Putting Into Words The Life Of A Man Of Thought

This book delivers on its implied promise, setting forth a straightforward and factually accurate account of the life of the renowned thinker it features. Though its sea of data maintains its calm surface throughout, devoid of any stormy scenes, psychologically delineated islands and inlets, and even outright sensationalistic tidal influxes -- as found in Rollo May's affectionate portrait Paulus, or in Hannah Tillich's From Time To Time (often as and sometimes even more revealing of her life than that of her famous husband's) -- the record it leaves us with is remarkable and well worth having. It turns into a handbook of sorts on how the increasingly rare life of a philosopher, which seems an endangered if not vanishing species, can actually be lived in modern times in the world as we know it today. For Tillich's whole being, after all, was that of a man totally given from his youth on to ideas and matters of thought. This never wavered or changed once throughout his entire life.

Though Paul Tillich personally lived through the cataclysmic events and earth-shaking cultural upheaval of fin de siècle Europe, as the 19th Century ended and the 20th Century muscled its way mightily, and not at all gradually, into human history -- with his serving as a young chaplain in the German army's trenches during World War I, while engaged in his own fledgling studies and emerging professorial career in the full turbulence and tumult of the 1920s, with the ensuing collapse of the Weimar Republic and Hitler's ominous rise to power -- and the staggering intellectual foment in all of the arts, sciences, literature, and socio-political revolutions of the time -- which Tillich experienced first, last, and always, for the most part, as real events in the arena of ideas. Who else but a person such as this would choose to characterize the front-line horrors of war that he experienced first hand and face-to-face by saying, "Overnight I became an Existentialist."?

What might be called the "novelistic dimension" of Tillich's rich and eventful existence is by no means missing from either Tillich's life or Pauck's treatment of it. It's just that it isn't told straight out, nor could it ever be, in the way a writer would lay it out in a novel. Pauck, a died-in-the-wool intellectual of this kind himself, who also lived by ideas and took great pains to describe them as the full-fledged creatures they are, showed Tillich's life as an unfolding of those ideas and key notions that made it up. The building blocks, discoveries, abrupt cave-ins, breakthroughs, reversals, sudden vivid illuminations and so on, are all in there still, but dressed up now in the finery of thoughts instead of presented as actions and feelings of characters shown as a passing parade of scenes and situations. Pauk knew Tillich long enough and in the very way required to do this fully as well as accurately, from the beginning of Tillich's life clear up to its end. Would anyone else have been able to do this? I, for one at least, honestly do not see how.

People no longer live this way today -- not within the particular belief-systems and academically seasoned theological and philosophical traditions Tillich and Pauck once did, nor do people any longer inhabit the institutionally religious organizations and occupations of the kind Tillich and Pauck both lived and worked in. Even the discourse they were so accustomed to is by now all but impossible to reconstruct. This is why what the Pauck's have given us counts for so much. Though neither an "entertaining" nor ever an "engrossing" book, it assuredly takes its place as an important one, and also one as rare as it is eminently worth reading.

Those who do that, and who keep on with it to the end, will be rewarded by picking up on those difficult-to-discern strands which, when woven all together, make up the very kind of life Paul Tillich lived. ( )