When I started this book, I had not expected Tillich to prove in any way central to the argument. I had not read him for years. Then by chance I read Mel Thompson’s Through Mud and Barbed Wire which explores Tillich’s wartime experience in the charnel house of Verdun. The image of Tillich losing his conventional faith in the trenches, wrestling with Nietzsche’s vision of nihilism, and then through art and poetry finding a belief in a God above God, is one which has stayed with me. Reexamining them I have been realized how often his themes mirror my own personal and pastoral experience. To my own surprise I now think that, for all his faults, Tillich is an indispensable theologian for our time.
Paul Tillich was born in Germany in 1886, ordained a minister of the Lutheran Church in 1912, and served as a chaplain during the First World War. It was the war that shattered him and made him. In October 1915 he experienced heavy gunfire for the first time at the battle of Tahure as the Germans suffered heavy losses. Then the same year at the battle of Champagne his initial traditional religious faith collapsed in the face of carnage. Tillich spent the night with the wounded and the dying, “many of them my close friends. All that horrible long night I walked along the rows of dying men, and much of my German classical philosophy broke down that night.” Reflecting on the experience in 1955 he said of the soldiers, “Most of them shared the popular belief in a nice God who would make everything work out for the best. Actually, everything worked out for the worst.”79 Instead there were young soldiers who if they did not take part in suicidal attacks would be shot by their own commanders. Tillich had a brigadier who was a dogmatic conservative Christian and believed that prayer could protect a soldier from enemy fire. Tillich challenged him to open his eyes.
Mel Thompson compares the experiences of Tillich in the trenches with those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest who served as a stretcher bearer with French North African troops. Teilhard never felt the darkness of war in the way Tillich did. In a letter dated 13th November 1916, at a time when the battle of the Somme was being fought, he wrote, “Death surrenders us totally to God; it makes us enter into him; we must in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandon.”80 Words which seem difficult to correlate with the reality of bayonet charges, decapitated bodies, and maimed lives. And Teilhard could not face the honest truth that faith gives no exemption from the realities of life and death. Teilhard describes a situation in which a shell goes off near a shelter where he had just said mass with five men. All of them escaped unhurt. Teilhard said, “It was the will of Christ who is among us that none of us should be touched.”81 In other words God bent the trajectory of the shell so that it missed them and hit some other poor person. The idea is obscene, though not to the degree of the army chaplain in the Vietnam war quoted by Max Hastings who sought to show his brotherhood with the soldiers by delivering imprecations such as, “Please, God, let the bombs fall straight on the little yellow motherfuckers.”82 Tillich rejects totally any such view. The idea that in war God directly chooses one to live and another to die is morally and intellectually impossible. As Thompson says, “Tillich could not pretend to go along with conventional supernaturalism, not interpret every act of incoming shell as somehow directed by God. His integrity would not allow it.”
In 1916 Tillich was at the battle of Verdun, one of the most terrible places in human history, with the fourth artillery regiment. Ironically Teilhard was a stretcher bearer on the other side of the trenches. The battle lasted ten months and saw something like 700,000 dead. There are still 138,000 unidentified bodies. I am reminded of Wilfred Owen:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle.83
Tillich was involved both in comforting the dying and acting as a gravedigger. Writing to his father he said, “Hell rages among us. It’s unimaginable.”84 A friend sent him a picture of herself in a white dress sitting on a lawn. To him it seemed inconceivable that that such a world still existed.85 Instead in his free moments in the French forest he reads Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The death of God, moral relativism, no good or evil but deeds of massive and terrible violence, all seemed too real. Nietzsche seemed prophetic: “When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”86 Unsurprisingly Tillich suffered a nervous breakdown. Returning to the front lines he broke down a second time and was admitted to hospital before finally being sent back to Germany.
The experience almost broke him. As Gary Dorrien eloquently puts it, “The war burned a hole in Tillich’s psyche that showed for the rest of his life.”87 He later said he went in the forest a dreaming innocent and went out a wild man. It was at this point that the pattern of casual sex began. For the rest of his life there was a chaos of despair always threatening him, he was walking on the edge of the abyss. He reports of that time that he had “seen too much of ugliness and horror . . . ever to be the same again.” For Tillich the God who is all-knowing and all-powerful and ordains who the shell is going to hit would be a monster, an egomaniac. For him, God had died. “This is the God Nietzsche said had to die because nobody can tolerate being turned into a mere object of absolute knowledge and control.”88 But he found a lifeline. On furlough in 1918 he went to the Kaiser Frederick Museum in Berlin and saw Botticelli’s painting Madonna and Child with Singing Angels.
Gazing at it, I felt a state approaching ecstasy. In the beauty of the painting there was Beauty itself. It shone though the colors of the paint as the light of day shines through the stained-glass windows of a medieval church. As I stood there, bathed in the beauty . . . Something of the divine source of all things came through to me. I turned away shaken. That moment has affected my whole life, given me the key for interpretation of human existence, brought vital joy and spiritual truth.89
It was a transcendent moment. There was still a depth and a wonder to life. He talked about it in a variety of ways. “Spiritual presence” is one of the most helpful to me. Tillich found, as he kept looking at the paintings, that he was doing theology; he saw that in the dimension of their greatest depth all art and, in fact all life, evokes a religious response.
Back in the trenches he read poetry, particularly Rilke, who suggests that the moment when God is dying may be the moment when God is being born. He found himself, he said, with a choice. Either to say “no” to life, and collapse into cynicism, or to say “yes” to what is experienced as good and positive. I chose, he says, the courage to be, to believe in love in the face of hatred, life in the face of death. Day in the dark of night, good in the face of evil. Despite everything it was a yes to life.
Where does this leave God? The God who is like a superior version of us, only all-powerful and all-knowing, is dead. That kind of God, the all-powerful male figure who comes down demanding our worship is inherently authoritarian and in practice reinforces elitist and patriarchal power. Such a God is both unbelievable and morally unacceptable. The God who is brought in as a stopgap to explain phenomena for which science has yet to give a satisfactory account is intellectually vacuous. As Nietzsche says, “into every gap they put their delusion, their stopgap, which they called God.”90 But out of the abyss might there not come a new picture of God? “The courage to be,” Tillich later wrote, “is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety and doubt.”91 So comes the idea of the God above God.
If the word “God” has any meaning, argued Tillich, it does not refer to an object or a being in time or space. It is therefore