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Tillich's Tergiversations Toward the Power of Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Lewis S. Ford
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Extract

In a well-known essay on ‘The Two Types of the Philosophy of Religion’, Paul Tillich distinguishes between the ontological and the cosmological approaches in our philosophical understanding of God, and aligns himself with the former. The ontological approach may be historically associated with Augustine and Anselm's ontological argument, as contrasted with Thomas Aquinas and the cosmological argument, but the decisive difference from Tillich's perspective is whether God is treated as a being, an instance of being exemplifying the fundamental metaphysical categories, or beyond being, a radical and necessary exception to these principles. Championing the ontological approach, Tillich declares: ‘The being of God cannot be understood as the existence of a being alongside others or above others. If God is a being, he is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to space and substance. Even if he is called the “highest being” in the sense of the “most perfect” and the “most powerful” being, this situation is not changed. When applied to God, superlatives become diminutives’ (ST I, 235). In response, proponents of the cosmological approach may agree with Alfred North Whitehead: ‘God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , August 1975 , pp. 323 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1975

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References

page 323 note 1 Theology of Culture: Essays by Paul Tillich, Ed. Kimball, Robert C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 10–29.Google Scholar

page 323 note 2 ST, I, II, and III refer to the three volumes of Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957, 1963).Google Scholar

page 323 note 3 Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 521.Google Scholar

page 324 note 1 ST, I, 230: ‘For the philosophical approach this ultimate is being-itself, esseipsum, that beyond which thought cannot go, the power of being in which everything participates.’

page 324 note 2 ST, II, 10: ‘in the doctrine of God, where God is called being as being or the ground and the power of being.’ Cf. ST, II, II.

page 325 note 1 ST, I, 231: ‘The power of being must transcend every being that participates in it.’

page 325 note 2 ST, I, 180: ‘As the power of being, being-itself cannot have a beginning and an end.’

page 325 note 3 ST, I, 235: ‘Whenever infinite or unconditional power and meaning are attributed to the highest being, it has ceased to be a being and has become beingitself.’

page 326 note 1 Love, Power, and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 39.Google Scholar

page 326 note 2 ST, II, 20: ‘As potential being, it is in the state of relative non-being it is notyet-being. But it is not nothing.… Potentiality is the power of being, which metaphorically speaking, has not yet realized its power.’

page 326 note 3 ST, II, 21: ‘An actual thing stands out of mere potentiality; but it also remains in it. It never pours its power of being completely into its state of existence. It never fully exhausts its potentialities.’

page 326 note 4 Tillich wisely avoids the traditional term ‘Person’, so widely misunderstood with respect to the Trinity.

page 327 note 1 ST, 110 (AI), 250f (CI), 272 (AI).

page 327 note 2 ST, 195f(B2).

page 327 note 3 (a) ST, I, 236: ‘the concept of being as being, or being-itself, points to the power inherent in everything, the power of resisting nonbeing.’ (b) ST, I, 163f. Ontology is able to ‘describe the nature and structure of being which gives everything that is the power of resisting nonbeing’. (c) ST, I, 261: ‘only in the power of being-itself is the creature able to resist nonbeing.’

page 328 note 1 ST, I, 189 (A2n4), 236 (A3), 250f (GI). Love, Power, and Justice, p. 110: ‘the power of God.… is the infinite resistance against non-being and the eternal victory over it.’ Also ST, I, 64: ‘If the notion of God appears in systematic theology in correlation with the threat of nonbeing which is implied in existence, God must be called the infinite power of being which resists the threat of nonbeing.’

page 328 note 2 This interpretation takes ‘infinite’ (in the passages cited in note I) to be a purely descriptive adjective, indicating that the power of being which being-itself has is infinite and inexhaustible. But it may also be understood in a restrictive sense, specifying that being-itself has a different kind of ‘power of being’ than finite beings have.

page 328 note 3 Tillich evidently intends to identify ‘pure’ being with being-itself, but we would question whether there is more than just a similarity. Both are similar in that they (a) are infinite, and (b) exclude nonbeing. But being-itself has these properties because it is the inexhaustible source of being, not because of its ‘pure’ being. There could be a being which was everlasting, without beginning or end (e.g. the world). Such a being would possess ‘pure’ being without necessarily possessing the sustaining power provided by the source of being, which could still remain extrinsic to the world. ‘Pure being’ need not be being-itself.

page 329 note 1 Love, Power, and Justice, p. 110.

page 329 note 2 Process and Reality, pp. 10f.

page 330 note 1 Cf. ST, I, 236 (quoted above A3), where the double prepositional phrase is used: ‘in everything and above everything’.

page 333 note 1 m‘Philosophy and Theology: The Argument over Personality’ in the Review of Religion, vol. 34 (1954), 201–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also his critique of Tillich, , ‘Ontological Possibility and the Nature of God: A Reply to Tillich’, also in the Review of Religion, vol. 36 (1956), 234–240.Google Scholar

page 334 note 1 See my essay, ‘Tillich and Thomas: The Analogy of Being’, Journal of Religion, 46, 2 (April 1966), 229–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 335 note 1 Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II, chapter 15, no. 5. In the translation by Anderson, James F., On the Truth of the Catholic Faith, Book Two: Creation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1956), p. 48.Google Scholar

page 337 note 1 ‘The Three Strands of Tillich's Theory of Religious Symbols’, Journal of Religion, 46, no. 1, part 2 (January 1966), 121–124.Google Scholar

page 337 note 2 Thus man ‘participates’ in the subhuman realm, because the physical, chemical, biological, and psychological levels are found within him (ST, I, 260f). See also ST, I, 176: ‘Man participates in all levels of life, but he participates fully only in that level of life which he is himself—he has communion only with persons. Communion is participation in another completely centered and completely individual self.’

page 338 note 1 This meaning of participation, while common in other thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, is not very explicit in Tillich, though implicit in his statements that ‘an individual leaf participates in the natural structures and forces which act upon it’ (ST, I, 176) and that a man participates in his own destiny since his actions will tend to affect him later on.