I Paul Tillich's relationship to nature Paul Tillich's life (1886-1965) spanned a period that saw great upheavals. In his autobiographical writings he recalls how his personal world changed from a reasonably peaceful existence at high point of bourgeois society with its productive grandeur, to one of conflict and destabilization of society he belonged to, reflected in split between Lutheran churches and proletariat, rise of Nazism, exile and adjustment to a new world and foreign language, and transformation of this world into a global village with new technologies offering new means of communication and travel. His life, as he admits, occasioned abandonment and overcoming of various provincialisms--intellectual, theological, and Western. For all his life Tillich stayed unusually attentive to culture, science and technology, and nature. While Tillich's theology of culture is relatively well known, his theology of nature has caught attention only in recent years (E.g. Drummy 2000, also cf Hummel 1994). With regard to he distinguished a predominantly aesthetic-meditative attitude toward nature from a scientific-analytical or technical-controlling relation. It is theologically formulated in his doctrine of participation of nature in process of fall and He contrasts his view with Ritschlian theology, which establishes an infinite gap between nature and personality and gives Jesus function of liberating one's personal life from bondage of nature within us and beside us. Nature is something to be controlled morally and technically, and only subjective feelings of a more or less sentimental character toward nature are admitted. There is no mystical participation in no understanding that nature is finite expression of infinite ground of all things, no vision of divine-demonic conflict in nature. Tillich's actual contacts with especially in his younger years, German poetic literature, and traditional Lutheran doctrine finitum capax infiniti brought him a sense of infinite potential in every being. In Tillich's first book of sermons, The Shaking of Foundations, published in 1950, there is a Lenten sermon about what nature means to us and to itself in great drama of creation and salvation. One of his biblical texts was Paul's assertion that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth until now (Romans 8:22) and one of his citations is Schelling's observation that nature, also, mourns for a lost good (Tillich 1950:82). In this sermon he poetically praises glory of nature before turning to its melancholy, asking: Why is nature tragic? Who is responsible for suffering of animals, for ugliness of death and decay, for universal dread of death? In second volume of his Systematic Theology, Tillich explains more formally that myth of fall portrays transition from essence to existence brought about through actualization of human freedom. The tragic element is that this exercise of freedom is result of human destiny rather than simply result of an individual's acts. The symbol of serpent and its curse represents involvement of nature. Any notion of innocence of nature before fall is rejected in view of simultaneous, transhistorical character of fall and creation. Nature participates in humanity and humanity in united in a shared destiny (Tillich 1957:42). Greatness of life, greatness and dignity make tragedy possible in all dimensions of life: all beings affirm themselves in their finite power of being. They do in their relation to other beings and, in doing so, bring upon themselves reaction of logos-determined laws, which push back anything that trespasses limits given to it (Tillich 1963a:93). This tragic explains suffering in an explanation which is neither mechanistic nor romantic but realistic in terms of spontaneous character of life processes. …