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Summer after summer it was the same. As soon as the tall Herr Professor arrived at the Baltic seaside for his vacation, he began to pace the beach methodically, studying the terrain. Then, in coveralls, armed with an enormous shovel, he started to dig. Hour after hour, day after day, he labored, heaping up the sand in a big, flat-topped pyramid some twelve feet square, the sides banked at just the right angle to avoid cave-ins, the corners smoothed to knife-edge symmetry, a system of ditches carefully plotted to drain off the ground water, a ramp from the beach to his plateau of sand. When the pyramid was about seven feet high it was finished, and the sweating professor toted to the top one of the hooded wicker chairs that are popular on European beaches. There on his sand castle he would sit overlooking it all—the scampering children, the courting couples, the endless rhythm of the waves and tides, the ultimate horizon.
Professor Paul Tillich came to the U.S. in 1933 and gave up building sand castles. But he has succeeded in erecting a towering structure of thought from which he currently commands the littoral of theology. The concepts which are his raw material may be as hard to grasp and hold as a handful of dry sand, but the edifice he has built with them is densely packed and neatly shaped against the erosion of intellectual wind and wave.
Though Harvard's University Professor* Paul Tillich is a rarefied philosopher and theologian, speaking and writing in a language he had to learn at the age of 47, in a country noted for its impatience with theology, he has come to be regarded by the U.S. as its foremost Protestant thinker. And though his working vocabulary is viscous with such terms as ontology, theonomy, numenous and the Gestalt of Grace, he is now devoting most of his time to teaching any Harvard or Radcliffe undergraduate who signs up for his highly popular courses.
"A Unified Meaning." Traditionally, the U.S. has imported new theological thought from Europe. Tillich's thought is now moving the other way. His books are rapidly being translated into German (he is too busy to do the job himself) as well as French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. Fellow theologians are increasingly coming to view his work as a monumental and unique effort to match the insights of Christianity with the predicament of modern man.
Last month Paul Tillich, 72, received a special kind of present—a book entitled Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Paul Tillich (Harper; $7.50), whose 25 contributors include such groundbreakers as Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, Philosopher Karl Jaspers. Theologians Karl Earth, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, Reinhold Niebuhr. Even Roman Catholic theologians are recognizing Tillich as the most challenging Protestant mind of his time. "The sustained brilliance of Tillich is amazing," writes U.S. Theologian Gustave Weigel, a Jesuit, "and his incredibly wide knowledge matches his brilliance. Any witness of the Protestant reality looks for someone to give a unified meaning to the whole thing. I believe that I have found that man [in] Professor Paul Tillich."