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powers were weak and did not help. So they were ripe for these quasi-religions. But that is
another subject for a whole seminar!
Are the Secular Religions Empty?
Student: I am not clear as to your statements on the secular religions. Do you consider the
secular religions to be empty, not giving man the true meaning of his life? Is that why they
become demonic?
Dr. Tillich: Now, you see, you cannot say such things! The secular religions, like the proper
religions, are open to many developments. They can be very solid expressions of ultimate
concern in secular language. That is, they can be this as long as a religious substance remains
effective in them despite the secularization, or as long as the ultimate concern or "infinite
passion" is still in them and shines through them.
Take a man like Plato: he was not a follower of the Olympian gods, he was far beyond them.
But the religious period which followed the Homeric period (a reform period) still influenced
him. So it was possible for him to become a secular philosopher, but with innumerable
philosophical insights pointing in every direction, so irrevocably that our whole Western
culture remains dependent on him whether we like it or not. At the same time, in every
dialogue he asked the question of the meaning of life. He is the typical expression of what I
would call the classical moment in history, if we may use the word for one special period, as
we usually do for classical art. For in Plato the substance of the archaic tradition remained,
but already expressed in rational terms, in terms of a very rational and very elaborate
philosophy. We know that Plato was the predecessor of modern mathematical science,
together with the Pythagoreans with whom we work today.
Now there are other possibilities open to us. If a wasteland slowly develops, the religious
substance is increasingly lost to the power of rational form. I can demonstrate this also very
well in the visual arts. After the classical gods or goddesses, we have beautiful women. And
in the end of the realistic period we even have prostitute types, with the names of goddesses,
which express the extreme emptiness of the situation. Then the reaction produces a new
archaism, as I said before. In philosophy we see emptiness in the form of a degeneration into
mere scientism, which does not have the power to give answers to the people of the period
to the problem of the meaning of their lives although earlier the Priest or priestess of
Delphi was certainly very influential among them, as we can see from the relationship of
Socrates to Delphi. He marked the beginning of autonomous criticism in philosophy, and
nevertheless was the wisest of all men, as the Delphic oracle told him. These are wonderful
historical nuances to contemplate.
A question, therefore, such as you have just asked "Are secular religions empty?"
cannot be answered. We can only say that in the process of historical development certain
stages appear. And we have to ask, "Where are we at present in all this?" I believe we are
perhaps in the archaistic stage not the archaic, but the archaistic. We look longingly back
to the time of power of our religion. Thus we recognize the appeal of sectarian movements
and the tremendous success of fundamentalism and of the Roman church, and so on. But we
are all at the same time going through this secularism whether we like it or not, because the
daily work going on here on this campus and elsewhere is based on the secularism of the
Western world, stemming from the Renaissance. We cannot escape it. And we have to fight to
avoid falling under wrong absolutisms, which I call demonizations, and to avoid simply
swimming along the popular ways of life into increasing profanization and secularization and
thus to an emptying of our culture.
Are the Quasi-Religions Necessary?
Student: I would like to return for a moment to the discussion on quasi-religion and put it on
an individual level, rather than on a group or sociological level. Would you say that concern
with the ultimate involves, during its development in the individual, an acceptance of some
form of quasi-religion?
Dr. Tillich: As an individual I am strongly attached to the quasi-religion of liberal humanistic
tradition, which is somehow politically expressed in the American Constitution and
philosophically expressed in the United States by people like William James or Whitehead. In
Europe it was expressed in earlier people like the German classical philosophers and their
critics, Nietzsche and others. So now we all stand in this tradition. I hope that, steeped as I am
in it, I likewise participate actively in it. On the other hand, I am also of the Christian
tradition, of the New Testament tradition, of the tradition of my great teacher Rudolf
Bultmann;3 and I am a product of the nineteenth century, which still taught me when I
attended the university from 1904 to 1907. These traditions are equally strong, and a part of
them I share with people like Luther and especially Augustine.
Now let us examine this liberal humanist tradition, which we need neither deny nor affirm,
since we are part of it. The word liberal means here autonomous thought and action, not
subjected heteronomously to either Fascism or Communism. In this sense I am free. But I try
to avoid, as I did as a religious socialist, falling into the process of emptying the liberal
humanist ideas of their original religious content. I always go back to the religious source that
underlies them, for there is no such thing as humanism in the abstract anywhere. Humanism is
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