Question: You said that the truths of philosophy are conceptual, and the truths of theology are symbolic truths. Are you not implying that some truths are truer than others, that there are some approaches to ultimate reality that contain more validity than others?

Answer (Paul Tillich)^c: The question was: what is the relation of truth of truth-of-concept and truth-of-symbols, and whether there are forms of approach to ultimate reality which are better than others. Now this question leads me actually to what I wanted to present today, and I will perhaps use this question to go a little bit into it now. But before doing it, let me answer your question directly.

I would say every knowledge, as Thomas Aquinas ^hknew, is a knowledge of God because everything which is, expresses divine creativity. In this sense l can say that the truth which is developed in symbolic logic says something about God. But it says something about God insofar as He is expressed in the structure of creation and of the human mind. There is another way, and this way is the way of ultimate concern, which is subjective and objective at the same time, where we are in a direct relationship with the ultimate. And here all these ways and methods – whether they are scientific or intuitive are not valid – here the only way which is valid is existential participation expressing itself in symbols. So in this sense I would say there is only one direct way of expressing the ultimate, namely the way of expressing our relationship to the ultimate, and this can be done only in symbolic forms – whereby “only” is not a devaluating concept but, on the contrary, a praising concept!

Now some of you may have other questions, but I will follow this question up now to what I wanted to say about the truth of religion, after having related