On the Boundary

In 1936, three years after his suspension from the Frankfurt chair and his move to New York, Paul Tillich writes a short autobiographical reflection. It appears first in English, as the opening of “The Interpretation of History”, and later under the German title “Auf der Grenze”; the English edition of 1966 carries the title “On the Boundary”. The text is not a life story in the usual sense. Tillich does not move along the years but along the boundaries: between two temperaments, between city and countryside, between theology and philosophy, between church and society, between home and foreign country. Each of these boundaries is given a section of its own.

The sentence that holds the whole together stands right at the beginning: the boundary is the truly fruitful place of knowledge. It is more than a piece of biographical self-description. Tillich is formulating an epistemological claim. Whoever stands wholly within one field no longer sees its presuppositions; they have become self-evident. Only someone standing between two fields, belonging fully to neither, notices that both fields have boundaries at all. This is uncomfortable — Tillich explicitly does not describe existence on the boundary as a comfortable place of compromise, but as a tension that has to be borne.

The timing is worth noting. The position in between, which Tillich interprets here as productive, was not one he chose in its sharpest form. The boundary between Germany and America was imposed. The text turns an experience of loss into a figure of thought, and it is precisely there that a question arises: how far does such an interpretation carry, and where does it begin to ennoble a misfortune after the fact?

For anyone working on Tillich the text is a good way in, because nearly all the themes of his work can be found here in outline — the theology of culture, the relation of faith and doubt, religious socialism, the question of how Christianity stands to other religions. They appear not as set pieces of doctrine but as places where someone could get no further without taking both sides into account.

Thomas Weiß introduces the text in a short lecture of just over four minutes, embedded above; it is the basis for task 2. The lecture is held in German and carries subtitles.

The sentence at the centre

The boundary is the truly fruitful place of knowledge.

On the text itself

The German version of this module carries the text in extracts — the introduction, two of the twelve boundary chapters and the retrospect, in Tillich’s own German. The full text cannot be reproduced: the rights rest with the publisher and the book is in print. For an English text you will need an edition:

• English: “On the Boundary”, the opening part of The Interpretation of History (New York 1936); revised and newly translated as a book of its own, On the Boundary. An Autobiographical Sketch (New York 1966), reissued by Wipf and Stock in 2011.
• German: “Auf der Grenze”, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. XII, Begegnungen. Paul Tillich über sich selbst und andere, Stuttgart 1971. Also the separate edition brought out by the Evangelisches Verlagswerk in 1962 for the Peace Prize ceremony.

The text is organised as thirteen boundaries — between two temperaments, city and country, social classes, reality and imagination, theory and practice, heteronomy and autonomy, theology and philosophy, church and society, religion and culture, Lutheranism and socialism, idealism and Marxism, home and alien land — followed by a retrospect that sets limits to the metaphor of the boundary itself.

Tasks 1 and 2 can be done without an edition; tasks 3 to 7 ask for evidence from the text.

Where the sentence comes from

The sentence this module turns on is already a self-quotation in “On the Boundary”. Right at the start Tillich notes that in the introduction to Religiöse Verwirklichung (1929) he had written: “The border line is the truly propitious place for acquiring knowledge.” Anyone quoting the sentence should know that it dates from 1929 and was taken up again in 1936.

How much the term mattered to Tillich shows twenty-six years later. In 1962, receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, he returns to it:

I want to speak about “boundaries”, a concept that has always aroused my philosophical as well as my personal interest. “On the Boundary-Line”, “Auf der Grenze”, was what I called a small piece of self-characterisation with which I introduced myself in America shortly after the emigration. And “Auf der Grenze” is the title of the little book that the Evangelisches Verlagswerk has brought out for today’s occasion.

— Paul Tillich, address on receiving the Peace Prize, 1962; quoted from Kaloudis (M1), p. 205, translated here

The address itself is in the listening area under Address on receiving the Peace Prize — forty minutes, unedited, in German. Placing the two side by side shows how the term shifted: in 1936 it concerns personal and thematic boundaries, in 1962 boundaries between peoples and the question of understanding after the catastrophe.

A note on the tasks

Below you will find tasks for working through the material in more depth, together with guidance on how to approach them.