Otthon és otthontalanság: A szenthez való viszony dialektikája Paul Tillich, Paul Ricœur és David Tracy műveiben

Home and homelessness: the dialectic of the relationship to the sacred in the works of Paul Tillich, Paul Ricœur and David Tracy Throughout the twentieth century, numerous influential scholars of religion and theologians have proposed the incorporation of a polarity or tension in describing different religions or denominations. These two primary modes of religious expression emerge from a fundamental dialectic inherent in religious experience itself: the disclosure of the reality of the self and the world as essentially good and in union with the sacred or the divine, and yet as also radically estranged from it. This dialectic has been described in terms of roughly analogous contrasting pairs such as the mystical and the prophetic, the aesthetic and the ethical, manifestation and proclamation, immanence and transcendence, or, in Christian theology, between sacrament and word. In this paper, after briefly reviewing the work of Friedrich Heiler, one of the pioneers of this approach, I discuss three notable later explorations of the aforementioned polarity: the “holiness of being” and the “holiness of ought to be” of Paul Tillich, “manifestation and proclamation” of Paul Ricoeur, and “the analogical and dialectical imagination” of David Tracy. Unlike earlier authors who tend to associate one pole with the core identity of a particular religion or denomination, Tillich, Ricoeur, and Tracy all insist on the complicated interdependence of these poles. I argue that their nuanced and critical use of the dialectic not only sheds light on the complexities and conflicts within and among religious traditions, fostering dialogue and mutual enrichment, but also yields seminal insights in studies of modern art and culture.