Tillich´s Appropriation of Meister Eckhart - an appreciative critique

Acknowledged ancestry.

In a candid account of his intellectual ancestry, Paul Tillich acknowledged the influence of Jacob Boehme in the frank confession, "...that his spiritual father was Schleiermacher, his intellectual father was Schelling and his grandfather on both sides was Jacob Boehme." Carl Braaten honors Tillich's mystical ancestry when he identifies the "...mystical ontology which undergirds his whole way of thinking." Braaten traces the lineage of such mysticism through Tillich's "...backtracking his way from Schelling through Boehme, German mysticism, medieval Augstinianism [read the early Franciscan tradition and Bonaventure] to early Christian Platonism." Braaten argues convincingly that Tillich's Platonism has its earliest roots in Augustine and Origen, roots which were significantly modified by Jacob Boehme who stands between Luther and Tillich and whose impact gave to Tillich's Lutheran inheritance its mystical substance and so its most distinguishing characteristic.

The admitted formative influence of Boehme and German mysticism on Tillich's guiding theological perspective raises, then, the question of why Tillich was relatively silent on the work of Meister Eckhart whose experience precedes Boehme's by more than two centuries and yet shares significant, if limited, common ground with Boehme. From his synopsis of Eckhart's foundational positions in his A History of Christian Thought, and again in his very late discussion with the Buddist scholar Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, Tillich displays a, perhaps passing, but nevertheless sympathetic and incisive knowledge of Eckhart's experience and thought. His bypassing of Eckhart's mysticism is of great interest in relation to Tillich's sustained insistence on the necessity of moving beyond subject/object categories in an adequate experience and expression of the divine/human relationship. Eckhart, as well as Boehme, could serve Tillich in this concern because Eckhart's mystical experience culminates in a state of identity with the divine in that apophatic moment of shared nothingness. In this moment all distinction between the divine and the human is dissolved and with it any possibility of relating to the divine as the Other or an Other over against the human subject.

The mystical defeat of the subject/object split.

Tillich insists throughout his work that conceiving of the divine/human relation within subject/object categories elicits atheism as the proper theological and spiritual response. This insistence brands his own theology as thoroughly atheistic in relation to all and every form of theism because theism cannot escape the subject/object split. Yet Tillich leaves but tantalizing hints of what going beyond subject/object categories might entail ontologically and epistemologically. In spite of the religious and spiritual necessity of moving beyond the subject/object split, Tillich is, in one instance, driven to state that only revelation succeeds in plumbing the abyss preceding the split. "Revelation" in this context probably means an unmediated experience of the abyss itself. Mystical experience could thus give flesh to the consciousness or lack thereof necessitated by the journey beyond subject/object categories to that moment of identity with the divine which can alone defeat the alienation endemic to a conception of God as other than the human.

As suggested, this moment of identity is pointed to by Tillich though rarely explicitly drawn out in its radical implications. His conception of the depth of reason establishes a dimension of reason where divinity and humanity coincide. It is from this point of coincidence that humanity and divinity depart into that distance which existential reason imposes on the knowing subject and object known. This distance and the alienation it entails is taken to its extreme in the conviction that God is somehow a Wholly Other and exceptional entity among the totality of entities. Without this point of coincidence in the depth of humanity, divinity's only approach to humanity is from without. For Tillich such a divine approach can only be heteronomous and so constitute the ultimate insult to the autonomy and dignity of the human mind and person. The depth of reason is no doubt closely related to that divine prius which precedes reason and whose recovery is, for Tillich, the basis of religion universally. This depth and this priority would also constitute the ontological ground of that panentheism which attaches to Tillich's understanding of the native participation of the human in the divine. Tillich waited till the end of his third volume to explicitly acknowledge this panentheism, though it is present from the first volume as the power which enlivens his understanding of the divine/human relationship and without which his system remains unintelligible and soulless.

Tillich also engages the point of identity between the divine and the human in his understanding of the "principle of identity", and its variant formulations, "the principle of immediacy", and "the mutual within-each-otherness" of the "infinite within the finite". All of these formulations refer to the point of coincidence in the human of the finite and infinite as the basis of the ineradicable possibility and necessity of human religious experience itself, and, so of the so called "world religions". Again, the point of coincidence between the divine and the human is dramatically on display when Tillich affirms that any authentic human knowledge of God is God's knowledge of itself working through the human. When he extends such intimacy to the spiritual world and to prayer he contends that all authentic prayer is likewise of God to God working through the human. In these positions Tillich approaches, if he does not repeat, Eckhart's famous affirmation that God and the human see each other through the same eye.

It would seem, then, that Tillich's profound concern over the need to transcend the subject/object categorization of the divine/human relation is most thoroughly realized in mystical experience. This realization should move mystical experience to a more prominent place in his systematic thought than Tillich ordinarily gives to it. For, Tillich usually identifies mysticism as one of the two major iconoclastic responses to the idolatry inevitably generated when what he calls the "universal revelation...which becomes the presupposition of every concrete and particular revelation" does, in fact, concretize into its historical variants of which Christianity is one. Mystical iconoclasm transcends idolatry by transcending any mediation, especially that of cleric or church, between the individual and the divine. In the German apophatic tradition this transcendence takes on the force of a moment of identity with the divine beyond all differentiation. On the other hand, prophetic iconoclasm rests on the prophet's critique, occasionally supported by critical, secular reason, of any pretension by that through which the holy appears to an unqualified identity with the holy itself. Tillich's famous interplay of Protestant principle and Catholic substance rests largely on the prophetic denial that any expression of Catholic substance, the sacramental basis of religion itself, including the religious figure of Jesus, can claim ultimacy in matters religious.

The problem of the relation of the iconoclastic response to concrete historical expressions of the "universal revelation", especially in their theistic forms, reaches a certain crescendo in the closing pages of The Courage To Be in Tillich's delineation of the "God beyond the God of theism." These pages contain Tillich's most sustained rejection of theism in all its forms. First he rejects popular theism's ability to evoke a largely psychological sense of gravity and moral substance enabling "politicians" and "dictators" to use the term "God" to establish their moral credibility. This kind of theism was blatantly exploited in the recent American election. Secondly theism can be used to describe the divine/human encounter within the subject/object scheme. Thirdly, theism, in direct continuity with his second point, reduces the divine/human relation to the level of a relationship between two persons one of whom is divine. It is especially in his rejection of the theological adequacy of religious and biblical personalism, in its usual and dubious form of an individual's relationship to an individual God, that Tillich's case against theism is most radical and drives to the God beyond the God of theism. Such a conception of God, though not less than personal, would corrode a relationship of the divine to the human reduced to that of one person to another.

Tillich argues, in these pages, that the God beyond the God of theism transcends both "...the mystical experience and the divine-human encounter." One can easily see why such a God would transcend the personal encounter, in this case meaning the prophetic tradition, because prophetic consciousness is inescapably mired in subject/object categories. The prophet speaks on behalf of a God who is not the prophet, has approached the prophet from beyond, and, as an external agent, has mandated and empowered the prophet's speech. In short the prophet speaks for another and Tillich's effort to free such speech from a theistic framework remains tortured and unconvincing. Ultimately the contention that the prophet escapes theism lies in Tillich's identification of mystic with prophet as sharing in what he calls "absolute faith", a faith derived from "being grasped by the power of being itself." The content of such faith is the God above the God of theism. However, Tillich's affirmation that absolute faith in the God beyond the God of theism transcends both mystical and prophetic experience remains highly suspect regarding prophecy because of the prophet's undeniable relation to a divine Other. Tillich's compulsion to extricate the prophet from the theism he rejects is probably grounded on his own admission that the prophetic lies at the heart of his cherished Protestant principle.

His God above the God of theism is less suspect in relation to mysticism. In Eckhart's experience, and in certain moment's of Boehme's, there can be no doubt that both understood themselves to enjoy an instant of identity with the divine well beyond the God of theism. In the end, only the mystic and hardly the prophet can lay full claim to transcending the God of theism. If anything, prophecy should be located in the wake of the mystic's experience and in the mystic's consequent response to and impact on the surrounding civil and religious culture. Not infrequently such prophetic impact has cost the mystic their peace and, indeed, their lives. Tillich would like to contend that the winnowing experience of modern doubt and meaninglessness is "more radical than mysticism" because it dissolves even the ecclesial springboard from which the mystic departs. However, a closer examination of the cost in suffering undergone by the soul as it moves to Eckhart's identity with the Godhead and undergone by Boehme in suffering the resolution of the divine self-contradiction in his humanity would, at least, lay this contention open to doubt.

Eckhart in more recent scholarship.

To emphasize the radical nature of Eckhart's experience, some of the scholarly development since Tillich's time of dominant themes in Eckhart's experience and theology need brief exposure before turning to Tillich's own appropriation of Eckhart. A scholarly consensus seems currently to be forming around the reality of two dimensions of divine life based on the distinction Eckhart explicitly draws in his statements, "God and Godhead are as different as earth is from heaven." and in variation, "God and Godhead are as different as active and inactive." In this statement God (Gottes) refers to the trinity as creator. Eckhart describes the life of the Trinity as a bullitio, a boiling, whose inner dynamic led to an ebullitio, a boiling over into creation. This overflow has many consequences. It places necessity in creation because the Trinity could not resist its own drive to express itself beyond itself. It also affirms the eternity of the world, a point Eckhart makes in his statements that in God's speaking the one Word he hears two things. This means that the expression of the Logos within the Trinity and beyond the Trinity are co-terminous, two dimensions of the same dynamic. It also means there was no situation in which the Logos remained unexpressed or creation uncreated. Further the divine flowing over grounds Eckhart's thought on the dialectical identity of creation and fall preceding Tillich's own position by some six centuries. In Eckhart's imagery when he flowed out from God all things spoke of God but none were blest. This was so because creation itself broke the identity of the creature with God by subjecting both to imprisonment in the subject/object split in which the creature stood in estrangement and alienation from a creator other than itself. In Tillich's variation creation occurs when the individual "steps out" of God by willing one's existence and so one's existential alienation from one's source. As with Eckhart so with Tillich do "...creation and Fall coincide...".

At this point the second dimension of divine life enters into play. This dimension is the Godhead (Gottheit) whom Eckhart clearly distinguishes from the Trinity (Gottes). Just how Eckhart relates the Godhead to God as trinity is subject to variant treatments by Eckhart himself . However, he is not affirming the simple emanation of the Trinity from the Godhead because the Godhead rests without any need for expression or activity beyond its own quiescence. The self-sufficient serenity of the Godhead plays the decisive role in freeing humanity from the alienation of relating to the creating Trinity as to another. The priority of the Godhead is evident in Eckhart's prayer, "I pray to God to rid me of God." In this enigmatic prayer he is praying to the Godhead to restore the identity he shared with it before the split into creature and creator. Eckhart here fills in the blanks Tillich leaves empty in what is involved in going beyond the subject/object structure. Only the recovery of a primordial moment of identity with the divine will suffice. Obviously such a moment cannot be permanently held or it would quickly move into a catatonic state. But neither can it be wholly avoided if the God beyond the God of theism is to be attained and "the negation of the negation" of being other than God truly effected.

Contemporary scholarship in Eckhart's thought and that of other medieval mystics now embraces the distinction between a unitas indistinctionis, a union of indistinction or identity, in contrast to a unitas spiritus, a union sustaining a distinction between the divine and the human throughout the mystic's relation to God. Eckhart's moment of identity with the Godhead, as well as that of certain contemporary Beguine mystics, is now clearly established as a unitas indistinctionis, a union in which all distinction between mystic and Godhead evaporates into an all encompassing nothingness. This union of identity lies at the heart of Eckhart's mysticism and constitutes at least a foundational moment in Boehme's.

Contemporary scholarship also draws an important distinction between Eckhart's experience of the birth of God in the soul (gottesgeburte) and the experience of the "breakthrough", (durchbruch). The experiences are no doubt related but are not identical. In fact the breakthrough would seem to go beyond the birth of God in the soul to the recovery of a lost identity with the Godhead. While the distinction of these two inner events cannot be denied neither can they easily be put into a template or a sequential series in which one could be understood as preceding and inducing the other. What can be said with greater certitude is that the non-distinction between the divine and the human attaching to the breakthrough defies and defeats an understanding of any relation to God based on subject/object categories and so transcends all imagery including that of God's birth in the soul.

The question then arises, "If Eckhart's experience and theology as well as that of all apophatic mystics culminate in an identity with the God beyond God and so beyond the subject/object structure, why did Tillich not exploit Eckhart as a prime example of what such experience would mean and how it would be expressed?" The answer here proposed is that Tillich's commitment to orthodox Christianity's trinitarian paradigm and its logocentrism forbad Tillich's full appropriation of Eckhart's experience of identity with the divine in the nothingness preceding all form and even tendency to form. Such experience implicates a number of theological consequences with which Tillich remained uneasy even in his attempts to delineate the nature of the God beyond the God of theism. The first is the moment of an unqualified identity of the divine with the human which Tillich, even with his powerful conception of humanity's unmediated but inchoate intuition of the movements of trinitarian life, reserved for a post-temporal situation. The second is the quaternitarian implication of Eckhart's experience which could never reduce the Godhead to the nature or function of the Trinity as creator. In his inquiry into the contemporary revitalization of the symbol of Trinity, Tillich toys with the idea of a quaternity but takes a non-committal stance to it. He himself may have realized and feared the power of a nothingness that not only precedes and births form and life but can also swallow it.

Tillich's appropriation of Eckhart.

Tillich's reticence in fully incorporating Eckhart into his theology may become more apparent through a cursory examination of the two major loci in his work where he refers to Eckhart. In his A History of Christian Thought his treatment of Eckhart in the context of medieval German mysticism is incisive but does not explicitly address the key issue of the mystic's moving to an identity with the divine. He does address the major themes of Eckhart's distinction between God as ground and God as trinity, an indirect recognition of Eckhart's quaternitarian divinity. He does refer to Eckhart's position that the generation of the Logos within the divine life and beyond the divine life into creation are closely related but does not draw out Eckhart's conclusion that these processions are identical and so confer on creation both its necessity and eternity. He does refer to Eckhart's pantheism, so closely associated with his own, in terms of the divinity of the spark or scintilla in the soul of every human. In these passages Tillich reveals that Eckhart's natural felt presence of God as ground to the soul foreshadows the "eternal now" of his own theology and preaching. In continuity with such a conception of divine intimacy, Tillich accurately cites Eckhart to the effect that humanity's natural divinity is the basis of the potential birth of God in the soul of everyone, a birth which relativizes the literal and historical birth of Jesus by Mary through extending such birth to humanity as a universal religious possibility and demand. In doing so Tillich acknowledges Eckhart's universalism based on humanity's native divinity and the subordination of his Christology to the religious anthropology this universalism implies. Again in continuity with Tillich's own theology, which would deny both the human possibility of atheism as an unattainable unconcern and the impossibility of a secularism divested of an ultimate cultural bonding value, Tillich rightly understands Eckhart simply to remove "...the difference between the sacred and the secular worlds."

In some sense Tillich does acknowledge Eckhart's radical apophaticism. Tillich points to it through Eckhart's use of the German word entwerden, an unbecoming or anti-becoming in a self loss which could describe Eckhart's breakthrough into the divine nothingness. However Tillich does not use the term "breakthrough" in his treatment of Eckhart in his historical work and so mutes the note of total fusion of the human and the Godhead in the God beyond the Trinity as the ultimate resolution of the estrangement inextricably attached to the creature's relation to God as other.

The reason for Tillich's silence on this further reach of Eckhart's experience becomes more evident in his 1957 Harvard dialogue with Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, a Zen monk and scholar. Hisamatsu, early in the dialogue introduces the Zen idea of the "calm self" or "formless self". Tillich admits that he would welcome this experience into his very busy life and asks the "how to" question, how to experience the formless self. In the following discussion Tillich suggests that the formless self would lie beyond the subject/object scheme and his conversant agrees. But, when Tillich a second time asks how to get to this state, Hisamatsu himself introduces Eckhart's experience of detachment and goes on to discuss Eckhart's understanding of poverty. Eckhart's is a rich and radical understanding of poverty which would divest the individual not only of excessive personal belongings, but also of intellect, will and even of autonomous existence in the attainment of identity with the Godhead. Tillich acknowledges that such poverty does indeed empty the individual of "the subject-object duality". It is obvious Hisamatsu is comfortable with the correlation of the Zen concept of the formless self with Eckhart's ungrund, as long and to the extent that, there remained no duality between the ungrund and its concretion in everything finite.

Tillich can partially agree with this position but his qualifications about formlessness and his discomfort with the nothingness it implies come to the fore as the conversation continues. Such reservation had already been stated in preliminary form when Tillich insists that what can never be emptied from human interiority is the residual spark of the divine present there which he identifies with the logos. Hisamatsu agrees with Tillich that this residual spark could be understood as a potential for the awakening of the formless self. But then Tillich insists again that the actualization of this spark, which he closely relates to Eckhart's understanding of the birth of God in the soul, must take the form of the birth of logos, in his own words, "the form in which the formless comes to form." In this discussion, as throughout his theology, logos stands for the principle of form structuring the divine mind, the human mind and nature. Put succinctly Tillich cannot abide formlessness or that nothingness beyond all need for expression in form and so wholly beyond the mind's antinomies in that formlessness experienced by Zen, by Eckhart and by Boehme.

Tillich's inability to appreciate states of formlessness prior to and without a compulsive drive to form should not be surprising grounded as it is in his trinitarian theology. The abyss dimension of God, Boehme's dark chaotic fire, has to express and complete itself in the Logos as the light and communicable moment in divine life. Only then can the antinomy of dark and light be perfectly balanced in mutual completion by the Spirit within the Trinity as the precondition and possibility of their synthesis in created life. This perfectly balanced conception of divinity leads Tillich to reject the fourth and preceding moment in divine life. His theology and its attendant spirituality pay a steep price for this truncation. The absence of the preceding fourth makes it difficult for him fully to appreciate religious experience of the nothing divested of any need for its expression in form as do some eastern traditions as well as the very apophatic western traditions on which his theology is, to some large extent, dependent.

In the context of Tillich's efforts to delineate the God beyond the God of theism, his uneasiness with the formless strips him of a theological resource, which could identify a dimension of the divine beyond the Trinity free of the compulsion to form, both within and beyond its own life. No doubt, Tillich's trinitarian theology is a powerful and compelling construct. It is rooted in the unmediated human experience of trinitarian life. However, if divinity's preliminary moment, the abyss which craves form for its self-completion, would cede to a deeper abyss which does not, then the soul's experience of rest in this abyss would provide relief from trinitarian urgencies and a certain realized blessedness in the here and now. Such rest would go beyond Tillich's proffered fragmentary participation of human life in trinitarian life in time as contributing to the blessedness of the divine and human in eternity. The present momentary loss of distinction between human and divine in a preceding nothingness would thus provide the mystic with the deepest possible religious perspective and sensitivity in the reengagement with his or her religious and cultural environment consequent to identity with its source.

Tillich, Eckhart, Boehme and the Double Quaternity.

Tillich's trinitarian thought also impedes his fuller appropriation of Jacob Boehme's experience. Boehme was also to enjoy a moment of identity with what he calls the "One" or the ungrund beyond the living antinomy of the Trinity as its "...cause and ground...". But as he returned to the grossness of the world from that unity which precedes Trinity, Boehme carried with him the sense that the conflicting divine opposites had not been overcome eternally within the divine life, as Tillich would have it with his balanced Trinity. In particular the world of the Father as a dark chaotic and masculine power, the hell to which the fallen angels were confined, remained in residual conflict with the Logos, the power of warmth, light and communication. Human consciousness then becomes the only agent in the universe which can first perceive and then resolve in history the self-contradiction divinity could not resolve in eternity. The meaning of history and of human suffering within history then becomes a process of mutual redemption and growth of both the divine and the human through the resolution of divine conflict in human consciousness at the insistence of divinity itself. This cosmology would again imply that divinity created human consciousness out of the necessities of its own unconsciousness as the only agency through which its own opposites could attain a redemptive harmony. With Boehme the master experience of a divinity dependent on humanity for its own integration, which is at the same time humanity's, cannot be denied. God as creator has an immense stake in humanity.

While Tillich is heavily dependent on Boehme for aspects of his trinitarian theology, he was throughout his earlier theology opposed to all real change in divinity as a consequence of its relation to humanity. His rejection of all forms of process theology was based on his conviction that a fated or conditioned God is not God. Boehme's God is fated to achieve the resolution of its inner turmoil in the human and so depends on humanity's success in working the accord of the divine opposites in history, an accord that completes both history and divinity in one organic process. As a predecessor of Hegel, Boehme's was a radical form of process theology. To Tillich's credit, again in the final pages of his systematics, he introduces the idea of essentialization. In his understanding of essentialization Tillich finally concedes to process theology and to Jacob Boehme that divinity is dependent on the human for its eternal wealth and blessedness. What becomes essential in time adds to the being and substance of divine and human blessedness beyond time. Indeed, "It [essetnialization] is the content of divine blessedness." In the very end Tillich concedes that if divinity had nothing to gain in time the human enterprise would be "...a divine play of no essential concern for God." In terms of the quaternitarian paradigm, Tillich finally acknowledges that Boehme completes Eckhart by making human interiority the locale in which divinity finds completion achieved in time and preserved in eternity.

This substantial alteration of his preceding theology is but one that the senior Tillich took to offset the Christian provincialism that he came to recognize and counter in his prior theology. His masterstroke in his late reversals was his effective denial of the Christians' need to affirm a definitive realization of the kairos within history. This admission relativizes his Christology by making the Christ event a significant but not exhaustive or culminating realization of the essential in history. It also broadens the mandate of the Christian theologian to see in other religions and manifestations of the essential variations of what has occurred in one's own. If Tillich's thinking were to be continued in this liberalizing vein his appropriation of the quaternitarian thinking of Eckhart and Boehme would produce a vastly extended theology of the divine/human relation transcending the truncations of his trinitarian and logocentric thought. Such an extension rests on the myth of a double quaternity. Eckhart's furthest thrust into identity with the fourth in the God beyond the God of theism and Trinity would produce a compassion better enabling humanity to fulfill the role Boehme envisaged for it, namely, the fulfillment of itself and divinity through the resolution of divinity's eternal self-contradiction in human history. In short the double quaternity would relate a deeper ingression into the divine life to a more gracious ushering of divinity into historical incarnation in human consciousness universally. In a time when a fearful humanity now asks not how it will be saved through its religions but how it will be saved from them, such deepening and extending of the sense of the sacred would become a valued resource for a more graceful redemption of divinity in human history if it is to continue.

NOTES.

1. Nels S.F. Ferre, "Tillich and the Nature of Transcendence," Paul Tillich: Retrospect and Future (Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press, 1966), p. 11.
2. Carl E. Braaten, "Paul Tillich and the Classical Christian Tradition" in Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Christian Thought, ed. Carl E. Braaten (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. xxv.
3. Cf. John Dourley, Paul Tillich and Bonaventure: An Evaluation of Tillich's Claim to Stand in theAugustinian-Franciscan Tradition (Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1975).
4. Braaten, op. cit., p. xxi.
5. Ibid., p. xxix.
6. Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, ed. Carl E. Braaten (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 201-203.
7. Paulul Tillich, "A Dialogue Between Paul Tillich and Hisamatsu Shin'ichi", The Encounter of Religions and Quasi-Religions, ed. Terence Thomas (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), p. 77-170.
8. Cf. as typical, Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1951), p. 172, 174.
9. Ibid., p. 237, 245. Cf. also P. Tillich, The Courage To Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 185.
10. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I, op. cit., p. 174.
11. Ibid., p. 80.
12. Cf. as typical, Ibid., p. 208.
13. Paul Tillich, "Two Types of Philosophy of Religion", Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 22.
14. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963), p. 421.
15. Paul Tillich, Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Christian Thought, ed. Carl E. Braaten (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 74, 75, 95, 100.
16. Paul Tillich, "Interrogation of Paul Tillich", Philosophical Interrogations, ed. Sidney and Beatrice Rome (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), p. 397.
17. Paul Tillich, Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Christian Thought, op. cit., p. 94.
18. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I, op. cit. p. 172.
19. Ibid., p. 127.
20. Meister Eckhart, sermon, Qui audit me on Ecclesiastes, 24-30, cited by Andrew Weeks, German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), p. 86.
21. Paul Tillich, "Christian and non-Christian Revelation", The Encounter of Religions and Quasi-Religions, op. cit. p. 64. Cf. also on universal revelation as the possibility of all revelation, P. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume
22. I, op. cit., p. 139.
23. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I, op. cit. p. 140.
24. Paul Tillich, "Christian and non-Christian Revelation", The Encounter of Religions and Quasi-Religions, op. cit., p. 69-70.
25. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III , op. cit., p. 245.
26. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I, op. cit., p. 134, 136.
27. Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be, op. cit., p. 187, 188, 189, 190.
28. Ibid., p. 182.
29. Ibid., p. 182-183.
30. Ibid., p. 177.
31. Ibid., p. 173, 177-178.
32. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I, op. cit., p. 227.
33. Ibid., p. 178.
34. Meister Eckhart, Sermon LVI, "The Emanation and Return", Meister Eckhart, ed. Franz Pfeiffer (1857), trans. C. de B. Evans (London: John M. Watkins, 1947), p. 142, 143.
35. Cf. Bernard McGinn, "Theological Summary", Meister Eckhart, eds. and trans., Edmund College and Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 31, and section D, p. 39-45. The locations in Eckhart are his
36. commentaries on John and Exodus.
37. Bernard McGinn, "Theological Summary", op. cit., p. 39. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume II (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957), p. 39-44.
38. Meister Eckhart, Sermon LXXXVII, "The Poor in Spirit", Meister Eckhart, op. cit., p. 221.
39. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume II , op. cit., p. 44.
40. On this point cf. Bernard McGinn, "Theological Summary", op. cit., p. 35, 36.
41. Meister Eckhart, Sermon LXXXVII, "The Poor in Spirit", Meister Eckhart, op. cit., p. 219, 221.
42. Meister Eckhart, Sermon 21, Eckhart, the Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist, 1986), p. 281.
43. Bernard McGinn (1998). The Flowering of Mysticism, Vol. III, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1998), p. 216-218.
44. Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart (New York: Crossroad, 2001), p. 47, 148, 178;
45. Don Cupitt, Mysticism After Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), Chp 8, Meltdown, p. 106-122.
46. Bernard McGinn, "Theological Summary", op. cit., 54, 55; John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), p. 128-132; Reiner Schurmann, Meister Eckhart;
47. Mystic and Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 74.
48. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I, op. cit., p. 250.
49. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963), p. 292-293.
50. Ibid., p. 294.
51. Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, op. cit., p. 201-203.
52. Ibid., p. 203.
53. Paul Tillich, "Two Types of Philosophy of Religion", Theology of Culture, op. cit., p. 27.
54. Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, op. cit. p. 203.
55. Ibid.
56. Paul Tillich, "A Dialogue Between Paul Tillich and Hisamatsu Shin'ichi", op. cit., p. 77-170.
57. Ibid., p. 78-81.
58. Ibid., p. 78.
59. Ibid., p. 80, 81.
60. Ibid., p. 83.
61. This is the point in his sermon, "The poor in spirit", fn. 36.
62. Paul Tillich, "A Dialogue Between Paul Tillich and Hisamatsu Shin'ichi", op. cit., p. 88.
63. Ibid., p. 89.
64. Ibid., p. 86, 87.
65. Ibid., p. 88.
66. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol, I, op. cit., p. 239.Ibid., p. 251.
67. Cf. J. Dourley, "Jacob Boehme and Paul Tillich on Trinity and God", ReligiousStudies, vol. 31, no. 4, December 1995. Paul 429-445.
68. Jacob Boehme, The Forty Questions of the Soul and the Clavis, trans. John Sparrow (London: John M. Watkins, 1911), sec. 18. Paul 2.
69. Ibid., p. v.
70. Ibid., sec. 196. Paul 47, 48; Six Theosophic Points, trans. J. R. Earle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), secs. 11-14. Paul 25-26;
71. The Three Principles of the Divine Essence (Chicago: Yogi Publication Society, 1909), secs. 68-71. Paul 49-50.
72. Jacob Boehme, The Forty Questions of the Soul and the Clavis, op. cit., secs. 197-206. Paul 48-49.
73. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I, op. cit., p. 247, 248.
74. Cf. Hegel's critical appreciation of Boehme, G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Lectures of 1825-1826, vol. III, Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. and ed. Robert F. Brown (Berkeley: University of
75. California Press, 1990), p. 117-131.
76. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III, op., cit., p. 421, 422.
77. Ibid., p. 422.
78. Ibid.
79. Paul Tillich, "The Significance of the History of Religions for the Systematic Theologian", The Future of Religions, ed. Jerald C. Brauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1996), p. 81