September 15, 2007

Book Review - "The Idea of the Holy" by Rudolf Otto

Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, London: Oxford University Press, 1950, Pp. 232. Paper, $ 8.95

Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige (1917), is translated from German language, by John W Harvey as The Idea of the Holy. Rudolf Otto, who died in 1937, was born at Peine in Hanover in 1869. He traveled widely and in 1910 set out on a long journey to the East which was to take him round the world. During the II world war he was a member of the Prussian parliament and that in 1917, the year of publication, he moved to a chair at Marburg, a university with a conservative and nationalist reputation.
As per the information provided in the English translator's preface, it is tempting to ask to what extend the book might be seen as Otto's contribution to the German war effort. There are many considerations that make this seem like a reasonable question, mainly, Otto claims explicitly that Christianity is the highest form of religion and implicitly that German religion is the highest form of Christianity. Might he be suggesting that on this account Germany is worth fighting for?
The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige), is fundamentally an inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational, is a book which has established itself, since the English translation appeared first in 1923, as a classic in the field of religious philosophy. In it his analysis of the nature of religious experience and his account of the history of religious experience is worth reading.
The Numinous in Religious Experience: Otto starts The Idea of the Holy by arguing that the expositions of the religious truth in language tend to stress the ‘rational’ attributes of God, i.e. synthetic essential attributes. But we should be incited to notice that religion is not exclusively contained and exhaustively comprised in any series of ‘rational’ assertions, i.e. the non-rational in religion must be given its due importance, then goes on to introduce and develop his notion of the numinous. As a kind of first approximation for the wholly new concept he is giving us, Otto characterises the numinous as the holy (i.e. God) minus its moral and rational aspects. A little more positively, it is the ineffable core of religion: the experience of it cannot to be described in terms of other experiences. It is to be noted that the German heilig can be rendered as either holy or sacred. The translator had to make a choice and chose holy. So in the context of Otto, for holy it is possible to read sacred: the religious experience he discusses is the experience of the sacred.
Otto's next approximation is the notion of creature-feeling. He suggests that those who experience the numinous experience a sense of dependency on something objective and external to themselves that is greater than themselves.
The Experience of the Numinous in Real Life: The writer goes on to indicate in concrete terms the kind of experience he is considering. Quotations are essential here so that we are absolutely clear on what author has in mind.
It is:
'The deepest and most fundamental element in all strong and sincerely felt religious emotion.'
It is to be found:
'in strong, sudden ebullitions of personal piety, in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings, to temples and to churches.'
It may peaceful and:
'come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship.'
or faster moving:
'thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its 'profane', non-religious mood of everyday experience'
even violent, erupting:
'from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions'
and leading to:
'the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy' pp 12-13
Otto's Mysterium Tremendum: Otto has reached the heart of the matter. He pins down this sort of experience for dissection in terms of a Latin phrase, mysterium tremendum. He presents the tremendum component of the numinous that is being experienced as comprising three elements: awfulness (inspiring awe, a sort of profound unease), overpoweringness (that which, among other things, inspires a feeling of humility), energy (creating an impression of immense vigour).
The mysterium component in its turn has two elements, which Otto discusses at considerable length. Firstly, the numinous is experienced as 'wholly other.' It is something truly amazing, as being totally outside our normal experience. Secondly, here is the element of fascination, which causes the subject of the experience of the numinous to be caught up in it, to be captivated.
There are several important points to be made about this description and analysis of religious experience. First of all note Otto's passing mention of the profane. In this account the religious person operates on two levels: usually on the profane or everyday level, but with occasional moments or longer periods of accession to a higher, sacred level.
Secondly, note the situations in which this higher level may be attained. Otto refers not only to personal piety, where he is presumably talking about prayer and religious meditation. He also includes participation in religious ceremonies and even visits to churches and the like.
Thirdly, note that although Otto initially mentions participation in ceremonies and visits to holy buildings as occasions for profound religious experience, he proves in the discussion of the five elements to be concerned above all with mysticism. This is surely a matter of personal piety.
Fourthly and finally, note that in the course of the analysis of the mysterium tremendum Otto gives us a preview of his ideas on religious progress. In the section on the first of his elements, awefulness, the writer explains how this part of the experience of the numinous still retains something of its origins in the most primitive form of religious experience. In his sections on the last two of his elements, the wholly other and the element of fascination, the writer refers again to 'daemonic dread' as the primitive starting point of the numinous experience.
Having established exactly what he means by the numinous and the experience of it, Otto goes on to explore various consequences of the idea.
The Profane: He argues that the experience of the numinous leads in people to much more than the sense of personal unworthiness. It leads, according to the writer, to a sense of the worthlessness of the whole of ordinary existence. He calls this 'the feeling of absolute profaneness'. Thus the experience of the sacred has as its inevitable parallel, the experience of the profane.
The 'Awefulness' of God: Also worthy of attention is Otto's effort in his chapters on the numinous in the Old Testament, in the New Testament and in Luther to emphasise that the rise of the rational in the Judeo-Christian tradition did not eliminate the non-rational numinous. In particular, he reminds the reader of the continuing presence of the 'awefulness' aspect, as in ideas of a dread inspiring, vengeful and wrathful God.
In the chapter on the numinous in the Old Testament, Otto discusses the transition of the Old Testament God from an early Yahweh, still bearing traces of the 'daemonic dread' of the pre-god stage of the numinous , to an Elohim in whom 'the rational aspect outweighs the numinous', though the latter continues to be very much present.
In the New Testament likewise, Otto looks at the balance between non-rational and rational. Here the rational aspect of God reaches its consummation, but the numinous aspect has not been lost. Thus Otto sees the numinous in New Testament references to a God of vengeance, who will 'destroy wicked men'. The author also notably sees St Paul's doctrine of predestination as 'non-rational' and springing from the numinous.
With regard to Luther, Otto argues that the non-rational in the reformer's religion has come to be ignored: 'the Lutheran school has itself not done justice to the numinous side of the Christian idea of God. By the exclusively moral interpretation it gave to the terms, it distorted the meaning of 'holiness' and 'wrath' of God.
Holy as an a priori category: The ‘holy’ in the fullest sense of the word is a combined, complex category, the combining elements being its rational and non-rational components, but in both, it is a purely a priori category. The Human Predisposition for Religious Experience: So religious growth has occurred not because of any development in human capacities, but because of a predisposition towards religious experience that was always present but only gradually awakened. The writer emphasises that this predisposition is a characteristic not just of some individuals, but of the whole human species.
Otto goes on to identify and discuss a series of phenomena he associates with the earliest expressions of the human predisposition for religion. He begins with: magic, worship of the dead, ideas regarding souls and spirits, belief that natural objects have powers that can be manipulated by spells etc, belief that natural objects like mountains and the sun and the moon are actually alive, fairy stories and myths.
Religion proper starts only when feelings prompted by the predisposition for religious experience are no longer projected on to things out there in the natural world, but are accounted for in terms of gods. From then on the progress of religion is a matter of the gradual refinement of people's understanding of their experience of the divine, till the culmination in Christianity. It should be noted Otto's view of Christianity as the end product of religious development: for example, ‘Christianity stands out in complete superiority over all sister religions.'
The Motive Force Driving Religious Progress: Now the human predisposition for religious experience does not explain how religious progress took place, how humanity gradually advanced towards Christianity. There had to have been some mechanism or mechanisms to drive things forward. At the very end of his main text, Otto points to 'three factors by which religion comes into being in history'. A specific type of historical event that Otto draws into his argument is the emergence of particular people far more sensitive to the numinous than their fellows and who sensitised those around them. These special individuals included the Bible prophets and pre-eminently Jesus, as the writer points out in the final words of his text.


“It is a book that every Christian thinker needs, and this translation has firmly established its position as an authoritative and lucid representation of an acknowledged classic of religious thought” – London Quarterly Review.
“Traditional theology has usually concerned itself with doctrine, with focus on the rational aspects of God. Otto, following the tradition of mystics, gave careful consideration to an often neglected aspect of theology: the non-rational aspects of God. In doing so, he coined the word "numinous" to depict that which transcends or eludes comprehension in rational terms. It suggests that which is holy, awesome, and 'wholly other.' He also applies the expression "mysterium tremendum" to the numinous, describing that which is hidden, esoteric, beyond conception or understanding, awe-inspiring, fear-instilling or uncanny, an absolute overpoweringness of an ineffable transcendent Reality” - David Graham, Amazon
"The Idea of the Holy" is not a terribly long book, but it is certainly not a casual or quick read. It is not aimed at a popular audience, and for many people it will require a dictionary close at hand. - Ryan Keating, Amazon


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1 comment:

Unknown said...

With a sense of pride at a fellow Indian putting up a summary of Otto's book I opened your page. Sorry to say that I had to hang my head in shame when I saw that much of the material is a word for word copy of John Durham's work. it is sheer plagiarism. For your own future good, Please follow the ethics of research and acknowledge your sources, and write the material in your own words.
With concern,
George