Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

NOTICE: The following article is Copyrighted by Theology Today.

The Tillichian Spell: Memories of a Student Mesmerized in the 1950s
Theology Today, Oct 1996
by Tom F. Driver

Composing these reminiscences was a labor of love. I did it at the request of the North American Paul Tillich Society, some of whose members, I’m sure, felt they ought to hear from the occupant emeritus of the Paul Tillich Chair at Union Theological Seminary before he fell asleep or came down with Alzheimer’s or something, especially as he is one of that diminishing band of veterans who claim to have seen and heard Paul Tillich in the classroom. I decided to ransack my memory for all the Tillich stories that it contained. This, then, is my modest effort to remember my old professor, one toward whom I have always had the most ambivalent feelings.

When I finished my undergraduate work at Duke University and went to Union Seminary in New York to study for the ministry, in 1950, I knew nothing of Paul Tillich. Since he was already famous, I must have heard of him, but I had read nothing by him and had no impression that I can remember. I was more conscious of Reinhold Niebuhr, President Henry P. Van Dusen, and John C. Bennett. Looking back, I think this means that none of my teachers and friends at Duke, nor the church pastors I knew, had yet assimilated Tillich; so they said little to me about him.

Everyone knows what a time it took for Tillich to find his audience in America. This had mostly to do with the fact that his philosophical thought, and hence his theological vocabulary, was unlike what Americans were used to. But in part, it came from the way he used and pronounced English words.

There’s an oft-told story that illustrates both factors. Soon after Tillich came to the United States, two philosophers (I think one of them may have been Theodore Green) went to hear him speak. Tillich lectured about the emptiness, which he called the vacuum, in modern life. As the two philosophers walked away from the hall afterward, one of them asked the other: “What did he say?”

“I don’t really know,” said the other. “What did he mean by the `wake womb’?”

If some people had trouble understanding Tillich’s English, there were speakers of English that he could not understand. Once, I heard Tillich tell a group of scholars, gathered in the Chapter House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, about his arrival in the United States. As you probably know, Reinhold Niebuhr and Columbia University Professor Horace Friess had arranged for him to come to Morningside Heights when he fled from Hitler’s Germany in 1933.

It is said that Tillich learned English on the boat coming over, but I can’t vouch for that. Nor do I know who met him at the dock, but he said he came in a taxi to Knox Hall, the faculty residence at Union Seminary, where he was greeted at the front door by Reinhold Niebuhr’s wife, Ursula. She welcomed him enthusiastically in her clipped British accent. Tillich told us he thought to himself, “English I know. But ziss iss Chinese!”

Having come to Union Seminary in 1950 very ignorant of Tillich, I was quite unprepared for what happened to me in his classroom. In a word, as soon as the course began, I realized that I was in the presence of the most powerful, the most masterful teacher I had ever experienced. At Duke, and even in high school, I had had some first-rate instructors who moved me deeply and gave me excellent preparation for postgraduate study, but Tillich was in another category altogether.

I came under his spell and stayed there for at least twenty years. In the 1970s, I thought I had exorcized the spell at last, but the older I get the more I think that it remains. He was the kind of teacher you never get over.

Substantively, the way Tillich got to me was to go about answering my questions without my having to ask them. Chalk that up to his intuitiveness, or to his great powers of cultural analysis, or to both at once. He was known as, and called himself, an apologetic theologian. I felt that his apologia was not addressed to unbelievers nearly so much as to persons like me who had been Christian all our lives and had now come to a time when we did not really know what Christianity was about, for it seemed so at odds with our culture. Tillich addressed both the confusion and the doubt of the Christian believer.

I had grown up in liberal Methodism, although that was in the South where the surrounding population tended toward fundamentalism. World War II, during part of which I had been in the Army, shook me out of the complacency of my liberal Christian upbringing, but I did not yet have anything to put in its place. I was ready for some version of what I soon learned to call “crisis theology.” But there were several varieties of crisis thought, so the question is why I was so entranced by Tillich’s version.

In his own recollections, Langdon Gilkey has said that students at Union did not see any conflict between Niebuhr and Tillich.1 Gilkey was there from 1946 to 1950, while I arrived in September of 1950. Perhaps it was different during his years there. Or perhaps he just means that there was no personal animosity between them. The students in my time were very aware of theological conflicts between them, as the following story, which may be apocryphal, makes clear:

It was said that Tillich and Niebuhr often took afternoon strolls together in Riverside Park. On one occasion, while they walked, Niebuhr held forth about something that had happened that day in the U.S. Senate that he didn’t like. When he stopped fulminating, he looked around to discover that Tillich was no longer with him. Tillich had stopped some distance back and was gazing in rapture at the sunset beyond the Hudson River. Niebuhr stormed back to him in fury and said, “I always knew you were a God-damned pantheist!” (I’ll have more to relate about sunsets later on.)

At Union, however, the sharpest disagreements with Tillich came from James Muilenburg. Although Tillich seemed to take little notice, “Muily,” as we called our very dramatic Old Testament professor, rarely let a class session go by without taking at least one potshot. Muily’s imagination lived in narrative. He had nothing but scorn for philosophy, especially for ontology. He agreed with Niebuhr’s opinion, expressed when the first volume of the Systematic Theology appeared, that Tillich’s ontological method “blunts the Bible.”

This sparring with Tillich that Muilenburg carried on created a great learning atmosphere. You couldn’t just sit it out. You had to make up your mind which theological way to go.

Much to my surprise, Gilkey says that “Barth was neither much studied nor much discussed at post-war Union.”2 Well, that was not true in 1950-53. John Bennett, as I remember, taught a course on Barth. In my time at Union, one had to make a clear-cut theological choice between Barth and Tillich. There was no getting away from it. My choice for Tillich was preordained.

I came to Union Seminary with strong cultural interests. At the center of these were dramatic literature and what we then called “legitimate theater.” Tillich was a godsend, because he was a theologian of culture. He taught me how to look in drama, and other cultural forms, not only for overtly religious content but also, and more importantly, for covert religious substance. In that way, and others, he answered questions that were very real for me but that I could not identify or formulate without the light that he shed. I became hooked.

THE MAN AND THE STORIES

But what I’ve said so far is only the rational analysis of why I came under Tillich’s spell. There were also irrational — or shall we say personal? — factors. I reach back in memory, trying to put myself once again in the presence of the man, to re-experience if possible the way it felt to be a student in his presence during that very formative period of my life. And when I do this, what come to me are stories.

I want to tell you as many of these as I have time for. When Gilkey spoke at a banquet like this, he said he knew only the stories he had put in his book, but I know a whole string of them, and I’m sure there are still others known to people in this room. It may be time to put some of these on record before they are lost.

I should make it clear that I was never one of Tillich’s Ph.D. students. I was simply a young fellow in the B.D. program, as we called the M.Div. back then. It’s true that I wrote my B.D. thesis for him, but he didn’t really advise me on it, and I think the actual reader was Werner Rhode, who was then his classroom assistant.

On page 198 of his Tillich book, Langdon Gilkey has a paragraph that is so right on that I want to quote it in full:

Stories gathered naturally around Tillich. This was not because he was “funny,” either a natural comic or an experienced raconteur —  anything but. It followed, rather, from this rare union of power and pathos, of supreme intellectual strength with a sort of inner frailty and outer vulnerability. Funny things happened to him. He was just helpless enough to be continually buffeted here and there; and he was strong and powerful enough so that this buffeting was funny and neither pathetic nor tragic.

This is very well said. Stories accumulated about Tillich because we loved him and were also awed by him. It’s a very unusual combination. And perhaps we could add one thing to Gilkey’s observation: The union of power and pathos in the man was but one of what seemed an endless array of contradictions within him. And affirmative humor (unlike the destructive kind) thrives on contradictions.

One of the contradictions in Tillich — everybody comments on it — was between his dry-as-dust manner at the podium and his extraordinary skill as a public speaker. It’s not just that some inner power came through, which it did. It’s that he knew exactly what he was doing, although he seemed not to. There’s a story illustrating this that I got from John Maguire, now President of the Claremont Graduate School:

Tillich went to a college campus to speak at their morning chapel or required assembly. (That shows you how long ago it was!) The college president told Tillich in the anteroom that the assembly would begin exactly at 10:00 and end at exactly 10:30. He said, “At 10:30 a bell will ring, and the students will all get up and rush out. So I will be very brief in my introduction, but you must stop by 10:30.” Tillich nodded, reached into his brief case for his text, and pulled out a sheaf of papers an inch and a half thick, all covered with typescript. The president was alarmed. He repeated his message: “Professor Tillich, remember that no one will listen to you once the bell rings.” “Yah,” said Tillich. So they walked in, and the president said one sentence and turned the podium over to Tillich, who laid his lengthy manuscript in front of him, pulled his glasses from his pocket, put them on, and began to read in a soft voice word for word what was on the first page. After about three minutes, he came to the end of that page, turned it over, and started the second page. The president’s dismay increased. This went on for about nine of the thirty allotted minutes. Then, to everyone’s astonishment, Tillich picked up a whole bunch of pages at once, turned them over, and continued reading without skipping a beat. After a while, he did that again. And then again. In this manner, he finally arrived at the last page of his manuscript, read it to the end, turned it over, and said, “Thank you”; and the bell rang!

Never tell me that Tillich was not a performer.

Another lecturing story seems to cast him in a bad light as a lecturer, but it’s only funny if you know that his lectures put those of others in the shade. Since I got this one from Jim Ross, I can’t vouch for its authenticity. Ross said that in the famous course on A History of Christian Thought, Tillich was speaking about Thomas Aquinas one day when the time ran out, so he said he would continue at the next meeting. When they reassembled, Tillich began to talk about William of Ockham. The students interrupted him, saying, “Professor Tillich, you said you were going to finish what you began about Aquinas.” Tillich, looking very surprised, studied his notes. “Ah!” he exclaimed, “Red marks last year! Blue marks this year!”

In the 1950s, the day at Union Seminary began with morning chapel, which usually included a short homily by one or another of the then all-male faculty, who wore black academic gowns not only to chapel but to their classes as well. Tillich didn’t like to go to chapel, especially so early in the morning, but President Henry Sloane Coffin insisted that he do so. Now, in those days, Tillich was something like the doyen of the community of German intellectual exiles in New York City, which he had helped organize during the war. When his turn in chapel was approaching, he would send out postcards to the likes of Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Theodore Adorno, Adolph Loeb, and so on, with this message: “Preaching James Chapel Thursday 8:30 a.m. Be there! Paulus.” Well, they quite obediently came. We students knew about this, and on Tillich’s day, we would go early and stand in the narthex to watch all these illustrious intellectuals find their way into the chapel and try to sit down without being noticed.

I took three courses from Tillich: one on what was to become volume 1 of the Systematic Theology, another on the christology of volume 2, and A History of Christian Thought. In the two systematic courses, we were given the detailed outline of the materials in mimeographed form (the day of the Xerox machine being yet in the future). We were asked to prepare questions on each day’s assigned portion, and Tillich would lecture in response to some of these questions. It was an excellent method and worked well even for his large-sized classes.

One day, he told us that he and Mrs. Tillich wanted to invite us to their apartment for a social evening. We were keen on that and cocked our ears to hear the details. He continued: “But you cannot all come on ze same evening. If you would come everybody on ze same evening, zere would not be enough chairs.”

He stopped. We waited. He was thinking. You could see the wheels turning but couldn’t imagine why. Finally, he said: “No, zat’s not right. Because I zink we could get enough chairs. But zere would not be enough space to put ze chairs!”

For me, there is so much of Tillich in that incident. Whatever he was presented with had to be thought through. If there was a problem, you had to understand it. You had to get the problem right. And this kind of thinking required patience. Tillich always took his time when answering questions, and that was one of his most effective and endearing qualities — his apparently endless patience with questions and questioners. I think he enjoyed helping people to get their questions right. He was, in fact, famous for translating dumb questions into good questions and providing thoughtful answers to them. This is the mark of a genuine teacher. Was it the Paucks or Hannah Tillich who recorded that Tillich felt such a calling to meet his classes that he once declined an invitation to the White House by saying that it conflicted with his class schedule?

One day while lecturing, he used the word “labile,” although he pronounced it “lah-beel.” I forget the context. Someone asked him to repeat the word. He did, and they said they didn’t know what it meant. Again, you saw his wheels turn, and then he said: “Zat’s a word in Italian. Zat’s a word in French. Zat’s even a word in German. It must be a word in English. You go look it up.” We learned that his broken English was often better than our own kind.

Here’s another example, which I got second-hand but think it’s authentic because who could have made it up? He was with a few students having a meal in one of those ordinary little restaurants along Broadway, not far from the seminary. For dessert, he ordered strawberries and cream. The waitress soon brought a bowl of strawberries covered with thick cream. He objected. “Ziss,” he said, “is not what I ordered.”

“Yes, it is,” replied the waitress.

“No,” he persisted, “I ordered strawberries and cream, but you bring me strawberries wiss cream.”

You can imagine the reaction of that New York waitress. “Oh,” she said, “What the hell! Strawberries and cream, strawberries with cream, what’s the difference?”

He looked at her with his usual patience. “Young woman,” he said at last, “do you know ze difference between a muzzer and child and a muzzer wiss child?”

Sometimes, however, Tillich’s broken English resulted in inadvertent puns. Beverly Harrison claims to have been present when Tillich got off a howler during a discourse about Gnosticism. As you know, he had a certain appreciation for it and felt it should be defended against its many detractors. (In this he was right, of course.) He ended his remarks on the subject by saying, “Zo remember: Wizout ze noses zere is no face.”

When the students laughed at this, Tillich looked bewildered and said, “Vat did I zay?” Then they laughed more, of course, and he didn’t help matters by continuing to ask, “Vat did I zay?”

I remember a time in the systematic theology course when Tillich was holding forth on the doctrine of God. He decided to shake us up a bit by satirizing a popular idea of the omniscience of God.

(But let me interrupt here. You need to know that Tillich’s speaking voice was full, mellow, and resonant-much more than mine. All these sibilants might make you think of a high or raspy voice, but it was not like that. Neither was it loud or bombastic. It just resonated from deep inside, and so it resonated also inside the listener.)

He was talking about and thinking about the omniscience of God: “When zeez people zink about Gott, zey are zinking about an old man zitting on a zrone in ze heaven. And zey zink zat he iss knowing everyzing. He iss knowing everyzing zat did happen, and everyzing zat iss happening, and everyzing zat will happen. And even he iss knowing what would have happened if not had happened what did happen.”

Tillich decided to give an evening series of extracurricular lectures on art, which he illustrated with slides. We crowded into the room. At the beginning of the second lecture, he told us that his wife had been critical of the first one. She had told him that it was too abstract. He defended himself to us in this way:

“I cannot help it. It iss how I am. Sometimes I am in Chicago to change trains in ze railroad station. And near to ze railroad station is ze Art Institute in Chicago. Zo I go zere to look at ze pictures. I love to look at ze pictures. And while I am looking at ze pictures, concepts are coming!”

It was in another of these art lectures that he came out with another of his hilarious, inadvertent puns. In the course of interpreting to us the significance of Postimpressionism, he put on the screen a slide of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of a cane-bottom chair, one of those marvelous studies in yellow and gray and emphatic form so characteristic of Van Gogh’s genius. Tillich, of course, was eager that our eyes, our inner eyes, should look for the substance of the picture and not rest content with recognizing the manifest content. This is what he said: “Ven you really look at ziss picture, you zee a chair. And you zee alzo zat ziss chair iss no longer ze means for an end.”

We broke into gales of laughter. Tillich looked puzzled. Finally, he said, “Ah! Zat’s a yoke!”

One of the art lectures was on Giotto. Tillich took some time to show us slides of the murals in Assisi and help us to view them the way he did. I, being then very impressionable, was particularly struck by what he said about the way Giotto painted trees. What we saw on screen were spindly trunks drawn as thin brown lines, atop which sat round balls of green. “Look at ze treess,” said Tillich. “Giotto iss not painting ze actual tree. Zeess are not ze treess of nominalism. Giotto iss painting ze treehood.” I was very impressed. I wrote in my notebook, “Giotto-treehood,” and discussed the point later with Anne, who had been to the lecture with me.

The following summer, Anne and I were in Italy, and went for the first time to Tuscany. Riding along in the train, I looked out the window and saw rows of poplars. They had thin, spindly trunks with balls of green on top, and looked exactly like the trees in Giotto’s paintings. I said, “Anne, look there. Here in Tuscany they don’t grow trees. They grow treehood!”

I used to tell this story in my own classes, when I wanted to warn students against overinterpretation of works of art and literature. I think it was the first tiny bit of critique of Tillich that I was able to engage in.

That critique aside, Tillich’s interest in art was enormously important to me and other students. In my senior year (1952-53), some of us students decided it would be a good idea to take advantage of Tillich’s presence and, with his assistance, mount an exhibit of religious art. When we approached him, he encouraged us. We decided to send out announcements nationwide and invite artists to submit photographs of work they could offer to the panel of judges who would choose the works for inclusion. Tillich himself recruited the judges, who included Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, Mrs. Alfred Goodman, and himself — a very distinguished group.

We students received the submitted photographs and organized them for the panel’s viewing, but we were distraught. I will never forget the evening when the distinguished experts met to do their judging in the Upper Refectory and we had nothing to show them but an enormous collection of kitsch. The announcement about a religious art show had brought out of the woodwork every hack artist from Maine to Mexico and elicited no response from any artist worthy of the name. And here was this panel of people who were interested in nothing but the best. We showed them what we had and stammered out our embarrassment.

There was a moment of fearful silence, and then I think it was Meyer Shapiro who spoke, although it could have been Alfred Barr. “Well,” he said, “this method did not work. But we know that the art we want is out there, so we will just have to go and get it.”

The committee of judges sat right there and drew up a list of artists whose work should be solicited, and by whom. It taught me that greatness pays no attention to setbacks.

In this way, we put together an art exhibit that drew a great deal of attention in New York. The major figures in the New York School of painting were represented, as well as others in different camps. Tillich’s work was mostly done behind the scenes, and I never loved him more than during that process.

One of Tillich’s good friends was the famous art historian Ernst Kantorowitz, author of The King’s Two Bodies and a refugee from Hitler. Tillich invited him to give a lecture at Union. I can still see the look of pleasure on Tillich’s face as he rose to introduce his guest. This is what he said:

“It giffs me much pleasure to introduce my friend Ernst Kantorowitz, who is a great scholar and interpreter of art. Ve vere teaching togezzer at ze University of Frankfurt. One day zey came to him and zed, ‘Zign ze loyalty oass.’ He said, “No. Loyal I am, but ze oass I don’t zign.’ Zo zey zed, `Go!’ and he went. He went to ze Univerzity of California. One day zey came to him and said, ‘Zign ze loyalty oass.’ He said, `No. Loyal I am, but ze oass I don’t zign.’ Zo zey zed, `Go!’ and he went. He went to ze Univerzity at Princeton. And Princeton is not far from New York, zo he can come here, and it makes me happy.”

That, of course, was in the days of McCarthyism and the rampages of the House Un-American Activities Committee. And that reminds me of an unlikely, but I think true, story of Tillich and Bertolt Brecht, which I learned from Eric Bentley, one of Brecht’s interpreters and translators.

Brecht, the communist playwright, was to run afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee and find it prudent to return to Germany, where he settled and worked in East Berlin. But before that, he went to see Tillich in Cambridge, where Tillich was by then teaching. The two had apparently never met before and would not again. Brecht spent the evening trying to persuade Tillich to join the communists but could not do so. As Bentley told it to me, Brecht would hold forth on some theoretical point and then Tillich would say, “Ja. Bestimmt!” or something like that. And Brecht would say, “So, you see, you are already one of us.” And Tillich would say, “Nein.” So Brecht would take another tack and talk a while about labor, or about international relations, or perhaps class struggle, or something. And Tillich would say, “Ja,” and agree with him. And Brecht would say, “So you really belong with us.” And Tillich would again say, “Nein.” And so it went for several hours, and finally Brecht, defeated, had to get up and leave.

I don’t know whether either Brecht or Bentley had read The Socialist Decision. Probably not. But if they had, I think they would have understood Tillich’s “Nein.” He was in strong agreement with the communist critique of capitalism and bourgeois society, but he recognized the heteronomous character of the Communist party, and he saw that the communist movement was falling back into the bourgeois mentality that he called “self-sufficient finitude.”

To return to my student days at Union in the 1950s, people often ask what we thought about Tillich’s unconventional sex life. I have to tell them we didn’t talk about that very much, and I for one didn’t know or think much about it. I must say that in all my years at Union, first as a student and later as a faculty member, the place did not go in for much gossip. Union faculty have always seemed to respect each other’s need for privacy, the more so as we lived cheek by jowl in seminary housing.

Away from the seminary, however, it has always been different. John Smith, the now emeritus philosopher at Yale and once a student of Tillich at Union and Columbia, has a wonderful story about this. It seems that Tillich was off somewhere at a meeting of theologians, who were having drinks late in the evening and, as such groups do, began to swap gossipy tales. To everyone’s surprise, Tillich had more such stories than anyone else. There seemed no end to the tidbits he knew. Finally, someone said, “But Paulus, this is amazing! How do you know all these things?” And he replied, “Ha! You zink zat I don’t keep my ear to ze soil!”

Well, that’s faculty and that’s when they’re away from home. Among us students in the old days, it was simply said — indeed it was obvious — that Tillich had an eye for beautiful women. For example:

One night, many of us went over to the Columbia campus to hear Tillich lecture to one of his classes there, because there had been some kind of announcement that we would be welcome. I don’t remember the topic, but it was of interest. Anne and I went over together and got there when Tillich had already begun to speak. He was seated at a desk in the front of the large classroom. There were no vacant seats, so we stood at the back near the door. Upon seeing Anne enter, Tillich, who I think did not really know who she was — not that it mattered — interrupted his lecture and beckoned her to come forward. She was quite puzzled, because she did not see any seats up there, so she stayed back. He did not speak but kept motioning to her to come up. The invitation was so obvious that she had to comply, because her reluctance was holding up the lecture. So she went forward, looking this way and that for the empty seat that he must have spotted, but not seeing it. Imagine her and everyone’s astonishment when, as she got near the front, Tillich reached down beside the desk, picked up the wastebasket, turned it upside down, spilling all its contents on the floor, placed it upside down beside him, patted it, and said, “Sit here.”

She did, and for the duration of the lecture we listened to him and looked at them both, he in his chair and the beautiful young woman on her wastebasket beside him. But it was so endearing you had to forgive him.

We students saw Hannah Tillich only occasionally, and when we caught glimpses of her, she seemed awkward and silent, something of a mystery in her husband’s shadow, unlike Ursula Niebuhr, who would not let anyone ignore her, or Betty Van Dusen, whose vivacity and Scots eccentricity were so attractive.

But there was one occasion with Hannah Tillich when I was a student that is unforgettable. We saw an announcement that she would lead a group to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at works by Rembrandt. Anne and I decided to go. The group was to gather in the Social Hall. When we walked in, Hannah (Mrs. Tillich to us) was there, looking awkward and a little bit frightened, as usual. A small group turned up, and we went down to the museum on the Fifth Avenue bus. I don’t remember that we talked with her on the bus. But when we arrived at the first room where the Rembrandts hung, Hannah became transformed. She suddenly became animated, enthusiastic, articulate, and beautiful. It was clear that she loved the art, which filled her with such appreciation that it spilled right out of her. Anne and I have often recalled that moment when a radiant Hannah Tillich materialized before our eyes. Paulus had often told us that the gold color in Rembrandt’s canvases symbolized transcendence, but on this occasion Hannah seemed filled with transcendence herself.

AND TIME WENT BY

A few of my Tillich stories come from later on, after my student days, and I think these become more poignant, whether because of my greater maturity or Tillich’s, I don’t know.

In 1959, when Tillich was at Harvard and I had become an Instructor at Union Seminary, NBC radio arranged for Tillich to record four interviews concerning his life. I was asked to do the interviewing, but that was no heavy responsibility because Tillich himself told me all the questions to ask. We grouped them according to four major interests in his life: philosophy, theology, politics, and art. Each interview was fifteen minutes long, and we taped them all in one sitting one afternoon at the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center.

The taping done, we were invited to have cocktails and dinner with some of NBC’s top brass in their private dining room high up in the RCA building. We got there just before sunset, and Tillich was enthralled by the view that overlooked lower Manhattan, the river, the harbor, and the southwestern sky. Someone handed him a drink, and he went straight to the large expanse of window and gazed out. One of NBC’s vice presidents, a man by the name of Popper, was eager to talk to Tillich, and I walked with him over to where the honored guest was staring out the window. Popper introduced himself and began to tell of his recent trip to Moscow.

Now, in those days, at the height of the cold war, not many Americans went to Moscow, so this was a very interesting story. Popper told about the trip over, the assortment of passengers on the plane, many of them undoubtedly spies, the reception he got in Moscow, the things people said, and so on. I was fascinated. Tillich, meanwhile, kept looking out the window, and every few minutes he would sigh. “Ah!” he would say. “Oh!” he would exhale a bit later. “Ah!”

Finally the storyteller finished, and the sun at last went out of sight beyond the horizon. Whereupon Tillich turned and said, “Now tell me, Mr. Popper, vat haf you been doing lately?”

I had to turn away to hide my laughter, and I remembered how Niebuhr had called him a damned pantheist. And I remember the crushed look that covered Popper’s face.

The incident reminds me that in their biography, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought,3 Wilhelm and Marion Pauck tell how in 1935 on a trip through the American South, “Tillich insisted on stopping the car in which he was riding so as to sit by the water and watch the setting sun and the moonrise.” They mention also that the group Tillich was with, which included Wilhelm Pauck, met Huey Long in a hotel room with the Governor “clad in green pyjamas.” When Pauck used to tell this story orally, he’d say that Tillich delayed the party so long while watching the sun set and the moon rise that they arrived very late for their appointment with Huey Long, and that’s why they had to see him in his pajamas in the hotel room. These stories have many versions.

Speaking of Pauck, I was always fascinated with his ambivalence toward Paulus, as he called him. Indeed, I predicted that the second volume of the Life and Thought would never be finished, because I knew that Marion had done most of the research on volume 1, and I thought Wilhelm was too ambivalent ever to complete a discussion of Tillich’s thought. Here’s an anecdote showing that ambivalence at work:

In February of the same year in which I did those radio tapes with Tillich, 1959, the Festschrift edited by Walter Leibrecht was presented to him at Harvard. They threw him a banquet, and I was disappointed not to have been invited, although there was no real reason why I should have been. A few days after the event, I ran into Pauck on the sidewalk near Union and asked him if he had been there.

“Oh, yes!” he answered. “I was there.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well,” said Pauck, “you know. They had a dinner. Tillich sat up at the big table and smiled. Then people made speeches. And then Tillich got up. And he explained to us how he came to be . . . Paul Tillich.”

You may have heard Marion Pauck tell about her wedding, when she was married to Wilhelm in a ceremony presided over by Tillich with Reinhold Niebuhr as the best man. In that company, Marion looked like a child bride. The wedding took place in the small chapel at the Riverside Church. I was present, sitting with Anne on the first row. When he came to the clincher, Tillich united the couple with these words: “I pronounce you man and wife-in ze name of God ze Fazzer, God ze Zon, and God ze Ghost.”

I had to put my hands over my mouth to keep from guffawing. Marion snuck a look at me over her right shoulder, and I thought for a minute we were both going to lose it. As you may know, Tillich had repeatedly admonished his students that the German word Geist should always be translated as “spirit” and never as “ghost”; but the liturgy must have confounded him, for here he was, marrying his two good friends in the name of “God ze ghost.”

While we are on the subject of marriage, let me put on the record something that Hannah Tillich wrote to me about hers. I was asked to review her book, From Time to Time, in The New Republic. I gave it a favorable notice, for although I did not necessarily believe everything in it, I read it as the cri de couer of a woman who had spent her adult life in the shadow of a famous man and was more than a little frustrated by her own lack of professional development, in spite of all her talent and imagination. I also felt that the book humanized Tillich in a way that would be helpful in introducing him to students who did not know how to read the man between the lines of his theological writings. This latter point proved to be right.

Hannah Tillich read my review and wrote me a short letter. It thanked me for what I’d written about her but then added: “You did not make it clear how much I loved him.”

I remember this beside the memorable line that she records having spoken to him while he lay on his bed in the Chicago hospital on what he himself called Sterbenstag, his “death day.” She said to him, “I have always loved your face.”

SUNSET

I spoke about contradictions in Tillich. One of them, of course, was that between the ontological philosopher and the existentialist. Or, in less technical terms, a kind of contradiction between the thinker and the man. Not that they didn’t belong together but that it was often hard to see them at once.

John Smith, to whom I referred earlier, had a great joke about Tillich the thinker. It rests on the point that Tillich’s thought was so systematic and so all-embracing that it was often hard to find your way into it or, once you were in, to find your way out. If anyone argued with Tillich, he would agree with them and then explain how what they were saying fit in with what he was saying.

John Smith said this reminded him of Bob Hope. The comedian had a routine in which he came on stage carrying a road sign. He would tell the audience that he always carried his road sign with him so that he would never get lost. John Smith said, “That’s just like Tillich: He always carried his universe with him.”

Yes, it’s true. But there was that other side to Tillich, the existentialist side, that I once came upon in the following way: The year must have been 1962. Tillich had gone from Union to Harvard and was either at Chicago or soon to go there, but volume 3 of the Systematic Theology had not yet appeared. Everyone was impatient for it to come out, most of all the University of Chicago Press, which feared something might happen to Tillich before it was done. Tillich was paying a visit to New York, and Marion Pauck gave a little party for him at her apartment. I got there on the early side, and Tillich pulled me over, asking me to sit on the couch with him. “I hear,” he said, “zat you are teaching a course about me.”

That was true. I had begun to offer a course on his theology, as he in fact knew first hand, because he had allowed me to come up to Harvard when he was there and look at the detailed outline of volume 3 for the benefit of my course. I had then sat in his office and poured over the material for several hours while he sat and talked about something else with Amos Wilder. So now he wants to ask me about the course I’m teaching.

“Tell me,” he said, “What do ze students say?”

I began to talk about the kinds of questions the students were asking, the interesting points they raised, the parts that were difficult for them, etc.

But soon I saw that Tillich’s eyes were glazing over. He wasn’t really listening, so I stopped. He said, “But you make it sound zo objective!”

I was taken aback, and realized I had got off on the wrong foot. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Good heavens! You are a very live subject, and I am a human subject, and we are sitting here talking to each other person to person, that’s true. I didn’t mean to slight the subjectivity. But you must admit,” I added, “that about the System there is something objective.”

He rose straight out of his seat, raised his hand, and said in a loud voice, “But it’s not finished yet!”

EPILOGUE

But, of course, it was nearly finished, which is why that story is so moving. I often wonder what Tillich thought when he finally put volume 3 to rest, for his own end came only two years after its publication.

I think it appropriate that my last story be an apocryphal one. As you will see, it was deliberately contrived.

In 1977, some twelve years after Tillich had gone to the other side of the great divide, I published a book called Patterns of Grace. In it, there is an open letter to Paul Tillich. The chapter is called “Dear Tillich: To Be or Not to Be Is Not the Question.” It was actually, of course, a letter to myself, written as I was trying to disentangle my own thought from that of my mentor. For I had spent about twenty years unable to tell the difference between what Tillich thought and what I thought. Only gradually did it dawn on me that my way of understanding existence was not truly an ontological one. Hence, the title of the chapter. I had first delivered it as a lecture to a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion, after which Van Harvey stormed up to me angrily, saying that I was just trying to kill my theological father and had no right to do so. To me, however, it was a question of finding myself.

When the book containing this chapter came out, there was a public discussion of it at Union Seminary, featuring a panel of my faculty colleagues, one of whom at the time was Robert McAfee Brown, who moderated the panel. Brown began the evening by telling the large audience that he had that day received a telegram that should be read aloud. And so, with accent and all, he read from a yellow slip of paper, as follows:

Dear Tom Driver: I am zo zorry zat I cannot be wiz you ziss evening, because I am detained elzevere. But I haf read ze book zat you haf written, and I zend my congratulazions. It is good to know zat you do not follow your teacher like a slave but zat you haf ze courage to go into ze deep waters and to sink for yourself.

-Paul Tillich

1 Langdon Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich (New York: Crossroad, 1989), p. 201.

2lbid., p. 204.

3 Wilhelm Pauck and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper &Row, 1976), p. 181.

Tom F. Driver, the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology and Culture Emeritus at Union Theological Seminary, delivered this address to the North American Paul Tillich Society at its banquet in Philadelphia on November 17, 1995 and to the Duodecim Society at its dinner in Princeton on April 19, 1996.

Copyright Theology Today Oct 1996
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

Update I: In the late 1960s, Dr. Driver was an Old Left Liberal (USA needs to go Socialist but not Soviet; I and circle of associates in charge of affairs) and crypto-New Left Radical (USA is evil, must be disrupted and taken apart, I urging on you young ‘uns, quietly, to do that … by raising hell … so get to it … [I and circle of associates will reap the benefits]).

Update II: On YouTube, rare interview, circa 1956, of Paulus at Union during his tenure as University Professor at Harvard [now Madrassa].

Update III: Professor Wesley Wildman maintains a fine Tillich page.

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA