New Yorker magazine, January 1970I once sat behind John Updike at a chamber music concert in an old mansion north of Boston. Sitting in the front row, he was a distraction. Not just because he was the famous author, but because he was so noisy, apparently having had too much to drink. Nor could I regard him only as the famous author, which may tell more about the state of my own sometimes salacious mind back then than about Updike himself. He and his mixed company, disrupting the concert experience as they were, made me think that I was witnessing the unfolding of a raucous chapter from Couples. On the other hand, by that point in my life I had become an avid reader of all his novels. What can I say? I scarcely listened to the music.
My relationship to Paul Tillich was much more extensive and much more personal. As I have often observed, it was my privilege to have been able to take courses from Paul Tillich for six years while he was teaching at Harvard, beginning already as an undergraduate. Along the way, I never encountered the seamy, Updikean side of Tillich that his wife, Hannah, was later to reveal in her memoir after Tillich’s death, From Time to Time. Rather, I relished his – I was later to realize – sometimes self-serving autobiographical reflections; and I delighted in all the sometimes moving obscurities of his wide-ranging lectures, above all his theology of culture. Turns out that Tillich’s early essay on “Nature and Sacrament” was, for me, perhaps the single most influential work of its kind that I ever read. I returned to it often, long after I first read it when I was a sophomore in college.
My relationship with Karl Barth was strictly academic or, rather, for me, profoundly academic (for my doctoral dissertation, I worked my way through his voluminous Church Dogmatics in German, as carefully as I could). True, I once visited Barth in his Basel home for exactly a half-hour (he timed the meeting) and that personal encounter was for me deeply moving. Even to be able to speak with that great man! Memorably, for me, as we talked in German (he knew English well, but insisted on Hochdeutsch), he made a to-me-not-surprising effort to talk me out of my dissertation topic, the theology of nature! How could I want to try to resurrect that dead horse (my words), he kept saying to me, in a variety of ways. While Barth and I were talking, Barth’s “significant other,” his editorial assistant, Charlotte von Kirschenbaum – not his wife, Nelly – served us tea. It was only much later that I would learn about that, to say the least, complicated relationship.
So it was of course a delight for me recently when, in working my way through a stack of reprints in my office, as I continue to downsize my library, I came across an essay by John Updike about Tillich and Barth (New Yorker, January 1, 1979). After eagerly re-reading that essay, I concluded that Updike had just about got it right. Perhaps, in retrospect, it took a great novelist to do that so insightfully:
In offering to meet the needs of their time, Tillich and Barth set their fellow-Christians opposite but, so elastic are the dialectics of faith, not mutually exclusive lessons. Both confronted the apparent withdrawal of God from the world around them – Barth by claiming that [God] was Wholly Other and thus immune to detection, Tillich by suggesting that [God] was present weakly, in everything. Theology buttresses the faith that would hold off mortal fear, and these two theologians, a decade after their deaths, present a merged afterimage, positive and negative slants on the problem of fear. What lingers of Barth, still ringing in the air of churches and seminaries, was his tone of fearlessness, his bold, encyclopedic, and hearty exposition of the word of God, as overagainst the word of Man; whereas Tillich, unable to exclude anxiety and doubt, brought them into the sanctum, and called them holy emotions.