[00:00:01] INTRODUCER:
Ladies and gentlemen, just before we appeared in this auditorium, Dr. Tillich spoke to the audience in 11 Wheeler, which is also packed, so that they might see him in the flesh before they heard him in the spirit.
(laughter)
By gift to the university in 1928, Miss Edith Zweybruck created the Agnes A. and Constantine E.A. Foerster Lectureship on the Immortality of the Soul in honor and memory of her sister and brother-in-law. Dr. Ralph Barton Perry, Professor of Philosophy in Harvard University, began the series of lectures on this foundation in 1933. Since then, many eminent philosophers and theologians from this country and from abroad have lectured on immortality and on kindred spiritual subjects.
The lecture tonight, if you will count them up in your program, marks the twenty-first in the series and the fourth time that the lecture has been given by a member of the faculty of Harvard University. At this time, I’d like to announce that the twenty-first– the twenty-second Foerster Lecture will be given in the spring semester by Aldous Huxley. Uh, the date will be announced later.
Dr. Paul Tillich has held appointments since 1955 as University Professor in Harvard University in the Divinity School. This title, University Lecturer, University Professor, uh, is reserved at Harvard for a small number of scholars who are free to work on the frontiers of knowledge without restriction as to field. It’s a very high honor.
From nineteen thirty-three to nineteen fifty-five, Professor Tillich was Professor of Philosophical Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Prior to nineteen thirty-three, he held teaching posts in several German universities: Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main. As an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime, he was compelled to leave Germany and came to the United States in 1933 at the invitation of the Union Theological Seminary.
He became a citizen of the United States in 1940. Since the end of World War II, Professor Tillich has returned to his native Germany to teach in some of the leading universities during the summer months. At present, he is working on his third and final volume of his great work on systematic theology.
Volume two, which was published in the spring of 1957, covers his doctrine of man and his doctrine of Christ. To quote his own words, he builds his theology on the method of correlation between questions arising out of the human predicament and the answers given in the classical symbols of religion. I have the honor of introducing to you Professor Tillich, who tonight will speak to you on symbols of eternal life.
Professor Tillich.
(applause)
[00:03:55] PROFESSOR TILLICH:
Mr. Strong, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, let me thank you for the honor to be one of the lecturers in this important lectureship. Secondly, for the great interest you have shown in this room and in the other one about the problems I want to deal with. The subject matter of this evening, Symbols of Eternal Life, is determined partly by the request of the foundation, which the vice president read to you, partly by my own systematic work, of which he talked to you, which centered presently around similar pro-uh, problems.
But partly, and I would think mostly, by the fact that the question of the thereafter, as it is badly called, has almost replaced in the minds of many people, especially in this country, the other problems and the other symbols of religion. But this is the central assertion of my paper. Without the whole of religious experience and religious symbolism, the problem of the symbols of eternal life, as I prefer to call them, lose their basis and their meaning.
They become a caricature of faith. They become superstition. Let me first speak to you about men’s experience of the eternal as the source of the symbols of eternal life.
Everything in the universe is subject to the temporal process, which means not having been before and not to be after a definite space of time, span of time. The awareness of this situation is anxiety in all beings in which the dimension of self-awareness is actual, in all human beings. But also in those beings, in those animals who have the self-awareness which produces anxiety in them.
Basic anxiety and awareness of finitude are one and the same thing. Anxiety is finitude aware. Man is not only anxiously aware of his finitude, He also knows it as what it is.
(chuckles)
He anticipates his future non-being, and he knows that once upon a time he was not. But in knowing this about himself and his world, he is at the same time above it. He participates in a universal truth, which as truth is not subject to temporality.
The meaning of time is not temporal itself. The act of knowing is only one of the acts of the human spirit which are transtemporal. The experience of the moral imperative and its unconditional character, whatever its changing contents may be.
The experience of the aesthetic expressiveness of the ethical ideas of justice and humanity, of the infinite concern about the meaning of life, the experience of the holy. They all have, although they appear in time, and in this sense are temporal, an element of trans-temporality or eternity. Expressions of this experience are evident since early mankind.
But the brevity of time given to my lecture forbids me to go into this extremely interesting development. But I want now to start by giving you a sharper formulation of the idea by circumscribing the concept of identity, uh, of eternity. I say not defining, I say circumscribing, Because there are concepts, many of them, in men’s spiritual life, which cannot be defined, but which can be circumscribed, which can be understood by bringing, by being brought into confrontation with other concepts of this character.
The origin of the symbol of eternity is a vision based on the experienced unity of stretches of time in memory and anticipation, which we all experience in every moment. In every moment of our consciousness of being present, we have still elements of memory of the immediate past or of a farther removed past, and we have elements of anticipation of the nearest or a farther removed future. We unite in our consciousness in this moment, disrupted moments of time in what we call presence.
(clears throat)
This was the pattern according to which a divine mind was supposed to unite infinitely larger stretches of time and finally all temporal developments. This was what the idea meant, expressed in different languages on which our concept of eternity is dependent. In Hebrew, Olam.
And when it was expressed in a full linguistic power, it was said, “Olamim ha-olamim”, the eternities of the eternities. Or in Greek, aion, and fully expressed, aiones aionon, and in Latin, aeternitas, and in full power, aeternitatis aeternitatum. It is the idea of a long but limited time.
It does not exclude time, but it is not timelessness either. Timelessness is expressed in the timeless validity of a mathematical proposition. It’s sometimes expressed in the symbol of the simultaneous presence of everything.
But the genuine concept of eternity is neither timelessness nor immovable presence in a simultaneous way. It is, if I may try a description, the trans-temporal unity of the consecutive moments of time. The trans-temporal unity of the consecutive moments of time.
This excludes the other distortion of the meaning of eternity, namely endless temporality. Endlessness is the prolongation of time without limit. But, and please keep this in mind, not only for this lecture, Endlessness is not eternity.
It is, as the philosopher Hegel has called it, bad infinity.
(laughter)
Good infinity is eternity.
(coughs)
Eternity is the belonging of men to the order which transcends temporality, besides his belonging to the order of temporality. Man belongs in his whole being, in every cell of his body, to two orders: the order of eternity and the order of temporality. The oldest and always present answer to the question: how can we prove this or if it’s asked in a more refined and sublime way, which is the evidence for this, is based on the identity of of the deepest ground in men with the deepest ground of reality.
The classical Indian formulation is the identity of Atman with Brahman. The ground of being universal is present in the ground of our being. In recognizing this identity, we recognize the double belongingness of men, to the world of seeming reality in which we live in time and space, and its ground out of which everything comes and to which it must return, the ultimate reality.
Similar in the Western world, Plotinus, the Neoplatonic philosopher and mystic, says, “If the soul is in the divine One, One with a capital O. She is not in something else, but in herself. And conversely, if the soul is in solitude with herself, separated from everything that is, she is in the One, the divine, the ultimate reality.
In order to have this experience, men according to Plotinus must empty himself of the contents of his empirical consciousness. One can call this mystical experience, if the verb mystical is kept free from the distorting connotations it has in popular talk, and unfortunately even in academic talk today, namely as something foggy, irrational, emotional, and many other bad things, which makes the word almost useless. But I beg you, we need an abbreviation for the way in which uncounted billions of people in historical mankind, have experienced the ultimate meaning of their lives.
So I try to save the word mystical in order to have one word for the religious experience of the larger part of mankind in the last at least three or four thousand years. Certainly, this evidence of the unity or the identity of the Atman and the Brahman, this evidence for our belonging to eternity is not based on a theoretical cognitive argument. We discover eternity in, in the line of that thought, to the degree in, in which we discover the ground of our own being within ourselves.
The opposite religious type is usually called the prophetic type. The discussion about the eternal destiny of men in later Judaism in, in which Jesus participated, led him to the sentence, God says, “I am the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, and God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Again, this is not an argument, but the pointing to an experience.
It formulates the religious ground of the certainty of an eternal destiny of men. The immediate experience of communion with God implies man’s potentiality of participating in the eternal, which God is. The certainty about man’s eternal destiny is identical with his certainty of a communion with God.
This is, so to speak, as we say in Latin, an argumentum ad hominem, and as we would say today, an existential argument which cannot be transformed into an objective theoretical argument. Nevertheless, Jesus gives an argument. He does not request the subjection to a doctrine.
as his churches later on did. The problems raised about man’s eternal destiny by the two types of religion are conceptualized in the philosophical inquiry into the problem. Here Plato is the representative figure, but he is not isolated.
He comes from Orphic mysticism And he was received by Jewish and Christian theology. In this way, he bridges somehow the mystical and the prophetic type. He is especially important because of the distorted use of his doctrine of immortality in popular thought, past and especially present.
We must distinguish when we speak of Plato, the motive and the arguments. The motive for his doctrine of the immortality of the soul comes out in Phaedrus, in this dialogue. For a man, in order to have understanding of universals, he must have the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while following God, when regardless of what we now call beings, she looked towards the true being, and therefore the mind of the philosopher alone has wings.
End quote. The doctrine of immortality, according to this, is the descriptions of men’s essential nature, which is eternally connected with the true and the good, and which being this being itself. The eternal element in the soul makes participation in the eternal possible.
A possibility which is actualized by the philosopher, who is called in the same context, the man who lives in recollection of those things in which God abides. This also is obviously an argumentum ad hominem, an existential argument. The certainty of an eternal destiny is real only in the act in which we are grasped by the true and the good.
The philosopher, the man who is liberated from the illusions of the ordinary existence in the cave, and not the professors of philosophy.
(laughter)
In this respect, the argument is analogous to that of Jesus. There are in Plato also seemingly objective arguments for immortality in Plato, but they are not real arguments. They are ex-existential experiences expressed in argumental form.
And therefore, Socrates, who leads to them, especially in the dialogue, Phaedon says, “You cannot be altogether confident of them.” As conclusions, they are not valid, but as descriptions of the eternal element in finite men, they are valid. They point to the creative independence of the human spirit with respect to the true and the good.
This does not prove the existence of an immortal substance called soul, but it describes men’s participation in the eternal. In these three forms, one common idea is expressed: man’s essential participation in the eternal. This certainty is not dependent on objective arguments.
It is implied in immediate existential experiences and has their certainty. But the way in which this certainty has expressed itself are manifold. And now I come to my second and larger part, the basic symbols of eternal life, their reality, their validity, and their limits.
All symbols of eternal life are symbols and not statements about empirical objects or happenings. This is the reason why arguments in the context of empirical knowledge can neither confirm nor refute them. Their language is religious language, and religious language is always, and by necessity, symbolic.
It takes empirical material and uses the categories of finitude, especially time, in order to express the dimension of the ultimate in being and meaning. But it uses them in such a way that they point beyond themselves. And this pointing beyond makes them symbolic.
Symbolic language is valid in the sense that it’s the only possible language for expressing the experience of man’s participation in the eternal. And symbols are by no means arbitrary. They are authentic when they are born out of a genuine experience of this participation, and they are adequate if they express the experience correctly and expressively.
Their distortions are due to the fact that they are taken in a non-symbolic literal way, and that their limits– they are limited in adequacy to the actual human situation. There is a basic polarity in all life, which can be called individualization and participation. Everything in all reality stands under this polarity.
And its character is that the more individualized a being is, the more it is able to participate. In men, we have complete individualization, and at the same time, in interdependence, universal participation. The symbols of eternal life are basically distinguishable according to the predominance of the element of participation or the element of individualization.
If the participation in the eternal is symbolized in such a way that the finite individual is completely taken back into the ground of all being, we can speak of symbols of proceeding for, from, and receding into the ground of being. In the opposite case, we can speak of symbols of being created and being reunited with the ground of being. And these are the two main types.
I repeat them. The one, symbols of proceeding from and receding into the ground of being. And the other, symbols of being created and being reunited with the ground of being.
The former group belongs to the mystical type, the latter to the prophetic type. Each of them, however, appears in three different ways. The proceeding of the finite from the infinite and its receding into it can be imagined in mystical, naturalistic, and idealistic symbolism.
The being created and reunited can be imagined in the symbols of the immortality of the soul, of the resurrection of the body, and of the participation in the Kingdom of God. To these six, two times three symbols, let us now dedicate our attention. The symbols of eternal life in terms of the proceeding of the individual from, and its receding to, the ground of its being is most monumentally and historically effectively expressed in the return of the individual Atman to the universal Brahman.
The world, including the gods, who are in India, not more but less eternal than the ascetics, is the product of the breath of Brahma and its return equally, or it is a deception of Maya which must be dissolved. The Nirvana symbol for eternal life points to the life of absolute fullness, not to the death of absolute nothingness, as sometimes is assumed. The life of Nirvana is beyond the distinction of subject and object.
It is everything because it is nothing definite. As in all symbols of eternal life, the imagination of the future is based on an experience of the present. The eternal is now present in him who has reached the states of the formless self beyond subject and object, as the principle of Zen Buddhism has been create, uh, translated into English.
But in order to reach this, many reincarnations are necessary. They are continuations of temporal existence, and therefore they are considered as punishment and suffering. Only the end of temporal existence brings the full participation in eternal life.
In it, individualization is conquered by participation, the full recession to the ground is taking place. But how can the one, we may ask, in giving some critical valuation of this idea, be understood as abundance if there is no differentiation within it? And what does reincarnation, this is the second critical remark,
(cough)
Mean in educating men
(cough)
if there is
(cough)
no awareness of it.
(cough)
The second form, in which the symbols of eternal life describe the individual as proceeding from and receding to the ground of being, identifies the ground to which the individual life returns with the life of the universe. It is the naturalistic contrast to the mystical form of the symbolism of eternal life. There are many forms of naturalism where it’s obvious that they use the symbol of eternal life, although this may be astonishing.
One could think of the Stoics and their doctrine of the participation of the wise men in the universal logos, the universal rational principle of reality. One could think of people like Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Goethe, with their cosmic enthusiasm and their love of the eternal substance, as Spinoza puts it. Or one could think of Nietzsche and his ecstatic concept of life affirming itself in eternal return.
This type of naturalism emphasizes the coming from and returning to the process of life universal, which represents life eternal. The extant participating in the ecstatically experienced universe conquers the anxiety of finitude. Especially if we are adherents of Christian thinking, we should not forget that many people have lived and died like Spinoza in this feeling.
The symbolic character of naturalism is however more hidden in the mechanistic type usually called materialism. The element of resignation about the eternal significance of the individual as individual is especially strong in it. But one often feels that it is his serene, humble, even superior resignation, which sometimes impresses you more than the easygoing immortality talk of Christian popular opinions.
This attitude of noble resignation is possible because in the knowledge and intuition of the natural process, the materialist participates in the essence of being. He identifies himself with this essential structure of things which he looks at and describes. And by such identification, he conquers in his way the anxiety of his finitude.
The third form of symbols of eternal life, in which individualization is subdued by participation, is the idealistic one. It is more directly dependent on the mystical form, and it shows whenever it appears mystical elements. But it is a conceptualized mysticism.
The classical struggle it fought was directed against Plato’s attempt to unite individuality and participation. This struggle was directed against Plato by his greatest pupil, Aristotle. He criticized Plato’s idea of the immortal soul insofar as Plato meant the individual soul.
For Aristotle, only the universal mind is eternal, and it is eternal because it participates in God’s eternal self-intuition. A similar idea was developed by the Arabian Aristotelian philosopher Averroes in the twelfth century. He followed Aristotle.
in dissolving the eternity of the individual in the eternity of the consciousness of the human race. Eternal is the universal creative mind, not the individual creator. In Hegel, it is the eternal Spirit which has eternity.
Eternal life for men is participation in the creative moment, movement of the Absolute Spirit, a participation which is identical with the process of culture. Participation in the process of culture, including religion in its center, is participating in eternal life. A critical valuation of this type has to point to the fact that the spiritual is creative only as the unity of the rational and the vital.
And the vital includes the unconscious, the bodily, and the socially immediate. But the bodily is the principle of individualization. A universe of mental functions is not eternal life.
The eternal self-intuition of the pure mind in Aristotle is not life. Hegel reaches down to life and to history, but the eternal process is the dialectical play of logical forms. It is not eternal life.
This is the limit of the idealistic form of the principle of the proceeding and receding of the individual. These three opposite forms of a symbolization of eternal life are determined by the preservation of the individual in eternal life. We have called them the symbols of being created and being reunited.
Here also, we can distinguish three forms. The first one is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. In its most important form, the Platonic, it describes the creation of the world into which soul, souls fall from the realm of the eternal essences to which they belong, into the realm of existence, of matter, of temporality, of genesis and decay, and the return to their former stage through insight and discipline as ways of overcoming the bondage to matter.
The eternal life of the soul, which it anticipates in its bodily prison, and to which it returns, is participation in the world of essences and ideas. Eternal life is intuition of the essences, the idea of the good, and in later religious language of God. This intuition and fruition and blessedness is the symbol of eternal life.
The individual is preserved, but only in its reunion with the realm of essences. I would like to go into the history of these ideas, but important for us in this moment is the use of this idea in present American Protestantism, especially in the more secularized forms of Protestantism. It is used as a description of a desirable continuation of life after death indefinitely.
This popular belief has actually pushed is- pushed aside most of the tenets of Christian symbolism. Eternal life has been replaced by endless temporal life after death. The life thereafter, as it is called, is imagined as a bodiless continuation of the experiences and activities of this life.
Platonism has become a popular Christian superstition. Many factors in our culture support this superstition. The desire to continue activities which seem to be important and they are cut off by death.
The valuation of the individual in his mental ca-capacities, the affirmation of life as such, the moralistic underground of American Christianity, the refusal to accept the seriousness of death. All this has contributed to the replacement of the symbol of eternal life by the expectation of endless temporal life. There must be added a large amount of sentimentality about death and the desire to remove it from the attention of the living.
The result is an interpretation of death which takes away its catastrophic character, and actually more or less remove its reality in the open, although I don’t believe in the half-unconscious or subconscious minds of many people. One continues to live after one has died in almost the same way as before, only without the body. Blessed spirits walking on beautiful meadows, as the funeral homes tell us.
This has nothing to do with Christianity and very little with Plato.
(laughter)
One is not aware of the fact that endless living in finitude would be hell, whatever the content of such life would be. To continue the finite beyond the limits of his finitude is endless punishment. Eternal fulfillment it is not.
The predominance of the individual element in the symbols of eternal life has been most emphatically expressed in the symbol of the resurrection of the, resurrection of the body. It is the symbol which, after a limited preparation in later Judaism, has been accepted by the New Testament and all Christian churches. This is partly the cause, partly the result, of the belief in the resurrection of the Christ.
Its basic motive, however, is the biblical emphasis on the bodily world as divine creation, and therefore the the emphasis on the unity of body and soul in man. This anti-dualistic bias of especially the Old Testament entails a strong affirmation of the total personality as eternally meaningful. And the total personality includes the body in which the individual existence in time and space expresses itself.
The contrast between spirit and flesh, or spirit and matter, if used in biblical language, does not refer to different parts of men, but it refers to contrasting states of the whole man. He, including his body, is either determined by spirit or by flesh. That means either by the divine presence or by that which separates from God, the bondage to the finite, but not the finite as such.
This agrees with the idea that the individual human face is able to express his unique spirit, which makes him into an incomparable self. The art of the individual portrait is an acknowledgment of the fact for which no dualistic thinking can account, that the atoms and cells of the body can express spirit and are therefore worth to be remembered beyond the limits of a man’s existence in time and space. Also, dualistic thinking cannot make understandable the idea of the sacramental embodiment of the divine spirit in physical materials like water, wine, oil.
In the most universal view, dualism can explain the universe only in terms of the far fall of the spirit from itself, not as creation. For as created, it is a positive manifestation of the divine ground and able to participate in eternal life. In some way, the symbol of the resurrection of the body is a logical consequence of the symbol of creation.
Both presuppose that the forms and structures of the material world are eternally present beyond potentiality and actuality in the divine life. The difficulties of this symbol are several ones. It’s highly symbolic.
Therefore, the distortion, if it is taken literally, is especially absurd and dangerous. The medieval pictures of the resurrection of the dead are expressions of a primitive symbolism, which was already criticized by Paul when he spoke of his spiritual body. He was, as he says, afraid of the nakedness of being a mere spirit, but he was not willing to fall into primitive literalism.
We can understand his phrase, spiritual body, only as a postulate which limits the symbol by two signposts, spiritual on the one side and body on the, on the other side, without describing what is between them, because this is impossible in itself. The second difficulty of this symbol is the combination of the resurrection of the dead with the day of consummation and judgment, an equally highly symbolic set of ideas. The implication of their connection with the symbol of the resurrection is that the end of the present life, even if it did not last, did not last more than one day in a baby, decides definitively about the eternal destiny of a human being.
The complete irrationality and absurdity of such an assertion has produced the idea of developments after death, which may change this destiny. According to the Roman Church, it is the purgatory which produces a slow and painful purification in preparation of the ultimate judgment. But this does not refer to those without the body of resurrection who are waiting for the resurrection, either for eternal life or eternal death.
For them, the decision has been made already. In Protestantism, especially under the predominance of moral and educational principles in the theology of Enlightenment in the 18th century, an intermediary state for further development between death and resurrection was postulated. In some men, like the greatest representative of German Enlightenment, Lessing, it took the form of an almost Indian reincarnation doctrine.
This shows how the same motives strive towards similar solutions, bridging the difference of the type to a certain degree. We mentioned the symbol eternal death as the opposite to eternal life. It is significant that in the language of the New Testament, there are two symbolic expression, expressions for the condemning judgment, everlasting punishment and eternal death.
The first corresponds to everlasting blessedness, the second to eternal life. This language shows the oscillation in New Testament symbolism between an unsublimated and a sublimated symbolism. Unsublimated is the symbolization of eternal salvation or condemnation by endless temporality in joy or pain.
Literalism in this respect is psychologically absurd because both joy and pain in the temporal process can only be felt intermittently. But it’s also theologically wrong because in every human being, the positive as well as the negative are ambiguously interwoven in every life process. Therefore, the terms eternal life and eternal death are much to be preferred.
The question asked most insistently about them is the question whether self-consciousness is the quality both of the eternal reunion with God and with the divine life, and of the remaining separation from it. To this, we must answer that self-consciousness, as we experience it in time and space, is bound to temporality. Without permanently moving and changing perceptions, a state of existence would take place in which the difference between subject and s- object would disappear.
A kind of catatonic stage. But eternity is not timelessness, and the participation in it is not extinction of the self. There also, we may point to an analogy in our actual experience.
Some ecstatic experiences have this character. It is here, as in all our interpretations tonight, you can build up two signposts, but you cannot describe what is between them. You only can say what it not is, and you can say where an analogous experience is made.
Eternal life is neither continuation nor extinction of the conscious self. We contrasted eternal life with eternal death, but we must change now the phrase “eternal death” to give it a precise meaning. Since eternity is the quality of God, death is not eternal, but the negation of eternity, the separation from the eternal.
And this is like eternal life, an experience here and now. The threatening loss of the meaning of one’s life by separation from its eternal ground. We must, with the Gospel of John, interpret this symbolism of places by the experience of inner states.
Symbolism of places if taken literally, heaven and hell is absorbed. Description of the experience of inner states, Blessedness and despair can be immediately understood and realized. The last question is how the different states distinguished in the symbols of eternal life are related to each other and to the unis-universe.
Here, an exclusive emphasis on the individual side has produced the doctrine of double predestination to heaven or to hell. It is implicitly refuted by all the analyses given before. But one question remains: What about the differences, not only between men, but also between all beings and all parts of the universe?
How appears the riddle of inequality under which we all are suffering when we look at the creatures everywhere in our world. How does this look in the light which comes to us from the dimension of the eternal? The symbol of the kingdom of God, to which I referred as the third type in the second series, implies by its very nature, universal fulfillment in new heaven and in new earth, but not in terms of a receding of the universe into its ground, but in terms of a reunion of everything separated and contrasting elements of being into the unity and clarity of the divine life.
I cannot say more than this. Nobody can say more.
(cough)
Paul expressed it by saying, “God will be all for all.” In this ecstatic symbol of fulfillment, the contrast of the types is reduced, but not completely overcome. Here a decision by our Western culture, and perhaps by all of us, cannot be avoided.
The Western world, even if it does not use the phrase, has decided for the symbol of the kingdom of God. In future history of religion, the future history will largely be an encounter of the two central symbols of eternal life, Nirvana and Kingdom of God. For in these symbols, all the fundamentals of both experiences of existence are expressed.
The affirmation of the created world, or, as in India, the negation of the appearing world, which is the world of Maya. The will to transform the appearing world in terms of justice and humanity and technical subjection, as it’s done in the West, or the will to produce in everybody the power of retiring, withdrawing from any bondage to this world, even the bondage of the will to transform it. These are the great problems of the future of religion, and they are perhaps most evidently expressed in the highly symbolic language of the symbols of eternity.
Everyone, on the basis of his particular tradition and experience, prefers one or the other of the main symbols of eternal life. Nobody is completely without preference for one of them. Nobody is completely without any of them, whether he knows it or not.
Much depends on such choice for personal and historical existence. But ultimately important is what is common in all of them, Namely, acknowledgement that being human be- means being aware of the dimension of the eternal and the desire to express this awareness in symbols of eternal life.
(crowd applauding)