Paul Tillich and the Body

Introduction

The connection between Paul Tillich’s theological and philosophical thought and the concept of the body is both fascinating and challenging. What do we mean by “body”? Is it materiality or bodiliness as contrasted with “spirit”? Is it the sexual body, as most people mean today, or the “spiritual body” as Saint Paul describes in I Corinthians 15? I am fascinated by this topic for this reason: too little work on the body qua body has been done in the history of Western theological thought, and for too long the “spiritual” has been set in opposition to the “bodily” or the “corporeal.” I am challenged for these reasons, to which we must consider one more: Tillich’s own ambiguous understanding of “body.” For he was a thinker of extraordinary theological and spiritual depth, while at the same time his personal life, with his extramarital affairs, suggested a very different view of body. In what follows, I wish to consider three topics: first, some ideas on Christian spirituality and the body; second, Tillich’s theology of the body in creation and his understanding of epithumia, or sexual desire, and eros, the power of love itself; finally, the body in his personal life.

The Body in Christian Spirituality

Let us begin our discussion of the body in the present and in this beautiful country. Jaci Maraschin has written eloquently about a Brazilian approach to the relation between art and body. He writes that, “Brazilian culture is strongly marked by a Dionysian tendency already visible in the experience of our beaches and the way we move our bodies in everyday life. Our life is directed by rhythm and joy. It is true that we have academic art and very traditional art galleries and museums. Nevertheless, art as lived and experienced by the people would fit better into the definition of art as presence. Presence here is unconcealed presence.” [1] He then proceeds to analyze four aspects of Brazilian culture and their relationship to body: Carnival, soccer, Catholic religious processions, and Pentecostalism. In each case, he reveals the importance of the surface elements, the bodiliness of these cultural expressions. In doing so, he has reminded us—perhaps unintentionally—of our Jewish Christian roots in the body, and the deepest meaning of the body in the role of Christian salvation. In any case, Sao Paolo, with its warmth and sensual beauty, is a long way from the dark and cold world of Germany where Tillich was born and raised.

From its origins, Christianity was a religion of the body, a faith grounded in the concrete reality of human flesh and blood. The goal of Christian life, as Saint Paul tells us, is to become a “spiritual” (pneumatikos) person, one who receives revelation through the Spirit and possesses the mind of Christ. Paul contrasts this spiritual person with the “natural” (psychikos) person, the individual who has no room for the gifts of God’s Spirit and sees them as folly (I Cor 2:9-16). “Spiritual” in the Pauline sense does not mean a soul distinct from body, but characterizes the inner core of the whole person, both body and soul, alive and filled with the Spirit of Christ. [2] When the Word of God became flesh and dwelled among us, it was in bodily form in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who was born as everyone else and lived life like everyone else. It is Christ’s body and soul that died on Calvary, and Christ’s body, that is, his entire self, that is raised from the dead. Likewise, it is Christ’s body and blood that is celebrated and memorialized in the Eucharist as the sacramental testimony of God’s complete self-donation in body and soul in Jesus of Nazareth. Christ’s risen body suggests that of all that is human, of the body, and earthly, nothing lies outside of God’s redemptive power and will. [3]

This bodily spirituality did not survive intact because of two historical forces: first, the conversion of Constantine to Christianity and its subsequent emergence as the religion of the Roman Empire; second, and more important, the interpretation of Christianity in Greek philosophical categories. In the first three centuries, Christians lived as a counter-culture with many surrendering to martyrdom for the Christian faith during periodic persecutions. With the conversion of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Empire in 312, devoted Christians no longer had the opportunity to demonstrate the depth of their love and commitment to Christ by offering their lives as martyrs. Furthermore, many people converted to Christianity as lukewarm Christians; if the Emperor was Christian, it was a good idea to follow suit. The most devout Christians became “martyrs” in a different way by witnessing to Christ through surrendering their lives in the world and entering monastic and religious life. Thus, they rejected the bodily life of marriage, sex, and procreation.

With this shift in the meaning of witness to Christ, virginity, or life outside of sexuality in the world, gradually became the higher form of Christian life. Greek philosophy, especially Neo-Platonism, emphasized the value of spirit over matter, thus furthering the second-class status of sexuality and marriage as a Christian way of life. St. Augustine, the greatest theologian in the West in the first millennium of the church, unfortunately regarded sexual activity, even in marriage, as shameful; such an attitude was common among many of the Church Fathers, especially those of the East. Unfortunately, Augustine, as the “father of medieval theology,” was followed by most of the medieval theologians and his negative attitude toward sex became normative for many in the Church almost down to our own time. Add to this, the sexual perversion prevalent in the late ancient world and in paganism in general led to an exaggerated sense of the importance of celibacy and virginity in the Church of the first five centuries.

The creation of two classes of Christians, the virgin and the married state, began to become widely accepted in the fourth century and after. Marriage and sexuality were unfortunately placed in second place; the marriage bond was viewed as the path for the weak because it served as a remedy for concupiscence, the human person’s sex drive isolated from his/her whole being. This attitude was more a product of Greek thought than Hebraic; Greek thought was inevitably dualistic, in which the material world was less important next to the world of the spirit. In Hebraic thought, on the other hand, bodily life in the world was of supreme importance, and marriage and sexuality were presumed. For this reason, the Scriptures speak of the resurrection of the body (a word that meant the whole person) rather than the immortality of the soul, a Greek idea that was foreign to the New Testament writers. Tillich himself rejects the “immortality” of the soul as a theological concept, though he realized its symbolic value. For Tillich, although immortality of the soul was used very early in Christian theology, only the resurrection of the body is the biblical symbol of eternal life. The resurrection of the body was a body transformed by the Spirit into a “spiritual body.” Thus, he defines the Pauline “spiritual body” as “a body which expresses the spiritually transformed total personality of man.” [4]

The dualism between body and soul that found expression in the concept of the immortality of the soul has persisted in Christian thought into our own times and has had several negative consequences on both theology and piety. With a theology and a piety about death that was primarily individualistic, static, and unbiblical, life in the world seemed less important and relevant than life in eternity. The earthly pursuit of justice and peace was passed over for the struggle to save one’s soul, with little thought of the importance of bodily existence or the body itself as part of God’s creative will. Sin, in both Catholic and Protestant traditions, was too closely associated with the body in a physicalist sense rather than with the attitude of self sufficiency, failure to trust, and estrangement of the whole person from the divine presence and grace. With the Second Vatican Council in Catholicism, a more biblical, historical, and communal understanding of Christian life emerged. In the Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, chapter five makes it clear that “all are called to holiness.” This opens the way for an authentic spirituality of married and family life, that persons who are sexually fulfilled in this world as marriage partners are holy, not in addition to, or outside of, their commitment to share all of life and love, including their bodies with one another, but precisely in and through such a unitive commitment.

This unity of body and soul has its roots deep in the traditional theology of Saint Thomas. For Thomas, the soul is form of the body, that which makes the body a body. Body and soul are not two substances but one in which two component factors can be distinguished. He rejects any theory in which the soul is in the body as a pilot in a ship, or that it would be better if the soul had no body at all. Thus, persons are persons because their bodies and souls, while distinguishable, are inseparable in one unified entity and personality. [5] Karl Rahner, among the 20th century’s greatest theologians, developed the theological importance of the body in his interpretation of death: that it is the whole person who dies, not just the body, and that there is no time that a person is a person without a body or “a-cosmic.” This has led Rahner to construct his hypothesis of the “pancosmicity” of the soul and matter in death. If the whole person dies and the whole person is raised to eternal life in Christ, then the person, in some sense, must remain “material,” since this materiality is constitutive of being a person. There is no discontinuity in the wholeness of the person, in life, in death, and in resurrection. [6] Thus, this brief review of the Christian theological tradition suggests a strand of thought that is far more positive to the role of the body that the influence of Greek dualism has sometimes allowed it to have. This context is important factor in considering Tillich’s theological and personal understanding of the body.

Tillich’s Intellectual Understanding of Body

Two aspects of Tillich’s theological understanding of the body are important here: first, the body in divine creation, and second, the role of eros and epithymia or libido in defining the body.

First, for Tillich, being-itself is fulfilled as spirit, where all the ontological elements and the telos of life are joined. Spirit is the unity of power and meaning. “Spirit is the power through which meaning lives, and it is the meaning which gives direction to power.” On the side of power, spirit includes “centered personality, self-transcending personality, and freedom of self-determination.” On the side of meaning, it includes “universal participation, forms and structures of reality, and limiting and directing destiny.” As Tillich affirms, “Spirit does not stand in contrast to body. Life as spirit transcends the duality of body and mind.” For Tillich, God as spirit is the inclusive symbol of the divine life. Therefore, spirit excludes nothing and, of necessity, spirit includes all, including body. [7] Tillich is fond of citing the Swabian mystic, F. C. Ötinger that “corporality is the end of the ways of God.” [8] This, he says, “is a necessary consequence of the Christian doctrine of creation, with the rejection of the Greek doctrine of materia as an antispiritual principle.” [9] In considering God’s omnipresence, he argues that God is not spaceless. While one cannot characterize God as body, to call God spirit does not exclude body. In spirit, according to Tillich, “the ontological elements of vitality and personality are included and, with them, the participation of bodily existence in the divine life.” [10] Thus, Tillich rejects any dualism between body and spirit, and according to the meaning of omnipresence, God is as close to the body as the soul, to the physical as the spiritual, to the secular as well as the holy. As he says, “in the certainty of the omnipresent God, we are always in the sanctuary.” [11]

Second, let us consider Tillich’s understanding of love as a clue to his idea of body. In Love, Power and Justice, Tillich proposes four types of love. These types of love are interrelated since each is characterized by the same movement of one’s being, that is, a quest for “reunion with the separated.” The classical types of love (the use of Greek names helps each type to be clearly understood) are these: epithymia (libido, in Latin), eros, philia, and agape. [12]

Epithymia or libido is the sexual and procreative drive towards union with another. Libido, according to Tillich, is more than a drive to the pleasure of sex; the desire for mere sexual pleasure is not love as epithymia, but, as Tillich’s student, psychologist Rollo May says, the release of physical tensions. [13] The direction of epithymia is primarily towards re-union with the other on a physical level, not the pleasure that accompanies this union. As Tillich says, “It is not the pleasure itself which is desired, but the union with that which fulfills the desire.” [14] Epithymia is good in itself and, according to Tillich, only puritans old and new (and Freud himself partially fits in here) fail to see that epithymia or libido is “the normal drive towards vital self-fulfillment.” Likewise, according to Tillich, “epithymia is a quality not lacking in any love relation” as long as it is understood not “as the thriving for pleasure for the sake of pleasure.” [15] As Theodore Mackin, writing on the Catholic sacrament of marriage says, “We are attracted to God by the very attraction we have towards one another.” [16] Certainly, part of this attraction is sexual attraction, as such attraction is the mode God has chosen for the race to survive and flourish.

More important, of course, both to understanding sexuality and Tillich’s idea of body, is the meaning of eros. Unfortunately, the English word “erotic” has lost its deep and comprehensive meaning in contemporary culture; it has been distorted, often reduced to synonym for “pornographic.” This use of the word eros is many steps removed from Plato who understands eros as “the god or demiurge…who constitutes man’s creative spirit.” Eros is the drive that “not only impels man to union with another person in sexual or other forms of love but incites in man the yearning for knowledge and drives him passionately to seek union with the truth.” [17] In the Symposium, Plato calls eros “a great spirit (daimon) and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal…” [18] Eros is a drive to wholeness and the absolute, a force within one’s being that is personal in its nature and directed to an infinite horizon of truth, beauty, and meaning. In the biological realm, it is a “drive for union and reproduction.” Eros can never be reduced or confined to a particular finite form or expression but can never be experienced except through a particular form. The ancient Greeks knew that eros was a god or daimon, not “in the sense of being above man, but the power that binds all men together, the power informing all things,” as Rollo May says. Eros is the “original creative force.” Eros “binds diversity together.” Eros is “the power in us yearning for wholeness, the drive to give meaning and pattern to our variegation, form to our otherwise impoverishing formlessness, integration to encounter our otherwise disintegrative trends.” [19] In Saint Augustine, eros was understood as “the power that drive [persons] towards God…a yearning for mystic union which comes out in the religious experience of union with God…” [20]

Eros, of course, can be reduced to mere sexual desire, but Tillich, in the traditions of the ancient Greeks, insists that the biological is not denied but incorporated and transcended in eros. [21] According to Tillich, “there is epithymia in every eros, but eros transcends epithymia.” “Without eros towards the truth,” Tillich states, “theology would not exist, and without eros towards the beautiful, no ritual expressions would exist.” [22] Tillich insists that both epithumia and eros be submitted to the judgment of agape. Agape is absolute and unconditional love, the love that is God’s love. Agape is not another type of love besides epithymia, eros, and philia (the love of friendship) but the quality of the unconditional in every type and expression of love. Agape, Tillich says, is “love cutting into love”…“the depth of love or love in relation to the ground of life.” [23] Agape is God’s love, the perfection of love in all of its forms. Agape judges the inadequacies of human love and heals and transforms love in its frailty and incompleteness. In the Gospels, Jesus preaches agape, not as love that excludes epithymia, eros, and philia but includes them. For this reason, Jesus went to the wedding feast of Cana to celebrate—with abundant wine one must note—the marriage of two people, shared close friendships with his disciples Peter, James, and John, and passionately preached the love of God for all people.

According to Alexander Irwin in his book Eros towards the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic, [24] the powers that Tillich ascribes to eros are “astonishingly vast.” [25] In his 1926 article, “The Demonic: A Contribution to the Interpretation of History,” Tillich identifies “the impulse for power and the impulse for Eros” as the two fundamental “polar and yet related forces of the subconscious.” [26] In his Socialist Decision, Tillich links eros with what he calls the “powers of origin.” Here he says, “Eros…wants to be in union with the primal power of existence prior to any analysis, and which is set in opposition, especially by youth, to the ways in which we rationally order the world.” [27] Further, he associates the non-rational and fundamental dimension of eros with the female, suggesting that, “women resonate with, or are disposed towards eros, in a particularly deep and decisive way.” [28] For Tillich, eros or love is the daimonic power and driving force in all the spheres of human life and culture—in knowledge, morality, aesthetics, religion, and what Tillich himself calls, and Irwin uses for title of his book, “eros towards the world.” [29] For Tillich, eros or love exemplifies the ontological power of all love: reunion of the separated. In the cognitive realm, without eros, knowledge would become a formal intellectualism. With eros, on the other hand, we are “driven to that to which we belong and that which belongs to us.” For Tillich, “in every act of knowledge, want and estrangement are conquered.” [30] Eros “drives the mind toward the true.” [31] In human relationships, without eros, their power and mystery would be lost to either mere sensation on the sexual side or mere association on the side of friendship. Thus, eros serves as a significant lens into both Tillich’s thought and his personal life.

Tillich and the Body in his Personal Life

In his autobiographical reflections, Tillich characterized his life as a life “on the boundary.” [32] One final boundary, one that Tillich himself did not speak about, remains to be considered in order to understand his relationship to the body and the vital role that eros played in his life. This is the boundary between his public and academic life and his private life as a husband, a father, and a friend. As Rollo May puts it succinctly, Tillich “had to live Dionysian and think Apollonian…[and] these built-in conflicts kept him always psychologically open and dynamic.” [33] Indeed, according to May, Paulus could say with Faust, “Two souls, alas, within me dwell.” [34]

First, it may be helpful to describe Tillich’s own relationship to his body. Like many Europeans, he was serious about remaining in good health. He built castles on the beach, took long walks on Sundays, as is the German custom, and for the most part, remained a fit man. [35] While he watched his diet, he also loved good food, fine wine, and French cuisine. [36] And he enjoyed his cocktails too. In an interview with Hannah Tillich in 1985 when she was 88, she told me that every day at noon and at 5:00, Paulus would have some scotch. [37] Not until his years at Harvard, when he turned 70 and he was a man with considerable fame, did he gain some weight. [38]

The primary source of information about Tillich and the body—how he lived out his view of eros at a personal level—comes from the historical record of his extra-marital affairs. Tillich was a man who did not remain faithful to his wife, Hannah, during their 41 years of marriage. She herself admits her own infidelity, perhaps in response to Tillich’s relationships with other women. The decade following Tillich’s death, his wife published two memoirs of her life with Tillich that brought into the public forum what their friends and colleagues had known for years. [39] The books, From Time to Time (1973) and From Place to Place: Travels With Paul Tillich, Travels without Paul Tillich (1976) caused quite a stir in the theological community. At the same time, his student and friend, Rollo May, in Paulus. Reminiscences of a Friendship, [40] suggested a very different view of Tillich’s life and relationships with women than Hannah’s scandalous stories. Let me note at this point that in my 1985 interview with Hannah Tillich, when I asked her to autograph one of her books, she appeared embarrassed and told me that she regretted having written both books. She told me that she was bitter at the time and needed the money that she thought the books would bring in. Few would question the factual information about their marriage as Hannah describes it, but many might disagree with her personal interpretation of the pattern of their lives they shared.

The facts are these: Tillich had numerous affairs with women after World War I. After his disastrous first marriage to Grethi, to whom he was deeply attracted to sexually, he turned to the Dionysian side of life. Grethi had betrayed Tillich by having a child with one of Tillich’s friends. He met Hannah at a ball and they married in 1924 and remained married until Tillich’s death in 1965. (Hannah died in 1988 at the age of 92.) When Hannah fell in love with Tillich, she was engaged to another man, whom she subsequently married and bore his child. In 1923, she divorced her first husband and married Tillich. [41] Two children, Mutie (Erdmuthe) and René, were born in 1925 and 1935 respectively. Paulus and Hannah slept in separate bedrooms after their trip to America in 1933, and their marriage, to put it mildly, was stormy for much of their four decades together. They had agreed upon an open marriage from the beginning, but like so many agreements, one party becomes hurt and feels abandoned.

The daimonic power of eros—used for both the creative and the destructive—was central to Tillich’s relationships with Hannah and other women. He came from a sexually repressed youth and Rollo May finds him naïve about sex when he was a teenager. [42] Likewise, a very traditional religious background (his father was a superintendent of the Church in Germany) hindered Tillich’s emergence from “dreaming innocence.” [43] He lost his mother at seventeen, and he was inconsolable after her death. [44] This event seemed to have marked his future relations with women: his mother died before he could win her, so only in his little-boy self was it possible to keep her and make her his own. This pattern of child-like charm was repeated repeatedly with other women. [45] For Tillich, the seduction was much wider than sexual seduction; his relationships with women were more often sensual and erotic than sexual, though many were sexual too. He could weave “an extraordinary web of emotional power over a woman,” with the ability to look “not at but into a woman.” [46] Rollo May recalls that Tillich disliked dirty or sexual jokes, but that he did enjoy good pornography. “I felt he had a kind of reverent attitude toward the female body and vagina as well as phallus.” [47]

Eros, the drive to wholeness and fulfillment, and not libido, was at the source of Tillich’s passion. May suggests that his “ontological needs were great” and that he demanded from women that they meet these needs.” [48] May cites a letter of Tillich just before Easter to a women he loved deeply during his marriage: “All my vitality resurrects if I think of you. Think of me on Easter morning. Will the stone ever be rolled away? Infinite love, P.” [49]

This gift of eros was also manifest in Tillich’s teaching. His biographers, Marion and Wilhelm Pauck, are very clear on this point: “As a teacher, he did precisely what he did in his friendships with men and women: he made potential spiritual riches actual.” He was gifted with the “ability to listen to the other person and take him seriously.” Thus, he “lured his listeners to say things, to utter ideas, they had not sensed were in them—ideas until that moment had lain silent and dormant.” [50] May reveals that “he was often depressed,” and this “was a general motif running through his life…He sometimes impressed people as man beset by life.” [51] His son, René Tillich, a therapist in Hawaii, writes: “Paul was constantly anxious at home, always sighing and wring his hands. In front of people, he was transformed, like the surgeon who has the shakes until he walks into surgery. His anxiety was constant unless working or performing.” [52] It was through teaching and his work as a theologian, as well as his relationships with women, that the anxiety and the need for affirmation and reunion his whole life long were overcome. Recall his lines from his Systematic Theology, “In every act of knowledge, want and estrangement are conquered.” [53]

Tillich’s passion or “eros towards the world” was not easy on his wife or his children. But Hannah herself had her own issues. Her son, René, describes her voice at home as “shrill, harsh, tyrannical, demanding, and critical.” Furthermore, she had own problems with sex. “It seems she was always talking about sex,” René writes. “She saw sexual motifs everywhere…she wrote novels with sexual themes, sent me pornographic books like The Story of O…” He diagnosed correctly that his mother was an adult molested as a child, in this case by Hannah’s father, an alcoholic. [54] Hannah grew more strident about Tillich’s sexual affairs as the years went on. Tillich, himself, was always concerned about public accusations and exposure, fearing that it would ruin his career. As an adolescent, René Tillich asked his father “how he could reconcile his position as a minister and adultery.” In reply, Tillich said, “that he had never spoken out against adultery and that ended the conversation.” [55]

Conclusion

Tillich’s theological understanding of the body was in the mainstream of the Christian theological tradition and appears, overall, to be more “Catholic” than “Protestant.” In the Catholic and Lutheran tradition, finitum capax infiniti (the finite is capable of the infinite) is an enduring principle; put differently, grace is embodied in the things of earth. Tillich as a person and a thinker was given to inclusiveness; it was catholic in the original sense of the term. [56] Thus, he saw sex as part of eros, the body as part of spirit, and non-being as part of being.

In his personal life, he understood the line from the poet Rilke, whom he enjoyed very much: “If my devils are to leave me, I fear my angels will take flight as well.” [57] He knew that the great and more comprehensive one’s being is, the greater the risk of non-being, and for this reason he understood that tragedy accrues only to the great. [58] Neither a moralist nor a libertine, he knew that eros was a daimon, a great spirit that linked the divine and the human; that the goodness of the daimon could soon turn negative, and become “demonic.” He admitted being pursued by his demons all his life. At the same time, according to Marion Pauck, one should not think that Tillich was running around seducing young women in a crass and physical way. He was not hypocrite; [59] he lived what he taught and taught what he lived. Yet, he possessed a great power over women and had deep and abiding relationships with many of them. “He had enough eros for all,” as one woman put it. [60] He saw divine things in earthly vessels; he saw grace embodied in relationships with people; he saw his passion for life, for sexuality, for art, for beauty, for food and drink, and for the life of the mind, take him to what he called, “the human border situation.” Perhaps his son, René, captured Tillich’s passionate life and his quest for wholeness better than anyone else:

[Tillich] practiced the cure people of my profession and persuasion would prescribe, honest self-exploration. Well, God knows, Paul did honest self-exploration, only one step removed. He did it in his theology—it’s there in his work, very clear—where he explained himself with a courage and rigor that are awesome, refusing to make nice what was not nice in the human soul, and, by extension, in himself. He acknowledged the reality of the demonic in humans and argued that it must be embraced, dealt with. He refused to separate sexual desire from love, and he refused to solve the problem of sexual excess by relegating it to the moral ash bin. And, I believe, he was looking at those questions in himself, even as he was struggling with them in theological terms. I believe Paul spent his life giving himself a talking cure just as Freud analyzed himself in the course of developing his own theories. They were both remarkable men, above and beyond the legacy they left the world. [61]

Tillich’s life and work manifests the triumph of inclusivity—of the union of body and spirit; of eros, libido, and agape; of the personal and the theological; and of passion and spirit. At the same time, his life also reveals the precarious nature of such an achievement.