Rudolf Otto and the Idea of the Holy
GREGORY ALLES
Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) was a German Protestant theologian and philosopher of religion best known for seeing the source of religion in what he called “numinous” experience. This term refers to an experience of, in his terms, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans (“an awe-inspiring yet fascinating mystery”). Otto claimed that most if not all people come equipped with a device that makes this experience possible, a sensus numinis (a “sense for, or ability to be aware of, the numinous”). He exercised considerable influence on the study of religion in the middle of the twentieth century, and the word “numinous,” which he coined, has since found its way into the vocabulary of scholars of literature and the arts. The phrase mysterium tremendum also now appears as an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
OTTO’S LIFE AND WORLD
Otto grew up in a well-to-do, devout north German family. Like many others of his generation, he wrestled in his youth with the results of nineteenth-century science and scholarship, especially Darwinian evolution and the historical study of the Bible. As a young university student of theology, he felt compelled to abandon the traditional Christianity with which he grew up and embraced instead a kind of Protestant theology that sought religious truth in the experience of individual persons, above all, individual Christians. This shift ultimately culminated in his identification and analysis of the numinous.
From his early days Otto was an inveterate traveler. In 1911–12 he made a “world tour”—actually a trip through North Africa, India, China, Japan, and Russia—that marked a shift of his attention away from the philosophy and toward the comparative study of religion. Subsequently, he learned Sanskrit and published translations of a number of texts as well as comparative studies of Indian religions and Christianity. Following the publication of his most famous book, The Idea of the Holy, in the fall of 1916 (dated 1917), he became professor of systematic theology at the University of Marburg, a position from which he retired in 1927, citing reasons of ill health. In autumn 1936 he fell, or perhaps jumped, from a tower and died of complications the following March.
Otto is most remembered today for a single book, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (1917, English translation 1923). Most accounts of it, however, tend to be overly simple. Other major publications include (dates of English translations in brackets): Naturalism and Religion (1904 [1907]), The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries (1909 [1931]), Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism (1926 [1932]), India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted (1930), Religious Essays: A Supplement to the Idea of the Holy (1931), and The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man: A Study in the History of Religion (1934 [1943]).
In addition to being a scholar, Otto was active in politics from his student days onward, serving as a representative in the Prussian legislature during World War I and founding in the 1920s a group to promote world peace through interreligious understanding, the Religiöser Menschheitbund (Religious League of Humanity). He also founded a museum for religious artifacts that still exists, the Religionskundliche Sammlung at the University of Marburg.
AN APOLOGIST FOR RELIGION
Otto began his academic career as an apologist. He wanted to argue that, despite the advances of the natural sciences and history, it still made sense to be religious. He was influenced above all by two thinkers, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and, after 1904, Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), both heavily indebted to German Pietism.
In Naturalism and Religion (1904), Otto took on Darwinian evolution and mechanistic explanations of the world. He accepted the results of science but claimed that science by itself was insufficient. For example, natural selection is able to explain evolution without invoking final causes (purposes, intentions), but human action still requires them. Human brains may be material objects, but one cannot account for the experience of consciousness in terms of the mechanistic interactions of chemicals. Most fundamentally, Otto insisted that every scientific explanation is accompanied by mystery. Why is there something rather than nothing, and why is the universe as it is and not somehow different? As Otto’s thinking developed, this “mystery” not only made it justifiable to be religious but also provided the key to understanding religion.
Five years later, Otto wrote The Philosophy of Religion, a book intended to introduce theology students to the thought of Fries. Among other points, Otto emphasized that all knowledge rests ultimately upon Gefühl. The word is related to the English word “feeling,” but Otto meant it in a cognitive rather than an emotive sense, as in a “hunch” or “feeling,” in the sense of “a feeling that … ” Even the rules of logic, he claimed, rest upon the sense or feeling we have that they are correct. At the same time, Otto reconceived of theology. Modern theology, he claimed, was not dogmatic but scientific. It was a Religionswissenschaft, a “science of religion,” and as such it had three branches: the philosophy of religion, which, similar to Kant’s analysis of knowledge, showed what made religion possible; the psychology of religion, which examined how religion manifested itself in internal experience; and the history of religions, which detailed the unfolding of religion in the human species over time. The Idea of the Holy was Otto’s major contribution to the descriptive psychology of religion.
THE HOLY AS A COMPLEX CATEGORY
The Idea of the Holy was never intended to be a comprehensive account of religion. It merely analyzed the experience upon which all religion allegedly rests. Otto claimed that this experience was captured by a category that was unique to religion, the category of “the Holy.”
A century before Otto, Fries had developed an “anthropological” approach to philosophy. That is, he did not think that it was possible to prove the truth of metaphysical principles. The most one could do was show that all (human) minds shared them. In this demonstration, introspection played a large role. Otto’s approach to the Holy was similar. No one could actually demonstrate that the Holy was ontologically real. All anyone could do was to note the presence of the experience in most normally functioning human minds. In contentious words, Otto invited readers who could not recall such an experience simply to stop reading. Like a person blind from birth trying to understand color, they were trying to understand an experience that was beyond them.
For Otto, the “Holy” was a complex category. Over time it had acquired the meaning of “morally pure,”1 but originally, Otto claimed, it had no moral content. Consider “the Holy One of Israel” killing Uzzah simply because in doing a good deed he happened to touch a holy object, the Ark of the Covenant.2 Otto called this original, nonmoral dimension of the Holy the “numinous.” No one could actually describe this dimension. Instead, somewhat as in the well-known Zen image of a finger pointing at the moon, all anyone could do was point toward it and try to evoke it.
In “pointing toward” the numinous, Otto used three Latin words: mysterium, tremendum, and fascinans.3 The numinous is a mysterium. It is not simply something that many of us do not understand, like the circuitry of a computer’s central processing unit. It is completely different (in Otto’s German, ganz anders) from anything that we know and can know. It is, further, a mysterium tremendum, a mystery that makes us feel as if we are nothing—a feeling more basic than Schleiermacher’s feeling of absolute dependence—and fills us with awe and dread. Finally, it is a mysterium fascinans. It attracts as well as repels us, for in the numinous human beings encounter love and grace.
Despite all that, Otto insisted that the numinous could not really be expressed in concepts. That is what he meant when he called it “nonrational”: it was beyond human thought and reasoning. Nevertheless, as a Christian theologian, he also insisted that the Holy had a rational side, for people, especially in “higher” religions, consistently associated it with specific concepts. Clearly these two claims are contradictory. To explain the relationship between the nonrational and the rational, the inconceivable and human conceptualization, Otto borrowed a term from Kant, “schematization,” which refers to the way in which we associate concepts with perceptual experiences, and a psychological “law of association,” according to which some feelings routinely arouse other, similar feelings. Certain aspects of our encounter with the numinous, he said, tend to evoke identifications that, although not entirely proper, nonetheless recur. For example, the power of the Holy—for theists, God’s power—is utterly different in quality, not just in quantity, from the various kinds of power that we can conceptualize, such as the power of nature or of a human ruler. Nevertheless, the mysterium tremendum reminds people of those other kinds of power. As a result, they speak of the Holy as being “powerful.”
Another rational dimension of the Holy belongs, Otto claimed, to the realm of value. We are all aware of the meaning of “Holy” as something “morally pure.” What is at stake here for Otto, however, is something greater than mere purity. For him, the Holy is a category of absolute, ultimate value. When human beings sense its presence, they also sense their own utter worthlessness. They are, in Jewish and Christian terms, “sinful.”
The relationship between the Holy and human experience is, then, a subtle one. On the one hand, Otto insists, various experiences can evoke a sense of the numinous in those who are attuned to it. Hieratic language, already suggested by Otto’s use of Latin, is one common means to do so. Examples include the way Christians use Hebrew phrases whose meanings they do not understand and the apparent nonsense syllables in various mantras. Otto also sees a particularly close relationship between the Holy and a characteristic of profound art, the sublime. The latter, Otto says, suggests the numinous. To his mind, however, art has even more direct ways to express the numinous: darkness, silence, and—more common in Asian than in European art—emptiness. As examples, he cites Gothic cathedrals, quietly profound music, and Chinese painting. On the other hand, while a sense of the Holy is evoked by experience, the Holy is not something that one learns from experience. It is a category a priori, one that we bring to experience—if, that is, we detect it at all. All of its dimensions, nonrational, rational, and the relationship between the two, are in our minds prior to experience. They are only “called” by our experiences, the way certain sequences of events “call” the a priori category of “causality.” (Obviously, Otto did not use programming terminology.) In other words, the Holy is a structure of human consciousness; it is built into the operating system of the mind. Ever the Kantian, Otto referred to this as a specific mental faculty. He called it the “faculty of divination,” or sensus numinis, what in more contemporary language we might call a “numinous detection device.”
COMPARING RELIGIONS
Only a few of Otto’s later publications directly expanded upon the ideas advanced in The Idea of the Holy. The most notable was a collection of essays published in English under the title Religious Essays. Other later writings went in different directions. Perhaps the most important were comparative.
Mysticism East and West and India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity probably seemed to make larger contributions at the time when they first appeared than they do today, because less was known then about the religions of India.4 The first volume compares the German mystic Meister Eckhart with the Indian philosopher Śankara (ca. 800 CE); the second compares notions of salvation in Indian traditions of bhakti and Protestant Christianity. In the end, Otto’s finds that Christianity is superior to Indian traditions. Śankara lacks Meister Eckhart’s active engagement with the world, while the Indian bhakti traditions lack a parallel to the cross.
The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man is not comparative per se, but it does discuss two different religious strands, Jewish and “Aryan.” These two combine, Otto claims, in the person and teachings of Jesus. Otto presents Jesus not as a rabbi but as a charismatic evangelist-cum-exorcist. In his teaching Jesus replaced the Jewish tradition of “the day of YHWH” as taught by John the Baptist with a notion of the Kingdom of Heaven that had Iranian and Indo-Iranian roots. In retrospect it is somewhat eerie that a book published in Germany in 1934 would emphasize a charismatic individual utilizing Aryan traditions to proclaim a new kingdom (Reich) and bring salvation (Heil). Otto was, however, careful to emphasize the essential contribution of Judaism to Christianity at a time when the German Christians were trying to de-Judaize Christianity altogether,
RECEPTION, CRITICISM, REJECTION
By the time of Otto’s death, theologians in Germany had almost entirely rejected his attempt to conceive of theology as a “naturalistic” Religionswissenschaft. In their view it was not possible to discover religious truth by studying human thought and behavior—or better, since they associated “religion” with human effort and activity, one could not discover God’s Truth that way. That was because, in the words of Karl Barth, there was an “infinite qualitative distinction” between the divine and the human; God’s Truth, the truth of the Gospel, necessarily irrupted into the world through revelation as the Word of God. To such theologians, Otto’s museum of religions was nothing but a house of idols.
Otto’s thought found a more favorable reception among scholars who wished to study religions comparatively, such as Friedrich Heiler, Gustav Mensching, and Ernst Benz. In this context it resonated with similar emphases on experience and holiness among thinkers as disparate as William James, Nathan Söderblom, and Alfred North Whitehead. After the Second World War a distinctive, independent academic enterprise devoted to the study of religions developed virtually throughout the globe. Although Otto’s ideas had taken shape in order to defend religion for liberal practitioners, scholars now turned to those ideas to justify the new academic field. If religion resulted from an experience that was ultimately sui generis and in principle not reducible to or expressible in any other terms, they argued, then it required a separate academic discipline. At the same time, creative writers and artists also took up the term “numinous.” Given Otto’s concern with the sublime and the alleged ability of art to evoke numinous awareness, perhaps that was inevitable.
By the end of the twentieth century, however, Otto’s influence had waned. Several factors are probably responsible. First, his ideas have internal inconsistencies. For example, if the Holy really is wholly other, it would be impossible for human beings to talk about it at all or even to apprehend it preconceptually. Again, it would seem contradictory to assert both that the Holy reminds people of natural things and that it does not share at all in the qualities of these natural things. Furthermore, the closer one looks, the harder it is to make sense of Otto’s ideas about schematization. In each of these cases, the exaggerated rhetoric of religious insiders would seem to have impeded meaningful analysis.
Second, as normative discourse, it may make some sense to claim that true religion is rooted in numinous experience (provided one accepts that claim). As a description of everything that we are inclined to call religion, it does not. As Ninian Smart pointed out, Otto’s account of the numinous is not even a reasonably accurate description of what we call mystical experience. Note, too, that scholars of religions have also become much more careful about distinguishing their work from theology.
Third, scholars sympathetic to Otto moved in other directions. For example, Joachim Wach sought fundamental types of what he called “religious expression” that bore no recognizable genetic relationship to either Otto’s or his own account of religious experience. Mircea Eliade lauded Otto but wanted instead to examine the basic forms in which the Sacred manifested itself in the realm of the profane.
Fourth, a “linguistic turn” that occurred in many areas of thought in the mid-twentieth century emphasized the role of language in constructing and evoking experience, making any appeal to a primary, preconceptual, and in principle nonconceptualizable experience suspect.
Fifth, as Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed out, assigning religion to the internal recesses of an abstracted, atomized individual seems inadequate when faced with the view of religion as social formation emphasized by French theorists in the tradition of Durkheim. Later developments in the sociology of religion, such as rational choice and network theories, have only made Otto’s move less tenable.
Sixth, the emergence of postmodern and poststructural thought and critical theory has called into question any notion that there is an “essence” of religion, much less the essence described by Otto. These trends have also critically interrogated the political agendas that previously sustained such claims.
Finally, and most recently, people studying consciousness and cognition have rejected fundamental moves that Otto’s analysis of the Holy presupposes. Otto’s claims about impossibility notwithstanding, neuroscientists have sought to correlate religious experience with physical events in the human brain. Cognitive scientists working on the level of mental activity have, like Otto, emphasized types of processing “hardwired” into the brain, but they do so not in terms of a peculiar kind of phenomenological experience but in terms of kinds of concepts and processes associated with the memory, transmission, and social perdurance of concepts.
Elements of Otto’s program may still be found. One example may be work on Religionsästhetik, the study of how religion utilizes and affects the senses, which is an active concern on the continent of Europe. These directions are pursued, however, largely apart from any attention to Otto’s thought.5
NOTES
1. This is perhaps stronger in German than in English. German-speakers use the word heilig, “Holy,” when English-speakers use the word “saint.” For example, in German Saint Elizabeth is die heilige Elisabeth.
2. 2 Samuel 6:6–8.
3. Later scholars of religious studies have also used the phrase mysterium fascinosum, presumably without realizing that before the modern era this Latin word was a hapax legomenon, that is, a word used only once, and that it seems to have been used in the sense of “having a large fascinum,” that is, a large penis (Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, s.v. fascinosus, -a, -um).
4. Otto tends not to use the term “Hinduism.” For example, in The Idea of the Holy the word “Hindu” appears twice, but otherwise Otto speaks of “Indian religion(s)” (four times), “the Indian pantheon” (twice), “Indian gods” (once), “Indian mysticism” (once), “the Indian Sankhya system” (once), “Indian terminology” (once, speaking about the words rakṣas and Brahman/Brahmā), “the Indian world” (once), and “the Īśvara of India” (once)—but never Hinduism.
5. For further reading, see Philip C. Almond, Rudolf Otto: An Introduction to His Philosophical Theology (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Todd A. Gooch, The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000); Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); Melissa Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).