By Gregory D. Alles
Rudolf Otto
(1869–1937) was a German systematic theologian who contributed especially to
the philosophy and history of religion. As a liberal theologian or, more
accurately, a Vermittlungstheologe (theologian of mediation), Otto
conceived of systematic theology as a science of religion, whose components
were the philosophy, psychology, and history of religions. In his view,
philosophy identified the source of religion in a qualitatively unique
experience for which he coined the term numinous. Descriptive psychology
revealed the nonrational dimensions of this experience as a mysterium
tremendum et fascinans, dimensions that, Otto said, were conjoined to
rational or conceptual elements through a process that, loosely following Immanuel
Kant, he called schematization. Otto's ideas became foundational for
much twentieth-century work in the study of religion that claimed to be
phenomenological or scientific rather than theological.
LIFE
Born on September
25, 1869, in Peine in the region of Hanover, Germany, Otto spent his childhood
in Peine and Hildesheim, where his father owned malt factories. After
graduating from the Gymnasium Adreanum in Hildesheim, he studied first at the
University of Erlangen, a conservative neo-Lutheran institution, then at the
University of Göttingen, where liberal theology and the historical-critical
study of the Bible prevailed. He initially prepared for a ministerial career,
but conservatives in the German church administration found him unsuitable.
Instead of taking a German congregation in Paris, he opted for an academic
career, where his prospects were only somewhat brighter. He became a Privatdozent
at Göttingen in 1898 and something like a visiting associate professor there in
1906, but official opposition to his liberal views and popularizing activities
plagued him for years.
In 1904 Otto adopted
the philosophy of Jakob Friedrich Fries, helping to establish a neo-Friesian
movement along with two Göttingen colleagues, the philosopher Leonard Nelson,
who introduced him to Fries's thought, and the New Testament scholar Wilhelm
Bousset, whom he recruited to the cause. In the same year, however, Otto fell
into a deep depression and considered abandoning theology altogether. When his
health finally recovered in 1907, Otto returned to teaching and writing, to
ecclesiastical and liturgical activities with a group known as "The
Friends of Die Christliche Welt" (Die Christliche Welt was a
semipopular magazine for liberal theology), and to political activities, at that
time in conjunction with a student-oriented group known as the Akademischer
Freibund, the Göttingen chapter of which he, along with Nelson and Bousset,
led. His most important publication from the period was Kantisch-Fries'sche
Religionsphilosophie und ihre Anwendung auf die Theologie (The Philosophy
of Religion Based on Kant and Fries, 1909).
In 1911 to 1912 Otto
undertook a "world tour"—actually a journey from the Canary Islands
to China and Japan—financed through the German government by the cosmopolitan
French banker, Albert Kahn, for the purpose of preparing an introduction to the
history of religions (never written). During a visit to a Moroccan synagogue on
this trip he encountered in memorable fashion the trisagion—"Holy,
holy, holy…" (Is. 6.3)—an encounter that he and his disciples later
considered the moment when he discovered the Holy. Upon his return, Otto
pursued the history of religions as part of a broader strategy of German
cultural imperialism, commensurate with the ethical imperialism of the
theologian and publicist Paul Rohrbach but in sharp contrast to the
militaristic colonialism of organizations like the Naval and Pan-German
Leagues. As part of this program he promoted the series Quellen der
Religionsgeschichte, a German equivalent to the Sacred Books of the East.
In 1913 he was elected to represent Göttingen in the Prussian state
legislature, where in 1917 he led a faction of the National-Liberal Party in an
attempt to abolish Prussia's notorious three-tier system of (Page 6929)
weighting votes. In 1915 he finally received a professoriate in systematic
theology at the University of Breslau.
Otto wrote his most
famous book, Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy, 1917), during World War
I. In part due to the attention this book received, he became professor of
systematic theology at the University of Marburg in 1917, where he stayed until
his death. During the 1920s he wrote two major comparisons of Indian religions
and Christianity, West-östliche Mystik (Mysticism East and West, 1926),
originally delivered as Haskell Lectures at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1924,
and Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das Christentum (India's Religion of
Grace and Christianity, 1930), originally the Olaus Petri lectures in Uppsala,
Sweden, in 1927. At Marburg Otto founded the Religionskundliche Sammlung,
a museum of the world's religions, on behalf of which he made a second lengthy
journey to South Asia in 1927 and 1928. He also attracted younger scholars as
students and associates, including Heinrich Frick, Theodor Siegfried, Friedrich
Heiler, Ernst Benz, and, more remotely, Gustav Mensching, Joachim Wach, and
James Luther Adams. In the immediate aftermath of World War I he served on the
commission to draft a new constitution, and in 1920 he organized a Religiöser
Menschheitsbund (Religious league of humanity), an international
nongovernmental organization that he saw as a necessary complement to the
League of Nations. His time in Marburg was also marked by vehement antagonism
to his thought from neoorthodox theologians, represented there by the New
Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann.
Although Otto
retired early from teaching in 1929 for reasons of poor health, he continued to
write and, after a brief hiatus, also to teach part time. In addition to
pursuing interests in Indian religions, he discussed what he alleged were
Persian roots of Christianity in Reich Gottes und Menschensohn (The
Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, 1934). He intended his final major work,
which was also to have been his Gifford Lectures, to be a system of ethics, but
his scattered essays on the subject were not collected until 1981. Ever an
ardent nationalist, Otto seems in 1933 to have taken an interest in the German
Christian position, although he found German Christian leaders distasteful. He did
not actively oppose the Nazi regime.
In October 1936 Otto
fell some twenty meters from a tower, a fall that persistent but unconfirmed
rumors identify as a suicide attempt. Whatever the cause, he suffered severely
from his injuries and died of pneumonia on March 6, 1937.
THOUGHT
Otto's intellectual
project grew from a desire to defend religion in general and Christianity more
specifically from the attacks of nineteenth-century historians and natural
scientists. As a result, although he taught dogmatics and ethics, most of his
writing in systematic theology fell within a domain traditionally known as
apologetics, albeit focused upon a general apologetics of religion rather than
a defense of the superiority of Christianity. By 1909, however, Otto had abandoned
these categories and had come to conceive of modern theology as a science of
religion, a term whose apologetic utility is evident.
In the tradition of
German idealism and, more remotely, of Cartesian dualism, Otto distinguished
two realms, the mental and the material, a distinction that he took over from
his teacher Hermann Schultz and developed in his first major book, Naturalistische
und religiöse Weltansicht (Naturalism and Religion, 1904).
Nineteenth-century naturalism made a major error, he thought, when it devalued
the mental in favor of the material. Human beings had immediate access to and
direct knowledge of only mental events, and such events always mediated
knowledge of the material world. Along with some noted biologists, such as Emil
Dubois-Reymond, Otto maintained that consciousness was a primary datum that in
principle could not be explained in terms of material processes, such as
neurophysiological events. Furthermore, he reversed the relationship between
rational certainty and intuition that René Descartes had postulated. For him,
the mental was not so much a rational realm of eternal ideas or pure reason as
it was a realm of conscious experience whose rational representations rested
ultimately on nonrational feelings and intuitions.
Although originally
attracted to the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher—as a young instructor, he
edited the one-hundredth anniversary edition of Schleiermacher's famous Speeches
on Religion—Otto came to believe that the thought of Fries provided a
philosophically more satisfactory account of religion. He summarized that
thought in Kantisch-Fries'sche Religionsphilosophie, and in doing so
provided a philosophic critique (in the Kantian sense) of the possibility of
religious experience, taking "experience" as much in an empirical as
in an emotive sense (Erfahrung as well as Erlebnis). Unlike Kant,
Fries thought that cognition takes place in the realms of practical and
aesthetic as well as of theoretical reason, raising the possibility of a
peculiar sort of religious cognition, too. Furthermore, in Fries's thought all
knowledge depends upon feeling. For example, a Wahrheitsgefühl, or
feeling of truth, is said to be responsible for one's judgment that the results
of one's rational processes are correct. Even in the realm of science and
mathematics it is possible to be convinced of the truth of a proposition
without being able to demonstrate it, as Otto once illustrated with Fermat's
last theorem: mathematicians could sense that the theorem was true, even if
they could not prove it. But unlike scientific cognition, Otto claimed,
religious cognition involves experiences that are in principle not subject to
correction, or even full formulation and elaboration, by theoretical reason.
In his most famous
book, Das Heilige, Otto turned from a critical philosophical account of
the possibility of religious experience to a descriptive psychology of the
content of that experience and its relationship to the "rational,"
symbolic dimension of religion. To designate religious feelings at their most
distinctive he coined the word numinous, which referred, he said, to the
Holy or Sacred minus the moral dimension. But he soon encountered a
methodological limitation. (Page 6930) Conscious
experience is only available to the person who has it; therefore, it is
possible to formulate a descriptive account of religious feelings only on the
basis of introspection, informed by apparent similarities in what others have
said. In other words, in order to study the experience that is the ultimate source
of religion, a scholar must have a sensus numinis, an ability to
experience numinous feelings—just as the description of color in painting or
pitch in music requires certain kinds of perceptual abilities. Those who have
such abilities, Otto suggested, experience the numinous as a mysterium
tremendum et fascinans. As a mysterium, it is completely other,
beyond the realm of ordinary existence, apprehensible but not comprehensible,
evoking in human beings the feeling of stupor and stunned silence. People find
this mysterium both attractive (fascinans) and repulsive (tremendum).
On the one hand, it arouses the sense of grace, love, and mercy. On the other,
it arouses feelings of terror and awe and the conviction that human beings are
in reality nothing—feelings to which Otto, countering tendencies to equate
genuine religion with love, gave a great deal of attention. Furthermore, this
Holy is a category a priori, and as such beyond empirical criticism. (Otto's
Kantianism is muddled.) It is, however, a complex category, consisting not just
of the nonrational numinous but also of rational symbolic and ethical elements
that "schematize" the numinous and result in relatively persistent
but culturally variable religious forms.
Within the framework
provided by these basic convictions in philosophy and psychology, Otto worked
extensively in the history of religions. After his journey of 1911 to 1912 he
learned Sanskrit and translated several religious texts into German. His most
ambitious venture was a three-volume study of the Bhagavadgītā (one
volume in English), which sought to reconstruct the poem's textual history and
thus to recover its original inspiration. His two major comparative works, West-östliche
Mystik and Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das Christentum, also
reflect his interest in Indian religions, as well as a division of religiosity
common at the time into the mystical and the devotional. The former book
compares the positions of the Advaita philosopher Śankarācārya with the German
mystic Meister Eckhart; the latter makes a similar comparison of bhakti
movements with Christianity of a Pietist bent. Both works ascribe the
distinctiveness and superiority of Christianity to a dynamism that derives from
its Jewish roots. Otto's last major work, Reich Gottes und Menschensohn,
is genealogical rather than comparative in intent and bridges what in the two
major comparative studies is a divide between the Christian and the
Indo-Iranian or, as that cultural region was called, Aryan. It examines the
alleged Iranian roots of Christianity, although it still attributes the highest
Christian insights to its Jewish ancestry.
Otto's work in the
history of religions was not all descriptive. Influenced in particular by
biology, he made modest attempts to identify processes at work in religious
history, such as his account of parallels and convergences; that is, of
similarities that derive not from common ancestry but from adaptation to
similar environmental circumstances. But Otto did not expect comparative study
to reveal the universal conceptual or symbolic content of religion, a point he
made as early as his critique of Wilhelm Wundt (1910). Indeed, the structure of
Otto's thought, oriented to a universal feeling beyond thought and expression,
relegates symbols and ideas to a culturally determined rational schematization
and so is fundamentally incompatible with later attempts by scholars such as C.
G. Jung and Mircea Eliade to identify universal elements of religious or mythic
thought. In old age Otto declined an invitation to participate in the first
Eranos conference.
Otto's ethics, left
incomplete, has received relatively little attention, but like his work on
religion it builds upon a descriptive psychology of moral feelings, such as the
feelings of guilt and responsibility. One might also note that Otto's thinking
was never isolated from the world but always explicitly engaged with it,
especially with the church and state. In the church, Otto strove to improve
worship and ministry by encouraging liberal theology and incorporating moments
of numinous experience into the liturgy. He was also convinced that his
insights into religion could further the interests of the German state, which
came into existence during his infancy, but his assessment of those interests
changed over time. In religion as he understood it, he found the source of both
German colonial greatness (his cultural imperialism before the first World War)
and of international justice and equality between nations (the Religiöser
Menschheitsbund afterward). In the Nazi period he claimed that the study of
religions revealed the struggle of the German soul at its most profound and
that dialogue between Protestants and Catholics was necessary to unify the
German nation.
IMPACT AND ASSESSMENT
When it appeared in
late 1916 (dated 1917), Otto's account of the Holy created an immediate
sensation, and it was quickly translated into English (1923), Swedish (1924),
Spanish (1925), Italian (1926), Japanese (1927), Dutch (1928), and French
(1929). The impact was especially pronounced in the English-speaking world,
perhaps because of affinities between Otto's thought and English Romanticism
(e.g., William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality"). Otto's
word numinous, his phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans
(occasionally cited as fascinosum, which means something different in
Latin), and even the title of his book, "The Idea of the Holy," still
enjoy a certain currency among English-speaking writers and artists, even apart
from the details of Otto's thought.
Although himself a
theologian, Otto's impact upon Protestant theology was muted, because his
attempt to found religion on human experience went counter to the tenets of
neoorthodoxy. Paul Tillich, however, made significant use of Otto's ideas, and
recently some theologians interested in interreligious dialogue (e.g.,
Hans-Martin Barth) and feminism (e.g., Melissa Raphael) have engaged them, too.
Otto's most significant impact was on the comparative study of religions, (Page 6931) especially that form often known as phenomenology.
Students and successors utilized Otto's analysis in far-reaching accounts that
saw religion as the expression of an experience sui generis. Indeed,
Otto's analysis became part of a standard rationale for founding independent
academic units to study religion. With time, however, scholars have become
suspicious that Otto's ideas improperly universalize structures that best fit
Christianity. In addition, the widespread turn to culture and language that
began in the 1960s tended to reject Otto's account of an experience that was
autonomous, primary, and universal, and either to speak of experiences as
shaped by particular cultural and symbolic environments or to ignore them
altogether. Furthermore, a significant number of scholars have rejected Otto's
insistence upon introspection and his prerequisite that in order to study the
source of religion scholars possess a sensus numinis as a violation of
scientific method. Among North American scholars, historical interest in Otto
has been eclipsed by interest in William James.
The concurrence of
neuropsychology, cognitive science, and the study of religion that took place
in the 1990s returned in significant respects to themes that interested Otto,
but in a way that reveals the difficulties of using Otto's thought today: For
example, neuropsychologists such as Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg have
studied religious experiences that are reminiscent of Otto's numinous
experience, but unlike Otto they postulate a unitary mind-brain, and so seek to
discover the basis for religious experiences in the structure and functioning
of the physical brain. Some theologians have seen in such work a foundation and
validation for human religiosity—a fulfillment of Otto's ultimate theological
aim, if by a somewhat different route.
Cognitive scientists
such as Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, and Stewart Guthrie have had relatively
little interest in religious experiences, even if they have on occasion
mimicked Otto's phrases, perhaps unconsciously. Nevertheless, in significant
respects their fundamental questions resemble Otto's. In a manner reminiscent
of Kantianism they want both to identify the a priori, universal structures
that shape intuitive, prerational cognition (folk physics, biology, and
psychology) and to relate to those structures the cognitive processes that make
religion possible. But they focus on mental representations rather than
feelings and intuitions, and they embrace rather than reject evolutionary
explanation. Like Otto they do postulate a plurality of distinct mental
domains, but they define them in terms of content (inanimate object, living
thing, animal, human) rather than varieties of rationality (theoretical,
practical, aesthetic), and unlike Otto they do not consider religious cognition
to constitute an independent, universal domain. Although they see religion as
beyond adequate rational formulation, they attribute this to the symbolic
rather than literal quality of religious representation and, unlike Otto, see
it as a mark against the literal veracity of religious claims. Finally, they
expect to test their claims not through introspection but through vigorous,
cross-cultural experimentation. So long as presumptions such as these dominate,
Otto's account of religious experience will remain data for the history of
religious thought, but it will not be a live theoretical option within the
study of religions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Otto
Naturalistische und
religiöse Weltansicht. Tübingen, Germany, 1904. Translated as Naturalism and Religion
by J. Arthur Thomson and Margaret R. Thomson. London, 1907.
Kantisch-Fries'sche Religionsphilosophie und
ihre Anwendung auf die Theologie. Tübingen, Germany, 1909. Translated as The
Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries by E. B. Dicker. London, 1931.
Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der
Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen. Breslau, Germany,
1917. Translated as The Idea of the Holy by John W. Harvey. Oxford,
1923; 2d ed., 1950.
West-östliche Mystik. Gotha, Germany, 1926. Translated as Mysticism
East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism by Bertha
L. Bracey and Richenda C. Payne. New York,
1932.
Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das
Christentum. Gotha, Germany,
1930. Translated as India's
Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted by Frank Hugh
Foster. New York, 1930.
Religious Essays: A
Supplement to the Idea of the Holy. Translated by Brian Lunn. London, 1931.
Reich Gottes und Menschensohn. Munich, 1934. Translated as The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man: A Study in the
History of Religion by Floyd V. Filson Bertram and Lee Wolff. Boston, 1943.
Aufsätze zur Ethik. Edited by Jack Stewart Boozer. Munich,
1981.
Autobiographical and Social
Essays. Edited by Gregory
D. Alles. Berlin, 1996.
Works about Otto
Alles, Gregory D.
"Rudolf Otto (1869–1937)." In Klassiker
der Religionswissenschaft: Von Friedrich Schleiermacher bis Mircea Eliade,
edited by Axel Michaels, pp. 198–210. Munich, 1997.
Almond, Philip. Rudolf
Otto: An Introduction to His Philosophical Theology. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984.
Benz, Ernst, ed. Rudolf Otto's Bedeutung
für die Religionswissenschaft und für die Theologie Heute. Leiden, 1971.
Davidson, Robert F. Rudolf
Otto's Interpretation of Religion. Princeton, N.J., 1947.
Frick, Heinrich, Birger Forell, and
Friedrich Heiler. Religionswissenschaft in neuer Sicht: Drei Reden über
Rudolf Ottos Persönlichkeit und Werk. Marburg, Germany, 1951.
Gooch, Todd A. The
Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto's Philosophy of
Religion. Berlin, 2000.
Haubold, Wilhelm. Die Bedeutung der
Religionsgeschichte für die Theologie Rudolf Ottos. Leipzig, 1940.
Schütte, Hans Walter. Religion und
Christentum in der Theologie Rudolf Ottos. Berlin, 1969.
GREGORY D. ALLES
(2005)
Source Citation: ALLES, GREGORY. "Otto,
Rudolf." Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Lindsay
Jones. Vol. 10. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference
USA, 2005. 6928-6931. 15 vols.
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