Book Review

Paulus Reminiscences of a Friendship. Rollo May. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973. 113
pages.
Rollo Mays brief book about his relationship with Paul Tillich reveals more about May than Tillich.
The great theologian is presented through the bedazzled eyes of the acolyte. Admitting his passion for
the spirit of the ancient Greeks, May begins by proclaiming that in Tillich, I sensed a direct line from
the eminent figures of ancient Greece Aeschylus, Sophocles, Phidias down to Paulus himself (14).
At the end, in a eulogy for Tillich, May likens Tillichs death to that of Socrates. In short, Tillich is
Mays hero and the book is a labor of love.
May provides vignettes of Tillich mentoring May, sharing leisure with May, seducing Mays fianc (an
act May oddly regards as complimentary), and otherwise being of great importance to May. Although
Mays text depicts Tillich reciprocating Mays friendship, it does not appear that dependency and love
were mutual in intensity or priority. Tillich was Mays salvation: I felt I had been waiting all my life
for someone to speak out as he did. His words called forth truths in myself that I had known vaguely
for years but never dared articulate (4). Tillichs salvation lay elsewhere.
May admits hero-worshipping Tillich. In a 1974 interview with Elliott Wright, for Christian Century,
May claimed that outrage greeting his book arose from anger that one should present a man as a hero
(Paul Tillich as Hero: An Interview with Rollo May, 1974). May acknowledges he wrote Paulus as
an admiring student who may not be the most objective judge of a teacher. He declared
unapologetically: Im not afraid to admire Paul Tillich. He has been my spiritual father. I learned from
him and loved him. Strangely that seems to enrage many people.
May notes in Paulus that Tillich swore eternal enmity (62) against hero-worship that excluded the
heros humanity. Nonetheless May repeatedly minimizes and psychologizes the great mans human
freedom and frailties. This is especially true when May ventures into Tillichs Eros and sexual
behavior. For May, Eros did not mean sex. Rather it was the most important daimon (little god) of
lifes basic motivational constructs, according to Mays psychology. In Tillich, May saw the clearest
demonstration of Eros in action I have ever seen (52). That Eros was a pull toward a higher state, an
allure of new forms, new potentialities, new nuances of meaning, in promise if not in actuality (52).
May asserts that Tillichs Eros generally excluded physicality.
May presents Tillich as compulsively driven toward erotic encounters and compares him throughout to
Gethes Faust. Yet May consistently maintains that Tillich sought sensual, not sexual, encounters in
his many relationships with women. May presents women as incapable of resisting Tillichs intense
presence, which was the source of his capacity to penetrate the woman with his eyes and voice, to a
depth below that in which she had always looked at herself (29). Tillichs alleged mental and
emotional penetration of women elevated the great man, and bespoke his ontological approach to the
erotic, according to May. His implication is that Tillich penetrating women in the base act of physical
intercourse was beneath him.
For a renowned psychologist, Mays attitudes towards women and physical sexual relations seem
disturbed. Despite denying physical intimacy in most of Tillichs relationships with women, May notes
that bodily contact seemed terribly important (55) to Tillich. Apparently May distinguishes between
physical intimacy and intercourse while asserting that Tillichs liaisons with women, with few
exceptions, were sensual rather than sexual. This seems a stretch given Mays comments that Tillichs
erotic pursuits were compulsive (36), driven by a need for physical contact, and the source of
considerable tension about the guilt and other difficulties [his] erotic patterns brought upon him (64).
Seemingly May is as bedeviled by sexuality as Tillich. He tolerates, even honors, his hero seeking the
warm glow of passion in his numerous, intimate, encounters with women, but not its physical
actuality (55). Even Tillichs frequent visits to prostitutes, May says, were pursued for conversation
not explicit sexual experience (63).
In the preface to Paulus, May states he will do justice to Tillich by limiting his text to areas in which
our lives overlapped and intermingled (vii). Almost immediately May crosses this self-imposed
boundary. He assumes the role of apologist and third-party psychoanalyst of Tillich, particularly when
it comes to Tillichs sexual life. Yet May did not participate in Tillichs erotic encounters. In fact, that
area of Tillichs life was uniquely veiled and beyond Mays access as the single area in which Tillich
demanded and maintained secrecy: Secrecy was another essential trait of Paulus erotic life.
Secrecy surrounded the whole area (55). Mays observations regarding Tillichs erotic needs and
encounters are seemingly suspect ab initio pursuant to Mays own criterionhis non-participation in
that area of Tillichs life. And they are rendered largely speculative by virtue of Tillichs insistent
secrecy.
Hannah Tillich, in her book, From Time to Time (1973), released weeks prior to publication of Paulus,
presents a very different picture of Tillichs erotic life. She describes Tillichs sexual behavior in lurid
detail and dreadfulness that often smacks of wounded vengeance presenting its own credibility issues.
May does not comment on Hannahs book in Paulus. He always denied rushing his book to publication
to counteract Hannahs From Time to Time. The reality seems otherwise.
In the Christian Century interview, May admitted reading a proof of Hannahs book in the summer
of 1972, and trying to persuade her not to publish it. He further acknowledged that he was persuaded to
publish Paulus to provide two versions of Paul Tillich. To discredit Hannahs effort, May asserted
that although he was a biased admiring student a wife is considerably less reliable.
Mays reliability and intentions are suspect as he ignores his own boundaries, straining to diffuse
Tillichs eroticism and deny that Tillich sought physical sexual gratification. The clearest example of
this comes when May acknowledges that Tillichs relations with women could and did at times become
angry and sadistic. May rushes to drain sadism of its heft, consigning it to psychology and philosophy,
and distancing it from the realm of behavior. Ultimately, Mays idealized construct of Tillichs
sexuality and eroticism, as ontological Eros, is unconvincing.
The real question then is not whether Tillich pursued and consummated erotic encounters, but why
Rollo May, the preeminent existential psychotherapist of his day, is so intent to deny his hero carnality
and flesh. Why would consummation in Tillichs affairs threaten Mays affair with Tillich? Perhaps
May answers the question himself: In dealing with people like Paulus, we tend to slide back into the
assumption that with the removal of a few minor aberrations, the worshipped person would fit our ideal
and could then be worshipped without contradiction. Our need to worship overcomes our respect for
truth (62). May constructs an image of Tillichs sexual conduct that, whether accurate in some
respects or not, likely removes some not too minor aberrations, allowing May to worship Tillich
without contradiction.
Among the Greeks May idolized, Socrates was morally unambiguous, a paradigm of virtue and fidelity
for generations. Gethes Faust, to whom May also compares Tillich, is quite another matter. Although
May ignores the ambiguity of Faust, his analogy opens a window to important truths about Tillich,
even as May clings inside to the sill. Gethes Faust is a man petrified by his study of philosophy,
jurisprudence, medicine, and (most ironic) worst of all, theology (JoHann Wolfgang von Gethe,
Gethes Faust; tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 93). Faust makes a pact with
the devil, Mephistopheles, who in Job-like fashion obtained permission from God to meddle with
Faust. Mephisto grants Faust more than any man has seen before (183), in exchange for Fausts soul.
Gethes Faust is a decidedly ambiguous figure straddling the polarities of tragedy and comedy while
storming through life with impunity. He sates his lust, acquisitiveness, hunger for power, knowledge
and passion through rape, murder, and piracy. He burns the home of an elderly couple because they
refused to sell it to him. He is hedonistic, repugnant, amoral, and unrepentant. In his vilest act he
destroys Gretchen, the 14 year-old virgin whom he seduced and impregnated. Then, in a conclusion
reviled by some and praised by others, Faust is saved, redeemed even, by his victim Gretchen.
The comparison of Tillich to Gethes Faust, which May suggests originated with Tillich himself, is
tepid in Mays hands:
Paulus had an identification with Faust that deeply involved his emotions. Both were devoted to power
of knowledge. Both were giants. Both experienced a great deal of sensuality along the way, we have
seen this in Paulus life, and his guilt about it. He often acted, indeed, as though he had sold his soul to
Mephistopheles, a guilt he consciously admitted. In such avowals, I suggest, his logic came to the
rescue and protection of his undeveloped emotional involvement (May 80-81).
May fails to acknowledge Fausts complexity and ambiguity. He ignores Fausts (and Tillichs)
depravity and self-centeredness. Nonetheless, by invoking Faust, May provides the reader with an
opportunity to know Tillich beyond Mays construct.
Tillichs compulsive quests for knowledge, perfection in thought, and intimacy with women (whatever
that actually entailed) damaged and hurt others. He neglected his children, acquired and abandoned
women, and caused his wife pain. Tillich was often wracked by guilt about his erotic life (as reflected
in letters Tillich wrote to certain women) and questioned whether it was ultimately a failure. He
emerges, like Faust after his compact with Mephistopheles, as unrestrained in his appetites, craving
experience, knowledge, perfection in thought, and intimacy generally and with women particularly.
Tillich is a man capable of great love and great anger, stirred by tragedy and the depths of the abyss,
and eager to cavort upon the heights of ecstatic reason grasped by ultimate concern. He traverses the
polarities of chaos and cosmos, perpetual angst and adjustment, dynamic peace and a tormented spirit,
sensuality and sexuality, tenderness and sadism, ecstasy and depression, secrecy and openness, logic
and emotions, anxiety and courage, good and evil, etc. Like Faust, Tillichs adult life is a tragic quest
to be saved by Gretchen, as Gethe puts it, or by the mothers (Gethe 57). Or, as May concludes, by
his mother.
Tillichs life, as presented by May, consists of innumerable polarities that both exhaust Tillich and
bring ecstasy. By some reckonings, Faust spends his life exploring and exhausting polar opposites that
are never resolved. It is not surprising that polarities are the foundation of Tillichs Systematic
Theology. It is surprising that the psychologist May does not explore whether the polarities at the
foundation of Tillichs life and work, which he clearly presents, are not also profoundly part of
Tillichs constitution, as some form of bi-polar illness. Possibly Tillichs plunges into the abyss, and
ascents to ecstasy, were more than intellectually or situationally determined.
Paulus is an interesting read, especially when considered along with Hannah Tillichs From Time to
Time. For what it is worth, my guess is that the truth about Paul Tillichs eroticism likely lies in the
space between Hannah Tillichs and Rollo Mays accounts, probably nearer the shore of From Time to
Time. Although May claims to write about the friendship between himself and Tillich, Paulus is best
viewed as autobiographical, with Tillich as Mays stage and set. More truth about Tillich will come
from reading Gethes Faust.
Jennifer Coleman
Boston University
Spring, 2008