limits and limitations of Tillich. We should also remember James Clifford’s aphorism that “‘Post’ is always shadowed by ‘neo,’”11 for the risk is always in centering ourselves around any singular theological figure— that, potentially, Tillich himself can become our ultimate concern that can be become a type of Empire wherein we engage and live seeking provincial security.12 In thinking of our use of Tillich we may, therefore, need to be reminded of that central question—why have we chosen to subsume ourselves within Tillich—or, indeed, any systematic thinker? Therefore, we must flanuer as much against Tillich as we may chose to flaneur with him, remembering Tillich often spoke of the need to undertake “‘the fight of religion against religion’, the continuous fight against the idolatrous deterioration of religion.”13

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I wish to raise the voice of caution that we must also undertake the fight of Tillich against Tillich and restore Tillich back into that voice that shakes the foundations and talks to, within, and against secular culture and the saeculum. We need to restore the voice of Tillich back into, for, and with those who were his prime concern: that large group of “thinking and doubting people.” These were identified as “those people who are in doubt or opposition to everything ecclesiastical and religious, including, Christianity. My work is with those who ask questions, and for them I am here.”14 Here is where agape comes in, for agape Tillich reminds us is not only the absolute principle but also the flexible principle—according to concrete situation.15 It involves the type of existential decision and challenge that flaneurs against all our self-interests and politics—a type of neoexistentialism of the response to the event, for “Agape is the form of love in which God loves us, and in which we are to love our neighbour, especially if we do not like him.”16

The Relevance of Tillich’s Irrelevance Tillich, in raising such issues, also raises the possibility that, in many ways, we may not like him or his impurities and limitations. Yet, if Tillich was for those who ask questions, then perhaps our role, in flaneuring with and yet against Tillich, is to be with those who are the thinking and doubting, asking yet more questions, and reminding ourselves that, as Tillich noted, “the universal relevance of the Christian message was grounded in the human situation.”17 In 1963, Paul Tillich preached a series of lectures that subsequently—and posthumously—became published as The Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message. In these, Tillich argued for what could be termed a type of Christian existential apologetics into, within, for, and against a society that (as he and I agree) understandably saw and experienced much of what was offered and expressed as Christianity as irrelevant to modern life. I also want to offer a word of caution; for the critiques that were outlined by Tillich regarding Christianity in modernity can easily, unfortunately, also be applied to Tillich in the eyes of many in late modernity. Tillich’s six points of irrelevance, as reapplied to Tillich, are: irrelevance of language used; irrelevance of the context of Tillich studies and expressions; irrelevance of traditional attitudes toward Tillich—which rejects his prophetic edge; irrelevance of many of those undertaking Tillich studies; irrelevance of much of Tillich studies to the various social classes—especially radical Labour, the intelligensia, and the organizational middle class; and the irrelevance of interest and passion in

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Tillich by a majority of scholars.18 These are admittedly strong claims but arise from the way Tillich has dramatically been sidelined from the central debates of theology and culture over the past 40 years. For Tillich has moved from being a theologian read across society, both in and outside the church, to now being the figure of specialized interest. Nevertheless, just as Tillich proclaimed relevance for Christianity, we can claim relevance for the radical, impure Tillich because of his central focus grounded in the human condition that takes modernity very seriously and centrally as the praxis of theology today. This enables us to also recover Tillich’s “impurity,” that is as a thinker of boundaries and margins, a thinker in whom seemingly strong divisions are held in tension: relevance/irrelevance; secular/theologian, and, the focus of this essay: Christian/socialist. To do so, this chapter reads Tillich as a radical, impure thinker and theologian via two radical, impure texts, from different ends of his career: The Socialist Decision (1933) and Ultimate Concern (1965). If The Socialist Decision is the culmination of his 15 years engaged in the radical impurity of religious socialism, Ultimate Concern—a series of dialogues with students at the University of California in 1963—is a different type of radial impurity, the impurity of a radical series of dialogues, yet one that continues the spirit of the socialist decision into a new context and a new society. In reading these expressions of the radical, impure Tillich in the twentyfirst century, Tillich’s self-identity as “a dangerous man”19 is engaged with and developed, arguing for a reading of Ultimate Concern as the socialist decision restated and re-imagined for the contemporary world seeking an alternative to neo-liberalism. This, in the words of Tillich, could be argued as being the radial, impure idea of attempting to combine “the innerhistorical or fragmentary fulfillment with the supra-historical complete fulfillment.”20 The claims of Tillich’s irrelevance are, therefore, answered through a reading of these texts. In this, a recovery is made of Ultimate Concern read anew via The Socialist Decision, arguing for the renewed relevance—or correlation—of the radical, impure Tillich.

The Socialist Decision Revisited The Socialist Decision was the culmination of Tillich’s response to the fall of Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazi state. Published in 1933, this call to a decision is where Tillich, in what can be termed the countermovement of the flaneur, walks with a critical gaze against Lutheranism as Socialist and against Socialism as a Lutheran—against politics as a theologian and

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against theology as one centrally committed to politics. In one sense, all of these positions are held to be both irrelevant and relevant. As claimed by John R. Stumme: “ . . . from the beginning, Tillich stood on the critical left wing of democratic socialism, searching for a third way beyond Marxism-Leninism and mere reformism.”21 In this, Tillich could be said to be identifying with the Frankfurt school of critical theory, itself a type of impure socialism for “thinking and doubting people.” The Socialist Decision, as an impure, dangerous position and text, is indeed influenced by his conversation within a circle of thinkers—including those of the Institute for Social Research that he named his “Frankfurt conversation.”22 What Tillich began to move toward was a separation of God and religion from the explicitly religious sphere of the church. This was the impurity of his religious socialism, an impurity that undertook theology within impure locations and possibilities in the desire to make what could be dismissed as the irrelevance of Christian theology relevant. Central to Tillich’s claim is that to make socialism relevant, it must reclaim its religious core. This religious core informs the opening question and demand, that of the socialist decision being a decision of and decision for socialism—a demand of socialism for those who are socialists and a decision for socialism by those who may be its opponents today but will need to support it in the future.23 Therefore, the socialist decision is also a manifesto of what is actually true and what could be, against how socialism presents itself and how it expresses the socialist principle, which is: “the power of a historical reality [in this case socialism] grasped in concepts.”24 The manifesto, as Mary Ann Caws observes, “makes an art of excess,”25 being “a document of an ideology, crafted to convince and convert.”26 Central to the manifesto is what Caws terms “the manifesto moment,” which is its positioning “between what has been done and what will be done, between the accomplished and the potential, in a radical and energizing division,”27 a moment of crisis expressing “what it wants to oppose, to leave, to defend, to change.”28 Here, “crisis” is the expression of what is often taken to be both the challenge of impurity and impurity as challenge. For the manifesto both opposes and is opposed. Central to his manifesto is socialism as a countermovement against both bourgeois society and—with bourgeois society—against feudal-patriarchal forms of society.29 This double countermovement positions the socialism of The Socialist Decision as the expression of a critical modernity: an impurity within and yet against—against yet within. There must be a break with a myth of origin, a break driven by the unconditional demand that adds “wither” to the question of “whence.”30 The unconditional demand is, in

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effect, the manifesto moment, a moment that is unconditional because what ought to be is not to be experienced in the unfolding of what is; because, as Tillich notes “The demand calls for something that does not yet exist but should exist, should come to fulfilment.”31 At the center of the call, of the demand of the question “whither” is the demand for justice, justice which is “the true power of being”32 wherein the question finds true and proper expression in the realization of the “whither.” For Tillich, this is to be found in the decision arising as the socialist principle—a principle that is descriptive of reality, “the power of a historical reality, grasped in concepts.”33 The socialist decision is, for Tillich, linked to the prophetic tradition, a tradition wherein the break with myths of origin occurs.34 Prophecy is the turn to history, the history of the relationship of God to Israel. The turn versus origin: a turn versus any claims of “the powers of soil, blood, group or status.”35 For Tillich, Christianity and the church become irrelevant when they identify with the myths of origins, when they become the expression of such claims, when Christianity and the church become the realisation and expression of a priesthood and not of prophets. Or, to put it another way, when there is the retreat from the manifesto moment. Such an abandonment of its prophetic foundation, most often expressed in an alliance with political romantics, means that any such Christianity has lost its identity and relevance.36 For political romanticism becomes “the attempt to restore the broken myth of origin, both spiritually and socially.”37 Therefore, what political romanticism enacts is the retreat from the universal in preference for the particular, a retreat from emancipation for all to emancipation for a select group, and a retreat from society in preference for a distinct community. As noted by Tillich, this countermovement can be either conservative or revolutionary, but both move against the socialist decision and the prophetic foundation.38 A danger, especially for Protestantism arises, because in comparison to Catholicism, it does not contain “a socially independent group” that can preserve the religious tradition from the influence of historical movements.39 Protestantism has no explicit myth of itself and most centrally, as Tillich emphasizes, “The ‘Scriptures’ have no fixed sociological expression.”40 I would argue that it is this issue that makes Protestantism open to the siren claims of community that sit at the heart of political romanticism. Unless Protestantism has a strongly self-critical, prophetic focus, the reduction to a contextual gospel, a contextual reading, and application of the scriptures opens the possibility for the retreat from society to the interest-group and conservative romanticism of a community that is politically romantic. This is the danger of a continually self-fragmenting Protestantism continuously in search of a pure community.

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Tillich positions a way forward in which the prophetic break with the bond of origin achieved by Protestantism in the rejection of the priesthood and the humanistic break with the bond of origin as achieved in the Enlightenment come together in the bourgeois principle that universally attacks both the myth of origin and the bond of origin.41 This means, Tillich observes, that: “Wherever technology and capital are at work, the spirit of Western bourgeois society is active.”42 For the socialist decision to occur, firstly bourgeois society itself must be overcome to ensure that bourgeois society, despite its basic immanence, does not attempt to “give itself the sanctity and power of transcendence.”43 For socialism to occur, the bourgeois principle must be overcome on the basis of the bourgeois principle, that is, by the overcoming of origin and all related to it by rational mastery of the elements of origin and “the rational assemblage of these elements into structures serving the aims of thought and action.”44 What socialism calls for is the bourgeois principle applied to itself; that is, the bourgeois principle must not be allowed to become its own myth of origin that seeks transcendent and mythic expression. The socialist decision is, therefore, a work of prophecy against and yet within the bourgeois principle; the attempt to make the bourgeois principle relevant is what it allows to occur. This occurs from position that arises from the proletariat, in this expressing the particular aspect of the proletariat and universal impact of society.45 Therefore, socialism must overcome itself to fulfil socialism; in this, it mirrors the bourgeois principle—but for different ends. Here it further mirrors the tensions of relevance and irrelevance. For what is relevant for the proletariat is not necessarily seen or experienced as relevant for society and vice versa. Socialism must, therefore, always exist in a manifesto moment as much to itself as it does to bourgeois society; otherwise, it is total reality reduced to the false consciousness of either a conservative or revolutionary socialism that creates and sustains its own myth of origin. Furthermore, as Tillich warns in reference to political romanticism, “apocalyptic, which is ecstatic and revolutionary in nature, has proved at present to be the most effective cultural expression of political romanticism.”46 So who are the proletariat for Tillich? They are what could be termed an impure group, in that they are not a closed group but rather both “an ideal type” and “an existential concept”47 wherein “socialism is the self-consciousness of the proletariat.”48 Here Tillich prophetically notes the problem for the left in the west since 1989 when he states: “if the connection between socialism and the proletariat is broken, they both cease to be what they are.”49 In such a situation, both socialism and the proletariat becomes irrelevant to the bourgeois principle, which can then proceed without its self-critique. Furthermore, central to this connection of socialism and the

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proletariat is the legacy and history of Christian humanism with its inherent tensions of Christianity, Greek humanism, and Jewish propheticism.50 This is where the irrelevance becomes relevant in its claims of and for the universality of socialism. The irrelevance can occur when we have, as today, intellectual socialism separated from the proletariat. Socialism, derived from the bourgeois principle, therefore, always encounters an inner conflict and contradiction that it must drive to overcome. The centrality and radical nature of Tillich’s view is that this cannot occur unless socialism remembers its central Christian humanism. This position is doubly impure and is emphasized by the need for the proletariat to deny the power of origin by which it attacks the bourgeois principle and for socialism to affirm the bourgeois principle that it seeks to overcome.51 This results in what Tillich has named “the socialist decision” wherein “socialism must direct its faith towards a future that stands in complete contradiction to the present” and operate in an “eschatological expectation” and, therefore, a self-overcoming of any expression of societal harmony that is not eschatological.52 This is the breakthrough of the bourgeois principle, the challenge to any presupposition that there exists a rational world order that, as such, is implicit in reality; yet any prophetic proclamation occurs in a manner defined by the bourgeois principle: that is “as purely immanent expectation.”53 Religious socialism uncovers the element of faith in socialism, makes it explicit, and overcomes the inner conflict of a self-consuming contradiction in which the universal participates in human reason, but occurs in being formed by consciousness. The tension is how to stop socialism from becoming bourgeois and so, in seeking to overcome the state, the aim must always be the abolition of state, power, and class. In short, the revolution must be eschatological and not sink into bourgeois replication of what was; central to this is that those who have overthrown should then voluntarily give up the power they have won, to give up a belief in rational bourgeois harmony.

Ultimate Concern Revisited Tillich also notes that socialism is—in the time he was writing—as much a struggle for the socialist idea of culture as it was for the socialist idea of economics. I wish to raise the possibility that today the struggle for socialism is now also a struggle for the socialist idea of theology and religion and that this constitutes the great impurity of our present age. An impurity versus

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both religion and theology and also socialism as many would want them to be. The traditional substitution of the science of bourgeois positivism for religion has failed socialism and so we now see the return of religion into socialism as the overcoming of the limits of a false harmony sought on the back of bourgeois positivism. This occurs because when science has become the bourgeois harmony, it must be overcome, in and by the eschatological expectation of the socialist decision for and from religious socialism. And this is its great impurity. The irrelevance of bourgeois socialism founded and focused upon bourgeois positivism can only be overcome by the prophetic challenge of the impurity of religious socialism, for sitting at the heart of religious socialism is a universal ultimate concern. The problem is that identified by Tillich: “A rational, analytical principle can never become the basis for individual or social life” and it is this that has necessitated the turn of the radical Left back to theology, a remade and re-theorized theology—an immanent, radical theology.54 In short, theology recovers the human in communism and socialism and for this reason; in its recovering of the universal human, we see the return to theology by the Left in the twenty-first century. For, from the universal claim of theology, we retain the prophetic call that the proletarian being has not been—and cannot be—reduced to the status of a thing.55 It is by the recovery of theology that socialism overcomes its irrelevance and by the recovery of socialism that theology overcomes its irrelevance. In both acts of recovery, socialism and theology become and remain impure—an impurity that sits at the heart of the relevance of ultimate concern. The ultimate concern, re-read through the socialist decision is one of expectation—of expectation that is prophetic, prophetic not only in the tradition of prophecy and, therefore, of theology, but prophetic in an immanent, socialist sense of a promised future that transcends this one, and as such socialism reclaims a relevance of ultimate concern. Here, in 1933, we have the impure Tillich laying the ground for what would become the radical Left’s re-engagement with and turn to religion, or, more specifically, Paul and theology, post-1989, signalled by Tillich’s statement of radical impurity: “socialism is propheticism on the side of an autonomous, selfsufficient world.”56 This is the manifesto moment, the stating of a newly relevant ultimate concern that explicitly identifies the prophetic core arising from primitive Christianity, the Christianity of Paul. An ultimate concern that is of and for humanity and not the individual, an ultimate concern of a history of eschatological hopes—or as Tillich expresses it, “as tension towards the unconditionally new.”57 In this, Tillich reminds us that any retraction of ultimate concern from that of humanity toward an individual or a particular community is the focus of a conservative romanticism.

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This becomes part of what I term the beginnings of the dangerous Tillich for his call for socialism, linked with propheticism “places every power, ‘high or low’ under its scrutiny” in its deep demand for equality, a demand that makes everyone equal without the destruction of one’s humanity that occurs when one is not allowed to enjoy the fullness of being.58 In this, he aligns himself with Marx’s fight for a genuine humanism. Tillich’s call is for a non-utopian socialism, a prophetical socialism. But even more so, in proclaiming that “Being comes to fulfilment only by transcending its immediate power” and further “that is the heart of the prophetic and socialist demand” Tillich offers something new.59 My reading is that here Tillich is, in effect, offering a form of correlational socialism—one that can be read back as a correlational ultimate concern with the socialist decision. We could put this as the ultimate concern of the socialist decision, and the socialist decision of ultimate concern for “the origin that bears us guarantees the realisation of that which transcends it and yet in which it reaches its fulfilment.”60 Yet the question remains as to whether ultimate concern is never realized? The promise remains—as is the promise of the prophetic in the socialist decision, but if either are to be realized, that raises the issue of falling guilty to the Hegelian problem—that of the fulfilled character of being that Tillich notes Marx experienced and proclaimed as actually being unfulfilled.61 This does set up a tension that can be expressed as the impurity of Tillich whereby we take seriously his claim that “human expectation is always transcendent and immanent at the same time. More precisely, if this opposition does not exist for expectation then a type of impurity exists between transcendent and immanent and socialist decision and ultimate concern.62 The impurity is Tillich’s overcoming in the radical claim of what can be termed the transcendent immanent and the immanent transcendent that he holds as the core of both prophetism and socialism and can be read at the center of ultimate concern and what I would, perhaps in claiming an impure Tillich, state is the core of Tillichian correlation. 63 This becomes the radical transformation effected via the prophetic call whereby the irrelevance of socialism becomes relevant via prophetism and the irrelevance of prophetism becomes relevant via socialism. The nub of what I have come to view as impure correlationism is the central claim of the socialist decision that “social being apart from social consciousness is a meaningless concept.”64 Here, further, is where ultimate concern can be positioned against religion experienced as false consciousness, against the institutions of religion experienced as social structures for “a false consciousness is nothing other than the wilful self-affirmation old social structures that are being threatened and destroyed by new ones.”65 Ultimate

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concern as the prophetic call is, therefore, directed against the irrelevance of Christianity in the context of new social structures wherein the socialist decision becomes understood as “the prophetic movement of our time; it is the movement that places itself under the demand of justice.”66 This is the stating of the irrelevance of Christianity as a project unless it aligns itself with the socialist decision. However, Christianity can become relevant if, as expression of ultimate concern, it aligns with socialist expectation wherein the new identity overcomes the existing one and, in doing so, aligned with the socialist principle, demands the fulfilment of the origin of justice.67 In this, the impurity is an impurity of relevance and hope that challenges both conservative pessimism and the optimism of a “bourgeois principle that believes in an authentic harmony.”68 The socialist decision is, therefore, ultimate concern and ultimate concern is, therefore, religious socialism, each as expression of radical, relevant impurity. The challenge is, therefore, expressed, reading backwards from today, as to why twenty-first century Left thought has to turn and re/turn to the type of impure theology as articulated by Tillich. For as he notes: it is not the most enlightened, the so-called “most progressive” consciousness that influences history. It is the consciousness whose energies follow from the fullness and depth of being, which brings it to light. Such energies are often lacking among socialist intellectuals.69 Therefore socialism, for Tillich, has to rethink its attitude toward religion and science, education, and culture. Central to this is the possibility, for Protestantism, “of taking the socialist principle into itself under the aspect of the New Testament concept of the kairos.”70 A new relevance is, therefore, possible out of this impure Christianity and socialism, out of a socialist decision of ultimate concern, a relevant Christianity “in which the opposition between the religious and the profane, the churchly and the secular, no longer has any meaning.”71 For without the prophetic element, both religion and Marxism are doomed to irrelevance, and without it both lack ultimate concern. And yet what makes the prophetic always at once both relevant and irrelevant is that “the prophetic is always addressed to all humanity, but it always proceeds from amongst a people.”72

The Socialist Decision as Ultimate Concern Today It appears that, some 30 years on, and in America, Tillich in the text of Ultimate Concern consigns socialism to a “quasi-religion.”73 And yet, if we consider Tillich’s definition of ultimate concern as “taking something

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with ultimate seriousness, unconditional seriousness,” then we can see it is not socialism but the socialist decision, of the prophetic coming together of Christianity and the socialist principle that is indeed the expression of ultimate concern—that is religious socialism as the expression of ultimate concern; an ultimate concern that I would term the impurity of making the irrelevant relevant.74 As Tillich states, looking back, socialism became distorted as a secularization that profaned socialism because it gave up an ultimate concern, arising from the prophetic and, in being profaned, it became empty.75 Therefore, only in recovery of the prophetic can meaning be put back into socialism and by prophetic is meant by an adequate criterion for judgment and self-criticism and this judgment, this self-criticism occurs out of interpretation—continuous interpretation.76 This is what makes Tillich answer “yes” to the question “are you a dangerous man?” 77 He is dangerous because he attempts the expression, via the socialist decision, of the coming together of the prophetic with ultimate concern in an age of the irrelevance of the Christian message. Reading both these texts from the perspective of a twenty-first century seeking the basis of an alternative to neo-liberalism, we must, therefore, read and think via a call for relevance—a relevance of ultimate concern and the socialist decision as answering “the existential questions of the humanity of today.”78 That is “those human beings who exist fully in the structures of the life of our time” and, engaged in self-criticism, undertake existential questions, questions that situate themselves against “the attempt to transform persons into controllable objects.”79 What Tillich, via his Critical Theory links to the Frankfurt School, reminds us is that modernity is itself an unfinished project that sits over, and yet within, the unfinished project of Christianity. Just as Christianity is necessarily radically impure in that it is this-worldly and enculturated, so is modernity likewise radically impure. The rupture, impurity, and brokenness of modernity, theology, religion, and religious socialism are a reminder and expression of not just the modern condition, but also that of humanity itself—a rupture that is in turn broken and renewed by God. The theology I am arguing for out of the radical, impure Tillich is not theology as commonly understood, but rather a self-reflexive, critical, secular theology that stands as “argumentative discourse” regarding all that we take to be normative. The Tillich I am arguing for is not Tillich as commonly understood, but rather a self-reflexive, critical, secular, socialist, radical impure Tillich. A Tillich newly relevant for today’s “thinking and doubting people” and an ultimate concern expressed as “the ultimate that grasps us . . . demanding a decision of our whole personality”; that is the radical impurity, the irrelevance and relevance of the radical prophecy of the socialist decision.80

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So just as Tillich proclaimed relevance for Christianity, we can claim relevance for Tillich—because of his central focus grounded in the human condition that takes modernity very, centrally seriously as the praxis of theology today. So I would further argue that Christianity or, indeed, Tillich studies have little if almost nothing to offer to overcome dualisms unless it takes stock and responds to and with what Tillich identified almost half a century earlier. Further, what needs to be offered is what could be termed, in my analysis, as cosmopolitan Christian existentialism. Christianity should be viewed and experienced as cosmopolitanism in the sense that it seeks to transcend the differences, remembering, in the words of Appiah that “ . . . the one thought that cosmopolitans share is that no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every other.”81 Therefore, the rupture of grace, initiated by the original Other (to humanity) of God, means all are now cosmopolitan by grace. In short, the rupture of grace demands a cosmopolitan response: we respond to and are concerned with the Other in our human lives because of the primary cosmopolitan encounter with the original Other who became God with us. This then extends to both fundamentalism and Radical Orthodoxy, both who seek to limit the other according to their own anti-modern gnosis. The cosmopolitan offer includes them in dialogue and agape—even if they wish to exclude us. For again, as Tillich notes: “The universal relevance of the Christian message was grounded in the human situation. Can that be reestablished for our present world?”82 Tillich’s response is to be found in the self-negating quality of Christianity: as that which is religion seeking to overcome religion—a continuous self-negation that reaches out to overcome all limitations; in short, a cosmopolitan offer.83 Yet also involved is the offer of the new start, the new humanity, a claim of self-affirmation of being human in the here and now.84 The offer and claim is that here in the saeculum, here in the mundane, and here in the not holy, we can re-experience and re-express what it means to be human. As Tillich succinctly and powerfully puts it, in what I would term cosmopolitan existential apologetics: What this new being does is overcome the conflict between essential being and distorted existence; between the created goodness of being and its disruptions as shown in the human predicament.85

For me, to overcome dualism with Tillich is the expression and the living out of what can be termed the secular theology of cosmopolitan existential Christianity. It seeks to articulate decisions of being and meaning that speak to each of us as beings, as humans confronted by the questions and limitations of existence. I do not live in a Christian environment. I am not part of the Christian institution, and I live and teach and engage

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in environments whereby, for most the Christian message, the Christian experience, and the Christian “problem” are seen and engaged with as best as irrelevant, at worst as that to be excluded and overcome. It is also a cosmopolitan environment whereby I must seek to engage with others—of many cultures, of many faiths, and of no faiths as first and foremost other beings, other humans. If I concentrate on our differences, then I cannot properly engage and exist. The way I choose to live, engage, and exist is a decision—it is existential in that regard. But it is a decision to do so in a secular manner, in and as an expression of the saeculum. For in the end, the demand for and of relevance begins with all of us who locate ourselves somehow under the claim and offer of Christianity. If we cannot offer something into modernist alienation, if we cannot offer possibilities for a rethought sacramental vision, if we cannot engage with others in ways that treat them as co-created beings, then we are responsible for our own irrelevance. In seeking to express relevance, a relevance for and of grace, we must also heed Tillich’s warning that “Grace is moralized in America and intellectualized in Europe.”86 Furthermore, the relevance of grace is one Tillich considered most necessary for Intellectuals, “ . . . the people who cannot escape the sad destiny of having to think . . . ” noting “ . . . I am interested in the situation of the intellectuals, and I am trying to interpret the Christian message in a new way to them.”87 For the only limitations for the recognition and possibilities of grace are the ones we create, impose, and demand. Wandering, flaneuring with and against Tillich, we arrive, as intellectuals, as thinking, doubting people, as those considered “dangerous” for doing so by both church and state, as secular theologians and theologians of the secular, at a decision: a decision for the expression of ultimate concern that attempts to make the prophetic core of Christianity relevant— politically and socially—in our time. It is a decision that is located in that paradoxical flanerie of knowledge and doubt that I propose has to occur alongside what Stephen Turner terms “frontier knowledge”: For the frontier is the first and last place to know: the first to confront the new, the not-yet-known, and the last to understand what it means, how it is understood in the most general sense, theorised, and returned to the margin.88

The decision of what is relevant and irrelevant—and how to respond to both—is, therefore, one of ultimate concern, a decision for grace, a decision of a manifesto moment proclaiming a new relevance for ideas and a theologian too easily and too often declared irrelevant. Perhaps, if grace is love, a decision we make, we have, in the words of the country song from Urban Cowboy, “been looking for love in all the wrong places.”89

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Notes 1. Tillich, On the Boundary, 13. 2. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (1982) (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknapp Press/ Harvard University Press, 1999/2002), 425. 3. Jerald C. Bauer, “Paul Tillich’s Impact on America.” In Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions, ed. Jerald C. Bauer (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966), 15–22. 4. McKenzie Wark, Dispositions (Applecross, WA and Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2002, April 20, 2001 11:18 EST. 5. Werner Schüßler, “Tillich’s Life and Works.” In Re Manning, Cambridge Companion, 15. 6. Gabriel Vahanian, Tillich and the New Religious Paradigm (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers, 2005), 21. 7. Martin Leiner, “Tillich on God.” In Re Manning, Cambridge Companion, 44. 8. For Vahanian’s critique of Tillich see Vahanian, Tillich. 9. John Thatamanil, “Tillich and the Postmodern.” In Re Manning, Cambridge Companion, 293. 10. Victor E. Taylor, Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000). 11. Russell McCutcheon, The Discipline of Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), xi [Orig: James Clifford, Routes: Travel & Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1997), 277]. 12. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001). 13. Paul Tillich, Ultimate Concern. Tillich in Dialogue, ed. D. Mackenzie Brown (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1965), 50. 14. Ibid., 190. 15. Ibid., 196. 16. Ibid., 197–198. 17. Tillich, The Irrelevance and Relevance, 22. 18. Ibid., 14–21. 19. Tillich, Ultimate Concern, 188. 20. Ibid., 123. 21. Tillich, Socialist Decision, xv. 22. Ibid., xviii. 23. Ibid., xxxi. 24. Ibid., 10. 25. Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of isms (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2001), xx. 26. Ibid., xvii. 27. Ibid., xxi. 28. Ibid., xxiii.

130 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

Mike Grimshaw Tillich, Socialist Decision, 1. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 20–21. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 35. Ibid. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 47–48. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 37. It is important to link this to Tillich’s total rejection of supernaturalism, which effectively prohibits any attempt to sidestep the bourgeois principle/modernity (I thank Russell Re Manning for reminding me of this). Ibid., 62. Ibid. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 62–63. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 69. Ibid. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 108–109. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 132. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 151.

The Radical, Impure Tillich 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

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Tillich, Ultimate Concern, 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 31; 34. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 188. Tillich, Irrelevance and Relevance, 13. Ibid., 14; 15. Tillich, Ultimate Concern, 10. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company), xvi. Tillich, Irrelevance and Relevance, 22. Ibid., 52. Ibid. Ibid. Tillich, Ultimate Concern, 148. Ibid., 190; 193. Stephen Turner, “In Derrida’s Wake: Why I Can’t Think Where I Am.” In Derrida Down Under, ed. Laurence Simmons and Heather Worth (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 2001), 70. Johnny Lee, “Looking for Love”; from the film Urban Cowboy 1980. (Time Warner)/original soundtrack album: Elektra/Time Warner, 1980.

Chapter 8 Socialism’s Multitude: Tillich’s The Socialist Decision and Resisting the US Imperial* Mark Lewis Taylor

We live, still, in the long aftermath of World War II (WWII), a nearly 70-year period beginning with the emergence of the United States of America as a hegemonic power after WWII. From this vantage point, the United States claimed and guarded the US dollar as global exchange currency, fought and endured “the Cold War,” and, with the fall of the Soviet Union and East European state socialism, rose to a sole superpower from the 1990s onward. It has instigated and fought hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as sponsoring “low intensity” conflict globally. All the while, it has claimed that its wars and economic power plays were essential to a globalization project, one usually unfolded under the banner of “development.”1 Today, US global sovereignty remains uncertain and in flux, with some sensing its demise as an imperial force, and others arguing for its reinvention and continued power. I will explore this debate briefly, and note also how the toll that US imperial presumption and policy have extracted from humanity and nature is now haunting even its own power, perhaps even subverting it. This may be both crisis and opportunity for overcoming the imperial United States. Any such “overcoming” of the US global sovereignty, however, will not occur without a resistance that is as theoretically astute as it is politically courageous. Paul Tillich’s thought offers both theory and courage that is

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worth considering in relation to the US imperial. In what way might there be a “radical Tillich” as resource for this period? The argument of this essay is that the early Paul Tillich haunts our present political thinking amid early twenty-first-century crisis, pointing to a unique mode of socialism—one that involves an ”expanded proletariat” and builds political alliances with groups rarely engaged by avowed socialist thinkers and activists. I will not argue that Tillich’s vision of socialism is the one that must be embraced, but in the process of making clear how his socialist theory works, I hope to raise further questions that bear on resisting the US imperial today. Given the specificities of Tillich’s time and ours, there can be no uncritical appropriation of Tillich as providing all that is needed for a “radical political theology” in our time.2 If Tillich haunts us fruitfully, however, he breaks free from a past to which many thinkers, especially in the United States, have often consigned him. The reigning view often is that this was a time when his religious socialism failed in the struggle against Nazism in his homeland, with this and other factors causing him to flee Germany in 1933. I will mean by the “early Tillich” mainly the author of The Socialist Decision of 1933, and whose political criticisms continued through to 1945, focusing on matters of the European and US powers during WWII and the postwar reconstruction. Here, “early” in this Tillich of 1933 to 1945 should not mean “unseasoned.” This early Tillich was a mature thinker, who had written perhaps his best book at age 47 (The Socialist Decision) after undergoing harrowing World War I experiences as a chaplain in the trenches, and having participated intellectually and politically in the tumult of Germany between the world wars—a time of European ruin, postwar bitterness, political conflict, and yet extraordinary creativity.3 This chapter unfolds in five sections. After a first introductory section on “The US Imperial as Haunted and Haunting,” a second section, “The Socialist Decision: Its Haunting Principle(s),” treats Tillich’s notion of the principle (Das Prinzip) as itself haunting and spectral in important senses. Tillich, as we will see, uniquely synthesizes his view of “the principle” from Hegel, Marx, and especially Schelling. We are readied then, in a third section to grasp the particular principles of The Socialist Decision in ways that illumine their potential for resisting the US imperial. In this section, entitled, “The Socialist Decision as Resistance to the US Imperial,” resistance comes, primarily, by exposing the destructive operations of the principles of Political Romanticism and Bourgeois Society. The fourth section, “Socialist Principle, Expectation, and Socialism’s ‘Multitude,’” then reflects on how the tense and labile relations between the principles yield a kind of “expectation,” an “awaiting,” that drives socialist decision-makers to strike alliances between their socialist principle, on the one hand, and

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both Bourgeois and pre-Bourgeois forces, on the other. This is what points to socialism’s engagement with a “multitude” of peoples—hence my title, for this chapter on Tillich, “Socialism’s Multitude.” The final and fifth concluding section, “Tillich and Resisting the US Imperial Today,” then considers whether there exist groups in our period, in relation to the US imperial, similar to those that Tillich suggested an expanded socialism should engage.

Introduction: The US Imperial as Haunted and Haunting Specter Readers will observe that, in this chapter, the notions of haunting and of the spectral are presented in three related ways. First, they refer generally to the persistent force of Tillich’s own thought from the period between the wars and into our time. Second, to the complex spectral power that the United States as global sovereign wields, itself being “haunted and haunting.” This is the concern of this section. Third, they also refer, more importantly, to the power of the socialist principle (Das sozialistische Prinzip) as dynamically interacting with the other principles—as haunting, in the sense of resisting and potentially subverting, those political formations that are imperial and capitalist today, as well as those political responses on the Left that, according to Tillich, might also become problematic. Let us provide context for the chapter’s reflections on Tillich’s socialist principle as “haunting,” by turning, briefly, to the US imperial. What is meant by “the US imperial,” and how might we think its own “haunted and haunting” spectral power today? In brief, “the US imperial” refers to the United States as a key player in a transnational global sovereignty. However, that sovereignty is exercised in a field of force that is greater in extent and complexity than the governing powers of its nation-state. This apparatus is formed “outside the nationstates,” writes international sociologist, Saskia Sassen. Nations, including the United States, participate in an “interstate system,” being “building blocks” of the whole, and often, at the same time, “profoundly altered from the inside out” by that belonging.4 This is why it is difficult for many theorists to speak of “American empire” or “American hegemony,” yet still find it necessary to write of various “imperial projects,” “U.S. imperial interests,” and so on. In this way, such thinkers—and I follow them here—not only acknowledge the import of the interstate system in which the United States is one participant, but also do not mask the particular, expansive power of the US military and nation-state, not only over territories of lands

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and bodies at home, but also throughout transnational domains and political processes. “The US imperial,” is my more abstract term for this complexity. I thus prefer it over “US empire” or “American empire.” If the US imperial is a “specter,” as I have written before, I do not aim to invoke easy talk of ghosts and phantasms.5 Nor do I plan to develop at length the Derridean and other poststructuralist discussions of specters and haunting, or “ hauntology” to recall Derrida’s neologism in his Specters of Marx.6 “Specters,” here, I take to be forces developing historically and socially, which are analyzable as such, but that also have a special power to engage thinking and experience in the present with a compelling force, provoking senses of danger or gift, of dread or hope—and these in various combinations. The terms, “haunted and haunting,” when attached to the US imperial as specter add something more: the specter’s relation to historical movement, the ways history continually moves into and out of the specter— passing through it, as it were, creating a forceful presence which is, in Walter Benjamin’s words, a point of history “pregnant with tensions.” 7 It has a fullness of past provocations of fear and dread, of danger and promise, and thus is a “haunted” power (with a heavy past), even as it is also “haunting,” carrying prospects for the future. As “haunted,” the US imperial is a formation of power that carries within it the teeming dead, which must include American Indian peoples dispossessed by US settler colonialism, the African bodies (dead and enslaved) amid the rise of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, and the overt and covert wars of post-World War US imperial force (in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan). It is haunted, too, by its backing of other military regimes of death—for just a few examples, in South Korea, Indonesia, Haiti, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Brazil Iran, the Congo, apartheid South Africa—and more. The “haunting” tension arises when the teeming dead, and especially the memory of them in the present by their descendants, and sometimes by others among us, impinge on the present. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst and historian Chalmers Johnson terms this “blowback,” when writing about specific US past violence abroad that comes back into the US present and territory.8 The post-structuralist discourse of Jacques Derrida speaks of “generations of ghosts” that “unhinge” the present, keep it connected to a responsibility for and to the past, such that our “living present cannot be fully contemporary with itself.”9 It remains open to, troubled and threatened by, what sociologist Avery Gordon has termed the “seething presence” of the US imperial past.10 The US imperial is haunted; and haunting. The “haunting” comes as a foreboding that is negative for ongoing powers of the US imperial, pressing for its demise, but positively as gift and promise for those who continue suffering its past and present.11

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The Socialist Decision—Its Haunting “Principle(s)” In turning from notions of haunting as a trait of the political present to Tillich’s The Socialist Decision, it is important to remember Derrida’s emphasis in his The Specters of Marx, that the “theory of specters . . . betrays its origin, namely, father Hegel.” Referring to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Derrida rightly asks: “and what is a phenomenology if not a logic of the phainesthai and of the phantasma.”12 The Socialist Decision is indebted to Hegel as being a logic of three specters, three phantasma; but this logic is, also as with Hegel, a logic in history and society, although, in many ways, Tillich departs from Hegel, moving along several other tracks that include the challenging pathways of Karl Marx, and especially Friedrich Schelling. I need to comment, at least briefly, on this indebtedness to and critique of Hegel in order to make clear how The Socialist Decision works, and how it can be read as theorizing a spectral threat—resisting the US imperial. When I say that The Socialist Decision can be read as a “logic of three specters,” I do not mean that Tillich uses the theoretical discourse of spectrality in that book. Nevertheless, there is a key notion, “the principle” (Das Prinzip), which, as treated by Tillich, has all the marks of an effective specter at work in history. The word “principle” in English, and perhaps “das Prinzip” in German, can be used in many ways, as “ideal,” “rule,” “strong moral conviction,” or even more vaguely as “theme” or “topic.”13 Tillich makes clear in the opening pages of The Socialist Decision, however, that he is using it in a very specific sense. His definition is given clearly: “A principle is the real power that supports a historical phenomenon, giving it the possibility to actualize itself anew and yet in continuity with the past.” It is “the inner-power of history-bearing groups.” He emphasizes his meaning with an italicized sentence: “A principle is the power of a historical reality, grasped in concepts.”14 Tillich distinguishes this notion of principle from the notion of “essence,” which in the history of European epistemology, he believes, is more abstract, a notion often contrasted to “appearance.” There is no abstract essence of historical and social phenomena; so Tillich cannot speak of essences of history. But he does sense the need for some “summarizing characterization” of the effective force of historical and political groups. This is where the notion of “principle” works. Key developments in history and society, especially in times of crisis, can be organized, Tillich believes, in terms of their principles, which help identify the “coherent movements.” Thereby, when facing the numerous, indeed, “infinite

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abundance of continuously linked events,” Tillich refers to “principle” in order to organize this multiplicity.15 Principle is also a dynamic concept, because “it contains the possibility of making understandable new and unexpected realizations of a historical origin.”16 There is an additional and important aspect of this notion of principle. It is not only a concept at work as an act of intellect or conceptuality; it also has a dimension of decision. Entscheidung (decision) is intrinsic to the Verstehen (understanding) that discerns principles in history.17 This will especially be the case with regard to the socialist principle. Understanding socialism, then, as a historical phenomenon, entails also a “decision”—a criticism and judging whereby the thinker makes choices, positioning oneself in relation to the historical phenomenon described. And so, a “principle” is not only a moving and lively analytic, a concept that is historically descriptive (a “summary characterization”), but also, as involving decision, it is critically normative (judging the historical realization in terms of the basic characterization). Thus, the principle also has an active and practical role in changing historical structures, demonstrating this role in the way it resolves certain “inner contradictions.” All this is entailed in Tillich’s “principle” as “the power of a historical reality, grasped in concepts.”18 Tillich’s notion of principle, unfolding with this complexity, shows its indebtedness, again, to Hegel, to “the restless negative,” as contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy puts it.19 Tillich’s notion of “inner contradiction” generating structural change is, indeed, reminiscent of Hegel’s “determinate negation” as force in the unfolding process of history. But Tillich is, in The Socialist Decision especially, indebted to the fundamental critique of Hegel made by both the later Schelling and Karl Marx. Tillich writes little of Schelling in The Socialist Decision, but Schelling’s influence is discernible in this notion of “principle.” Tillich was dependent on Schelling from his earliest dissertation years and throughout his career. Even in lectures given toward the end of his life, Tillich announced Schelling as “the critic whom I consider to be the most fundamental philosophically and theologically, and perhaps most important for our intellectual life today.”20 Schelling, as Tillich read him, moved first from a synthesis of Kant and Spinoza (wherein ideals are “brought down” from Kantian abstraction and inscribed in a Spinozistic “living substance of every entity”). Then Schelling showed the inner powers of nature— the conscious and the unconscious as driving forces of history. In these ways, Schelling better than Hegel, writes Tillich, explored the complexities of history’s “actual situation” as being complexes of material forces more determinative than philosophers’ notions of being and thought. 21 He turned attention, as liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel puts it, to a material critical principle that, first Marx, and then thinkers “other than

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Europe” would stress still more prominently, thus foregrounding a notion of “reality” that is before being or thought.22 Tillich sees Schelling taking “the spiritual” more deeply and complexly into this reality, this materiality, than did Hegel. As Tillich writes, following Schelling, the “powers of being which grasp the human mind” are those which must “go through man’s [sic] psyche, his soul, through his conscious and unconscious mind, but they do not derive from it. They come from the roots men [sic] have in the depths of reality itself.”23 Schelling’s emphasis on the aesthetic function for grasping this complex flow of being from this material complex of reality also anticipated the emphasis Tillich would place on symbols throughout his theology, even on the expressionist aesthetics of his Christology. This expressionist symbolism was a way to tap into the actual material force of historical reality.24 Then there’s Tillich’s engagement with Marxian thought. With being and spirit more deeply etched into the material by Schelling, Tillich was more than prepared to embrace much of Marx’s “reversal” of Hegel. Tillich did not embrace the “dogmatic Marxism,” wherein he lamented the Marxists’ frequent dismissal of deep and important discussions of human nature and society as “so much superfluous or harmful ideology.” 25 But Tillich embraced both Marx’s dialectics of history and his strong emphasis on the economic dimension as generative of history. He read Marx’s historical materialism, and the materiality of economics, as “an infinitely complex, multifaceted reality. All aspects of human being must be considered when economics is considered.”26 Tillich took with full seriousness Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” especially the emphasis on a sensuous materialism of “socially productive humanity” as “the matter of history,” rather than “an overarching reason.”27 I think it fair to say that the complexity of being’s power in material life (again conscious and unconscious, in nature and society) kept Tillich attuned to this complex Marx, one freed from dogmatic Marxism, even while Schelling’s aesthetic materialism kept Tillich in a theoretical place “beyond Marx,” wherein symbol and the arts for Tillich would play a crucial role for, and in, socially productive humanity. These post-Hegelian—Schellingian and Marxian—interpretations of the powers of being in history thus help explain further the nature of Tillich’s “principle” (Das Prinzip) and, more importantly, how the major “principles” interplay in Tillich’s The Socialist Decision. With regard to each of the principles, Tillich repeatedly reminds his readers of the historical efficacy they involve: “A principle is the power of a historical reality, grasped in concepts.”28 This “power” of “historical reality,” Tillich referred to in 1929 as “emergent form,” which arises out of the tensions existing within an actual form. The emergent form is a dynamic set of “tendencies”

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that are, again, material, “the living, psychic, social substance” that includes an ever-materializing “ideal.”29

The Socialist Decision as “Resistance” to the US Imperial Attention to the interplay of the three principles is crucial for articulating the way The Socialist Decision provides an understanding for resistance to the US imperial. The Socialist Decision can be understood as a theory of resistance, only if we understand the socialist principle in its complex transforming tension with two other principles, those Tillich names “Political Romanticism” and the “Bourgeois Principle.” In what follows, and to the end of this chapter, I will examine each of the three principles of The Socialist Decision, foregrounding their key tendencies and movements, illustrating these by reference to the main political dynamics that have emerged in post-9/11 United States. Each principle has its own defining dynamic, its distinctive history-bearing groups, and, develops crucial “inner contradictions” that serve as determinate negations driving it forward through various psychic, social, and political dimensions of life. This will enable our discerning the importance of socialism’s “multitude” and the kind of political radicality that Tillich proposed. Political romanticism has, as its driving principle, a governing set of tendencies (psychic, social, political, and economic) desiring to return to what Tillich repeatedly names, “the powers of origin.” This means that primary attention is given here to a sense of “the whence” of human being, the “from where” of one’s community, group or nation. In Tillich’s time, political romanticism’s history-bearing groups were “the nobility, the landowners, the peasantry, the artisans, the priesthood,” including those wanting to remain in touch with primal erotic powers, those seeking meaning in the face of death, for whom the past is not nostalgia, but a source of sustaining memory for a better hope.30 One can see the power of this romanticism, in especially the early Walter Benjamin, in his influence by figures like Stefan George and Gustav Wyneken.31 By returning to “the powers of origin,” Tillich refers to very material means by which consciousness intensifies its connections to native soil— earth, vegetative powers of being that tie one to tangible senses of land and home, and also to blood relations wherein such political romanticist notions of “noble blood,” “noble race,” and great lineage can work. The powers of origin also include the tightly organized social group, persisting even when detached from soil and blood, solidified usually by patriarchal

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rule, wherein fatherly demand and maternal nurture are stereotyped together as romanticized forms of the social group. Priesthoods usually link powers of origin to transcendental discourses, thus sacralizing soil, blood, and group.32 “The creative powers of origin have a tendency to press beyond their original point of emergence,” writes Tillich.33 This romanticism’s discourse usually asserts that one’s own god is . . . the Almighty, the “ruler of heaven and earth” . . . one’s particular god becomes god of the whole world, resulting in “the idea of the totality of all that is, the logical imperialism of which is an appropriate expression of the mythical-political imperialism with which it is connected.34

Richard Slotkin wrote that “the history of humanity gives us no reason to suppose that we will ever cease to mythologize and mystify the origin and history of our societies,” and the United States has been no exception.35 Or, with the discourse of “American exceptionalism,” we could say that a US romanticism has taken itself as “the exceptional” national project. Other scholars, in addition to Slotkin, have traced this romanticizing tendency in the United States, which projects the nation as a “city on a hill,” a light or beacon to the nations, with a “manifest destiny” willed by God for expansion, with its mytheme of “bringing freedom” to the world.36 When the United States’ own, protected, Eden-like existence between two oceans was “violated” by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, a kind of super-patriotism reemerged, designed to restore the romanticist sense of origin among US citizens. After the attacks, Anatol Lieven interpreted the resurgent and virulent nationalism as the ascendance of a long-standing, sometimes hidden, but always powerful stream of American nationalism—an aggressive stream celebrating white, manly performance along frontiers where cowboys, soldiers, and explorers prove their mettle and character, usually through conflicts with nonwhite, alleged “enemy combatants.”37 “U.S political romanticism,” especially after 9/11, differentiates within itself, and along the lines of two crucial distinctions that Tillich also discerned in The Socialist Decision. There is first of all the distinction between “religious” and “secular” romanticism, which in Tillich’s book was a way to distinguish romanticisms keen on “transcendence” from those that were more “naturalistic.”38 In the United States, the religious form of romanticism often yokes transcendental discourse to US origins, and continually justifies US policies as divinely mandated. At the time of 9/11 and for nearly eight years afterward, the political leader of the Christian Right, George W. Bush, occupied the White House.39 Practiced reverence for

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nation, deemed by contemporary Christians as a spirit inaugurated by Christian “founding fathers,” pervaded many federal government offices during the Bush administration, from the president’s office on down. Creationism was promulgated by the government. Federal subsidies to religious organizations were provided, but usually to Christian ones— rarely to those of other religions.40 The more secular or “naturalist” forms of political romanticism also were resurgent after 9/11, but linking reverence for national origins not so much to God as to senses of republican virtue, civic spirit, and, most of all, to a “sense of American greatness”—a term used by “neoconservative Pentagon planners” in their campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.41 Thus, in spite of a Christian/secular distinction that could divide them religiously, in terms of political ideology in post9/11 culture, these two political romanticisms (religious and secular) could and did strike common cause. Tillich’s second distinction among forms of political romanticism is even more important for understanding the US imperial in its post-9/11, early twenty-first-century formation. This is Tillich’s distinction between “conservative” and “revolutionary” romanticism. This distinction is not parallel to the first one; instead, this conservative-revolutionary distinction cuts across the religious-naturalist one. In other words, religious romanticists could be either conservative or revolutionary, and secular ones could also be conservative or revolutionary. The conservative romanticists revere national origins, largely eschewing new systems. These display a preservationist impulse that idealizes the past. In contrast, revolutionary romanticists seek not only to revere national origins but also mythologize those origins as programs for present and future transformation. As “revolutionary,” these romanticists organize to counter modernity with a romanticist future that aims to rebuild the past in the future. (For Tillich, the Nazis were revolutionary romanticists.) In post-9/11 United States, one witnessed an especially potent reconfiguration of a long-standing ideological strand of US history, that is, the fusion of religious romanticism with revolutionary romanticism—and the fusion occurred at the highest levels of national power. US revolutionary romanticists wanted to remake the country in the name of an ever-expanding America—both religiously sacralized and aggressively nationalized. Tillich, however, before delivering outright critique of this type of romanticism, makes the situation still more complex. This fusion within political romanticism—between its religious and its revolutionary tendencies—is still only one of the debilitating dynamics that concerns him. Indeed, this revolutionary romanticism can become even more destructive when it strikes alliance with history-bearing groups manifesting a second major principle, one at work in bourgeois society.

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This is the site of the most complex of principles in The Socialist Decision. “Bourgeois society” is Tillich’s name for that collection of history-bearing groups who embrace the bourgeois principle as a principle that breaks with powers of origin. It breaks the sense of “the whence,” and leans toward a demanding future, the new, alive to “the whither” (Wozu) of history. The bourgeois principle is “the radical dissolution of all conditions, bonds, and forms related to the origin into elements that are to be rationally mastered, and the rational assemblage of these elements into structures serving the aims of thought and action.”42 The undergirding belief of this principle is a confidence in harmony. This is necessary because, as this principle dissolves and breaks ties to origin, its desire for rationality needs grounding for reassembling the elements it dissolves. A naïve trust to “harmony” provides this.43 In his own time, Tillich identified bourgeois society as made up of various groups alienated from the myth of origin by their social situation. These included intellectuals as champions of inner autonomy (excluding clergy), public officials representing the controlling reason of the state, “employees of higher rank” who benefit from the concentration of capital and elimination of small businesses; also “workers, who have been wrenched loose from their ties to home and to the transcendent and so become mere means toward economic goal.” These latter possess only their labor power and so, in desperation, often embrace the instrumental reason of bourgeois society. Then, too, Tillich includes in bourgeois society those wholesale merchants whose rationality respects largely unrestricted commercial exchange— industrial entrepreneurs or managers of finance capital.44 The bourgeois principle, in breaking free from the myth of origin, is a result of historical being’s leaning into the future, affirming that future. More specifically, its emergence takes the form of what Tillich terms a “double break”—one being “humanistic,” another “prophetic.” By the humanistic break, Tillich refers to an “Enlightenment” period that he traces from its earliest forms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to later in the positivisms and liberalisms of the nineteenth century.45 It has spun the beliefs in harmony and progress, such that rationality’s dissolution of romanticist myths of origin could flourish, creating an “autonomous consciousness.”46 The Enlightenment, however, is nestled within and anticipated by by an earlier break with powers of origin, namely, “prophetic history.” This has its deepest roots in Jewish prophetism, which Tillich sees as having “radicalized the social imperative to the point of freeing itself from the bond of origin.” The God of the Hebrews makes war even against “His” (sic) own originated monarchy when it violates social justice.47 Thus, the bourgeois principle is a fruit of both Jewish/Christian prophetism as well as the Enlightenment. Both shatter the myth of origin.

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To fully understand this bourgeois principle, however, we must note that Tillich sees its creative drive as going into a kind of “over-drive,” taking it into an “inner contradiction” (Widerspruch).48 It is precisely this inner contradiction within the bourgeois principle that generates the proletarian situation, which in turn brings on the crisis/opportunity (Kairos) that enables decision for the socialist principle. For Tillich, “the proletariat” is not simply a revolutionary anti-group, opposed to bourgeois society, as common parlance often has it. As Tillich writes, “The proletariat is nothing but a product of bourgeois society and from its formation of the world and the society. It is the result of the complete objectification of all existing things in nature and society through the domination of the bourgeois principle.”49 The proletariat is the group that marks the failure of the principle of harmony that the bourgeois principle often invokes. “The proletariat does not experience harmony, but disharmony.” Aware of this, it begins to separate itself from bourgeois society, but from within it. It is “within” it, recall, because as the most atomized it is the most fully dissolved—this dissolution being the key characteristic of the bourgeois principle and its rationality. Because bourgeois society cannot rule this most atomized and dissolved of its products (the proletariat), bourgeois society usually effects a key alliance against its unruly proletariat. What kind of alliance? It allies itself with “pre-bourgeois forces that are still bound to the origin.”50 In this alliance, bourgeois class rulers, although they have broken with the myth of origin and its nationalism, will still embrace romantic nationalism if and when it enables protection of their class rule. At home, the proletariat now becomes the “unpatriotic” enemy of the state. Abroad, the pre-bourgeois romantic nationalism also enables class rulers to quash competition, “reducing competition in the world market” so that the state, under bourgeois class rule, is enabled to pursue “autarky” (economic independence) and “imperialism.”51 The result of this bourgeois/romanticist alliance is an even fiercer and more expansive political formation of nationalism than revolutionary romanticism could achieve on its own. This national chauvinism, in turn, strengthens the capitalists and ruling classes shift into overdrive. In Germany, Tillich especially saw this alliance made when a “small stratum” of bourgeois “landed proprietors and large entrepreneurs . . . handed over weapons and capital to National Socialism, because they trembled in the face of social reorganization.”52 Hitler promised German businessmen that he would eliminate the Marxists and restore the armed forces (“the latter was of special interest to such business giants as Krupp, I.G. Farben and United Steel which stood to gain from rearmament”).53 It should also be stressed that US entrepreneurs played crucial roles in allying corporate business with National Socialism. “The chauvinistic Nazis,” as noted by

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prize-winning historian, Christopher Simpson, “tended to view U.S.-based multinational companies with suspicion, but still encouraged them to invest in Germany when it benefitted Nazi rule. Soon US corporate investment was expanding more rapidly in Hitler’s Germany than in any other country in Europe, despite the worldwide economic depression.”54 Now, we can return to the political situation in post-9/11 United States. In the United States, even before 9/11, corporate powers and military contractors feared the kind of social reconstruction that many demanded within the United States at the time of fall of the Soviet Union, at “the end” of the Cold War. This at least suggested a redeployment of national funds, away from armaments to bring a so-called “peace dividend” (which never came) and toward paying for much needed social and infrastructural projects at home. After the attacks of 2001, just a decade later, however, corporate powers had the excuse they needed to re-invest heavily in “American exceptionalism” and imperial “nationalism,” thus entering into vigorous alliance with American political romanticism. Just weeks after 9/11, the Republicans in power sought to cut taxes on the largest corporations. The religious and revolutionary romanticist, George W. Bush, rolled back taxes on the upper 1 percent of income earners, dramatically, and even tried to end estate taxes.55 Now, why is this dangerous alliance also important to recognize for resisting the US imperial? For an answer, we must complete our analysis of the dialectics of principles in Tillich’s The Socialist Decision, by treating, directly, the socialist principle and its spirit of expectation.

The Socialist Principle, Expectation, and “Socialism’s Multitude” The socialist principle, and the “decision” Tillich urged his contemporaries to make for it, emerges from a conflict within the proletarian situation—a conflict that he terms a contradiction. This conflict is a contradiction that has its roots in the fact that, although demonized by bourgeois society, the proletariat was first created by and resulted from bourgeois society. Thus, the tough situation, the inner contradiction of the proletariat: it must “overcome the bourgeois principle by means of the bourgeois principle!”56 How is this possible? How might the proletariat go with the bourgeois principle’s rational analytic that produces dissolution, thus breaking with powers of origin and aiming at reassembling life, and yet also resist that dissolving principle? That is the contradiction. The basic answer Tillich gives is that the

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proletariat takes as its key symbol the notion of “expectation” (Erwartung). This symbol springs from the tension of being both in a state of suffering and with desire to end the suffering. The proletariat wields the symbol both as affirmation and negation of the bourgeois principle. It is affirmation, in that the proletariat, leaning into the future, expects the new. Like the bourgeois principle, then, it is a movement from origin toward the future, “the whither” (Wozu). It is negation, too—because it moves against the bourgeois principle seeking a future that is different. It is a future that frees the proletariat from its dispossession and atomization, and from its “thing-ification” by bourgeois society. Proletarian expectation of this sort embraces bourgeois society’s movement toward the future but seeks to burst that future open for a destruction of that very bourgeois society. This produces the proletariat’s unique kind of approach to the future. It is not simply a matter of driving through, and beyond “what is not now” (was nicht ist).57 Even bourgeois power-holders do this, especially as we have seen, when they make their destructive alliance with pre-bourgeois powers of origin to maintain class rule. But the proletariat, in its way of driving beyond “the not now,” reconstructs also the origin. But it does so in a way contrary to the modes of embracing origins found in either romanticism or bourgeois society. The proletariat expectation yokes its refashioned sense of origin toward its future goal in a way that will not reduce the proletariat to things. Expectation, thus, according to Tillich, takes on and abides in a “tension (Die Spannung) with a forward aim,” one “straining” as the English translator renders the proletariat’s distinctive forward movement of struggle and perseverance. Expectant tension in the proletariat is the socialist principle’s incipient drive, at the level of material suffering and persevering desire, toward the “unconditionally new,” and a “new order of things.” This straining toward the unconditionally new has, for Tillich, a special ethical content. The driving inner power of the socialist principle (here expectation) now incorporates a critical ideal element: the demand for justice and equality. Here re-enters, again, the power of Jewish/Christian prophetism. This demand for equality and justice is understood as calling forth a mutual recognition of all peoples’ equal dignity in their historical circumstances. It thus lives in expectation of “classless society,” “socialism’s key symbol for approaching the future.”58 The socialist principle that drives with this critical ideal is no mere passive waiting (warten). It is an awaiting, erwarten. It is proactive both in receiving a demand that cannot be generated by human powers, and also in mobilizing its own human powers of action. Both the actions of reception and mobilization constitute the straining tension, die Spannung, of expectation as the arising socialist principle.

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Moreover, with the critical ideal of justice and equality, the justice demand takes on an “overarching character.” By this, Tillich means that justice, in its being a critical ideal for all peoples’ dignity, not only presents a goal or demand, but also uncovers for socialist society a sense of origin, its “true origin.” This overarching is not an arching “over” history and world. It is an arch from origin to new future within history. Nor is it a restoration to the origin of mythologized powers of soil, blood, society, and nationalistic belonging. Tillich does write that some of these elements will still remain in socialism, but now they point to an origin where all peoples have their common origination, in a shared nature that makes possible a socialist future. In contemporary terms, we might say, it would be an origin that reminds all social strata and all peoples of their co-planetary belonging, a belonging wherein a shared origin and future are realms from which no one can be excluded. Thus Tillich writes, “justice is not an abstract ideal standing over existence; it is the fulfillment of primal being, the fulfillment of that which was intended by the origin.”59 I have described Tillich’s ideal of justice, elsewhere, as having a “riverine” quality; from the origin of being, it runs like a deep river through all life, especially showing itself in the proletariat’s pressing for “classless society.” Again, this is neither a transcendent principle above and against life, nor merely life itself; it is a tension of the pressure of the new within life, “just as much a transcendent symbol as an immanent object.”60 Thus, if one makes a decision for the socialist principle, it is a decision of the socialist principle, that is, a decision deriving from socialism as a flowing part of primal being, working for an erosion of the structural domains of both political romanticism and bourgeois society.61 Those who experience this demand for justice, who are carried by that demand and proactively expect it (await it), form “the proletariat” in Tillich’s broader sense of that term. For Tillich, the proletariat is certainly a more complex and broad group than when it is understood as a socialist vanguard of worker elites.62 In a long paragraph stretching across two pages, Tillich refers to a very broad notion of the proletariat. Of course, it includes primarily “that class within the capitalist system whose members are dependent exclusively upon the ‘free’ sale of their physical ability to work.”63 These, through their dispossession, however, also point toward many others, “millions of the unemployed.”64 In The Socialist Decision, Tillich continues, listing an array of social forces that he adds to these workers and the unemployed: “various spiritual movements working on issues of work, recreation, love, destiny and death; different regional and national traditions; the petit bourgeois, . . . longing for the supportive powers of origin; youth movements; those with “combative instincts” finding expression in “military organization and manoeuvers,” . . . and so on. Tillich hints that

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“a considerable number of others could be added.”65 Among them could be even “the white-collar proletariat” which exists, and, he adds, is “not just a caricature.”66 So, Tillich’s proletariat has a specificity, but also a variety of kind such that we can begin to speak, using terms from Italian autonomist socialist movement, of the proletariat as “multitude.” Proletarians are “not restricted to specific social classes,” writes Tillich, “they belong quite generally to the history of humanity as such.”67 In the United States of our time—and of Tillich’s time—the aspirations of castes and classes, racialized groups subject to white power and supremacy, would also have to be included in Tillich’s proletariat. Tillich himself, in a failure of radicality, we must say, was not attuned to black socialist thought and movements, even if, structurally, his thought could have articulated their power and place and, reciprocally, have been re-structured by black and other radical traditions.68 Overall and theoretically, we can say that Tillich’s proletariat aims at being the “world precariate” as an effective socialist force. He continued to envision such, even along lines of racial contestation when he posed his pointed questions to US audiences, as in Indianapolis just six months after the Pearl Harbor attack: “When we fight against Japan, do we fight a racial war, a war for the maintenance of European imperialism in Asia, or do we fight for the freedom of Asia also from ourselves?”69 The most thought-provoking aspect of Tillich’s socialism concerns the way he challenges this expansive proletariat to counter the bourgeois principle with a particularly striking manoeuver. It is a key strategic move which Tillich calls for throughout The Socialist Decision.70 That move is one whereby the socialist principle of expectation carried by the proletariat dares to forge alliances with pre-bourgeois forces—namely, with political romanticism—but in such a way as to counter the mode in which bourgeois society also allies itself with those forces. I term the proletariat’s move a “counter-alliance” to distinguish it from the reactionary alliance that corporate bourgeois society makes with romanticism in conditions of acute economic crisis. Tillich’s proposed counter-alliance encourages socialists to not leave the sense of origin completely in the chauvinistic hands of the romanticists. “We must strive,” writes Tillich, “for an alliance of the revolutionary proletariat with the revolutionary groups within political romanticism.” 71 Not to do so, Tillich feared, is to leave those revolutionary groups vulnerable to cooptation by both revolutionary romanticists like the Nazis and by the bourgeois corporate forces that throw-in with fascist rule. The broader proletariat, Tillich is emphasizing, needs to secure itself by reaching out under its justice demand for a “genuine encounter with the pre-bourgeois revolutionized classes.”72 Tillich advises this because he viewed middle class, romanticist populations’ imperfect but real revolutionary attitudes against bourgeois class rule as a resource for socialism. This,

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of course, meant that Tillich proposed being selective when approaching those with such attitudes, seeking alliance only to groups with “certain tendencies” that are genuinely anti-capitalist in attitude.73 Here is the uniqueness of Tillich’s proletariat: it is not only expansive with groups sufficiently numerous to suggest a “multitude” for socialism, but also it features a strategic aim to relate to powers of origin so as to attract revolutionary romanticists. Tillich knew well in his time that most of these potential allies were finding their way into National Socialism and a “blatant nationalism.” 74 But he still hoped, perhaps naively, that they might be siphoned off into socialist revolutionary action.75 Tillich considered this recommended strategic move as constituting the heart of the challenge faced by German socialism in his time.76 Socialism must make “a clear decision for the powers of origin, while rejecting the forces of origin that have become bourgeois.”.77 This is a key dynamic for creating socialism’s multitude in Tillich’s The Socialist Decision. I conclude by asking how this strategic alliance might be understood as an act of resistance today, vis-à-vis the US imperial.

Conclusion: Tillich’s Socialist Decision and Resisting the US Imperial Today? Recall that, with the demand for justice fully operative as the critical ideal of the driving principle of socialist expectation, the proletariat also rediscovers and forges a relation to origin—to humanity’s common origination. Thus Tillich writes, “in the society which socialism wishes to create, the factors of soil, blood, and social group will be present,” and further, socialism, “in the present situation, is dependent on the origin-related powers.”78 Socialism can link to these powers found among “revolutionary origin-related groups that are resisting class rule as we know it today.”79 Where should we look for such groups today amid the specter of the US imperial, and so be led to ponder a socialism subversively spectral to the US imperial? My first suggestion takes a cue from Sheldon Wolin.80 He makes a point that may strike some to be as naive as Tillich’s hope for allying with elements of National Socialism. Wolin writes that, in resisting state moves to total dominance today, it is necessary to consider those whom he terms, “champions of the archaic.” These Wolin sees as “provocateurs,” bringing if not truth, their necessary “passionate commitments” for arousing “selfconsciousness in the public” about totalizing domination. Who are these “champions of the archaic?” Wolin names “the Klan, militiamen/-women, neo-Nazis, Protestant fundamentalists, would-be censors of public and

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school libraries, champions of an “original Constitution.”81 He is identifying here “revolutionary romanticists,” in Tillich’s language, who often guard the myths of US origin. Although “liberals” and socialists in the United States often cannot tolerate these groups, they nevertheless constitute, for Wolin, forces that “are crucial to the cause of anti-totality and its vitality.”82 There is actually some truth to this, in that today, as the US imperial defends its expanding powers of its surveillance state, these romanticists—for all their systematic distortions (their racism and Christian imperialism)—nevertheless, are now in a kind of rebellion against US imperial state power that might bring them into uneasy alliance with socialist forces resisting state violence and control. Libertarian critics of state surveillance and power, and military veterans of US wars who still cultivate patriotic allegiance to nation, but mix it with critique of US wars and dominance, may be examples of such “champions of the archaic.”83 Second, there are groups in the United States, and abroad, who seek to yoke demands for socialist justice to new modes of national consciousness and even to efforts to reconstruct nation-states. These have anti-capitalist tendencies, even if in romanticist form, to which counter-alliance might be made by socialism’s expansive proletariat. The nation-state is often declared dead or ineffective, by both the Left and the neo-liberal “Center”/ Right. Indeed, one can sense an eclipse of the power of nation-states, simply by remembering the many new nations of the mid-twentieth century that, after declaring “independence,” remained very much in neocolonial dependency, dominated by the US imperial.84 Nevertheless, in recent Latin American struggles, for example, especially those begun by indigenous peoples who are not strangers to violation by nations, we can see them still reimagining national contexts as viable way to resist global orders anchored by the US imperial. The “nationalism” of the Mexican Zapatistas of Chiapas is one example. Although seeking a territorial “autonomía” for indigenous peoples, they still insist on inclusion in a new modern México that defies transnational elites, in solidarity both with a new Mexican nation and with a world precariate. As another example, anthropologist Diane Nelson finds similar dynamics at work in Maya activists’ struggle for liberation in Guatemala under racist Ladino rule and US-led global subordination of its peoples. “The nation-state may have been imposed historically, but in Guatemala today it is a space of productive power that makes it impossible to frame any other response.”85 These examples remind, too, of Frantz Fanon’s embrace of “national literature” in a third stage of colonized intellectuals’ development. Fanon, of course, knew the dangers of nationalism and was suspicious of colonized intellectuals who trusted to national culture and consciousness.86 But in his own complex move, he also stressed that “National culture in the

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underdeveloped countries, therefore, must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle these countries are waging.”87 Such affirmations of national culture-building may be exemplary of some of the revolutionary romanticist forces toward which Tillich’s expanded proletarian socialism drives. The final example points toward efforts by alternative globalization thinkers, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as in volume three of their “empire” trilogy, Commonwealth. In this work, while tending to dismiss all “socialism” as only the central planning bureaucracies of late twentieth-century socialist states, Hardt and Negri see a politically liberating multitude created not simply by “anti-globalization” or “anti-modern” struggle, but by alternative globalization—an “alter-modernity.” This alterconsciousness is oriented by what Hardt and Negri term, “the common.” They use this term for the generative power and creative energies of social movements, as these energies come from bodies and powers of the earth in social mobilization. Here—while they decry any liberating notion of nation-state—there is a respect for soil, body, erotic powers—all constitutive of “conatus” and “desire” that they render in Spinozist and Deleuzian terms. They trust to this for mobilizing the multitude.88 Hardt and Negri risk romanticism, but unapologetically, when also emphasizing the “power of love” that needs to be forged into a justice-making force.89 However different the historical contexts, the analogies seem clear here, between Tillich’s advocacy of a socialism as an expanded proletariat with alliances to bourgeois and romanticist elements of origin and belonging, and Hardt and Negri’s “multitude” with its originary powers of desire and belonging to earth and body. The “true origin” for Tillich, recall, was found in the present under the critical ideal of justice that seeks to be “for the dignity of all,” from and for the common. In this, Tillich looked to classless society. But the ideals of justice and classless society were rooted, he insisted, in a principle of expectation originating from the “common” matter of all living things. Many socialist intellectuals dismiss this kind of reference as romanticist, too weak to foster the needed revolutionary and material change under current socioeconomic conditions. It is suspect as a kind of failed socialism which, as one critic observes, “rewrites Marx as Foucault.”90 One could say that Tillich has done something similar, although Tillich would be quick to counter that the Foucault dimension is there in the early Marx, the Marx of the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.” This early, more “humanist Marx,” Tillich read as contextualizing but not displacing the later Marx of Capital, and so displays a socialism that is connected to the origin as well as to prophetic traditions.91 Hardt and Negri, no more than Sheldon Wolin, do not see this new “common” breaking forth in a homogeneous global movement as a unified system opposing today’s global sovereign systems. Instead, they both point

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to what Wolin terms “a multiplicity of modest sites, dispersed among local governments and institutions under local control . . . and in the ingenuity of ordinary people in inventing temporary forms to meet their needs.”92 Such local efforts and cultivation of people’s ingenuity is also how Tillich hoped that post-WWII reconstruction would take place. What he proposed, often against US designs, remains a testimony to the kind of revolutionary socialism he envisioned, perhaps also a sign of the future that still needs reconstructing. Tillich wrote: My idea for the spiritual reconstruction of Europe envisions a large number of anonymous and esoteric groups consisting of religious, humanist, and socialist people who have seen the trends of our period and were able to resist them, . . . (many of them under persecution), . . . The policy of the democracies after the war can only be to protect these groups against political or economic suppression.93

Rather than following Tillich’s advice here, or the advice he had given to US-American audiences throughout the war, the United States preferred to fight its war “for the maintenance of European [and American] imperialism.” Tillich also foresaw the United States, in its economic and political affairs, seeking to “actualize the ‘American century’,” as in fact it has done now for nearly seven decades.94 We still await seeing anything like Tillich’s socialism of the multitude. Indeed, we will need to build what Tillich sought as socialism’s “expansive proletariat” more in “the undercommons” forged by radical activists of color today, than in “the common” of more university intellectual traditions.95 No movements have yet succeeded in making the socialist decision, in Tillich’s sense, marked as it is, above all, by a revolutionary socialism that preserves the sense of origin, daring to strike alliances with revolutionary romanticisms. It remains unclear as to whether such romanticisms are, in fact, conducive to socialism. Any resistance to the US imperial will require further testing of possible socialist alliances with the kinds of groups mentioned in this conclusion. Whether socialism should even bother reaching out to the romanticists allied to bourgeois and pre-bourgeois forces or stay with the radicals of “the undercommons” will remain much debated. The “radical Tillich” of The Socialist Decision keeps that question alive in our time.

Notes * This essay in its first form was the “2013 Tillich Lecture” at the University of Frankfurt, delivered June 20, 2013. I express my gratitude for the invitation to

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Professor Heiko Schulz of that University, and to all his colleagues who made my visit to Frankfurt so immensely enriching. 1. I have made arguments for the claims of this opening paragraph elsewhere. Here, I cite, on the post-World War II period as US-dominated globalization of development, Walter D. Mignolo, Global Designs/Local Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); on the sleight-of-hand represented by globalization’s “development” projects, Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: On the Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); on the issue of US dollar diplomacy and its imperialism, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); on the United States as imperial power, West Point scholar Andrew J. Bacevich’s book is still helpful, American Empire: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). On Vietnam’s relation to US imperial designs and geopolitics see William Spanos, America’s Shadow: Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and on Korea and the US imperial, both Bruce Cummings and Jodi Kim are essential, respectively, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011), and The End of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 2. My own approach to a contemporary political theology can be found in Mark Lewis Taylor, The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011). 3. One of the best one-volume analyses (800 pages) of this period, focused on the Weimar Republic, is Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). 4. Cited in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 277, from Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 5. Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 13–14. 6. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 7. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” 1940. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 262–263. 8. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). 9. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix. 10. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 17, 21, 195. 11. I have detailed the specific dynamics of haunting and the spectral, in Taylor, The Theological and the Political, especially pages 31–49. 12. Derrida, The Specters of Marx, 121, 122.

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13. Several meanings of Das Prinzip are intimated in Tillich’s early 1921 essay, “Basic Principles of Religious Socialism.” In Political Expectation, ed. James Luther Adams (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 58–88. 14. Tillich, Socialist Decision, 10. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 9–10. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 20. Paul Tillich, A Complete History of Christian Thought, 2 vols., ed. Carl Braaten (New York: Harper & Row, 1967, 141. This publication is based on the second edition of Tillich’s 1956 lectures on history of Christian thought. 21. Ibid., 150. 22. Enrique Dussel, Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, trans. Eduard Mendieta, CamiloPerez Bastillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 219–220. The concept is difficult, but the gesture here is toward a materiality—a “reality” —that is not a naïve uncritical realism, but is affirmed as preceding both thought and being. See especially Dussel, page 19. 23. Ibid., 152. 24. See Systematic Theology, on symbolic functions in his doctrine of God, I:238– 247; and on his expressionist Christology, II:114–117. 25. Socialist Decision, 124–126. 26. Ibid., 116 (italics in the original). 27. Ibid., 115. 28. Ibid., 10. 29. Paul Tillich, “Protestantism as a Critical and Creative Principle.” Original 1929. Political Expectation, 20, 22. Tillich contrasts this ideal in tendencies of substance with Kant’s more abstract and formal ideal: Kantian criticism, he writes, “is not upheld by the power of an emerging form. It is abstract and condemned to be merely a subject for academic debate; at the most it can only obstruct concrete criticism” (19). 30. Socialist Decision, 25. 31. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 62–63, 102–103. Tillich had earlier characterized this movement around the popular poet, George, as abounding in “priestly spirit” but lacking universality, a “prophetic spirit for all” (Tillich, Religious Situation, 65–66. 32. Socialist Decision, 13–18. 33. Ibid., 18. 34. Ibid., 19. 35. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998) 654. 36. On the notion of American exceptionalism, see Reader’s Companion to American History, ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, s.v. “Manifest Destiny”

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37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

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(Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1991, 697–698, and Eldon Kenworthy, America/ Américas: Myth in the Making of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Universtiy Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995). Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 145. Socialist Decision, 28. On the striking sense in which Bush was indeed seen as such a leader, see Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Viking, 2004), 224. Esther Kaplan, With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy and Democracy in Gorge W. Bush’s White House (New York: New Press, 2004). Taylor, Religion, Politics and the Christian Right, 62–66. Socialist Decision, 48. Ibid., 49–53. See Tillich’s phrasings that qualify what he means by each of these groups in Ibid., 52. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 56. Ibid. This is a theme of several of Tillich’s radio addresses into Germany during WWII. See Paul Tillich, “The Intelligentsia and Germany’s Conquest.” In Tillich, Against the Third Reich, 56. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New edition with afterword by author (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 189–190. Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 11 and 314 n20. Taylor, Religion, Politics and the Christian Right, 83. Socialist Decision, 97. On this notion, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), and as applied to US mass incarceration and solitary confinement, see Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Socialist Decision, 111. Ibid., 140. Ibid. See Mark Lewis Taylor, “Tillich’s Ethics: Between Politics and Ontology.” In Re Manning, Cambridge Companion, 189–207, 200. We now can see better the meaning of Tillich’s opening sentence in the book’s Foreword, “The socialist decision is a decision of socialism and a decision for socialism.” Socialist Decision, xxxi. Ibid., 99.

156 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Mark Lewis Taylor Tillich, “The Protestant Principle and the Proletarian Situation,” 164. Ibid., 165, 167. Socialist Decision, 99. Ibid., 136. Ibid. 99–100. See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley with a New Preface by the Author (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 2000).For Tillich’s view of racial struggle, see Grace Cali, Paul Tillich First-Hand: A Memoir of the Harvard Years (Chicago: Exploration Press, 1995), 136–137. Paul Tillich, “The Storms of Our Times.” 50th Church Congress of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Indianapolis, May 6, 1942. In The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 251. Socialist Decision, 29, 44, 68, 92, 129, 137, 143, 162, and 169–170 n.25. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 68. He sees the communists of his day more ready to make this connection than other socialist intellectuals and leaders. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 169–170 n.25. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 130. See Sheldon S. Wolin, “Inverted Totalitarianism,” and “Postmodern Democracy: Virtual or Fugitive,” and other essays in his Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 581–606. Also, Sheldon Wolin, “Inverted Totalitarianism,” The Nation magazine, May 19, 2003, and in Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 211–237. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 604. Ibid. See, for instance, Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State (London: Continuum, 2012); Iraq Veterans Against the War. http://www.ivaw.org/ See Kenworthy, The America/Américas Myth. Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 347. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. French 1961, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 159. Ibid., 168. See the entire chapter, “On National Culture,” 145–180. For further definition of the notion of “the common,” see Commonwealth, viii, and 171–173, 299–306. Ibid., 179–187. Alex Callinicos, “Toni Negri in Perspective.” In Debating Empire, ed. Gopal Baladrishnan(New York: Verso Books, 2003), 127–133.

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91. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2009), 111. Tillich’s view of socialism’s future justice as rooted in a shared “common” origin, makes it comparable, I suggest to Foucauldian ideas of the “biopolicial.” 92. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 605. 93. Paul Tillich, “Spiritual Problems of Postwar Reconstruction,” in The Protestant Era, 269. Tillich’s meaning of “spiritual,” here, should be taken in his sense as the “valuably human,” and so it can include many social movements, even secular ones, that have “revolutionary power and a willingness to accept persecution” (269). 94. Tillich, “The Storm of Our Times,” in The Protestant Era, 251–252, “three questions,” 251–252. 95. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Study and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), esp. 22–43.

Chapter 9 Changing Ontotheology: Paul Tillich, Catherine Malabou, and the Plastic God Jeffrey W. Robbins

By his identification of God with being-itself, Paul Tillich is an ontotheologian par excellence. As Charles Winquist affirms: “Tillich is not a postmodern theologian. He clearly works within the ontotheological tradition.”1 Indeed, Tillich may be seen as the last unabashed ontotheologian. While this relatively straightforward claim has been contested by many leading scholars of Tillich, it will be my argument that the radical Tillich is the ontotheological Tillich.2 While much of contemporary philosophical theology has been preoccupied—nay, even consumed—by the task of overcoming ontotheology, a task largely set by Tillich’s contemporary Martin Heidegger, I do not intend my argument regarding the radical Tillich as the ontotheological Tillich as a critique. On the contrary, by taking Tillich’s identification of God with being-itself with the utmost seriousness we have the potential for a radical reconceptualization of the so-called problem of ontotheology. Put otherwise, by embracing rather than resisting the ontotheological dimension of Tillich’s thought, not only his radicality, but both his originality and contemporaneousness are brought into critical relief. The radical (i.e., ontotheological) Tillich is our contemporary because he forces us to come to terms with the ontotheological condition of thought and thereby helps us to move not only beyond theism (and atheism), but also after the death of God. In short, God is not dead; God has changed. God is change. Or,

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to invoke Catherine Malabou, whose reading of Hegel and Heidegger as well as her signature concept of plasticity will figure prominently in this chapter: our God is a plastic God.

The Problem of Ontotheology, Part I: The Quest for Theological Purity At least since Heidegger, the problem of ontotheology has been (taken as) well established. John Thatamanil is certainly correct when he asserts that the problem of ontotheology has been the rubric by which “the postmodern critique of reason’s pretentions, especially with respect to thinking about God” has been understood.3 Consider Jacques Derrida here: in his first direct and extended foray into religion with his essay, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” he famously differentiated deconstruction from negative theology and différance from God.4 Derrida accepts Heidegger’s claim that metaphysics is inevitably and necessarily ontotheological. As such, the problem of ontotheology must be seen as a variation on the problem of the metaphysics of presence. While some considered negative theology as a way to bypass, if not overcome, the problem of ontotheology, for Derrida, this does not avoid the problem. Instead, negative theology only extends the metaphysics of presence by presuming a hyper- or super-presence to the divine. It is for this reason that negative theology’s mystical God beyond being is not to be confused with différance. On the contrary, negative theology is ontotheological in that it “saves” the name of God by locating the presence of God beyond being. As John Caputo puts this, negative theology operates by a “double bind” that endeavors toward a “double save”: When negative theology says that God is beyond every name we give to Him, that is a way of saying and saving “God such as he is,” beyond all idols and images, a way of “respond[ing] to the true name of God, to the name to which God responds and corresponds.” Every time negative theology engages in negation, “it does so in the name of a way of truth,” of a goddess whose name is aletheia, under the protective auspices of a truthful and authoritative name.5

From this deconstructive perspective, therefore, Tillich’s God beyond God is to be seen as a quintessential ontotheological gesture. Far from overcoming ontotheology, such a gesture only reifies the problem. But Derrida and Heidegger go even further: not only is metaphysics inevitably and necessarily ontotheological and, thus, caught up on the metaphysics

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of presence, but theology too is necessarily ontotheological. This latter point is not so much argued as it is suggested by a consistent linkage of theology with the problem of ontotheology. It is in this way that the religion without religion that Caputo has insisted is the affirmative, animating passion of Derrida’s deconstruction is necessarily a private one. Religion cannot be thought or spoken. Theology corrupts, or at least alters, pure faith, turning a living wellspring of passion into a rigid dogma, an idol of thought. Or, to borrow the formulation from Heidegger: theology, unlike philosophy, does not think. Theology not only corrupts faith, but it is also a contaminant to pure thought. Theology and philosophy are “absolutely different.”6 The difference between the two is the same difference as between thinking and science. Philosophy asks the question of being. It is a thinking of an indeterminate origin and end. Theology, on the other hand, is the science of faith. It proceeds by way of certainty as a self-explication of faith. It knows its end thought before it ever begins the task of thinking. It answers to a “God” who is the name of a limit—a limit that encloses theology in a circle of the same. In this way, and as the problem of ontotheology is typically construed, religious faith must be distinguished and protected from theological thinking, just as philosophy must be kept separate from theology, for each speaks its own language.7 It is why Heidegger likens the notion of Christian philosophy to a “square circle,” an oxymoron that betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of both the nature of faith and the nature of thought.8 Once again, therefore, Tillich’s philosophical theology is a violation of the strict separation between philosophy and theology insisted upon by Heidegger—a separation that has been largely accepted without question by nearly all those who have followed in Heidegger’s wake.9 Finally, in case one were wrongly to conclude that this quest for a purity of thought as dictated by Heidegger comes only from the side of philosophy, we may look to the example of the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, often regarded as the most significant theological voice of the twentieth century. Barth shared with Heidegger the basic concern with the dangers of the contamination of thought. For Barth, this concern resulted in a self-critical theology attempting to preserve for the Church the autonomy and integrity of the Word of God. By reading Barth in conjunction with Heidegger’s unfolding critique of ontotheology, we can discern a surprising similitude— surprising because Barth famously showed a “benign neglect” of currents in contemporary philosophy, often expressing frustration and distress over what he considered to be the spectacle of his theological contemporaries pandering to philosophy.10 As he explained once to Rudolf Bultmann: I will not defend in principle what you call my ignoring of philosophical work . . . It is also a fact that I have come to abhor profoundly the spectacle

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of theology constantly trying above all to adjust to the philosophy of its age, and thereby neglecting its own theme.11

For Barth, as is well known, the proper theme—or better, the proper subject—of theology must remain the God of revelation. Barth replaces modern philosophy’s grounding in human consciousness with his own theological grounding in the subject of God. For him, the proper question for thought is not epistemological—“How do we know what we know?” Rather, it is exegetical—“How does God make Godself known to us?” This brings us to the most profound irony of contemporary philosophical theology. Namely, it is Barth, more than any of the theological students or followers of Heidegger (consider here: Bultmann and Tillich, and also Gerhard Eberling, Ernst Fuchs, and Friedrich Gogarten), who realizes Heidegger’s vision for theology in the wake of the critique of ontotheology most fully. Specifically, wittingly or unwittingly, independently or derivatively, Barth is the one who follows the prescriptive Heidegger offered to a group of German Protestant theologians that if a “proper theology” were to be written, the word “being” would not appear.12 While Barth himself never develops a critique of ontotheology per se, the mixing together of, or the collapsing the difference between, philosophy and theology remains a problem for him. Extending Barth’s distress over the theological pandering to philosophy, we might say that the problem of ontotheology from a strictly theological perspective is that it does not know which way to turn—whether to God or creation as the source of truth. For him, philosophy works best when it limits itself as an endeavor to test the limits of human understanding. Theology, on the other hand, speaks from a different source, derived not from the horizon set by knowledge, but from the Word of God spoken by faith. Ontotheology is undesirable because it sets humans in the place of God by forgetting the infinite qualitative difference. Barth resists it, even without naming it as such, because it constrains the absolute freedom and transcendence of God. Tillich follows a different path. Whereas Barth’s preservation (or is it a recovery?) of the purity of theology is achieved by a recovery (or is it a preservation?) or the personal God of biblical revelation—God as subject—the transcendent being of God for Tillich is expressed in non-theistic terms— God beyond God. In so doing, once again Tillich stands guilty as charged of the sin of ontotheology. In this case, the charge comes from the side of theology. Tillich has conflated, and thereby confused, what ought to regarded as two distinct discourses. His is an ontological philosophy masquerading as a theology. And irony of ironies, although it is Tillich who imbibes from the Heideggerian well more than any of his other theological contemporaries, it is he who is most in violation of the direct prescription

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that Heidegger himself gives to the theologian. So we must ask: if the way for the theologian to avoid the problem of ontotheology is to write a theology without the word “being,” then what, if any, possible defense of Tillich can be offered?

The Problem of Ontotheolgy, Part II: The Struggle for Justice Before turning to Tillich’s defense, there is still one additional concern that must be lodged. Specifically, it is the concern over the connection between Tillich’s ontotheology and liberation theology—or put otherwise, theology’s contribution to the struggle for justice. Mary Ann Stenger and Ronald H. Stone have done a great service for scholars of Tillich by their book Dialogues of Tillich, which stages encounters between Tillich and other streams in contemporary Christian thought, as well as Buddhism, feminism, marxism, liberation theology, and fundamentalism. It is Stone’s chapter on “Religious Socialism and Liberation Theology” that best sets the stage for the concerns I wish to raise here. The chapter begins with the statement: The religious socialism of Paul Tillich preceded liberation theology and consequently never entered into dialogue with it. Liberation theologians of Latin American do not know much about Tillich’s religious socialism and have not engaged it in dialogue. This chapter is an attempt to bring into dialogue two traditions which themselves have not engaged in conversation.13

In his most recent book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the black liberationist theologian James Cone has staged a similar, but much more critical, encounter between Reinhold Niebuhr and liberation theology. For Cone, Niebuhr has always figured prominently in his work, specifically for his appreciation of the social nature of sin and the tragic dimension in human history. By this orientation for which Niebuhr is rightly celebrated, Cone argues that Niebuhr should have been more sensitive to the sin of racism and the tragic dimension of American race relations. Instead, Niebuhr was largely silent throughout the worst ravages of the lynching era—a silence that Cone declares is “profoundly revealing.”14 The more Cone has reflected on his one-time theological mentor the more he has come to the conclusion that his silence amounted to a certain theological apathy born of privilege and reflecting “a defect in the conscience of white Christians.”15 In his case against Niebuhr, Cone says that there was “no

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madness in [Niebuhr’s] soul,” or “no prophetic outrage,” and he finally came to the measured conclusion: Thus, I have never questioned Niebuhr’s greatness as a theologian, but instead admired his intellectual brilliance and social commitment. What I questioned was his limited perspective, as a white man, on the race crisis in America.16

Turning from Niebuhr back to Tillich, J. Kameron Carter has shown how, over the course of his life, Cone has increasingly drawn on Tillich as a way to counter the excesses of his earlier reliance on, and employment of, Barth. While Barth’s radically transcendent God initially provided Cone with the firm theological footing for his social protest against racial injustice, it has eventually come to be regarded as a “false start.”17 Tillich’s dialectical theology of culture has been instrumental to an explicit shift within Cone’s own thought from what he has termed an “abstract revelation” to a more contextual theology that arises out of and directly addresses a concrete social situation. In addition, just as Tillich interprets Heidegger’s project of overcoming metaphysics as an existentialist task in the “courage to be,” Cone interprets Tillich’s notion of courage or struggle as black power. While Cone remains sympathetic and indebted to Barth, he ultimately comes to the conclusion that “although God is the intended subject of theology, God does not do theology. Human beings do theology.”18 For Cone, this means that there should be no pretensions to objectivity or universality when doing theology. On the contrary, theology is always already an interest-laden procedure. In this way, Tillich’s theology of culture provides a guide. Carter accepts this methodological theological insight of Tillich’s insofar as it goes, but stops short of a full embrace of Tillich largely due to Tillich’s ontotheology. The ontological question of being underlies Tillich’s theology and helps to reveal its dialectical structure. That is because, “In our search for the ‘really real’,” in Tillich’s words, “the search for beingitself” or “for the power of being in everything that is,” the theologian is on a “search for ultimate reality beyond everything that seems to be real.” As Carter puts it, “The human pursuit of ultimate concern is a search to transcend the Finite . . . It is eternity conquering temporality.”19 Specifically, it is Tillich’s “beyond” that raises Carter’s ire, and not only because it is a gesture of ultimate transcendence that would seem to contradict what Carter terms the “anti-Barthian nature of Tillich’s thought” that expresses itself in terms of a dialectical philosophy of life (à la Nietzsche), but more fundamentally, because it follows a well-established Christian theological pattern of anti-materialism, anti-historical spiritualism, other-worldliness, and abstraction.

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To be fair to Tillich, he goes to great lengths to expose the false dichotomies of religion/culture, transcendence/immanence, autonomy/heteronomy, etc. Likewise, by Tillich’s rendering, a theological ontology provides the fertile ground upon which human relationality—not only among humans, but also the relationality that exists between subjects and objects, and between humans and the divine—is best established. Nevertheless, to the extent that Tillich insists on the God beyond God, the theology that always already contains the answer to the questions that different cultures at different times and places and in different ways pose, and the sense of ultimacy that lies hidden in the passing phenomena of concrete human existence, then as Carter sees it, “it follows that cultures, history, and people groups have no lasting value in and of themselves.” Carter continues by linking this Tillichian gesture toward the beyond to the age-old, essentially Gnostic tendency within the history of Christian thought: Like the historical Jesus who is overcome by the universal Christ and in this way realizes infinite unity, so, too, is it the case that cultures, histories, and people groups must be overcome.

Moreover, just in case the racial significance of this is lost, Carter puts it to a fine point with his question, “Is this not an anti-Jewish philosophy of culture?”20 What we see here, therefore, is a different concern with the problem of Tillich’s ontotheology. It is not simply that Tillich’s identification of God with being classifies him as an ontotheologian par excellence, that his theological ontology does precisely what Heidegger explicitly forbids, or that by his outsourcing of his theology to the currents of contemporary philosophy he has somehow sacrificed the autonomy and much-needed clarity of his theological voice in a time of crisis. Even more, Tillich’s ontotheology is a problem precisely because it participates in and reifies the very processes by which Christian thought has racially constituted the world. Put otherwise, Tillich’s ontotheology is exemplary of what Carter terms “the theological problem of whiteness.”21

Defending Tillich’s Ontotheology Comparative theologian John Thatamanil offers the most thorough defense of Tillich against both of these charges: the charge of ontotheology and, by extension, the charge of ethnocentrism. He begins with the statement, contra-Barth, that not every theological appeal to ontology is

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necessarily ontotheological, especially not if the theologian’s ontotheological claims are “hypothetical and so vulnerable to correction.” With this important caveat, he then turns directly to the question of whether Tillich is guilty of ontotheology. He admits “at first glance” that Tillich seems “to be the very embodiment of what is now widely regarded as an obsolete and unsustainable kind of metaphysical theology.” He also concedes that, in the light of Derrida’s differentiation of deconstruction from negative theology, Tillich’s apophaticism is not enough for him to escape the charge of ontotheology. So given, Thatamanil nevertheless provides a multipronged defense: (1) Tillich’s reference to God as being-itself does not yield, or even promise, conceptual knowledge of God. In Thatanamil’s language, the “term’s meaning remains shrouded in mystery.” The point here is a profoundly Heideggerian one—namely, being is presumed, but can never itself be thought as such. It is for this reason that Tillich supplements his identification of God as being-itself with the claim that the identification is a “nonsymbolic statement.” That is to say, as a term shrouded in mystery that does not generate determinate knowledge of God, it necessitates religious symbolism. But the symbol of God must never be confused with the being of God. (2) Tillich speaks of God both as the ground of being and as an abyss. In this way, Tillich’s theology is a non-foundational—and thereby, post-ontotheological—theology. (3) Tillich’s God is not a determinate being among beings; nor is God conceived of as an infinite or Supreme Being. Instead, what must be said is that God does not exist, at least not as existence is traditionally conceived according to the metaphysics of presence. (4) For Tillich, neither the category of causality nor substance can be ascribed to God. While non-theistic, it would be incorrect to speak of God in Aristotelian terms as an unmoved mover. Likewise, the substance of God must not be thought in terms of a fullness of being—or more accurately, in terms of pure actuality. On the contrary, being includes nonbeing, and thus the negative element within the divine—or more accurately, divine potentiality—must be preserved. (5) Tillich is a “wholly impure thinker— a thinker of boundaries and margins,” whether those margins are between theology and culture, theology and philosophy, or Christianity and other world religions. Based on these five points, Thatamanil concludes that “Tillich’s God can in no way be reduced to an ontotheological foundation,” and “is simply not the ontotheological God that Heidegger rejects.” Thatamanil must be commended for this defense. Not only is his knowledge of the Tillich corpus masterful, but also the way he extends—we might even say, radicalizes—Tillich’s late concern with comparative religion continues to breathe new life into the study and employment of Tillich. But it is at this point that we might twist Thatamanil’s opening declaration

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slightly: while it is true that not every theological appeal to ontology is ontotheological, it might also be said that not every form of ontotheology is necessarily a problem. Thatamanil has gone to great lengths to insist that Tillich is not an ontotheologian, but perhaps this cedes too much authority to Heidegger’s original analysis of the ontotheological problem. The result is a reactive, rearguard defense. While it may succeed in clearing Tillich’s name, it does so only by demonstrating his palpability. Echoes of Barth’s consternation over the spectacle of theology’s losing of its own distinctiveness, conforming to certain philosophical norms, and chasing after the latest wave in contemporary philosophy can be heard here. What if, instead, we came clean to the obvious: Tillich is an ontotheologian, at least of a certain sort. It is, after all, Tillich’s theological ontology that is one of several aspects of his thought that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Consider the following: Tillich’s formulation of the “God beyond God” has been read as preparing the ground for, or as a forerunner to, the radical death of God theologies of the 1960s.22 Tillich’s remark that “God does not exist” has been employed to cut through the debates over the so-called New Atheists.23 Tillich’s theology of culture continues to serve as a model for the non-sectarian academic study of religion and has developed into what is sometimes referred to by the oxymoron “secular theology.”24 Tillich’s forays into the theological engagement with other world religions and the history of religion have been cited as a contemporary model for the burgeoning field of comparative theology.25 Yet his theological ontology, which is at the very heart of his systematic theological doctrine of God, is somehow sidestepped or explained away.26 If the above account is accurate, and Tillich’s contributions in each of these arenas of contemporary religious thought have been cited, recognized, employed, and to a certain extent absorbed, then it seems all the more reason to assert that the lone remaining arena is where the truly radical Tillich might be discerned—to wit, the radical Tillich is the ontotheological Tillich.

The Radical Tillich Is the Ontotheological Tillich By this, we are in a position to ask a different question: not whether or not Tillich is an ontotheologian, but the degree to which Tillich’s particular ontotheology is amendable to change? Returning briefly to Carter’s theological account of race and the way by which Christian identify formation has been racialized and is, thereby, a prime contributor to the problem of

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racism in the modern world, recall the argument that it is to the extent that Tillich’s theology is predicated on a “beyond” that his theology of culture actually amounts to an anti-Jewish, anti-material, and anti-historical theology of culture. While there is a certain relationality at work in Tillich ontology, by Carter’s assessment it is only a relative relationality, a mere passing moment to a higher unity. In this way, the God beyond God not only claims a false universal but contributes to the Christian supersessionist problem by which religious identity formation operates according to a racial—if not yet racist—logic. Carter’s project asks “how the discourse of theology aided and abetted the processes by which ‘man’ came to be viewed as a modern, racial being.”27 His answer is that “modernity’s racial imagination has its genesis in the theological problem of Christianity’s quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots.” This severing is accomplished by the Christian spiritualization of the fleshly, material existence of Jesus’ Jewish body. In Carter’s words, “Christ did not assume a ‘psychic body’ but a material one.” And not to put too fine of a point on it, Jesus’ God was not a God beyond God, but the God of creation, of history, and of Israel. Jesus’ Jewish, covenantal flesh is the key to redemption for both Jews and Gentiles alike. “Given this,” Carter adds, “we must say that Christ’s flesh in its Jewish constitution is ‘mulatto’ flesh. That is to say, in being Jewish flesh it is always already intersected by the covenant with YHWH and in being intersected it is always already intraracial (and not merely multiracial). Its purity is its ‘impurity.’”28 In the place of the false universal of the beyond—which is a unity predicated on purity—Carter is suggesting a “unity-in-distinction,” or a “discontinuity-in-continuity,” by which the material existence of Christ’s covenantal flesh reveals God’s saving grace. The covenant liberates identity from the fiction of (racial) purity, which is why Carter proclaims Christ as a “linguistic liberation.”29 What must be observed here is that like Thatamanil’s claim for Tillich, Carter is a “wholly impure thinker.” But Carter’s is a different sort of impurity. Whereas Tillich is a genuine thinker of boundaries and margins, this still presumes discrete identities and discernible parameters. Carter, by contrast, invokes miscegenation, with all the sociopolitical implications this term implies. Theology might be radically reformulated based on changing cultural norms, but the question is whether this reformulation also includes a change in the very essence or being of theology. Is what it means to think theologically fundamentally altered, or merely repackaged? How one answers this question determines the degree to which Tillich is rightly or wrongly regarded as a radical theologian. It also just might address the issue regarding whether the problem of ontotheology is a genuine problem, and thereby suggest an alternative future for a truly radical theology.

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Changing the Problem of Ontotheology: Tillich after Malabou To address this issue, an intervention is in order. While working with much of the same philosophical archive as Tillich, Catherine Malabou’s contributions to contemporary Continental philosophy have yet to be applied to Tillich, or to the problem of ontotheology more generally. Malabou is one of the most creative and far-ranging Continental philosophers in the world today. Her work is located at the nexus of deconstruction, neuroscience, psychoanalytic theory, and gender studies. She reads textuality as a materiality, and thus situates herself within the lineage of her teacher Jacques Derrida, but announces a new epoch in thought—namely, plasticity. In so doing, she has made original contributions to the burgeoning discourse on the new materialism. This is a non-reductive materialism that provides profound implications for the nature of human freedom, moral responsibility, and the individual’s relationship to society. Evidence for Malabou’s creativity and significance can be seen not just by the fecundity of her signature concept of plasticity, but also in how her readings of the modern Western philosophical canon are entirely original, bucking academic trends and fashions. For instance, the contemporary philosophical dismissal of Hegel is well established. For Malabou, the various iterations of this dismissal are all variations on the question of the future, both in terms of how Hegel’s dialectic conceives of the future and whether there is a future for the critical engagement with Hegel. To put it in schematic form: (1) Hegel’s philosophy aspires to a total comprehension of history in which all of human culture—for example, art, religion, politics, etc—are subject to the Aufhebung, the process of sublation that both suppresses and preserves everything that came before it in a final synthesis that is the realization and culmination of the absolute spirit. However, and this is the problem with Hegel for his contemporary critics, once history has been fully comprehended, it is ended. Or more precisely, history can only be fully comprehended when it has come to an end. Therefore, to the extent that Hegel is a thinker of the end of history, there is no future in Hegel. (2) Hegel is merely of historical interest. To the extent that Hegel is merely of historical interest, then, there is no future for Hegel. (3) For many critics, there is no real contingency within the Hegelian dialectic, but only a contained contingency. In the end, for Hegel, there is no doubt of what the end will be. While the Spirit may achieve its final destination in many different ways, it will always—necessarily and inevitably—achieve its final destination. The Hegelian dialectic does not permit a different or alternative destination, only infinitely different means. As John Caputo

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has written, “Hegel’s future means that what is going to happen next is an open question, but in the end, no matter what happens, there will have been an explanation and a necessity . . . In that sense, there is no chance and no event.” In this sense, the concept of plasticity employed by Malabou can only stretch so far. Malabou cannot stretch plasticity far enough so long as she is contained within the Hegelian dialectic. If the end or the outcome is never put into question, then there is no future. This would be a plasticity without any explosive potential, and thus the future would merely be a repetition and a perpetuation of the same. Thus, to the extent that the Hegelian dialectic is merely a perpetuation of the same, then there is no future in Hegel. Against the argument that Hegel is a relic of the past, Malabou shows how Hegel conceives of humanity, divinity, and philosophy as inherently amenable to future transformations. Regarding humanity, consider the material practice of habit: through habitual behavior, human beings fashion a second nature for themselves. Routines become internalized. Rituals and customs become automatic. Taboos become written into the very fabric of the ego’s identity formation. By Malabou’s rendering, this is the accidental becoming essential and reveals the plasticity of human subjectivity. So understood, by attending to the constitutive role of habits, this breaks down the dichotomy between nature and culture—not simply because nature is always already inculturated, but because nature can be changed or altered by the taking on of a second nature. Conversely, by the Hegelian dialectic, the divine must be thought of as a “plastic God,” the becoming accidental of the essential. Likewise with philosophy: Hegel’s dialectic is itself plastic, “capable of being transformed by those who read it, and capable of transforming those same readers.” In other words, Absolute Knowledge rightly conceived is characterized by “metamorphosis” not “stasis,” the dialectic process does not stop, but changes and transforms, the Aufhebung undergoes its own Aufhebung.30 It is in this sense that, for Malabou, Hegel is both open to and productive of change. This rehabilitation of Hegel for contemporary Continental philosophy provides the template for how Malabou reads Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud as well. For my purposes here, I will limit myself to what she terms “the Heidegger change” wherein she develops her fundamental ontological insight—namely, being is change. For Malabou, this ontology of change lies beneath and goes beyond Heidegger’s famed identification of the ontological difference. And by attending to the concept of change throughout Heidegger’s oeuvre, she is able to show that this is a consistent insight that runs throughout Heidegger’s career, from beginning to end, irrespective of the so-called Heideggerian turn. That is to say, both before and after his Nazi associations, whether in his development of his existential analytic and

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fundamental ontology during the period of Being and Time, or in his later, more contemplative, poetic works—and perhaps even unbeknown to him all along—Heidegger’s interests were driven by a sense that being as such is being qua change, that the very condition of possibility for the ontological difference is the self-differing made possible by an ontological mutability. Nothing is without change. Or put otherwise, nothing is prior or more fundamental to being than change. Change makes what is to be. Before considering how this alternative understanding of ontology might be applied to Tillich, we must first revisit the so-called problem of ontotheology. Heidegger’s clearest and most fully developed analysis of the problem comes from his work Identity and Difference. There the problem of ontotheology was located within his larger project at overcoming metaphysics. Indeed, in arguing for the ontotheological constitution of metaphysics, he identified metaphysics as an ontotheological problem: metaphysics operates by both—a theo-logic and an onto-logic. The concern with metaphysics is how it conceives of being in terms of identity, and thus is forgetful of the ontological difference. Metaphysics has the character of ontotheology by its conflation of theology and ontology and thus rendering what is different as the same. By this analysis, the problem with ontotheology is that it is at once both the most fundamental and the highest expression of identity. Being is hardened as the self-same. Even more, being is held up or set aside as an object of thought. Such is the comprehensive, totalizing gaze of Hegel’s dialectic. Such is the idolatry of those who dare speak of/for God. In Thatanamil’s words, “The argument . . . claims that any thinking of God that identifies God with being will constrain and even determine the conditions under which God is permitted to appear.” It is at this point that we must endeavor the intervention by Malabou: if earlier I insisted that the radical Tillich is the ontotheological Tillich, here I must defend the claim that the problem of ontotheology is perhaps least understood by Heidegger himself. This is the key to Malabou’s radical reinterpretation of the significance of Heidegger’s work—namely, by attending to the notion of change in Heidegger’s work, this is the device whereby Heidegger himself is changed. This is more than a demythologization or deconstruction of Heidegger, a salvaging of the good from the bad or the subjecting of his fundamental ontology to an ethics as first philosophy. Instead, Malabou’s provocative suggestion is that there is a “secret agent” at work in Heidegger’s philosophy, so clandestine that it remains radically unknown even—or especially—to him. If change comes before, and is more fundamental than, difference, then Heidegger’s project at overcoming metaphysics—which for him is the context by which the problem of ontotheology is rightly understood—is misguided at best. It operates by a logic of identity (and difference), effecting a reversal, but not a way out from, the binary.

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In short, Heidegger misdiagnosed the problem of ontotheology. He misdiagnosed the problem because he misunderstood—or simply missed—his most important insight into ontology. It is not, as he supposed, that he clarified the ontological difference and recovered the ontological question, but beneath both something more fundamental was at work. The word “being” was consistently evoked in connection with terms such as change, metamorphosis, and transformation. The ontological difference was derivative to this ontology of change because it is change that makes differences happen. Put in different terms more resonant with Carter’s concerns with the theological problem of whiteness, the problem with Heidegger’s analysis of the problem of ontotheology is that it belies a quest for purity. This is the critical argument I pursued in my book Between Faith and Thought.31 In this respect, I see Heidegger and Barth as flip sides of the same coin, each recognizing the limits of language and thought but still, nevertheless, taken by the desire for purity. In that work I appealed to Levinas’ notion of the trace as a way to make clear that there are no pure actions or intentions, or that the ontotheological condition of thought renders any prospect of either a pure identification or pure differentiation an impossibility. In the place of Heidegger’s project at overcoming (metaphysics), I suggested a thinking that is “otherwise than overcoming,” an ethical interrogation of the misguided quest for purity—a recognition that it is perhaps the desire for overcoming itself that is the problem. John Caputo is helpful here as well. Where I talk of Heidegger’s quest for purity, Caputo speaks of Heidegger’s mythological gesture that “takes the form of a myth of origins, of a Great Beginning, of a great founding act back at the beginning of the tradition, which gives flesh and blood— mythic form—to a philosophical insight.”32 Heidegger constructs a grand narrative of monogenesis, to which Caputo asks, “Why must there be the history of Being and not rather many such histories, a whole host of them, a proliferation of histories, which tell us many stories, so many that they are impossible to monitor and to organize into a grand narrative of Being’s singular upsurge and decline?”33 And lest one think this effort at thinking otherwise is merely semantic, Caputo gives a name to Heidegger’s fatal flaw: “The fateful, fatal flaw in Heidegger’s thought is his sustained, systematic exclusion of this jewgreek economy in order to construct a native land and a mother tongue for Being and thought.”34 Returning to Malabou once again, we may pose the possibility of a series of changes. She herself admits that even with the completion of her book on Hegel she had still not recognized the decisive shift it effected: from plasticity to metamorphosis.35 It was only by virtue of her book on Heidegger, which came after her book on Hegel, that she was able to go back and recognize that her probing of the future of, and for, Hegel was really a question

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about the possibility for making change, for a way of affirming the dialectic without being trapped in a merely retrospective gaze or without reifying the perpetuation of the same, and for a radically immanent form of thought that still holds out the possibility for difference. It is this nascent thought that leads her to the interrogation of the Heideggerian concept of change itself, which gave even further clarity to her true question: if her interest in plasticity was really a way at getting at metamorphosis, then what Heidegger’s metabolic ontology helps to clarify is that the fundamental question of philosophy is about transformation, and whether transformation is achieved by way of immanence or transcendence, or in Malabou’s terms through ontogenesis or as a pure rupture. Malabou’s views should be clear: the notion of the pure rupture is a dangerous fantasy that plagues any and all quests for purity. “There is no outside,” she writes, and then adds the important caveat, “nor is there any immobility.”36 By changing Heidegger, Malabou gives us a way to think otherwise: an “alterity without an outside,” a “lack of beyond” that does not imply a lack of difference or the reduction of the other to the same. Put otherwise, we come to realize that transformation—and not transcendence—is the origin of alterity. There is no messianism here, but neither is there a need for this pure figure of the wholly other or of the absolute future. There is no messianism, but only metamorphosis. That is because not only do we have the capacity to change, but our very being is change. As Malabou puts it, this is “a radical transformation without exoticism.”37

Hope for a Changed Tillich: The God Beyond God Is a Plastic God By the preceding, we have been presented with at least two ways to rethink the problem of ontotheology and, by extension, two ways to remember and reclaim the radical Tillich. There is miscegenation. And there is metamorphosis. Both are figures of the reject. Think of the mulatto Lieutenant Governor Silas Finch from D. W. Griffith’s cinematic masterpiece Birth of a Nation, a power-hungry, wanton sex-fiend, whose every look exposed his deviance and danger even more. And think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, the character who awoke to find himself metamorphosed into a “monstrous verminous bug,” a figure so absurd and so grotesque that he lay beyond the scope of human care. In spite of his suggestion that Tillich’s theology of culture is, in effect, an anti-Jewish theology of culture, Carter nevertheless appreciates the appeal of Tillich’s reconstrual of transcendence for the development of black

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liberation theology. Tillich redefines transcendence as a self-transcendence in the existentialist guise as the quest for authenticity and the “courage to be.” This existentialist moral fortitude provides a schema for articulating black power and resistance. But as Carter sees it, this language of courage comes with a cost—namely, Tillich’s reconstrual of transcendence is an immanent transcendence predicated on the immanence of being. Further, this immanence is total. Even God is housed in being, albeit as its ground. So conceived, the threat of nonbeing is an existential threat, and the quest for authenticity requires the overcoming not just of one’s anxiety by way of courage, but the overcoming of finitude itself. The irony Carter seems to be suggesting is that by Tillich locking himself into immanence of being, he is that much more beholden to a beyond. By this reading, Tillich is no radical theologian at all. On the contrary, he is a theologian of culture who in actuality sees no lasting value in cultures. He is an existentialist thinker of finitude whose work is animated by a quest for transcendence. Recall Carter’s words, “ . . . it is the case that cultures, histories, and people groups must be overcome: that is, they must exhibit courage in order to be liberated into the infinitude of their existence.”38 This infinitude operates as a universal norm, and thus not only is anti-Jewish but also eviscerates black liberation theology’s claim on the revelatory significance of black culture and experience. In this way, as an ontotheologian par excellence, Tillich’s identification of God with being contributes to the total erasure of difference. It matters little that Tillich carefully avoids calling God either the first cause or the highest being. His ontotheology is problematic in traditional Heideggerian terms because he privileges identity over difference, and the one over the many. But with a changed Heidegger, we might also hold out hope for a changed Tillich. Or better, by unleashing the secret agent of change onto Heidegger’s conception of being and the problem of ontotheology, we might be in a better position to appreciate how Tillich’s ontotheology is both radical and contemporary. Carter makes the mistake of reading Tillich more in Hegelian than Heideggerian terms. But regardless of whether Tillich is rightly or wrongly characterized as Hegelian or Heideggerian, as Malabou has shown, the two together may be read as a “transformational mask,” with the face of the one rendering the other more or less visible. Like Hegel, Tillich’s notion of transcendence can be characterized as either a self-transcendence or an immanent transcendence. In both cases, there is a radical immanence at work. The question is whether this radical immanence constrains God, and correlatively, places a limit on, or immobilizes, being. By Tillich’s identification of God with being, we may now say that God is change. The God beyond God is a plastic God. As Malabou has written of plasticity more generally, the characteristics of plasticity include the

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capability of receiving form (of being changed), of giving form (of making change), and of explosion (of transformation and metamorphosis). In this respect, Tillich’s ontotheology is not a problem. Nor is his radical immanence. On the contrary, these are productive, if not necessary, conditions for conceiving of miscegenation and metamorphosis. Ontotheology is a mixed discourse. The ontotheological condition of thought recognizes the ethico-political significance of thinking on the border. Thinking ontotheologically is a rejected way of thinking that, nevertheless, gives birth not so much to something new, as to something old, something impure. A miscegenated form of thought does not reject the reject, but instead it rejects the misquided quest for purity in the task of overcoming. Likewise with metamorphosis, the traditional reading of the problem of ontotheology is concerned with how it establishes an artificial limit, establishing a determinant floor (being as ground) and ceiling (God as the highest being). So conceived, ontotheology sets us in a trap of radical immanence wherein there is nothing beyond and, thus, no hope for change. The longing for transcendence typical of the theological gesture is nothing more than the effort to escape the trap of the ontotheologian’s own making. As such, it is the ultimate alienation: liberation is predicated on an impossible infinitude. And it is a fundamental self-contradiction: radical immanence betrays a secret desire for transcendence. But what if, as Malabou insists, there can be “radical transformation without exoticism,” that just because there is no outside does not mean there is immobility? Instead, difference is made by way of a self-differing, by the strangeness and otherness that lies within. We are not just capable of change. But we necessarily and inevitably change because being is change, because to be is to change. This profound insight into the ontology of change goes all the way down and all the way up, from being as ground to God as the highest and most complete expression of plasticity. Combining Malabou’s ontology with Tillich’s ontotheology, then, we may say: the identification of God with being means that God is seen as the very being and source of change. This claim does not rest on the hope for the impossible, but instead is grounded in the very nature of our being.

Notes 1. Charles Winquist, Desiring Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 62. 2. Most especially, see John Thatamanil, “Tillich and the Postmodern.” In Re Manning, Cambridge Companion, 288–302. See also J. Blake Huggins,

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5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

Jeffrey W. Robbins “Tillich and Ontotheology: On the Fidelity of Betrayal,” Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society 38, 3 (Summer 2012), 27–36. Thatamanil, “Tillich and the Postmodern,” 290. See Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” In Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 46. See Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology.” In The Piety of Thinking, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977). For instance, in The Piety of Thinking, Heidegger writes, “We understand each other better when each speaks in his own language.” Ibid., 21. This is the basic point of my Between Faith and Thought: An Essay on the Ontotheological Condition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). See Robbins, Between Faith and Thought, 24–28. See Bernd Jaspert and Geoffrey W. Bromiley, eds., Karl Barth—Rudolf Bultmann: Letters, 1922–1966 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1981), 41. See Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking, 59–71. Mary Ann Stenger and Ronald H. Stone, Dialogues of Paul Tillich (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002), 188. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011), 30. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 56, 60. See J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 188. James H. Cone, Black Theology of Liberation: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001), xix. Italics his. Carter, Race, 183. Ibid., 187, 188. Ibid., 4. For instance, see the doctoral dissertation by Christopher D. Rodkey, In the Horizon of the Infinite: Paul Tillich and the Dialectic of the Sacred (Madison: Drew University, 2008). See also Richard Grigg, Gods after God: An Introduction to Contemporary Radical Theologies (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). For instance, see the blog post by Peter Rollins, “Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens: The New Theists?” in The Huffington Post (March 10, 2013): http://w w w.huff ingtonpost.com/peter-rollins/dawkins-dennett-andhitch_b_2830963.html. See also, Jeffrey W. Robbins and Christopher D. Rodkey, “Beating ‘God’ to Death: Radical Theology and the New Atheism.” In Religion and the New Atheism: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Amarnath Amarasingam (Boston: Brill, 2010): 25–36. For an example of how Tillich has been situated within the history of the developing field of Religious Studies, see Walter H. Capps, Religious Studies:

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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The Making of a Discipline (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), especially 30–35. For a discussion of the notion of “secular theology” and its place within the academic study of religion, see two special issues of The Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin (April 2008) vol. 37, no. 2, and (September 2008) vol. 37, no. 3. For instance, John Thatamanil, The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006). See also, Capps, Religious Studies, 289–296. Robert P. Scharlemann is the exception to this rule. See especially his Religion and Reflection: Essays on Paul Tillich’s Theology (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2005). Carter, Race, 3. Ibid., 30. Ibid. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel. Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 134, 145, 155. See Robbins, Between Faith and Thought. John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 28. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 6. See Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 17–29. Ibid., 44. Ibid. Carter, Race, 188.

Chapter 10 Can There Be a Theology of Disenchantment? Speculative Realism, Correlationism, and Unbinding the nihil in Tillich Thomas A. James

Contemporary philosophy seems to be showing signs of dissatisfaction with an agnostic orthodoxy that has been, according to some, all too comfortable for religion. Beginning with what Quentin Meillassoux ironically calls the “Ptolemaic” counterrevolution of Immanuel Kant, and continuing in both continental and Anglo-American contexts in the forms of phenomenology, linguistic analysis, and pragmatism, philosophy in the modern period has in one way or another disavowed knowledge of the “thing-in-itself.”1 New realists, such as Meillassoux, charge that in so doing it has carved out a philosophical niche to shelter some of its most prized notions (God, freedom, and immortality, to recall Kant’s own program) from the withering impact of the properly revolutionary turn in cosmological thinking inaugurated by Copernicus. Meillassoux labels this long-standing philosophical tradition “correlationism,” because it maintains that access to objects as they are in themselves is barred—we have access to objects only as correlates of particular perspectives held by knowing subjects. The problem with the tradition, Meillassoux argues, is that it makes it impossible to think of what he calls the “ancestral”: it makes the vast stretch of time before the advent of consciousness not only unknowable but incapable of being conceptualized at all.2 This means that philosophical

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reflection is protected from the results of cosmological theorizing because it is always able to bracket realist interpretations of them. As Meillassoux points out, philosophy always seems to escape the blistering austerity of contemporary cosmology with the addition of the “for us.” The correlational “for us” blocks cosmology and also kicks open the door for the moral idealism and religious belief that appear to be threatened by it. For Kant, the relegation of cosmological knowledge to phenemonality makes room in the world for God, freedom, and immortality. In recent continental philosophy, the perpetual escape of the “wholly other” from the strictures of representation warrants the fideistic “return to religion.”3 According to speculative realists, the “for us” of correlationism derails the Enlightenment program of disenchantment. Modern philosophy in the wake of the mathematization of the universe should have eliminated theology from the realm of intellectual respectability, and was on its way toward doing so before what Meillassoux calls the “catastrophe” of correlationism and its disavowal of absolute knowledge.4 As Ray Brassier points out, it is not just ancestrality, but the lifeless eschatology projected by modern science (what he calls “posteriority”) that evades correlationist reason. Solar death, and beyond that the entropic dissolution of life and of matter itself in the distant future—knowable not as correlates of human experience or intuition but as outcomes of mathemetization—present to us the speculative opportunity to interface with the real as fatally entropic and, therefore, as devoid of ultimate meaning.5 Provocatively, Brassier suggests that it opens the door to the recognition that we are already dead, that life is a contingent perturbation of the inorganic, that the negentropy that defines life over against the entropic is vanishing fluctuation.6 In order to close the door once and for all on theology, interestingly, Brassier calls for the “theologization” of these bleak features of recent cosmology.7 As a theologian, I want to ask what might result if we were to do just that. What if speculative realism were conceded as true? What if we theologians were forced to come out of what these critics call the anti-realist, counter-enlightenment shelter correlationism provides? Would that be the end of theology, as Brassier believes? To probe this question, I will subject Paul Tillich’s theology to speculative realist analysis, asking if it also invokes a protective strategy that blocks the influence of cosmology— whether it, too, is bound by a philosophical correlationism that makes it impossible theologically to think cosmology. In a word, I will suggest that the answer is “Yes.” Nothing, in fact, could be clearer. In some ways, Tillich’s theology is almost a caricature of speculative realism’s correlationist target. But I also will argue that this does not place Tillich squarely under the heel of speculative realism. There is a life after realism, I suggest, or rather within it, even if realism portends our extinction. Unbinding

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the nihilizing implications of realist interpretations of modern cosmology within Tillich’s theology, I will argue, opens the possibility for a different sort of theology, certainly more austere but also, in some respects, more radically Tillichian.

Theologizing Life We begin in the middle of Tillich’s Systematic Theology, a section of volume two in which he tries to give an account of the Fall as the universal “transition from essential to existential being.”8 Famously, Tillich calls his account a “half-way demythologization.” It demythologizes because it refuses to interpret the Fall as a “once upon a time” event; but the demythologization is only “half-way” because there remains an irreducibly temporal element in the transition to existence.9 There is a non-necessary rupture or break from essential being, and such a break cannot be domesticated by a dialectic or by some other kind of logical necessity: rather, it is a contingency that can only be accounted for by way of narrative. In other words, it must remain in part mythological. What is curious about Tillich’s account is the central claim embedded in the narrative he gives. “One can say” he writes, “that nature is finite necessity, God is infinite freedom, man is finite freedom. It is finite freedom which makes possible the transition from essence to existence.”10 Dogmatically, the motivation behind this statement is obvious: human beings are responsible for the Fall—although it is universal and inevitable, it is necessitated neither by nature nor by God: it is the contingent actualization of finite freedom. However, the oddness of ascribing an apparent ontic priority to human beings as finite freedom with respect to existence as a whole is hard to miss. On the face of it, it appears as if the 14-odd billion year-long stretch of cosmic evolution prior to the emergence of homo sapiens either did properly exist or is somehow made dependent in its existence upon the universal Fall effected in the appearance of human beings But a Tillichian will no doubt reply that his reading simply shows that the correlational method that governs Tillich’s theology has not been properly grasped. Theological statements, she might continue, are not disinterested statements about temporal states of affairs, as if they were in some sort of ill-fated competition with scientific statements. They do not propose an ontic priority of human beings with respect to cosmic evolution, for example, because they are not ontic statements at all, but rather ontological. That is to say, talk about the transition from essence to existence in terms of finite freedom is a way to grasp the ontological connection

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between freedom and destiny within human experience. “Existence” refers here to specifically human existence—Dasein, we might say, borrowing from Heidegger—as an uneasy combination of necessity and freedom. To interpret it more broadly is to interpret theological statements as if they were empirical statements of putative fact, and thus to turn Tillich into a creationist. But this objection is beside the point. I am not arguing that Tillich is a creationist—clearly, he is not—but rather that his construction blocks modern cosmology from having anything theologically important to say about the history of the cosmos prior to human beings. To say that the theologically relevant meaning of existence is what results from the actualization of human freedom is to place theological knowledge of the real in a tight correlation with its appearance “for us.” In Meillassoux’s terms, the correlational rendering of theological statements—tying their meaning to what existence is “for us”—makes it impossible theologically to think the “ancestral.” And so the problem is that we have a tension in Tillich’s account of creation: he is committed to a theistic evolutionary account (i.e., non-creationist) of the world and yet abstracts the doctrine of creation from knowledge of that from which human life evolved (non-living matter). I will venture a generalization at this point that could only be fully justified by a detailed consideration of Tillich’s entire systematic theology that I can only suggest here. The correlational method in Tillich functions in just the same way that so-called philosophical correlationism functions in post-Kantian philosophy according to Meillassoux’s reading of it: it protects certain prized notions (for Tillich, the concept of life) from the withering effects of modern cosmology, especially the horrors of the ancestral and also what Ray Brassier calls the trauma of extinction. At the root of this protective move is the anxiety induced by modern cosmology’s disclosure of a contingency that is literally unthinkable in terms that would privilege human meaning and value. Life arises contingently from non-life, sustains itself negentropically for only a moment of cosmic time, and then lapses into non-life again in the eternal expansion of a cold, dark universe. Another way to say this is that correlationism is itself the methodological correlate of a kind of theological vitalism. Although not all forms of correlationism are necessarily vitalist, the correlational method, according to which knowledge of the real is always already tied to the existential situation of the knower, serves to protect the self-estimation of the living against data that would undermine or deflate it. In Tillich’s theology, theology answers questions that are borne by the existential struggles of human beings. It is driven, then, by a struggle of a particular form of life—that is, human beings—against that which would dissolve or reduce it to the non-living, rather than by the quest for adequation to the real

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that characterizes modern cosmology. By framing theological knowledge in terms of the interests of the human knower, Tillich’s theology is able to project an essentially vitalist cosmology: seen from the vantage point of the living, the universe is the arena of life, governed and brought to fulfillment by a “living God” who promises “eternal life.” I suggest that Tillich’s theological vitalism can be seen with special clarity near the beginning and at the end of his Systematic Theology. In volume one, Tillich famously differentiates the idea of God as ground of being from the supernaturalist account of God as the highest being. God is not, Tillich argues, a part of the system of being—God is “beyond the contrast” of being and non-being and thus not constrained by it. By rejecting the notion of a highest being as incoherent and unintelligible, atheism is essentially correct in its protest against traditional, supernaturalist theism.11 Of course, acceptance of atheist critique does not mean that Tillich is himself an atheist—only that he holds that the reality of God cannot be properly reified or reduced to the status of a discrete individual alongside others. However, the austerity of Tillich’s position is qualified. While God is not a discrete living being in the way that supernaturalism imagines, God is nevertheless not less than that—God is not limited by organic vitality, but is nevertheless also not limited by its negation. In fact, for Tillich, God is not indifferent to life but is positively related to it. In a typically founding gesture, Tillich urges that God is the ground of life. This consideration not only warrants, but renders non-negotiable, the symbol of the “living” God: Life is the process in which potential being becomes actual being. It is the actualization of the structural elements of being in their unity and in their tension. These elements move divergently and convergently in every lifeprocess. Life ceases in the moment of separation without union or of union without separation. Both complete identity and complete separation negate life. If we call God the “living God,” we deny that he is a pure identity of being as being; we also deny that there is a definite separation of being from being in him. We assert that he is the eternal process in which separation is posited and is overcome by reunion. In this sense, God lives.12

What is interesting about this account is the deep connection between Tillich’s affirmation of divine living-ness and the characterization of the life process as absolute and universal. God is the ground of being, and being is always in the process of actualization. To move toward actualization is to become real in the eternal dynamic of separation and reunion, which is nothing other than the dynamic of life. Therefore, to be is to be alive, and to become actual in the divine life. There is more than a hint of panentheism here, and it is theologically compelling for Tillich and for

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others because it powerfully connects the universality of divine rule over the cosmos with the intimacy of divine presence within the cosmic trajectories that existentially matter to us. But, we may fairly ask, if God is the ground of being, and if it turns out that being is mostly non-living (“mostly” in both spatial and temporal terms), why privilege the idea of God as “living?” There are at least two difficulties. First, can the concept of life do the descriptive work that is being asked of it here? Does the ancestral, the billions of years of cosmic time in which nothing like the autotelic process of life’s negentropic struggle was going on (not to mention the trillions of years in the future in which it will have exhausted itself), really amount to a dialectical interchange between separation and reunion? Are there not plenty of separations without reunions and unions without separations in cosmic history, and isn’t the fact that separations and unions are not in living relation in the vast majority of instances actually the main story? This gets us to the second problem: Is actual being really to be conceived as the product of something that can be described as living? As will be apparent, this more overtly metaphysical issue is really the same difficulty isolated above in reference to Tillich’s account of the transition from essence to existence. It is hard to see what could warrant denying actuality to that which falls outside even Tillich’s expansive definition of “life.” The ancestral, we know, is not a shadowy world of essences or non-actualized potentials, but a terrifically enormous array of actual events where nothing of interest to life occurs. Again, Tillich’s existentially compelling but descriptively odd account of God’s relation to the world is tied to his correlational method. In the end, Tillich is not interested in the ancestral because it falls outside of the correlation of living beings and their interests. As a non-creationist, he does not deny that human beings and even ordinary biological life as we know it came about only after billions of years of cosmic history. But those billions of years are unthinkable within the correlation, which is to say that their metaphysical significance is prevented from coming into view. Tillich’s theological vitalism is also observable in his eschatology. Significantly, the crescendo of volume three of Systematic Theology is the final section on “Eternal Life.” It is here that the life process that is the subject matter of the volume reaches fulfillment, and it is also here where panentheistic implications of Tillich’s doctrine of God come to full flower. For Tillich, life is ambiguous insofar as the fulfillment of its aims is always mixed with their frustration or distortion. The spiritual presence heals the split between essence and existence, or we might say it overcomes the estrangement of existence from essence, but the presence of spirit is always incomplete or not fully actualized. The complete actualization of the spiritual presence would be the full essentialization of existence, in which the

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elements of estrangement that cling to life are as it were “burnt” away.13 But the full essentialization of existence is also the overcoming of the separation of creatures from God. Eternal life as the fulfillment of life’s essential aims is life in the living God. As life, it is a never-ending, eternally dynamic process, but as life in God, it is life that is completed by its incorporation in the divine life that is eternally complete.14 But this brings us to what is, in some ways, the more important objection speculative realism might bring against a correlational theology like Tillich’s. Just as lifeless ancestrality falls outside the correlation, so do the lifeless eschatological scenarios suggested by modern cosmology. In other words, correlationism blocks the theological meaning of modern cosmology at the far end of the cosmic story, a “far end” that portends not billions of years of non-life but trillions and more. Dogmatically, it is not difficult to see the appeal of the claim that life is eternally essentialized in God. Tillich is ingeniously working around the notorious difficulties in holding together consummation and the openness of life to contingency that were pointed out, for example, by Friedrich Schleiermacher.15 The process is completed in God because God is herself the eternal completion of the process, and yet the process does not cease in God to be precisely a process. So, we have the satisfaction of completion without, presumably, the nonliving stasis that completion seems to imply. The trouble, however, has once again to do with the status of cosmological knowledge. Here the problem is somewhat different from the problem raised by ancestrality. The challenge of the ancestral is that it asserts a vast realm of actuality that is indifferent to and bears no relation to life. So, insofar as we inscribe theological knowledge in a correlation between object and living subject, we find the ancestral quite literally unthinkable and thus have no way to integrate it into theology. The challenge of what Ray Brassier calls “posteriority,” however, is the fact that all of our cosmological knowledge suggests that there will be vastly (indeed infinitely) more time in the universe that will transpire after life has become impossible than the time during which life is actual.16 More starkly put, the time of death is much greater than the time of life. Therefore, to the extent to which Tillich proposes an eternal process of life in God, his theology must also hide or at least ignore the eschatological scenarios mathematically extrapolated from modern cosmological knowledge. And so, eternal life, as an eternal process of fulfilling life’s intrinsic aims toward self-actualization, becomes other-worldly. But that is of course what Tillich, with his refusal of supernaturalist theisms, is trying to avoid. The contrast between Tillich’s eschatology of eternal life and Ray Brassier’s “naturalization of eschatology,” or what he also calls the “theologization of cosmology,” could not be sharper.17 Indeed, they are driven by

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two conflicting aims: if Tillich seeks to provide an account of the world’s future that privileges the perspective of the knower (or, more precisely, the believer) and her fate, Brassier’s theologization of cosmology seeks to make good on the philosopher’s claim to know the absolute—that is, to adequate thought to the in-itself. The mathematization of the universe in the era of scientific enlightenment has handed to philosophy knowledge of the in-itself, and philosophy’s job is to think it. The trouble, since Kant, is that philosophers have been disappointed with the world they have been handed, with its lack of a moral God, incompatibilist freedom, and immortality, and that is why Brassier, with Meillassoux, urges that the test of adequation to the real is precisely disappointment or disenchantment.18 If a view of the world consoles, it hasn’t taken seriously the marginalization of life in a universe which can be shown to be indifferent to it. We must theologize what we know—that is, we must think the meaning of the death of meaning. Out of our disappointment, we must forge a theology of disenchantment. For Brassier, nihilism is not a disease; nor is it, in contrast to Nietzsche, something that must be overcome. Rather, nihilism is the speculative opportunity to dedicate adequate thought to the real.19 The opportunity is “speculative” because it is not the opportunity to realize practical value, but to realize philosophy’s desire to know the in-itself. Brassier draws on Freud’s notion of the death drive as an analogue. For Freud, there is a primordial pull within life back toward the inorganic. Although life diverges from the inorganic in ever more circuitous detours, these are no more than temporary extensions of the latter, which will eventually contract back to their original inorganic condition, understood as the zero degree of contraction, or decontraction.20

However, this drive toward death is not to be understood in Aristotelian terms as a teleology intrinsic to the organism. The problem with such an inner telos, according to Brassier, is that it has no existence independently of the organism, and so it can be assimilated into the organism’s primordial drive to fulfill itself. In contrast, Freud maintains the realist thesis according to which “inanimate things existed before living ones,” and uses it to underwrite the reality of the death-drive. Consequently, the inorganic as “initial state” and “aim” of life cannot be simply understood as a condition internal to the development of life, whether as the essence that life has been, or the telos which it will be. Just as the reality of the inorganic is not merely a function of the existence of the organic, so the reality of death is not merely a function of life’s past, or of its future. Death, understood as the principle of decontraction driving

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the contractions of organic life is not a past or future state toward which life tends, but rather the originary purposelessness which compels all purposefulness, whether organic or psychological. With the thesis that the “aim of all life is death,” Freud defuses Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will: the life that wills power is merely a contraction of the death that wants nothing. The will to nothingness is not an avatar of the will to power; rather the will to power is merely a mask of the will to nothingness.21

In short, death is the in-itself of life—or, alternatively, life is just a variation upon death. The truth disclosed by the mathematization of the cosmos, then, is not simply that we are all going to die and that the human project will come to a close, but that we are, in fact, already dead. The enchanting “manifest image” of ourselves as a vital subjectivity that transcends the lifeless physical system of which we are a part, to borrow a phrase from Wilfred Sellars, is destroyed.22 The challenge is to think of this destruction theologically.

Theologizing Cosmology: A More Radical Atheism for a More Radical Tillich Again, what if speculative realism’s critique of correlationism were true and it is possible to know the absolute on the basis of the mathematization of cosmology? It is a distinct possibility that both Meillassoux and Brassier are far too confident in the reach of human knowledge, but a theology bold enough to confront the starkest possibilities in the service of realism should not shrink from such well-attested cosmological theories on the basis of their uncertainty. To do so would be to confirm the suspicions of the new realists that religion is ultimately a self-protective, fideistic venture. Given the challenges of ancestrality and posteriority, how might the theologian respond? As I see it, there are three types of responses that might be given. First, in response to the challenge of posteriority, one may simply deny that eternal life has anything to do with this cosmic realm. The difficulties to be faced here would be several, however. Among them would be the pushback of some speculative realists that this response doesn’t touch the realist claim that life is just a variation upon death. But, much more importantly for our purposes, this response would amount to a re-deployment of the dualistic supernaturalism that Tillich’s theology seeks, rightfully in my judgment, to avoid. Therefore, I will not pursue that course here, nor offer any further comments on it. A second type of response is much more sophisticated, and is developed by the other speculative realist we have discussed, Quentin Meillassoux.

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In After Finitude, Meillassoux argues that there are no metaphysical necessities—no necessary being, nor any necessity behind the laws of nature. Thus, although natural laws describe the system of nature as it currently exists, nothing prevents them from changing in a moment.23 They literally rest on nothing, so there need be no reason for them to become something different. In his unpublished although famous work The Divine Inexistence, Meillassoux suggests that this radical contingency applies also the inevitability of death. Quite simply, death is just as contingent as life, and may be replaced without reason by immortality, without having to posit another world.24 I believe there is considerable promise in this perspective, and its implications would be rather startling for theology. Moreover, my own reconstruction of Tillichianism in response to nihilism will rely on an assist from Meillassoux. However, the genius of Meillassoux’s position as a whole is that it uses radical contingency actually to undermine nihilism, and the purpose of this chapter is to ask about the prospect of a theology that embraces at least some, although not all, of the nihilism of Brassier’s version of speculative realism. So, what happens if, in a third option, we unbind the nihil in Tillich, neither rejecting nor undermining nihilism but in some respects embracing it? The key to this thought experiment is in the observation I made above— if God is the ground of being, and if being turns out to be mostly inorganic, what sense does it make to privilege the notion of the “living God?” Famously, Tillich accepts the criticisms of atheism with respect to the supernaturalist account of God characteristic of popular and also some more sophisticated philosophical versions of theism. The protest of this atheism was against a reified personal God who dwells in a realm somehow apart from the world. Tillich could accept such a critique of traditional theism—indeed, it was in his constructive interests not only to accept it but to promote it. However, the atheism of Ray Brassier’ speculative realism is much more radical. One can be an atheist in the first sense and still accept a vitalist account of the universe. Then, as Tillich does, one can simply recast theism by calling that vital reality that grounds the dynamics of cosmic history “God.” But Brassier denies the vitalist account, and so undercuts such a move. The question, then, is whether there is a parallel between the rejection of a reified personal God and the rejection of a vitalist cosmology, and if so, whether Tillich’s methodological acceptance of atheism in order to open the possibility of a deeper, richer account of the divine can work in both cases. I believe there is such a parallel, and that Tillich’s dialogue with atheism can be similarly productive in both cases. In support of this claim, I offer the following reconstruction of Tillich’s view of God that accepts the mathematizaton of the universe and at least some of its nihilizing implications.

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God is the ground of being. Or, we might just as well say that God is that which renders the world absolutely contingent. If being grounded itself, then it would be necessary. If it were necessary, there would be no dynamism to being, or else its dynamism would simply be the necessary unfolding of its potential being (Hegel). But to say that God is ground is to deny the status of ground to any entity or set of entities within the universe and also, of course, to deny such status to the universe as a whole.25 Conversely, it is to say that God is ontologically indifferent to any particular configuration of being including the universe as a whole. So, in effect, God’s grounding un-grounds the universe. As un-grounding ground, God is both the ontological support of being and the primordial menace to its configurations, whether they be regional or universal. If we say, going at least this far with Quentin Meillassoux, that the ordering of the universe is subject to chaos insofar as there is no intrinsic or immanent reason at all for it being what it is—and that would be a way of saying that it is un-grounded—then we may say that God is the chaos, or what Meillassoux calls the “hyperchaos,” the primordial un-reason for being: simultaneously its support and its threat.26 And in a sense, we would not be far from Tillich in doing so. Tillich, for his part, resists pitting God against the threat of nonbeing that is chaos (μη ον), and so distinguishes his account of God from classical process theology. Chaos, if it has any ontological standing, is within God rather than outside of God as something that is opposed to God.27 Here, I am suggesting that to say as much is at least to invite the thought that chaos may be a way of naming the divine itself, especially when we have taken the step of identifying God’s grounding as a primordial un-grounding. Tillich himself would not have said so, of course, but this refusal is in part a function of the ultimacy of life in his theology, in contrast to a theology that embraces non-life relative to the negentropic processes that contain and co-opt chaos. Without such containment, chaos is both primordial and ultimate. The point toward which I am pressing here is that, if God is the hyperchaos that un-grounds the world, if God is thus indifferent to the various possible configurations of being, then God is connected only in a maximally ambiguous way with the trajectories in the universe that lead to and support life. It is important to see that naming the divine hyper-chaos is not tantamount to saying that God is the dynamism that unsettles, haunts, and/or lures the world forward in a vitalist fashion. It is not to label an alleged foundational vitality of the universe divine. Rather, the divine chaos can unsettle and it can stop the unsettling. That is, it can yield becoming and it can yield eternal stasis. It can support life and it can close the doors on life. As Tillich himself holds, God is not reducible to becoming, and we might add that God is in no way required to support

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becoming rather than to curtail it. Moreover, there is no reason for either happening at all—that is why it is called “chaos,” or “hyper-chaos.” To say that God is the “living God” in this context would be an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Living is only one of the expressions of divine chaos and, as far as we know, only a tiny sliver of the whole. But what about God’s relationship to life? To attempt to think the ancestral and the posterior outside of the correlation of knower and known does not mean that we have to bracket questions of existential significance— only that we have to adjust our answers to these questions to the disenchantments entailed by our knowledge of a fully mathematizable universe. So adjusted, it does not appear that life is at the center of what is going on in the universe, and so it does not appear that it is the signature expression of divinity. God is neither the ambience of life nor the auto-telic, negentropic process that is its own point (to borrow a thought from a more recent Tillichian of sorts, Mark C. Taylor).28 Rather, God is that which enables and limits the process. God is external to life without being unconnected to it. God enables life by un-grounding static structures that would have preserved the absolute hegemony of the inorganic. But God limits life in two ways: first and principally, by un-grounding or non-necessitating the negentropic processes of life; but also by being expressed in a natural order that portends the unencroachable temporal boundary of life in the form of an ineluctable entropic dissipation of energy. God, in other words, is the ontological context in which life and meaning arise and pass away. None of this, it seems to me, would mean that Tillich’s analysis of finite being, with its tensive interplay between the polarities of freedom and destiny, dynamics and form, and individuation and participation, is overturned—only that it would be relativized. With Tillich, we would want to say that God is beyond the tension between the polar elements in each case, but we would want to go further to say that God does not constitute a more fundamental harmony between the two elements in each case, nor does the outworking of divine purposes, or the incorporation of the finite into the divine life, resolve or overcome them. That is to say, the divine chaos does not guarantee the fulfillment of life’s urge to harmonize the tensions of finitude and to overcome its ambiguities. Rather, with Brassier’s reading of Freud in mind, we would want to say that the tensions themselves are preceded and will consequently be succeeded by a more simple and much less interesting state of being that is neither tensive nor dynamic in the least. Again, it is not as if the polarities in their tension are deficient (because merely finite) expressions of a more primordial harmony that will, in the end, be regained—rather, they are simply contingent and temporary. What we see in the absolutization of the polar elements is an ontologizing of life and its internal tensions and, therefore, the

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relativization of life entails the relativization of the polarities. God is finally indifferent to them—ontologically speaking, contrary to Tillich’s claim at the end of his system, the cosmic drama means nothing for God.29 And, so, does the “unbinding the nihil” in Tillich leave us with a kind of theological nihilism? In a sense, it does: rather than meaning being guaranteed or grounded by the divine, meaning is hemmed in by the divine. God is the final menace to meaning—the abysmal real that issues meaning only to revoke it in the end. But we should ask whether a stern rejection of theological vitalism really means nihilism in the way Brassier envisions it. It is really the case that, because organic life is simply a fluctuation of the inorganic, the fundamental truth about human life is that we are already dead and our lives have no meaning? This viewpoint is not only unattractive (which in Brassier’s Schadenfreude only makes it all the more attractive!), it is crudely reductionist. Just because meaning is temporal and temporary doesn’t mean that it is not real. It still seems possible to characterize the universe and, therefore, the divine who grounds/un-grounds it as the cradle of a meaning and vitality, even if they have a limited run, as it were.30 Meaning, we might argue, is only intensified by the fact that it is hemmed in by chaos. Life is, if anything, more precious for being rare. I suggest that Tillich’s theological framework, when cosmologized in the way a dialogue with speculative realism suggests, in fact offers a middle course between vitalism and nihilism. God, in such a revised framework, is the beyond of being. As such, God is beyond life, beyond hope, even beyond the confines of what we call “meaning.” God offers no complete and final redemption nor does the divine ground an eternal return. Rather, God is the eternal mystery that envelops the real, creating and also destroying, radiating and also extinguishing. God is that real before which we arise and pass away, lending ontological seriousness once again, this time for a post-theistic age, to a piety that affirms that we “blossom and flourish like leaves on a tree, then wither and perish, but naught changeth thee!”

Notes 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 118. 2. Ibid., 3–7. 3. Ibid., 43–49. 4. Ibid., 120. 5. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 223–230. 6. Ibid., 239.

192 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Thomas A. James Ibid., 231 Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, 31. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 31. Italics added. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 235–236. Ibid., 241–242. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, 399. Ibid., 420–423. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999), 703–707. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 229. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 73. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 98. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, xi. Ibid., 235. Ibid., 235–236. Ibid., 26. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 53. Portions of The Divine Existence have been published in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). See Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 197–193. In Meillassoux’s terms, it is to deny there is a “whole” to which its elements must be subject. In The Divine Inexistence, he calls this God’s “inexistence.” See Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 177–182. For Meillassoux’s concept of “hyperchaos,” see Meillassoux, After Finitude, 164. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 179, 247. Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 345–347. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, 422. Douglas Ottati’s theatre analogy seems apt here. The best hope for a broadway show is not that it should continue forever, but that it have a “good run.” That is, its value and meaning are connected to its having a place in and time in which its value is expressed—not in the idea that place and time will be preserved forever. See Douglas Ottati, Theology for Liberal Protestants, Vol. I: God the Creator (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 228.

Chapter 11 Depth and the Void Tillich and Žižek via Schelling Clayton Crockett

The Real Tillich In his Preface to The Gospel of Christian Atheism, Thomas J. J. Altizer proclaims his appreciation of Tillich. He writes, “Among twentieth-century theologians, it was Tillich alone who made possible a way to a truly contemporary theology.”1 Altizer, the important death of God theologian, claims that while he has had to disagree with Tillich’s conclusions: nevertheless, “I do so with the conviction that they are not yet radical enough, and with the memory of Tillich’s words to me that the real Tillich is the radical Tillich.”2 This is a strange statement by Altizer. Tillich’s manifest theological conclusions are not radical enough, and yet the “real” Tillich is the radical Tillich, and this is reportedly from Tillich himself. One question, then, concerns the nature of this real as applied to Tillich. I want to think about the word real, as applied to Tillich, in a Lacanian, psychoanalytic sense. According to Lacan, human understanding works on three registers at once: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. In his early work, Lacan sought to distinguish the imaginary from the symbolic, because when we speak and think, humans invariably believe that we are referring to reality rather than symbolic discourse. The symbolic order works due to its mediation by what Lacan calls the Other, which crystallizes the unconscious nature of symbolic reference. As Lacan famously declares, human desire is fundamentally the Other’s desire, which means

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that your desire is not simply your own.3 You may believe that you truly desire to purchase and consume a soft drink to quench your thirst, but in many respects the natural drive of thirst has been co-opted by corporations whose images and logos represent to us what it means to drink a product. The imaginary orientation is to mistake the symbolic order for the real. The real is what recedes from the symbolic, what is eclipsed by the symbolic once symbolic language structures meaning. Later, Lacan turns to think more insistently about how the real disrupts the symbolic order, and prevents it from closing on itself. The point is that all three—the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real—are intertwined in human signification, according to Lacan. I want to use Lacan’s thought to think about Altizer’s statement, which references the real Tillich as the radical Tillich. Of course, Altizer is not using psychoanalytic language or categories, but I think this language is useful to think about Tillich, especially the possibility of a radical Tillich.4 The radical Tillich concerns the real, and the real in Tillich, which can be considered in two distinct but related ways. First, there is the depth aspect of being, as it is expressed in Tillich’s Systematic Theology. Second, there is Tillich’s encounter with the real, first in the trenches of World War I, which annihilates and radicalizes him to the core—according to his biographer, Wilhelm Pauck, “Tillich never fully recovered from his intense suffering in the face of death” as a chaplain to the German army—and later, in connection to the rise of Hitler and Nazism, which prompts The Socialist Decision.5 In this chapter, I am using Žižek’s appropriation and elaboration of Lacanian psychoanalysis to radicalize Tillich. Specifically, Žižek’s understanding of the real in terms of the void is a way to connect Žižek’s philosophy to Tillich’s theology of depth in a way that radicalizes it. For Tillich, depth is an aspect of being, which is more profound than the structure of being. What Žižek properly shows is that the void is the expression of this depth within being in a way that divides being from itself, such that God is separated from God by a gap or abyss. Furthermore, Žižek more directly connects his philosophical theory to his political commitments in a way that Tillich usually only approaches, but that most explicitly occurs in The Socialist Decision. Most of Tillich’s theology, whose conclusions Altizer opposes, is symbolic. Tillich develops an impressive, subtle, and overarching theological language to express his symbolic theology. Tillich draws on German idealism, existentialism in art and philosophy, and Heidegger’s philosophy to develop his vision of theology. It is only after his move from Germany to the United States that he gives this theology an explicit structure in his threevolume Systematic Theology. Here I want to trace his work on Schelling from his dissertation on The Construction of the History of Religion in

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Schelling’s Positive Philosophy to the first volume of his Systematic Theology and The Courage to Be, and show how his understanding of the potency of being in Schelling becomes the depth aspect of being in the Systematic Theology and his later work.

From Potency to Depth Tillich actually wrote two dissertations on Schelling, and both focus on Schelling’s later, positive philosophy as opposed to the early system of transcendental idealism. His first dissertation was his PhD dissertation from the University of Breslau, The Construction of the History of Religion in Schelling’s Positive Philosophy, published in 1910. His second dissertation was for his licentiate in theology from the University of Halle, published in 1912. The second dissertation is Mysticism and Guilt-Consciousness in Schelling’s Philosophical Development, and this dissertation is probably more important to the development of Tillich’s own theology, but I think that the first dissertation remains significant for its evidence of Tillich’s profound philosophical encounter with Schelling. In this first dissertation, Tillich engages with Schelling’s later, positive philosophy, and specifically with Schelling’s concept of the potencies. The potencies are potentialities of being, and there are three potencies: first a potency of existing or necessary being, which is viewed as nature; second a potency of pure act, which is the ethical action of subjectivity; and finally a potency of freedom or spirit that unites subject and object. According to Tillich’s analysis of Schelling, “freedom and history depend upon the preservation of a subjective, potential, irrational and voluntary moment in the concept of being,” which is what the potencies preserve.6 This potential “reality of nonbeing” as relative nonbeing that stands in a dialectical relationship with being rather than the affirmation of an absolute nonbeing is an essential insight of Schelling’s thought for Tillich. Relative nonbeing is contrasted with absolute nonbeing, and the potencies allow for the expression of the former while discounting the latter. For Tillich in this dissertation, “God is God because of his relationship to the potencies,” even if God apparently transcends the opposition between being and nonbeing in Schelling’s later positive philosophy of freedom, where God is “absolute spirit . . . free even from himself and from his being as spirit.”7 Tillich explains that “whereas God as infinite potency is the starting point of rational philosophy, God as absolutely transcendent being is the principle of positive philosophy.”8 Just as Schelling attempts to resolve the complicated deduction of divinity, he sets out in his unfinished

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Ages of the World manuscripts, Tillich appeals to Schelling for a unity that overcomes but maintains differentiation and diversity, or a God who incorporates both being and nonbeing. In his later, mature theology, Tillich will affirm the potencies, or the expression of the relative nonbeing of God and being, as the depth aspect of being. The depth of being is tied to the category of mysticism, which Tillich explores in his second dissertation, and associates with a more neglected history of Christian thought. Mysticism opens up to the mystery of the depth of being, which counters the rationality of human theoretical endeavor. Tillich is a philosophical theologian, and he affirms reason and rationality, but at the same time he limits the scope of rationalization as well as he amplifies it by tying it to a depth of reason or a depth of being. In the first volume of his three-volume Systematic Theology, Tillich contrasts reason with revelation, where the structure of reason comes up against its own limits in the experience of revelation. According to Tillich, “in revelation and in the ecstatic experience in which it is received, the ontological shock is preserved and overcome at the same time.” In this experience, ecstasy unites the experience of the abyss to which reason in all its functions is driven with the experience of the ground in which reason is grasped by the mystery of its own depth and the depth of being generally.9

The experience of the depth of reason is the experience of relative nonbeing, as expressed in Schelling’s three potencies, and this experience of nonbeing enriches being even as it limits it, because it opens being up to what Tillich calls being-itself. Finite human being must confront the mystery of nonbeing, which humans experience in and as finitude. Being and nonbeing cannot exclude each other; they must exist in a state of dialectical relation, or what Tillich calls “the dialectical participation of nonbeing in being.”10 This dialectical relation is what makes possible a world for human beings, and it expresses the nature of ultimate reality, which is named God. According to Tillich, “the being of God is being-itself,” which transcends and embraces both being and nonbeing.11 Tillich articulates the most radical implications of this affirmation of God as being-itself, not in his Systematic Theology but rather in his more popular book The Courage to Be. In the second half of The Courage to Be, Tillich sets up a polarity between the courage to be as an individual self versus the courage to be as a part of a larger collective, and then wants to transcend the two poles. He claims that “the Protestant courage of confidence affirms the individual self as an individual self in its encounter with God as person,” and this courage of the Reformers “transcends and unites both” the courage to be as a self and the

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courage to be as a part.12 Tillich endorses the Lutheran courage because he sees its affirmation of despair in the form of guilt as a form of faith. Tillich wants to apply this form of courage to contemporary humanity, which is threatened by the loss of meaning. Existentialism threatens the meaning of human being with the nonbeing of meaninglessness, and, for Tillich, Christian faith involves a “justification of the doubter” that corresponds with Luther’s justification of the sinner. In his affirmation of courage, however, Tillich radicalizes faith itself beyond this Protestant Christian faith when he claims that “absolute faith also transcends the divine-human encounter.”13 Tillich expresses this absolute faith in Hegelian terms, where being is “the negation of the negation of being,” but it is better to read this discussion of absolute faith as more Schellingian.14 Absolute faith concerns being itself that refers to a God beyond God. As Tillich explains, the state of absolute faith, “or the state of being grasped by the God beyond God, is not a state which appears beside other states of mind.” It always appears as a “movement in, with, and under other states of mind.”15 The awareness of what Tillich calls absolute faith is an awareness of the depth of being, or being-itself, which somehow includes both being and non-being. If we read Tillich as a Hegelian, then Tillich is not radical, or not radical enough; absolute faith is a summative experience, where we experience the culmination of being and nonbeing. The opposition between being and nonbeing is sublated or aufgehoben in a higher unity. If we keep in mind Schelling’s influence as we read Tillich, however, it becomes possible to perceive this radical side of Tillich’s theology. Tillich states that this experience of absolute faith constitutes a boundary: “it is not a place where one can live, it is without a name, a church, a cult, a theology. But it is moving in the depth of all of them. It is the power of being, in which they participate and of which they are fragmentary expressions.”16 The courage to affirm being over against nonbeing takes place along the knife-edge that separates being from nonbeing that holds them together in and as beingitself. Being-itself is not a Hegelian notion, at least for the radical Tillich.

Ages of the World How is being-itself, or the idea of the God who appears when God has disappeared in anxiety, indebted to Schelling? I will briefly consider some aspects of Schelling’s so-called middle period, which culminates in his unfinished drafts of the Ages of the World (1811–1815), to show how Schelling radicalizes Tillich. Slavoj Žižek is attentive to this aspect of Schelling’s philosophy, although Žižek is apparently more affiliated with Hegel. But the abyss of

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freedom that Schelling demonstrates in the divinity, which is related to the depth of being in Tillich, is also connected to the gap or void in Žižek’s philosophy. One could say that Žižek “corrects” Hegel by reading his dialectic back into Schelling, whilst maintaining his allegiance to Hegel for more political purposes, including his commitment to radical politics. In his essay on Schelling’s Ages of the World, Žižek argues that the three drafts represent Schelling’s three philosophical periods, with the first draft being closest to Schelling’s early philosophy of identity, and his third draft moving in the direction of his positive philosophy. Žižek says that, in the first draft, God’s act of creation is a kind of freedom, but it is a primordial freedom “of necessity, not through an act of free decision.”17 In the third draft, however, Schelling synthesizes a “simultaneity of freedom and necessary existence,” such that God is a necessary being who then creates the universe as a free act.18 In contrast to both of these solutions, in the second draft, Schelling “goes farthest in the direction of freedom, [and] endeavors to conceive the primordial contraction [of God] itself as a free act” such that the tension between freedom and necessity is “purely internal to freedom.”19 Another way to describe this is to say that, in the second draft, Schelling most closely sutures God to the void, where the void is what Žižek calls the abyss of freedom. Here, in the second Ages of the World draft, God most closely becomes this void or abyss, without remainder. In his earlier philosophy and the first Ages of the World draft, Schelling wanted to show how the void could produce divinity from itself, and later, in the third draft and in his subsequent positive philosophy, Schelling starts with God and wants to show the creation of the world from God’s own me-ontic nothingness.

Difference Out of Identity Tillich’s conception of the depth of God comes from Schelling’s various meditations on the abyss of nothingness from which God and world emerge. Here, at the heart of Schelling’s unfinished Ages of the World drafts, God most profoundly “is” this abyssal nothingness. Instead of looking more closely at the Ages of the World, however, I want to examine another text from around the same time as the earliest draft, Schelling’s Stuttgart Seminars from 1810. This text makes it clearer what is at stake in Schelling’s understanding of God. In his Stuttgart Seminars, Schelling begins with the question of a system, and claims that the cosmos or world already constitutes a system prior to human beings’ efforts to theorize one. Schelling retrojects philosophy into the beginning of this world-system by positing a primordial essence, which

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“is necessarily and by its very nature the absolute identity of the Real and the Ideal.”20 Schelling is here working with and out of his philosophy of identity, where identity must come first, and he wants to demonstrate how difference develops out of identity. This effort involves Schelling in all sorts of difficulties, that he never completely resolves. He requires a first principle of absolute identity, which is the primordial essence, and then he needs to show how a “complete transfiguration of the whole primordial Being into the Real and Ideal opens the requisite path toward the finite and real differentiation.”21 The passage from the unified ground of being, which is God, to the real differentiation of finite being, takes place by means of a contraction or concentration, where this original essence or God “restricts Himself to the first power” and allows for a second power to manifest. The emergence of the second power represents the creation of the world, and this “beginning of creation amounts indeed to a descent of God.”22 God breaks with God’s own undifferentiated unity and spontaneously creates a space for the creation of the world as differentiated from God. Schelling affirms that this is an act of freedom, which is at the same time an absolute necessity. In the first power or potency, God is all in all, and Schelling designates this with the letter A. In the second potency, A², God is subject and “the focal point and unity of time,” while that which is finite and differentiated from God is designated B.23 God’s conscious existence proceeds out of an unconscious state, and this involves “the process of complete comingto-consciousness, of the complete personalization of God.”24 The unconscious dimension of God is externalized, expelled outside of God, and takes the form of “matter (although not yet formed matter). Yet in seeking to exclude it from Himself, on the one hand, He also strives to integrate it with Himself, on the other.”25 This matter is called B to distinguish it from the A of the primordial unity, and the overcoming of the split within God is described with the equation A = B. The third power or potency, A³, expresses the re-unification of A and B, or God and world. This reunification overcomes and abolishes the previous differentiation, and is accomplished for Schelling by the Word or Son of God.26 The problem is that it is impossible for Schelling adequately to work out this reconciliation, as he struggles to in the Ages of the World drafts. But the inability to resolve the problem is a sign that it is badly posed, and the main issue here is the assumption of a primordial unity in the first place. In the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze is the main philosopher who works out an ontology of the world starting from difference rather than identity, although Deleuze is influenced and impressed by Schelling. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that “the most important aspect of Schelling’s philosophy is his consideration of powers. How unjust, in this respect, is Hegel’s critical remark about the black cows! Of

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these two philosophers, it is Schelling who brings difference out of the night of the Identical, and with finer, more varied and terrifying flashes of lightning than those of contradiction: with progressivity.”27 Although Schelling begins with identity, his efforts to differentiate this primordial essence are so extraordinary that they mark Schelling as a thinker of difference. As Deleuze concludes, the potencies “A, A², A³ form the play of pure depotentialisation and potentiality, testifying to the presence in Schelling’s philosophy of a differential calculus adequate to the dialectic.”28 Tillich is also attuned to this play of differences in the expression of divinity and our interaction and appropriation as finite beings. One of the main insights Tillich takes from Schelling concerns a revision of traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Schelling explains that the notion of creation ex nihilo is confused, because it imagines a creation literally out of nothing, or ouk on, while we should properly think about creation as me-ontic, out of a relative nothingness or non-being. This is key to Tillich’s understanding of Schelling, and therefore of divinity: All finite beings have been created out of nonbeing, yet not out of nothing. The ouk ón is no more a nothing than the mé phainomena of the New Testament; it is only the nonsubjective, the Nonbeing, yet precisely therefore it is Being itself. A nonbeing frequently impresses itself on us as a being, when seen from another perspective.29

For Tillich, God is being-itself, which includes being and nonbeing. And this nonbeing is the dark or depth aspect of being. Near the conclusion of his Stuttgart Seminars, Schelling affirms that “all productions require a dark principle, a substratum from which the creations of a higher being are derived.”30 This tension between creation as an upward movement toward something higher and a downward movement in which divinity externalizes itself consistently marks Schelling’s philosophy. The key, however, is the irreducible existence of this dark principle, which Deleuze calls a dark precursor in Difference and Repetition.31 Here Schelling calls the dark principle in philosophical work a kind of feeling, in contrast with the lighter principle of reason. In psychoanalysis, this dark principle is viewed explicitly as the unconscious, of which Schelling (along with Nietzsche) is seen as a precursor.

Žižek Radicalizes Tillich Why is this detour into Schelling’s philosophy necessary? Part of the reason for this excursus lies in Schelling’s influence on Tillich, but the other

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reason is to set up an understanding of Žižek that will help us radicalize Tillich’s notion of the depth of God. Again, Žižek is famously and fabulously Hegelian, but he has also written importantly on Schelling, and Žižek’s understanding of Hegel is influenced by both Kant and Schelling as well as Lacan.32 In The Indivisible Remainder, Žižek argues that “the gap that separates the Stuttgart Seminars from Schelling’s late ‘positive’ philosophy remains unbridgeable: in late Schelling, God possesses his Being in advance; the process of creation therefore concerns another being, not the being of God Himself.”33 For this reason, the role of the Ages of the World drafts is essential, because it testifies to a failure to work out what Schelling wants to resolve rather than its success, according to Žižek. The three successive Weltalter drafts signify “the repeated failure of Schelling’s desperate endeavor to avoid the terrifying intermediate stage between the pure, blissful indifference of the primordial freedom and God as a free Creator.”34 Here God emerges as a distinct subject, but God is not yet free. God is caught in God’s own creation; or rather, God’s creating activity is not yet free, as it is assumed to be in the third potency. In the second potency, “after contracting being, God is submitted to the blind necessity of a constricted rotary motion.”35 This rotary motion is a kind of repetition compulsion, where God is compelled to act but without being able to free Himself from His own creation. For Žižek, the crucial moment is the event of contraction: “how did the abyss of primordial Freedom contract being?” We saw how Schelling posits this contracting moment in God in the Stuttgart Seminars as a way to explain creation of the world outside of God. To reunite God and world, Schelling posits a third potency, A³, that can join A and B, but this solution does not genuinely work, and Schelling returns to it again and again in his Ages of the World drafts between 1811 and 1815 before finally giving up. Ultimately, the only way that Schelling is able of resolving this deadlock is to shift to positive philosophy, in which “logical deduction gives way to mythical narrative.”36 Later in The Indivisible Remainder, Žižek suggests that this difficulty of reconciling philosophical Reason with its irrational Ground is intrinsic to all of German Idealism. The most difficult task of philosophical speculation, according to Žižek, “is to bring to light the ‘madness of the very gesture of instituting the domain of Sinn’ [Sense].”37 The problem is that any systematic attempt to generate the many from the One ends up bearing “the indelible mark of a ‘pathological’ exclusiveness of One—that is, it hinges on the ‘partiality’ of enunciation.”38 Because the One is always one-sided, at least in its enunciation, it always appears arbitrary and violent in its imposition of order. Since every Order is based on a prior or concomitant Disorder, as Schelling points out, this means that “the very imposition of Order is an act of supreme violence—Order is a violent imposition which

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throws the universe out of joint.”39 This conclusion suggests that God’s freedom remains an irrational freedom that cannot be reconciled with the goodness of God’s necessary being. There is a dark principle of God, that serves as God’s own depth and nonbeing. It’s not just nonbeing for us. And the crucial split here is not between Schelling and Hegel, but lies within each of them as they both grapple with this paradoxical situation of thinking and being. Tillich engages with Schelling’s positive philosophy in his two dissertations, and I am arguing that Tillich’s first dissertation is a more serious effort to get at what Schelling was doing in his Stuttgart Seminars and Ages of the World drafts, whereas the second is more interested in using Schelling’s positive philosophy and theory of myth to explain the history of religions. Furthermore, I suggest that this unresolved tension in Schelling can be traced throughout Tillich’s theological work, including the Systematic Theology and The Courage to Be. Finally, the line between the effort to grapple with the dark power of God intrinsic to being-itself and the effort to affirm a God who sublates and overcomes nonbeing divides the radical Tillich from the non-radical Tillich. The radical Tillich can be subtracted from Tillich’s systematic theology, just as Schelling’s middle period can be subtracted from his broad philosophical career as a whole. Subtraction occurs by means of a void, as Alain Badiou tells us.40 Schelling and Tillich waver between placing the void between God and the world, and within Godself, and this equivocation marks their respective philosophy and theology. It is Žižek who provides the theological answer to the problem set up by Schelling and Tillich: the void is within God, but this void is the same void within us and within creation itself. The gap or void is not between God and the world or God and us; it is within God, the world, and humanity. This gap is the depth that “joins” us to God. The gap is a primordial nothingness, and we—God, world, humans, or animals—are subtracted from the void. We are all less than nothing.41 In The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek clarifies this situation regarding his affirmative understanding of Christianity. According to Žižek, the true meaning of Christ’s divinity indicates that “we are one with God only when God is no longer one with Himself, but abandon’s Himself, ‘internalizes’ the radical distance which separates us from Him.”42 So the becoming-human of God is not simply about closing the gap that was opened up between God and creation, but affirming the same gap within God, the world, and humanity. Christ symbolizes the tearing open of this gap, because he identifies fully with God on the Cross at the same time as he is dying: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Here is “the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt,” and it takes absolute courage to affirm this notion of divinity.43

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Žižek draws the theological conclusion: “we must help God,” because God cannot help us.44 Or as Žižek puts it in God in Pain, paraphrasing Schelling, “only a suffering God can help us now.”45 The idea is that our very lack and self-sufficiency is not healed by God’s fullness; rather, God is defined precisely in terms of this same lack. God is a void, cut off from Godself, just as to be human is to be split internally by a wound that can never heal. According to Tillich’s Systematic Theology, in volume two, Christ is “the New Being.”46 But this New Being is not the cure of the lack of being that defines the old being. Rather, it is the affirmation of this very lack, the positing of this gap as Good News. Žižek says that the phrase “‘man in man’ indicates the noncoincidence of man with man, the properly inhuman excess which disturbs its self-identity.”47 The phrase “man in man” is now suspect as sexist, although it means what defines the human as human—what sets humanity apart from animality. At the same time, from Žižek’s perspective, not only is humanity defined by this “properly inhuman excess,” but God is defined by a properly ungodly excess, and nature by a properly unnatural excess, so we should probably assume that animals are marked by the same unnatural excess as well. This unnatural excess is often figured as a gap or a void, but we should not cling too literally to the metaphorics of lack or excess here. The point is the intrinsic selfdifferentiation as constitutive of any identity, whether it be ours, God’s, or the world’s. For Žižek, Christ is “the name of this excess inherent in man, man’s ex-timate kernel,” and this kernel is what constitutes the perverse core of Christianity and what defines the Real in psychoanalytic terms.48

God Is the Radical Lack The Real is the excess or the gap that prevents anything from being what it is, and this gap is shared by human beings, God, and the world. In the symbolic order, God takes up finite being and the threat of nonbeing and overcomes them in the symbol of being-itself. In the Real, God “is” the radical lack or excess of being that constitutes anything at all. According to Žižek, “the Real is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle that prevents this direct access; the Thing that eludes our grasp and the distorting screen that makes us miss the Thing.”49 The Thing is Lacan’s term, taken from Heidegger, to indicate the justbarely-symbolized Real. For Žižek, the Real is not simply the Thing that represents it, it is also the screen that cuts us off from it. He clarifies that “more precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first standpoint [the Thing itself] to the second [the obstacle or screen].”50

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This shift of perspective is what Žižek later calls a parallax shift, the shift from the point of view of thinking about God as out there, an exception to finite humanity and the world, to thinking of God in here, immanent to the world as what prevents it from closing in on itself. We have to stop thinking about God as this exceptional being out there in the heavens, in some transcendent realm. Tillich’s theology helps us, but his radicality is compromised by the symbolic system in which he expresses it. Žižek’s theology is more radical, although it is less clear, but it helps us to isolate and consider the radical part of Tillich’s thought. What we call God is being-itself, and what we call being-itself does not exist except as the depth of all of our existence. This depth is the ungodly, inhuman, unnatural excess that constitutes existence as such. The void is also the ground of political decision, which is both absolutely free and absolutely necessary. Tillich made such a decision in 1933, and it was a decision for socialism and against Nazism. Tillich was broken personally and theologically in the trenches of World War I, which he called “a ‘personal kairos’ in his own life.”51 The war radicalized Tillich theologically and politically, and he participated in and supported Socialist movements in the 1920s. When the Nazis came to power, Tillich summoned all of his efforts to sharpen the stakes of a decision for socialism and against barbarism, although it was too late. Even if The Socialist Decision was unsuccessful, it galvanized his theology in a time of extreme danger, and led to his being relieved of his academic post and emigrating to the United States. After World War II, Tillich moved away from explicit political engagement as his colleague at Union Theological Seminary, Reinhold Niebuhr, allowed his theology of Christian Realism to be used as Cold War propaganda. Reading Tillich with Žižek can supply not only a more radical theology, but also a more radical political side of Tillich—one that was more evident in the early 1930s. In The Socialist Decision, Tillich contrasts the bourgeois liberalism that downplays working-class movements with “the feudal, stratified concept of organism espoused by political romanticism.”52 What Tillich perceives here is “the way from liberalism to the new feudalism” that is inherent not only in Nazism but in all political romanticism.53 Our consciousness of what is going on is limited, and distorted by ideological false consciousness. This is why Tillich asserts that “being is always and everywhere more decisive than consciousness.”54 We need to attend to what is going on with being, both on the surface and in the depths of our existence. In The Socialist Decision, Tillich attempts an impossible synthesis of Jewish prophetism, Christianity, humanism, and political socialism.55 The fact that it fails should not indict the effort, or its significance, even if we

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would have to think any such synthesis on different grounds today. Toward the end of the book, Tillich gestures toward “an alliance of Marxism and psychoanalysis.” Of course, he is not the first to affirm this alliance, but it is significant that he does so as a Christian theologian. Tillich explains that there are two sides to psychoanalysis: one that is oriented to the nineteenth century and that explains how the mind works in mechanistic terms as an “objectified interpretation of the world expressed by the bourgeois principle.” There is another side, however, that “dethrones consciousness and shatters faith in its supremacy.”56 Here a more radical psychoanalysis “points to connections between spiritual forms and the vitalities of life, a connection that corresponds to the authentic Marxist view of history, undistorted by bourgeois influence.” 57 This affirmation of a Marxist side of psychoanalysis is connected to the contemporary efforts of the Frankfurt School, but it also prefigures later theoretical work in French, inspired by Lacan and others. Here Tillich functions as a precursor to Žižek, and Žižek helps us identify and affirm the radical side of Tillich. This chapter brings together Tillich and Slavoj Žižek around the idea of the void, and compares and contrasts their interpretations of Schelling. My argument is that Tillich wavers between a more radical assertion of the depth of God as a void inherent to God, and a more symbolic understanding of God as overcoming this depth of finite existence in a more conventionally Hegelian way. In his theological works, Žižek helps isolate this void as a void that lies within God’s own existence, and suggests that it is the same void that is inherent to humanity and nature. Understanding and affirming Tillich’s depth of God as a void opens up a more radical side of Tillich, and this radical theology is also more useful for a radical politics.

Notes 1. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, 10. 2. Ibid. 3. See for example Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power.” In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 525: “it must be posited that, as a characteristic of an animal at the mercy of language, man’s desire is the Other’s desire.” 4. See my discussion of Tillich in connection with Schelling, Lacan, and Žižek in Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), chapters 6 and 7. 5. Wilhelm Pauck and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life & Thought, Volume I: Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 51.

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6. Paul Tillich, The Construction of the History of Religion in Schelling’s Positive Philosophy: Its Presuppositions and Principles, trans. Victor Nuovo (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1974), 52. 7. Ibid., 61 (Tillich is quoting Schelling). 8. Ibid., 65. 9. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 113. 10. Ibid., 187. 11. Ibid., 235. 12. Tillich, The Courage to Be, 2nd ed., 163. 13. Ibid., 178. 14. Ibid., 179. 15. Ibid., 188. 16. Ibid., 189. 17. Slavoj Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom.” In The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, ed. Slavoj Žižek and F. W. J. von Schelling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 34. See also F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World: (Fragment) From the Handwritten Remains, Third Version (c.1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000). Two excellent contemporary studies of Schelling in English are Jason M. Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), and Daniel Whistler, Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Finally, Saitya Brata Das is developing an important interpretation of Schelling in relation to the theme of political theology. 18. Ibid., 35. 19. Ibid., 34–35 (emphasis Žižek’s). 20. F. W. J. Schelling, “Stuttgart Seminars (1810).” In Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 195–268 (quote 200). 21. Ibid., 202. 22. Ibid., 204 (emphasis Schelling’s). 23. Ibid., 205. 24. Ibid., 206. 25. Ibid., 208 (emphasis Schelling’s). 26. See ibid., 213. 27. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 190–191 (emphasis Deleuze’s). 28. Schelling, “Stuttgart Seminars,” 191. 29. Ibid., 209 (emphasis Schelling’s). 30. Ibid., 235. 31. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 119. 32. See Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008). 33. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 37. 34. Ibid.

Depth and the Void 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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Ibid. Ibid., 39 (emphasis Žižek’s). Ibid., 76. Ibid. Ibid. (emphasis Žižek’s). See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 65. See Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012). This monumental work on Hegel is striking insofar as it includes no serious engagement with Schelling, although it does engage Fichte, mainly through the interpretation of Dieter Heinrich (see chapter 3, “Fichte’s Choice”). Perhaps here Žižek’s Hegelianism has swallowed up his Schellingianism, which has always been a more minor aspect of Žižek’s oeuvre. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 91. Tillich, The Courage to Be, 190 (emphasis Tillich’s). Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 137. Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gundević, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 157. See Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2. Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 143. Ibid. Ibid., 77. Ibid. Tillich, The Socialist Decision, Introduction by John R. Stumme, xi. Ibid., 53. Ibid. (emphasis Tillich’s). Ibid., 56. See Ibid., 64. Ibid., 134. Ibid.

Chapter 12 The Critical Project in Schelling, Tillich, and Goodchild Daniel Whistler

The Genre of Ultimate Concern Thomas Altizer begins his most recent “call to radical theology” with the following demand for “unthinking”: A genuinely radical theology is a theological thinking that truly rethinks the deepest ground of theology, a rethinking that is initially an unthinking of every established theological ground; only through such an unthinking can a clearing be established for theological thinking, and that is the very clearing which is the first goal of radical theology. Nor can this be accomplished by a simple dissolution of our given theological grounds, for those are the very grounds that must here be ultimately challenged, and challenged in terms of their most intrinsic claims.1

It is under the sign of this task of “unthinking” that I wish to position Tillich and a tradition of critical theory in what follows. It is a call that is echoed throughout Tillich’s works as the imperative that “the concrete contents of ordinary faith must be subjected to criticism and transformation.” 2 Altizer and Tillich repeat a Cartesian trope that lies at the kernel of modernity: beginnings must be destructive; they should open a space free from the orthodoxies, assumptions, and doxa that clog up the airways of thought. To get at “the deepest ground of theology”—which following Tillich one might call “ultimate concern” or following Goodchild “piety”—one must

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reorient oneself and, most especially, one’s attention. Such reorientation is a necessarily destructive critical enterprise. In other words, genuine criticism is the only way to get at theology’s ground (or unground), to get at what matters most. Moreover, when Altizer theologically transposes the philosophical slogan that “it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things,” he problematizes the very relation between theology and philosophy, challenging the possibility of any determinate, hierarchal relation between them.3 This is, of course, a recurrent move in his oeuvre. Yet, at this juncture—in the very opening words of The Call to Radical Theology—it raises a specific question with which all the thinkers discussed in this chapter find themselves confronted: whence critique? That is, what is the optimal discourse from within which one can embark on the critical project? What is the genre of critique?4 If criticism is inherently theological but structured philosophically, are those who critique philosophers then theologians or sui generis (κριτικόι)? These are questions recently discussed by one of Altizer’s heirsapparent, Bradley Johnson, in an analysis of the above quotation. In The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville, Johnson states explicitly that the reorientation of thinking to its grounds—what Altizer calls “theological unthinking” and Johnson himself calls “the thinking of theology’s self-creation as theology”5 —necessarily occurs as “the ironic dissolution of genre.”6 He continues in a way that should remind us of Tillich’s “boundary” configured as the “center” for “fruitful” thinking,7 My conception of theology [is] a fundamental, ontological discourse that operates best when emerging in the spaces between any number of discourses and disciplines . . . The interdisciplinary model I hope to exemplify is invested in that which is unthought in thought—i.e. its radically disrupted, repressed aesthetic-theological excess. Only in this way does one’s thinking about theology (qua subject) become a theological thinking (qua Subject).8

In other words, theology is not a self-enclosed field of discourse, but an excess (produced in the very act of grounding and ungrounding) that circulates through discourse. Therefore, the only criterion for the κριτικός is not commentary on a summa or fidelity to a church, but finding a place to stand that most effectively harnesses this excess (wherever that may turn out to be).9 We must also ask why it is that theology has traditionally been restrictive in this regard; what is it about the established field of “Theology” that needs to be superceded? Again Johnson provides orientation: Traditional theology . . . begins and ends with the naming of its ultimate concern. In this way, it says both too much and too little . . . There is, of

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course, a crucial difference between a theologian, the one who names, and a philosopher, whose attention is to the conditions of naming itself. Indeed . . . perhaps only the latter, the non-theologian, can be truly attuned to the promise that crosses religious divides, that of a “new creation” (or “enlightenment”)—the creation of a new existence.10

The theologian names without attending to why, how or by what right she so names; in consequence, the theologian is insufficiently attentive ever to be able to reorient thinking’s pieties (its ultimate concerns or deepest grounds). Which is not to say that Johnson rejects theology tout court; rather, he goes on to speak of “a new theological thinking . . . concerned with why and how the naming of the unconditioned occurs at all” and so which practises “an active ethics of thinking embodied by the attention paid to that which is unthinkable in the thinkable.”11 This is a discourse that identifies itself as theological without trapping itself within the prison of traditional theological questions and concerns. It is concerned not just with names but with the conditions of possibility of naming (it is, therefore, critical in the strictly Kantian sense); yet, it also exceeds the merely philosophical insofar as its concern is that ground of discourse that is itself excessive (thereby “express[ing] the experience of abyss in philosophical concepts”).12 On this line of thinking, the critique of pieties and the reorientation of ultimate concern (i.e., radical theology as defined by Altizer above) is an ethos—an ethics of thinking. In what follows, I trace this ethos through three manifestations of a distinct, if previously underexplored, tradition of radical theology running through Schelling, Tillich, and Goodchild. What all three have in common is a commitment to attend to that which matters most (piety or ultimate concern) and to a project of critique that radicalizes the Kantian definition of the transcendental (“all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects”) in order to get at that which eludes Kant’s own thought, the unconditional or “deepest theological” values that orient personal existence.13 Throughout, I attempt to not just speak the names given for such pieties, but also describe the conditions that for Schelling, Tillich, and Goodchild make possible this naming process at all. What is at stake, therefore, is a genuinely critical theory.

The Neo-Schellingian Tradition As an initial means of justifying my locating of Tillich in a tradition that spans back to Schelling and forward to Goodchild, I provide some

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historical context. This context serves as a means of bringing out what is essential to Tillich’s Schellingianism, therefore provisionally justifying his place in the canon of critical theory, that is, the development of an ethos of thinking that is first and foremost a matter of criticism (in the Kantian sense). It was as a student that Tillich first discovered Schelling’s writings: I recall the unforgettable moment when by chance I came into possession of the very rare first edition of the collected works of Schelling in a bookstore on my way to the University of Berlin. I had no money, but I bought it anyway, and this spending of nonexistent money was probably more important than all the other non-existent or sometimes existing money that I have spent. For what I learnt from Schelling became determinant of my own philosophical and theological development.14

Indeed, on September 26, 1954, the centenary of Schelling’s death and over 40 years after that purchase, Tillich spoke again on what Schelling had meant to him, I felt that I could express with this speech something of the admiration I owe to my great teacher in philosophy and theology. He was my teacher, although the start of my studies and the year of his death lie exactly fifty years apart; never in the development of my own thought have I forgotten my dependence on Schelling. In all times as well as on half-alien soils his fundamental ideas have been of help to me in all sorts of areas.15

By Tillich’s own admission, then, Schelling’s thought permeates all of his own—but, of course, it was not just his own.16 Our understanding of the history of ideas in early twentieth-century Europe is impoverished if it does not include the category of “neo-Schellingianism” to describe many of the concerns of Berdiaev, Bloch, Bulgakov, Frank, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Rosenzweig as well as Tillich. Each thinker (and it is immediately noticeable that, in line with the train of thought followed in the previous section, they cannot easily be described as either philosophers or theologians) returned to the work of F. W. J. Schelling for inspiration. For, far from the mainstream view of Schelling as a pre-Hegelian relic, there emerged here a Schelling who—to quote Jaspers—is “a prototype of modern possibilities.”17 In 1957, for example, Marcel’s “Schelling fut-il un précurseur de la philosophie de l’existence?” set out to review this obsessive return to Schelling repeated over the past 50 years. He writes, If, for a form of thought that aims at rigour before anything else, Schelling cannot be either a master or an example; for thought that, on the contrary,

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regards philosophy as a heroic adventure entailing risks and skirting abysses, he will always remain an exhilarating companion, and, perhaps even, an inspiration.18

We must remember that Marcel and other neo-Schellingians wrote in a scholarly vacuum. When Tillich wrote his first doctoral thesis on Schelling in 1910, there was no book-length study of Schelling’s later philosophy on which he could draw. Schelling had not yet been domesticated by the university; instead, as the above quotation clearly implies, the wild Schelling of the early twentieth century stood alongside Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche as a fresh voice for the unorthodox. More specifically, for Marcel, Schelling “prepared the terrain for . . . a renaissance of metaphysics on non-traditional foundations,” a renaissance sorely needed to satisfy a thinking “increasingly wary of the encroachment of legalistic categories on the one hand, and of the Hegelian temptation on the other.”19 When it comes to identifying the elements of Schellingian philosophy that Marcel, Tillich, and others found so appealing, a list of two items is usually given: system and freedom (to put it in the language of Heidegger’s 1936 course on the Freiheitsschrift). As Marcel makes clear in the above, neo-Schellingianism is premised on the rejection of a choice between neoKantian legalism and Hegelian metaphysics, between philosophy limited to the subject and speculation that ignores it. The neo-Schellingians were precisely those who wanted both.20 For Heidegger too, “Schelling is the truly creative and boldest thinker of this whole age of German philosophy,” precisely because he thinks through the compatibility of system (as “the task of philosophy”) and freedom (with its own peculiar “factuality”).21 In general, the neo-Schellingians are followers of Schelling to the extent they eschew the exclusive choice between human freedom and metaphysics. They chose both. Tillich’s second doctoral thesis on Schelling, Mysticism and GuiltConsciousness in Schelling’s Philosophical Development, stands firmly in this tradition. Mysticism is “the feeling of unity with the absolute.”22 Only on the basis of some form of affinity between man and God, Tillich claims, can any knowledge of God—and so a speculative theology—occur. Equiprimordial with this principle, however, Tillich also posits guiltconsciousness, “consciousness of opposition to God . . . the experience of contradiction between Holy Lord and sinful creature.”23 Present alongside mystic union with God is always an awareness of unworthiness in His eyes. This second element is the very principle most philosophical speculation suppresses; Schelling alone gave guilt-consciousness the status it deserved, according to Tillich. By acknowledging guilt-consciousness as well as identity, Schelling permits a moment of the irrational into his system. As

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Tillich writes, “The supreme principle of all reality [becomes] the identity of essence and contradiction, of the rational and the irrational.”24 That is, no theology should deny humanity’s separation from God and radical freedom to sin; yet, on the other hand, no theology should use this as an excuse to sacrifice God’s relation with the world and the systematic speculation this makes possible. Both aspects (system and freedom) must be retained, and the struggle to achieve this is the struggle to theologize.25 Always, Schelling’s own successes remained normative for Tillich, providing the model to aspire to. Schelling’s philosophy exemplifies a “both . . . and . . . ” logic from which results a non-dualist thinking of human freedom embedded in and commensurate with wider reality.

The Beginning of All Genuine Philosophy Nevertheless, it is not merely the incorporation of system and freedom for its own sake that interests Tillich. When he returns to Schelling in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the real stakes of Tillichian neo-Schellingianism begin to emerge. Here we have Tillich’s polemical insistence that Schelling was “the predecessor of all existentialists,” and his late Berlin lectures “the original document of existential philosophy,” but there is also something more: the correlation of system and freedom is what allows the theologian to attend to the matter of ultimate concern itself.26 That is, as we have already seen at length, Schelling “attempts to return to an attitude in which the sharp gulf between the “subjective” and “objective” realms had not yet been created.”27 Further, Tillich now emphasizes, this is done in the name of revealing an underlying asubjective-anobjective transcendental condition of experience. Schelling “turned toward ‘subjectivity’, not as something opposed to ‘objectivity’, but as that living experience in which both objectivity and subjectivity are rooted . . . [He] tried to discover the creative realm of being which is prior to and beyond the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity.”28 Such a realm of being is “the Source whence springs my thinking and acting.”29 To locate and describe this source is the very pinnacle of criticism, for this is the transcendental condition that makes all of life possible. The correlation between man and world (freedom and system) is here recast as a means of accessing a further principle—piety, the primordial realm of ultimate concern that orients both being as a whole and the human subject in particular. The transcendental source of subjective existence and

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objective being is the ground/abyss of all life and is obtained through a neoSchellingian methodology. That is, Tillich (repeating German Idealism) identifies the Kantian attempt to pinpoint the psychological conditions of representation with the metaphysical search for grounds of being; he realises, that is, that “the transcendental stratum of knowledge corresponds to the transcendental stratum of being,” and such a speculo-critical transcendental stratum is named “ultimate concern.”30 This then is one of the core functions of Tillichian correlation in general: the determination of ultimacy through a dual discourse of man and world. The discussion of revelation in the first volume of the Systematic Theology further clarifies this knot of criticism, correlation, and ultimacy. Revelation is defined precisely as “the manifestation of what concerns us ultimately,” the refocusing of attention onto pieties.31 Such a process of refocusing consists in two moments (that ultimately collapse into identity): a “negative side” of critique and a positive moment of speculation where there “opens a new dimension of knowledge, the dimension of understanding in relation to our ultimate concern and to the mystery of being.”32 It is of course the initial critical moment that concerns me here, a moment that is rigorously correlated by Tillich into accounts of the (objective) “abysmal element in the ground of being” and a (subjective) ecstatic shock to the mind.33 In a paragraph that recalls the later Schelling as much as it foreshadows Goodchild’s Deleuzian invocation of limit-experiences, Tillich writes: The threat of non-being, grasping the mind, produces the “ontological shock” in which the negative side of the mystery of being—its abysmal element—is experienced. “Shock” points to a state of mind in which the mind is thrown out of its normal balance, shaken in its structure. Reason reaches its boundary line, is thrown back upon itself, and then is driven again to its extreme situation.34

Criticism—in its Tillichian, Schellingian, and Goodchildian form—takes reason beyond itself to its ground and abyss, as “the beginning of all genuine philosophy.”35 Therefore, to limit Tillich’s neo-Schellingianism to the inventory of freedom and system is insufficient; indeed, it does not get at what matters most. Such an inadequate account tends to pigeonhole Tillich as a metaphysician attempting to provide a cosmological account of freedom. What I am arguing in this essay, however, is that Tillich is a critical thinker, and what he takes from Schelling and bequeaths (indirectly) to Goodchild is a critical project, a discourse that names and describes the conditions of

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naming what is of ultimate concern. Tillich is speculative insofar as he is critical and (ultimately) he is critical insofar as he is speculative. For Tillich as for the German Idealists, the post-Kantian critical project reaches a point indistinguishable from speculation, thereby “abolishing the contrast between metaphysics and epistemology.”36 This is, in keeping with Tillich’s slogan that “understanding Kant means transcending Kant” a repetition of criticism that transcends the strictures placed on it in Kantian and neo-Kantian traditions.37 Of course, one can find plenty of attacks on the latter throughout Tillich’s works— from the attack on neo-Kantianism that opens Mysticism and GuiltConsciousness through the 1922 article on Religionsphilosophie (published in the Kantstudien Jahrgang) that speaks of the emptiness, formalism, and fideism of critical thinking to the derogatory comments that litter the Systematic Theology.38 Much of Tillich’s output should indeed be defined by “a protest against the methodological formalism of the Kantians.”39 Nevertheless, I contend, criticism tout court is not thereby discarded; rather, it returns in a more originary form as the description, transformation, and amelioration of what concerns us ultimately—or, in the language of the opening to the Systematic Theology, the testing and interrogation of theological concepts by means of formal criteria for ultimacy.40 To put it bluntly, criticism returns as the critique of idolatry, where such a critique is not extrinsic to the theological enterprise but the ground from whence it perpetually begins again.41 There emerges here, therefore, a mutant form of criticism that is also, I will argue in the next section, the most paradigmatic form of criticism (“criticism as such”) to the extent that it identifies and describes the transcendental condition of subjective experience and objective being that Kant misses: ultimate concern—or piety.42

Criticism as Such Theology becomes critical in Tillich’s neo-Schellingianism. In order to enrich this description of such criticism (and the conditions of its own possibility), I now turn to Philip Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion, which stands squarely in both a Schellingian and Tillichian tradition insofar as it conceives the task of thinking as an encounter with and reorientation of what matters most. Capitalism and Religion stands under the same Marxian epigraph, “The criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,” that is an essential component of Tillich’s “transcending” of Kant.43 Developing the tradition of critical theology further through Goodchild’s work enables us to note three key aspects: first, the knot that exists between critique and

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crisis (one that is verified in their etymological affinity, even if it extends beyond this); second, the extensity of the crisis with which the critical thinker must engage; and third, the inextricable relation between critique and futurity. A κριτικός is someone able to make judgments, that is, someone trained in the art of κρίσις, for κρίσις (as we know) originally meant judgment or the act of judging. A critical thinker, in consequence, is also concerned with crises. She is concerned, that is, not only with describing the conditions of already existing crises, but also with discerning new crises for thought. This could perhaps suggest a breach from Tillich’s selfunderstanding of the critical project: for, surely, Tillich’s early work most often takes the form of a rejection of theologies of crisis (Barth, Gogarten)? And yet Tillich’s response to the dialectical theologian is always to radicalize and intensify the crisis—“to submit not only dialectically but really to paradox.”44 The theologian, that is, must submit completely to “the No.”45 At that moment, crisis (and so criticism) is not transcended, but enriched and deepened by “the positive paradox,” the speculative affirmation that is identical to all criticism: The theology of crisis is right, completely right, in its struggle against every unparadoxical, immediate, objective understanding of the unconditioned. It is no transition, but something permanent, an element in the essence of theology. But it has a presupposition which is itself no longer crisis.46

For Tillich, therefore, as for Goodchild and (as we shall see) for Schelling, the κριτικός thinks only of crises. Whereas the Kantian corpus responds to the crisis of metaphysics and Tillich to the crisis of idolatry, Goodchild’s early work similarly responds to the crisis of piety—a crisis that is simultaneously ecological, economic, and mental.47 The material nature of these crises should not be overlooked; the critical thinker is not merely provoked by ideas, but by the lack (or abundance) of matter: The last insight to arrive [in writing this book] was the contemporary truth of suffering: a growing awareness that current trends in globalisation, trade and the spread of technology are not only leading towards a condition where the human habitat is unsustainable, but the urgency and responsibility announced by the preventable catastrophe mean that little else is worth thinking about.48

The Goodchildian project cannot, therefore, consist merely in the identification and description of the conditions of these crises; it needs also

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to ameliorate, transform, and intensify these conditions in the name of a better future, fusing criticism with activism. To put it bluntly, Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion is nothing other than a threefold investigation into the possibility of a future for thought: a diagnosis of the present conditions of crisis-ridden thinking, a description of the future conditions necessary for renewing thought, and, crucially, also an attempt to meet these conditions. This forms “a critical theory of piety.”49 According to Goodchild, piety designates the process by which we select what matters most and maintain a relationship to it. Piety is “a determinate practice of directing attention towards that which matters.”50 Piety is not the only condition of thought of course, but, because it is the arbiter of that to which thought is ultimately directed, it is both a necessary and universal condition. It “makes a meaningful experience of the world possible.”51 Piety is a transcendental condition of thought, corresponding structurally almost exactly to Tillichian ultimacy. Again, we can discern that thinkers in this critical tradition do not merely imitate the Kantian critical project; they are in fact more critical than Kant. And this is because the crisis of piety (or ultimate concern) is the crisis of thought par excellence. Goodchild, like Tillich and Schelling before him, situates the philosopher at the site of crisis as such as a form of criticism as such. Moreover, criticism as such is not merely a thinking of crisis (as objective genitive), but thinking as crisis (the subjective genitive). Goodchild makes this particularly clear in the autobiographical Preface to Capitalism and Religion: Each of these [crises] fractured my self-consciousness, exposing an abyss beneath all my thoughts and relations to myself, to others and to the world. I became a stranger to those closest to me as well as to myself. Each issue imposed itself as a dynamic force on thought, a problem of unlimited importance that I feel barely equipped to begin to address . . . [On the one hand] the public consensus is engaged in a vast enterprise of evasion, sheltering in a wicked and lethal complacency. Yet each of these problems calls to and awakens the others. Anyone who carefully attends to the significance of these issue may risk having their world shattered. Thinking is nearly as dangerous as complacency.52

Criticism is a dangerous business, for it puts itself at risk to search out, utilize, and redeploy “dynamic forces” liberated by the shock of catastrophe. It is not only the doxa of common sense but also philosophy’s and theology’s “defences and shields against the absolute” that usually protect us from such danger.53 To confront crisis and become a κριτικός, one must “unthink” these grounds.

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According to Goodchild, such unthinking is to be achieved through practices of disorientation, such as “the art of cultivating ecstatic states” or “an experience of the chaotic interval.”54 At the limit, the potencies of thought (defined as “the unconditioned within experience”) manifest themselves in an “apocalyptic experience” that finally disciplines attention to what matters most:55 Awareness is normally dim because, although it can direct attention, there is nothing which can reveal it as a focus of attention. The unthinkable, even though it is thought by right, does not normally come into thought. Piety cannot choose to indicate a potency. Yet potency may indicate itself. Whether in global catastrophe or in minor domestic cruelty, suffering is a sign that indicates an absolute: there is something that matters, something that motivates and empowers us.56

In a crisis, a new, liberatory “ethics of thinking” can reveal itself, one that both attends to and reorients our ultimate concern. Here thought meets “the challenge of contemporary ethics . . . to incarnate that excess of force within reason, so that reason itself becomes a force.”57 With this ideal in mind, Goodchild concludes Capitalism and Religion in the following Tillicho-Schellingian terms, The consummation of critical piety comes in the form of awareness of potency, when a potency indicates, dramatizes and individuates itself. Such an awareness, such a rare experience, empowers attention no longer to focus simply on itself but to grant attention to what lies outside, to that which matters. Such is the aim of philosophy.58

The Future of Piety Central to Goodchild’s conception of the critical project is the futurity of piety. Goodchild defines piety as “an orientation towards the future,” transforming this type of critical theory into a thinking aware of its own future.59 To grasp what is at stake in this conception of criticism, it is crucial to recognize the role of the three Goodchildian “potencies” and their basis in Schelling’s Weltalter drafts. Goodchild repeats the three Schellingian potencies of experience as a relation between the past, present, and future. He speaks of the Weltalter as “a dialectic of potencies [which] must describe the construction of modes of piety and their dissolution,” concluding, “In addition to the dialectic driven by lack and contradiction, Schelling indicates that the will does not

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merely seek to overcome the past, but actively searches for the future.”60 At first glance, Goodchild’s reading of Schelling seems derivative of Žižek’s. Like Žižek, Goodchild makes much of the final page of the 1813 draft of the Weltalter: “The Eternal leads the force of the highest consciousness into unconsciousness and sacrifices it to externality so that there might be life and actuality.”61 This passage continues, This is how things had to stand if there were to be an eternal beginning, an eternal ground. That primordial deed which makes a man genuinely himself precedes all individual actions; but immediately after it is put into exuberant freedom, this deed sinks into the night of unconsciousness. This is not a deed that could happen once and then stop; it is a permanent deed, a never-ending deed, and consequently it can never again be brought before consciousness . . . This deed occurs once and then immediately sinks back into the unfathomable depths.62

A hasty reading of Goodchild’s interpretation could easily identify piety with the Schellingian notion of “beginning.” Piety, like the past, is ineluctably suppressed and forgotten in modern thinking.63 The potency of the past, on this reading, is a transcendental condition of existence that makes life possible, but must equally necessarily be suppressed and pushed into the past for that life to be possible. A Žižekian Goodchild would claim: both the positing and negation of piety are necessary for the possibility of thought. As the future of thinking would depend on the suppression of all pieties, criticism in any form would become impossible. The above already indicates why Goodchild cannot subscribe to this Žižekian reading of the Weltalter and, indeed, he explicitly distances himself from Žižek.64 Goodchild does not identify piety with a necessarily suppressed and unavailable past; rather, as we have already seen, Goodchild identifies piety with the potency of the future. Moreover, he puts this Schellingian future of the third potency into battle with the capitalist future. So, on the one hand, there is that dead and empty vision of the future that asserts: To save time is to reinvest the time we spend on time itself. This reflexive intensifying process leaves little time to spare for other needs that demand our attention. The essence of contemporary ideology is a focused and selfenclosed attention: in focusing on expectations about future rates of return, extrapolated from limited processes in the present, and in focusing on saving time, one loses sight of reality.65

And on the other hand there is a critical future that promises transformation through asking, in Schelling’s words: “Is [the future] not just that

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inner spiritual matter which still lies concealed in all things of this world, only awaiting its liberation?”66 And the key issue, of course, is how to construct the latter as resistance to the former.

After the Deluge Goodchild, Tillich, and Schelling all assert (in their own way) the following thesis: the future is born out of catastrophe. Crisis is a key theme in Schelling’s work from 1809 onward. The Freiheitsschrift, for example, is intent on charting the eruption of grounds (whether geological, metaphysical, epistemological, or religious). The history of religion sketched at the end of this work follows the ultimate ground (or in Tillich’s vocabulary, ultimacy itself) as it recurs in more ideal forms, transforming itself into light, spirit, and finally love.67 However, interspersed are a series of catastrophes. For example, “Because the principle of the depths can never give birth for itself to true and complete unity, the time comes in which all this glory decays as through horrible disease, and finally chaos again ensues.”68 Or again, At last there results the crisis in the turba gentium which overflow the foundations of the ancient world as once the waters of the beginning again covered the creations of primeval time.69

History in the Freiheitsschrift incorporates a catastrophic flooding, or, in Grant’s words, “a geological eruption in the midst of the philosophy of freedom.” 70 A philosophy of piety (a philosophy of the future) must concern itself with these catastrophes—these moments when piety as a suppressed transcendental condition is finally revealed. Put more prosaically, what matters most to us becomes particularly clear in a crisis: such is the commonplace assertion that Schelling’s geological ontology attempts to justify. A similar mapping of the catastrophic alternation of grounding and ungrounding dominates Schelling’s Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology. Historical time, and so the very possibility of the future, is constructed through crisis (an unprethinkable event of separation). Moreover, in a prefiguring of Tillichian correlation, Schelling articulates this crisis in the dual discourses of objectivity and subjectivity. In addition to the constitution of separate nation-peoples through crisis (including references once more to a primordial great flood), such an event is also “a spiritual crisis that . . . occurred in the foundation of human

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consciousness itself.” 71 It “shake[s] consciousness in its principle, in its foundation” as “a tremoring of consciousness itself ” (words that again recall Tillich’s description of revelation).72 Thus, the necessary condition of the possibility of a future for the subject and the world is a crisis. Out of crisis, the future emerges. What is more, for Schelling, language (particularly the language of mythology, i.e., divine names) is a privileged record of this coming into being of the future through catastrophe. It is “a body of unprethinkable human knowledge.” 73 Hence, Schelling’s crucial assertion: “In the formation of the oldest languages a wealth of philosophy can be discovered.” 74 Only through study of the crisis through which matters of ultimate concern are revealed can thought become adequate to itself, thereby intensifying the critical project; as the last words of the lecture course put it, the philosophy of mythology gives rise to “the power to expand philosophy and the philosophical consciousness itself or to determine them in an expansion beyond their current limits.” 75 So the task of a Schellingian critical theorist is to interrogate and test names, so as to confront the crisis anew and intensify thought. This is, in fact, precisely what Schelling undertakes to do in The Deities of Samothrace. The work consists in an investigation of the Greek mysterycult native to the island of Samothrace; it asks why the gods of that cult were given the names they were and, for our purposes, what is key is the link Schelling establishes between a geological catastrophe and these divine names (naming gods, of course, being a particularly obvious example of the process of piety or manifesting ultimate concern).76 The work opens with a geological survey of the island that focuses, in particular, on a prehistoric flood (once more): Ancient geographers surmised that great convulsions of nature afflicted these regions even up to human times. It may be that the waters of the Black Sea, raised simply by flooding, first broke through the Thracian Strait, and then through the Hellespont. Or that the force of a subterranean volcano altered the level of the waters. The oldest Samothrace stories, transmuted into monuments exhibited in commemoration, preserved an account of this event, and from that time on they fostered the reverence and patronage of the native gods.77

An eruption of geological grounds gave rise to a catastrophe (commemorated in “the oldest Samothrace stories”) that in turn triggered a new reverence for the divine among the people of Samothrace. The Samothracian mystery-cult, Schelling insists, was born from a “great convulsion of nature”

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(the “turba gentium” of the Freiheitsschrift). The critical stakes of this opening passage should now be clear: only in crises can the thinker gain access to grounds; only then can she “theologically unthink.” Moments of catastrophe—like the flooding of Samothrace—make possible a critical thinking attempting to identify its own conditions. Criticism must take any and all crises as its subject matter, including the flooding of Samothrace—and this is especially true when such catastrophe has already been commemorated and attested to in the religion of those affected by it. The founders of the Samothracian mystery-cults were κριτικόι par excellence, for, situated at the site of a crisis, they invented new forms of discourse and (most significantly) new pieties to bear witness to the ground that was made manifest to them. This is an archetype of criticism as such—and it is perhaps for this reason that Schelling devotes a treatise to it. Schelling’s analysis of the Samothracian mystery-cult is a means of locating the pieties which had surfaced during the crisis. Thought only has a future if such pieties can be described, and such description is dependent upon thinking (as) catastrophe (as Schelling does here). To analyze divine names philosophically is simultaneously to reveal the workings of criticism itself: The Deities of Samothrace is ultimately a meta-philosophical enterprise.

The Right to Name, or Back to Kant The above may seem to have strayed far from Tillich; however, an analysis of two quotations can rapidly show otherwise. First: One is enabled to speak of that which is most vital in the present, of that which makes the present a generative force, only insofar as one immerses oneself in the creative process which brings the future forth out of the past.78

“What is most vital in the present” or what concerns us ultimately is constituted and attended to through a synthesis of time—in line with Goodchild’s assertion, “modes of piety are syntheses of time.”79 Past events bring forth the future, and it is only a thinking that submits itself to this temporal process (in parallel to, if not in identity with, its submission to crisis) that can genuinely be called critical. Indeed, Tillich even interprets Schelling (and particularly his Weltalter) through this very idea of “history viewed in light of the future.”80 Tillich’s Schelling is very much the Goodchildian Schelling of the third potency, just as Tillich’s critical project as a whole is one attentive to the future of thinking.

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The second quotation is taken from Tillich’s typology of reason in the opening to Perspectives. Here he more than half-heartedly affirms the revolutionary power of “critical reason”: It was not a calculating reason which decides whether to do this or that, depending on which is more advantageous. Rather, it was a full, passionate, revolutionary emphasis on man’s essential goodness in the name of the principle of justice.81

Tillich goes on to label it “revolutionary reason,” and in so doing he links critique inextricably to the power to change the future, to reorient one’s ultimate concerns, and to manage one’s pieties differently.82 In his invocations of justice and revolution, he also makes explicit a theme that has been bubbling under the surface of this essay from the very beginning: criticism and politics. It is with this link that I want to conclude. At stake here is the right or legitimacy by which the κριτικός accesses what is ultimate, names it, and transforms it: from where does the κριτικός obtain this authority? It is, I am arguing, a matter of positioning. The κριτικός has the right to name what grounds and ungrounds experience because she stands in the position from which the ground is most accessible. It is a matter, therefore, of the proximity from which one confronts the crisis—that is, of politics. Criticism as such, I have argued, concerns itself with crises. It situates itself in limit-experiences where piety (or the future) manifests itself. What orients thinking and acting only becomes clear in a crisis—and, as this principle of orientation is a key transcendental condition, criticism is not criticism as such unless it thinks (in a) crisis. The κριτικός must seek out the crises in the turba gentium, because it is there that the future is manufactured. There is a danger here and it is a danger of which Kant in particular was acutely aware—the danger of proximity. A revolutionary, Kant implies, is not a critical thinker, because criticism necessitates distance from what is being described. That criticism which places itself too close to catastrophe can no longer be criticism. This danger Kant dubs, “fanaticism.”83 There are two related reasons why a revolutionary fanatic cannot be a κριτικός. First, the fanatic does not have the discursive distance to think about the crisis. In the middle of the crisis itself, there is no privileged position to describe its contents and to view the ground as it reveals itself. The fanatic is too close. Second, Kant writes, fanaticism “is the delusion of wanting to see something beyond all bounds of sensibility.”84 For our purposes, this is the error of impatience: instead of awaiting the emergence of the future in the crisis, the fanatic tries to realize it too quickly, to anticipate. The κριτικός must be patient. Such is what Goodchild designates

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“absolute faith”: “Absolute faith allows the future to be constituted as a gift of the potencies. Absolute faith waits.”85 This poses a problem. Throughout this essay, I have argued that Kant did not go far enough; he did not practise criticism as such. Is his exclusion of the fanatic another example of this failure to cultivate criticism as such or should such critical thinking follow Kant in prohibiting the figure of the fanatic from critical thought? In fact, this question need not be answered head-on, for Kant himself offers a way out of this stark dichotomy by means of an additional concept—enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a means both to participate in a revolution and be critical. Enthusiasm for Kant “is a straining of our forces by ideas that impart to the mind a momentum whose effects are mightier and more permanent than are those of an impulse produced by presentations of sense.”86 It is “the state of mind in which it has become inflamed by any principle above the proper degree.”87 That is, enthusiasm is an excess of attention, a state in which ultimate concern becomes more manifest. Thus, for Kant, “ Nothing great in the world has been done without [enthusiasm].”88 History (the future) comes to pass only through enthusiasm (attention to what is ultimate)—a pattern that has been repeated throughout this essay. Toscano has recently drawn attention to the constructive role of enthusiasm in Kant’s political philosophy. Arguing against Arendt, Lyotard, Critchley, and all those who see Kant as a philosopher of neutrality, an anti-enthusiast, Toscano develops the idea of the philosopher as partisan spectator from Kant’s writings on the French Revolution. Kant does not advise the philosopher (or indeed any enlightened citizen) to remain apathetic and indifferent to the events in France; instead, he recommends for any spectator regarding these events from afar to feel enthusiasm at what they see—and this enthusiasm reveals “a tendency and faculty in human nature for improvement.”89 Toscano continues, What allows these spectators’ affective participation in the good to serve as a sign of human progress is not their impartiality, but the very fact that, at the risk of persecution, they are taking sides for the revolution. It is not impartiality but partisanship that defines the universal import of political judgment . . . These are not disincarnate, objective spectators, judging in terms of a dispassionate vision of the whole; instead they embody a passionate yet disinterested partisanship . . . The spectator ‘acts’ through the risky choice of public partisanship, and that what his enthusiasm signals towards is the very capacity of the human being to be a collective historical political agent.90

The critical thinker is an enthusiastic partisan. While she is not a fanatic militant situated in the fray (so liable to the errors of immediacy and

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impatience), neither is she apathetic and unconcerned. She possesses discursive distance, yet still attends to the crisis. What is more, and here Kant is insistent, something more is revealed to this enthusiastic philosopher than would have otherwise been: enthusiasm reveals the human faculty for improvement. Amelioration is possible for the enthusiastic κριτικός, the thinker of the revolution or the catastrophe. At this point, Kant approaches Tillich, Schelling, and Goodchild most closely. As a coda to this invocation of the politics of criticism or an extension of its cultural purview, one final work cited by Toscano must be brought in to enrich the problematic: Euclides da Cuhna’s Rebellion in the Backlands.91 What is remarkable about da Cuhna’s book is that it takes as its subject matter all of the crises covered in this essay (and more) in the name of understanding the formation and orientation of a future political community. It is the synthesis of all attempts at criticism as such. Rebellion begins with an extensive geological survey of the relevant region of Brazil in the manner of Schelling’s Deities of Samothrace. As Toscano goes on to point out, “Geological violence seems to presage and prepare the apocalyptic politics.”92 Geological crises are also crises of politics and religion: in all three, the same pieties, the same concerns, and the same future are revealed. Moreover, da Cuhna explicitly invokes these links among politics, religion, and geology in the name of prophecy—that is, in the name of the future. Rebellion sets itself the task of using these crises, revolutions, and catastrophes as means of uncovering the future for the people of Brazil. Brazil’s future is manufactured out of these past events, because in these events the ultimate concerns of Brazilian society is revealed. Just like Schelling in the Deities of Samothrace, da Cuhna “joins geology and millenarianism,” and this eclectic carnival of genres, subject matters, and concepts rearranged in the name of revealing what matters most should, it is my contention, be seen as akin to Tillich’s project and so be dubbed “critical philosophy as such.”93

Notes 1. Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Call to Radical Theology, ed. Lissa McCullough (Albany: SUNY, 2012), 1. 2. Tillich, The Courage to Be, 172–173. 3. René Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy, §1 (in, e.g., Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (London: Penguin, 1998), 112). 4. Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s work from the late 1970s that is also driven by this question (e.g., Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Bernard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). Bradley A. Johnson, The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville: Aesthetics, Politics, Duplicity (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 77. Ibid. See Paul Tillich, “Philosophy and Theology.” In Hauptwerke, ed. John Clayton et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), 4:279; Paul Tillich, “On the Boundary.” In The Boundaries of Our Being, trans. J. Heywood Thomas (London: Fontana, 1973), 297. Ibid., 6–7. Significantly for this paper, Johnson employs a model derived from Schelling’s Weltalter to make this argument. Bradley A. Johnson, “Making All Things New: Kant and Rancière on the Unintentional Intentional Practice of Aesthetics.” In After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, ed. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastle: CSP, 2010), 377–378. Ibid., Johnson is here quoting Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002), as we shall see. Tillich, “On the Boundary,” 321. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1929), A11/B25. Tillich, Perspectives, 142. Paul Tillich, “Schelling und die Anfänge des Existentialistischen Protestes” in Hauptwerke, 1:392. This is, of course, to accept Tillich’s later mythologising of his encounter with Schelling at face-value; for a concerted attempt to demythologise it, see the works of Christian Danz, especially Religion als Freiheitsbewußtsein (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000). Karl Jaspers, Schelling: Größe und Verhängnis (Munich: Piper, 1955), 332; translated in Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman, “Introduction” to the New Schelling (London: Continuum, 2004), 2. Gabriel Marcel, “Schelling fut-il un précurseur de la philosophie de l’existence?” In Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale (1957), 87. Ibid., 86. See further George Pattison, Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 20. See further Gabriel Marcel, “An Essay in Autobiography.” In The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Citadel, 1956), 105–106. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 4, 27, 164. Tillich, Mysticism and Guilt-Consciousness, 27. Ibid. Ibid., 112. Similar claims are made as early as Tillich’s initial doctoral thesis on Schelling. Here Schelling is said to combine two methods in his philosophising on religion: an anthropological study of man as the giver of meaning to religion and a metaphysical examination of the structures of being that

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

Daniel Whistler make religion possible. As such, “To reach the essence of religion it is necessary to conceive the spirituality of man in an original and substantial relatedness to God. The method becomes speculative” (Tillich, Construction, 119). The anthropological starting-point in man is combined with a speculative extension of philosophy into a concern with God. As Tillich expressed it in 1948, “The way to ontology passes through the doctrine of man.” (Paul Tillich, “Existential Philosophy: Its Historical Meaning.” In Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 98). Tillich, “Schelling und die Anfänge,” 394; Perspectives, 141. Tillich, “Existential Philosophy,” 107. Ibid. Ibid., 92. Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History, trans. Elsa L. Talmey (New York: Scribner, 1936), 158. Tillich, Systematic Theology vol. 1, 110. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 113. Ibid. Paul Tillich, quoted in Gunther Wenz, “An Introduction to Paul Tillich’s Philosophical Writings,” Hauptwerke 1, 12. On this point in relation to Goodchild, see Joshua Ramey and Daniel Whistler, “The Physics of Sense: Bruno, Schelling, Deleuze.” In The Metaphysics of Gilles Deleuze, ed. Edward Kazarian et al. (Lexington, MA: Lexington, 2013). Tillich, Perspectives, 70. See, for example, Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 82–83; Tillich, Mysticism and Guilt-Consciousness, 22; Paul Tillich, “Religionsphilosophie,” Hauptwerke 4, 125–130. Tillich, The Interpretation of History, 124. For these formal criteria, see Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 12–14. C.f. the discussion of Tillich’s notion of “critical reason” in the conclusion to this essay. On Kant’s refusal to countenance piety (and its relation to Goodchild’s work), see Daniel Whistler, “The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goethe, Herder, Kant.” In Moral Powers, Fragile Beliefs: Essays in Moral and Religious Philosophy, ed. Joseph Carlisle, James Carter and Daniel Whistler (London: Continuum, 2011). Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro. htm; last accessed: March 17, 2013); quoted in Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, v. Paul Tillich, “Critical and Positive Paradox.” In The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, trans. Keith R. Crim and ed. James M. Robinson (Richmond: John Knox, 1968), 141; my emphasis.

Schelling, Tillich, and Goodchild 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

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Ibid., 135. Ibid., 141. See, for example, Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 247. Ibid., xiii. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 248. Ibid., x. Ibid., xiv. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 194, 174. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 239–240. Ibid., 157, 250–251. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 112, 229. Žižek’s reading of Schelling concentrates on the notion of “the Beginning” or the self-genesis of God: “Since there is nothing outside God, [he] has to beget out of himself a Son, that is, the Word which will resolve the unbearable tension. The undifferentiated pulsation of drives is thus supplanted by the stable network of differences, which sustains the self-identity of the differentiated entities . . . Consciousness arises from the primordial act which separates present, actual consciousness from the spectral, shadowy realm of the unconscious” (The Abyss of Freedom in F.W.J. Schelling, Ages of the World (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 32–33). In Lacanian terms, this is the “passage from the Real to history” (Ibid., 37). However, it follows from this (in an orthodox Lacanian manner) that reality is formed at the expense of the Real (the past): the Beginning “is ultimately always ill-fitting, contingent. It “betrays” the subject, represents him inadequately” (The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 2007), 43). To begin always comes at a price: “The price is the irretrievable loss of the subject’s self-identity: the verbal sign that stands for the subject— in which the subject posits himself as self-identical—bears the mark of an irreducible dissonance; it never ‘fits’ the subject” (Ibid., 47). The suppression of the past is “the elusive intangible gap that sustains ‘reality’” (Ibid., 68). F. W. J. Schelling, Ages of the World, trans. Judith Norman (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 179; quoted in Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 111. Schelling, Ages of the World, 179. Thus Goodchild claims, “Modern reason eliminates access to piety” (Goodchild 6). In other words, “Piety [is] invisible” because modernity “arises from a disavowal of the determinate practices of directing attention.” (Ibid., 247–250) See Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 124. Ibid., 144.

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66. Schelling, Ages of the World, 151; quoted in Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 113. 67. F. W. J. Schelling, Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (La Salle: Open Court, 1936), 56–58. 68. Ibid., 56. 69. Ibid., 57–58. 70. Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006), 17. 71. F. W. J. Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselberger (Albany: SUNY, 2007), 73. 72. Ibid., 75. 73. Ibid., 65. The Homeric poems in particular are documents of this process: “The crisis . . . takes place in the poets themselves, forms their poems.” Ibid., 18. 74. Ibid., 39. 75. Ibid., 175. 76. Therefore, Tillich’s definition of “gods” in the Systematic Theology: “Gods . . . are expressions of the ultimate concern which transcends the cleavage between subjectivity and objectivity” (1:214). 77. F. W. J. Schelling, The Deities of Samothrace, ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977), 15. For more on this reading of Deities, see Daniel Whistler, “Language after Philosophy of Nature: Schelling’s Geology of Divine Names.” In After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, ed. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastle: CSP, 2010). 78. Tillich, Religious Situation, 34. 79. Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 191. 80. Tillich, “Existential Philosophy,” 101. 81. Tillich, Perspectives, 32. 82. Ibid. 83. The two key discussions of fanaticism—outside the passage from the Critique of Judgment cited below—occur in Essay on the Maladies of the Head, 2:267 and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 2:251 (both collected in Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. and ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). My discussion of Kant in the next two paragraphs is dependent upon Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), 120–146. 84. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 5:275. 85. Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 237. 86. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 5:272. Kant does not always use “enthusiasm” so positively, see, for example, Kant, Observations, 2:221. 87. Kant, Observations, 2:251; quoted in Toscano, Fanaticism, 123. 88. Kant, On the Maladies of the Head, 2:267; quoted in Toscano, Fanaticism, 123.

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89. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. A. W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 304; quoted in Toscano, Fanaticism, 139. 90. Toscano, Fanaticism, 143–144. 91. Euclides da Cuhna, Rebellion in the Backlands, trans. Samuel Putnam (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 92. Toscano, Fanaticism, 62. 93. Ibid.

Chapter 13 Radical Apologetics: Paul Tillich and Radical Philosophical Atheism Russell Re Manning

The False Humilty of Correlation Paul Tillich is perhaps best known for his apologetic theology, in which he develops theological answers to existential questions. Tillich names this approach “correlation” and gives as a definition that the “method of correlation explains the contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence.”1 For many, this methodological stance represents the last great hurrah of liberal modern theology: reactive and thus dependant upon the secular philosophy that it seeks to reply to and that it is positioned by. It is precisely this sort of theological loss of nerve that John Milbank has in mind when proposing his radical alternative: The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. For theology, [sic.] this must be a fatal disease, because once theology surrenders its claim to be a meta-discourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God, but is bound to turn into the oracular voice of some finite idol . . . If theology no longer seeks to position, qualify or criticize other discourses, then it is inevitably that these other discourses will position theology: for the necessity of an ultimate organizing logic cannot be wished away.2

This view is echoed by Michael Buckley’s genealogy of modern atheism, which, he argues, came out the attempts of early-modern natural

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theologians to provide compelling arguments to convince their scientifically informed contemporaries. Over the centuries the theologians had become philosophers in order to counter a putative atheism. What is more, philosophy had become Newtonian physics, and its apologetic value lay in the ability to do physics better than one’s opponents. If physics declared that it wanted and needed only commensurate principles to explain the mechanical phenomena it was investigating, then the existence of God was left without the foundations upon which the theologians had been counting and to which they had made appeal.3

Modern apologetics, on this view, is neither desirable nor effective and it comes as no surprise to find that the recent forms of theology that position themselves explicitly against “modern liberalism” are equally and strongly allergic to apologetics.4 As such, Tillich appears to be on the wrong side of history or, more charitably, he is afforded a place in histories of modern theology largely as a stock example of the perils of apologetics: a liberal accommodationist who ends up an “ecstatic naturalist” with his abstract and unoffensive talk of “ultimate concern” and “ground of being.”5 Meanwhile, however, the challenge of atheism—the position of those cultured despisers of theology to whom any apologetics is addressed—has not gone away; instead atheism has never been a more pressing threat to theology. Moreover, it has taken on newer and more interesting— and radical—forms that call for newer and more interesting—and more radical—apologetics.6 In this chapter, I suggest the contours of a Tillichian radical apologetics in correlation to radical philosophical atheism, focusing on interpretations of the radical atheism of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida as well as more recent philosophical atheisms of Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Quentin Meillassoux.7 By correlating the death of God as developed philosophically by Heidegger and Derrida, Tillich’s can be reconsidered as a radical apologetics and not simply a positivist rebuttal or pietist refusal of the challenge of radical philosophical atheism.

Radical Philosophical Atheism Common to these recent accounts of radical philosophical atheism is the conviction that much recent theological engagement—and notably the work of John D. Caputo—has not taken sufficient recognition of

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the deep, radical, character of these passionate philosophical atheisms.8 It is my contention that, up to a point, the critiques of Caputo’s overquick theological appropriation of Heidegger and Derrida (and, more recently, Deleuze and Badiou) are well founded; but that this analysis ought by no means to deny the possibility for an alternative—more radical and more Tillichian—theological correlation to radical philosophical atheism. Central to my argument is an appreciation of quite how little radical philosophical atheisms have to do with a denial of the existence of God.9 Instead, properly philosophical atheisms are concerned with ontological and metaphysical questions of the interpretation of being and the nature of life. As such, I argue that a theological response that seeks to co-opt such atheistic philosophy while carefully exempting a “genuine” theology—variously articulated as “non-idolatrous,” “non-metaphysical,” or “non-ontotheological”—is profoundly misguided and fails to respond substantively to the real a-theological force of these philosophical atheisms. Instead, I wish to propose the outlines of a radically Tillichian theological correlation to these philosophical atheisms—one that is, I suggest, foreshadowed by a distinction Caputo himself draws between “radical” and “confessional” theologies (as Caputo puts it: “radical theology is not the theology of a rival religion”).10 The key to such a correlation lies in Tillich’s own radical revisionary theology that enables us to think (or at least clears some of the conceptual space for such thinking) of an “atheistic theology” that returns us to the primordial piety of the unconditioned— precisely the intention of radical philosophical atheisms—without succumbing to the comforting fidelities of the religions.11 I draw attention to three features. The first is at the level of methodology and the neglected significance of Tillich’s displacement of theology from kerygma to apologia in his revolutionary re-casting of the enterprise of theology as theology of culture. One routinely underestimated aspect of this relocation of theological thought is that, for Tillich, as theology is no longer tied to religion, or religious traditions in the narrow confessional sense, it [theology] becomes, in some sense, theoretically prior or antecedent to religious thought.12 Theology becomes, at least in part, normative cultural analysis and religion becomes part of culture. Culture, as it were, stands between theology and religion and is the site of a conflict between the two.13 Theology, thus, becomes a form of critical theory—or, in the terms of this chapter, a “philosophical theism” able, and necessitated, to respond to philosophical atheism.14 Theology, on this model, is as a result no longer simply the “talk of God” (neither as so-called “speculative theology,” in which God is the “object” of theology,

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nor as “dogmatic theology,” which takes God as its “subject”), but rather as theology of culture theology is the mediated enterprise of the “talk of God of culture.” That is to say, the indirect discussion of the question of ultimacy outside of religion, or a “secular theology”: as Tillich writes, “it seems to me that the unconditioned character of religion becomes far more manifest if it breaks out from within the secular, disrupting and transforming it.”15 The other two features concern Tillich’s more constructive theological proposals in his doctrine of God. Here, more specifically I argue that in Tillich’s account of God as “being-itself” and as the “living God” we find radical theological responses to the radically atheological doctrines of God put forward by Heidegger and Derrida (at least as presented by Hemming and Hägglund). Tillich’s account of God as being-itself tackles Heidegger’s atheology head on by insisting on the irreducible identity of God and being.16 Far from falling into the trap of attempting to separate God from being (always the religious temptation and, of course, a move endorsed by Heidegger himself in his famous 1951 Zurich seminar), Tillich’s “ontotheology” stands as a clear response to Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology. In this, Tillich returns to the roots of theology itself, before it was corrupted by the theistic positivism of religion, in a retrieval of the neo-platonic logic of participation (and not the religious logic of analogy). Thus, it is Heidegger, the philosophical atheist, who yearns for a pristine deity uncompromised by being, and not Tillich, the theologian of the unconditional ground of meaning and being. Secondly, and with obvious roots in Schelling, Tillich’s interpretation of the living God can be read as a direct engagement with Hägglund’s presentation of Derrida’s radical atheism of the autoimmunity of life.17 Instead of attempting—impossibly—to place God outside of the dynamic of life and death, Tillich’s is the radical step of making God alive. As such, Tillich’s is less a theology of the death of God as one of the life of God—and it is far more radical for so being. The God who is dead has, as Hägglund argues and Tillich concurs, never been alive. It is instead the living God, who is forever—that is, all the time—dying.18 Tillich can affirm the possibility of what for Derrida is impossible; not as Caputo does by a passionate faith in the inconceivable (this would be to promote a Kierkegaardian “cosmological” paradox that is wholly alien to Tillich’s “ontological” dialectic) but rather by, in effect, identifying God with life.19 Neither are possible, in the sense of being contingent; both are unconditioned by anything but themselves. Again, here we are far from the religious logic of analogy, but instead find the original, radical, logic of a vital participatory theology (a “vito-theology” of the living God, if you will, to complement Tillich’s “onto-theology” of God as being-itself).

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The Difficulty of Atheism As Nietzsche knew only too well it is the theologians’ blood that runs through the veins of continental philosophy and, whereas the analytic tradition presents a blank rejection of theology, its continental cousin by contrast simply cannot get enough theology. Indeed, one suggestive way of tracing the development of continental philosophy is to present it as a series of atheisms; as a set of strategies for thinking through the death of God, so provocatively agonized over by Nietzsche in The Gay Science. What matters, of course, about Nietzsche’s pronouncements is not that he seeks to deny the existence of God (that question, so beloved of analytic philosophers of religion, barely features at all in continental discussions), but that he calls upon “modern man” [sic] to recognize the consequences of living in a post-theological epoch. A recognition that he warns has not yet been acknowledged: It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.—But what if . . . God should prove to be our most enduring lie?20

Part of the reason, of course, why, for Nietzsche, the death of God though a past occurrence still lies in the future is that theology (i.e., “that Christian faith that was also the faith of Plato”) lies at the very foundations of Western thinking itself: Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means—and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built on this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example the whole of our European morality.21

More insidiously still, Nietzsche suggests that the theological is lodged even within the very ways of thinking that philosophy makes use of in its attempt to think through the death of God: ‘Reason’ in language—oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.22

What is it, in effect, that Nietzsche is concerned with is that the sharp divorce between faith and reason required by Kant’s “critical turn” and summarized by his famous remark in the Preface to the second edition of

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the Critique of Pure Reason (1787) that he “had to deny knowledge to make room for faith” cannot be sustained.23 Faith and reason are too intimately intertwined to enable a true atheism in continental philosophy, in spite of the repeated attempts to imagine such. To oversimplify the story tremendously, I want to suggest two main types or stages of post-Kantian philosophical atheism, both of which are afflicted by Nietzsche’s predicament: “imitative” and “residual.”24 Imitative atheism explicitly rejects theology and its categories but implicitly imitates these very categories by replacing “God” with a supposedly atheistic placeholder, such as “Man” or “Reason.” Imitative atheism is clearly visible in Feuerbach’s “anthropotheism” as well as in Comte’s secular “religion of humanity.” It also haunts Nietzsche himself and finds expression in Heidegger’s attempt to wrestle fundamental ontology free from its theological corruption. By prising “onto-theology” apart, Heidegger succeeds only (if indeed he even does that) in replacing “God” with “Being.” Imitative atheism takes the Kantian either/or seriously, but in seeking to displace God ends up only ever replacing the divine. By contrast, residual atheism “seeks, with a heroic or despairing asceticism, to make do with the meagre residue left over after the departure of God, Truth, Justice, Beauty and so on.”25 Rather than the attempt to dethrone theology, residual atheism aims instead to think without theology, to reject any recourse to theological substance within philosophy. It is, as Foucault puts it in response to any attempt at an idolatrous humanism “un rire philosophique, c’est-à-dire, pour une certaine part, silencieux.”26 This “philosophical laugh” in the face of imitative atheism remains however, itself entangled within the very parasitism that it denounces: In limiting itself to the sensory world as opposed to the suprasensory, the immanent as opposed to the transcendent, residual atheism finds itself—just like imitative atheism—defined in terms of that which it seeks to escape.27

Derrida provides a clear example of this tendency of residual atheism in his repeated insistence that deconstruction resist the very conceptuality of theology, for instance, in his affirmation that deconstruction is not equivalent to negative theology precisely because it refuses to speak of God at all. In so doing, however, Derrida remains under the shadow of the theological; thinking always in the wake of God, never truly without God. Or better, perhaps, Derrida is located “before God,” en attendant Dieu, if you will, as figured in his later notion of a justice that is perpetually “to come.” It is hardly surprising that those in the generation of philosophers after poststructuralism are impatient with such residual atheism. Alain Badiou, for instance, declaims:

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‘A thinking that is entirely to come!’ How irritating is this post-Heideggerian style of perpetual announcement, of the interminable to-come; this sort of secularised prophecy never ceases to declare that we are not yet in a position to think what is to be thought, this pathos of having-to-respond to being, this God who is lacking, this waiting before the abyss, this posture of gazing far into the mist and saying that we see the indistinct approaching! How we long to say: ‘Listen, if this thinking is still entirely to come, come back and see us when at least a piece of it has arrived!’28

Rather than imitating theology or thinking in its wake, this generation of “new materialists” are seeking instead to take up Nietzsche’s demand and follow through on the death of God more rigorously than before. As Christopher Watkin notes, it is no surprise that the failure of continental philosophers finally to be rid of God has occasioned a “return of religion”, understood, as he puts it “as theology’s colonisation of residual atheism by exploiting its gesture of ‘making room’.”29 Referring to Levinas and Marion, Watkin suggests that neither of the dominant atheistic tendencies in continental philosophy succeed in undermining theology root and branch—in fact, ironically, theology and its categories are safely sealed off, preserved intact, as it were, ready to return wholesale and pronounce the era of the post-secular. It is this resurgent religious theology that the “newer” atheisms of Badiou, Nancy, and Meillassoux are ranged against.30

Newer Atheisms One helpful way of characterizing much contemporary continental philosophy is as a rejection of the linguistic apophaticism of the dominant poststructuralism that determined the later twentieth century as the era of postmodernity. Central to this is a dual-faceted turn to materialism and a renewed attempt to think through the death of God. It is also, interestingly, marked by an engagement with the natural sciences (including mathematics) that confounds the easy ascription of the continental/analytic divide as an arts/sciences split. Nature, matter, and the real are key notions and they are located within a philosophical framework that privileges immediacy and presence over the postmodern obsession with difference and alterity. Furthermore, these philosophies aim to be politically engaged, combining a fierce anti-capitalism (itself nothing new within continental philosophy, of course!) with an applied concern with issues surrounding global climate change. Christopher Watkin usefully designates this philosophy as “post-theological” and, in so doing, highlights one of the most significant features for theologians, namely the fierce resistance to the “turn to religion” and

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yet the simultaneous foregrounding of religious ideas. He writes, with reference to Badiou, Nancy, and Meillassoux in particular: The prefix ‘post-‘ is merely an indication of chronology: to think in the West today is to think after God, with concepts and a tradition bequeathed by theology and theologically informed thinking, and even if the aim of such thinking is to be atheological it cannot avoid the task of disengaging itself from the theological legacy. The common impulse of the three posttheological philosophies . . . is that they seek 1) to move beyond imitative and residual atheism in order fundamentally to re-think philosophy without God or the gods and without parasitising any assumptions dependent on them (hence post-theological not merely post-theistic), while nevertheless 2) refusing ascetically to renounce the notions associated with such gods—namely, truth and justice—relinquished by residual atheism.31

Hence the striking prevalence of religious and theological themes within these rigorously atheistic philosophies. In essence, what these philosophies attempt is a reversal of the post-secular strategy of the colonisation of the secular: materialist atheism seeks to colonize theology and, therefore, finally to rid grammar of God. Watkin continues: It is this integration that makes the new post-theological though truly new; it is a turn to religion in order to turn the page on religion . . . What posttheological integration attempts is not to oppose theism but to occupy it, not to expel theism but to ingest it, taking terms and patterns of thought previously associated with theism and reinscribing them . . . 32

One way of getting closer here is to understand this form of continental philosophy as a flat-out rejection of the Kantian critical turn. In a sense, of course, all continental philosophy is a rejection of Kant and his restriction of philosophy to critique, but whereas idealism, phenomenology and post-structuralism tend to leave the framework of the Kantian critical turn intact, Quentin Meillassoux in particular has taken aim at the very heart of the Kantian project itself. Meillassoux charges that Kant’s claim to have inaugurated a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy is fundamentally inaccurate. Far from the Copernican idea of displacing humanity from the center of the cosmos, what Kant in fact achieves is the most uncompromising anthropocentrism possible. This, Meillassoux calls “correlationism” and he is unflinching in his rejection of it. For Meillassoux: Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another.33

This is to say, what Kant denies to subsequent thinking is the possibility of a genuine realism in which the material per se can be present to thought.

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By dislodging the Kantian correlational posture Meillassoux seeks to provide the possibility of an anti-humanist metaphysical scientific realism— or otherwise put, the possibility of imaging the real as just simply what it is: a pure objectivity. This he names the “principle of factuality,” which he defines as follows: only facticity is not factual- viz., only the contingency of what is is not itself contingent.34

In other words, he claims that there is a new answer to the fundamental theological and philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing—and that this answer is both theological and atheological: metaphysical problems are revealed always to have been genuine problems, since they do admit of a solution. But their resolution depends on one precise and highly constraining condition—that we begin to understand that in reply to those metaphysical questions that ask why the world is thus and not otherwise, the response “for no reason” is a genuine answer. Instead of laughing or smiling at questions like “where do we come from?,” “why do we exist?,” we should ponder instead the remarkable fact that the replies “from nothing. For nothing” really are answers, thereby realising that these really were questions –and excellent ones at that. There is no longer mystery, not because there is no longer a problem, but because there is no longer a reason.35

Having thus, as he sees it, freed philosophy from its theologically determined correlationism, a genuinely godless materialism can be proposed, according to which a robustly atheist response can be given to the basic question of existence, thereby deflating any notion of ultimacy by affirming the non-paradoxical “necessity of contingency.” Here, then, we seem to be beyond both imitative and residual forms of atheism. Meillassoux’s materialism is neither a displaced divinity—nature is rather thought of in its “pure naturalness”—nor is it a nihilism lurking in the shadow of God—nature is thought of in its material reality as the thing-in-itself that it is. Unlike the moral outrage that animates anglophone so-called “new atheism” (and thus obscures its real metaphysical significance), this “newer atheism” is squarely and unapologetically post-theological in its atheism. And, of course, it is precisely this that makes it so interesting for theology.

A Theology That Is Not a Theodicy I propose that it is a radically Tillichian philosophical theology that is capable of responding to the underlying ethical objection that really

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motivates these radical philosophical atheisms—namely, the charge of theodicy. Philosophical thought in the wake of the technological transformation of society in the modern turn to capitalist anti-humanism (and equally “anti-nature-ism”) is rightly revolted by any theology that turns to God as providing a sufficient reason for the world’s evils—and in so doing neutralizing any attempts at critical rebellion against the state of creation. For Heidegger and for Derrida, as well as for Meillassoux and his fellow post-theological atheists, the world is in need of salvation and not consolation.36 It is precisely at this point that these philosophers are let down by their theological colleagues, who, in the place of salvation, ironically condemn the world to its fallenness by offering no alternative other than an impossible narrative of a world simultaneously already redeemed and still yet to be completely renewed. It is this eschatology with its infinite deferral of “yet to come” that offends the philosophical voices calling for a present (material) action and it is all a piece with the theological obsession with divine purity—a purity that is repeated in the bizarrely disembodied models of atonement that dominate mainstream (Barthian-inflected) theological accounts of the economy of salvation. Here again, Tillich offers a radical theological alternative with his kairotic Christology of Jesus as the Christ as the bearer of new being; a Christological event that is never completed and that is yet already felt in history (and not just in the history of the church). Strikingly, it is a short step from Tillich’s Christology to his theology of culture—and more specifically his political theology in the form of his decision for religious socialism.37 For all its apparent abstraction, Tillich’s theology impacts directly onto his politics—indeed, his “socialist principle” is clearly a theological and never merely a political notion. Thus, to paraphrase Tillich’s friend and former student, Theodor W. Adorno’s question about the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz, it is Tillich’s that the radical Tillich who enables the future of a theology that is not a theodicy, for a world that is still in need of salvation.

Notes 1. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, 68. 2. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 1. 3. Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 98. 4. In effect, this apologetic allergy is one of the common features of the otherwise highly divergent strands that constitute the dominant mainstream in

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contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. Strikingly, just as John Milbank’s “radical orthodoxy,” the “post-liberal” theology associated with Hans Frei and George Lindbeck and the Barthian-Bonhoefferian line all share a rejection of apologetics, so too do the more philosophical styles of “reformed epistemology” and “analytic theology.” The obvious exception here are the recent various revivals of natural theology, from Richard Swinburne’s cumulative case theism and William Lane Craig’s “reasonable theism” to Alister McGrath’s “scientific theology” and the more indirect imaginative apologetics of John Cottingham, Mark Wynn and Douglas Hedley. For more on the intellectual history and variety of natural theology and the eclipse of apologetics in mainstream theology and philosophy of religion, see Russell Re Manning (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and New Varieties of Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2015). 5. For an example of a positive estimation of such a position, explicitly influenced by Tillich, see the project of Robert S. Corrington, in particular, Nature and Spirit. An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992). A good example of Tillich’s place in textbook accounts of the history of modern theology, see David H. Kelsey’s chapter in David F. Ford (edited with Rachel Muers), The Modern Theologians. An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918. 3rd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 62–75. 6. As should be obvious, my reference to “newer” atheism is intended to distinguish the kind of philosophically atheism that is the concern of this chapter from the so-called “new” atheism, which is primarily scientifically motivated in the cases of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and politically motivated in the cases of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. For an insightful critical discussion of this latter, see Amarnath Amarasingam (ed.), Religion and the New Atheism. A Critical Appraisal (Leiden: Brill, 2010). See especially Chapter 2, “Beating ‘God’ to Death. Radical Thelogy and New Atheism” (25–36), in which Jeffrey Robbins and Christopher Rodkey develop a “radical theological critique of the new atheism” explicitly informed by Tillich’s own critique of “theological theism.” 7. In this chapter, I draw largely on the following interpretative accounts of these philosophical atheisms: Laurence Paul Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism. The Refusal of a Theological Voice (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism. Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), and Christopher Watkin in his Difficult Atheism. Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Of course, this does not mean that I fully endorse their interpretations, nor their constructive conclusions, but am rather appropriating their presentations as contestable yet defensible accounts of two major twentieth-century philosophical atheistic positions. It would, I submit be possible to extend the range of this encounter with reference to the philosophical atheisms of a set of thinkers including Kojève, Levinas, Koyré, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite (and Heidegger) considered in Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism

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9.

10.

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Russell Re Manning That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Hemming is less concerned to rebut Caputo specifically—aiming most of his critical fire at Jean-Luc Marion, but he does refer to John D. Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Martin Heidegger, ed. C. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Heidegger and Aquinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), and Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Hägglund is equally exercised by Marion’s misinterpretation of Derrida, but also takes care to set out his own position in comparison with that put forward by Caputo, referring primarily to The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). By contrast, it might not unreasonably be said that it is one of the defining novelties of the “new atheism” that it is so concerned with a desire to prove the nonexistence of the divine! For a fascinating perspective on the decidedly un-philosophical new atheism, see Tim Jenkins, “Closer to Dan Brown than Gregor Mendel. On Dawkins’ The God Delusion,” Scottish Journal of Theology 62.3 (2009): 269–281. John D. Caputo, “Theopoetics as Radical Theology.” In Theopoetic Folds. Philosophizing Multifariousness, ed. Roland Faber and Jeremy Fackenthal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 125–141. In this I differ from the emphasis placed in Robbins and Rodkey’s response to “new atheism” on Tillich’s critique of “theological theism.” They correctly develop a critique of new atheism’s commitment to a particularly narrow form of “theism” and the consequent obsession with disproving the existence of God—as though that were what really mattered. By contrast, for the radical philosophical atheisms of Heidegger and Derrida the question of the existence or nonexistence of God is of little concern; what matters instead are the philosophical consequences of the death of God and that, in Nietzsche’s words, “the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 343. Here, it should be stressed that Tillich’s formula “theology of culture” is disanalogous to Pannenberg’s understanding of “theology of nature”. In the latter, religious concepts or claims are used to structure and determine a “theological” interpretation of nature (e.g., as created or in the image of God). By contrast, Tillich’s theology of culture cedes no prior authority to the religious in its interpretation of culture. In fact, Tillich’s “theology of culture” is, in this sense at least, more similar to “natural theology” than to “theology of nature.” See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature. Essays on Science and Faith, ed. Ted Peters (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993) and Re Manning, Handbook of Natural Theology. Some forms of theology reconceived as theology of culture are, of course, closer to religion, in its confessional sense, than others. Clearly, systematic theology is the most “church theological” form of theology, defined, in Tillich’s terms

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as “a function of the Christian church.” Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, 3. Yet even here it is clear that systematic theology is not bound to the kerygma of the church alone, but, as he puts is “supposed to satisfy two basic needs: the statement of the truth of the Christian message and the interpretation of this truth for every new generation.” Ibid. 14. Of course, here the term “philosophical theism” is being used in a broader sense than its typical application in analytic philosophy of religion, in which it is largely synonymous with the defense of the existence and nature of the God of so-called “classical theism.” 15. Tillich, On the Boundary, 72. 16. It is important to stress, of course, that—contrary to popular opinion— Tillich’s theology was decisively not formulated in response to Heidegger. As Marc Boss definitively establishes, it is mistaken to talk of an “existentialist turn” in Tillich’s theology, which was already developed in its substance prior to Tillich’s encounter with Heidegger. The roots of Tillich’s philosophical theology lie in the retrievals of Kant, Fichte and Schelling in the early years of the twentieth century and not the subsequent emergence of phenomenology and existentialism. Remarkably, even as Tillich’s terminology changed in the inter-war years (as it did again with his emigration to the United States) the fundamentals of his philosophical theology remain his dialectical integration of a Fichtean and a Schellingian response to the defining moment of modern philosophy, namely Kant’s invocation of freedom as autonomy. As Boss summarises his thesis: “sous l’ifluence décisive du néofichtéisme introduit à Halle par son mentor Fritz Medicus, Tillich structure sa philosophie de la religion comme un système dans laquel entrent en tension deux interpretations rivals et pourtant complémentaires de Kant: l’une conçoit la liberté dans les termes fichtéens d’une fondamentale autoposition de la raison (dans le prolongement des reflexions de Kant sur l’autonomie de la volonté); l’autre la comprend dans les termes schellingiens d’un abyssal pouvoir d’autocontradiction (dans la continuité des meditations d Kant sur le mal radical).” Boss, Au commencement la liberté, 9–10. He continues “S’il tint en haute estime le concept de liberté que Schelling érige en principe de sa philosophie positive, Tillich voit en lui l’effet non d’une revocation, mais d’un approfondissement du principe rationnel qu’est la liberté chez Fichte. En soulignat leur contiuité dialectique, il veut montrer que l’éloge schellingien de la positivité n’implique aucune reddition de la raison critique devant l’hétéronomie d’une révélation religieuse, et que l’éloge fichtéen de la raison autonome n’implique ni pathos antireligieux ni démesure prométhéenne, mais sa présente au contraire comme une extension du principe de la justification par grâce au domaine de la pensée. Décrit dès 1910 comme une >—métaphore que reprendra la Théologie systématique un demi-siècle plus tard -, ce dispositive orchestra les différends entre Fichte et Schelling sur l’arrière-plan d’un projet qui, du temps de leur collaboration comme du temps de leur broille, n’a cessé de les mobilise l’un et l’autre: recondure le criticisme à ses premises informulées pour concevoir, avec et contre Kant, une philosophie de la religion qui ne ferait qu’un avec le système de la liberté” (10).

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17. For more on Tillich’s appropriation of Schelling in his concept of God, see Russell Re Manning, Theology at the End of Culture. Paul Tillich’s Theology of Culture and Art (Leuven: Peeters Press, 2005). 18. The point may be put less formally with reference to a creedal statement of the Iron Islanders in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy saga A Song of Fire and Ice—“what is dead may never die.” In order to die, God must live; thus a God whose death has been announced is no longer God and indeed never was really God at all. Only the living are capable of dying: what is dead may never die. Popular culture contains another salutary image of this notion in the figure of the zombie or the “undead”—those without death precisely because they are without life. Importantly, this is a misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s seminal proclamation of the death of God, which far from claiming the death of God as an accomplished fact rather diagnoses it as an ongoing event. For Nietzsche, as Heidegger correctly perceives, God is never truly dead, but continues to live on precisely as the condition of His ongoing death: “-But what if . . . God should prove to be our most enduring lie?” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 344. 19. The distinction is, of course, Tillich’s from “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion.” In Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 10–29. 20. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 344. 21. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 279. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 170. 23. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1998), 117 (B xxx). 24. Watkin, Difficult Atheism. 25. Watkin, Difficult Atheism, 5. 26. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses. Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 354. 27. Watkin, Difficult Atheism, 6. 28. Alain Badiou, “L’Offrande réservée.” In Sens en tout sens: Autour des travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. François Guibal and Jean-Clet Martin (Paris: Galiée, 2004), 15–16. English translation by Watkin, Difficult Atheism, 19. 29. Watkin, Difficult Atheism, 8. 30. It is instructive to see the contours of this debate in the encounter between Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ. Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 31. Watkin, Difficult Atheism, 13. 32. Watkin, Difficult Atheism, 13–14. 33. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5. 34. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 80. 35. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 110. 36. This is, of course, to put matters somewhat differently from their standard description, according to which the theologians diagnose the need for redemption whilst the atheist philosophers have the courage to face up to the bleak

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godforsakenness of the world. But my point is that appearances can be deceptive: it is part of the fundamental logic of theology that it is elliptic (to use one of Tillich’s favoured images)—at least when it pretends to being a descriptive discourse of positive revelation. 37. See Russell Re Manning “A Political Theology of Culture.” In Kritische Theologie. Paul Tillich in Frankfurt (1929–1933), ed. Heiko Schulz (Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming 2015).

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Contributors

Thomas J. J. Altizer is professor emeritus in Religious Studies at The State University of New York at Stony Brook. Publications include: The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Westminster Press, 1966), Radical Theology and the Death of God (with William Hamilton) (Penguin, 1968), and The New Gospel of Christian Atheism (Davies Group, 2002). Christopher Craig Brittain is senior lecturer in Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He is on the editorial board of the journal Critical Research in Religion (SAGE) and for the book series Studies in Critical Research in Religion (Brill). Publications include: Adorno and Theology (T&T Clark, 2010) and Religion at Ground Zero: Theological Responses to Times of Crisis (Continuum, 2011). Clayton Crockett is professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of five books, most recently Deleuze Beyond Badiou (Columbia University Press, 2013). He is a coeditor, along with Slavoj Žižek, Creston Davis, and Jeffrey W. Robbins, of the book series Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture, with Columbia University Press. Richard Grigg is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. He has studied Tillich as a radical theologian for many years. His book on Tillich is Symbol and Empowerment: Paul Tillich’s Post-Theistic System (Mercer University Press, 1985). Mike Grimshaw is associate professor in Sociology at Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand. He is a series editor for Radical Theologies (Palgrave Macmillan). Publications include editing The Counter-Narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music: Songs of Fear and Trembling (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and Bibles and Baedekers. Tourism, Travel, Exile and God (Equinox 2008). He works on the intersections of radical theology and thought, culture, society, and whatever else interests him. Currently, he is editing the letter of Tom Altizer for a forthcoming volume in the Radical

266

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Theologies series (Palgrave Macmillan), reassessing the impact and legacy of Romerbrief on the turn to Paul in continental thought and considering—via Vattimo—what a hermeneutic capitalism might look like. Thomas A. James is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Southfield, Michigan. Previously, he was on the theology faculty at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Publications include In Face of Reality: The Constructive Theology of Gordon D. Kaufman (Wipf and Stock, 2011), and, with Chris Baker and John Reader, A Philosophy of Christian Materialism: Entangled Fidelities and the Public Good (Ashgate, forthcoming in 2015). Daniel J. Peterson is professor in the Humanities for Seattle University’s Matteo Ricci College. He is the author of Tillich: A Brief Overview of the Life and Writings of Paul Tillich (Lutheran University Press, 2013) and coeditor with Michael Zbaraschuk of Resurrecting the Death of God: The Origins, Influence and Return of Radical Theology (State University Press of New York, 2014). He has written numerous articles and reviews, the most recent of which have appeared in Dialog, Theology and Science and Comparative and Continental Philosophy. He earned his PhD in systematic theology from the Graduate Theological Union and is an ordained minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America called in a specialized ministry to students at Seattle University. Russell Re Manning is senior lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics (Western Traditions) at Bath Spa University and Visiting Fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Past-President of the North American Paul Tillich Society and former Co-Chair of the Tillich: Issues in Theology, Religion, and Culture group of the American Academy of Religion, he is editor-inchief of the Complete Works of Paul Tillich in English (de Gruyter, 2015f). He is series editor for the Pickering and Chatto series “Pickering Studies in Philosophy of Religion” and, with Tom Greggs, of the Edinburgh University Press series The Edinburgh Critical History of Christian Theology. Publications include: The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich (Cambridge University Press, 2009), The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Science and Religion in the Twenty-First Century (SCM Press, 2013). Jeffrey W. Robbins is chair and professor of Religion and Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College where he also serves as the Director of the Undergraduate Research Symposium and the Faculty Mentor for the Allwein Scholars Program. He is a contributing editor of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory and a coeditor for the Columbia University Press book series Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics and Culture. His most recent book publications include Radical Democracy and Political Theology (Columbia UP, 2011), the co-authored Religion, Politics

Contributors

267

and the Earth: The New Materialism (Palgrave, 2013), and the coedited The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion (Indiana UP, 2014). Christopher D. Rodkey is pastor of St. Paul’s United Church of Christ in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, and is Instructor of Philosophy at Penn State York, where he is the recipient of the James H. Burness Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the North American Paul Tillich Society. His books include The Synaptic Gospel (University Press of America, 2012), Too Good to Be True (Christian Alternative, 2014), and The World is Crucifixion (The Davies Group, forthcoming 2015), and he is series editor of Intersections: Theology and the Church in a World Come of Age, published by Noesis Press. Mark Lewis Taylor is Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. His most recent book is The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (2011). Taylor received the Best General Interest Book Award for his 2001 book, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (2nd edition forthcoming in 2015). His other major books include Religion, Politics and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Politics and American Empire (2005), Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis (2005), and an anthology of Tillich’s writings, Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries (1986). Matthew Lon Weaver has been chaplain and chair of the Department of Social, Religious, and Ethical Studies at the Marshall School in Duluth, Minnesota, since 2012. He has taught in adjunct capacities for the College of St. Scholastica, Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, Midland University, and Viterbo University. Active in the American Academy of Religion and past-president of the North American Paul Tillich Society, Weaver is the author of several articles and the book, Religious Internationalism: The Ethics of War and Peace in the Thought of Paul Tillich (Mercer, 2010). He is the editor of Applied Christian Ethics: Foundations, Economic Justice, and Politics (Lexington Books, 2014) and the translator of Tillich’s Voice of America speeches, half of which were published as the volume, Against the Third Reich (Westminster/John Knox, 1998). Daniel Whistler is lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity (Oxford University Press, 2013) and The Right to Wear Religious Symbols (with Daniel J. Hill; Palgrave, 2013). He is also coeditor of After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (CSP, 2010) and Moral Powers, Fragile Beliefs: Essays in Moral and Religious Philosophy (Continuum, 2011).

Index

9/11, 140–2, 145 a/theology, 49–50 abyss, 52–3, 194–8, 201, 239 Adams, James Luther, 25 Adorno, Theodor, W., 81–95, 242 agape, 117 Ages of the World, The, 23, 196–202, 219–21, 223 Altizer, Thomas J. J., 9, 14, 23–9, 31–2, 41, 43, 49, 57, 115, 193–4, 209–11 America, the United States of, 26–8. See United States of America American Academy of Religion, The, 1 American exceptionalism, 141, 145 analogia entis, 57, 59 ancestrality, 179–90 Anglicanism, 24 anti-Judaism, 165, 168, 173–4 apocalypse, 15, 28–9, 43, 74–7, 121, 219 Apollo space programme, 108 apologetics, 24, 233–42 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 127 Aquinas, 65 Arendt, Hannah, 225 aseity, 36–8 atheism, 9–10, 24–6, 71, 159, 167, 187, 188, 193, 233–42 Aufhebung, 169–70, 197 Augustine, 25 Auschwitz, 88, 92, 242

Baard, Rachel Sophia, 54 Badiou, Alain, 10, 202, 234, 235, 238–9, 240 Barth, Karl, 3–4, 7, 9, 24–6, 87–8, 95, 115, 161–2, 164, 165, 167, 172, 217, 242 Bauer, Jerald, 114 Beckett, Samuel, 10, 90 being-itself, 11, 33, 35, 38, 48–9, 50–1, 53–6, 159, 166, 196, 236 belief-ful realism, 100, 106–7 Benjamin, Walter, 85, 114, 136, 140 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 212 Bernstein, Jay, 90 Berry, Wanda, 66 Bildverbot, 94, 95 Birth of a Nation, 173 black theology, 164–5, 173–4 Blake, William, 25–6, 41 Bloch, Ernst, 86, 212 Boehme, Jakob, 24, 34, 36, 37, 40, 43 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 32, 43 boundaries, 6, 43, 99–108, 113–17, 166 bourgeois principle, 121–2, 143–9 bourgeois society, 121–3, 134–5, 143–9 Brahman, 51, 57 Brassier, Ray, 180, 182, 185–6, 187, 188, 190, 191 Buckley, Micheal, 233–4 Bulgakov, Sergei, 212 Bultmann, Rudolf, 12, 27–8, 87, 161 Bush, George W., 145

270

Index

capitalism, 216–20 Caputo, John D., 1, 11, 160–1, 169, 172, 234–6 Cardinal Cushing College, 65 Carter, J. Kameron, 164–5, 167, 172, 173–4 Catholic theology, 23–4 Caws, Mary Ann, 119 Cezanne, Paul, 101 Champion, James, 84 Christ, Carol, 53–6 Christianity, 120–2, 125 Clayton, John P., 12–13 Clayton, Philip, 1 Clifford, James, 116 coincidentia oppositorum, 43 Cold War, the, 133 comparative theology, 166–7 Comte, Auguste, 238 Cone, James, 163–4 confessional theology, 235 Cornelius, Hans, 4, 82–3 correlation, 124–5, 181–2, 184, 214–15, 233–4 correlationalism, 179–91, 240–1 cosmology, 179–91 cosmopolitanism, 127 courage, 33, 35–6, 41–4, 48, 66–71, 164–5, 174, 196–7 Courage to Be, The, 6, 10, 196–7, 202 courage to sin, 66–71 Cox, Harvey, 9, 11 creatio ex nihilo, 69, 200 crisis, 88, 119, 144, 216–26 Critchely, Simon, 225 critique, 6, 8, 89, 92–5, 209–26 da Cuhna, Euclides, 226 Daly, Mary, 53–6, 58, 65–77 de Beauvoir, Simone, 13, 65 de Chardin, Teilhard, 42 death, 188 death of God theology, 6–9, 13, 15, 31, 49, 65, 70, 115, 167, 193, 236

decision, 138, 145–8 Deleuze, Giles, 10, 15, 199–200, 215 deliteralisation, 12 demythologisation, 12, 27–8 depth, 38–9, 51, 85, 193–205, 221 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 15, 50, 136, 137, 160–1, 166, 169, 234–8, 242 différance, 67, 160 disenchantment, 179–91 disorder, 201–2 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 213 doubt, 6, 8 Dourley, John, 33–4, 43 Dussel, Enrique, 138 Dynamics of Faith, 56 Eberling, Gerhard, 162 Eckhart, Meister, 32 ecstatic naturalism, 26, 71–4, 234 Einstein, Albert, 38 Eliade, Mircea, 24–5 Engels, Friedrich, 114 Enlightenment, 143–4 enthusiasm, 225–6 eschatology, 90–1, 93, 122, 184–5 estrangement, 107, 184–5 eternal life, 184–5 existentialism, 10, 27–8, 101, 127, 194, 197, 214 expectation, 123–5, 146–9 expressionism, 101 Extra Calvinisticum, 39–40 faith, 5–7, 27–8, 71–4, 122, 161–2, 237–8 Fall, the, 181 fanaticism, 224–6 Fanon, Frantz, 150 feminism, 13, 42, 53–6, 65–77 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 15, 238 flaneur, 114–18, 128 Foster, Durwood, 13–14 Foucault, Michel, 151, 238 Frank, Manfred, 212

Index Frankfurt Peace Prize, 103 Frankfurt School, the, 81, 82–5, 115, 116, 126, 205 French Revolution, The, 225 Freud, Sigmund, 38, 186–7 Frye, Marilyn, 70–7 Fuchs, Ernst, 162 future, the, 169–75, 186, 219–26 Gage, Matilda Joslyn, 65 George, Stefan, 140 German Idealism, 7, 28, 29, 194, 201, 215–16 gnosticism, 165 God, 11–12, 25, 32–44, 53–6, 195–205 God above God, 32 God as living, 32–44, 181–7, 190, 236 God beyond God, 160, 162, 165, 167–8, 173–4, 197 Goddess, 53–6 Gogarten, Friedrich, 162, 217 Goodchild, Philip, 209–26 Gordon, Avery, 136 grace, 127–8 Grant, Iain Hamilton, 221 Griffin, Susan, 65 Grigg, Richard, 47–64, 71 ground of meaning and being, 11–12, 95, 183–5, 189, 234 Hägglund, Martin, 236 half-way demythologisation, 181 Hamilton, William, 9, 115 Hamlet, 101 Hamman, Georg, 3 Hammond, Guy, 83–4 Hardt, Michael, 151–2 harmony, 143 Harvard Divinity School, 65–6 Hass, Andrew, 39 Haught, John F., 1 haunting, 134–9

271

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 10, 34, 3, 40, 41, 43, 50, 86, 137–9, 169–75, 197–8, 199, 201 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 10, 15, 28, 48, 50, 87, 88–9, 95, 102, 159–75, 194, 212–13, 234, 236, 238–9, 242 Hemming, Laurence Paul, 236 Heraclitus, 51 Hoagland, Sarah, 70 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 82, 86–95 hope, 105–6 Horkheimer, Max, 82–4 humanism, 122 Idealism, 10 imaginary, the, 193–4 impurity, 113–28, 166, 168 inequality, 13, 60 Infra Lutheranum, the, 33, 39–40, 43 injustice, 15, 33, 42, 58, 107 Institute of Social Research, 82–5, 119 inter-religious encounter, 8–9 irrelevance, 113–28 Irrelevance and Relevance of the Christian Message, The, 13–14, 117 Jaspers, Karl, 212 Jay, Martin, 83 Jesus Christ, 11, 29, 168, 202–3, 242 John of Patmos, 76 Johnson, Bradley, 210–11 Johnson, Chalmers, 136 Judaism, 84 justice, 72–4, 107, 125, 147, 163–5, 224 Kafka, Franz, 173 kairos, 102–3, 116, 125, 144, 204 Kant, Immanuel, 38, 92, 138, 179, 180, 186, 201, 214–18, 224–6, 237–8, 240–1 Keller, Catherine, 74, 77 kenosis, 15, 32, 33–4, 41–4 Kierkegaard, Søren, 3–4, 6, 25, 48, 88, 103, 213

272

Index

Kingdom of God, 41–4, 93, 103 Korte, Anne-Marie, 70–1 Krell, David Farrell, 89 Kulturprotestantismus, 3–4 Lacan, Jacques, 193–4, 201–5 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 51 Leiner, Martin, 115 Levinas, Emmanuel, 172, 239 liberal theology, 1, 4 liberalism, 10 liberation theology, 163–5 Lieven, Anatol, 141 life, 181–7, 190–2, 219–20, 236 logos, 37 love, 107, 117 Love, Power, Justice, 73 Luther, Martin, 25, 39–40, 48, 197 Lyotard, Jean-François, 225 Malabou, Catherine, 159–60, 169–75 manifesto, 119–20, 123 Marcel, Gabriel, 212–13 Marcuse, Herbert, 84 Marion, Jean-Luc, 239 Maritain, Jacques, 65 Marx, Karl, 15, 38, 103, 114, 124, 137–9, 151–2 materialism, 139 May, Rollo, 69 Meillassoux, Quentin, 10, 15, 179–80, 182, 186–9, 234, 239–41, 242 Milbank, John, 10, 233 Mill, John Stuart, 99 Miller, William Robert, 43 monotheism, 57–60 Morton, Nellie, 65 multitude, 134–5, 148–52 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 138, 234, 239–40 national socialism, 42, 87–9, 104–5, 118, 134, 144–5, 148–9, 194, 204 nationalism, 144–5, 150–1 natural theology, 233–4

nature, 35 negative theology, 160 Negri, Antonio, 151–2 Nelson, Diane, 150 nemesis, 72–4 neo-liberalism, 126 neo-Schellingian, 211–14 neo-Tillichian, 116 new atheism, 167, 241 new being, 29, 43, 51, 67, 103 New Harmony, 76–7 New School for Social Research, 13 New Testament, 27–8 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 59 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 163–4, 204 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9–10, 38, 65, 74, 77, 102, 103, 164, 186, 187, 200, 213, 237–8 nihilism, 186, 188, 191 non-being, 35–6, 41–4, 92–3, 166, 189–91, 195–7, 200, 215, 242 O’Keeffe, Terence, 83, 85 O’Neill, Andrew, 35 ontological shock, 51 ontotheology, 159–75, 236, 238 order, 201–2 O’Regan, Cyril, 33, 43 origins, myths of, 120–2, 140–2 panentheism, 184–5 paradox, 87–8, 217 parataxical theology, 85–95 parataxis, 81–2, 85–95 para-Tillichian, 116 Parmenides, 51 Parrella, Frederick J., 38 participation, 59–60 Pascal, Blaise, 48 Pauck, Wilhelm, 194 Paul Tillich Park, 77 Pausanias, 72 peace, 99–108 piety, 209–11, 214, 226

Index Plaskow, Judith, 55–6 plasticity, 169–75 Plato, 72, 237 pluralism, 58–60 poetry, 86–95 political romanticism, 120–2, 134, 140–2 political theology, 4–5 positive philosophy, 195, 198, 201–3 positivism, 7 posteriority, 180, 185, 187, 190 post-liberalism, 1, 9 postmodernism, 10 post-theological, 239–40 post-Tillichian, 116 potencies, 195–6, 199, 201 power of being, 57 priesthood, 140–2 principle, 137–9 proletariat, 121–2, 134–52 prophetic criticism, 82, 102, 120–8, 146–9 Protestant principle, the, 5, 24–5, 58 Protestantism, 120–2 psychoanalysis, 169, 193–4, 205 purity, 7, 172 quasi-religion, 2, 8, 125 Quintessence, 69–71 racism, 13–15, 163–5, 168 Radical Orthodoxy, 1, 116, 127 radical theology, 1, 9–16, 47–60, 167–8, 209, 235 real, the, 193–4 relevance, 113–28 religious socialism, 4–5, 83, 86, 101, 118–22, 163 revelation, 51, 162, 215 reversal, 74–5 revolutionary reason, 224 revolutionary romanticism, 140–2, 150–2

273

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 101 Ritschl, Albrecht, 3–4 Robinson, J. A. T., 9 Rosenzweig, Franz, 212 Rubenstein, Richard, 49 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 53–4 saeculum, 114–17, 127–8 Samothrace, 222–3, 226 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 10 Sassen, Saskia, 135 Scharlemann, Robert, 8 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 7, 10, 23, 34, 102, 134, 137–9, 193–205, 209–26 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 3–4, 185 Schneider, Laurel, 58–9, 65, 71 Schoenberg, Arnold, 86 Schüßler, Werner, 114 Schweiker, William, 1 Second Vatican Council, 23–4 self-transcendence, 66–77 Sellars, Wilfred, 187 sexism, 13–15 Simpson, Christopher, 145 Simpson, Gary, 84–5 sin, 66–71, 163–5, 213–14 Slotkin, Richard, 141 Smith, Jonathan Z., 1 socialism, 83, 101, 118–28, 133–52 Socialist Decision, The, 4–5, 43, 118–28, 133–52, 194, 204 socialist principle, 134, 135, 242 specter, 136–7 speculative realism, 179–91, 239–41 Spinoza, Baruch, 57, 138 Spirit, 36–8 Spiritual presence, 77 Stenger, Mary Ann, 163 Stone, Ronald H., 83, 163 Studebaker, Stephen, 37, 43 Stumme, John R., 119 symbol, 12, 42–3, 47–60, 139, 166

274

Index

symbolic, the, 193–4 Systematic Theology, 10–11, 86, 181, 194–7, 202, 215 Taubes, Jacob, 26 Taubes, Susan Anima, 26 Taylor, Mark C., 1, 11, 49–53, 54, 190 Taylor, Mark Lewis, 38–9, 133–52 Taylor, Victor E., 116 Thatamanil, John, 115, 160, 165–8 Thatcher, Adrian, 43 theodicy, 60, 241–2 theological modernity, 10 theological vitalism, 182–3 theology of crisis, 3, 216–19 theology of culture, 2–4, 114, 164–5, 168, 173–4, 235–6 theology of hope, 13 theonomy, 81–2, 91–5, 101–2 Tiedemann, Rolf, 86, 91 Tillich, Hannah, 86 Tindley, Charles, 76 Toscano, Alberto, 225–6 Tracey, David, 1 tragedy, 163 Trinity, 36–9 Troeltsch, Ernst, 3–4 Turner, Stephen, 128 ultimate concern, 8, 11, 40–9, 52–3, 55, 92–3, 123–8, 164, 209–11, 214–26, 234 Union Theological Seminary, 204

United States of America, 107, 133–52, 204 University of Berlin, 212 University of Breslau, 195 University of Frankfurt, 82 University of Halle, 195 unthinking, 209–11, 219, 222 Urban Cowboy, 128 US-Imperial, the, 133–52 utopia, 77 Vahanian, Gabriel, 9, 114, 115 van Buren, Paul, 9, 49 vito-theology, 236 Voice of America, 104–8 void, 193–205 von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 23 Wagoner, Bryan, 85–6, 93 Ward, Keith, 31, 43 Wark, McKenzie, 114 Watkin, Christopher, 239–40 Weil, Simone, 26 whiteness, 163–5 Wiggerhaus, Ralf, 85–6 Winquist, Charles, 159 Wolin, Sheldon, 149–50, 151–2 womanist theology, 14 Word of God, 87, 91, 161 World War I, 2–3, 42, 134, 194, 204 World War II, 104–8, 133–4, 204 Wyneken, Gustav, 140 Žižek, Slavoj, 10, 193–205, 220