PAULUS: A Personal Portrait of Paul Tillich

by Rollo May ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 1973

It's too simple to say he was a model for me,"" psychoanalyst and one-time theology student May writes of his mentor and comrade Tillich, but the philosopher was a ""therapist for therapists,"" the ""teacher and friend who gave me more than all other teachers I ever had combined."" The two men met in 1934 in a lecture hall at Columbia's Union Theological Seminary (May was struck by Tillich's ""countenance,"" as were many other people); the relationship matured when Tillich supervised May's doctoral thesis on anxiety, a nine-year effort, and the philosopher remained one of May's spiritual sources -- the concept of the demonic as a constructive force in Love and Will is one such derivative -- for the rest of his life. Tillich's was an internally experienced weltanschauung which developed from his own psychological imperatives; the son of an authoritarian but blustering father, and a quietly dominating Victorian mother who died when he was seventeen, he ""lived perpetually on the tense and delicate borders of the world; on the frontiers of thought and experience,"" intellectually magnificent but emotionally a twelve year-old. His apparently legendary philandering was an endless search for his mother which could fall into the sadistic, but May looks kindly upon this peculiarity (""It was a sensual seduction, not a sexual one""), as on all his other human failings (depression, withdrawl, egotism). ""In this anxious, alienated age where every man, woman and child prizes security above all"" Tillich, with his propensity to see life whole and live it fully, may fall from popular favor but May regards his multidimensional vision as descriptive of man's fate. This is above all May's personal tribute to this venerable theologian, complementary to Tillich's own My Search for Absolutes and his wife's From Time to Time (KR, p. 873).

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION