At the time I was at Columbia University, as a graduate student in philosophy as well as an Assistant in the Religion Department, Paul Tillich – a theologian of world stature in the twentieth century – was just a few blocks up the street at Union Theological Seminary. Although Tillich was said to be quite friendly and accessible, I felt no prompt to go up to Union to meet him. Great men don’t necessarily need a visit from me. Besides, this one was widely known to be – if you’ll pardon my language – an ass pincher.

Susan Sontag, not then well known as the public intellectual she became, was also in the Religion Department, as an instructor, and we shared a large, populous office that had several desks in it besides ours. About meeting Tillich, she told me that all you needed to do, when it was time to leave, was back out the door. No doubt she was right, but I didn’t see how the physical challenge of walking out of an office backward harmonized with the spiritual challenge of thinking about God in the company of a great man.

Recently that long-ago question took on new life for me as I read a memoir by Hannah Tillich, his widow. Here’s the tale as told in From Time to Time. Hannah first met Tillich at a costume party in 1919, just after Germany had lost the First World War. There was nothing special about his looks (“he looked motheaten”) but, once they were alone and he started to talk, “he seemed to me the only human being among the clowns and knights, the nymphs and dwarfs.” Some “playful, sensuous meetings” later, he would be the one to whom she would surrender her virginity. 

At this juncture, the story gets unexpectedly complicated. Despite the overwhelming quality of her bond with Tillich, she goes ahead with a first marriage to another man. As she said to an inquirer, she did not quite trust Tillich. Though she finds nothing wrong with the first husband and much to like about him, once pregnant, she leaves him and goes to live with Tillich! The first husband persists in his unrequited and betrayed love until their child dies, for which (unfairly in her view) he blames Hannah.

Her divorce from the first husband and lifelong marriage with Tillich follows. Yet something in her never recovers from Tillich’s having spent the whole of their wedding night away from his bride, in the company of friends at a seductive bachelor party. At intervals, they do rekindle their passionate joy in each other as well as a deep intellectual communion. Yet he takes lovers, as does she, in accord with the vaunted superiority-to-bourgeois-values of that era. It’s a style she falls into but proves unable to sustain when it comes to the women with whom he gets infatuated. She rather hates them, despite her “emancipated” principles.

Meanwhile, Tillich is gaining recognition as a thinker of stature and they move through a succession of favorable university appointments in theology. In the Germany of that perilous time, communists and Nazis are battling in the streets. Hannah had seen Hitler at one of his rallies and didn’t see anything specially alarming about him. However, at Hannah’s insistence, Tillich goes to a Hitler rally and moves up close to get a look at him. “He came home shudderingly impressed by the demon in Hitler’s eyes. Paulus felt the spell of the little man with the uncultured voice and the brutality of his wordy assault. He sensed great danger.” 

Her husband’s personal virtue shines especially as the Hitler regime gains power, acting with uncanny speed to find, capture and “remove” Jews and political dissenters. While people in their circle are wondering whether and when to leave Germany, Paul refuses to resign as he has been invited to do. He “would not leave [his academic position] of his own volition. They had to throw him out. But nobody, nobody in the world could change his spiritual and intellectual convictions, neither his father, his wife, nor a whole world in turbulence.” He returns only after the war “without hostility against individuals, but he gave a speech about the anti-Semitism of the Germans that made the women in the audience weep.”

They come to America where he accepts a succession of university posts, at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard and finally Chicago – the city where he will die. Sadly, in the years of their American sojourn, he keeps so distant from her, while continuing his infidelities, that she becomes finally disaffected and embittered. Abandoned by him, she turns to the disciplines of Yoga and meditation. It’s a resort to which he too finally turns, and they share a rekindled friendship as his life force ebbs.

Theologically, I am just getting to know Tillich and can’t say much about his thought. In the one book of his I’ve read, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, he tries to overcome the contradiction between an impersonal Ultimacy (the “ground of being”) and the personal God of Biblical faith. Whether he continued his effort to merge the impersonal features of divinity with the personal God of history, or whether they came apart for him at the end, is unclear from what I’ve read so far, whether in her memoir or in this one of his many books.

What do I personally make of this strange story? It might be a bridge too far for one human being to try to comprehend ultimate things – “the ground of being” – and at the same time figure out how to live in the relative realities of our world. To a thinker of Ultimacy like Tillich, petty questions of personal betrayal and broken commitments might have taken second place. In his mind, questions like that might be reserved “for the women”– the way observant Jewish women are delegated to handle the separation of dishes into those set aside for meat and the ones set aside for dairy.

I would say, to the great theologians, the pathbreakers, the intellectual pioneers who proceed as if the women are out of it –

don’t be quite so sure.