Paul Tillich Quotes on Politics
Paul Tillich's political reflections, gathered here, grow out of his theology of culture and his analysis of courage. Tillich held that religion and culture are inseparable, that religion is the substance of culture and culture the form of religion, so that political life always carries an implicit ultimate concern. Writing as an exile from Nazi Germany who had seen collectivism at first hand, he warned that even a free society could drift toward a conformism that approximates collectivism, not in its economy or constitution but in the pattern of daily life and thought. Against this he set what he called the courage to be as oneself, the resistance of the individual person to absorption by the mass. Drawn from The Courage to Be and his writings on culture, these passages present politics as a field in which ultimate concerns and the courage of the person are at stake.
Quotes
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Attributed to Paul Tillich:
“Religion is the substance of culture; culture is the form of religion.”
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“[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.”
p. 112 -
“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.”
p. 116 -
“Philosophy asks the question of reality as a whole; it asks the question of the structure of being. And it answers in terms of categories, structural laws , and universal concepts.”
Systematic Theology(1951–63) -
“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.”
The Courage to Be(1952) | p. 177 -
“Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith. And this is the first step we have to make in order to understand the dynamics of faith.”
Dynamics of Faith(1957)