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PARTISAN REVIEW
PAUL TILLICH
The questions formulated by the PARTISAN REVIEW are
altogether pertinent to the problem under discussion. One
is
tempted
to answer them point by point. But it seems more fruitful to give
an independent statement which tries to answer the questions
im–
plicitly.
The fact that there is a tum toward religion among intellectuals
cannot be questioned. The literature of the last decades is a con–
tinuous witness to the fact. It is difficult to find in the outstanding
recent philosophers, novelists, poets, playwrights, educators, psycho–
logists, physicists, anybody who would stand for the shallow atheism
or optimistic secularism of two or three generations ago. Some reasons
for this situation are obvious: Reality has changed and the inter–
pretation of reality has changed with it. History has become the
scene of a continuous chain of catastrophes, and thought has become
an interpretation of the human predicament as manifest in these
catastrophes, partly before they actually happened. In the beginning
of the twentieth century the European intelligentsia included a van–
guard of prophetic minds, in art as well as in philosophy, who antici–
pated what was to come. And when
it
came and their visions were
confirmed by revolutions and reactions they became the leaders of
the new generation, first in Europe and since the great crisis also in
America. This development is not a "failure of nerve" but it is
the courage to see what a favorable historical constellation had cov–
ered for almost a century what could not be hidden any longer,
the dark underground of the personal and social life. The picture
of man as the master not only of nature but also of his personality
and his society and therefore of his individual and historical destiny,
this shining picture took on darker and darker colors. Destiny proved
to be the master of man, not as a strange power but as power in the
depth of man himself. The view was in no way influenced by theo–
logical pessimism. People like Nietzsche and Freud, Van Gogh
and Strindberg, Heidegger and Unamuno, Sartre and O'Neill have
no direct contact with the doctrine of man in classical theology.
Nevertheless they all helped preparing the tum toward religion in
large groups of the Western intelligentsia.
If
the human predicament
is as they have seen it, only two honest ways are open, the way of ac-
