OTTO, RUDOLF (1869-1937),
German Christian theologian
and scholar of the history and phenomenology of religions. Rudolf
Otto was one of two great theological influences in Germany in
the years after World War I, the other being the neoorthodox theologian
Karl Barth. Otto's Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy; 1917)
and Barth's Römerbrief (Commentary on the Letter to
the Romans; 1923) set the theological agenda for many years, though
in different directions. While Barth rejected the liberal emphasis
on Christianity as a religion, Otto centered his life work on
understanding the nature of religion, its divergent expressions
in the world religions, and its importance for Christian theology
and practice.
Rudolf Otto was heir
to the primary theological and philosophical tendencies in Germany
at the end of the nineteenth century. He studied at Erlangen and
Göttingen, and he taught on the theological faculties of
Göttingen and Breslau until he went to the University of
Marburg in 1917; there he remained the rest of his life. Among
the strong influences on him we can first count Luther, the subject
of Otto's 1898 dissertation, 'Die Anschauung vom Heiligen Geiste
bei Luther' (Luther's View of the Holy Spirit). From Luther, Otto
learned the importance of religious intuition and the sense of
the inward presence of God. A second major influence was Schleiermacher;
Otto edited a centennial edition of Schleiermacher's Speeches
on Religion in 1899 and later wrote that Schleiermacher had
recovered the importance of 'feeling' in religious experience.
The dominant influence of Kant's thought is clear especially in
Otto's early work, and from the philosopher Jacob Fries he took
over the notion of Ahndung or 'longing' as an aesthetic
mode of perception that apprehends the meaning and purpose of
existence. He discussed these two philosophers especially in his
1909 work, The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant
and Fries.
Unlike many other theologians of his time, Otto also interested
himself in the non-Christian religions of the world. He learned
Sanskrit, translated and studied important Hindu writings, and
made several extensive trips to India, Burma, China, Japan, Egypt,
J Jerusalem, and other places in his search to understand religious
experience. It was perhaps the tremendous impact of his trip to
Asia in 1911 and 1912 and his early study of Sanskrit texts that
led him to the analysis of religious experience first articulated
in The Idea of the Holy.
In this widely influential book,
Otto attempted to clarify the distinctively religious element
in religious experience by attending especially to the nonrational
factor what is left over after the rational elements have
been subtracted. This is not to say that Otto ignored the rational
aspects of religion, as some have charged; indeed, his earlier
work had dealt largely with religion in its rational dimensions,
and this book specifically investigated the relationship of the
rational to the nonrational in religious experience. Otto pointed
out that the term holy, which should designate the special
religious dimension, had lost its primary meaning and had come
to designate ethical and moral self-righteousness. Its primary
meaning, Otto found, eludes apprehension in conceptual terms.
So Otto coined a new word, numinous, to stand for the holy
minus its moral factor and without any 'rational' aspect. The
'numinous' now indicated the special religious 'overplus' of meaning
in the idea of the holy beyond that which is commonly thought
of as rational and moral. This numinous factor, according to Otto,
is sui generis, that is, irreducible to any other factor;
it can be understood only when there has been an existential experience
of it.
Otto then described the object to which the numinous consciousness
is directed. This is the mysterium tremendum, the mystery
before which one trembles, which evokes a strong sense of 'creature
feeling.' This experience' according to Otto, includes a double
dimension of response to the holy: an element of shaking fear
or repulsion (mysterium tremendum), and an element of powerful
attraction or fascination (mysterium fascinans). This numinous
experience of the holy is basic to all religious experience, according
to Otto, and is thus an a priori category in both its rational
and nonrational elements.
Otto held that human beings have a special faculty of genuinely
recognizing the holy in its appearances, a faculty that he termed
'divination.' This faculty of divination, which Otto drew in part
from Fries's idea of Ahndung ('longing') and Schleiermacher's
idea of 'feeling,' is the means by which a person senses the meaning,
value, and purpose of the numinous presence. Because the numinous
experience is nonrational, it evades precise formulation; the
'overplus' of meaning can only be indicated by what Otto called
'ideograms,' that is, concepts or doctrines that cannot be understood
logically but only symbolically.
After writing this seminal and incisive analysis of the nature
of religious experience, Otto began to apply his category of the
numinous to various facets of religion. In a series of additional
essays over the next fifteen years, he analyzed many topics of
religious experience in Christianity and other religions in this
manner. He showed how the recovery of the numinous dimension liberates
concepts like sin and guilt from their moralistic bounds and casts
them in a new light, because of the sense of the mysterious Other
with the accompanying feeling of creatureliness. Sin, for example,
is not simply moral depreciation or transgression; it is a feeling
of absolute profaneness, involving the most uncompromising judgment
of depreciation of oneself as a creature, accompanied by heightened
appreciation of the numen as holy mystery. The source of forgiveness
thus springs directly from the numinous, from the awe of standing
before the mysterium tremendum with a sense of one's unworthiness.
Part of Rudolf Otto's contribution to religious studies lay in
his investigation of the numinous as found in the major religions
of the world, especially in Hinduism. He translated some important
texts into German, attempting to portray a living impression of
the religious experience to which the texts testified, and interesting
himself especially in the idea of salvation or the mystical experience
they presented. Otto filled a gap in Western scholarship on Hinduism
particularly in paying attention to Hindu devotion, not only in
its ancient forms but also especially in its medieval expressions,
an area that had hardly been studied in Germany.
In addition to his translations, Otto provided a number of studies
in the history of religions, together with some significant comparative
works. In studying world religions, Otto developed a theory of
the convergence of types and parallel forms. He chose examples
from various traditions to show how similar religious expressions
were, arising out of the common human sense of the numinous. But
he was careful to show, at the same time, how parallel forms are
qualified by the dynamics of the individual religion. In his view,
the historian of religions must be sensitive to both similarities
and differences. Otto himself presented a number of models~ this
comparative methodology. In his important work of 1926, Mysticism
East and West, he provided a thorough comparison of the important
Hindu philosopher of nondualism, Sankara, and the medieval Christian
mystic Meister Eckhardt. In this study he first showed a broad
basis for common mystical outlook; then, within that framework
of agreement, he was able to demonstrate the peculiar spirit of
each of the two mystics in relation to their respective cultural
traditions. In 1930, a second important comparative study, India's
Religion of Grace and Christianity, appeared, in which Otto
described the personalistic, theistic piety (bhakti) devoted
to Vishnu and showed how this bhakti impulse is similar
to that found in Christianity. The lost condition out of which
one is delivered is conceived somewhat differently in the two
religious traditions, however: deliverance out of sin and guilt
in Christianity, but deliverance from the cycle of rebirth and
the world of appearance in Hinduism.
As a Christian theologian Otto was interested in issues within
the Christian faith, although he - more than most theologians
of the time - saw the history of religions as a necessary backdrop
for Christian theology. His last work, The Kingdom of God and
the Son of Man, published in German in 1934, is a major study
on Christology, one that deals with the New Testament data but
does so from Otto's unique perspective on the history of religions.
This work made an important contribution to the study of eschatology
in the formation of New Testament thought. Otto's theory was that
the ultimate source of the concept of the kingdom of God was the
Iranian tradition of the kingdom of 'Asura'. Jesus' eschatology
took the form of an announcement of the spiritual power of the
end-time kingdom already here; Jesus' own particular role can
best be defined, according to Otto, as that of charismatic evangelist
and exorcist.
Rudolf Otto was also much interested in the sphere of practical
religious experience. He offered many suggestions for a dignified
celebration of the Christian Eucharist, and his own experimental
liturgy embodied the sense of the numinous by culminating in silence.
He proposed an ecumenical unity of all Christians in Germany long
before the Christian ecumenical movement became popular. Through
his interest in symbols and ideograms he established at Marburg
a collection of religious symbols, artifacts, and apparatus of
the religions of all peoples. And his broad understanding of religious
similarities and differences led him to propose and participate
in a 'religious league of mankind,' challenging the people of
all religions to unite against the common problems that confront
human beings.
Otto's attempts to analyze the essence of religion and to describe
the religious object as the presence of the holy have been criticized
by some scholars who hold that the essence of religion and of
the divine object cannot be defined by phenomenological means.
But his work still provides a penetrating analysis of religious
experience and a model of comparative religious research, one
that has stimulated much thought and that will continue to exert
great influence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Rudolf Otto
Among Otto's early major
works must be counted
Naturalistisch und religiose Weltansicht (Tübingen,
1904), translated as Naturalism and Religion (New York,
1907); and
Kantisch-Fries' sche Religionsphilosophie (Tübingen,
1909), translated as The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant
and Fries (New York, 1931).
His best known work is
Das Heilige (Breslau, 1917), translated as
The Idea of the Holy (1923; 2d ed., Oxford, 1950), in which
he analyzed religious experience as the sense of the numinous.
He followed this work with many essays devoted to the topic of
numinous experience, collected in 1932 in two volumes,
Das Gefuhl des Oberweltlichen and
Sunde und Urschuld (Munich, 1932); some of
these essays are in
Religious Essays: A Supplement to 'The Idea of
the Holy,' (London, 1931).
Two major works in which Otto presented comparative studies of
Hinduism and Christianity are
West-östliche Mystik (Gotha, 1926),
translated as Mysticism East and West (New York, 1932);
and
Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das Christentum
(Gotha, 1930), translated as India's Religion of Grace
and Christianity (New York, 1930).
Otto's last major work was
Reich Gottes und Menschensohn (Munich, 1934),
translated as The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man (London,
1938).
Of Otto's many textual
studies and translations of Hindu writings into German, his studies
on the Bhagavad-Gita have been translated into English
as The Original Gita: The Song of the Supreme Exalted One (London,
1939).
Works about Rudolf Otto
Book-length studies of Otto
in English include
Robert F. Davidson's Rudolf Otto's Interpretation of
Religion (Princeton, 1947), discussing both the background
of Otto's thought and his specific proposals for understanding
religious experience; and
Philip C. Almond's Rudolf Otto: An Introduction to His
Philosophical Theology (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), which includes
a description of his life and work.
Shorter general studies of Otto's thought include
Joachim Wach's 'Rudolf Otto and the Idea of of the Holy,'
in
Wach's Types of Religious Experience: Christian and Non-Christian
(Chicago, 1951), pp. 209-227; and
Bernard Meland's 'Rudolf Otto,' in A Handbook of Christian
Theologians, edited by Dean G. Peerman and Martin E. Marty
(Cleveland, 1965), pp. 169-191.
John P. Reeder has analyzed the moral implications of Otto's
thought in 'The Relation of the Moral and the Numinous in Otto's
Notion of the Holy,' in Religion and Morality, edited by
Gene H. Outka and John P. Reeder (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), pp.
255-292; and
David Bastow has studied the relation between Otto's philosophical,
phenomenological, and theological positions in 'Otto and Numinous
Experience,' Religious Studies 12 (1976): 159-176.
Robert F. Streetman has shown the renewed relevance of
Otto for current religious study in 'Some Later Thoughts of Otto
on the Holy,' Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48
(1980): 365-384.
Of the many studies of Otto in German, a helpful volume is Rudolf
Otto's Bedeutung fur die Religionswissenschaft und die Theologie
Heute, edited by Ernst Benz (Leiden, 1971), which includes
a substantial biography of Otto.
(Theodore M. Ludwig)
The Encyclopedia of religion
[edited by] Mircea Eliade
New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, © 1987