freedom which has encircled their lives. Their courage is the “revelation” of an ultimate and abiding freedom that transcends and empowers our existence.
Our finite freedom (freedom in the second sense) is not a negative “freedom from,” but rather a participatory freedom, an experience of opening oneself to and being grasped by the encompassing freedom that embraces and conquers the threat of nonbeing. This horizon of freedom of which we partake cannot be comprehended intellectually. It is not a possession and it cannot be controlled by acts of “willfulness” on our part. It can only be experienced by oneself or pointed to as it becomes evident in the courageous lives of human persons. Its reality is felt only in the act of allowing oneself to be grasped by it. For that reason any scientific demonstration of its presence is impossible.
In the concrete lives of heroic people, moreover, we may encounter the fascinans, the fulfilling side of freedom; we may get an inkling of the dimension of freedom that corresponds with the “grounding” aspect of our experience of depth; and we may also observe the foundation of what we called hope in the previous chapter.
The name of this ultimately grounding and courage-bestowing horizon of freedom that becomes transparent in acts of courage is—God. That grounding freedom is what the word “God” means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it and speak of the deep freedom for which you yearn, beyond the finite securities you cling to in order to escape existential anxiety. Perhaps, in order to do this, you must forget many things you have learned about “God,” perhaps even the word itself. But as long as you open yourself to a courage whereby you realistically accept your existence, you cannot then call yourself an atheist in any meaningful sense of the term. For you cannot consistently maintain that there is no basis in reality for your courage. Even in your uttering such a statement, you would give evidence of your participating in such a power of self-affirmation.
32. The following text is an excerpt. Previously published in Haught, What is God?, 47–68. Reprinted with permission.
33. Sartre, Existentialism and the Human Emotions, 52–59.
34. See Kohlberg, Philosophy of Moral Development.
35. See Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death.
36. See Tillich, Courage To Be, 64–85.
37. Tillich, Courage To Be, 32.
38. Tillich, Courage To Be, 36–39.
39. See Tillich, Courage To Be, 32–36.
40. See Tillich, Courage To Be, 181.
4: Beauty41
We have seen that the encounter with depth, futurity, and freedom requires an attitude of allowing ourselves to be grasped by them. Our typical response, though, is one of initially shrinking back from entering into the embrace of these horizons (which are really three ways of thinking about a single horizon) while, at the same time, being irresistibly drawn toward them. Rather than allowing ourselves to be immediately comprehended by depth, futurity, and freedom, we try to place them under our control. Such a response is inevitably unsuccessful, however, and we finally realize that our sense of well-being, our happiness, requires that we surrender ourselves to them.
Nowhere is this need to surrender more obvious than in our encounter with beauty. In order for us to experience the beauty of nature, other persons, a great event, or an artistic masterpiece, we have to allow ourselves to be “carried away” by the aesthetic phenomenon. This experience of being grasped by the beautiful is one of the clearest models we have for expressing what is involved in the intuition of the divine. In fact, it is more than a model. We may even say that our ordinary experience of the beautiful is already an encounter with ultimacy.
The experience of beauty is as two-sided as is the religious experience of the sacred. On the one hand, great beauty is overwhelming in its seductiveness and attractiveness. It is a mysterium fascinans that compels us and invites us to surrender ourselves to it. At times we have all experienced the seductiveness of the beautiful, especially as it is embodied in other persons, but also in the glories of nature, music, and literature. At the same time, we have felt the pangs of unfulfilled longing that accompany every aesthetic experience. We are implicitly aware of the chasm that lies between the beauty embodied in any particular object of aesthetic delight and the unlimited beauty for which we long in the depths of our desire. This abysmal distance is a mysterium tremendum from which we shrink back. Our recoil from ultimate beauty takes the form of a fixation on particular, limited, aesthetic objects; this fixation is accompanied by an anaesthetizing of our deep need for a wider and fuller beauty.
In short, our quest for beauty is a quest for the divine. That ultimately satisfying beauty which we long for—but continues to elude us—is what the word “God” means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it and speak of the ultimately beautiful for which you are continually searching in the depths of your desire. Perhaps, in order to do this, you must forget much that you have learned about God, perhaps even that name itself. For if you know that God means ultimate “beauty,” you already know much about the divine. You cannot then call yourself an atheist, for you cannot think or say, “I am completely indifferent to beauty.” If you could say this in complete seriousness, then you would be an atheist; otherwise, you are not. For as long as you have some longing for a wider and deeper beauty than you have experienced thus far in your life, you show that you have already in some way encountered the divine, or rather, that the divine has taken hold of you. Another way to think about God, therefore, is as the horizon of ultimate beauty toward which you are irresistibly drawn.
Scholars of religion rightly make a distinction between religious and aesthetic experience (as we shall call the experience of beauty). Religion, they often say, involves the symbolic sense of a “totally other” dimension that becomes transparent to the believer in the images and objects that stand for and mediate the “sacred.” The aesthetic experience, on the other hand, is not explicitly concerned with the symbolic transparency of the aesthetic object. It does not have to understand a beautiful object as standing for any sacred reality “beyond” itself. The beautiful seems sufficient in itself and does not inevitably lead us into another dimension, whereas the religious sense does.42 To many individuals for whom the “sacred” means nothing at all, the “beautiful” means a great deal. Therefore, some distinction must be made between “the sacred” and “the beautiful.”
But can we so neatly set one experience apart from the other? I am uncomfortable with too sharp of a distinction between the aesthetic and the religious experience. To segregate them too crisply seems artificial and out of touch with what actually happens in our encounter with the beauty of reality. For if we carefully ponder what is involved in the experience of concrete beauty, we may think of it as continuous with our encountering the divine. By our tasting the beauty in our ordinary experience, we are already being invited into the realm of ultimacy, although we may not wish to interpret it as such. Nonetheless, the point of the following is to argue that this is indeed the case. An examination of our ordinary encounter with beauty may disclose to us that the beautiful is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans too, and that we respond
