Having recently read the memoir of Hannah Tillich, largely concerned with her marriage to Paul Tillich, renowned theologian – with close-up views of how he pursued his own erotic opportunities at the cost of their marital romance – one upshot was that I became less interested in reading Paul Tillich. Had he managed to reconcile his ontological focus on the “ground of being” with the personal God of the Bible? I was not able to detach that fine question from my sense of the seducer whose question it had been.

Do the lives of great men – of the greats – have to attain the heights of their thought? I don’t know if the lives have to be comparably great, but if you’re writing about God and our human selves, the writer’s life has relevance. And particularly if a hurtful pattern affecting an intimate love persists, or gets worse, over a lifetime of thinking about the Ultimate. I found that I couldn’t pick up his most cited work: The Courage to Be. I was just glad I wasn’t married to him.

Those reflections brought to mind another thinker with whom I was actually and ineluctably connected: Henry M. Rosenthal, my father. In the last year of his life, my father was at work on a book titled The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way. He died just after completing the Hobbes section, which includes some footnoted responses to questions I raised while he was writing it. Part II, on Spinoza, bore no mark of our conversations (and does not, I think, suffer from their absence). 

For a number of years after my father’s death, the manuscript languished in the hands of the co-executor, to whose wishes I’d deferred up to the moment of my being diagnosed with cancer. Then I felt duty-bound to step up and put the book together. My task would be to supply introductions that would situate the book in the context of recent, relevant philosophic work on Hobbes and Spinoza, also to write the appropriate words about my father’s life.

At that point, my own life was becoming an uphill climb. In the mornings, I would report to a Manhattan hospital for radiation treatments for breast cancer. In the afternoons, I would repair to the New York Public Library at 42nd Street to read up on “the literature” – the recent work on the two seventeenth-century thinkers with whom my father’s book was concerned. By then, my own book, A Good Look at Evil, had come out with Temple University Press, which meant I had an editor to whom I could show my father’s manuscript when these preliminaries were done.

I consulted with the family lawyer who advised me first to get to the point where the contract was in hand and ready to be signed before seeking my co-executor’s signature and, only then, to advise my editor that it would be required. 

Since there was no guarantee that, after the radiation treatment, I would recover from the cancer, I also enlisted a collegial friend – who’d been one of my father’s philosophy students – to take over the project if I didn’t live to complete it.

As it happens, I didn’t die then, the needful agreements were secured without incident, the book drew a number of laudatory reviews and – though deeply relieved at this outcome – after all that I felt no call to revisit the experience or the book. What stayed in my mind was the moment when I’d finished the last of the Intros and the biographical Preface. I was alone in the house in Maine that I’d co-inherited. Putting the pen down, I walked outside and down the marina to the water’s edge. It was sunset time, the close of the day. There was a pink half-circle in the sky, as if the very sky wore a halo, and I seemed to hear my father say to my mother – as he might have – slapping a country hat against his knee, “She did it! The kid did it!”

All that is background to my recent interest in revisiting HMR’s Consolations of Philosophy, if only to see how it compared to Paul Tillich’s thinking on ultimate topics. So far, what I found is that the originality and depth of its insights are partially concealed by the condensed, aphoristic complexity of the style. The good reviews, the interest it had drawn from recognized scholars, had not been of my making. The deep chords it had struck in qualified readers were indeed there – and I had not put them there. But he was never going to edge Paul Tillich off the playing field.

One of the favorable reviews had come from Thomas Altizer, a well-known theologian. When I met him, some time after his review appeared, he said to me, and I quote:

“I am a sonovabitch. I am a sonovabitch. There’s only one thing I care about – and that’s God. And your father – was a man of God.”

So my efforts on behalf of this book, and belief that my father was a deeply interesting man, were certainly well-founded. But in his written work, which included decades of journals that I later went through in hopes of producing a book that could distill their insights, he still refused to come out into the discursive daylight. Finally I just had his unpublished materials archived at the American Jewish Historical Society.

On the first day of his admission to the Maine Coast Memorial Hospital in Ellsworth, Maine – where he would die at the end of a week of hospitalization – the intelligent young physician leaned over him to ask how he felt. He answered, in the last full sentence I heard him say,

I feel real resuscitated.

Related Content: 

The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way | Abigail L Rosenthal – Academia.edu / Henry M . Rosenthal – Academia.edu / Collection: Henry M. Rosenthal Papers | The Center for Jewish History Archives Space (cjh.org)