Tillich and Buber

All theologians of my generation and possibly, indeed probably, those of later generations are indebted to Martin Buber. I was an undergraduate when his great book, I and Thou, appeared in English and I remember purchasing a copy which l read avidly. It had been translated by Ronald Gregor Smith, and years later I heard from him the story of its translation (Buber, 1937). John Baillie had referred to the work in a lecture and warmly commended some of its content. After the lecture Gregor Smith asked him for particulars of the book; and, on securing a copy, set about translating it. To me the book seemed to do two things at the same time—it gave a recognizable picture of life in the world where our very nature is that we are not alone and, at a different level, it suggested significant ways of understanding the philosophical problems of the self and knowledge of others (including God). At the time, though I intended going on to study Theology I had never even heard of Tillich and could not have imagined that he would be such a significant figure in my life. The association was in fact accidental because my purpose in going to the USA had been to continue my research on Kierkegaard; but meet him I did, and the meeting was something of a turning point in my life. Of the debt I owe him, I need only say that he was my only real teacher of Theology and my appreciation of the humanity of Theology is largely the result of his influence. To compare these two giants of the 20th century is not only to recall some of its ferment but perhaps even more to understand its abiding legacy.

Tillich and Buber were both of them born at the end of the 19th century and their formative years were the opening years of the 20th century. Both were brought up in Germany but clearly not in the same or even the same kind of context. The main reason, however, for comparing them is that Tillich acknowledged a debt to Buber which a later generation such as mine would readily understand but—perhaps more importantly—suggested their common prophetic role. Though, as I have said, both were brought up in Germany it was not until 1924 that they had come into contact. Tillich’s contact with Jews had begun earlier: indeed, one of his most significant and profound friendships was with Adolf Lowe, the economic technician and later professor of economics who was a member of the Berlin Group or Kairos Circle formed in 1920. It was a small circle of 10 or 12, described by Eduard Heimann as, “naive, optimistic, esoteric, eccentric academicians” (Pauck and Pauck, 1976). The aftermath of the Great War was in their view an opportunity to create now conditions for international survival and self-government. Lowe, a believing non-orthodox Jew, was a firm friend of Tillich’s and he began Tillich’s dialog with Judaism. Tillich’s thought even then had taken its decisive form as a theology of culture, a theory in new philosophical categories which would try to speak to the situation in which Europe now found itself, “when the whole house lay in ruins.” The tragedy of 20th century Europe is the background to Buber’s work as well. A personal witness of the collapse of Western civilization, he became—like Tillich—a prophet who pointed out the emergence of demonic powers in European life. The similar background and common notes of their message made the two men firm colleagues; and they maintained their contact in the different context of the New World. Consequently, when in 1963 Tillich went to Israel the highlight of the trip for him was his meeting with Buber. He spent an evening with Buber, and he records that towards its close he asked Buber whether he planned to visit the USA or Europe again. When Buber answered quietly but emphatically “No” Tillich sensed that it was their final meeting. (Paul and Buber, 2001) Buber died in June 1965 aged 87: Tillich died rather suddenly after an illness of 10 days in October the same year.

I have spoken of the two as prophets with a similar emphasis in their message and it is worth saying more about this. Both saw the real roots of modern man’s disturbance in a loss of transcendence and of the capacity to interpret human existence from a perspective which conquers a narrow, autonomous humanism, a perspective which nevertheless in no way diminishes the uniqueness of man’s being. Tillich was a socialist who condemned the “finite spirit” of a capitalist culture which had cut itself adrift from its own depth, reducing everything—man included—to the status of objects which are to be manipulated and indeed exploited. Much has been made of Tillich’s relation to Marxism; but however much he was indebted to Marxism, his thought and outlook were not Marxist. He did not regard Marxism as the answer to the modem predicament because Marxist man, just as much as capitalist man, lacks all sense of real transience. In much the same way Buber spoke of the “eclipse of God” as the, “character of the historical hour through which the add is now passing” (Buber, 1953). In our time, as in no other, man has reached the point in which he, “can no longer stretch his hands out from his solitude to meet a divine form” but remains imprisoned in his own subjectivity, a prison he has created for himself. The ‘World of It’ reigns supreme; and this world found its inevitable expression in the Nazi death camps where human beings were literally transformed into objects - quite literally being made into lampshades and soap.

Tillich was a theologian of culture and a socialist. Similarly, Buber expressed his faith in both political and cultural aspirations. Tillich had devoted one of his earliest writings to the theme of a theology of culture and had arrived at the formula which he repeated in the final volume of Systematic Theology: ‘religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion’. (Adams, 1969) These two aspects of his work would have been sufficient to mark him out as one of the greatest contributors to the development of 20th century Christianity. At a time when theologians like Barth were concerned to criticize the relationship of Christianity to culture Tillich pleaded for a proper understanding of their intrinsic relation. Similarly in the capitalist society into which he became absorbed - and gratefully so - he nevertheless remained faithful to his original radical view of the critical message of Christianity. He never abandoned his conviction that ideally the social expression of Biblical faith was a religious socialism. In his article Martin Buber and Christian Thought he refers to their having shared this conviction and their common involvement in the Religious Socialist Movement. What is most significant about his description of Buber’s contribution to the understanding of social justice is not simply that Buber was reminding us of the prophetic demand for social justice but the way in which this was an emphasis on the normative character of Biblical language. He refers to a conference at which Buber criticized his paper:

I shall never forget the conference … where I was to deliver the main address … In order to make myself understood to those unfamiliar with or opposed to religious terminology, I had tried with great care to avoid any of the traditional religious words like God, sin, salvation, Christ, etc. … After I had finished Martin Buber got up and challenged my paper, not with regard to its contents but its language. He stated with great seriousness that certain words are not replaceable, that these are Unworter (primary words) which no other, especially no philosophical terms, can ever supersede. Later liturgical attempts … confirmed for me the truth of Buber’s assertion (Commentary, 1948).

The second contribution Tillich singled out was Buber’s rediscovery of mysticism as an element of prophetic religion; and it is not fanciful to describe the religion of The Courage to Be with its odd notion of God above God as suffused with mysticism. (Paul, 1952a) Most telling, however, is the third contribution he identified - the understanding of the relationship between prophetic religion and culture. In his fine study of Buber, Maurice Friedman points out the dialectical nature of the relationship Buber saw between religion and culture. (Freedman, 1960) Religion is the life spirit that pulses in the veins of every culture, breaking up old forms and creating new ones. Culture is the crystallization of the religious stream as it ebbs. For both Buber and Tillich the task of philosophical theology in the 1920s was to define the time as one of opportunity for religion and culture. Tillich’s great lecture on the theology of culture was a summons to Europe but particularly to Germany to rise and build a new society. The destruction of the Second Reich had bought with it a weakening of the old cultural forms. This period has been well described as one, ‘in which cynicism, despair, radial reconception, revolutionary impulse and heady utopianism vied with each other in appeal for public favor’. (Paul and James Luther, 1973) The end of the war had seen Tillich beginning his academic career but it had also been a time of deepening political consciousness and conviction. As early as May 1919 he had spoken at a rally of the Independent Social Democrats, the most radical of socialists, on the theme of Christian socialism. Though his mature political theology was not to be expressed until the beginning of the 1930s in The Socialist Decision it had originally taken form in his mind as the question facing the Church after the Great War - the kairos for a new decision. (Paul et al., 1977) It was the period following World War II that saw Buber’s activity. The time was, he said, one of conflict between the forces of humanity and those of inhumanity. This was the real issue for religion and culture. Thus, in post war Israel he argued against a narrow nationalistic interpretation of the Zionist idea and opposed the restoration of the death penalty in order to punish Eichmann. His own Zionism, mystically centered on Israel, was utopian and not merely socialist and it was clearly rooted in his religious philosophy.

One final point of similarity thus emerges; and happily, that is a metaphor that the two have in common. While Tillich spoke of himself as ‘on the boundary’ Buber spoke of himself as on ‘the narrow ridge’: (Paul, 1987).

I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as “the narrow ridge”. I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed (Buber et al., 1947).

In the delightful and wonderfully enlightening memoir, On the Boundary, Tillich tells us how his theological activity and indeed his theological development were on the boundary. He had been brought up on the boundary ‘between two temperaments’ (his conservative father and his more adventurously spirited mother), ‘between city and country’, ‘between social classes’. He came to a self-awareness ‘between theory and practice’ and ‘between heteronomy and autonomy’. His work was on the boundary ‘between Theology and Philosophy’, ‘between Church and Society’, ‘between religion and culture’, ‘between Lutheranism and Socialism’ and ‘between Idealism and Marxism’. Finally, as an exile, he was to know that peculiar boundary life ‘between native and alien land’. Buber likewise walked ‘the narrow ridge’ between the sacred and the secular, theology and philosophy, Judaism and the world, existentialism and mysticism, Europe and Israel. Both of them had real the certainties of a particular, defined and enclosed space and the security of an impenetrable fideism - Jewish in the one case and Christian in the other. They prefer what Buber called the ‘holy insecurity’ of standing on a boundary or a narrow ridge.

I cannot ever remember hearing Tillich saying much about the Jews; but ever since the 1930s he had identified with the Jews. His proud declaration that he was the first non-Jew to be expelled from his post in 1933 as an enemy of the Nazis testified to the impact of his anniversary lecture at Frankfurt University’s Philosophy Faculty. The lecture showed the influence of Jewish thought on classics, German literature and philosophy. ‘As the audience left the lecture hall Tillich heard one of his colleagues exclaim “Nun will man uns auch noch zu Juden machen” (Now they even want to turn us into Jews)’. (Frielander, 1985) When in 1936 the organization ‘Self-Help for Emigres from Central Europe’ was founded in New York Tillich was one of its founders; and for 15 years he was its chairman. His identification with the refugees was warm and strong and it led to his condemnation of the Jewish persecution as not only putting Jews to death but also killing Christianity and humanism. Similarly, as is clear from his paper on Jewish influences on Christian theology, the kind of anti-Semitism that has often characterized Protestant theology, was entirely alien to his thinking and feeling.

He was a theologian who was concerned with living religion and was catholic in his appreciation of the religious attitude. It is clear that it was not only for his political stubbornness that when the Nazis came to power he was removed abruptly from his chair in Frankfurt - which was also Buber’s university - when Hitler came to power. Judaism was, for Tillich, an authentic living religion, a proper expression of biblical faith, not a fossilized anti-religion which had been the picture drawn of it by the histories of religion born of so much Protestant Theology. For him, then Judaism had a double significance for Christianity. In the first place, there was the obvious and undeniable significance it had as the birthplace of Christianity or the mother of Christianity. But, as he points out in Protestant Era, it was also the ‘real birthplace of a universal historical consciousness in world history’. (Paul, 1951) The elected nation is the main bearer of history but its history has a meaning for all nations. So, Judaism is a ‘permanent corrective’ of the subtle lure of pagan instincts which have seduced the church continually since its foundation. (Paul, 1952b) Popular and official Christianity, says Tillich, is continually tempted by the pagan gods of space, those deities enshrined in every political or social theology, every nationalism or supernaturalism, ‘which express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm and tragic self-destruction’. (Paul, 1959) Matching these general observations are Tillich’s comments in his memorial essay to which we have already referred. There he describes Buber’s contribution to Christian theology as threefold (that, in itself, being a typical piece of Tillichian thought). First it had offered an existential interpretation of prophetic religion as a message of social justice which was a criterion for contemporary political thinking and action. Secondly, Buber had rediscovered the mystical element within prophetic religion, something which was of particular significance to Tillich’s thinking ever since his 1912 Halle theological dissection - which, as Victor Nuovo remarks Tillich seems to have valued the more of his two Schelling dissertations. (Paul and Victor, 1974) Finally, as has been noted, Buber had revealed an appreciation of the relation between prophetic religion and culture.

It seems very clear from what we have said that not only was there a profound similarity between Tilllich’s and Buber’s thought but indeed a real connection. Whatever other Jewish influences are discernible in Tillich’s thought Buber’s will surely have been the most significant. Buber’s vision of God as the eternal Thou awakened in him an appreciation of the Hebraic origin of Christian faith, connecting Christian worship with the Isaianic awareness of the Holy, which led to a perception of the lasting significance of Jewish prophecy. With a rather classical sense of the necessity to correct hubris he sees Judaism as the constant whisperer into the ear of imperialist Christianity, reminding it of the concrete perception of the unity of God and the necessity of justice. It is not enough simply to possess the Old Testament. That, he thought was the self-destructive possibility of Protestantism - to claim that it had the truth in the word. For that reason, he rejected the traditional attitude of Christianity, an instil to convert Jews to the true faith: true religion was incompatible with such anti-Semitism. So, in conclusion it could be said that the greatest similarity between Buber’s and Tillich’s outlook, as indeed their greatest common contribution to 20th century religion (and not simply theology) was the warning against religion’s tendency to false gods.