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

 Daniël Mok: Een wijze uit het westen; beschouwingen over Rudolf Otto en het heilige  Rudolf Otto: Het heilige; over het onberedenaarbare aspect in de religieuze ervaring en de relatie daarvan met het redelijke  Rudolf Otto: Indiase genadereligie en het christendom  William James: Vormen van de religieuze ervaring; een onderzoek naar het wezen van de mens

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