Authenticity: An Excerpt from Rollo May's Book On Tillich

While making a half-hearted attempt to get of more things from my garage this weekend I was sifting through books to discard (donate to library) when I noticed a page in Rollo May's Paulus that I had tabbed. Paulus is May's portrait of twentieth century existential theologian Paul Tillich. (You can read my review of Tillich's autobiographical On The Boundary here. )What follows is an excerpt from a chapter titled Paulus' Personal Presence.

Paulus believed that every encounter with a new person is anxiety-creating. Anxiety is present in every authentic encounter, to is, one in which people let themselves genuinely meet. This anxiety is the dread of freedom; in Kierkegaard's words, it is the "dizziness of freedom." You don't know what is ahead or what demands the encounter may make upon you, or the possibilities in this new relationship. You know you must risk something in order to go through with it, but you don't know how much. Also the pleasures, delights and joys it can give are still unknown. The meeting my jar you off your present course. It may bring a new expansion in your life or it may push you toward curtailment and psychological slavery.

The following page he continues...

The instinctive reaction is to protect oneself until the coast is clear, to hide one's own originality, one's impulses and native responses. The mechanics for doing this lie in the standards of courtesy, good manners, and so on, under whose aegis we conceal our authentic selves. But we do it at a price of falsifying ourselves. No matter how "necessary" such protection is, or the fact that no one could survive without such social forms, it is still very important that this protecting of oneself be done consciously. I you repress and do not know you are repressing, there is a danger of suffocation, a stultifying of the self. The problem of honesty in personality relationships is difficult indeed.

The operative word here is authentic. In the first paragraph he speaks of authentic encounters with others. In the second he speaks of our authentic selves, as opposed to false impressions and insincere self-projections.

We've become accustomed to politicians being "crafted" to fit an image that will sell, as if he or she were a brand. This political gamesmanship has become nauseating for many voters because in an era such as our we crave authenticity. It is because of these absurd election games that someone like Jesse Ventura got elected as governor, simply because he came across as real.

Rollo May is not talking about elections and news spin here, though. He is addressing our day-to-day encounters and how we carry our selves. Paul Tillich, he says, was strong enough to not conceal his weakness. According to May's account he didn't need to put on armor when he went about his business. He remained vulnerable, and sensitive. He accepted the risk of being hurt, or fulfilled.

Authenticity is about more than just being real. It means being credible and true. But the dictum "To thine own self be true" assumes you know who you are. You can't be true to yourself until you first know who you are, though. Simba in The Lion King forgot who he was and nearly missed his calling lost as he was in the land of Hakuna Matata.

What's your calling? Do you have ambitions that you conceal for fear of being ridiculed? Are you stuck in a place that doesn't feel like you? Where do you really want to go? What do you really want to be? Are you tired of the games?

O.K. that's enough. Time to get dressed and get to work. 

On The Boundary

It's interesting how much of life is lived in the colliding spaces between polarities. For example, part of us feels a need to connect with others and another part requires solitude. We like being busy, but we also enjoy when we can just lay back and rest.

Theologian Paul Tillich's autobiography On The Boundary is essentially a collection of the various tensions in his life. He explains his life by means of the boundaries where these polarities collide. Chapter one is titled Between Two Temperaments. And although he makes a point of not ascribing too much of who we are to our parents, there is no denying the influence of parental and ancestral traits.

Between City and Country is a second chapter. I know in myself the attraction of rural, open spaces. I also know the attraction of cultural experiences that exist where people live in more congested spaces. Tillich lived in the country from age four to fourteen. But having lived in the city for a portion of his life he could not embrace the "romantic rejection of technical civilization" and learned the importance of the city "for the critical side of intellectual and artistic life." Through the city he learned first hand about the social and political movements that are concentrated in cities.

Another chapter is titled Between Reality and Imagination. "Imagination manifests itself, among other ways, in a delight in play," Tillich writes, soon citing Nietzsche (who preferred play to a spirit of gravity), Kierkegaard''s "aesthetic sphere" and the manner in which imagination wove itself into mythology. "Art is the highest form of play and the genuinely creative realm of the imagination."

Between Theory and Practice is the following chapter. Tillich was attracted to the theoretical life, but the practical issues served to unhinge any effort to live totally in the confines of the ivory tower. "We were thus inevitably faced with problems of practical politics which often conflicted with theoretical positions," he wrote.

Between Heteronomy and Autonomy deals with the struggle to find oneself in a culture where you are supposed to fit in and be like everyone else. "The age-old experience of mankind, that new knowledge can be won only by breaking a taboo and that all autonomous thinking is accompanied by a consciousness of guilt, is a fundamental experience of my life," he wrote. And a little later he states, "Freedom that has been fought for and for which no sacrifices have been made is easily cast aside."

Other chapters include:

Between Theology and Philosophy

Between Church and Society

Between Religion and Culture

Between Lutheranism and Socialism

Between Idealism and Marxism

Between Native and Alien Land

Retrospect: Boundary and Limitation

In this last chapter Tillich offers his summing up: "This is the dialectic of existence; each of life's possibilities drives of its own accord to a boundary and beyond the boundary where it meets that which limits it. The man who stands on many boundaries experiences the unrest, insecurity, and inner limitation of existence in many forms."

Food for thought... Where are your boundaries? What are the polarities that define your life?

Between This and That

“The boundary is the best place for acquiring knowledge.” ~ Paul Tillich

Life has many challenges. Transitions are always fraught with challenge, for example. Whether from adolescence to adulthood, employment to retirement, or geographic relocation, every transition stirs up things within us that can cause emotional upheavals.

There are many other kinds of challenges, of course. The struggle against temptation (a word one hardly seldom hears in a post-Christian culture) is ever with us, simply because we live in a broken world and none of us is exempt from its influence.

There are also matters that do not pertain to ethics per se. Year in and year out complications beset us as we strive to understand who we are and how we fit together with others who are often so different from us. In many respects we even get caught in the middle between polarities that divide our own selves. If it is a challenge knowing ourselves, no wonder we occasionally scratch our heads when we try to read others, and are in turn misread.

Theologian Paul Tillich’s book On the Boundary is an autobiographical exploration of the polarities that were at war within himself. In his attempt to understand his life he discovered that there were many parts of himself that were at odds with other parts of himself. One chapter describes the tension that he experienced between the temperaments of his two ancestral heritages. Each of his parents came from different kinds of backgrounds. As a result one part of himself tended toward the melancholy, contemplation and consciousness of personal duty. His counter-temperament tended toward a zest for life that was at odds with that other part of himself which sought composure and harmony.

Another chapter addressed his struggle between city and country. City life has a different character than rural. He found a part of himself in each, but occasionally they were at odds with each other.

Social classes also present issues. The family of humankind flows through all walks of life, from doctors to beggars to everything in between. Often we find tensions created by these differing backgrounds and experiences. Tillich experienced this within himself, but churches and communities can likewise experience it.

Another area of conflict is the tension between idealism and realism. It is good when young people are idealistic. Such idealism makes us discontent with the status quo and can motivate us to try to change the world, to make it a better place, to bring it into conformity with higher values. Idealism empowers us to take action. But realism does not mean we have abandon ideals. As we get older we see that there are more variables than we initially recognized, and perhaps that the world's brokenness is more serious than we could initially comprehend. Yes, it is possible to overcome, but are we willing to pay the price to get there? It might be a higher price than we originally expected and, perhaps flippantly, paid lip service to.

In another chapter Tillich wrestles with autonomy and conformity to an imposed dogmatism. It is very difficult to think for ourselves. It takes courage to question what we have been told we should believe and to discover for ourselves the truth through honest inquiry. For many, who grew up being “told” what to believe, it is almost feels like sin to question, to break free from the safety of acquiescence. Once free from imposed systems of belief, such persons react strongly against being corralled.

My mother used to always say, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” Truth emerges from within and cannot be imposed from without.

From my earliest days I have always pictured God like an enormous chandelier of cut jewels. God, who is light, is in the middle of the chandelier, but we do not see Him because He is “immortal, invisible… in light inaccessible from our eyes,” to quote the hymn writer. What people see are the jewels and diadems, each of us different, and in different locations on the chandelier. We each reflect God in a different way, yet contribute to the whole in a unique and beautiful way. What we forget is that those jewels began as rough stones that needed chiseling and polishing. They did not “just happen.”

Paul Tillich affirms that the places where he has grown most are in those places where he experienced conflict and upheaval, often within himself. This is the chiseling that turns us into diamonds. Our suffering is not in vain.

It's normal to try to avoid conflict. It feels dangerous, but is often essential to growth. As the psalmist once wrote, “weeping may last for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”