The Eternal Now was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1963. It is Tillich’s third and final sermon collection — published two years before his death in 1965 — and carries the weight of summation: a thinker in his late seventies reflecting on time, eternity, loneliness, and the meaning of death with the authority of someone who has spent a lifetime thinking about these questions and is now approaching their experiential reality.
The title sermon, “The Eternal Now,” addresses the human experience of time: the past as memory (which fades), the future as anticipation (which never arrives as expected), and the present as the only moment in which eternity touches time. Tillich argues that the “eternal now” is not a theological abstraction but a lived reality: the moment in which a person is fully present — to beauty, to love, to the depth of existence — is the moment in which temporal and eternal converge.
“Loneliness and Solitude” distinguishes between loneliness (the pain of being separated from others) and solitude (the creative use of separation for depth). “The Holy” examines why modern culture has lost the sense of the sacred — not because the sacred has disappeared but because the human capacity to perceive it has been dulled by distraction and the flattening of experience into consumption.
The collection represents Tillich at his most accessible: the sentences are shorter than in his academic work, the examples drawn from common experience, the arguments made through narrative and metaphor rather than systematic logic. These are sermons intended to be heard — and their oral quality gives them an immediacy that Tillich’s more formal writing sometimes lacks.
Collecting The Eternal Now
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1963): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$12
- Signed copies: $50–$150
Tillich’s last collection and his most personal. The proximity to his death gives these sermons an added weight — the voice of a man completing his work.