pet paradigms and models in an effort to domesticate science’s tempestuous inner voice—“things are not what they seem to be”—even after we have gone deeper and yet deeper in our understanding. The question keeps forcing itself upon us, therefore: why are things not what they seem to be? What is reality that in the case of others, myself and nature it continually evades full disclosure. Why is it that what seemed profound yesterday is today exposed as trivial, or that what impressed me as deep before appears now as rather shallow? What sort of universe are we dealing with if it does not exhaust itself in our impressions of it?
And there is also the social world of institutions, politics, economic arrangements, and their history. In this world that we share in common with others we may once again experience the shallowness of our impressions of things. Though peoples and nations can survive for years and even centuries on the assumption that their own social and cultural ideals and experiences are universally normative, sooner or later the events of history will bring about a serious challenge to this prejudice. The resistance to this revision of perspective will prove to be enormous and people will even go to war to defend the alleged finality of their culture, politics, or economics. But eventually they will have to confess: “we are not what we thought we were. Our previous self-understanding has been superficial and misguided. We must rethink what we are as a society.” And so, from a new perspective, occasionally at least, they may look back with amazement at their previous lack of sensitivity regarding their social and political life.
Let us return to our question, then: why is it that, in the case of others, myself, nature, and society, things are never quite what they seem to be? According to Paul Tillich, it is because there lies beneath their surface an infinite and inexhaustible dimension of depth. Perhaps many people would be content to call it a dimension of mystery. But this word, like the word “God” itself, has lost its meaning for many people. And so it might be useful in this context to call this dimension of inexhaustibility beneath the surface of our impressions simply the depth of existence, the depth of reality, the depth of the universe.
In his famous meditation, “The Depth of Existence,” Tillich notes that the wisdom of all ages and continents tells us about the road to that depth. What gives the great classics of philosophy, literature, and religion their authority, generation after generation, is that they are the expression of a journey toward depth undertaken by sincere and concerned individuals or peoples throughout history. The reason that they still grip us today is that we sense in them the call of a depth dimension that promises to give more substance to our lives than what we can find on the surface. They hold out the possibility to us that our own lives can be enriched and that an unexpected contentment with life can be ours if we follow them through the difficult but rewarding way to depth. Those whose lives and experiences have been imprinted in the great classics have all witnessed the same experience:
They have found that they were not what they believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their very lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth.15
What name, then, can we give to this dimension of depth?
The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth . . . is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life . . . Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth you know much about Him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you or not. He who knows about depth knows about God.16
This dimension of depth, therefore, will be the first of the five ideas in terms of which I would suggest that we think about the divine.
What is there in the experience of all of us to which the word “God” is pointing? Tillich’s answer is that “God” is a name for the dimension of depth that all of us experience to one degree or another, even if only in the mode of flight from it. We truly experience the depth even though we find it impossible to focus on it—as if it were just another object of vision or scientific investigation. Depth appears more as the horizon of our experience than as a direct object thereof. Its apparent elusiveness is quite compatible with its being the very condition of all of our experience. Perhaps, as we shall see in more detail a bit later, this observation can help us to interpret and tolerate the apparent absence of God. As the geographical horizon is unavailable to us since it recedes as we explore further, so God might be understood in part as the ultimate horizon of all of our experience, always receding, encompassing, and illuminating, but never falling within our comprehending grasp. But in thinking of the divine as the ultimate “horizon” rather than as a controllable object of experience, have we diminished our sense of its reality?
There is a fundamental dimension of human experience that has the peculiar characteristic of being too massive and, let us say it, too real, to be trivialized as a specific object capable of being placed under our comprehending gaze. It is more accurate to say that this dimension comprehends us rather than we comprehend it. We experience this dimension as real even though it is unavailable to our verificational control. In our frustration at not being able to comprehend it, we may be tempted to deny that it exists at all, but this is a futile denial. All we have to do is to recall those moments in our personal life, in our relations with others, nature, and society, when we have been rocked from the surface by something that we could not control. We may have called it “fate” or “circumstance” and we may have cursed it or repressed it. But it would be hard to deny that there was something eminently real about the experience. It is as though something much larger than ourselves, our lives, or even our period of history, swept us into its embrace, even though we may have been unwilling participants in this dislocation. We may have been tempted to think of such events as utterly impersonal and in no way as evidence of any sort of providentially divine care governing the course of our lives or of history. Taken in isolation, these experiences may have constituted for us sufficient evidence of the universe’s fundamental indifference to us.
However, there may also have been some moments, after experiencing these “earthquakes,” when we found ourselves on more solid ground than previously. The experience of “fate” was also one that led to a deeper “grounding” in reality. We may even have reached the point of being grateful that we went through such difficult straits since they turned out to be the occasion of growth and a contentment that transcends mere gratification.17 They have made us experience a new level of ourselves and reality. Such earthquakes awakened in us a courage that gave us a deeper sense of being alive. The dimension of depth, therefore, is ambiguous. It is both terrifying and deeply fulfilling. In the words of Rudolf Otto, it is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.18
The experience of depth has two faces.19 It is both abyss and ground. The dimension of depth which supports the surface of our lives initially presents itself to us as an abyss. Instinctively, we recoil from an abyss, since it seems to be unfathomable and bottomless, a void in which there are seemingly no supports. To fall into it would mean to lose ourselves. This is the first face the depth presents to us. It is an anxiety-inducing “nothingness” which seems to threaten our very being.
We might gain a more concrete sense of what this abyss means if we conjure up the specter of being utterly alone without the support of other people or of status or possessions. There is probably nothing we humans find more terrifying or try more ardently to avoid than the state of aloneness. One of the reasons for our anxiety about death is that it is an occurrence that we shall have to go through utterly alone. And so we tend to avoid the threat of death, along with other such “existential” threats as meaninglessness