Is Tragedy Essential to Knowing? A Critique of Dr. Tillich's Aesthetic

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THE church's dialectic with culture has always risen and fallen in intensity, involving attraction and repulsion, an enmity and an accommodation. The church has not taken art seriously for some time now, other than as an ornament or a didactic device. In our own generation, however, there has been a restoration of communication between the church and culture and, through architecture, at least a partial restoration of the church's awareness of its intellectual investment in the world of artistic forms. Except, however, in this one area there has been little articulate awareness of the significance of this investment and therefore little positive communication between the church and the arts from the center of the church's faith rather than from the periphery. That this should be so is certainly not the fault of Paul Tillich, who has not only wished to establish a dialogue between the community of faith and its culture but has made this commerce the constructive principle of his theological method. His of correlation states that theology is defined out of the answers it must give to the questions involved in the concreteness of existence and experience. Thus culture is not simply a periphery of the theological enterprise but the origin and constructive principle of its systematic formulation. Implicit in this method is the use of the arts, with a notable emphasis on the visual arts, as essential to the process of isolating the questions. Other theologians have made incidental allusions to the arts, but Tillich is without equal among Protestant theologians and perhaps among distinctive Protestant thinkers, not just in the range and variety of his interests in the arts, but in the centrality of his concern with it. The result has been that, almost singlehandedly, he has restored communication between the community of the arts and the community of thinkers in the Protestant churches. The nonChristian critic has acknowledged with some interest that the church has a voice of significant relevance to his affairs. The critic who is a Christian, hitherto bound to conceal or ignore his faith in the process of any professional activity, begins to realize that it is not absolutely required of him that he be an intellectual schizophrenic. Others in the church begin to discover something of the relevance and nature of the arts. This is all to the good and a proper subject for rejoicing. Any restoration of communication among the isolated communities of modern life is good, and all concerned members of the intellectual community owe a great debt to Tillich * John Dixon is presently associate professor of religion and art in the Department of Religion of the University of North Carolina. He has taught previously at Michigan State College, Emory University, and Florida Presbyterian College. He holds degrees from Emory and Henry College (B.A.) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.). He has published Form and Reality: Art as Communication and various articles in Christian Scholar and Motive.