A famous Christian theologian was a sadist pornographer

The story of Paul Tillich

If you learn about “Christian history,” there’s the stories they tell, and the ones they don’t—like about Paul Tillich. He himself wished it forgotten.

As he was dying in 1965, he was trashing piles of letters and pornographic photos of women. He didn’t plan on his religion knowing he was a sexual athlete with a taste for sadism.

And his religion planned to help him conceal it.

His last day of life was October 22, 1965.

In the hospital, friends arrived to say goodbye, and were refused. Even his children weren’t allowed to see him. Was it his wife Hannah being jealous? People who knew the Tillichs assumed they’d stayed together only because a divorce would’ve damaged his career.

But she would say later that he was frightened of dying and didn’t wish to be seen. In their last moments, she recalled, he’d asked her to destroy any further evidence she might find of his sexual history. He was crying.

“My poor Hannachen,” he said, “I was very base to you, forgive me.”

Obituaries overflowed with his praises.

I look through the newspaper coverage, finding many Christians moved by the passing of a hero. One writes:

“Tillich, more than anyone, has saved a generation from despair and restored to it the sense of human dignity and of spiritual destiny.”

To be a more ‘progressive’ Christian was to be referencing Tillich. A 1963 religious bestseller, John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God, challenged Christian orthodoxy with Tillich’s ideas at their base.

Martin Luther King, Jr., who had done his Ph.D. thesis in part on Tillich, paused his civil rights activism to say that Tillich “gave us a system of meaning and purpose for our lives in an age when war and doubt seriously threatened all that we had come to hold dear.”

After World War II, Paul Tillich had seemed to chart a way forward for Christianity.

It no longer seemed possible in the post-War world to be what the religion had been before. He was open to science, the arts, philosophy. One could be an open, aware person, it seemed, and yet be Christian.

He’d suggested Christianity hadn’t been understood before, and he offered a series of re-defined terms. Perhaps ‘God’, he suggested, was not an angry deity in the sky, but simply — “the ground of being.”

Perhaps Christ was an abstract concept of a “New Being” or “new eon,” a brighter future toward which humanity moves.

‘Faith’ might be “the state of being ultimately concerned…”

The ‘demonic’ was not a reference to vile spirits in Hell, perhaps, but the human impulse for ‘destruction’.

His re-definition of ‘sin’ proved most influential.

It’s now found widely throughout Christianity, taught from many a church. As Martin Luther King wrote in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

“Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation.”

Tillich was cremated and his ashes were taken to a park in New Harmony, Indiana that was to be a permanent memorial to him. The ashes actually washed away in a flood. The statue remains to this day.

Tillich left an autobiography to be published after he died.

He dedicated On the Boundary ‘To my wife’, though the book made just one fleeting reference to her. There was barely any sense of his life as a mortal on earth in a body. His life seemed as a series of insights happening in his mind. A typical sentence:

“I was about eight when I first wrestled with the idea of the Infinite.”

The book didn’t even use the word ‘woman’. Paul Tillich had prepared himself well to be remembered as a Christian theologian.

Hannah Tillich did find more to destroy.

In her husband’s papers, she found love letters that ‘shocked’ her, is all that she would later say. She found pornography, tinged with S&M themes, mixed in with drafts of his Christian writings.

“I lit the fireplace and spent two days burning the great man’s past, as he had wished me to do,” she said.

For two years, she was reclusive in their East Hampton home. She’d recall the time in an interview: “I was alone. I cried.”

Then she began to write an autobiography. She said: “I don’t know — was it a confession? I think it was a way to come to terms with myself.”

She writes of her own sexual awakening.

It had been, primarily, with women. “I kissed her, I embraced her. She seemed stunned and I whispered that she should not tell anyone about it.”

She calls herself a ‘witch’, and noted she saw auras, and had mystical experiences. She was ‘queer’ in a modern sense. During the period when she and Tillich met, she writes, she looked like a man “in drag.”

He was a decade older, and bisexual too, she thought, or he “often talked about his latent homosexuality during his student days,” she noted.

She writes of their first sex scene, when each was actually with someone else. He was married, she betrothed.

“…as he entered me for the first time after many playful sensuous meetings, he was frightened. It meant nothing to me except for his fear at seeing drops of blood. He had conquered me long before.”

After each had shed their partners, they married. She hoped the lesbianism was behind her. But was it what her husband liked? She writes: “Paulus had a feminine component that made him vulnerable to masculine women.”

She knew he saw other women — all the time.

Tillich had sex with Hannah on their wedding night, then went off to be with another woman. He was working as a professor of Christian theology at the University of Frankfurt. He slept with everyone, it could seem, except her. He slept with his students. He slept with the maid.

Students he’d slept with sometimes came to Hannah to “tell” her, she notes, “which amused me.” He kept a separate apartment for girlfriends. She writes: “Paulus dealt with sex in utmost secrecy. In later years, he would not even let himself know what he was doing.”

Hannah was jealous — and seeing other men.

One seemed to like her. “He wanted me to leave Paulus, which was impossible for me,” she writes. They were together, even when apart. She narrates scene after scene of them as sexual adventurers in Weinmar Germany—like some Christian version of Cabaret:

“…a long-legged lesbian aristocrat came sailing into the room on a bicycle, wearing pink leggings, her face painted, flowers in her hair, imitating a circus beauty. The kissing, drinking and flirting were indiscriminate. I was uncomfortable. Paulus was delighted.”

Hannah had more girlfriends, interested to watch her sexual evolution as she moved from women to men, and back again.

“Eve was somewhat enamored of me and I was excited by her, without becoming the pursuer, as I had been with my previous ladyloves.”

Paul Tillich was a rare anti-Nazi Christian.

“The churches fell to Hitler,” Hannah writes. She remembers visiting a church. “Red Nazi flags with the swastika stood around the altar,” she writes. He was fired in a purge of non-Nazis and Jews.

They went to America — having sex with people at every step. But in America, she felt, everything was different. “Sex seemed a strange word here,” she writes. “It implied copulation without imagination.”

For Americans, she realized, sex was “a cold bed and satisfying a physiological need only.” Except in Harlem, where they went to African-American nightclubs to see sexy shows. She writes:

“A nude Negress painted gold, having danced with a Negro twice her size, leaned her body against a post and masturbated with violent snakelike movements…”

Paul Tillich had his work as a seminary professor, and his mistresses.

Hannah did drugs and yoga, and had her own friends and lovers. She tried threesomes, and foursomes, feeling a new consciousness of togetherness come over her:

“…it was a new concept of participation without losing one’s identity, of becoming more and not less in a foursome. One no longer lived inside a picture frame, pressed flat on a single plane, one moved out into thinking not in opposites but as a group.”

Her sex life with her husband had ended, but a kind of renewal took place in their marriage in their old age. She writes: “I could enjoy him again, loving his noble aging face, listening to him on social evenings.”

And then he was gone. And she was writing a book.

Her memoir was released in October 1973.

From Time to Time was detailed, raw, shocking a Christian sensibility.

She was noted in newspaper gossip columns as a bizarre anomaly. She wasn’t a feminist, she clarified. She was a witch. But she did want her book to be understood as an act of female liberation. “He loved so many people that I became invisible to him,” she said. “I decided to make myself visible.”

The San Francisco Examiner ran a feature on her. There is “great anger” among her husband’s fans, she says. “It is because they cannot accept the image of the hero with feet of clay.”

She’d tried to be honest, she says, though adds: “The truth is hidden. It is something for me and something else for you. But you can have great honestly. You can be as honest as possible.”

Did she have regrets? the reporter asked.

“Not a little bit of regret,” she replies. “Life with Paul Tillich was so tremendous. It was wonderful to share his world. He could talk to me about everything…when the time came.”

Tillich’s friends knew of her plans to write a book.

They’d begged her not to publish it. Then they came up with a plan. Rollo May, the Christian psychiatrist who had been Tillich’s student and friend, began writing a book to counter Hannah’s book.

Reviewing the sources in a 1998 paper, the scholar Tracy Fessenden found that May’s intention was “to deflect attention from what he knew Hannah Tillich would say…” The result was Paulus: a Personal Portrait of Paul Tillich, part memoir, part psychiatric evaluation, and all religion.

May notes the “sheer sexual libido which emanated from” Tillich. It was felt by many women around him. He writes:

“Many women were disarmed, taken off their usual guard, by his intense presence. With Paulus they would open their emotions and feel they were led into new worlds, where there were new visions and new sensations. They felt the encounter as one of the most treasured experiences of their lives, and kept it in memory as a mixture of dream and reality which had its own separate existence.”

There’s been girlfriends, he admitted.

Then Tillich loved prostitutes. He liked “good pornography,” as May puts it. He writes: “I felt he had a kind of reverent attitude toward the female body and the vagina as well as toward the phallus.”

When a woman says she loves a man, Tillich would say, the man is “the accepting priest, representing the divine voice…” The woman then becomes “the way to God…”

Tillich would say: “Women are closer to God.”

He was into S&M, but not with every girl.

The “sadism,” May thinks, had mostly emerged when Tillich was making “a desperate attempt to reach someone deeply, to break the ‘skin barrier’…” When a woman was remote, Tillich would use such technniques to reach her “inner being…”

Such sessions, May understood, centered on a scenario in which Tillich played a judge, as the woman was the ‘criminal’ keeping secrets. May adds: “Through torture the guilty person would be made to confess.”

It was consensual and well-received. May writes. “I have rarely met a woman who knew him who did not prize and treasure the experience.”

May’s book came out in early 1974.

Tillich fans were quick to proclaim it the better of the two. The magazine Christianity Today dismissed Hannah’s book as full of “bitterness and resentment…” Or as one scholar sympathetic to Tillich said: “no good has come to anyone as a result of Hannah Tillich’s angry book.”

Hannah’s book wasn’t ‘angry’. But the Christian world didn’t want to deal with her book, or Rollo May’s book either. Both went out of print.

Tillich’s star rapidly fell. A planned biography was cancelled. A story circulated about that owing to theological considerations, but the scholar Charles Marsh suggests that “Tillich’s extramarital affairs and rumored sexual advances presented an insurmountable challenge.”

The reality was that Christianity had known about Tillich’s sexual side.

A few recollections were mentioned in later years. A 1985 biography of Reinhold Niebuhr notes that Tillich had been “exuberantly, compulsively promiscuous,” and relays a scene from the 1950s when both had been at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

One day a female student went to see Tillich in his office. “He welcomed her warmly, closed the door, and began fondling her.”

But this was hardly unusual. As the scholar Elaine Pagels remarked of her sexual assault by Helmut Koester at Harvard Divinity School in the late 1960s: “This was part of the story about being a woman graduate student almost anywhere in that time.”

In a standard reflex, Tillich’s sex life was dismissed.

In 1996, the famed pastor Eugene Peterson recalled being a big fan of Tillich, who “everything that a theologian should be,” he wrote. “And then I found out that he was a compulsive philanderer and a dabbler in pornography.”

Peterson recalls raging about it: “I’m totally disillusioned!” he told his pastor. His pastor replied: “Good! Who wants to go around stuck with a bunch of illusions! Jesus is not going to disillusion you.”

That was the line typically taken among academic ‘Christian’ commentators: If you had a problem with Tillich’s womanizing, what was your problem?

The scholar Victoria Gaile Laidler would write of commenting in a class at seminary that Tillich had been a sexual harasser. Her professor replied that “all of us are sinners…”

Tillich’s work would sometimes be dismissed over the sexual information.

In 1975, the theologian Donald MacKinnon found a pattern of “shameless and heartless sexual promiscuity,” and in Tillich’s theology, “an element of fraud, of hypocrisy…” In 2013, Diarmaid MacCulloch wondered “how far any of Tillich’s theological work can be taken seriously.”

But I wonder if the real story has gone unnoticed.

Tillich had given Christianity a series of new “definitions” for Bible terms—since the religion didn’t know what the terms meant! The religion found his new definitions more workable than the old ones.

Then Tillich went off on the study that he would not be able to discuss: exploring the true nature of Christianity in bodywork and photography.

I sit browsing through vintage S&M images.

They are strikingly ‘religious’ in suggestion. A woman is often bowing — in prayer? Or sexual submission.

Are those different?

Tillich had focused on a torture and ‘confession’ scenario.

But that was a deep insight into the culture of Christianity — in which every believer, male and female, is made to keep secrets and then forced to ‘confess’ them.

And also punished at every moment…for everything.

The ‘fetish’ S&M imagery was the religion in physical form.

Was there reason to think poorly of Tillich?

His wife had known about everything. They were each researchers on the same basic problem: how to be sexual beings, and use sex to connect with others in a world where it’s mostly used to punish.

I wondered if Paul Tillich left so much material for Hannah to find because only she could tell his story. 🔶