Paul Tillich: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Pietism and methodism reemphasized personal guilt, personal experience, and individual perfection. They were not intended to deviate from ecclesiastical conformity, but unavoidably they did deviate; subjective piety became the bridge of the victorious reappearance of autonomous reason. Pietism was the bridge to Enlightenment. But even Enlightenment did not consider itself individualistic. One believed not in a conformity which is based on biblical revelation but in one which should be based on the power of reason in every individual. The principles of practical and theoretical reason were supposed to be universal among men and able to create, with the help of research and education, a new conformity.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 114

Men , Education , Universe , Victory

“In a man like Friedrich von Schlegel the courage to be as an individual self produced complete neglect of participation, but it also produced, in reaction to the emptiness of this self-affirmation, the desire to return to a collective. Schlegel, and with him many extreme individualists in the last hundred years, became Roman Catholics. The courage to be as oneself broke down, and one turned to an institutional embodiment of the courage to be as a part.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 117

Courage , Parting

“The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 116

Courage , Victory

“One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word "spirit" was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in “spirit” was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality. The middle ground between them, the spiritual soul, in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 82

Life , Soul

“There is no truth without the form of truth, namely justice.”

Paul Tillich

Source: Love, Power and Justice (1954), p. 21

Truth , Justice

“The second element in absolute faith is the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience on being and the dependence of the experience of meaninglessness on the experience of meaning. even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 177

Faith , Dependency , Despair

“[American] conformism might approximate collectivism, not so much in economic respects, and not too much in political respects, but very much in the pattern of daily life and thought. Whether this will happen or not, and if it does to what degree, is partly dependent on the power of resistance in those who represent the opposite pole of the courage to be, the courage to be as oneself.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 112

Life , Courage , Dependency

“The anxiety about death is met in two ways. The reality of death is excluded from daily life to the highest possible degree. The dead are not allowed to show that they are dead; they are transformed into a mask of the living. The other and more important way of dealing with death is the belief in a continuation of life after death, called the immortality of the soul. This is not a Christian and hardly a Platonic doctrine. Christianity speaks of resurrection and eternal life, Platonism of a participation of the soul in the transtemporal sphere of essences. But the modern idea of immortality means a continuous participation in the productive process.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 110

Life , Death , Way , Soul

“Secular movements… try to avoid myths and rites…. How shall Christianity face them? Shall Christianity tell them: Come to us, we are a better religion?… Shall we make of the Christian message a success story, and tell them, like advertisers: try it with us, and you will see how important Christianity is for everybody? Some missionaries and some ministers and some Christian laymen use these methods. They show a total misunderstanding of Christianity. The apostle who was a missionary and a minister and a layman all at once says something different. He says: No particular religion matters, neither ours nor yours. But I want to tell you that something has happened that matters, something that judges you and me, your religion and my religion. A New Creation has occurred, a New Being has appeared; and we are all asked to participate in it.”

Paul Tillich

Chap. 2: The New Being
The New Being (1955)

Religion , Appearance , Success

“Without the eros toward truth, theology would not exist.”

Paul Tillich

Source: Love, Power and Justice (1954), p. 31

Truth

“Even loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the universe are in him.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 121

Universe , Loneliness

“God's forgiveness is unconditional. There is no condition whatsoever in man which would make him worthy of forgiveness. If forgiveness were conditional, conditioned by man, no one could be accepted and no one could accept himself. We know that this is our situation, but we loathe to face it.”

Paul Tillich

Chap. 1: "To Whom Much is Forgiven..."
The New Being (1955)

God , Forgiveness

“Enthusiasm for the universe, in knowing as well as in creating, also answers the question of doubt and meaninglessness. Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. And meaninglessness is no threat so long as enthusiasm for the universe and for man as its center is alive.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 121

Question , Knowledge , Universe

“Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 125

Knowledge

“The Great Commandment demands of everyone the total love of God and the love one's neighbour according to the measure of man's natural self-affirmation. If love is emotion, how can it be demanded? Emotions cannot be demanded. We cannot demand them of ourselves. If we try, something artificial is produced which shows the traits of what had to be suppressed in its production. Repentance, intentionally produced, hides self-complacency in perversion. Love, intentionally produced, shows indifference or hostility in perversion. The means: love as an emotion cannot be commanded. Either love is something other than emotion or the Great Commandment is meaningless.”

Paul Tillich

Source: Love, Power and Justice (1954), p. 4

Love , God , Hostility , Nature

“Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 113

World , Parting

“We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.”

Paul Tillich

Chap. 1: "To Whom Much is Forgiven..."
The New Being (1955)

Love , Forgiveness

“In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 133

“As the Greeks devoted themselves to philosophy, obedient to the logos within the limits of the kairos; as the Middle Ages subordinated the logos to the great kairos upon which their culture was built; as modern philosophy through its kairos adapted itself to the logos of a world-dominating science and technique, so our task is to serve the logos out of the depths of our new kairos, a kairos that is now emerging in the crises and catastrophes of our day. Hence, the more deeply we understand fate — our own personal fate and that of our society — the more our intellectual work will have power and truth.”

Paul Tillich

"Philosophy and Fate"
The Protestant Era (1948)

Fate , Truth , Age , World

“At the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p.57

Age