P TILLICH ON IDOLATRY WILLIAM P. ALSTON* AUL TILLICH'S concept of idolatry, although it seems clear enough at first sight, presents on closer analysis some puzzling problems. Since this concept is quite central for Tillich's criticism of theologies and religions, the examination of these problems is a matter of some importance. Tillich sometimes speaks of idolatry as an identification. "All idoltary is nothing else than the absolutizing of symbols of the Holy, and making them identical with the Holy itself" (CS, p. 193).t The theologian must "resist the idolatrous identification of the ground of our being with the God of ordinary theism Who... is a symbol for the God beyond the God of theism... the ground of being and meaning" (RS, p. 114). * William P. Alston is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. He received his education at Centenary College (B.M.) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.). He has also held teaching positions at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Harvard University. In 1955-56 he held a fellowship from the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association for work on the meaning of religious statements. Professor Alston has written for the Journal of Philosophy, Review of Metaphysics, Philosophical Review, Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. t My discussion is based primarily on the following sources (hereinafter abbreviated as indicated in parentheses following each): 1. Systematic Theology, Vol. I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. (ST) 2. "Theology and Symbolism," in F. Ernest Johnson (ed.), Religious Symbolism. New York: Harper & Bros., 1955. (RS) 3. "Religious Symbols and Our Knowledge of God," Christian Scholar, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 3 (September, 1955). (CS) And "the vigorous opposition of the Reformers to the transubstantiation theory was the belief that it was a regression into the magical identification of the Divine with the bearer of the Divine" (RS, pp. 114-15). But what is meant by such an identification of a symbol of the ground of being with the ground of being itself? It would seem that no one in his right mind could make such an identification. For, in order to identify A and B, I have to have concepts of both; and no one who had both the concept of the ultimate ground of being, in Tillich's sense of that term, and a concept of a "symbol" like Jesus Christ or the elements of the Communion, could possibly identify the two. If he did so, that would be a good indication that he did not have the concepts in question. Certainly, those who say that the consecrated bread and wine is the body and blood of Christ make no such identification. In fact, many who believe this do not have any concept of the ground of being. Perhaps "replace" would be a happier term than "identify." Symbols "always have the tendency (in the human mind, of course) to replace that to which they are supposed to point, and to become ultimate in themselves" (CS, p. 193). Thus idolatry would consist in treating a symbol in a way which is appropriate only to the ground of being (or being itself). But, if we are to understand this, we must ask: How is being itself appropriately treated when things 263
264 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION are going as they should? Tillich's answer seems to be: By taking something concrete as a symbol of being itself, as "pointing to" being itself.' And what does this mean? A close examination of Tillich's discussions of this topic will reveal that, in fact, he explicates "taking x as a symbol of being itself" in terms of certain ways in which we act, feel, and take up attitudes toward x (summed up under the label "ultimate concern"). It is these modes of response to the concrete object in question, and not any independently discoverable relation to an independently identifiable something called "being itself," that Tillich seems to take as an actual criterion for someone "taking a concrete object as a symbol of being itself." This being the case, what could it mean to replace being itself by a symbol, for example, the Bible, the historical figure of Jesus, or the idea of a personal creator? It would mean taking something else as a symbol of the first symbol. But it is clear that this is not what typically happens when people are said to be practicing idolatry. It is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of idolatry with respect to Jesus or the state that one take something (e.g., the cross or the flag) as a symbol of it. But there is an even more fundamental difficulty with this formula. It is impossible for one to take x as a symbol of a concrete object in the same way as one takes x as a symbol of being itself. For, as we have seen, taking x as a symbol of being itself is just to treat it in certain ways; there need be no explicit reference to being itself, n oontological concept, involved. But this is not the case with symbols of concrete things; there some explicit reference to the entity symbolized is required in order that we be justified in saying it is symbolized. If a man treated a flag with veneration and devotion, treasured it, unquestioningly obeyed any speaker who waved it, etc., this still would not be sufficient to justify us in saying that he took this flag to be a symbol of a particular country, unless his activities were connected with that country in some way, physically or mentally. Thus it is (logically) impossible to take something concrete to be holy the way in which one takes being itself to be holy. No response of the sort which constitutes symbolizing being itself could pick out any object which is more specific. The response and the object (being itself) have been indissolubly connected by definition. Thus it is logically impossible for anything to replace being itself; as soon as we are in the sort of situation in which we could use x to point to being itself, being itself is what we are, by definition, pointing to. Tillich has other ways of defining idolatry, but they are all vitiated by essentially the same difficulty. For example: Innumerable things, all things in a way, have the power of becoming holy in a mediate sense. They can point to something beyond themselves. But, if their holiness comes to be considered inherent it becomes demonic [ST, p. 240]. But what does it mean to speak of considering something inherently holy? It has something to do with cutting the object loose from its connection with being itself. "Inherently" is meant to be contrasted with "as pointing to being itself." But what happens when this cord is severed? Perhaps we are then just interested in the objects as empirical realities, with the characteristics they inherently have, as we might still find
value in sacred music, or religious poetry, even after we have ceased to suppose that it has any sort of reference to a real deity. But in that case there is no sense in calling the object "holy" any longer. It has lost all religious significance and so cannot be an occasion for that particular perversion of the religious called "the idolatrous." What Tillich wants to say is that the object is still taken as holy but not as pointing to being itself. But, as Tillich uses these terms, this is like saying that we see a moving train which is not going in any direction. He has introduced the terms "take something to be holy" and "take something to be pointing to being itself" so that they stand or fall together. "Take something to be inherently holy" is thus a self-contradictory expression. Another idiom for talking about idolatry is that of "ultimate concern." "Idolatry is the elevation of a preliminary concern to ultimacy" (ST, p. 16). (Cf. also "The representations of man's ultimate concern-holy objects-tend to become his ultimate concern. They are transformed into idols" [ST, p. 240].) But let us note that preliminary and ultimate concerns have been distinguished on the basis of whether there are special conditions for the actualization of the concern and whether it exercises unrestricted influence over all of life, in other words, in terms of the place the concern has in the psychological structure of the individual. But, if so, there is no possibility of interchanging them. If a man's concern about x is conditioned and partial, then it is preliminary; if not, it is ultimate. But perhaps what is meant is that something which is fitted by its nature to be the object of only a preliminary concern is made the object of an ultimate concern. "Some- TILLICH ON IDOLATRY 265 thing essentially conditioned is taken as unconditional, something essentially partial is boosted into universality, and something essentially finite is given infinite significance" (ST, p. 16). But this just leads to the previous impasse in another form. How can we take something other than being itself as an object of ultimate concern in just the way that being itself is properly so taken? In no way. For "ultimate concern with being itself" is defined to mean being concerned with finite things in a certain way. Nothing can compete with being itself for this place, for there is no place for which to compete. When we have already determined that someone has an ultimate concern, which is focused around certain concrete objects, we will express this fact by saying that he is concerned about being itself. Hence there can be no question as to whether ultimate concern, in a particular case, is directed to being itself or to something finite. It is always directed to both, in different senses. What has been tripping us up all along is the fact that "being itself," as used in these contexts, has been defined as what we are concerned with (or symbolizing) when we respond to concrete objects in certain unconditional ways; and no meaning has been given to saying of anything else that it is the object of concern (or symbolized) in just the same way. Hence we cannot even frame a meaningful question as to whether the place of being itself has been taken by something else. We could frame such a question only if "symbolize" (and "ultimately concerned with"), on the one hand, and "being itself," on the other, were defined independently; then it would perhaps be an open question as to what we are concerned with (or sym-
266 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION bolizing) in any given case. But no such independent definitions have been provided.2 Tillich sometimes suggests that what he means by "idolatry" is the determined attachment to one set of symbols and the refusal to recognize the possibility that any other set of symbols could perform the same or analogous functions. One might call such an attachment an absolutizing of the symbols, taking them to be inherently holy, etc. Undoubtedly, such absolutizing does occur in religion and often presents serious problems. But we should clearly recognize the following points. (1) "Idolatry" in this sense has no essential reference to being itself; hence we could not describe such phenomena by saying that symbols are being identified with the ground of being. (2) This is not what is usually meant by "idolatry." (3) It is a more widespread phenomenon than what is ordinarily called "idolatry"; and it may be so deeply rooted in the religious enterprise that it is impossible to remove it without destroying the enterprise as a whole. How does it come about that Tillich talks about idolatry in this self-defeating manner? I suspect that something like this is involved. The concept of idolatry has arisen in cultures which possess a relatively spiritual conception of God-a conception which would imply the impossibility of any adequate sensuous representation and, as a corrolary of this, an attachment to relatively spiritual ways of approaching God, such as prayer and mystical experience, as opposed to magical practices and elaborate rites focused around tangible sacred objects. The proponents of this spiritually oriented religion condemn their more materially minded con- temporaries for idolatry-i.e., for undue attention to idols, for conceiving God in too crudely sensuous a manner and approaching him in too materialistic a fashion. (This is sometimes put by saying that the idolaters put idols in place of God himself, and, as we have seen, Tillich makes use of this sort of formulation. But it is doubtful that it ever has more than a propaganda value. For it is dubious that any people have ever treated physical objects as such as divine.) The point to be noticed is that this standard use of "idolatry" presupposes a distinction between certain conceptions of the deity and certain modes of transaction with him as valid, in contrast with others as invalid. And the term is used in the course of recommending the former to the exclusion of the latter. It seems that Tillich wants to carry on this prophetic war against idolatry, except that, whereas his predecessors denounced certain religious conceptions and practices from within their own religion, Tillich wants to be able to condemn idolatry from a higher standpoint, one that will be innocent of any prior commitment to a particular religion. And this, presumably, is because he wants to be able to use the concept of idolatry as a general criterion for judging rival religions and theologies.3 The ontological, non-symbolic concept of being itself is supposed to provide just such a standpoint. Thus it might appear that in his denunciations of idolatry Tillir" is doing the same sort of job as the Hebrew prophets, except that he is carrying it much further; that, just as they contrasted their spiritual conception of Yahweh to the idolatrous conceptions of fertility deities held by many of their contemporaries, so Tillich is contrasting
TILLICH ON IDOLATRY 267 his still more severe, and religiously neutral, conception of God as being itself with any concrete idea or representation of God and denouncing the latter as idolatrous. But such a parallel cannot be mad.. out. A conception of God as being itself does not represent a religious alternative to the use of more concrete ideas, representations, etc. For, as we have seen, a religious concern with being itself is defined in terms of certain sorts of concerns which are focused on concrete entities. Religious attitudes toward being itself, in Tillich's conceptual scheme, are dependent on religious attitudes toward concrete entities. We cannot worship naked being itself; we must approach it through some of its manifestations. Hence Tillich cannot parallel the Hebrew prophets in advocating this specific conception of God to the exclusion of all others. Being itself is not a rival of the "God of ordinary theism" in the way that Yahweh was a rival of the Canaanite Baal. Still Tillich, for reasons given above, wants to conceive idolatry by reference to a conception of God as being itself. And, since he cannot shake religion loose from dependence on symbols, he must try to make a distinction between different ways of taking religious symbols in terms of their relation to being itself. And so he is led to define "idolatry" as "responding to religious symbols without taking them as symbols of being itself," in spite of the fact that his conceptual scheme makes any such concept impossible. In this way he is led into the difficulties we have been uncovering. Our examination of these difficulties has shown that Tillich has not really been able to construct a religiously neutral concept which would cover the sorts of cases usually called "idolatrous." (Of course he could call all religion which does not conceive God as being itself idolatrous, but then it would turn out that all religion, except for that of a few philosophers and theologians, is idolatrous.) This means that the proposal for judging rival religions and theologies on such a basis collapses. And it means that Tillich, if he is going to talk about idolatry, will have to do so from within some definite religious commitment, involving, in his terms, an attachment to certain particular religious symbols. NOTES 1. See, e.g., chap. ix of ST ("The Meaning of God"), where Tillich says things like: "The ultimate can become actual only through the concrete, through that which is preliminary and transitory" (p. 242). 2. Tillich does independently define "being itself" in ontological discussions. But he does nothing to link being itself, as so defined, to symbolism and ultimate concern. 3. See, e.g., CS, p. 197, where he says that, "if Christianity claims to have a truth superior to any other truth in its symbolism," it is that "he who himself embodies the fullness of the divine's presence sacrifices himself in order not to become an idol." Tillich then adds: "This is at the same time the criterion of all other symbols, and it is the cri- terion to which every Christian church should subject itself."