"WOMAN" AND THE "PRIMITIVE" IN PAUL TILLICHS LIFE AND THOUGHT

Some Implications for the Study of Religion

Tracy Fessenden

One of the qualities with which [Tillich] endow[ed] eros, and the loved woman, [was] the capacity to constitute him as a being.

—Rollo May1

Tillichs pursuit of women was a search for the Eternal Feminine. Whether he was exclaiming over the "10,000 women's legs" in Berlin, whether he was read­ing pornography, or whether he was seducing the latest woman of his life, he pursued the image of la femme éternelle, the shadow side of the Christian God, so deep in shadow that she cannot even be mentioned in systematic doc­trine.

—Tom Driver2

How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification? . . . How might the socially saturated do­mains of exclusion be recast from their status as "constitutive" to beings who might be said to matter?

—Judith Buder3

In 1993, at an American Academy of Religion (AAR) session gamely co-sponsored by the North American Paul Tillich Society and the AAR s Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Group, I presented a paper titled "La Pensée Sauvage: Women and the 'Primitive' in Tillich s Life and Thought." My reading traced what I saw as a set of interrelated assumptions about sex, gender, and "primitive" others from Tillich s crucial 1926 essay "The Demonic" through his

1 Rollo May, Paulus: Reminiscences of a Friendship (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 53. 2 Tom Driver, "Scandalous Existence," New Republic, 24 November 1973, 28. 3 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 188-89.

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later reflections on politics, the arts, world religions, and eros, together with temporally adjacent works in ethnography, psychoanalysis, and art history. My sources in the paper were also biographical: against what appeared to be a quiet consensus that, as Tom Driver puts it, the "lurid details" of Paul Tillich s "secret sexual life" given in Hannah Tillich's From Time to Time had "no place in his theology,"41 argued that Tillich the connoisseur of prostitutes and pornography and Tillich the systematic theologian might be seen to converge in, for ex­ample, the musings on the erotic resonance of "woman" in The Socialist Deci-sion, the image of the ground of being as life-giving and life-extinguishing womb in Systematic Theology, or the sexualizing of primitive ritual and art in "The Demonic."5

The paper provoked a spirited and mixed response. The generous con­versation among many in the audience strengthened my conviction that Tillich s "erotic solution," for what it suggests of his lapses of indifference to gen­der, racial, and class privilege as forms of power, rightfully compels serious and sustained attention. A number of comments, however, suggested that while my paper was colorful, entertaining, or "interesting," the concerns it raised re­mained outside the scope of theological discussion. One listener upbraided me for taking Hannah Tillich's account of Paul Tillich s sexual exploits at face value. Another asked what all of this had to do, finally, with Tillich s theology. An anonymous respondent to whom the paper was later circulated questioned "the cash value of references to Tillich's own personal interest in sexuality—is it merely to elicit our interest? What is the point?"

What, indeed, is the point? Or as a professional acquaintance asked me privately after the panel, "What, exactly, is bothering you?" However patron­izingly put at the time (I was half tempted to answer, "PMS"), this question remains acute for me. I teach religious studies and women's studies at a large state university; my research interests would probably peg me as an American­ist, and while I do take up theological issues in my writing and teaching, NI am not by training or vocation a theologian. Why, then, should I and others simi­larly and differently positioned find Tillich's sexual biography so problematic? This essay attempts to recast the original material of my 1993 paper in the form of a response to this question.

I begin by reviewing the state of conversation on the "problem" (for gen­erally it is seen as a problem) of reconciling Tillich's life and thought, though I offer no new attempt to theorize their connections. With Tillich himself, and with others who have found his biography illuminating, I simply assume that the materials of life as lived are also the materials of theology and that the achievements of Tillich the thinker were made by Tillich the man. I then turn

4 Driver, "Scandalous Existence," 28. 5 1 am particularly grateful to Alexander Irwin, Margaret Miles, and Owen Thomas for their

comments and encouragement at this session.

Fessenden: "Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich's life and Thought 47

to the historical context of Tillich's erotic investment in forms of human other­ness that, by his own accounts, sustained his work as a theologian, in order to recover the presence of these other lives in a body of writing that both required and submerged them. Finally, I consider some of the implications of Tillich's legacy for the study of religion, which, for a variety of institutional and histori­cal reasons, remains recognizably Tillichian in many of its assumptions and approaches. The connections (in Tillich and elsewhere) between women and primitive others, and the conventional rendering of both as mute or marginal to academic discourse, are felt in religious studies departments not only in text­book representations of women's or "primitive" religious lives but in a whole host of assumptions about the practice of religion more generally—as some­thing colorful, often irrational, archaic, or timeless, and vaguely feminine, an indispensable muse to the more manly work of theology or theory.

Tillich and Women: The Biographical Context

Tillich's sexual conduct began to provoke debate shortly after his period of service as an army chaplain in World War I and subsequent brief marriage to Grethi Wever. Following their divorce, according to biographers Wilhelm Pauck and Marion Pauck, Tillich "plunge[d]" into a series of sexual relationships that constituted "a life he euphemistically called 'the Bohème.'"6 Already his col­leagues were urging Tillich to "seek a balance in his relations with women," to leave off his treatment of them "as a means to productive intellectuality." Ac­cording to Pauck and Pauck, "Tillich rationalized his not unsullied reputation... yet he rejected [his friends'] advice He did not want to pay the high price of the loss of nature, the demonic, the world of art, intuitive truth, and mysticism" (84). When Tillich felt himself "deprived of the experience of the erotic, whether actual or sublimated," the Paucks write, "he could not produce" (83).

Interpretive narratives of Tillich's erotic life now include, in addition to the standard biographical sources (the Paucks' Paul Tillich, Rollo May's Paulus, and Hannah Tillich's From Time to Time), Alexander Irwin's Eros toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic, as well as shorter pieces by Melvin Vulgamore, Owen Thomas, and others. Hannah Tillich's memoir, writ­ten in 1973, was the first of these accounts to be published. According to Owen Thomas,

The picture we get [from Hannah Tillich] is of Tillich as a compulsive womanizer, adulterer, and exploiter of innumerable women, one who

6 Wilhelm Pauck and Marion Pauck, Paul TiUich: His Life and Thought, vol. 1, Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 81. For the sake of clarity, I somewhat reluctantly refer to the work of the Paucks or of Pauck and Pauck, even though this volume, on Tillich s "life," was "primarily the work of Marion Pauck" (xi). The second volume, on Tillich's "thought," was to have been written primarily by Wilhelm Pauck; it never appeared.

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lavished love, time, attention, letters, and poems on other women but not on his wife. He demanded secrecy from his women friends for fear his own reputation might be ruined. The exploitation was in the use of the energy Tillich needed and received from the women to carry on his work, energy which he transmuted into his ideas. Added to this was his fascination with sadism and pornography which Hannah describes as the "Obscene signs of the real life that he had transformed into the gold of abstraction: King Midas of the spirit."7

This picture is widely corroborated. Tillich's "erotic solution," worked out in the 1920s, was to see as morally acceptable all relationships (but primarily his extramarital involvements) from which "agape was not absent."8 The range of potentially agapic relationships was extensive. According to Richard Fox's 1985 biography of Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, Tillich was "not just unfaithful to his wife, Hannah; he was exuberantly, compulsively promiscuous. Niebuhr once sent one of his female students to see Tillich during his office hours. He wel­comed her warmly, closed the door, and began fondling her. She reported the episode to Niebuhr, who never forgave Tillich."9

Whether individually or, as Rollo May puts it, "heap[ed]... into a nameless mass,"10 women figure centrally in Paul Tillich's biography. With few exceptions, however, the subject of women figures only as a massive and, one suspects, enabling silence in Tillich's published writings. His coda to On the Boundary seems to allude to his "clandestine" relations with women (which were in fact widely known)11 while leaving open the question of whether, in his own assess­ment, these even mattered for the shaping of his life: "Many possibilities of human existence, both physical and spiritual, have been discussed in these pages. Some things have not been mentioned, although they are a part of my biography. Many more things have been left untouched, because they do not

7 Owen Thomas, "Thought and Life: The Cases of Heidegger and Tillich" (unpublished manuscript, 1995), 7.1 am grateful to the author for making this paper available to me before its publication.

8 Pauck and Pauck, 92. See also Melvin Vulgamore, "Tillich's Erotic Solution," Encounter 45, no. 3 (summer 1984): 193-212.

9 Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 259; qtd. in Thomas, 8.

io May, 61. 11 As Alexander Irwin suggests, "The fact remains that until todays generation of lesbian and

gay theologians . . . Tillich was the modern Christian thinker whose erotic life had attracted the greatest public scrutiny and generated the widest discussion." Eros toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 100. This is amply confirmed by the Paucks. Before his death (and well before the publication of Hannahs memoir), Tillich asked a friend for help in destroying the evidence of his affairs so that he be remembered "as a systematic theologian and not just as a lover." Qtd. in Ann Belford Ulanov, "Between Anxiety and Faith: The Role of the Feminine in Tillich's Theological Thought," in Paul Tillich on Creativity, ed. Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989), 142.

Fessenden: "Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich s Life and Thought 49

belong to the story of my life and thought."12 It seems to make no difference whether (at least) some of Tillich's relationships with women constituted a cru­cial "part of [his] biography" to be discreetly passed over in silence, or whether, in his judgment, they do not even "belong to the story"; in either case, the mes­sage we have from Tillich is that the women in his life were simply not worth mentioning. As Alexander Irwin notes, despite Tillich s "frequent complaints about puritanical moralism and Christian prudishness . . . [his] published dis­cussions of sexuality are marked by a distinct taste for euphemisms and cir­cumlocutions."13

A good example of this indirection, and one of the few places where we find the appearance of "woman" (if not actual women) in Tillich s writing, is in The Socialist Decision, where Tillich writes of "the powers of origin possessed by woman by virtue of her resonance with eros and motherhood." Woman s "resonance with eros and motherhood" means that her consciousness "cannot easily be incorporated into the extremely one-sided, male-oriented, rationalistic system' (Tillichs emphases). "Socialism cannot possibly tolerate . . . male pa-triarchalism";14 the archetypal feminine in this text comes to be associated with socialism as the theonomous alternative to communism, nationalism, and other political arrangements particularly susceptible to the distortions of sin. Women s powers of origin, unsuited to capitalistic, technologized society, equip them to sustain life, to heal a disturbed relation to the world. As Judith Plas-kow puts it, for Tillich, "the relative 'naturalness' of women [and] their less highly differentiated sense of self [were] viewed as marks and guarantors of a close and fervent God-relation throughout life."15 For this reason, according to Melvin Vulgamore, "Tillichs erotic experiences were simply too vivid and satisfying, too real and undeniable to be excluded from his theological system. The highest form of love for him could not exclude the warmth of eros nor libidinous desire."16

In Vulgamore s view, Tillich s erotic life is undeniably present, however submerged and abstracted, in his theological writing. Others who have com­mented on the relationship between Tillich s life and thought have variously decided (1) that Tillichs erotic life is present in the work primarily as damage, in the form of "deep corruption," "fraud," and "hypocrisy" that "inevitably in­fect the texture of his oeuvre";17 or (2) that the erotic life remains external to

12 Paul Tillich, On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch (New York: Scribner's, 1966), 97. 13 Irwin, 45. 14 Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision, trans. Franklin Sherman (New York: Harper & Row,

1977), 152^53. 15 Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold

Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980), 119. 16 Vulgamore, 200. 17 Donald MacKinnon, Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM, 1979), 130, 134; qtd. in

Thomas, 8.

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the thought, and, further, that the disjunction between a life of concupiscence, on one side, and a body of work devoted to discerning the depths of Gods power and love, on the other, is (reassuringly, and in good Tillichian fashion) attributable to the conditions of finitude, sin, and estrangement that are only fragmentarily transcended in any life; or (3) that the connection between the life and thought is irrelevant and/or impossible to establish on sound theoreti­cal grounds.18 Of course, the vast majority of those who write on Tillich do not mention his relationships with women at all, whether for any of the foregoing reasons, or because discretion and respect enjoin against it, or because they are simply uninterested in the question. In any event, the silence that Tillich demanded from the women with whom he had relationships, the silence of his own periodic denial of those relationships,19 and the absence of sustained reflection on women, gender, and sexuality in his own writing are matched by the silence that most theologians appear to have agreed tacitly to observe on the subject.

No such reticence obtains, however, among those who seek to reconcile Tillich s life with his thought when the actions, habits, or preferences in ques­tion, for example, are Tillich s love of art, his experiences in Weimar Germany, his flight from Nazism, and so on. Something else is clearly at stake in the si­lence surrounding Tillich's erotic life, particularly given his own surprisingly candid assertions that the "creative chaos" of "human relations with respect to authority, education, family, sex, friendship and pleasure" during his pos t -World War I years in Germany provided ample "material for an apologetic theology."20 According to Irwin,

When [From Time to Time] was first published, it provoked a scandal in the theological community. Its descriptions of Tillich s tireless pursuit of women and taste for sadistic pornography were so shocking that many readers and critics interpreted the work as an act of pure vengeance.... Aii unwillingness to face the truth about Tillich's erotic conduct was evi­dent in the embarrassment of many conservative theologians. Some even indicated explicitly that they would have preferred not to be in­formed about Tillich s erotic behavior. Excessive attention to the details of Tillich s biography, they feared, might cloud one s judgment of his intellectual achievement. "How much do we need to know?" asked the editor of one journal.21

18 Thomas is my primary source for the summary of these views. 19 According to Hannah Tillich, her husband would periodically confess to infidelity as his

"predicament" and then retract or deny the confession. From Time to Time (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), 246.

20 Paul Tillich, "Autobiographical Reflections of Paul Tillich," in The Theology of Paul Tillich, ed. Charles W. Kegley (New York: Pilgrim, 1982), 13-14.

21 Irwin (cited in n. 11), 103.

Fessenden: 'Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich s life and Thought 51

Implicit in the act of laying blame for these embarrassments at the feet of Hannah Tillich is the assumption that Paul Tillich did not disclose his sex­ual pursuits to friends and intimates. This, however, we know was not the case. May wrote Paulus to deflect attention from what he knew Hannah Tillich would say in From Time to Time and ended up conceding most of it, despite his insistence (which was also Tillich s) that "the sexual urge . . . was in the service of another aim which I call, in its strict sense, eros."22 Tillichs myriad infi­delities, taste for sadism, and enthusiasm for pornography were all "secrets" that May somehow knew, as he also knew that Tillich demanded the strictest confidentiality from his mistresses.23 Even as May and other of the Tillichs' associates begged Hannah Tillich not to publish her book, May, Niebuhr, and Tillich himself all spoke on these subjects; they spoke to one another and to male colleagues and admiring students, who have kept the stories in circu­lation.24 At an AAR panel discussion of Irwin's Eros toward the World, John Carey affirmed that "no good has cometo anyone as a result of Hannah Tillich's angry book,"25 as though posthumously enjoining Tillich's wife, as Tillich had enjoined his lovers, not to speak of certain experiences with him. But why not? How are we to understand this silencing?

The rule of silence surrounding Tillich's sexual biography belongs, I sug­gest, to a particular sort of gentleman's agreement, honored in the breach as well as in the observance, which is usefully seen through the lens of Heidi Hart-mann's definition of patriarchy: "relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women."26 Illuminating moments in the enforcement of that agreement include Rollo May s classic de­fense, familiar to battered women, of Tillich's "sadistic tendency" in relation to his lovers as "a desperate attempt to reach someone deeply... to break the 'skin

22 May (cited in n. 1), 52. 23 According to May, "Secrecy was another essential trait of Paulus s erotic life. . . . The

women who succeeded with Paulus were those who had and kept secrets with him. The veiled quality was necessary for die relationship to survive" (55).

24 Tom Driver recalls that during his student days at Union Theological Seminary, the theolo­gians he studied with frequently went in for "gossipy tales" and that "Tillich had more such stories than anyone else." Among students "it was simply said—indeed, it was obvious—that Tìllich had an eye for beautiful women." "The Tillichian Spell: Memories of a Student Mesmerized in the 1950s," Newsletter of the North American Paul Tillich Society 22, no. 1 (January 1996): 6.

25 John J. Carey, "Response to Alexander C. Irwins Eros toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Francisco, Calif, November 1992); qtd. in Thomas (cited in n. 7), 7.

26 Heidi Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union," in Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End, 1981), 14; qtd. in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men; English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3.

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barrier/"27 One could also cite Mays and Tom Drivers good-natured accounts of the sexual attention Tillich lavished on their own female partners. "I was a little proud of the event, and had no jealousy," writes May of Tillich s seduc­tion of his (Mays) fiancée, an event May describes as "a kind of psychologi­cal reenactment of the old custom of the deflowering of the new bride by the Lord of the estate."28 Driver, in an address gushingly titled "The Tillichian Spell: Memories of a Student Mesmerized in the 1950s," relates an occasion on which Tillich, speaking to a packed lecture hall at Columbia University, repeatedly interrupted his talk in order to summon Driver s wife, Anne, among the many standing listeners, to come up and sit beside him on an upturned trash bin on­stage. "She did," Driver recalls, "and for the duration of the lecture we listened to him and looked at them both, he in his chair and the beautiful young woman on her wastebasket beside him. But it was so endearing you had to forgive him."29

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has famously given the name "homosocial de­sire" to the continuum of male-male bonds—between male teachers and their male students, between male colleagues or rivals, and between male friends or lovers—which, in the terms of Hartmann s definition of patriarchy, create the requisite solidarity and interdependence among men that allows them to domi­nate women. Sedgwick suggests that, within patriarchal social systems, male homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality belong to the requisite, structural denial both of the continuities between "male bonding" (e.g., in fraternities and seminaries) and homosexual desire, and of the "special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for main­taining and transmitting patriarchal power."30

One could argue that, in Tillich's case, compulsory—indeed obsessive— heterosexuality worked to "normalize" the homosocial desire that characterized his relationship to other boys in his beloved Wingolf Fellowship;31 his enduring love for his friend Richard Wagner, for whom his first wife deserted him;32 the atmosphere at Union Theological Seminary, where he and his male colleagues swapped "gossipy tales" of sexual conquest;33 and his mentorship of students whose wives he flattered or seduced. I am more interested, however, in the role of women in these triangulated relationships, which belong not only to Tillich s private life but also to very public discourses, structures, and institutions that maintain and transmit patriarchal power.

27 May 63. 28 Ibid., 51. 29 Driver, "The Tillichian Spell," 6. 30 Sedgwick, 26. 31 P. Tìllich, "Autobiographical Reflections," 11; Pauck and Pauck (cited in n. 6), 20ff. 32 Pauck and Pauck, 80-81. 33 Driver, "The Tillichian Spell," 6.

Fessenden: 'Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich s Life and Thought 53

Whether women in Tillich s life were targets of his sadistic fantasies or mediators of grace and forgiveness, whether they secretly raged against him, "felt overwhelming gratitude and love,"34 or sat on proffered trash cans by his side, their silence—enforced on many levels—enabled the theological con­versation to continue. l ike the girls who were occasionally invited to join the Wingolf festivals but otherwise remained "out of bounds," the women admitted into Tillich s world seem to have gone "as guest-observers rather than as par­ticipants."35 Writes Rollo May, "This was the function of Hannah and my wife in the many conversations we four had: They absorbed some of the intensity."36

Recognition of her buffering, enabling status in relation to her husband s work is what made Hannah Tillich, for all her jealousy and rage, able freely to iden­tify with the other women in Tillichs life in having been "turn[ed] into an abstraction."37 On a more practical level, it was women (occasionally Hannah Tillich, but also students like Mary Heilner and Elizabeth Cooper Wood) who typed, revised, organized, rewrote, and edited Tillich s lectures and notes, mak­ing possible the publication of much of his work (including the most popular of his sermon collections), which would not have seen the light of day without them. So, too, the publication of Systematic Theology relied on the uncredited, invisible labors of secretaries, friends, and students, many of them women whose names have been forgotten.38

Other Others

It is not only "woman" who inhabited what Judith Butler calls the "consti­tutive . . . domains of exclusion" in relation to Tillich s published thought. Butler suggests that the tendency within much current feminist and psychoanalytic theory to privilege gender as a category of analysis dangerously

presumes that sexual difference constitutes an autonomous sphere of relations and disjunctions, and is not to be understood as articulated through or as other vectors of power. . . . [T]hough there are clearly good historical reasons for keeping "race" and "sexuality" and "sexual difference" as separate analytic spheres, there are also quite pressing and significant historical reasons for asking how and where we might read . . . their convergence.39

S4 Ulanov (cited in n. 11), 141. 35 Pauck and Pauck, 24. s« May, 33. 57 H. Tillich (cited in n. 19), 242-43 . 3 8 On the largely uncredited labors of Tillich's female students and friends toward getting his

ideas into print, see Pauck and Pauck, 231; on Hannah Tillich's service as a typist and caretaker, see p. 92. Marion Pauck may also be seen in this light; see n. 6.

39 Butler (cited in n. 3), 167.

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One site where dominant constructions of sexual and other human differences converge, in modernist reflection, is the category of the primitive.40 As Mari­anna Torgovnick writes in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives,

Gender issues always inhabit Western versions of the primitive. . . . Freud's theories about sexuality, Malinowski s observations of male and female roles, have assured that how we conceive of the primitive helps form our conception of ourselves as sexual, gendered beings. .. . When the conventional substitution of females for primitives is avoided, other, often class, substitutions may occur instead. Frequently, the working class or other subordinated segments of a population become associ­ated or identified with primitives—the Irish, for example, or Jews . . . or U.S. blacks. These Others are processed, like primitives, through a va­riety of tropes which see them as a threatening horde, a faceless mass, promiscuous, breeding, inferior.41

The imagined lives of primitive others, Torgovnick points out, are by no means wholly negative; in Western fantasy, the primitive often represents, and prom­ises to restore, a lost connection to being, wholeness, or transcendence, to the sacredness of the earth, to genuine selfhood, to a liberating, "natural" sexuality.

Tillich s understanding of the erotic, and the feminine, drew deeply on this cultural deposit of Western belief and practice. In his 1936 Travel Diary, for example, Tillich lined up desirable women alongside other forms of the com-pellingly exotic: "Down the BouF Mich through a crowd of students from the Sorbonne, to the Coupole on Montparnasse. Delightful atmosphere. Arabs, Turks, Negroes, all kinds of models, e tc . . . . Paris is the greatest temptation in the world." Or again, "Then on to a Negro bar, featuring interesting types. . . . With Eckart [von Sydow] to the famous Maison des Nations {maison d' amour de luxe). Can be seen—for a few francs. Interesting rooms, gallery of beautiful girls."42

One of the most sustained accounts of Tillich s habit of associating sexually available and/or desirable women with other strikingly objectified forms of em­bodied otherness comes in Hannah Tillich s narrative of the Tillichs' early im­pressions of New York. I quote at some length:

Paulus was eager to find out about the red-light districts in New York. Wherever we had been, Paulus had first walked around and then guided me to the "whore" streets....

40 Primitive is, of course, a loaded term. To leave it in quotation marks throughout this essay would be to signal its artifactual quality, its association with European-derived cultural assump­tions, but at the risk of implying that those assumptions are always visible and may now be neatly excised from thought, which is far more than I can claim.

41 Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 17-18.

42 Paul Tillich, My Travel Diary, 1936: Between Two Worlds, ed. Jerald C. Brauer, trans. Maria Pelikan (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 103,108.

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In Paris, Paulus took me to a street that had what looked at first like the window displays in one of the big Fifth Avenue department stores. But the dummies in different outfits were human beings. I was intrigued. This was the dream street of male desire and female submis­sion. Here was the simply dressed girl looking like a neighbor or the sleeping beauty in pink veils; here was the girl with high boots and a whip or the lady in violet velvet; here was the girl begging for punish­ment. It was a window into hidden truth.

In New York, we could not find any red-light district. We learned only vaguely about call girls in hotels. What men did outside of mar­riage was kept hidden.. . . Where were the dreams accompanying sex?

We found some sort of consolation in Harlem. Somebody must have taken us to Smalls Paradise Inside the long, dark room, we sat facing clouds that drifted behind an orchestra of Negroes, who played noisily and shrilly. It was as if we had entered a tropical forest with par­rots screaming, dark faces peering out of a jungle, falsetto voices, and brilliant colors. A Negro danced with me, a Negress with Paulus. We did not know the rhythm so we stopped dancing, but we sat there and felt good, taking in the emotional outbursts in color, voice, and smells, which we had missed so much—at Union, nobody smelled of anything. We felt relaxed at Smalls and returned there with our friends, grateful

" voyeurs, taking in the primeval charm of the hearty men and swaying women. We considered it an aesthetic show. We did not think at all in economic, political, or social terms. . . .

People at the seminary did not think our adventures such a good idea.43

It would be easy enough to take Hannah Tillich s descriptions of these "ad­ventures" to be a regrettable lapse into racism and sexism with no bearing on her husband s work. To do so, however, would be to ignore the way in which conflations of women, sex, and blackness belong also to Tillich s personal writ-

43 H. Tillich, 175-77. This account admittedly comes from Hannah Tillich, not Paul Tillich, about which two things must be said. First, as to its credibility as a representation of Paul Tillich s perceptions and behavior: In connection with these "adventures" in Harlem, Hannah Tillich reports conversations with her husband about the powers, dangers, and attractions of blackness: "Paulus and I had talked about the black image from primeval times on, the dark people being considered the least aristocratic . . . in psychic circumstances, the black or dark one is always the devil . . . the black soul against the white soul . . . black as a magic color expressing evil or dark, underground powers . . . in fairy tales, the black princess, submerged under water, reappearing as white and no longer evil" (177; ellipses in original; echoes of this discussion, more nuanced and less culpably racist, can be found in Paul Tillich's discussion of the demonic). Hannah Tillich s descriptions and juxtapositions of Harlem's Negro bars and of desirable women for sale, moreover, match those in her husband s travel diary. Second, in arguing that this vision was also Paul Tillich's, I hardly mean in this instance to exonerate his wife. Hannah Tillich's participation as a privileged and highly educated white woman in these scenes of sexual exploitation and colonialist fantasy alerts us to this position's race and class entailments as well as to its availability across genders.

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ings, as well as to modernist discourses of "high" art forms, notably expression­ist painting, whose importance for Tillich s theology is routinely acknowledged. According to Tillich in The Religious Situation (1926), "Expressionism proper arose with a revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary force.. . . Naturally the movement turned back to older, primitive and exotic forms in which the inner expressive force of reality was still to be found untamed. The discovery of primitive and Asiatic art came to be the symbol of revolt against the spirit of capitalist society."44

This statement is interesting not least for placing primitive and exotic art in the same relation to capitalist society that woman would occupy nearly a decade later, in Tillich s The Socialist Decision (1933). Yet the model of the primitive, to which opponents of the capitalist spirit turned "naturally" (but also with the self-serving force of "discovery") was in fact made available to European artists through the twin forces of capitalism and colonialist expansion. Trade and exploration in Africa, South America, and Asia delivered typically plundered artifacts to cities like Paris, Berlin, and London beginning in the seventeenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, ethnographic "finds" were ex­hibited at worlds fairs as well as in ethnographic museums, like the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford or the Musée Ethnographique des Missions Scientifiques in Paris. In these early exhibitions, the collected artifacts were jumbled together as the spoils of a hectic Western imperialism rather than singled out for display as art objects in their own right. Primitive objects became "art" (if always of a second order) when they entered the collections, and eventually inhabited the artistic styles, of such painters as Gaugin, Matisse, and Picasso.45

Probably the most remarked case of primitive influence on European painting is Picasso's 1907 Les demoiselles d'Avignon. Picasso had begun the painting as a brothel scene depicting five naked women, a medical student (perhaps alluding to syphilis), and a sailor. After a visit to the Musée Ethno­graphique in Paris—where the tribal objects, Picasso later recalled, impressed him most vividly with their repulsive smell—Picasso completely redid the painting: the sailor and student disappeared, and three of the prostitutes were given African masks (or masklike faces). As Phyllis Rose remarks in her account of the paintings transformation, the completed Demoiselles "call[s] on an asso­ciation between female sexuality and blackness which exists only from a white perspective."46

44 Paul Tillich, excerpt from The Religious Situation (1926), in Paul Tillich, On Art and Archi­tecture, ed. John Dillenberger in collaboration with Jane Dillenberger, trans. Robert P. Scharlemann (New York: Crossroad, 1970), 68.

451 am here indebted to discussions in Torgovnick; Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Phyllis Rose,/azz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), esp. chap. 1, "Savage Dance."

46 Rose, 43.1 am indebted to Rose's discussion of this painting and to discussions in Torgov­nick and in Mark C. Taylor, "The Politics of Theo-ry," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59, no. 1 (spring 1991): 1-37. See also Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an

Fessenden: 'Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich s life and Thought 57

An interest in the primitive also animated adjacent intellectual movements, notably psychoanalysis and the history of religions. For Freud, ethnographic readings of primitive ritual and belief as belonging to the "childhood of the race" implied an association between the childlike primitive and the figure of the mother or simply of woman. We see this in The Question of Lay Analy­sis, where Freud likens female sexuality to "a dark continent,"47 as well as in the theory of the origin of religion in Totem and Taboo. Torgovnick suggests that although the primal horde is identified as masculine, Freud s theory maps so­cietal development onto the development of the individual; thus, the primitive residuum that societies leave behind, like the id within the ego, is associated with the mother.48 "There is a joking saying that love is home-sickness/" writes Freud in "The Uncanny," "and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: 'this place is familiar to me, I've been here before/ we may interpret the place as being his mother s genitals or her body," "the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning."49

According to Tillich, the modern "discovery" of "primitive and exotic forms," a discovery of which expressionist painting was paradigmatic, "made re­ligious art again possible."50 By his own lights, that discovery also made Tillich s theology possible. Tillich wrote of his early theological career being nurtured within "the small social group called 'Bohemia,'" a circle of artists, intellectuals, and political radicals tuned into "Nietzsche, expressionism, and psychoanaly­sis."51 Tillich claimed that he had "derived" his own religious and philosophical categories from his early encounter with, or what he called his "conversion" to, expressionism following the First World War. After the decline of German ex­pressionism proper, Tillich continued to use the phrase "expressive style" to distinguish those works of art which in his view did what expressionist painting does, which is to "express . . . the ground and abyss in which everything is rooted."52

In expressionism, as in related modernist discourses of the primitive, the erotic element of the primitive is strongly foregrounded and given both a gra­cious and a threatening aspect, corresponding to Tillichian notions of ground and abyss. Assuming the form of a meditation on desire and restraint, European

Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," Critical Inquiry (autumn 1985): 204 -42 .

47 Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psy­choanalytical Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), 20:212.

48 Torgovnick, 204. 49 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in Standard Edition, 17:245.1 am indebted to Torgovnick

for these examples from Freud and their interpretation. so R Tillich, On Art and Architecture, 123. si P. Tillich, On the Boundary, 22-23. 52 P. Tillich, On Art and Architecture, 123.

58 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

accounts of "the sexual life of savages," to invoke a classic text in anthropology, tend to reproduce Nietzsche s model of the Dionysian revel in The Birth of Tragedy: "The central concern of such celebrations was, almost universally, a complete sexual promiscuity overriding every form of established tribal law; all the savage urges of the mind were unleashed."53 Primitive "passion," with its dangerous excesses, might as easily be read as the regenerating power of "spirit" or "soul," a religious dimension existing at the depths of things and at the mar­gins of alienated, technologized culture. In his classic account of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, Nathan Huggins suggests that voyeuristic white pilgrims turned to Harlem s black performers, writers, and artists for a vicarious sexual and religious pleasure, for the "soul" that was missing from their own and Americas past.54 The white Parisian art dealer Paul Guillaume put it this way: "We who think we have a soul will blush at the poverty of our spiritual state before the superiority of blacks who have four souls, one in the head, one in the nose and throat, the shadow, and one in the blood."55

Primitive artifacts of the kind that Guillaume traded in figure prominently in Tillich s 1926 essay "The Demonic," written shortly after the birth of the Tillichs' first child, Erdmuthe. Tillich had left his wife and new daughter behind to spend the summer in Paris with his old "bohemian" friends Eckart von Sydow, the historian of German expressionism, and Christian Herrmann, who had once lived rent-free with Tillich in exchange for six months of amateur psy­choanalysis.56 In this essay, Tillich addresses capitalism, nationalism, and the aestheticization of the German state as "demonries of the present." Yet the first place he turns to describe "the nature and reality of the demonic" is to what he calls "the art of primitive peoples," the "statues of their Gods and fetishes . . . their crafts, and dance-masks." "We have noticed that these objects matter to us," he says, "since in them are expressed depths of reality which had, to be sure, escaped our consciousness, but in subconscious strata had never ceased to determine our existence."57 Tillich cites "negro sculpture" and "Shiva picture[s]" (79) as exemplary forms in which what he catalogs as the "organs of the will to power"—"hands, feet, teeth, eyes . . . breasts, thighs, sex organs"—acquire a "strength of expression that can mount to wild cruelty and orgiastic ecstasy" (78). What tribal masks and "negro sculpture" reveal "for the present," he con­tinues, "the history of religions confirms with inexhaustible material": "vital-orgiastic nature cults," "orgiastic phallic cults," "ritual prostitution," "intoxi-

5 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 25.

54 Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), esp. chap. 3, "Hear t of Darkness," and chap. 6, "White/Black Faces—Black Masks."

55 Paul Guillaume, qtd. in Rose, 45.

56 See H. Tillich (cited in n. 19), 115,127; and Pauck and Pauck (cited in n. 6), 81 .

57 Paul Tillich, "The Demonic," in The Interpretation of History (New York: Scribners, 1936), 77.

Fessenden: 'Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich s Life and Thought 59

cated laceration myths and orgies," and "blood sacrifice to the god of the earth who devours life in order to create life" (79). These familiar tropes of primitivist discourse then become paradigmatic of the demonic wherever it appears: "The demonry of the state, church, and economics is visible when the holiness of these social forms . . . is misused destructively.... Here too, the dual face of the demonic shows itself in its terrifying dialectics as it does in the sculptures of primitive religions" (92-93).

"Demonic" Inspiration: The Human Context

The "demonic," for Tillich, named "the form-destroying eruption of the creative basis of things" (85). The germ of this formulation can be found in the 1919 essay "On the Idea of a Theology of Culture." This essay, however, takes its examples not from primitive art but from German expressionism; its cate­gory of "form-shattering religious import . . . struggling to find form," according to Tillich, was "worked out. . . under [expressionism s] influence."58 "The De­monic" develops this notion of the form-destroying-creation-of-form, visible in all instances of what Tillich would later call the expressive style.

So "The Demonic" confronts us with a question: Why, here, does Tillich talk explicitly about primitive sculptures, masks, and dance? Why not talk in­stead, as he had done and would continue to do, about the expressionist and the expressive, European forms that "naturally" turn to such primitive art forms for inspiration or to "rediscover" the depth dimension that these art forms reveal?

I believe that Tillich directly engaged (the Western fantasy of) the primi­tive in this essay because he wrote it in Paris in the summer of 1926, when the papers and cafés buzzed with talk of "jungle rhythms," "demon possession," and "the frenzy of African eros."59 The subject of this discussion was not an ex­hibition of plundered African artifacts but a pair of notorious cabaret acts: the Harlem-influenced Revue Nègre, on the Champs Elysées, and a copycat sequel at the Folies Bergères. Both acts indulged a scandalized and insatiable Parisian public in an assortment of primitivist fantasies embodied most spectacularly in their star, the twenty-year-old African American dancer Josephine Baker.

Baker had become an international sensation as soon as the Revue Nègre opened in 1925. Her extraordinary acclaim came not only from the popu­lar press but from such arbiters of "high" culture as the art dealer Guillaume, the essayist Janet Flanner, the director Max Reinhardt, and the poet e. e. cum-mings. At the end of 1925, the Revue Nègre moved from Paris to Berlin, where Baker was described admiringly, if proprietarily, as "a figure of contemporary

58 R Tillich, On Art and Architecture, 125. 5 9 The quoted phrases are contemporary (1925-26) French responses to Josephine Baker, see

Rose, Jazz Cleopatra, 9, 31 ,99 .

60 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

German Expressionism."60 Reinhardt assiduously pursued Baker, promising to make her his next star; Baker disappointed him by returning to Paris in the summer of 1926, to dance in a Montmartre production that had been created for and around her.61

Did Tillich see Josephine Baker dance in Paris that summer? I have found no direct proof that he did. But he could hardly have been unaware of her enormous vogue. Given what we know of Tillich s fondness for frequent­ing "Negro bars" with von Sydow, his favorable comparisons of Harlem bur­lesque shows to those at Montmartre, his esteem for Reinhardt, and his interest in the expressionist potential of dance, not to mention his "eye for beautiful women,"62 it seems likely that Bakers sensational "Danse Sauvage," performed at the Folies Bergères in the summer of 1926, was as close as Tillich got to the "primitive dance-masks" that figure so centrally in the essay he wrote in Paris at that time.

Echoes and anticipations of Tillich s "The Demonic" abound in the re­sponses of Josephine Bakers white audiences. Tillichs interest in the "wild," "orgiastic" vitality expressed in "negro sculpture" can be heard, for example, in the frequent description of Baker as an African sculpture brought to life. Oth­ers noted Baker s "possessed" state, "as though she were possessed by a demon, or as though she were having an epileptic seizure";63 she was often billed as le diable en corps. Commentators also routinely compared her to an animal, cum-mings, describing Bakers entrance onto the stage of the Folies Bergères— "walking . . . on hands and feet, legs and arms stiff"—wrote that she resembled "a creature neither infrahuman nor superhuman, but somehow both: a mysteri­ous, unkillable Something, equally nonprimitive and uncivilized, or beyond time in the sense that emotion is beyond arithmetic."64 So also Tillich, in his reflection on artistic representations of the demonic, might have been describ­ing Baker: "The strongest picture of the demonic is a union of elements of the animal sphere and elements of the mental sphere but in a distorted form, for it contains this dual dialectics of creative and destructive, of mental and sub­mental."65

Nowhere, of course, do we find acknowledgment of Josephine Baker as the potential inspiration for this essay. Both Tillich and his readers have rou­tinely credited any of a number of canonical male European artists as fertil­izing influences. We may presume that the same recognition will not readily be

6 0 Qtd. in Lynn Haney, Naked at the Feast: A Biography of Josephine Baker (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981), 88.

6 1 My account of Baker here is indebted to Haney and to Rose. 62 Driver, 'Tillichian Spell" (cited in n. 24), 6. 63 Rose, 99. 6 4 e. e. cummings, "Vive la Folie!" Vanity Fair, September 1926,116. 65 P. Tillich, "The Demonic," 86.

Fessenden: "Woman" and the 'Trimitive" in Tillichs Life and Thought 61

extended to Josephine Baker, an illiterate black woman whose fame was made by dancing in the nude, for many of the same reasons that Tillichs engage­ments with art or politics are typically accorded theological relevance while his engagements with pornography and extramarital liaisons are not. Reluctance to concede the relevance of primitive artists (or exotic dancers) for theology ap­pears to stem also from the sense that their achievements are simply "natural." Whereas the genius of a Picasso or a Goya, Tillich would say, is his ability to express his consciousness of the demonic, the African artist seems merely to transmit what she is passively tuned into. Or as the art historian René Huyghe put it in a 1973 essay,

[P]rimitive art is literally prehistoric, since it has no background of writ­ten tradition (sometimes there are oral traditions, but these are simply legends). We see it without the modifications and explanations of his­tory. It comes to us as raw material.... The striking plasticity of African and Oceanic art is best explained in terms of the stage of evolution of the society which produces them. There is no room for individual ex­pression in art of this kind. . . . It is not in any way the result of sophisticated and concerted research, as modern Western art is, but of an innate way of looking at the world.66

Such assumptions enabled Tillich (and others) to credit the expressionists and other modern artists with "breakthroughs" of utter originality, even as these are seen to take place as the "natural" turning toward the forms of expression that primitive art makes tunelessly available.

This view assumes that primitive art stands with modern art in a rela­tionship of nature to culture, or of timelessness to history. In a very real sense, however, "primitive art"—the term did not exist before the nineteenth century, although many of the human creations on which it was later bestowed did—is as much a modern discursive production as "modern art."67 The same might be said of Josephine Baker; as Jan Nederveen Pieterse writes, "Baker s talent and energy were her own, but her so-called wildness was a quality carefully con­structed by impresarios and avant-garde artists: íprimitivism, as an artefact, 'wildness' as an artful illusion, a new gimmick of Paris café society."68 As Baker herself put it, "The white imagination sure is something . . . when it comes to blacks."69 The Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, who arrived in Paris at about the same time that Baker did, found himself on the receiving end

66 René Huyghe, "African and Oceanic Art: How It Looks from the West," Réalités (English ed.) 273 (1973): 66-67.

67 See Price (cited in n. 45), particularly chap. 1. 68 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular

Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 142. 69 Josephine Baker, qtd. in Rose, 81.

62 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

of the same exoticism; he called it being "caged . . . in the circus of civili­zation."70

The figure of the primitive other "caged in the circus of civilization"—the prostitute in the shop window, Bakers "Danse Sauvage" at the Folies Bergères, the "interesting types" who delighted Tillich in Paris "Negro bars," the hap­hazard arrangement of African artifacts at the Musée Ethnographique, or the primitive energies framed and contained in works of modern art—was also familiar to Tillich as the Freudian model of the psyche, which he implicitly endorsed when he noted, in the opening paragraph of "The Demonic," that psychoanalysis could be credited (alongside ethnology and modern art) with uncovering the reality of primitive "depths."71 In that model, the (modern European) soul houses a conflict between underlying primitive forces, which are represented as dark, deep, and intractably there, and the more fragile claims of culture and civilization, which lie closer to the surface.72

This schema of the "savage" caged within the recesses of the self legiti­mates the modernist project of constituting, and then maintaining watchful access to, the "savage" outside the self: exotic but also familiar, ever available to inspire occasions for psychic reintegration among those seeking to renew con­tact with their own deepest instincts. According to "The Demonic," the power of primitive objects is that they lay open the contents of "our subconscious strata."73 Such notions die hard; as the art critic Ladislas Segy wrote fifty years later in Masks of Black Africa,

The power of the [mask of Black Africa]... is such that it is able to elu­cidate emotional reactions, to disclose the authentic self which one hides or represses in one s unconscious. The mask with its powerful ex­pressiveness works like a catalyst, enabling us to experience the same process of becoming aware on a preconscious level of the existence of archetypal images within us. The true experience is self-revelation which is beyond definition.74

To describe engagements with primitive others as psychic homecomings, occasions for making contact with the depths of one s own existence, is (at the very least) to block consciousness of the structures of exploitation, of one-way instrumentalism, that have historically characterized such encounters. White

70 Langs ton H u g h e s , The Weary Blues ( N e w York: Knopf, 1926), 100. 71 P. Tillich, "The Demonic," 77. 72 Pieterse sketches the geopolitical contexts of this model: "Two contrasting scenes—one of

the suppression of 'savages' in Africa and in the South of the US, and the other of a fascination with 'savages' in Europe and in the North of the US—seemed to resonate with one another: one fantasy of power created a savage alter ego to be repressed, and was compensated by the other fantasy of power, which enjoyed the savage alter ego's abandon" (144).

73 R Tillich, "The Demonic," 77. 74 Ladislas Segy, Masks of Black Africa ( N e w York: Dover , 1976), 5 5 .

Fessenden: "Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich s Life and Thought 63

patrons of jazz, African sculpture, or Josephine Bakers dancing frequently defended their preferences to scandalized contemporaries in the language of cultural revitalization: European culture, this argument ran, requires these alien forms to nourish and refresh its own creative aesthetic. As Phyllis Rose remarks in her biography of Josephine Baker, this model of regeneration "as­sumes a kind of ingestion of lower organisms by a higher one, plankton by a whale." In the terms of the familiar nature/culture schematic, jazz, African sculpture, and exotic dancers "are viewed as raw materials for future higher cultural forms."75

Women, Eros, and the Tillichian System

The leviathan image—plankton ingested by a whale—is worth remarking for the frequency with which something like it shows up in interpretations of Tillich, particularly in attempts to account for his erotic behavior. Owen Thomas describes Tillich as "a living example of concupiscence, which [Tillich himself] defines as 'the unlimited desire to draw the whole of reality into one­self/"76 Hannah Tillich described her husbands "face . . . lit by desire, search­ing out another victim of his ever-hungry need to be worshipped, to possess and be possessed."77 The image of the voracious feeder also appears in descriptions of Tillich s thought. John Foester calls Tillich s "life-long demon" his "urge to fit all experiences and concepts into clear-cut schemes based on dialectical polar­ities."78 This all-encompassing aspect of Tillichs thought, according to David E. Roberts, "becomes a liability at the point where existential problems, after being highlighted, are swallowed into an abyss." Roberts continues: "Somehow Tillich, like God, manages to engulf distinctions without blurring them. . . . But it is a weird experience . . . to have problems answered with great sensitivity and patience, by being brought into connection with some relevant segment of the system, only to discover later that I do not happen to be the man who car­ries this system around in his head."79

I hardly claim to understand the whole of Tillich s "system"; he himself seems to have numbered all of those who, in his view, did understand it, and he took note of their passing.80 What must be clear to all who have any knowledge

75 Rose, 30.

76 Thomas (cited in n. 7), 9; Thomas quotes Paul Tillichs Systematic Theology (1951-63; re­print, 3 vols, in 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 2:52.

77 H. Tillich, 252. 78 John Foester, "Paul Tillich and Inter-religious Dialogue," Modern Theology 7, no. 1 (Octo­

ber 1990): 23. 79 David E. Roberts, "Tillich s Doctrine of Man," in The Theology of Paul Tillich, ed. C. Kegley

(cited inn. 20), 164. 8 0 According to Pauck and Pauck, "[0]n the occasion of Archbishop [William] Temple s death,

[Tillich] was heard to remark, 'Ah, and he understood my system—it is a great loss'" (233).

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of the system, however, is how attuned even this most totalizing of structures is to fragmentation, to what apparently resists incorporation within the whole. Part of what made Tillichs thought, as Tom Driver put it, "so all-embracing that it was often hard to find your way into it, or, once you were in it, to find your way out"81 was his desire to value and to include what both traditional philosophical thought and pietistic Christianity had marked off as belonging to their consti­tutive "outside." In The New Being, for example, Tillich classes "the beauty of nature," playing, dancing, and "the ecstasy of love" among those pleasures that many in Christianity have renounced with "anxious conscience"; that rejection, he claims, "implies a rejection of creation," "a blasphemy of the creator God."82

If states of demonic possession and grace, nature, and sexual pleasure rightly belong within and not outside the Tillichian system, what nonetheless cannot be brought within the system, Tillich insists, is "the unconditionally real, the originally given, the ground and abyss of everything there is." The "char­acter of the unconditional" is that "it cannot be grasped; its power includes its unapproachable mystery. If we try to grasp it, it is no longer the unconditional that we have in our hands—even if it has the highest religious or ontological names."83

Tillich s "God beyond God," the unconditional that, as such, always eludes human attempts at systématisation, rationalization, or symbolization, might be understood as something close to what Jacques Lacan means by "the real." The Lacanian "real" signals both fullness and lack: on the one hand, the "excess" that all symbolic accounts of reality fail to grasp; on the other, the radical insuffi­ciency, or what Lacan called the "trauma," of any attempt at symbolization that takes reality as its object. As Judith Butler glosses Lacan, the real belongs to

the psychoanalytic insight that any effort [of discourse]... is subject to failure, haunted by contingency, to the extent that discourse itself invari­ably fails to totalize [its object].... Indeed, any attempt to totalize . . . is to be read as a symptom, the effect and remainder of a trauma that itself cannot be directly symbolized in language. This trauma subsists as the permanent possibility of disrupting and rendering contingent any dis­cursive formation that lays claim to a coherent or seamless account of reality. It persists as the real, where the real is always that which any ac­count of "reality" fails to include. The real constitutes the contingency or lack in any discursive formulation.84

As "that which any account of 'reality' fails to include," the real, says Butler, still following Lacan, may be understood as "the outside to discourse construed as

si Driver, "The Tillichian Spell," 7. 82 Paul Tillich, The New Being ( N e w York: Sc r ibner s , 1955), 1 4 8 - 4 9 . 83 Paul Tillich, "Real i sm a n d Fa i th , " in Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries, ed . M a r k

Kline Taylor (London: Collins, 1987), 76. 84 Buder (cited in n. 3), 191-92.

Fessenden: 'Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich s Life and Thought 65

symbolization." This much Tillich seems to be getting at in his famous claim that the only nonsymbolic statement that theology can make about God is that all statements about God are symbolic. But Butler also makes the crucial point that the constitutive "domains of exclusion" of any discourse tend also to be "so­cially saturated," populated by subjects whose everything-and-nothing status— as of women, for example, in Freud s treatment of the elusive question of the feminine85—bars their entrance into that discourse "as beings who might be said to matter."86

I have been suggesting that the "domains of exclusion" in Tillich s life and thought were populated by subjects who are figured as bearing a special rela­tionship to the object of theological discourse—God, the unconditional, being itself—but whose special status is secured at the price of exclusion from the very discourse they enable. Tillich draws into his system what belongs to Chris­tianity's traditional domains of exclusion: joy, pleasure, danger, and the life of the senses. What always remains beyond the system, or beyond that-which-can-be-systematized, is God, the divine life, states of grace, and the demonic depths of things. The ambiguity of this formulation is that what Tillich courageously wished to include in his system he also associated with the unassimilable outside. In "Basic Principles of Religious Socialism," for example, Tillich writes that "the erotic and dynamic powers are the real in every actuality, form­ing its ground and its abyss."87 As the ground and abyss of every actuality, this Tillichian (here remarkably Lacanian) real constitutes the depth of the actual, that is, its surplus presence, its outsidedness to thought (Unvordenkliche, "that before which thinking cannot penetrate"), and the inadequacy of thoughts, or names, to grasp it.

Thus, in Tillich s writing, figures of plenitude are simultaneously figures of estrangement and alienation. This schema allowed Tillich to figure erotic love as the site of grace and plenitude, while at the same time figuring the beloved other as a site of grief and loss. Tillich spoke of eros as the fullness of total

8 5 Freuds essay "Femininity," from his New Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, takes the form of a public lecture, beginning thus: "Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Throughout history people have knocked their heads against die riddle of the nature of femininity.. . . [N]or will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply—you are yourselves the problem." This is the rendering of Luce Irigaray, who responds: "So it would be a case of you men speaking among yourselves about woman, who cannot be in­volved in hearing or producing a discourse that concerns the riddle, the logogriph she represents for you. The enigma that is woman will therefore constitute the target, the object, the stake, of a masculine^discourse, of a debate about men, which would not consult her, would not concern her. Which, ultimately, she is not supposed to know anything about." Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 13. This reading inspired me to think about the silences enforced (particularly on women) in discourses of Tillich s erotic life.

86 Butler, 189. 8 7 Paul Tillich, "Basic Principles of Religious Socialism," in Paul Tillich, ed. Μ. Κ. Taylor

(cited in n. 82), 63.

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participation of subject with object, or as that which opens the way for contact with "powers of origin," which in The Socialist Decision Tillich also names "the irrational, the living, the depth dimension," and "undisturbed nature."88 In this text, such sites of origin are gendered female; Tillich remarks, for example, on "the blood-oriented proximity to origin of the female sex" and "the powers of origin possessed by woman by virtue of her resonance with eros and with motherhood."89 Tillich s phrase "ground of being" is actually taken from Niet­zsche s Birth of Tragedy, where its synonyms are "original Oneness," "primord­ial One," and "Original Mother." "The mystical jubilation of Dionysos," says Nietzsche, "breaks the spell of individuation and opens a path to the maternal womb of being."90 If eros is fulfillment, however, it is also the end of fulfillment: "Fulfilled love is, at the same time, extreme happiness and the end of happiness. The separation is overcome. But without the separation there is no love and no life."91 In the twist of a now familiar dialectic, however, this figure of alienation opens again into a figure of plenitude, as the solitary subject of the erotic quest becomes ripe, in his very emptiness, for absorbing the world into himself once more. "Individualization separates. The most individualized being is the most unapproachable and the most lonely one. But, at the same time, he has the greatest potentiality of universal participation. He can have communion with his world and eros toward it. . . . He can participate in the universe in all its dimensions and draw elements of it into himself."92

If, for Tillich, experiences of plenitude are also necessarily experiences of fragmentation and loss, then to feminize these sites of erotic fullness is also to read fragmentation and loss as belonging somehow to "woman," or, more likely, to the failure of actual women to deliver adequately on the promise of redemp­tion that woman figures forth. As the sign of fullness, grace, and plenitude, woman stands closer to being itself than does man; as fragmentation, alien­ation, and loss, woman signals the disappointment of the particular, the call to submerge it. To put an earlier quote from Rollo May in this context, 'While [Tillich] greatly appreciated the 'madonna' side of women, he also from time to time saw them as prostitutes. He could give them individuality but he also could heap them into a nameless mass. He could distinguish them and also ex­tinguish them. He could put them into the 'bottomless abyss' he wrote of . . . [but] he could make them taste the 'dark depth of madness.'"93

88 P. Tillich, The Socialist Decision, 55. 89 Ibid., 31,152. 90 These quotations from Nietzsche appear in M. C. Taylor (cited in n. 46), 20-21; this is my

source for the appearance of "ground of being" in The Birth of Tragedy. 91 Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 27. 92 P. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3:33. See Vulgamore (cited in n. 8), 204, on the separation

of lover and beloved as paradigmatic of the ambiguity of existence. See also Irwin (cited in n. 11), 37-39.

93 May (cited in n. 1), 61.

Fessenden: 'Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich's Life and Thought 67

This dynamic is further illuminated in the case of primitives. In "On the Demonic in Art," written many years after "The Demonic," Tillich wrote of Picasso that "[n]obody before him used these kinds of cubistic and abstract forms to express living faith."94 "The Demonic" had (at least partially) credited African and other primitive artists with having forged their expressive, demonic style before Picasso; in the later essay, however, primitive innovation becomes Protestant iconoclasm read through the lens of Protestant anomie. Tillich de­clares that Picasso's Guernica is a supremely Protestant work in that it shows the Protestant judgment against ordinary life as disruption, existential doubt, and meaninglessness—all occasions for the breaking in or breaking through of grace.95

Not surprisingly, the primitive forms that Tillich read as a judgment against modern meaninglessness tend not to be read by their creators, or within their own contexts, as speaking to the existential ennui of modern Protestants.96 Nor did Josephine Baker find anything wistful or frightening in the dances that white audiences nevertheless read through the lens of melancholy or savage horror.97 Might not, then, these episodes of sadness, brokenness, or demonic distortion, which for Tillich were revealed by the African dance mask, point in­stead to what Tillich himself saw as the limitations of the aesthete s ability to "identify himself with all things," to the domineering, erotic, violent element in such failures of encounter and fusion with the represented plenitude?98 "The demonic," as Tillich wrote in the essay of that name, "reveals the divine as that from which one is estranged."99 But because nothing except God remains out of bounds, because there is nothing human, theoretically, that cannot be brought within the reach of Tillich s all-engulfing system, then whatever human experi­ences do remain out of reach make their elusiveness present in the form of Lacanian "trauma," as brokenness, alienation, and distortion.

What Tillich and others see in primitive art and its attendant imagined subjective states is precisely what its makers do not see, because they are not primarily seeking to connect with modern European viewers who are search-

94 P. Tillich, "On the Demonic in Art," in On Art and Architecture, 110. 95 Ibid., 96. 96 See the discussion in Price (cited in n. 45), 30ff. 97 "We don't understand their language, and we can't find a way to tie the scenes together,"

wrote one Parisian journalist of Baker and the Revue Nègre, "but everything we've ever read flashes across our enchanted minds: adventure novels, glimpses of enormous steamboats swallowing up clusters of negroes who carry rich burdens, a caterwauling woman in an unknown port. . . stories of missionaries and travelers, Stanley, the Taraud brothers, Batouala, sacred dances, the Sudan . . . Plantation landscapes, the melancholy songs of Creole nurses, the Negro soul with its animal energy, its childish joys, the sad bygone time of slavery, we had all that listening to the singer with the jungle voice." Paul Achard, "Tout en noir ou la Revue Nègre," Paris-Midi, 27 September 1925; qtd. in Rose (cited in n. 45), 8.

98 P. Tillich, "The Demonic," 118. 99 Ibid., 88.

68 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

ing for a connection with them (or with their own deepest selves). This ap­parent self-sufficiency becomes, like the mother in Freud and in Tillich s gloss on Freud, an object of nostalgia.100 In Tillichs writing, woman or any primitive other—prostitute, erotic dancer, high-spirited Negro—is typically made the figure both of charged excess and easy access, belonging to the "outside of dis­course construed as symbolization" and at the same time subject, within reach, available for use. But neither appreciation nor exploitation (giving them indi­viduality or heaping them into a nameless mass) yields the promised fullness, the connection to being with which the figure of excess has been invested. The resulting ambivalence, far from putting an end to the cycle of projection and appropriation, is precisely what allows it to continue. The alienation that the other is made to bear is the brokenness of connection to that other— more specifically, the failure of connection to the fullness, plenitude, and self-sufficiency that the other is also made to bear. Brokenness is given as the elu­sive promise of wholeness: "Man discovers himself when he discovers God," Tillich writes. "[H]e discovers something which is identical with him even though it transcends him infinitely; something from which he is estranged, but from which he never has been and never can be separated."101 If this is so, then humankind s relationship to the ground of being and its erotic avatars is going to be marked by the same kind οι fort-da movement that Hannah Tillich used to characterize her husband s compulsion to forever seek new relationships with different women: it was a need to keep returning, she wrote, "to the inex­haustible springs of subterranean depths."102

Tillichian Ambivalence and the Study of Religion

If, as Nathan Huggins claims, Harlem offered white pilgrims vicarious par­ticipation in the spiritual and erotic pleasures of a hypothesized "blackness," then it—together with prostitutes, pornography, and other erotic liberties taken—offered Tillich vicarious participation in all that Christianity, to his view, had washed out of itself. I say "vicarious" because, as we have seen, Tillich typically failed to own these pleasures publicly. Refusing to acknowledge the "wild cruelty and orgiastic excess" of his own erotic experiences, he found them instead in, for example, the "breasts, thighs, [and] sex organs" of "negro sculp-

100 i n Freud, the achievement of individuation (what Tillich called die "actualized freedom" of standing "outside the divine essence" [Systematic Theology, 1:255]) is figured as separation from the mother. Tillich insists that the separation can never be more than partial: as a symbol, the ground of being "points to the mother-quality of giving birth, carrying, and embracing, and at the same time, of calling back, resisting independence of the created, and swallowing it" {Systematic Theology, 3:294).

ιοί Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 11. 102 H. Tillich (cited in n. 19), 21.

Fessenden: "Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich s life and Thought 69

ture" and other primitive forms that he described in "The Demonic" and re­turned to, in more or less submerged ways, throughout his career.

Eric Lott, here reading Slavoj Zizek, has suggested that membership in

rationalized Western societies . . . seems to depend upon the remanding of enjoyment, the body, an aptitude for pleasure. It is the other who is always putatively "excessive" in this respect, whether through exotic food, strange and noisy music, outlandish bodily exhibitions, or unre­mitting sexual appetite. . . . [Privileged subjects in the West] in fact organize their own enjoyment through the other . . . and access pleasure precisely by fantasizing about the others "special" pleasure. Hatred of the other arises from the necessary hatred of one's own excess; ascribing this excess to the "degraded" other and indulging i t . . . one conveniendy and surreptitiously takes and disavows pleasure at the same time.103

Tillich might be seen simultaneously to have taken and disavowed erotic plea­sures not only in his habit, as Hannah Tillich reported, of "cover[ing] a porno­graphic book with an acceptable book during his rest hour"104 or of otherwise veiling his sexual involvements, but also, as Carter Heyward has suggested, in his figuring estrangement from God as a given, a fact of the human condi­tion, and not or not also as the result of concrete actions of injustice or wrong relation.105

These habits, I suggest, pose particular problems for those of us who teach religious studies, since Tillichs ambivalence toward women and others fre­quently extended to the otherness of religions. Particularly in America, religion for the last two centuries has been discursively feminized.106 As opposed to the­ology, it is also typically allied with primitives.107 The relationship of theology to religion, therefore, can easily be cast (although it is rarely overtly cast) as the relationship of masculine to feminine or civilized to primitive. Like the figures of the feminine and the primitive, religion, for Tillich, occupies sites of both plenitude and loss; it is readable both as ultimate concern and as the particu­lar that needs to be subsumed or negated by ultimacy. As a site of plenitude,

103 Eric Lott, "White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Dur­ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 482.

104 H. Tillich, 189. 105 Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and Love of God (San Fran­

cisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 63-65. My source for Heywards critique is Irwin, 183. 106 The classic accounts of why this is so are Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The Ameri­

can Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); and Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon, 1977).

107 Cf. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Re­ligion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), esp. chap. 6; and Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search ofDreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

70 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

religion is "the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the an­swer to the question of the meaning of our life/'108 As a site of finitude and alienation, religion nevertheless provides the raw materials for its own "self-overcoming,, in something evidently higher and more reliably transcendent.109

For the leviathan of Tillich s system, women, primitives, and religions occupy a similar place on the food chain.

To what degree has the Tillichian discourse of religion left its mark not on theology but on religious studies? While Tillichs institutional influence is difficult to measure with any precision, the opening chapter of almost any in­troductory textbook bears ample witness to the pervasive effect he has had on the field. The examples I cite here come from a random sampling of books on my shelf; I have no desire to single these works out as being particularly prob­lematic, because I see them instead as representative.

According to Tillich, "[E]very religious experience is an experience of the holy, of the sacred, and in the very nature of the holy lies the answer to our quest for a concept of religion which is all-embracing."110 In the study of reli­gion, the language of the holy has been eagerly seized. Thus, a fairly typical introduction defines religion as "entailing a sense of the holy and the conviction that vital human existence stems from experiences of the holy.... [Communi­ties of faith counter experiences of emptiness and longings for restoration with the good news that salvation or deliverance is possible."111 Nearly all accounts allege the universality of the "holy" and of the religious disposition that seeks it, even though, as Plaskow and others have pointed out, the category of "es­trangement" that prompts the quest for the holy seems peculiar to the modern West.112 At any rate, Tillichs notion of the universality of "ultimate concern"

1 0 8 Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter with World Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 4.

1 0 9 In Ibid., Tillich speaks of a similar tension between "the particular and the universal char­acter of the Christian claim . . . the tension between Christianity as a religion and Christianity as the negation of religion" (81). As an example of Christianity as the negation of religion, Tillich cites the New Testament s salutary "fight against cult and myth" in its "dispossession" of the ritual law in Paul (90). At the same time, ritual, cult, and myth—the particulars of religious practice and belief—can be valued as occasions for revelatory experience: "Ritual, cult, and myth provide the vital energies for religion s self-overcoming: religion cannot come to an end, and a particular reli­gion will be lasting to the degree in which it negates itself as a religion. Thus Christianity will be a bearer of the religious answer as long as it breaks through its own particularity" (96-97).

1 1 0 Paul Tillich, "The Meaning of Religion and the Protestant Principle," in The Encounter of Religions and Quasi-Religions, ed. Terence Thomas (Lewiston, Ν.Y.: Mellen, 1990), 10.

m Roger Schmidt, Exploring Religion, 2d ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1988), 12. H 2 Plaskow (cited in n. 15), 173. Kumkum Sangari adds that "the postmodern preoccupation

with the crisis of meaning isn't everyone's crisis (even in the West)." "The Politics of the Possible," Cultural Critique 7 (fall 1987): 184. In his Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Ishm (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Talal Asad has sug-

Fessenden: "Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillichs Life and Thought 71

seems to have opened the way for the study of religion as the study of some­thing more and other than specific beliefs and practices, and for making homo religiosus, as J. Z. Smith puts it, the "enduring, species-specific definition of man. ίίό

This vaunted universality of religious experience or the religious self generates criteria for ranking religions by, say, their openness to universality, their repudiation of idolatry or magic, or their closeness to the center that all religions seek, according to the canons of interpretation legitimized by the Tillichian model. Tillichs criticism of Islamic opacity to revelation, of the "pagan substance" of missionary Catholicism, or of the "magical element in higher religions" constitutes, as he puts it, "one of the great functions of... the Protestant principle."114 Religious studies textbooks, less overtly wed to the "Protestant principle," often approximate this ranking by condensing a number of otherwise unrelated religious forms under the heading of "primitive" (or "nonliterate," "tribal," or "indigenous"), to be summarily dispensed with in a single chapter: "Before proceeding to the main subject of this book, namely, the world's great living religions, it will be useful for purposes of critical perspec­tive to glance briefly at a sampling of other religions, past and present."115

At the same time, the habit of presenting all religions, whatever their colorful and exotic variety, as being in fact different versions of the same thing (again customarily given, in Tillichian terms, as a seeking after ultimacy, or the holy) means that primitive religious forms can be homogenized not only in their outsidedness to "the world s great living traditions" but also and ironically in their "possess [ion] of certain basic themes which, in modified form, appear centrally in later religion as well."116 (As Tillich put it, explaining the exclusion

gested that the search for a universal, all-encompassing definition of religion has its roots in the Re­naissance encounter of European explorers with the "savage" and the concomitant requirement of accommodating foreign belief systems to the alleged superiority of Western Christianity. The even­tual "solution" to the dilemma of difference was to rewrite Christianity along the lines of Humean "natural religion" or Kantian "universal morality," to which all religions could be plotted in osten­sibly progressive relationship. In Asad s account, allegedly universal definitions of religion belie their own specificity as parts of a historical narrative of European cultural superiority.

113 J. Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 37.

114 P. lillich, Christianity and the Encounter, 78,84,8. Tillich here defines the Protestant prin­ciple as "the protest of religion against religion within religion in the name of God," a type of protest of which Luthers was paradigmatic (15-16). Tillich insists that "the Protestant principle . . . is not identical with any particular religion, not even with Protestantism" (3). To my ear, this is a little like saying that phallic privilege is not to be identified with any particular bodily attribute, not even the penis. See Jane Gallop, "Phallus/Penis: Same Difference," in Thinkingthrough the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

us John A. Hutchison, Paths of Faith, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), 26. 116 Robert S. Ellwood, Many Peoples, Many Faiths: An Introduction to the Religious Life of

Humankind, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992), 51.

72 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

of the "whole reality of primitive religion" from his consideration of world reli­gions, "[H]e who knows the history of religion in our days knows that elements of the primitive religions are indirectly present and have a persisting influence in every religion.")117 Primitive religion represents the condensed form of all religion, since it lies closer to the universal "depth" dimension in each. At the same time, the march of secularization, also presumed to be universal, poten­tially turns all religions into primitive survivals.

If "we" assume that the varieties of religious belief and practice are so many ways to the center, responses to the holy, or negotiations with ultimacy, then what is our relationship to those who say the rosary, fast for Ramadan, pray to Lakshmi, or stare at the sun? The model of religions as forms sharing a common center or to be subjected to a common center implies a secular, cos­mopolitan access to those forms. As we have seen, pictures of access to the exotic or primitive abound in Tillich; it is striking how frequently religious stud­ies textbooks place the reader in the equivalent of Tillich s Parisian sidewalk café, in the "delightful atmosphere" populated by "Arabs, Turks, Negroes," and other "interesting types." What Tillich called the "panorama" of world reli­gions118 is recreated in textbooks that begin by inviting the reader to "picture yourself in New Delhi" and "[n]ow picture yourself in Medieval England,"119

or by panning a universe populated (within a single paragraph) by Muslims, Roman Catholics, Hindus, Jews, and Lakota intoning their morning prayers.120

One text explicitly identifies the reader as both a daring explorer and an arm­chair consumer: "The religions of the world . . . invoke a cinerama of images . . . incense and temple gongs, yogis in strange contorted postures, ancient and enigmatic chants . . . exotic lands to which only the most intrepid travelers have voyaged. In todays pluralism and world communities, almost any faith from anywhere is a presence and an option."121 These structures of access, it should be noted, typically operate in only one direction: the picture-yourself-here be­ginning offers a glimpse of a local people who belong to their exotic landscape rather than, like the worldly reader, temporarily adventuring there.

The model of spurious access to the exotic given in religious studies textbooks recalls the colonialist escapism of the brothel Tillich knew as the "Maison des Nations" or of the Parisian music hall that, in the words of one commentator, put "the world . . . at our disposition: Hawaii with its nostalgic guitarists, the Orient with its jugglers and disturbing balancing acts, America with its eccentrics, its dancing girls and its dancers, India with its charmers and

117 P. Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter, 6. us Ibid., 2. 119 Denise L. Carmody and John T. Carmody, Ways to the Center: An Introduction to World

Religions, 2d ed. (Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth, 1985), 2. 120 Schmidt, 4. 121 EUwood, 2.

Fessenden: 'Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich s Life and Thought 73

magicians."122 Such models of one-way availability instrumentalize exotic others as sources of spiritual replenishment or self-discovery for the student of reli­gions, offering vicarious participation in realities that remain safely other yet point to our deepest wishes and needs. Whatever their tendency to homogenize primitive or alien religious forms, textbooks tend in the same measure to appreciate primitive "wholeness" as especially needful in a technological age: "[N]onliterate religions . . . might teach aberrant modernity a great many lessons in what is necessary to regain a healthy, peaceful human nature. . . . How many modern Westerners, for example, have a vividly sacred world?"123

Moreover, the assumption that Tillichian "depth dimensions" lie at the heart of all religious experience, hidden yet eminently accessible, blocks aware­ness of the objectification and one-way instrumentalism such models require by "separat[ing religion] conceptually from the realm of power."124 The neces­sary strategies of homogenization, decontextualization, and dehistoricization of religious others will generally remain invisible to the student of religions who, thus confronted with an unfamiliar religious form associated with nameless practitioners who are assumed to have operated out of their own deep con­nection to the holy, will have little else to do than to commune with the numi-nosity of this new phenomenon, to be engaged and awakened by contact with its sacred depths. As Mircea Eliade notes admiringly of Tillich, "[0]ne of the dominant characteristics of his thought was a capacity for renewing itself after an encounter with a radically different, even inimical ideology or historical situ­ation. . . . [A] similar creative process had started after Paul Tillich s encounter with archaic and oriental religions."125

The portrait of religions that emerges from introductory religious studies textbooks—as alluring but finally dispensable in their particularity, universally tuned in to the sacred, subject to nonreciprocal availability for projects of revi-talization and self-discovery, and segmented from the realm of domination and injustice—is at these points continuous with the portrait of women and primitives in Tillich s life and thought. Of course, more advanced responsible scholarship in religious studies is generally far more nuanced in its characteri­zations of its subject. The facility with which introductory textbooks wield these representations, however, suggests that a "Tillich effect" is operative in religious studies not only at the introductory level but also at the level of doctoral pro­duction: if, as it appears, the Tillichian model of religion as "ultimate concern" is easier to teach than alternative models that foreground geopolitical imbal-

122 Louis Léon-Martin, Le music-hail et ses figures (Paris: Les Éditions de France, 1928); qtd. in Rose (cited in n. 45), 94. "Spurious access" is Roses phrase (282).

123 Carmody and Carmody, 53. 124 Asad (cited in n. I l l ) , 29. 125 Mircea Eliade, "Paul Tillich and the History of Religions," in The Future of Religions, ed.

Jerald Brauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 33.

74 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

anees of power or the limitation of religious studies as the science of "total man,"126 then the result will be more Ph.D. s and thus more teachers of religion who require introductory textbooks that perpetuate these forms of inattention.

Spiritual Regret

I will close by briefly considering an alternative model for the study of reli­gion, one that, not incidentally, provides a revealing lens for refocusing Tillich s "erotic solution." In a suggestive essay on virtues and the study of religion, Lee Yearley considers the responsibilities attendant on encountering "not just. . . what is often today called the religious Other' b u t . . . the religious Other' that attracts us."127 Yearley begins with a now familiar catalog of the way that "appar­ently alien religions have been treated" in theological and academic discourse. The others religion is generally represented as (1) "a mistaken version of one s own truth"; (2) "a lower stage of development" in relation to which one s own tradition is "of a higher sort"; (3) a potentially fuller and richer tradition than one s own, an even closer approximation of "that to which the home tradition aspires"; or (4) a manifestation of "differences between oneself and the other [that] are probably only apparent" (4). Each of these approaches is present to some degree in Tillichian and/or textbook presentations that frame religions as (1) transparent in different measure to universal religious claims; (2) rankable in quasi-chronological but implicitly developmental order (usually beginning with primitives and culminating in contemporary Protestantism); (3) available as sources of visionary wisdom lost or potentially lost to the secular West; and (4) essentially about the same thing. The simultaneous presence of all four modes of presentation in the accounts I have briefly surveyed makes sense in light of what Yearley defines as the common "central claim, one that underlies all other claims": "that there is a single goal," "either a single, limited form of ex­cellence or a harmony among somewhat different forms" (3). Yearley reads this claim as evidence of a widespread "human unwillingness to face fully what is involved in a plurality of religious goods," even "a propensity to kinds of idolatry or envy: to see diverse spiritual goods only in one s image or to feel antipathy toward spiritual goods that one does not fully possess" (15-16).

As a corrective to these propensities, Yearley proposes what he calls the "virtue of spiritual regret." The cultivation of spiritual regret, according to him, "deals with the recognition that various, legitimate ideals of human flourishing exist and that although some of them move you deeply you cannot manifest

i26 Russell T. McCutcheon, "The Category 'Religion' in Recent Publications: A Critical Survey," Numen 42 (1995): 305.

127 Lee Yearley, "New Religious Virtues and the Study of Religion," Fifteenth Annual Univer­sity Lecture in Religion at Arizona State University (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1994), 2.

Fessenden: "Woman" and the "Primitive" in Tillich s Life and Thought 75

them, indeed may not even want to manifest them" (3). More specifically, spiri­tual regret involves the recognition that "genuine goods, especially religious goods, can differ substantially enough to present a person with sharply di­vergent life plans, plans which are both legitimate and appealing" (3); that complexity and variety among spiritual goods "means that no single person can come close to exhibiting all of them" (13); and, finally, that the spiritual goods "which one can pursue or possess will usually be determined by forces either beyond ones immediate control or beyond anyone's control" (13).

How spiritual regret might best be cultivated in the classroom or in a schol­arly life remains to be worked out in each case. It may, for example, proceed as the mindful revision of categories of singularity or oneness that have tended to characterize religious studies scholarship, or as the cultivation of finely aware, disciplined regard (of the form Simone Weil called "attention")128 in relation to legitimate but conflicting religious goods. It may mean valuing the integrity and embeddedness of historical lives (the students as well as the subject s under study) in ways that preclude Joseph Campbell-like sampling or essence-piercing fusions. What can be said at least is that the possibility of simply absorbing into our own life-worlds the religious lives of those we study and teach about will decrease, becoming an occasion for spiritual regret, the greater the moral and imaginative complexity we bring to the apprehension of such lives.

Religion is not, or not only, a scholar s convenience129 but a form of rela­tionship; so, too, is the study or teaching of religion a form of relationship. In thinking about the possible role of spiritual regret in relationships generally, I am drawn to Tillich s biography as a locus for reading spiritual regret as a dimension of what might be called "erotic regret" (and vice versa). That I can project this virtue of spiritual regret into the realm of the erotic, however, be­trays a debt to Tillich, who spoke eloquently (if obliquely) on the powerful connections between the erotic and the spiritual, and on the forms of love that knowledge and teaching require.130 More than in using the notion of spiritual regret against Tillichs "erotic solution," however, I am interested in further

i28 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

i29 I am thinking here of J. Z. Smiths (cited in n. 113) infamous dictum that "[r]eligion is solely the creation of the scholar s study... created for the scholar s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the acad­emy" (xi). Whatever the merits of this formulation as a corrective to the Tillichian notion of religion as universally present "ultimate concern," it risks reobjectifying religious belief and practice as no more than occasions for the "disinterested" classification and analysis, from a position of privilege, of other human lives. To say that religion is a creation of scholarship is like saying, with Disraeli, that "the East is a career" (qtd. in Edward Said, Orientalism [New York: Vintage, 1979], xiii).

130 See esp. Irwin (cited in n. 11), 55-60.

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unfolding it in the context of the study of religion. If Tillich can bring resources to that task, they will likely be found, I believe, scattered here and there in what the Paucks' biography calls the "incompatible fragments, the conflicts of his life, the bits and pieces of his ideas,"131 and not in the "system" that hungrily absorbed them.

131 Pauck and Pauck (cited in n. 6), 92.

^ s

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