Paul Tillich Quotes

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.

Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.

The first duty of love is to listen.

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.

Boredom is rage spread thin

Wine is like the incarnation--it is both divine and human

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

...history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.

Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being

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 a meaning of our life." Paul Tillich

Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity.

The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

Astonishment is the root of philosophy.

The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that "loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude." Because the borderline finds solitude so difficult to tolerate, she is trapped in a relentless metaphysical loneliness from which the the only relief comes from of the physical presence of others. So she will often rush to singles bars or with crowded haunts, often with disappointing--or even violent--results.

There is no place to which we could flee from God, which is outside of God.

Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.

Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous YES to one's own true being.

man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements - as well as one's deepest failures - is a definite symptom of maturity.

We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea.

Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the seperated.

The separation of faith and love is always a consequence of a deterioration of religion.

I hope for the day when everyone can speak of God without embarrassment.

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.

In the courageous standing of uncertainty, faith shows most visibly its dynamic character.

The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.

Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.

As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

In this respect fundamentalism has demonic traits. It destroys the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and it makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware

the courage to die is the test of the courage to be.

We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go.

I have given no definition of love. This is impossible, because there is no higher principle by which it could be defined. It is life itself in its actual unity. The forms and structures in which love embodies itself are the forms and structures in which love overcomes its self-destructive forces.

...only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

...sin is separation.

Man is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason

The neurotic is aware of the danger of a situation in which his unrealistic self-affirmation is broken down and no realistic self-affirmation takes its place.

Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason.

No self-acceptance is possible if one is not accepted in a person-to-person relation.

Man creates what he is.

He who participates in God participates in eternity.

Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.

[A] process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control. … [T]he safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price: man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means.

real joy is a “severe matter”; it is the happiness of a soul which is “lifted above every circumstance.

Wine is like the incarnation-it is both divine and human.

Reasoning as a limited cognitive function, detached from the personal center, never could create courage. One cannot remove anxiety by arguing it away.

Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith

Neither one of us could really articulate how we felt until I heard Lamott referencing Paul Tillich and telling the audience, “The opposite of faith is not doubt—it’s certainty.” Steve and I didn’t leave religion because we stopped believing in God. Religion left us when it started putting politics and certainty before love and mystery.

For encountering God means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity.

the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable…. This is the genuine meaning of the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of ‘justification by faith

gave me a going-away present on behalf of Rochdale, a book by Paul Tillich called The Courage To Be. Bob wrote inside, Cathy, read this sometime in your life when you need “to be.” He was right. Later in my life when I was at a low that book pulled me through.

Paul Tillich - Loneliness & Solitude: "And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain to pray: and when the evening was come, he was alone" - Matthew 14.23. 'He was there alone.' So are we. Man [humankind] is alone because he/[she] is man [human]. In some way every creature is alone...Loneliness can be conqured only by those who can bear solitude (1973:15 & 20). To overcome 'our' sense of aloness is a life long pursuite - let us not despair in its pursuite!

Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the civil rights pioneers who took an interest. While working on his philosophy of non-violent resistance, he read Sartre, Heidegger and the German-American existentialist theologian Paul Tillich.

The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich recently drew a similar distinction between the God we imagine when we hear the term, and the “God beyond God,” that is, the “ground of being” that underlies all our concepts and images.

Truth without the way to truth is dead.

The typical American, after he has lost the foundations of his existence, works for new foundations

Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.

And so we use them for a kind of pleasure which can be called "fun." But it is not the creative kind of fun often connected with play; it is, rather, a shallow, distracting, greedy way of "having fun." And it is not by chance that it is that type of fun which can easily be commercialized, for it is dependent on calculable reactions, without passion, without risk, without love. Of all the dangers that threaten our civilization, this is one of the most dangerous ones: the escape from one’s emptiness through a "fun" which makes joy impossible.

The fact that man never is satisfied with any stage of his finite development, the fact that nothing finite can hold him, although finitude is his destiny, indicates the indissoluble relation of everything finite to being-itself.

Providence,” he argues, “is not a theory about some activities of God; it is the religious symbol of the courage of confidence with respect to fate and death.

The basic error of fundamentalism is that it overlooks the contribution of the receptive side in the revelatory situation and consequently identifies one individual and conditioned form of receiving the divine with the divine itself.

Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given.

الأبدية هي التجدد الدائم

الموقف الديني هو دائما في الوقت نفسه موقف مجتمع ما

Paul Tillich, for example, maintained that, ‘It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it.’4

To paraphrase Paul Tillich, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.

In the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. But there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the "power of acceptance". To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be.

The law of love is the ultimate law because it is the negation of law; it is absolute because it concerns everything concrete. The paradox of final revelation, overcoming the conflict between absolutism and relativism, is love.

And he wanted more than anything else, deeply and compassionately, to be of help; and he could be of help in this age, and was of help, because artist and philosopher as well as theologian, he cared for culture as well as for Christ.6

Man is essentially 'finite freedom'; freedom not in the sense of indeterminacy but in the sense of being able to determine himself through decisions in the center of his being. Man, as finite freedom, is free within the contingencies of his finitude. But within these limits he is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become, to fulfill his destiny.

Self-affirmation, for Tillich, is the paradox of “participation in something which transcends the self” (165).

Christianity sees in the picture of Jesus as the Christ a human life in which all forms of anxiety are present but in which all forms of despair are absent.

Philosophy deals with the structure of being in itself; theology deals with the meaning of being for us.

It is the expression of the anxiety of meaninglessness and of the attempt to take this anxiety into the courage to be as oneself. (139)

The gratitude of those who receive help is first and always gratitude for love and only afterwards gratitude for help.

The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. “Existential” in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence....There are realms of reality or—more exactly—of abstraction from reality in which the most complete detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. Everything which can be expressed in terms of quantitative measurement has this character. But it is most inadequate to apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. But by participating you change it. In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing.

Man is the question he asks about himself, before any question has been formulated. It is, therefore, not surprising that the basic questions were formulated very early in the history of mankind.

The typical American, after he has lost the foundations of his existence, works for new foundations.

في الحقبة الحديثة انطلق العلم يفجر الطاقات الكامنة في الانسان منذ نهاية العصور الوسطى، لكن العلم انقلب على الانسان لأن الإنسان استغله لاستعباد الانسان.

لا يمكن إزالة المجازفة عن أي فعل إيمان .

Only if God IS ultimate reality, can he be our unconditional concern; only then can he be the object of surrender, obedience, and assent. Faith in anything which has only preliminary reality is idolatrous.

It is most important for the practice of the Christian ministry, especially in its missionary activities toward those both within and without the Christian culture, to consider pagans, humanists, and Jews as members of the latent Spiritual Community and not as complete strangers who are invited into the Spiritual Community from outside. This insight serves as a powerful weapon against ecclesiastical and hierarchical arrogance.

The opposite of faith is not doubt--it's certainty. Paul Tillich. I didn't leave religion because we stopped believing in God. Religion left us when it started putting politics and certainty before love and mystery.

The most important decision in Christian theology is to decide whether you will speak of God as a person or as a concept, as a name or as an idea. Talk about God as, to use Paul Tillich's term, "ultimate reality," and you will get a safe, dead abstraction that you can utilize in whatever salvation project you happen now to be working. Name God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and God will enlist you in God's move upon the world.

He who is grasped by the one thing that is needed has the many things under his feet. They concern him but not ultimately, and when he loses them he does not lose the one thing he needs and that cannot be taken from him.

Ordinary theism has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter of ultimate concern. God is not God without universal participation. “Personal God” is a confusing symbol.

We must abandon the external height images in which the theistic God has historically been perceived and replace them with internal depth images of a deity who is not apart from us, but who is the very core and ground of all that is. —Paul Tillich

This is biblical ethics. It has little to do with the middle-class ethics of avoiding a few things which are supposed to be wrong and doing a few things which are supposed to be right. Biblical ethics means standing in ultimate decisions for or against God.

[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. It means that whatever concerns a man ultimately becomes god for him, and, conversely, it means that a man can be concerned ultimately only about that which is god for him.

To overcome our sense of loneliness is a life long pursuit. Let us not despair in its pursuit!

It is not Christianity as a whole, but Calvinist Protestantism whose attitude towards nature contradicts almost completely the Buddhist attitude.

The “stigma” of finitude which appears in all things and in the whole of reality and the “shock” which grasps the mind when it encounters the threat of nonbeing reveal the negative side of the mystery, the abysmal element in the ground of being. This negative side is always potentially present, and it can be realized in cognitive as well as in communal experiences. It is a necessary element in revelation. Without it the mystery would not be mystery. Without the “I am undone” of Isaiah in his vocational vision, God cannot be experienced (Isa. 6: 5). Without the “dark night of the soul,” the mystic cannot experience the mystery of the ground.

Being human means asking the questions of one's own being and living under the impact of the answers given to this question. And, conversely, being human means receiving answers to the questions of one's own being and asking questions under the impact of the answers.

The faith which makes the courage of despair possible is the acceptance of the power of being, even in the grip of non-being. Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself through us. The act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith.

The existential psychotherapy approach posits that the inner conflict bedeviling us issues not only from our struggle with suppressed instinctual strivings or internalized significant adults or shards of forgotten traumatic memories, but also from our confrontation with the “givens” of existence. And what are these “givens” of existence? If we permit our-selves to screen out or “bracket” the everyday concerns of life and reflect deeply upon our situation in the world, we inevitably arrive at the deep structures of existence (the “ultimate concerns,” to use theologian Paul Tillich’s term).

[T]he question of the existence of God can be neither asked nor answered. If asked, it is a question about that which by its very nature is above existence, and therefore the answer - whether negative or affirmative - implicitly denies the nature of God. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not a being. On this basis a first step can be taken toward the solution of the problem which usually is discussed as the immanence and the transcendence of God. As the power of being, God transcends every being and also the totality of beings - the world. Being-itself is beyond finitude and infinity; otherwise it would be conditioned by something other than itself, and the real power of being would lie beyond both it and that which conditioned it. Being-itself infinitely transcends every finite being. There is no proportion or gradation between the finite and the infinite. There is an absolute break, an infinite “jump.” On the other hand, everything finite participates in being-itself and in its infinity. Otherwise it would not have the power of being. It would be swallowed by nonbeing, or it never would have emerged out of nonbeing. This double relation of all beings to being-itself gives being-itself a double characteristic. In calling it creative, we point to the fact that everything participates in the infinite power of being. In calling it abysmal, we point to the fact that everything participates in the power of being in a finite way, that all beings are infinitely transcended by their creative ground.

The being of God is being-itself. The being of God cannot be understood as the existence of a being alongside others or above others. If God is a being, he is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to space and substance. Even if he is called the “highest being” in the sense of the “most perfect” and the “most powerful” being, this situation is not changed. When applied to God, superlatives become diminutives. They place him on the level of other beings while elevating him above all of them. Many theologians who have used the term “highest being” have known better. Actually they have described the highest as the absolute, as that which is on a level qualitatively different from the level of any being - even the highest being. Whenever infinite or unconditional power and meaning are attributed to the highest being, it has ceased to be a being and has become being-itself. Many confusions in the doctrine of God and many apologetic weaknesses could be avoided if God were understood first of all as being-itself or as the ground of being. The power of being is another way of expressing the same thing in a circumscribing phrase. Ever since the time of Plato it has been known - although it often has been disregarded, especially by the nominalists and their modern followers - that the concept of being as being, or being-itself, points to the power inherent in everything, the power of resisting nonbeing. Therefore, instead of saying that God is first of all being-itself, it is possible to say that he is the power of being in everything and above everything, the infinite power of being.

As Donald Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 he was asked, “Have you ever asked God for forgiveness?” He replied, “I’m not sure I have. I just go and try and do a better job from there. . . . If I do something wrong, I think I just try to make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.”1 He created quite a stir among many religious people, so he tempered the comments a few days later. But I think he was being honest, and his comments reflect the way many people feel: in theory they believe in the forgiveness of sins, but the concept doesn’t really apply to them. Standing in stark contrast to this view is one articulated by twentieth-century existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, who once said, “Forgiveness is an answer, the divine answer, to the question implied in our existence.”2

The ecstatic state in which revelation occurs does not destroy the rational structure of the mind. The reports about ecstatic experiences in the classical literature of the great religions agree on this point - that, while demonic possession destroys the rational structure of the mind, divine ecstacy preserves and elevates it, although transcending it. Demonic possession destroys the ethical and logical principles of reason; divine ecstasy affirms them. Demonic “revelations” are exposed and rejected in many religious sources, especially in the Old Testament. An assumed revelation in which justice as the principle of practical reason is violated is antidivine, and it is therefore judged a lie. The demonic blinds; it does not reveal. In the state of demonic possession the mind is not really “beside itself,” but rather it is in the power of elements of itself which aspire to be the whole mind which grasp the center of the rational self and destroy it. There is, however, a point of identity between ecstasy and possession. In both cases the ordinary subject-object structure of the mind is put out of action. But divine ecstasy does not violate the wholeness of the rational mind, while demonic possession weakens or destroys it. This indicates that, although ecstasy is not a product of reason, it does not destroy reason.

Knowledge of revelation cannot interfere with ordinary knowledge. Likewise, ordinary knowledge cannot interfere with knowledge of revelation. There is no scientific theory which is more favorable to the truth of revelation than any other theory. It is disastrous for theology if theologians prefer one scientific view to others on theological grounds. And it was humiliating for theology when theologians were afraid of new theories for religious reasons, trying to resist them as long as possible, and finally giving in when resistance had become impossible. This ill-conceived resistance of theologians from the time of Galileo to the time of Darwin was one of the causes of the split between religion and secular culture in the past centuries. The same situation prevails with regard to historical research. Theologians need not be afraid of any historical conjecture, for revealed truth lies in a dimension where it can neither be confirmed nor negated by historiography. Therefore, theologians should not prefer some results of historical research to others on theological grounds, and they should not resist results which finally have to be accepted if scientific honesty is not to be destroyed, even if they seem to undermine the knowledge of revelation. Historical investigations should neither comfort nor worry theologians. Knowledge of revelation, although it is mediated primarily through historical events, does not imply factual assertions, and it is therefore not exposed to critical analysis by historical research. Its truth is to be judged by criteria which lie within the dimension of revelatory knowledge. Psychology, including depth psychology, psychosomatics, and social psychology, is equally unable to interfere with knowledge of revelation. There are many insights into the nature of man in revelation. But all of them refer to the relation of man to what concerns him ultimately, to the ground and meaning of his being. There is no revealed psychology just as there is no revealed historiography or revealed physics. It is not the task of theology to protect the truth of revelation by attacking Freudian doctrines of libido, repression, and sublimation on religious grounds or by defending a Jungian doctrine of man in the name of revelatory knowledge.