Meaning in German

Tillich lived his life as a theologian and academic, writing and speaking only in his native tongue till the age of forty-seven when he immigrated to the United States. If he used the English meaning so ubiquitously in his adopted homeland, he must no doubt have carried over elements of the corresponding words in German. But here we immediately encounter difficulties. It is worth at least mentioning that German has two overlapping but non-synonymous words that could be translated into English as meaning: Sinn and Bedeutung. While Bedeutung is similar to meaning in that it is a verbal noun and denotes the action of the verb bedeuten, “to mean” in the sense of “to signify,” Sinn is the word that most commonly appears in contexts similar to those in which the English meaning appears. “The meaning of life,” for example, is almost always “der Sinn des Lebens” in German and much less often “die Bedeutung des Lebens.” In his pre-American period, Tillich used the word Sinn as abundantly as he used meaning in his English writings. He rarely used Bedeutung. The question is whether, when he wrote in his adopted language, he understood meaning as something different from Sinn.

Sinn is not at all identical to the English meaning, and even the phrase “der Sinn des Lebens” does not mean the exact same thing(s) as the English phrase “the meaning of life.” Sinn has a peculiar history in German. Its root sense has to do with moving and traveling, hence with the notion of direction and, by extension, with goals and purposes. Early in its history, Sinn took on an association with mental states: sensing, thinking, and feeling, like the Latin sensus (to which, despite what appears to be an obvious resemblance, it is only very remotely related). It steps in to denote the senses, as in sensory (sinnlich) experience or “sensibility” (Sinnlichkeit), Kant's name for the faculty that receives “intuitions” (Anschauungen) from the outside world. Only subsequently does it come to denote “meaning” of a word or sentence, and even then the emphasis appears to be more on the mind that understands a word than on something that the word contains. The meaning of the word meaning in the English phrase “the meaning of life” is ambiguous in the extreme and so, often, is the German word Sinn in the phrase “der Sinn des Lebens.” But the German word is much more likely to suggest “sense,” “direction,” or “explanation” than is the English meaning. If I say, “Life is meaningless,” I can be obscurely suggesting any number of things that are wanting in life, including some sort of undefined essence evoked by the word meaning. But if I say, in German, “Das Leben ist sinnlos,” I might be saying nothing more than that life is senseless, that it “makes no sense,” that I can find no explanation for it. Then again, I might be suggesting that life lacks direction, a goal, a purpose. Or I might be suggesting that life lacks a something-or-other that is analogous, mutatis mutandis, to the meaning of a word, sign, or symbol—something that I can recover through an act of interpretation.

The notion of meaning (Sinn) as applied to such broad concepts as life, nature, human existence, and the world appears to have arisen in Germany at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Among writers in the German Hochromantik, there was a tendency to view the world as a book or set of holy scriptures, containing signs and symbols whose meaning (Sinn) was to be discovered. The late Hans Blumenberg wrote about this in Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (1981). Novalis, for example, in his very short life, wrote some extremely suggestive, though characteristically enigmatic, statements about meaning, book, and world. One of the poet's most provocative phrases includes a reference to “the meaning of the world”: “Everything that we experience is a message. Thus is the world in fact a message, a revelation of the spirit. The time is no more when the spirit of God was comprehensible. The meaning [Sinn] of the world has gone missing. We're left with nothing but the letters [as in letters of the alphabet].”Footnote ⁸ A few years earlier Novalis had actually used the phrase “Sinn des Lebens”: “Only an artist can guess the meaning of life.”Footnote ⁹

We find similar formulations among romantics of this era. Thanks to the labors of a group of German scholars engaged in what might be called “Meaning of Life Studies,” one can establish a partial list and chronology of statements. Two examples will suffice. The final chapter of Friedrich Schlegel's visionary romance Lucinde (1799) is a kind of prose poem on the soul. The soul, we read, comes to understand nature, nature reveals itself to the soul “significantly” (bedeutsam), and the soul understands “the holy meaning [Sinn] of life as the beautiful language of Nature.”Footnote ¹⁰ Friedrich Schleiermacher, in Monologen, writes that the artist, always “on the lookout for what might become sign and symbol of mankind . . . seeks secret meaning [Sinn] and harmony in the beautiful color play of Nature.”Footnote ¹¹

We can get a sense of Tillich's precursors’ use of meaning as related to life and similarly expansive concepts, from an article on existential philosophy that Tillich published in 1944 in the Journal of the History of Ideas (JHI). That existential philosophy in the twentieth century, in the eyes of Tillich, is concerned with meaning is clear from statements he makes toward the end of the article. “The Existential philosophers,” he writes,

For Tillich, key precursors from the middle to the late nineteenth century are Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dilthey (and, much less compellingly, Marx). The works of Kierkegaard are shot through with references to the meaning of life—more, to the best of my knowledge, than in the works of any predecessor in Europe and the United States. Did Tillich come across these references to such an extent that they would have made an impression on him? This is difficult to say with any level of confidence. In his first English-language book, The Interpretation of History (1936), Tillich refers to his “limited” knowledge of Kierkegaard.Footnote ¹³ Yet Tillich as a young student had participated in a study group devoted to the works of Kierkegaard, in addition to mentioning him in the early Systematische Theologie (1913).Footnote ¹⁴ And there can be no doubt of the centrality of Kierkegaard's thought in Tillich's intellectual development, as evidenced by the prominence the German-born theologian affords the Danish writer in the JHI article and in other writings. From the JHI article, we know that Tillich read Concluding Unscientific Postscript and The Concept of Anxiety. He cites the former in the English translation that Princeton University Press had recently brought out (1941). We do not know if he had originally read it in German. Tillich refers to the latter, which had not yet appeared in English translation, only as “Kierkegaard's famous work on Angst,” indicating that he had read it in the one German translation in existence when he was still in Germany. Tillich would return to this work in volume 2 of Systematic Theology (1957), in a section titled “‘Dreaming Innocence’ and Temptation.” Here he explicitly discusses the word Angst, which he identifies as both German and Danish (though Kierkegaard used the alternate Danish spelling Angest) and which, he claims, “has become a central concept of existentialism.”Footnote ¹⁵ In the German translation of Kierkegaard's work on anxiety, one of the most striking sentences Tillich would have read is about “the meaning of life” (“Sinn des Lebens”), even though the phrase in Danish (“mening i livet”) would more accurately be translated as “meaning in life.”Footnote ¹⁶ Kierkegaard's idea seems to be that if religious faith is present perchance in some individuals and not in others, then we should forget about finding any “meaning in life.” Concluding Unscientific Postscript would have furnished Tillich with no examples of “meaning of life,” since only the Danish word betydning occurs in connection with life, and the English translator rendered it as significance, not meaning.Footnote ¹⁷

In the JHI article, Tillich never refers to an occurrence of “the meaning of life” or similar uses of meaning in the works of Kierkegaard. In the case of Nietzsche, however, he does. The quoted passage, which Tillich himself must have translated into English (somewhat loosely), is taken from the 1906 Taschenausgabe of Nietzsche's works, specifically from the volumes bearing the title Wille zur Macht (Will to power). (The notion of a book under this title, authored or compiled by Nietzsche himself, is discredited nowadays; most of the contents of what passed for such a book are to be found in the voluminous Nachgelassene Fragmente—“Posthumous fragments.”) Tillich translates the passage like this: “When we have reached the inevitable universal economic administration of the earth, then mankind as a machine can find its meaning in the service of this monstrous mechanism of smaller and smaller cogs adapted to the whole.”Footnote ¹⁸ In the original German, the phrase that Tillich translated as “find its meaning” is “ihren besten Sinn finden” (“find its best meaning”). Nietzsche's works include a number of instances of the phrase “Sinn des Lebens,” in most of which Sinn appears to mean “purpose” or “aim.” We can hardly be certain about what Nietzsche intended in this passage, which does not include the word Leben, but the context, where mankind is represented as machinery (“Maschinerie” in the original German), suggests strongly that Sinn is “direction” rather than “meaning.” Yet here is Tillich's gloss on the passage: “No one any longer knows the significance of this huge process. Mankind demands a new aim, a new meaning for life.”Footnote ¹⁹ Aim fits the German; meaning does not.

In the same JHI article, Wilhelm Dilthey curiously comes up in connection with Nietzsche—a pairing that would be odd in some other contexts. But for Tillich, the works of both philosophers fall under the category of Lebensphilosophie. This is a classification that makes sense for each of these thinkers given the emphasis on lived experience and the resistance to positivism that were hallmarks of this philosophy. The single work by Dilthey that Tillich cites (admittedly without directly quoting any material from it), Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883), is positively brimming with references to the Sinn not of life, but of history. Thus philosophy of history, as Dilthey sees it, concerns itself not only with causal connections in history but also with “the meaning [Sinn] of the historical process, i.e., its value and its goal [Ziel]” such that when this philosophy assumes a teleological form, “the meaning [Sinn], purpose [Zweck], value that it sees realized in the world is also represented.”Footnote ²⁰ Here, once again, where the dominant idea is process and movement and where consequently the notion of direction is present, meaning is an incomplete if not misleading translation of Sinn. If Tillich read further in Dilthey, he surely encountered the larger idea of hermeneutics and interpretation as applied to history. This is where the legacy of Schleiermacher and the romantic notion of reading the world—or reading history—as if it were a book, thus finding meaning in the world and history, emerge at the end of the nineteenth century. When it came to interpreting and thus understanding history, Dilthey uses both Bedeutung and Sinn. In many instances, he does not explicitly distinguish between the two terms, but when he does, it is generally to assign Bedeutung to the meaning of smaller units—words in a text and, by analogy, discrete events in history—and Sinn to the import of something larger—an entire sentence in a text and, say, an entire life in history.

Here the English translator runs into a serious problem. If we are studying a text and are first examining an individual word, meaning is what immediately comes to mind to denote what we find when we interpret that word. If, like Dilthey, we believe that what we find on interpreting an entire sentence or an entire literary work is something qualitatively different from what we find on interpreting an individual word, what English term would accurately denote that something so as to distinguish it from the meaning of an individual word? The closest term we have, which accidentally resembles Sinn, is sense, as in “the overall sense” we have of something. But sense is broad and vague and is often pressed into service when we cannot quite express the “meaning” of something or when we are not sure which of several possible “meanings” to choose from. Of the two English translations of Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften that came out, one in 1988 and the other in 1989, one largely uses sense and the other meaning for German Sinn. Thus, for the passages I quoted a moment ago, we read, in one, “the sense of the course of history” and “sense, purpose, and value” while in the other it is “the meaning of the historical process” and “meaning, purpose, and value.”Footnote ²¹ I think it is safe to say that neither quite conveys Sinn in the original German, where it suggests something different from signifying as well as something different from sense, especially given Dilthey's explicit association of Sinn with value and goal.

Possibly most relevant to a discussion of Tillich's use and understanding of Sinn in the decade or so before he emigrated is a set of developments in German philosophy around the turn of the century. German theologian and philosopher of religion Ulrich Barth admirably tells the story of these developments, and their connection to Tillich's early work, in an essay on the sinntheoretisch bases of the concept of religion.Footnote ²² The story is complicated, and there is not adequate space here to retell it in detail. From late 1917 till July 1918, while he was serving on the front, Tillich carried on a correspondence with Protestant theologian Emanuel Hirsch, in which Tillich described the philosophical crisis he was undergoing and named the figures whose works were guiding the new direction he was taking. All this was by way of explaining the following statements (for the sake of simplicity I translate Sinn, and only Sinn, here as meaning): “Precisely this is now my way of thinking [Meinung]. Spiritual life is life in meaning or incessant creative meaning-giving. . . . The divine is meaning, not being. . . . I am therefore teaching the monism of meaning.”Footnote ²³ The relevant figures, for our purposes, are Husserl and Emil Lask. At the risk of being reductive, one might tell the story like this: From the Husserl of Logische Untersuchungen (1900–1901), Tillich would have derived the notion of Sinn in connection both with linguistic signs and forms of expression, on the one hand, and with the intentional, act-based nature of cognition, on the other. In Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie (1913), Sinn comes to be associated (though not precisely synonymous) with noema, which, for the sake of simplicity, we can define simply as the object-correlate of an act of cognition (the act constitutes noesis, and it is directed toward the noema). No matter what Husserl (not to mention Tillich) might have really understood by these concepts, we can safely say that Sinn has expanded its reach in such a way that it forms part of our very experience of the world. In Emil Lask, the Sinnbegriff, as Barth characterizes it, has attained the status of something fundamental, universal, and absolute. As he puts it, “Meaning [Sinn] is the universal medium of the understanding [des Verstehens] of the world.”Footnote ²⁴

Barth intended his essay to be merely preparatory to a future study of Tillich's Sinntheorie, one that would include a focus on writings from the 1920s. Barth himself does not carry out this task, so we have no way of knowing how he might have explained the Sinn concept in those writings. For example, would the word Sinn consistently—or, for that matter, ever—signify “universal medium of the understanding of the world,” or would it function differently in different contexts?

Be that as it may, in this sampling from Tillich's precursors (including the German translator of Kierkegaard) and their use of German Sinn in connection with life, nature, human existence, the world, and similarly expansive notions, we can see that the word suggested a range of possible, often overlapping senses: a mysterious essence or truth symbolized by objects in the natural world or by the natural world itself; an overarching metaphysical truth; sense or direction; aim, goal, telos, purpose; perhaps grand understanding. It is when we get to Tillich's immediate precursors, in the phenomenological and neo-Kantian strains of philosophy, that we truly run into problems with translating Sinn into English. If it is true, as Barth asserts, that Sinn has come to convey something as broad and, at the same time, vague as “the universal medium of the understanding of the world,” then we must attempt not only to construe the German word in this way, while deciding in which contexts the word carries this sense, but also to determine whether what is conveyed in the German word is carried over into English.

Tillich in German

Even a quick perusal of Tillich's early works in German will confirm the impression that the young scholar of philosophy and theology was obsessed with the notion—or collection of notions—expressed in the German word Sinn. In 1923, as a Privatdozent in Berlin, the 37-year-old Tillich wrote Das System der Wissenschaften nach Gegenständen und Methoden (The System of the sciences according to their objects and methods), in Gesammelte Werke. Here, der Sinn plays a foundational role in understanding (Verstehen). For the moment, I will leave the word Sinn untranslated: “Philosophy,” Tillich writes, “is the doctrine of Sinn-principles [Sinnprinzipien], i.e. of Sinn-giving [sinngebenden] functions and categories . . . Sinn functions [Sinnfunktionen] are those directional acts in which the mind-supporting form [Gestalt] carries out its relationship to reality in a valid fashion and thereby constructs a Sinn-ful reality [eine sinnvolle Wirklichkeit].”Footnote ²⁵ This language, reminiscent of the Husserl-Lask nexus that Barth discusses, might convey that “universal medium,” or it might simply be an ornate way of saying that philosophy has as its function to “make sense” of the world.

That same year Tillich finished Religionsphilosophie (“Philosophy of Religion,” published two years later, in 1925). After a lengthy introductory section, the opening chapter of Part I is titled “Die Sinnelemente und ihre Relationen” (The Sinn elements and their relations). In the space of two-and-a-half pages, the word Sinn, alone and in compound words, occurs no fewer than 73 times. Consider, for example, this passage (again I leave Sinn untranslated):

One can begin to appreciate not just the difficulty of translating this passage but the difficulty of interpreting it, if we read how James Luther Adams, in his introduction to the English translation of this work, explained Tillich's concept of meaning. Tillich's philosophy of religion, Adams writes, “is a philosophy of meaning, and of relatedness to the Unconditional in terms of meaning.” What, then, is meaning? Meaning for Tillich “is threefold,” Adams explains. “It is an awareness of a universal interconnection of meaning, an awareness of the ultimate meaningfulness of the interconnection of meaning, and an awareness of a demand to fulfill, to be obedient to, the ultimate, unconditional meaning-reality.”Footnote ²⁷ It would greatly understate the case to say that this is not helpful. For not only has Adams defined meaning in terms of meaning itself, he has not paused to tell us what meaning means when he invokes it to define . . . meaning itself. Given the centrality of meaning here and given that, as we have seen, English meaning and German Sinn function differently from each other, the reader can hardly help being more than a little confused.

But this is perhaps not Adams's fault, for the German original, it must be said, does not readily yield to interpretation. Tillich begins the section in which these statements appear with this claim: “Every act of mind/spirit [Geist] is a Sinn act [Sinnakt].” He goes on to write about various theories of knowledge and about how all of them share the premise that “the mind/spirit [Geist] is always a carrying-out of Sinn [Sinnvollzug] and that-which-is-intended in the mind/spirit [das im Geist Gemeinte] is always Sinn-connection [Sinnzusammenhang].”Footnote ²⁸ He writes about a “ground of Sinn” (Sinngrund), by which term he defines “the unconditionality of Sinn.” I would challenge anyone to offer an easily comprehensible explanation of the material in these pages.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Barth's “universal medium of the understanding of the world” is at play in the passages I have just quoted in translation. It might make sense to speak of “consciousness of Sinn” or “Sinn-connection,” if we are talking about an awareness of that medium or some notion of interconnectedness within, and thanks to, that medium. But what are we to understand by “individual Sinn,” “unconditional Sinn,” and “ground of Sinn”? If Sinn is a “universal medium,” then how can there be an individual one, why is “unconditional Sinn” not a redundancy, and how can there be a ground of something that already appears to be the ground (or “medium”) of all understanding? If “universal medium” is not what Sinn refers to in some or all of these instances, then what does it refer to? Is it something like the English meaning, as when Sinn refers to the meaning of a word—thus something that gets expressed? Is “individual Sinn,” as opposed to both “Sinn-connection” and “unconditional Sinn,” analogous to Dilthey's Bedeutung as opposed to overarching Sinn? Or is Sinn a term for some sort of grand metaphysical quality that is never quite defined? What appears clear is that Sinn functions in more than one way in these passages and that substituting “universal medium” for each and every instance of it would make the passages even more difficult to interpret than they are to begin with. At the very least, if we assume that Sinn in each of the foregoing instances has something to do with understanding, we might hazard a guess that “individual Sinn” refers to individual acts of understanding (making sense) that form part of a nexus with other such acts—thus the “Sinn-connection.” And then “ground of Sinn” and “unconditional Sinn” would perhaps denote some sort of absolute by which all sense-making takes place. Is it a synonym for God? Tillich does not explicitly say.

At the end of the 1920s, Tillich collected a set of lectures and essays under the title Religiöse Verwirklichung (Religious realization). One essay in the collection stands out for a use of Sinn that appears to stray from Tillich's practice in the writings I have just discussed. It is titled “Das religiöse Symbol” (The religious symbol), and it foreshadows the theory of symbols that Tillich will include in Dynamics of Faith (1957). The full details of the theory need not concern us for the moment. Tillich aims to show the symbolic nature of “the religious act,” by which he appears to mean an act of faith that apprehends God. But this act is modeled on the act by which we apprehend a symbol of any sort. “The inner act,” he writes, “that directs itself at the symbol intends [meint] not the symbol but the symbolized [das Symbolisierte] in it. At the same time, the symbolized itself can in turn be a symbol of a symbolized of higher order. Thus a written character can be called a symbol for the word and the word a symbol for the meaning [Sinn].” By way of further example, Tillich explains that devotion to the cross in Christianity is directed toward the crucifixion, devotion to which in turn is directed toward “the redeeming acting” of God, which in turn is “the symbolic expression for an experience of the unconditionally transcendent.”Footnote ²⁹ In a later passage, Tillich shows that “God” is in a double sense the end of a “religious act,” which is fundamentally symbolic in character. “To be sure,” he writes, “the religious act intends [meint] what it intends [meint], namely, it intends [meint] God, but in the word God there wavers a duality: the unconditionally transcendent, ultimately intended [Letztgemeinte], and some sort of thought object with properties and actions.”Footnote ³⁰ In other words, the being that we conceive as possessing properties and carrying out actions is itself a symbol representing the ultimate.

The language here is clearly the language of signifying and representation. Sinn in the passage I quoted clearly refers to the thing recovered from a sign or symbol in an act of apprehension or interpretation. Worth noting is Tillich's use of the verb meinen, “to mean,” “to intend,” “to have in mind,” which seldom shows up in his other writings having to do with Sinn. Tillich is clearly showing the human subject as the agent in what he describes as the symbolic religious act. God, whether “the ultimately intended” or “some sort of thought object,” is the object of an act carried out by a human subject. The verb meinen, cognate with the English to mean, has a human being as its subject and God as its object. I will return to this point later.

Tillich in English

History has thrown us a rather odd curve in the case of Tillich. A common story about his career tells that in the decade before Tillich immigrated to the United States, his theological-philosophical thinking took a turn from meaning to being. After all, so the story goes, it was in the United States that he began to use such expressions as “the ground of being” and “being-itself” either as stand-ins or as actual replacements for God; and “began to use” these expressions not just for the obvious reason that these are English-language expressions and Tillich didn't write in English before he left Germany, but also because he had not used even the German equivalents of these expressions when he was writing exclusively in his native language. There are two problems with this story. The first is that Tillich actually had used German equivalents beginning in the mid-1920s, during his time at the University of Marburg, though admittedly not as frequently as he would come to use the English expressions.Footnote ³¹ The second is that the meaning-to-being story suggests that Tillich largely abandoned his earlier commitment to German Sinn in favor of concepts associated with being (Sein in German). Determining whether or not this is true is tricky, of course, because once Tillich starts writing in English he has no choice but to use an English word—almost always meaning—and we have to decide whether the English word is equivalent to the German, as he had recently used the German word, or whether it means something different. And, if we decide it does mean something different, is it because the English word meaning by itself carries a set of connotations distinct from those that German Sinn carries, or is it because Tillich had changed his mind about Sinn? Christian Danz, in fact, has suggested that the meaning-to-being story is unhelpful precisely because it eclipses the role that meaning would always play in Tillich's philosophy. To be clear, Tillich had already moved in the direction of ontology in the decade before he immigrated to the United States, and ontology necessarily implies a focus on being, but, as Danz put it, Tillich, even in his ontological period, remained always “an Idealist, a philosopher of spirit and meaning.”Footnote ³²

The question is, which meaning? If Tillich, from the time of his immigration to the end of his life, is going to use the English meaning almost as liberally as he had used Sinn in Germany, should we fill in the phrases “universal medium of the understanding of the world” or “individual act of understanding”? Or should we assume that (a) Tillich's philosophy has changed and (b) he has adopted a word that he knows to be different from anything in his native language? Alternatively, might the English word, different as it is from the German equivalent, have pushed an unwitting Tillich's thinking in a direction it might not have taken had he never come to write in English?

He must surely have figured out that, unlike the German Sinn, English meaning carries the idea of intention, allowing us to use the word in connection with a subject, whether or not that subject is a human being. As a verbal noun, meaning affords the possibility that a sentence containing it may be rephrased (admittedly with a possible semantic change) with a finite verb: “X means Y.” This in turn makes it possible to cast the thing that possesses a meaning as the subject of a sentence, giving it agency. I stated earlier that meaning in English is far less likely than Sinn in German to suggest direction. And while meaningless and senseless can be used synonymously, the latter is much more likely than the former to suggest simple incomprehensibility or illogicality, while meaningless is much more likely to suggest the absence of something more difficult to define and express than the sense in senseless. In German, there is only sinnlos. In addition, in instances where meaning and to mean carry the idea of intention, will it simply substitute for the German meinen? As we just saw, Tillich almost always makes a human being the grammatical subject of meinen. This will not be true of Tillich's use of the English meaning/to mean, which will almost always be associated with something external to the human subject.

After Tillich arrives in his new homeland, it will be some time before he publishes work—in English, of course—that can accurately be characterized as representing substantive thinking that he did in the United States. The Interpretation of History (1936), Tillich's first book published in English, presents an “autobiographical sketch” (written in German and translated into English) that includes some material about the author's encounter with existential philosophy.Footnote ³³ The remainder of the book consists of pre-exile material translated into English. The Protestant Era (1948) is a collection of short pieces, some dating back to Tillich's German period (and translated into English), others on a variety of relatively narrow topics. It is only with the publication of volume 1 of Systematic Theology that we really see the Tillich who will become known in both academic and popular circles among English-speaking readers.

Anyone versed in both German and English who had followed Tillich's career in German and now picked up the new work in 1951 would have been immediately struck by a major shift—and not simply because the new work was in English. Even if one were to translate Tillich's English “back” into German (something that in fact was done in Germany for each volume of Systematic Theology within five years of its publication), one would see that the language was not what it had been in the 1920s and early 1930s. The “move to ontology” that scholars speak about (admittedly with a healthy dose of simplification) makes itself felt in the very premises that Tillich establishes in the opening pages of this central theological work.

First, “ultimate concern,” as a concept, was not new for Tillich, and the German translators rendered it back into the author's native language using a version of the phrase that Tillich had used earlier: “das, was uns unbedingt angeht” (that which unconditionally concerns us). What is new is not only the English expression—not entirely identical to the German both because of the word ultimate and because the German verb angehen has become the English noun concern—but, above all, how the concept is framed. Tillich quickly takes us from the somewhat surprising claim that ultimate concern is an “abstract translation” of the “great commandment” (“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might,” Deuteronomy 6:4–5, Mark 12:29–30), through the claim that the concern of which he speaks is “ultimate, unconditional, total, and infinite,” to this statement: “Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us.”Footnote ³⁴

So, what about the term being? It “does not designate existence in time and space,” Tillich writes, “but the term ‘being’ means the whole of human reality, the structure, the meaning, and the aim of existence. All this is threatened; it can be lost or saved. Man is ultimately concerned about his being and meaning.”Footnote ³⁵ Before too long, since he is, after all, writing a work of theology, Tillich comes to ask what the difference is between philosophy and theology. His answer: “Philosophy deals with the structure of being in itself; theology deals with the meaning of being for us.”Footnote ³⁶ Not long after this, we have a statement that joins together the threads of the “existential” theology that Tillich will set forth for the next almost nine hundred pages. At issue here is the “New Being,” as the object of the theologian's quest. The New Being turns out to be another name for Jesus, just as “ground of being” and “being-itself” will be alternate names for God, but they will be alternate names because the expressions Jesus Christ and God, all alone, by appearing to denote external objects, are misleading. So instead, in the case of Jesus, we say “Jesus as the Christ,” therefore remaining agnostic on the historical reality and divine paternity of the more conventional Jesus. Just as God is the ground of being, Jesus is “the New Being in Jesus as the Christ as our ultimate concern.”Footnote ³⁷

So, for now, the question is this: if we are speaking about being, the structure of being, the New Being, the ground of being, and being-itself, and if “theology deals with the meaning of being,” then in what sense is Tillich using the English word meaning here? Can the question, “What is the meaning of being?,” be rephrased as, “What does being mean?” If so, then, assuming that “the meaning of being” does not refer to the dictionary definition of the word being, the answer would simply consist in an explanation of the concept of being and would not suggest something as grand as “universal medium of understanding.” But a few sentences earlier Tillich has said that “man is ultimately concerned about his being and meaning,” that is, not the meaning of being, but meaning as a separate thing to be concerned about.Footnote ³⁸

At the end of a section titled “Being and the Question of God,” Tillich introduces yet another distinction, this time between “the teleological argument” and “the cosmological argument” for the existence of God. The former has to do with what Tillich terms the “ground of meaning,” since the telos in teleology is “the ‘inner aim,’ the meaningful, understandable structure of reality.”Footnote ³⁹ Tillich now brings up the Kierkegaardian/existentialist notion of anxiety. “Anxiety about meaninglessness,” he writes,

What, then, does meaning mean here? There is a “ground of meaning,” and there is a “ground of being.” The former is placed in apposition to “God,” suggesting that, like “ground of being,” it can fill in for “God.”

The allusion to anxiety provides a clue. If Tillich had been speaking solely about Kierkegaard, anxiety would have been associated with the notion of finitude and, by extension, nonbeing. Kierkegaard never spoke of “anxiety about meaninglessness.” The philosopher who allegedly had done so, however, is named earlier in the same section: Jean-Paul Sartre. “Sartre,” Tillich wrote, “includes in nonbeing not only the threat of nothingness but also the threat of meaninglessness (i.e., the destruction of the structure of being).”Footnote ⁴¹ What is Tillich referring to? The only hint of a reference to an actual work by Sartre in Systematic Theology is in volume 2, where Tillich uses the phrase “no exit” (Sartre's play, Huis clos, had been translated into English as No Exit as early as 1946).Footnote ⁴² In The Courage to Be, published the year after volume 1 of Systematic Theology, Tillich mentions, once again, No Exit and briefly refers to Sartre's novel The Age of Reason (translated into English in 1947).Footnote ⁴³ In neither of these works is there anything that might be rendered in English as “the threat of meaninglessness,” though both contain passages with references to meaning (le sens) in connection with life. Moreover, both in The Courage to Be and in volume 3 of Systematic Theology, Tillich offers a discussion of Sartre, in connection with Heidegger, in which he refers to concepts clearly not drawn from the French philosopher's literary compositions: from the former work, a proposition that Tillich renders as “the essence of man is his existence” and, from the latter, “Sartre's assertion of the mutual objectivation of human beings in all of their encounters.”Footnote ⁴⁴

The source of the comment about “the threat of nothingness” and “the threat of meaninglessness” could hardly be anything other than l’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness), published in French in 1943. It first came out in German translation in 1952 and in the English translation by Hazel E. Barnes in 1956. Did Tillich read this work in French? Did he read reviews of it? Did he perhaps only hear it talked about?

Being and Nothingness contains passages that at least appear to address the topic that Tillich hints at in his brief comment. First, anxiety (angoisse, which Barnes translated into English as anguish): in a chapter on “The Origin of Nothingness,” Sartre writes of anxiety and of Kierkegaard. “It is in anxiety that man becomes conscious of his freedom, or, if one prefers, anxiety is the mode of being of freedom as consciousness of being; it is in anxiety that freedom, in its being, is in question for itself.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Freedom, in turn, is tied to values: “It follows that my freedom is the sole foundation of values and that nothing, absolutely nothing justifies my adopting this or that value, this or that scale of values . . . And my freedom suffers anxiety from being the foundation, without foundation, of these values.”Footnote ⁴⁶ As for meaning, Sartre primarily used the word sens, but in one of the most extended passages on the topic, he used both sens and signification, without troubling to explain the distinction. Either way, the words are inextricably tied to freedom and to life. For example: “If this is the case, we can no longer even say that death confers a meaning [sens] on life from outside; a meaning [sens] can come only from subjectivity itself. Since death does not appear at the foundation of our freedom, it can only remove all meaning [signification] from life.”Footnote ⁴⁷ “Thus death is never what gives its meaning [sens] to life; on the contrary, it is what on principle removes all meaning [signification] from it.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The word sens frequently occurs together with valeur (value), as though the two words were inextricably linked.

Whatever the source of Tillich's knowledge of Sartre, the brief passage that refers to him is evidence of a shift in the sense of meaning. The moment we begin to hear about meaninglessness in connection with nonbeing and nothingness, we are entering the realm where meaning is defined at the outset through the idea of negation, as something missing that renders life both incomprehensible (in French, “La vie n'a point de sens,” means, “Life makes no sense” or “I don't understand life”) and, what follows as a corollary, without value (“La vie ne vaut pas la peine d’être vécue,” means, “Life is not worth living”). Because of the nature of the French word sens, the negative statement that life lacks it does not automatically raise the question of what sens would mean in an affirmative statement in which life is said to have it. But if, when life lacks sens, we find ourselves plunged into the absurd and therefore, out of a desperate desire to escape that condition, impelled to seek sens, then we find ourselves under the necessity of supplying a positive content for this term or, rather, for meaning, the English equivalent that Tillich used. So, what is that content? In this context, the idealist “universal medium of the understanding of the world” and the other meanings that the German Sinn appeared to have do not really fit anymore.

The issue comes into full relief in The Courage to Be (1952). This book, written for a popular readership, brought meaning into an adapted existentialist nexus with anxiety, ultimate concern, faith, being, and freedom. As in Sartre and Camus (both briefly mentioned in this book), the notion of meaning arises from its negative. Early in the book, Tillich distinguishes among three types of anxiety, one of which is “the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness.” “We use the term meaninglessness,” Tillich explains,

Thus, as “meaninglessness” is placed in apposition to “loss of an ultimate concern,” “meaning” and “ultimate concern” come to be equivalents, together with “meaning which gives meaning to all meanings” and “ultimate meaning.” Ultimate, which till now in Tillich had chiefly modified concern, has now come to modify meaning, and “ultimate meaning” appears to be yet another substitute expression for God.

At the end of The Courage to Be, Tillich takes up two notions that we would never find in Sartre or Camus: absolute faith and God. He has remained true to his adapted existentialist framework. The logic—though Tillich does not follow the order of this logic in his presentation—appears to be this: (1) “the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness” threatens us with loss of the meaning of life;Footnote ⁵⁰ (2) this loss can interrupt our “quest for the courage to be”;Footnote ⁵¹ (3) beyond simple being, there is being-itself;Footnote ⁵² (4) we reach being-itself via faith, defined as “the state of being grasped by the power of being itself”;Footnote ⁵³ (5) being is connected with meaning, because, paradoxically, we must first accept nonbeing and meaninglessness in order to experience being and meaning;Footnote ⁵⁴ (6) in the end, having accepted nonbeing and meaninglessness as a path to being and meaning, we reach a stage, via “absolute faith,” where we transcend “the theistic idea of God” and arrive at “God above the God of theism.”Footnote ⁵⁵ And meaning is there to the very end. The old God, “the God of theism,” disappears in the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness, so that the new God, presumably the God of meaning, can appear. It is in that new God that the titular “courage to be” is rooted, as Tillich explains in the final sentence of the book.

But what is this meaning? If it is the thing that is missing in meaninglessness, then once we transcend meaninglessness, we should find meaning. And since, when we transcend meaninglessness, we find the new God, finding the new God and finding meaning should be roughly the same thing. So, this meaning can't be the Sinn of Tillich's earlier days, because (a) that Sinn (often signifying “universal medium of the understanding of the world”) was centered in the subject and the subject's understanding (sense-finding) and (b) it did not unequivocally appear as a totalizing quality equivalent to God. Then what is it? Is it always the same thing, even in this book, The Courage to Be?

Even if we exclude instances of the word meaning that are clearly not relevant to this discussion, we can easily see that it is not consistently used in the same sense even within The Courage to Be. For example, at one point Tillich returns to his Husserlian roots and speaks of intentionality. “We have defined intentionality as ‘being directed toward meaningful contents,’” he writes. “Man lives ‘in’ meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, ethically, religiously.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Then, in a chapter titled “Self and Participation (The Courage to Be as a Part),” where the topic is the life of the self in a collective or community, Tillich brings up language and why it is essential to the self that belongs to a community. “Without language,” he writes, “there are no universals; without universals no transcending of nature and no relation to it as nature. But language is communal, not individual. The section of reality in which one participates immediately is the community to which one belongs.”Footnote ⁵⁷ “Truth and meaning,” he writes a few pages later (admittedly without explicitly mentioning language), “are embodied in the traditions and symbols of the group.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Meaning in these passages is not the same as in the ones I mentioned a moment ago. In its plural (“man lives ‘in’ meanings”), it suggests a world alive with signs and symbols that wink at us as we pass through (a bit like the “forests of symbols” that Baudelaire described in his famous sonnet Correspondances). If the topic is language, then we are explicitly talking about meaning in the fairly ordinary sense having to do with signification and communication. When we speak of intentionality in a Husserlian sense, we might be using meaning in the sense of “intending,” like the German meinen, but Tillich sticks to the word intentionality as something “directed toward meaningful contents,” and thus in English, meaning continues to represent something external to the human subject.

So the question is who or what is doing the intending and the meaning, that is, carrying out the action of the verbs to intend and to mean, even in the various different senses of meaning. We cannot be absolutely certain that the meanings in which we live are initiating the interaction with us who pass through. But what about “ultimate meaning”? At the end of The Courage to Be, it becomes clear that a change has taken place in the relationship between the believer and the unconditional absolute that now goes by several names, among which are God, “meaning which gives meaning to all meanings,” and “ultimate meaning.” The faculty or power that governs that relationship, of course, is faith.

But first, what was the status of faith in the earlier, German period? Here is how Tillich defined it in Religionsphilosophie:

And here is what he had to say about God, with respect to faith:

Here, with the possible exception of “directedness toward,” the human subject is the originator of all actions connected with faith: turning toward, grasping, intuiting, willing, intending. This certainly seems like classic epistemological dualism, in which the human subject seeks to bridge a gap on the other side of which lies an object, in this case God. And this despite the claim Tillich has made a few pages earlier that, in what he calls the metalogical method, there is no dualism, that the religious act and the object of that act are identical. “The question of the truth of religion is answered by means of the metalogical construal [Erfassung] of religion as directedness toward unconditional meaning [Sinn],” he wrote.Footnote ⁶¹ Because the question whether the unconditional exists already presupposes the existence of the unconditional, Tillich argued, directedness toward that unconditional cannot be treated as dualistic. And yet, only a few pages later, Tillich is defining God as an intended object. Whether or not one buys the argument that this view is not dualistic, it is difficult to deny that the human subject is the agent in this model.

Now compare how Tillich elaborates on the conception of faith at the end of The Courage to Be:

The language that Tillich now uses to describe and explain faith is characterized by passive verbs: “being grasped,” “is grasped,” “is affirmed.” Faith now appears as a state or condition in which the person of faith receives the action of an outside force. That outside force in this passage is named “the power of being-itself,” another expression for God. God is thus no longer the object of an act of faith, as he had been in the period of Religionsphilosophie. Instead, God is now another name for the power that grasps the person of faith. The state or condition of being grasped somehow leads to freedom and the courage to be (terms suggesting agency), but “the power of being-itself” does the grasping, and the person of faith gets grasped, only after which that person is able to affirm. If one of the other names for the outside force includes the word meaning (“meaning which gives meaning to all meanings,” and “ultimate meaning”), then we can say that English allows that force to function as a force that does something. It grasps me; I don't grasp it. It acts. It means something to me. One cannot convey this with the German Sinn.

By the time Tillich wrote Dynamics of Faith (1957), the relation between faith and human beings had fully settled in. “An act of faith,” wrote Tillich, “is an act of a finite being who is grasped by and turned to the infinite.”Footnote ⁶³ This act follows the being-grasped-and-turned. Revelation? It is “the experience in which an ultimate concern grasps the human mind and creates a community in which this concern expresses itself in symbols of action, imagination, and thought.”Footnote ⁶⁴

And what do symbols, that is, bearers of meaning, do? Here is where Tillich gave the best-known English-language account of his theory of symbols (though he included abridged accounts in numerous other writings from his American period). Symbols of any sort bear six characteristics. (1) They “point beyond themselves to something else.” (2) A symbol “participates in that to which it points.” (3) A symbol “opens up levels of reality which otherwise are closed for us.” (4) A symbol “unlocks dimensions and elements of our soul which correspond to the dimensions and elements of reality.” (5) “Symbols cannot be produced intentionally.” (6) Symbols “cannot be invented.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Whatever the merits of this preliminary account, one can say that Tillich, without expressly using the word meaning, is speaking of a form of signification: symbols “point beyond themselves to something else.”

But if we are focused on the use of the word meaning and the verb to mean, we see that the discussion quickly becomes confusing. “Whatever we say about that which concerns us ultimately,” Tillich writes, “whether or not we call it God, has a symbolic meaning. It points beyond itself while participating in that to which it points.” To what does it point? Ultimate concern? God? Are they the same? “The fundamental symbol of our ultimate concern is God,” Tillich then writes. “Ultimate concern cannot deny its own character as ultimate. Therefore, it affirms what is meant by the word ‘God.’” Now, however, we are speaking of the word God and what it means, or points to, in its signifying function, but presumably we are not speaking of God, that is, what the word God means, or points to. Tillich then moves to speak about God by referring to atheism, which, in denying God, he writes, “can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern—to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one's existence.”Footnote ⁶⁶ But this is not the same meaning as in the phrase “symbolic meaning”; this is something grander, something metaphysical but undefined. Thus meaning (and to mean) in this brief passage alone carries more than one sense. (1) Religious symbols appear to mean, that is, to point to the ultimate, namely God. (2) But God is a symbol and thus must point to, or mean, something ultimate. (3) Another equivalent for “ultimate concern” is “the meaning of one's existence,” where meaning no longer has to do with symbolic pointing but clearly serves as an equivalent to “ultimate concern.”

A few years earlier Tillich had given a lecture at the Jewish Theological Seminary titled “Theology and Symbolism,” in which he traced out a path similar to the one we find in Dynamics of Faith. The path is from meaning, as denoting the thing to which a symbol points, in virtue of its function as a symbol, to meaning more metaphysically construed, to meaning as synonymous (or virtually synonymous) with God. Even the following sentence shows a shift: “The symbol opens up a level of meaning which otherwise is closed. It opens up a stratum of reality, of meaning and being which otherwise we could not reach.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The first meaning technically denotes what a symbol points to. The second has begun to be conflated with being and has taken on a slightly different status. Religious symbols, Tillich continues, “have a limited meaning, they have a conditioned validity; but they are used in order to point beyond themselves to that which has unconditional, unlimited, and infinite meaning.” Footnote ⁶⁸A religious symbol “is material taken out of the world of finite things, to point beyond itself to the ground of being and meaning, to being itself and meaning itself. As a symbol, it participates in the power of the ultimate to which it points,” otherwise known as the “holy.” Footnote ⁶⁹At the end of this path, we find the symbol exercising its function as a meaning object (an object that carries out the action of the verb to mean) by pointing to the ultimate. Thus “the God of theism,” that is, the vulgar God of common belief, is “a symbol for the God beyond the God of theism.”Footnote ⁷⁰ That God (the God beyond) is “the ground of being and meaning.” So, the God of theism, in his symbolic, pointing function, points to his (technically defined) meaning, the thing we recover through an act of interpretation when we encounter a symbol. But in this case, the thing recovered is “the ground of meaning.” And yet this meaning cannot possibly be the same as the technically defined meaning (in the sense of pointing or thing-pointed-to), nor can it even be a kind of pure, ultimate version of that meaning. It has a different status altogether, something undefined but closely connected with being.

How is this important to Tillich's new conception of faith? In the new conception, the external, unconditional, absolute is the agent. There are many expressions for this absolute, but among them are the word meaning and phrases including the word meaning. As a verbal noun, the English word is a much better vehicle for the notion of agency than the German Sinn.

This relationship that faith brings about finds its full realization in volume 3 of Systematic Theology, published six years after Dynamics of Faith. Tillich introduces a distinction between human spirit (lowercase s) and divine Spirit (uppercase S), also called “Spiritual Presence,” which he defines in one place as “the actualization of power and meaning in unity.”Footnote ⁷¹ Once again, the outside force is the agent that acts on us. “Man in his self-transcendence,” Tillich writes of Spiritual Presence, “can reach for it, but man cannot grasp it, unless he is first grasped by it.”Footnote ⁷² Being grasped by Spiritual Presence is called “ecstasy,” which Tillich had understood, in Dynamics of Faith, in the root Greek sense (ἔκστασις) of “standing outside of oneself.”Footnote ⁷³ And meaning is predictably not far behind. The Spiritual Presence is “a meaning-bearing power which grasps the human spirit in an ecstatic experience.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Once again, faith is a state of being grasped. “Faith, formally or generally defined, is the state of being grasped by that toward which self-transcendence aspires, the ultimate in being and meaning. In a short formula, one can say that faith is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Faith is thus “not an act of cognitive affirmation within the subject-object structure of reality,” not a “will to believe.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Gone is the dualism of Religionsphilosophie, gone, therefore, is faith as directedness toward something, and gone is God as an object. And if meaning steps out as something closely associated, if not synonymous, with the unconditional absolute (or God), then it is in large part because Tillich is now writing in English. The German Sinn, given its grammatical status as a noun, given its connection to sensory experience, and therefore to a dualist religious epistemology in which God is an object, would not really fit. Sinn has no intrinsic agency; meaning does.

These reflections on Tillich's conception of faith leave us with a perplexing puzzle. Did Tillich change his mind about faith for reasons independent of his having been obliged to adopt English as his new scholarly language? If so, then we might say it was a happy coincidence that, in his adopted language, the word most closely equivalent to German Sinn afforded him an easy way to articulate his new conception of faith. An alternative hypothesis is that Tillich's thinking, perhaps without his even realizing it, was moved in a new direction by his adopted language, specifically by the grammatical properties of the English word meaning. This is an intriguing possibility, with enormous negative implications for any idea that theological thinking can somehow cross linguistic boundaries and arise independently of the peculiar properties of the language in which a given theologian thinks and writes. As central and essential a notion as faith, together with the critical question whether the human subject is active or passive in relation to it, would by this hypothesis be subject to the grammatical vagaries of the language in which the notion is contemplated and articulated. Theology would then become “God-talk” only in a particular idiom.

Sadly, the biographical record, to the best of my knowledge, does not provide a definitive solution to the puzzle in the case of Tillich. Christian Danz, in a lengthy history of the project by which Systematic Theology was translated into German, included a brief description of Tillich's composition practices in English. These practices included Tillich's faltering attempts to come up with proper English words and expressions, which were then unsystematically vetted by American assistants, and his initial use of German words and expressions, which were then unsystematically translated by his assistants.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the end, both because the information is inconclusive and above all because one realizes that these composition practices were so disorderly, it is difficult to arrive at a judgment about the nature of the process by which Tillich formulated his thoughts when he expressed them in English. There can be no doubt, however, that the English language provided a hospitable medium for the new conception of faith. One might safely say that the path to that conception would have been, if not blocked, then far less smooth in German.