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he criticizes. I know that behind these concepts lies a great amount of consideration and
decision with respect to the whole history of philosophy and the present situation in theology
and religion.
Now let me offer for this love-and-reunion idea a thesis I have developed not in
theological but in philosophic thought. I used as examples, I believe, Hegel and William
James and Nietzsche. The concepts from which this idea of love finally grew in my mind are
fragmentary in Hegel s early writings. His fragment on love is one of the greatest
contributions to the philosophy of love, although he wrote it long before his Phenomenology
of the Mind. But this fragment is, so to speak, the blood that courses through his whole
system, his "estrangement and reconciliation," or the more formalized "antithesis and
synthesis." Hegel was a philosopher of love before he put into logical terms the movement of
love, the going out and returning. Now we must not speak of "strangers," namely, God and
man as strangers, or man and man as strangers, but rather of estrangement. Estrangement
always implies a fundamental belongingness, and therefore an inner drive toward reunion.
The stranger, on the other hand, is only accidentally related to me, and he might or might not
become my friend or enemy. In any case, this difference between stranger and estrangement is
a very fundamental idea.
Now, I define the concept of love as the urge to reunite the separated. And there are at least
four different qualities of love which must be clearly distinguished, but all of them share in
common a desire to be united with something that is not strange but separated. Thus, you see,
separation implies belonging. If this concept is applied to God, we can understand the
fundamental distinction between two theologies the theology of the stranger, which makes
God an individual somewhere in the air, or beyond the air, who might or might not be related
to us; and the theology of estrangement, which insists that "from him and through him, and to
him are all things," to use the Paulinian phrase. This means we are related to him, and are
determined to return to him because we come from him. The stranger, on the other hand, may
be a tyrant who can force us to do something.
The whole ethical problem is immediately implied by this distinction. For me, as I explained,
the true ethical principle is the reconciliation with one s own being. It is not the acceptance of
a strange command from outside, whether conventional or human or divine, but the command
of our true being, from which we are estranged and in this sense separated. And in every
morally positive act there is a reunion. Therefore, I agree with what was said by Erich Fromm,
with whom I often disagree, in a small article he wrote twenty or thirty years ago about "self-
love," that self-love is clearly necessary. And if this self-love does not exist, we become
"selfish," because selfishness and disgust toward oneself are one and the same thing. But the
right self-love is self-affirmation, in the sense in which God sees us, or the sense in which we
are essentially created. And this leads us back to the initial ideas of estrangement and
reconciliation. This is my answer to the third question.
Professor: God then is our true being?
Dr. Tillich: I would not formulate it like that, but of course our true being is rooted in the
divine ground. As classical theology expressed it, every universal essence and also the
essence of every individual human being is in the divine, or in theological language "in
the mind of God." Of course, "in the mind of God" means "in God," for God does not have a
special mind which is not he himself as a whole. In this sense I agree with you.
Finite and Infinite
Professor: That gives us one final question before we proceed to today s topic. It comes from
another student. "What is the basis for the assertion that one s ultimate concern and you
have defined faith as ultimate concern is toward something that is not finite? What is the
qualitative difference between finite and infinite subject matter in terms of experience? Why
must ultimate concern be concern with something that is not finite?"
Dr. Tillich: Yes, now, the question "Why must or should ultimate concern be related to
something ultimate and not finite?" is almost a tautology. And the experiential difference
between the finite and the infinite, or the conditional and the unconditional, leads us back to
the very first point of the experience of something infinite or unconditional to which we
belong. In the moment in which we experience the unconditional validity of the moral
imperative, whatever its content may be the moment in which we say, "We have to do this,
at whatever cost" we experience something unconditional.
Professor: In that sense, infinite, unconditional, and ultimate all mean the same?
Dr. Tillich: Yes, although they vary in their origin. For instance, I would speak of "infinite
passion" with Kierkegaard. Although I would not speak of "unconditional passion" or
"infinite interest," I certainly would speak of "unconditional imperative" in the Kantian sense
of the term. And I would say "ultimate concern" in order to compare it with the preliminary
concerns that ordinarily fill our life. These are nuances according to the context in which the
words are used.
Professor: And what you have been saying is that every one of us has a relation to God, in the
sense that sooner or later everyone must have a concern which is unconditional, or ultimate,
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