SOURCE: “The Arts as Ways of Understanding: Reflections on the Ideas of Paul Tillich,” in Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 25, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 5-20.

In the following essay, Yob presents Tillich's conception of aesthetic symbols as the most revealing, genuine, and powerful creations of the human mind, and explains how they relate to the visual and aural arts.

One may wonder how it is that the German-American Paul Johannes Tillich (1886-1965), theologian primarily and philosopher by training, comes to be included in a discussion of research and teaching for music educators. The wonder may be exacerbated when one also discovers that music is an aesthetic endeavor to which he gave little or no attention. He seldom mentions it, or dance and drama, in his voluminous writings and innumerable papers, and often when he does, they appear in parentheses as though he sensed they somehow belonged to the arts...