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mystical, but then you must have a lecture of two semesters only in order to remove all the nonsense from the connotation of the word “mystical.” But what I mean here is just this, nothing else but this, nothing irrational, nothing against reason, but simply the experience of the holy which grasps you, and elevates you, and makes you transcend the subject-object situation.

Question: What would be the difference between what you say – “encounter with the holy” – and what Buber^b says: “encounter with the eternal Thou”? What you say is the subject-object world and what he calls the world of “it”

Answer (Paul Tillich)^c: What he calls “it,” I call the realm of objects. Now his ego-Thou is different from my own interpretation of the encounter with the holy insofar as I believe the more adequate this ego-Thou encounter with God is, the more the separation of ego and Thou is overcome by God acting in us, in His [his?] encounter with himself [Himself?], so that, so to speak, there are not two individuals separated by different bodies, or by space or anything like that, but there is a power grasping us which has both personal and supra-personal character. And if for “supra- personal” you say “mystical,” then this is another way of speaking about the mystic, but it is by no means the anti-rational.

Question: Do you think that ours is the first period of history in which such great objectivation has taken place?

Answer (Paul Tillich)^h: This is a very justified question, whether our period is the first in which such objectivation has taken place. I have learned about the whole thing only by studying the history of Greek