Paul Tillich (1886-1965)

A Prussian parsonage

Paul Johannes Tillich was born on August 20, 1886 in Starzeddel, a small village in the province of Brandenburg, in the district of Guben (today Starosiedle, Poland). His father, Johannes Tillich, was a conservative Lutheran pastor in the Evangelical State Church of the older Prussian provinces; his mother, Wilhelmine Mathilde Duerselen, from the Rhineland, belonged to a religious milieu with more liberal sensibilities^[30]. This double origin -- paternal Lutheran orthodoxy and maternal Rhenish openness -- runs, according to Tillich's biographers, through the later tension of his theology between fidelity to Christian vocabulary and the desire to rework it in modern terms.

In September 1903, when Paul was only seventeen, his mother died of cancer^[31]. This early loss, occurring in adolescence, is regularly linked by commentators to the existential sensitivity that would permanently mark Tillich's work: his entire theology would organize itself around human anxiety before non-being, finitude and death, long before it received its learned philosophical formulation.

Berlin, Tuebingen, Halle: intellectual formation

From 1904 to 1911, Tillich studied successively at the University of Berlin, the University of Tuebingen, and the University of Halle-Wittenberg^[32]. During these years he immersed himself in classical German idealism, especially the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), whose late "positive philosophy" -- the attempt to move beyond pure Hegelian logic through a thought of concrete existence -- became the durable philosophical matrix of Tillichian theology.

In 1911, Tillich defended at the University of Breslau his doctoral dissertation in philosophy, Die religionsgeschichtliche Konstruktion in Schellings positiver Philosophie, ihre Voraussetzungen und Prinzipien ("The religio-historical construction in Schelling's positive philosophy, its presuppositions and principles")^[33]. The following year, in 1912, he obtained at Halle his licentiate in theology with a second thesis, Mystik und Schuldbewusstsein in Schellings philosophischer Entwicklung ("Mysticism and consciousness of guilt in Schelling's philosophical development"), before being ordained a Lutheran pastor in the province of Brandenburg that same year^[34]. Already in these two theses two themes appear which Tillich would never leave behind: the question of the ultimate ground of being, inherited from Schelling, and the tension between mystical experience and moral consciousness of guilt.

The trauma of the Great War

On September 28, 1914, shortly before leaving for the front, Tillich married Margarethe ("Grethi") Wever^[35]. From October 1914 onward, he joined the Imperial German Army as a military chaplain and spent most of the four years of war in the trenches of the Western Front. He buried many comrades and close friends, was hospitalized three times for nervous collapse, and received the Iron Cross for conduct under fire^[36]. Tillich returned from the front deeply marked by the experience: to his biographer Wilhelm Pauck he would describe those years as a radical rupture with the man he had been before the war^[37].

The trench experience plays, in Tillich's intellectual biography, a role comparable to that played by the shock of August 4, 1914 in Karl Barth's trajectory^[38]: it shattered his inherited confidence in the theological and cultural frameworks he had received, and pushed him toward a theology able to name anxiety, finitude and non-being directly -- rather than a theology of moral consciousness or inherited nineteenth-century religious progress.

The Berlin Circle and the concept of kairos

Returned to civilian life in 1918, Tillich settled in Berlin where, from 1919 onward, he became one of the central figures of the religious socialism movement (religiöser Sozialismus), alongside Carl Mennicke, founder of the "Berlin Circle" (Berliner Kreis), and Eduard Heimann^[39]. That same year, Tillich delivered before the Kant Society in Berlin his foundational lecture Über die Idee einer Theologie der Kultur ("On the Idea of a Theology of Culture"), the program of a theology claiming to read, in every production of human culture -- art, science, politics, philosophy -- the trace of an ultimate religious concern, and not only in the narrow framework of the visible Church and its dogma^[40].

It was in this circle that Tillich elaborated the concept that would become one of the signatures of his thought: kairos, the moment of "fullness of time" when the eternal breaks into history and history is prepared to receive it^[41]. Unlike chronos, neutral and homogeneous chronological time, kairos designates a qualitatively charged moment -- and Tillich considered the aftermath of the First World War, with the collapse of old bourgeois and imperial orders, precisely such a kairos for a religious and social refoundation of European civilization.

From 1919 to 1924, Tillich taught theology and philosophy of religion as Privatdozent at the University of Berlin, while also publishing in the Blätter für religiösen Sozialismus, the review of the movement founded in 1920^[42].

A broken marriage and a troubled second marriage

Tillich's marriage to Margarethe Wever did not survive the war: in 1919, she left him after having a child by another man during the conflict, and the divorce was pronounced in 1921^[43]. In the early 1920s, Tillich met Hannah Werner-Gottschow, then married and pregnant; the two married in March 1924 and had two children^[44]. This second union lasted until Paul's death in 1965 -- but it was built, as will be seen below, on foundations very far from classical conjugal fidelity, something Hannah herself would recount directly after her husband's death^[45].

Marburg and the encounter with Heidegger

In 1924, Tillich became associate professor of theology at the University of Marburg, where he taught until 1925. He worked there alongside Martin Heidegger, whose existential analytic of Dasein, soon formulated in Sein und Zeit (1927), deeply influenced the philosophy of existence Tillich would develop in the following decades^[46]. From this encounter Tillich drew the conceptual tools -- the analysis of the "existential questions" of finite man, anxious and threatened by non-being -- that would become the first pole of his later theological method of correlation.

Dresden, Leipzig, then Frankfurt

From 1925 to 1929, Tillich taught systematic theology at the Technical University of Dresden and at the University of Leipzig^[47]. In 1929, he was called to the University of Frankfurt, where he succeeded the phenomenologist Max Scheler, who had died the previous year, in the chair of philosophy and sociology of religion. At Frankfurt, Tillich was associated with the beginnings of the Institute for Social Research, future home of the Frankfurt School: among his assistants and collaborators were Harald Poelchau and the young Theodor Adorno, with whom he co-led seminars on Simmel, Lessing and Hegel; he also taught with Max Horkheimer a course on John Locke during the winter of 1930-1931^[48]. This intellectual proximity to the early Frankfurt School -- with which Tillich shared a critical sensitivity toward modern alienation without adopting its integral materialism -- nourished his social and political reflection up to his most engaged book.

The Socialist Decision and the Nazi expulsion

In 1933, only a few weeks after Adolf Hitler's accession to the chancellorship, Tillich published Die sozialistische Entscheidung ("The Socialist Decision"), in which he analyzed National Socialism as a form of "political romanticism" -- a mythical and anti-rational regression exploiting the mass existential anxiety born of industrial modernity in order to replace it with a racial community and a mystique of blood and soil. The book was immediately seized and banned by the new regime^[49].

On April 13, 1933, under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), Tillich was dismissed from his Frankfurt chair, together with Karl Mannheim and Max Horkheimer^[50]. Unlike those two colleagues, both of Jewish origin, Tillich was among the very first non-Jewish academics removed by the new power -- his dismissal, purely political, directly punishing his leading role in religious socialism and his public critique of National Socialism.

"Can one, apart from any belief in historical salvation, preserve the consciousness of the unconditional dimension of the moral and social demand?" — Paul Tillich, Die sozialistische Entscheidung, Alfred Protte Verlag, Potsdam, 1933^[51]

Reinhold Niebuhr, staying in Germany during the summer of 1933, learned of Tillich's dismissal and arranged his recruitment at Union Theological Seminary in New York; the seminary faculty accepted a voluntary 5% salary cut to finance this new position during the Great Depression^[52]. In the autumn of 1933, Tillich emigrated to the United States with his family -- he was then forty-seven and spoke almost no English.

Union Theological Seminary, a place of refuge

At Union, Tillich began as visiting professor of philosophy of religion, while also lecturing in philosophy at nearby Columbia University (1933-1934)^[53]. He received tenure in 1937, then, in 1940, was promoted to professor of philosophical theology and naturalized as a United States citizen the same year^[54]. During these twenty-two New York years Tillich published the essential works of his mature reflection: The Interpretation of History (1936), The Protestant Era (1948, a collection of his most significant essays on theology of culture and religious socialism), The Shaking of the Foundations (1948, a collection of sermons), then, from 1951 onward, the first volume of his Systematic Theology.

Harvard, then Chicago: public recognition

In 1953-1954, Tillich was invited to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland -- international academic recognition rarely granted to an emigrant theologian^[55]. In 1955, he joined Harvard University with the rare title of University Professor, free from attachment to any particular department, which allowed him to teach at the intersection of theology, philosophy and the human sciences until 1962. He finally ended his career at the University of Chicago, where from 1962 to 1965 he held the John Nuveen chair of theology at the Divinity School.

The Time cover and public fame

On March 16, 1959, Time magazine put Paul Tillich on its cover^[56] -- a striking sign that his influence had moved beyond university and ecclesial circles into the American public sphere, at a time when religious existentialism occupied a central place in United States intellectual culture. This notoriety also appeared in the academic reception of his thought: in 1955, the young Baptist pastor Martin Luther King Jr. devoted his doctoral dissertation in theology, defended at Boston University, to a comparison between the conceptions of God in Tillich and in the theologian Henry Nelson Wieman^[57] -- evidence of the breadth of Tillich's intellectual reach well beyond his own Lutheran origin.

The method of correlation

Tillich's whole Systematic Theology rests on an explicit methodological principle he calls the method of correlation: philosophy, through the analysis of human existence, formulates man's great existential questions -- finitude, anxiety, non-being, estrangement, doubt, meaninglessness -- while theology, drawing from Christian revelation, provides the corresponding symbolic answers^[58]. The two procedures remain mutually interdependent but asymmetrical: the questions come from the philosophical analysis of human existence; the answers come from the Christian source -- yet the question posed by man determines the form in which the theological answer can be received and understood.

"The systematic theologian must draw his answers from the Christian sources, but he cannot give these answers before he has fully developed the questions which are implied in the human existential situation." — Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1951, introduction^[59]

This method, whose structural echo will later be found in the "transcendental method" of the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, commits Tillich to pass systematically through every classical Christian doctrine -- God, creation, sin, Christ, Spirit, Church, Kingdom -- by first placing before it an existentialist philosophical analysis of the corresponding question, then following it with a contemporary reformulation of the traditional Christian symbolic answer.

God as being-itself and ground of being

The first result of this method, for Tillich, is a radical displacement of the question of God. Refusing to treat God as "a being" -- even a supreme, all-powerful and personal one, in the way classical theism usually understands him -- Tillich affirms that God is being-itself, the ground of being that makes possible the existence of every finite being:

"Nothing can be said theologically about God before the statement that he is the power of being in everything that has being." — Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. III, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1963, p. 294^[60]

"God is being-itself, or the ground of being." — Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1951, p. 236^[61]

To treat God as "a being," even a sovereign one, is for Tillich to place him in the same logical category as his creatures, to make him an object among other objects, a subject among other subjects -- which he judges to be the very root of religious idolatry. God, by contrast, is neither object nor subject: he is the condition of possibility of every object and every subject, the "power of being" that resists non-being in each finite being. This conception, which takes up and extends the late Schelling's philosophy of "positivity," places Tillich in a singular doctrinal position: neither pantheism in the strict sense, since God is not simply identified with the totality of finite beings, nor classical theism, since God is precisely not conceived as a supreme person among beings.

The doctrine of religious symbols

As a direct corollary of this doctrine of God, Tillich's theory of religious symbols maintains that every statement about God other than the statement that he is being-itself is necessarily symbolic, not literal:

"The only nonsymbolic statement which systematic theology must and can make is that everything about God is symbolic." — Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. I, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1951, p. 239^[62]

For Tillich, a symbol differs radically from a mere conventional sign: a sign points to a reality outside itself without participating in it, whereas a symbol "participates in the power of that which it symbolizes"^[63]. To say that God is "Father," "Creator," "Person," "just" or "good" is therefore, for Tillich, not literal discourse but authentically symbolic discourse, capable of making the divine reality present and effective without adequately describing, in the strict conceptual sense, the nature of God himself. Only the abstract statement "God is being-itself" escapes, in his view, this generalized symbolization -- because it says nothing concrete about God, but merely designates his ontological function as ground.

The courage to be and the God above the God of theism

It is in The Courage to Be (1952), his most widely read essay for a general audience, that Tillich most freely develops the existential consequences of his doctrine of God. He distinguishes three fundamental forms of human anxiety before non-being -- the anxiety of fate and death, the anxiety of guilt and condemnation, the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness -- and argues that the ultimate form of courage consists in affirming one's own being in spite of non-being, even when doubt has stripped faith of every concrete content^[64].

This "absolute faith," stripped of every particular object, finds its ground in what Tillich calls the "God above the God of theism":

"The content of absolute faith is the 'God above God.' Absolute faith and its consequence, the courage that takes the radical doubt, the doubt about God, into itself, transcends the theistic idea of God." — Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952 (2nd ed. 2000), p. 186^[65]

"Only if the God of theism is transcended can the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness be taken into the courage to be. [...] The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt." — Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952 (2nd ed. 2000), pp. 186 and 190^[66]

For Tillich, the "God of theism" -- the personal divinity, object among objects, subject capable of being invoked, prayed to, thanked or implored -- remains a figure too human, too finite, too "objectified" to bear the weight of modern man's radical doubt. Only a God beyond this personalization, identified with the very power of being that resists non-being, can in his view ground a courage capable of facing the meaninglessness proper to modernity.

Theonomy, heteronomy and the kairos of history

Taking up the categories forged in his Berlin years, Tillich distinguishes three possible relations between human culture and its ultimate religious dimension: autonomy, where human reason cuts itself off from any transcendent ground and closes in upon itself; heteronomy, where an external religious authority dominates and forcibly suffocates cultural creativity; and theonomy, the ideal state in which the ultimate meaning of existence shines freely through all forms of human thought and action without ever being imposed on them from outside^[67]. Kairos, the moment of fullness of time when the eternal breaks into history, is precisely the occasion when a culture can, according to Tillich, recover this theonomous relation to its own ground -- the event of Christ being, from this perspective, the kairos par excellence, the "pleroma of time" announced by John the Baptist and then proclaimed by Jesus himself.

To this trilogy Tillich adds the category of the demonic (das Dämonische), which he borrows from Goethe and reworks theologically: a creative force of being, good in itself, which sets itself up as absolute and closes itself within its own finitude, thereby becoming destructive -- an explanatory model Tillich applies directly, in the 1930s, to his theological reading of National Socialism as an idolatrous political religion^[68].

The New Being in Jesus as the Christ

The heart of Tillich's Christology, developed in the second volume of Systematic Theology (1957), is the category of the New Being: Jesus, as the Christ, is the one man who lived fully under the conditions of estranged existence without ever breaking communion with the ground of his being, without ever claiming ultimacy for himself, remaining at every moment "transparent" to the divine^[69]. Tillich explicitly rejects the classical Christological vocabulary of the "two natures" forged at Nicaea and then Chalcedon:

"The development of Protestant orthodoxy, both in its classical period and in its later reformulations, has shown the impossibility of an intelligible solution of the Christological problem in terms of the classical terminology." — Paul Tillich, cited in Gerald L. Orbanek, The Christology of Paul Tillich: A Critique, Faith & Reason, vol. I, no. 2, 1975, p. 2^[70]

For Tillich, the very term "nature" applied both to Christ's humanity and to his divinity is irremediably ambiguous: applied to man, it would have to distinguish essential nature, estranged existential nature and the ambiguous nature mixing the two; applied to God, who transcends every essence, it can designate only a radical transcendence incompatible, in his view, with any substantial union to a concrete man^[71]. He proposes to replace the language of the hypostatic union of two natures with that of an "eternal unity of God and man" or an "eternal God-manhood," historically realized in Jesus as the Christ^[72]:

"The Incarnation of the Logos is not a metamorphosis, but his total manifestation in a personal life." — Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. II, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1957, p. 149^[73]

It is precisely this reformulation -- an "eternal God-manhood" rather than a unique divine person subsisting in two distinct and unconfused natures -- that earned Tillich, from its first presentation, the Catholic accusation of Nestorianism, as the final evaluation will show.

Encyclopedic honesty requires reporting, without complacency or voyeurism, a widely documented and publicly recognized aspect of Tillich's biography: his conjugal life with Hannah Werner-Gottschow, whom he married in 1924, was marked by numerous extramarital relationships on both sides, within what the couple itself described as an "open" marriage^[74]. After Paul's death, Hannah Tillich published in 1973 her memoirs, From Time to Time, which caused a real shock wave in the American theological world by revealing in detail, interwoven with her own poetry, the content of this unconventional married life^[75].

This dimension of Tillich's biography is not an anecdotal detail external to his work: several commentators, including readers sympathetic to his theology, have noted the tension between his insistent doctrine of the "courage to be in spite of" existential anxiety and a personal life that does not always seem to have found, in that same doctrine, the resources for stable conjugal fidelity^[76]. Ignispedia reports this fact with the truthfulness required of any serious encyclopedia, without judging Tillich's soul in the internal forum, but honestly noting the gap between the theoretical ambition of his system and the actual conduct of his own existence -- a gap which Catholic teaching on coherence between doctrine and life precisely invites one never to conceal.

A true intuition: man's existential question

An attentive Catholic can recognize, in Tillich's insistence on existential anxiety -- finitude, guilt, the void of meaning that threatens modern man -- a profoundly true intuition compatible with classical Christian anthropology: man is indeed a being marked by contingency and sin, in search of an ultimate ground that infinitely surpasses him. The desire for the absolute that Tillich calls "ultimate concern" joins, by another philosophical path, what the Catechism of the Catholic Church recognizes as the natural desire for God inscribed in the human heart^[77]:

"Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man's ultimate concern." — Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, Harper & Row, New York, 1957, p. 1^[78]

This way of taking seriously the existential dimension of faith -- against a Christianity reduced to cold adherence to abstract propositions -- also meets a pastoral concern shared by the Catholic Church herself. But the accuracy of the question in no way guarantees the accuracy of the answer: precisely on the doctrine of God, the theory of religious language and Christology, Tillich's theology moves furthest away from constant Catholic teaching, as the best Catholic theologians who studied him directly did not fail to point out.

Tillich's being-itself before Saint Thomas's Ipsum Esse Subsistens

Between Tillich's vocabulary and that of classical Catholic theology there is a deceptive verbal proximity. Saint Thomas Aquinas also defines God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens, subsistent Being itself, from whom every creature receives being by participation^[79]. But this proximity of vocabulary covers a radical divergence in doctrine, which Catholic theology repeatedly recalled in relation to Tillich:

Reading the table: the verbal resemblance between "being-itself" (Tillich) and Ipsum Esse Subsistens (Saint Thomas) masks a doctrinal opposition on nearly every point that determines, in Catholic theology, the personality, transcendence and knowability of God.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, in his critique of what he calls Tillich's "transtheistic" position, reproached him precisely for reducing God to the impersonal "necessary being" of scholastic philosophy, thereby losing the living, personal and invocable God of biblical revelation^[83]. The judgment from the evangelical Protestant side is no less severe: the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology summarizes the difficulty by saying that, at best, Tillich was pantheistic, while his thought borders on atheism^[84]. Catholic theology, through the Jesuit Erich Przywara -- already known for his doctrine of the analogy of being opposed to Karl Barth^[85] -- examined Tillichian terminology in the same direction, seeing in it a structural confusion between the God of the philosophy of being and the living God revealed in Scripture^[86].

The doctrine of symbols before the Catholic analogy of being

Catholic theology obviously does not deny that human language about God contains an irreducible imperfection: since Saint Thomas Aquinas, it teaches that our names for God -- goodness, wisdom, power, justice -- are said of him by analogy, not by pure univocity, because God infinitely transcends the finite mode in which we conceive these perfections^[87]. On this point, Tillich and Catholic tradition share one concern: to avoid naive anthropomorphism that would reduce God to a large human being.

But Catholic analogy is not Tillichian symbol. Analogy affirms that our divine names, though imperfect, truly say something of God as he is in himself -- God is really good, really wise, really just, although in a way infinitely superior to what we conceive by these words when applied to creatures. Tillichian symbol, by contrast, does not claim to describe God as he is: it makes him present and effective for the religious subject, without guaranteeing the conceptual truth of what it affirms. The Jesuit Gustave Weigel, who devoted more than ten pages to this doctrine in his study Myth, Symbol, and Analogy, gives an analysis judged by scholarship to be "the clearest presentation of Tillich's argument" available -- while concluding that this theory of symbol cannot ultimately ground a true knowledge of God such as the Catholic tradition of analogy teaches^[88]. The result, for a Catholic reader, is that Tillich's doctrine of religious language, pushed to its conclusion, leaves human reason without real access, even imperfect and analogical, to God's nature -- something Vatican I formally excludes by teaching that God can be known with certainty by natural reason from the works of creation^[89].

A Christology judged Nestorian by Catholic theologians

It is on the terrain of Christology that the disagreement between Tillich and Catholic doctrine is most explicitly documented. As early as 1950, barely a year after Tillich's first developed presentation of his doctrine of the Incarnation, the Jesuit theologian Gustave Weigel published in Theological Studies an essay openly describing Tillich's Christology as Nestorian^[90] -- that is, close to the heresy condemned at the Council of Ephesus (431), which recognized between Jesus and the divine Word only a close moral union, not the hypostatic union of one single person subsisting in two distinct natures.

"This is the best analysis of my thought that I have ever seen." — Paul Tillich, in response to Gustave Weigel's article, cited in Weigel, Contemporaneous Protestantism and Paul Tillich, Theological Studies, vol. 11, no. 4, 1950, pp. 201-202^[91]

Tillich's own response to Weigel -- praising the analysis rather than contesting it -- is all the more significant because it recurs after the publication of the second volume of Systematic Theology in 1957, where Tillich, again accused of Nestorianism by Catholic critics, answers without denying the substance of the accusation:

"My task, in answering these accusations, cannot be to deny them. From the point of view of the received dogma, they may be correct. But, theologically, ideas rejected by the ancient theologians and their successors may contain a truth which must be expressed in contemporary categories and concepts." — Paul Tillich, An Afterward: Appreciation and Reply, in Thomas A. O'Meara and Celestine D. Weisser (eds.), Paul Tillich in Catholic Thought, Priory Press, Dubuque, 1964^[92]

The Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, whose classic article on dogmatic development directly illuminates this debate, admits that a Christological reformulation using new philosophical tools is not condemnable in itself -- but he sets three strict conditions such a reformulation must respect in order to remain orthodox: it must recognize that Christ's self-surrender to God presupposes a real communication of God to this man; that this absolute surrender implies an absolute communication of God, such that what it produces becomes the very reality of the one who produces it; and that such an existential statement is not a mere way of speaking, but, in the most radical sense, a statement about being^[93]. Yet precisely this second condition -- a communication of God so absolute that it makes Christ's humanity identical with God's own reality, and not merely in privileged communion with him -- is what Tillich's Christology of the "New Being" and "eternal God-manhood" fails to satisfy^[94].

Gerald Orbanek's concluding analysis, published in Faith & Reason, summarizes the heart of the problem:

"A Catholic must say of Jesus: 'He is the Lord; He is the Christ; He is God.' In Tillich's system, this last affirmation cannot be made. For Tillich, it would be idolatry." — Gerald L. Orbanek, The Christology of Paul Tillich: A Critique, Faith & Reason: The Journal of Christendom College, vol. I, no. 2, autumn 1975^[95]

On this precise point -- the direct and unreserved affirmation of Jesus' divinity, "true God and true man" according to the Chalcedonian formula -- Tillich's Christology, by the internal logic of his own philosophical system, cannot join the constant Catholic teaching from the Council of Nicaea (325) and the Council of Chalcedon (451)^[96].

The judgment of Catholic theologians on Tillich's work

It is striking to note, as the theologian J. Heywood Thomas observed in his 1963 survey in the Scottish Journal of Theology, that "some of the best critics of so important a Protestant theology are Roman Catholics"^[97]: nearly a dozen learned Catholic articles, against a much smaller number of equivalent Protestant critical analyses, examined Tillich's work in the 1950s and 1960s -- Weigel on myth and symbol, Avery Dulles (future cardinal) on Tillich's use of the Bible, George Tavard in a full monograph on his Christology, Przywara on his theological terminology^[98].

Dulles, in his study Paul Tillich and the Bible, published in 1956 in Theological Studies, observes that Tillich, faithful to the end to his "Protestant principle" of distrust toward any absolutizing of a finite form, finds it extremely difficult to accept the full doctrinal content of the Incarnation, while recognizing the symbolic value of the biblical portrait of Jesus as the Christ^[99]. This observation joins the overall judgment of Catholic criticism: what Tillich preserves, with real philosophical talent and a sincere pastoral concern for modern man, is the existential function of the Christian message -- but what he loses, in the eyes of Catholic theology, is precisely what that function is supposed to serve: the objective truth of a personal, truly transcendent God, truly incarnate in history in a man who is, without symbolic reservation, "true God and true man."

Tillich's work remains, with Karl Barth's^[100], one of the two great poles of twentieth-century Protestant theology -- the two men representing, each in his own way, a radically opposed response to the legacy of nineteenth-century liberal theology inaugurated by Friedrich Schleiermacher: where Barth chose to ground theology exclusively on revelation received from above, rejecting every natural theology, Tillich chose instead to anchor theology in the philosophical analysis of human existence, thus recovering, by another path than Schleiermacher's, a theology constructed from man's religious experience and question. His method of correlation permanently marked twentieth-century academic theology, including Catholic theology, where a structurally comparable procedure -- though based on very different philosophical presuppositions -- can be found in the transcendental theology of the Jesuit Karl Rahner. His concept of the "courage to be" nourished, far beyond theological circles, existential psychology and American pastoral counseling in the second half of the twentieth century. But it is precisely the solidity and constancy of the Catholic critique -- from Przywara to Weigel, from Dulles to Tavard -- that most clearly brought to light what Tillich's system cannot offer a Catholic believer: a personal and transcendent God truly knowable, language about God authentically analogical and not merely symbolic, and a Christ who can be confessed without reservation, with the Church of all centuries, as true God and true man.

• Karl Barth (1886-1968), Tillich's exact contemporary and the second great pole of twentieth-century Protestant theology, whose dialectical theology stands in direct opposition to Tillich's method of correlation.
• Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), father of German liberal theology, whose legacy runs, by opposite paths, through both Barth and Tillich.
• Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), precursor of existentialist philosophy, whose analysis of anxiety directly anticipates Tillich's.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), another German Lutheran theologian contemporary with Tillich, whose resistance to Nazism took a much more radical path and ended in martyrdom.
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose critique of classical metaphysics and analysis of nihilism deeply nourished Tillich's vocabulary of non-being and courage to be.
• Responses to Protestantism, for the complete Catholic dossier on the doctrinal points separating Catholicism from the theologies born of the Reformation.