Interpreting Tillich’s Symbolism as a Corollary of Scholastic Doctrine of Analogy and beyond

The elaboration of symbolism in Paul Tillich’s philosophy of religion is a crucial element in the dynamics of faith as articulated by him in terms of man’s ultimate concern. Tillich asserts that human language of God or the ultimate concern can be only symbolic, since the truly ultimate must transcend the finite infinitely. No finite reality can therefore ever express the ultimate directly and properly. God’s nature is so transcendent that man’s grasp of it, however refined human language be, is hopelessly inadequate. Whatever is spoken of God, therefore, must have only a symbolic meaning. This symbolic theory of religious language advocated by Tillich has its roots in the doctrine of analogy developed by the Scholastics even though it can by no means be reduced to the latter. The difference between the two, perhaps, is in the conception of the nature of the referent of the language they adopt. While the Scholastics conceived of God as the creator, Tillich conceived of God as the ground of being. In this context, the present paper is a brief attempt to understand the trajectory of Tillich’s theory of religious symbolism beginning from the doctrine of analogy to its expression in terms of the idea of participation.