Love, Power and Justice

“Love, Power and Justice” goes back to lectures Tillich gave in Aberdeen and Nottingham in 1952; the text appeared as a book in 1954. In it Tillich sets himself against a widespread arrangement: love is commonly taken to be the soft thing, power the hard one, justice the cool rule in between. The three appear as quantities that hold each other in check — whoever loves gives up power; whoever wants justice must set love aside.

Tillich disputes this arrangement. For him the three concepts are not competitors but belong together at the root. Love, in his account, is not a feeling but the drive towards the reunion of the separated. Power is the capacity of a being to assert itself, even against resistance — in itself neither good nor evil, but a condition of anything existing at all. And justice is the form in which love becomes effective where more than two people are involved: it gives each what is due to them as this particular person. Love without justice becomes sentimental, justice without love becomes mere allocation, and power without either becomes violence.

How far such a conceptual framework carries shows itself in a concrete case. Verna Ehret brings Tillich’s reflections together with the conflict over the land of the Seneca Nation. When the Kinzua Dam was built on the Allegheny River in the early 1960s, some 40 square kilometres of Seneca land were flooded — land whose inviolability the United States had guaranteed to the Seneca in the Treaty of Canandaigua in 1794. More than a thousand people had to leave their homes; graves were relocated. Legally the process was covered; the older treaty was simply overwritten.

It is in cases like this that Tillich’s distinction becomes practical. A power that prevails without taking account of the right of the other not only fails love but destroys its own foundation. From this Ehret draws a line to the present: to the treatment of Native American tribes and further to the question of racism as a structure that systematically withholds from people what is due to them. Tillich’s concepts are old enough not to have been cut to fit these debates — and that is what makes them usable as an instrument of examination.

The sections of the conversation

The conversation can be found in the listening area under Religion and violence — Tillich and the Seneca Nation — five sections, each playable on its own.

1. Opening and Introduction (3:03)
2. What one book would you take on a lonely island? (2:54)
3. Religion and Violence — Love and Power (3:11)
4. The Seneca and the Five Nations (1:33)
5. Tillich’s notions of justice (4:29)

Verna Ehret describes her fascination with Paul Tillich and how she came into contact with his work. She reports at length on her work with the Six Nations and in particular on the injustice done to the Seneca Nation. Tillich’s remarks on justice play an important part in her perspective on how the Native American tribes should be dealt with in future.

Ilona Nord interviews Verna Ehret, 23 November 2019 in San Diego.