The Eternal Now

Works of Love is, perhaps, the greatest single piece of literature written in the history of humankind. Astonishingly, it has been greatly ignored by philosophers, laymen, and theologians alike. Unlike its predecessors Works of Love has largely remained unknown in the Western world. In an attempt to introduce my parents to this masterpiece, I discovered that the Russians had not even bothered to produce a translation to this very day! Reading recent reviews written by modern readers—a bare dozen or so—I recognized in their writings precisely how I felt about the book: mesmerized and changed. Most reviewers were both disturbed by the fact that such a life-altering book could have been given a cold shoulder, lasting a swiftly-approaching two centuries.

A person has needs in life, and the needs are arranged and gradual, some of them are basic and necessary, some of them touch his physical needs, and they are the ones that preserve his survival and presence in life, and some affect the mental and psychological side, and they help in his advancement, progress and creativity.

Paul Tillich was a German theologian and philosopher who moved to the United States after having to flee from Nazis in the 1930s. He became a lecturer at Yale University in Connecticut

The thesis of the book is that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realisation of his individual self.

Freedom, though it has brought him his independence and rationality, has isolated him, and made him anxious and powerless.

This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realisation of positive freedom which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man.

WHAT IS RELIGION ? by Paul Tillich, Translated by Mejahed Abdelmeaim mejahed, combines three works originally written in German, one of which was published in 1925. The two works in the final third of the book were presented to meetings of Kant-Gesellschaft in 1919 and 1922, and may now be found mainly in Gesammelte Werke volumes I and IX...