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 in a short lecture on “Auf der Grenze”.

The sentence at the centre

The boundary is the truly fruitful place of knowledge.

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.