Paul Tillich and St Thomas

The theological writings of Professor Tillich deserve the attention of students of St Thomas, both for their positivecontent, which is of the highest interest, and because on fundamental matters they explicitly and sharply join issue with Thomism. They invite the presumption of a certain common ground, certain affinities, and at the same time throw out a challenge which we cannot ignore.To read these works, especially the great Systematic Theology (1951), is to encounter a powerful and original personality, a mind organized to an uncommon degree around a single centre. Tillich’s peculiar gift is for synthesis; a constructive thinker with a very wide range of interests, he is always striving to correlate and organize these on the basis of a singularly vivid intuition of being in general, the primary datum of the mind, which for him—as for St Thomas—represents the mind’s first opening onto reality as a whole, as both containing and transcending human nature. It is this consciously ontological character of Tillich’s thinking that seems to distinguish him among contemporary Protestant theologians; as J. H. Randall observes, he ‘stands in the classic tradition of Western philosophy’, in the tradition, derived from the Greeks, of speculative concern with being itself and wisdom. Let us stress this ‘concern’. ‘Ultimate concern’ is Tillich’s definition of religion, and by ‘ultimate’ he means ‘that which determines our being or non- being’. Man for him is the being who ‘asks the question of being’, and since God is ‘the answer implied in the question of being’, theology is essentially a searching into the same question.