Being Ultimately Concerned With Being Itself: Paul Tillich's Theology of Culture

December 6, 2003
By Jim Weller

More than once, I have heard a friend say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” Paul Tillich’s work pointed out the self-contradiction of such a statement, and showed how the contradiction itself points toward the universality of the “religious question” for humankind. In a 1958 article for the popular magazine The Saturday Evening Post, Tillich wrote:

"Is there an answer? There is always an answer, but the answer may not be available to us. We may be too deeply steeped in the predicament out of which the question arises to be able to answer it. To acknowledge this is certainly a better way toward a real answer than to bar the way to it by deceptive answers. And it may be that in this attitude the real answer (within available limits) is given."

One answer is in an apothegm produced early in Tillich’s theological career, which may well be located near the center of all his theology. According to his biographer and confidante Wilhelm Pauck – himself a leading figure in twentieth-century theology – in Paul Tillich’s “first public presentation of his own creative thought,” a 1919 lecture at the University of Berlin, he proposed, “Religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion.”

Using his form-and-substance dialectic, I think Tillich would say that my friend, whose artwork and her reverent way of living is ‘in-formed’ by her deep spirituality, is engaged in genuine religious practice. Her formative concern with that which is essential to her being, he would call a religious concern. “Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt,” he wrote. This is the posture of Tillich’s “religious question.”

The son of a distinguished Lutheran pastor, Paul Tillich was educated in the formal orthodoxy of 19th century German Protestantism, attained the degree of Licentiate of Theology at the University of Halle as well as PhD at the University of Breslau, and was ordained a minister of the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union in Berlin in 1912. He eventually became a professor of philosophical theology, though – not a churchman per se.

Paul Tillich was indeed a dialectician. His life’s work involved using words and ideas as tools, and as structural elements, in the project of creating a system of thought and imagination with which to approach a more useful apprehension of religious truth. His biographers Wilhelm and Marion Pauck wrote of him, “he preferred to be an architect, using ideas as a builder uses bricks to make a new edifice. It was a bold ambition, and it came to him naturally to think in a systematic way.” The Paucks recount that Tillich was thoroughly educated in classical languages, and he employed this learning liberally; “he . . . frequently built his lectures and sermons around the Latin or Greek etymology of a word or phrase.” By this account as well, on the occasion of Tillich’s confirmation, his “father presented him with a motto for his future life, and he felt, he says, that these words were just what he was looking for. They were, ‘The truth will make you free.’ (John 8:32)” He sought liberation from the bondage of error, sin, and despair not only for the salvation of his own soul, but for the benefit of humanity, by the orientation of his great gift of intellect, and application of the methods of philosophy, toward creative answers to the religious question.

Throughout his work, Tillich embraced existential doubt as an essential element of the human condition. During his education at Halle, his biography explains, “Tillich gained the insight that man is justified by grace through faith, not only as a sinner but even as a doubter. The discovery of this idea brought him great relief.” Additionally, despite “his father’s effort to keep him from anything but orthodox Christianity, he found himself attracted to the liberal theologians . . . who were influenced by historical criticism.”

In 1911, in Berlin, as he labored to complete his theological dissertation, “he began to realize that many Christians did not understand the language in which he had been taught to communicate the gospel.” For most of his nonclerical contemporaries, the orthodox religious idiom was of little or no avail, and thus “he confronted the harsh fact which later inspired him to use non-traditional language to communicate the meaning of biblical revelation.” This realization “determined his way of being a theologian: early in his process of development he cast his lot with the apologetic theologians, namely those who attempt to interpret the Christian faith by means of reasonable explanation, [that is, in Tillich’s words], with ‘a common criterion in view.’”

Tillich’s experience of the First World War, in front-line service as a Prussian Army chaplain, was harrowing and deconstructive. Like countless others, the Paucks say, “he grappled with the awareness that the concept of God that had crumbled on the battlefield – namely, of a God who would make everything turn out for the best – needed to be replaced. In early December [1917] he wrote, ‘I have long since come to the paradox of faith without God, by thinking through the idea of justification by faith to its logical conclusion.’” Tillich, and the remnants of European culture, emerged from the war and its aftermath shattered. His biographers summarized the effects of his experience of this era on his later thought thus:

Caught between the conservative Christian traditions of the nineteenth century and the bold radical creativity marking the new style of the twentieth, he could not side with either one or the other. He sought to combine the two. Freud’s psychoanalysis, Cezanne’s Expressionist Impressionism, Marx’s socialism, all became material for his Christian apologetic theology. He said neither yes nor no; he said both. The split did indeed remain, despite his great efforts to heal or hide it – much later he called it “the boundary.” His great gift for synthesis, analogous to Proustian recollection, gradually produced a written work marked by bright clarity on one hand and dark obfuscation on the other. He made endless distinctions, relied on his excellent grasp of the history of philosophy and Christian doctrine, and finally caught all of his ideas in the net of philosophical presuppositions worked out during his lifetime.

In this manner, Tillich approached his “theology of culture.” The startling note he sounded was that religion was not, after all, a special sphere and function in the social and cultural lives of humankind, but “the dimension of depth,” as he put it, in all of life’s functions. In an essay entitled, “Aspects of a Religious Analysis of Culture,” collected with fourteen other selections from his oeuvre in his 1959 book, Theology of Culture, Tillich formulated several of his key terms with regard to religion in this way:

"If we abstract the concept of religion from the great commandment, we can say that religion is being ultimately concerned about that which is and should be our ultimate concern. This means that faith is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, and God is the name for the content of the concern. Such a concept of religion has little in common with the description of religion as the belief in the existence of a highest being called God, and the theoretical and practical consequences of such a belief. Instead, we are pointing to an existential, not a theoretical, understanding of religion."

Tillich’s starting point, which he identified with Augustine’s, is that the basis – what he calls the prius – of all philosophy of religion, is the Deus est esse. God is being, a unity of essence and existence. He regarded this “content” of “ultimate concern” as “Being itself,” as primum esse, the “Unconditioned.” Of this “ontological principle” of religion, he wrote that “Man is immediately aware of something unconditional which is the prius of the separation and interaction of subject and object [being and becoming; essence and existence; knower and known], theoretically as well as practically.” Thus, “the certainty of God is identical with the certainty of Being itself. God is the presupposition of the question of God.” Moreover, “the Unconditioned cannot be conditioned by a difference between its essence and its existence. In all finite beings, on the other hand, this difference is present; in them existence as something separated from essence is the mark of finitude.”

Tillich redefined religion “in its innermost nature” as “the state of being concerned about one’s own being and being universally” – that is, ultimately concerned, about Being itself and one’s own existential participation in it. It is not to be missed that he correlated this definition of religion with the great commandment as enunciated by Jesus: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Nor does Tillich’s correlation ignore the second commandment that is inseparable from it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

The human experience of being is irreducibly relational. Human culture is the expression of the collective experience of being, in relationship with other human beings and with Being itself, i.e., God – the content, rightly considered, of humankind’s ultimate concern. Thus, there are many people, Tillich observed, like my ‘spiritual’ friend, “who are ultimately concerned in this way who feel far removed, however, from religion in the narrower sense, and therefore from every historical religion. They are religious while rejecting the religions.”

Before proceeding further with a discussion of Tillich’s “theology of culture,” it will be useful to digress more regarding his idiosyncratic terms. As it was in the understanding of the long line of theologians and philosophers of theology before him (from Augustine to Anselm, Aquinas, and Nicholas of Cusa, among others), for Tillich, on the “basis of the ontological approach,” God was ultimate reality. Yet, in the “predicament out of which the [religious] question arises” in our time, the meaning of religion as ultimate concern with the “dimension of depth” in human existence has been lost. In consequence, Tillich wrote, “God becomes a being among others whose existence or nonexistence is a matter of inquiry [of opinionated belief or non-belief]. Nothing, perhaps, is more symptomatic of the loss . . . than the permanent discussion about the existence or nonexistence of God – a discussion in which both sides are equally wrong, because the discussion itself is wrong and possible only after the loss of the dimension of depth.” Thus, with regard to the “content” of this ultimate concern, he wrote,

"God is the answer to the question implied in man’s finitude; [God] is the name for that which concerns man ultimately. This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be ultimately concerned about him. Ultimate concern must transcend every preliminary finite and concrete concern. It must transcend the whole realm of finitude in order to be the answer to the question implied in finitude. This is the inescapable inner tension in the idea of God. The conflict between the concreteness and the ultimacy of the religious concern is actual wherever God is experienced and this experience is expressed, from primitive prayer to the most elaborate theological system."

Ultimate concern is the human capacity that seeks answers for the religious question. The religious question arises out of the existential human condition, our "predicament." It seeks to reconcile humankind’s transcendent spiritual essence, ‘what I am,’ with the immanent condition of finite existence, ‘that I am.’ Tillich wrote, “The relation between man’s essential nature and his existential predicament is the first and basic question that theology has asked.”

I think Tillich would say that this existential condition and ultimate concern are common in the experience of all peoples, in all times and in all cultural milieux. Tillich’s thesis is that our ultimate concern, our religious question and the answers implied, are expressed in both sacred and secular cultural forms. Religion is not exclusively ecclesial; the spirituality of secular cultural forms has the same substance. Thus, “a . . . consequence of the existential concept of religion is the disappearance of the gap between the sacred and the secular realm. If religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, this state cannot be restricted to a special realm.”

Are all forms of human culture religious in substance? If in some sense they are, are they all equally so? I think Tillich would say that all cultural expressions, sacred and profane, are ultimately informed and arise out of the existential predicament of the human soul, or consciousness, whether or not this is recognized by the persons expressing it. However, there are positive forms, which affirm the great commandment and are oriented toward reconciliation with Being itself; and there are negative forms that deny this or point toward our alienation from it. Moreover, there are conditional, proximate concerns, which pervert the religious question, claiming ultimacy but serving rather to further alienate us from our essential being, and from the Unconditional or Being itself.

In contemporary society, the perversions of the religious question are the multifarious forms of mass culture, the forms of economic and political exploitation of post-industrial society that have largely displaced the forms once referred to as popular culture in earlier industrial society, and as folk culture in pre-industrial society. Mass culture is mistakenly called ‘popular’ but it is not that at all – not in the sense of being created out of the communal life of the populace. Instead, it is superimposed upon the lives and collective consciousness of the people through the ubiquity of mass media, for purposes of dominion by the ruling class, while pretending to reflect social reality.

For Tillich, the forms of cultural expression that genuinely reflect the religious substance are those that can be included in the broadly defined category of creative art. It is the purpose and meaning of the expression, not just its form and medium, by which the distinction is made. Thus, the commoditized artifacts of what I have described as mass culture, the primary purposes and meanings of which are instrumental and commercial, are beyond the pale of Tillich’s theological analysis of culture. His dialectic applies to them only by way of what he calls the “protest . . . against . . . the predominant movement [which] is the spirit of industrial society.”

Tillich wrote that the forms of culture that are to be seen as genuinely religious in substance, that is, the “cultural forms in which religion actualizes itself,” both affirmatively and negatively, are “the great works of the visual arts, of music, of poetry, of literature, or architecture, of dance, of philosophy, [and] including therapeutic psychology.” Tillich’s examples of revelatory cultural forms all seem to be within the realm of Kultur, the early 20th century German conception of ‘high’ culture. However, I do not think that he meant thereby to exclude from consideration less exalted, but genuinely artistic or aesthetic forms of expression within the realm of ‘folk’ or ‘popular’ culture, not purposely created as instruments of commercial or political exploitation.

To the contrary, Kelton Cobb, a research scholar at the University of Tübingen, criticizes Tillich’s method on just that ground, writing that, “He avoids popular culture to such an extent that it is questionable whether he carries through on his promise, which is to look into culture as ‘the totality of human self-interpretation.’ While Tillich, in principle, directs us to all cultural artifacts . . . in practice he privileges the self-interpretation of the cultural elite – with a special status reserved for the avant-garde.”

I do not disagree with Cobb’s introductory statement that “It is time to reexamine it [Tillich’s theology of culture] and reflect on its viability.” I do note, however, that Cobb’s beginning proposition about the totalistic scope of Tillich’s view of culture is set up in the words of another reviewer, John P. Clayton, in 1980 – and not in Tillich’s own words; it does not seem to me, as I’ve indicated, that this is what Tillich meant.

Cobb’s conclusion is this:

"The material in culture that is worthy of attention in theology of culture should not be limited to that produced by or of interest to the cultural elite. The range of sources for theology of culture should be opened up to include any vortex of valuation that functions to attract and repel and otherwise activate or alter the way people value reality. A case could be made that popular culture discloses more of this than high culture. The images and stories that make the evening news or that claim sustained attention from movie makers, and the further use to which they are put by their audiences, for instance, represent potent cultural texts which promise fruitful interpretation to a theologian of culture.”

I think Cobb has missed Tillich’s point, which is that a theological analysis of culture in his terms can show clearly the perversion or misdirection of mass culture’s ‘ultimate concern’ that has “helped to transfer the powerful expressions of the dimension of depth into objects or happenings on the horizontal plane.” Tillich explained, “man, in contrast to other living beings, has spiritual concerns – cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. Some of them are urgent, often extremely urgent, and each of them as well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for a human life or the life of a social group." An example, he wrote, “is the ultimate concern with ‘success’ and with social standing and economic power. It is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it demands what every ultimate concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction and creative eros.”

I think Tillich’s work is a call to theology for continued and strengthened protest against such forms of idolatry that divert people’s attention from humankind’s real ultimate concern and distort it. His is a call to discern in genuinely creative cultural expressions the universal religious question: "What is the meaning of my existence? Why am I given the gift of apprehension of the Infinite, of the Unconditioned; yet I must die, and while I live, I must suffer?" It is a question that cannot answer itself, and that is its revelatory power. The answer to the question of finitude is beyond finitude. Quoting Psalm 90, Tillich wrote, “‘Relent, O Thou Eternal!’ – this prayer is the prayer of mankind through all eons, and the hidden prayer in the depths of every human soul.”