Tillich's Schellingian Styles

Abstract In this essay I contend that, whatever one might say about F.W.J. Schelling's historical and conceptual influence on Paul Tillich's doctrines, the overall style of Tillich's project can helpfully be dubbed Schellingian to the extent it mixes together discourses, genres, and vocabularies into an ever‐expanding whole. To the extent that anything can be labelled Schellingian in Tillich, it is, I suggest, his will to speculate symbolically —or, more precisely, his desire to accumulate concepts, stories, and styles (including, in fact, the very myths he tells about his Schellingian origins). Tillich, following Schelling, continually adds one way of speaking to another, and such an additive procedure is to be dubbed ‘symbolics’, i.e., Tillichian symbols are constructed by overdetermining sense through the proliferation of discourses. Tillich's texts take the form of an ‘and… and… and…’—they practise a paratactics . I argue this by attending to various Schelling‐like genres in Tillich's works, such as criticism, mystery, and speculation, before focusing more concertedly—via detours on Quentin Meillassoux's very different practice of speculation and Søren Kierkegaard's anxieties over the mixing of genres—on the ways in which these different ‘dimensions’ of Tillichian discourse are assembled into a stylistic whole à la Schelling.