... much of Tillich’s life has been a fight against Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor. "History has shown," says Tillich, "that the Grand Inquisitor is always ready to appear in different disguises, political as well as theological." And so he has constantly been on the lookout for authoritarian systems which threaten to stultify the life of the individual. (ibid, p. 4)
Yet it must not be thought that Tillich was a complete revolutionist. He has often been called a romanticist. As noted, his romanticism involved nature, but it was also concerned with history.
He has always revered history "as a living reality in which the past participates in the present." In spite of his early criticism of the nineteenth century, of which he was a part, he sometimes looks back to it with nostalgia for the intellectual freedom he remembers. One might say that his life work has been to restore the Western individual’s relation to his tradition by pointing to the timeless elements in that tradition which have been unwittingly
rejected by contemporary man — rejected along with those dogmas which science and technology have made unacceptable. In this sense he is a conserver rather than revolutionist. (ibid, p. 4)
World War I marks the end of what Tillich calls his preparatory period. There occurred then what he considers a personal kairos: during one terrible night of the battle of Champagne, in July of 1916, he witnessed the suffering and death of hundreds of casualties in the division in which he served as chaplain. The horror of that night, during which he lost some of his friends, never left him, and the whole structure of classical idealism under which the war had taken place was shattered. (ibid, p. 4)
In part it is the chronology of Tillich’s life, spanning the two world wars, spanning the conflicts of science and religion, politics and ethics, authority and freedom in this century, that makes his analyses of the religious situation and the problems of our day so meaningful. (ibid, p. 5)
He prefers to begin with the "human situation." No one probes the meaning of words and symbols more profoundly than he, but abstractions as such are not his primary interest. ... Tillich begins, rather, with the human predicament. In that sense he is an existentialist. To him, the primary problem is our situation, our sense of estrangement and the tension in which we live. (ibid, pp. 5-6)
Tillich defines faith, and indirectly religion, as "ultimate concern." (ibid, p. 6)
Since we are finite creatures, we are separated from this infinite ground or foundation of our being. And feeling this estrangement, we experience anxiety.
We may consult a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist may attempt to solve our problem. But Tillich insists that while the psychiatrist can cure many anxieties — particularly the unnecessary exaggerated, or unreasonable ones — he can never cure this basic anxiety. Psychiatry deals with the finite, whereas this anxious estrangement results from our separation as finite beings from what is infinite or unconditional. (ibid, p. 6)
Paradoxically, Tillich sees religion itself as one of the great dangers to the religious life.
Why? Because religious systems tend to become rigid with age. And when they become rigid they suppress the inquiry, the dynamic, the love, and the insight that gave them their original inspiration and growth.
Continuous individual research for the deepest meanings of rituals and symbols is absolutely necessary to preserve the vitality of religion. And unfortunately all religions tend eventually to defeat and discourage that search, a fact which presents us with the existential problem: How can we restore the meaning of religious symbols and goals
which have been challenged and sometimes destroyed by the emergence of technology, bourgeois ways of life, nationalism, and the quasi-religions? (ibid, p. 6)
