CHAPTER EIGHT

UNDERSTANDING AND TEACHING

RUDOLPH OTTO'S THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

"These words were chosen that that which could not be comprehended
might yet in some measure be understood."
-Hugh of St. Victor (Cited by Otto in the The Idea of the Holy)

Rudolph Otto's book on the holy is both simple and complex: simple in pre-
senting a single, compelling definition of religion's meaning; complex in for-
mulating concepts that explain religion's origins and development. 1 Students
who do not appreciate Otto's complexity run the risk of oversimplify the idea
of the holy, rendering it a discrete religious object which can be experienced
directly in the way the sun's light is experienced on hot summer days. This
essay is devoted to a clarification of what is simple and what complex in
Otto's account of the holy.
Otto's descriptive account of the unique experience of religious feeling
as mysterium tremendum etfascinans, is the simpler, more vivid, and perhaps
more convincing part of his book. The complexity begins when Otto moves
from a description of religious feeling to an analysis of the idea of the holy,
the origins and essence of religion, and finally of religion's historical devel-
opment and fulfillment. This account which mixes phenomenology, episte-
mology, and theology in bewieldering amounts, seems at times to confuse
rather than to clarify the nature of religious feeling. Yet it is a necessary part
of Otto' account of religion, as we shall see.
However complex Otto's argument is about religion his genius as a writer
was to give his readers the confidence that religious experience has a unique
content and a distinct meaning. He wrote that " if there be any single domain
of human experience that presents us with something unmistakably specific
and unique, peculiar to itself, assuredly it is that of the religious life." [4] In
this respect Otto continued the task begun earlier by Friedrich
Schleiermacher in 1799 with the publication of his Speeches on Religion To
Its Culture Despisers, which was to defend the uniqueness of religion against
the naturalists who would equate religion with ethics or reduce it to psycho-
logical and social reactions to life's situations.
The dominant theological influence on Otto's idea of the holy was
Luther's doctrine of justifification by faith alone. The main philosophical in-

1 All page numbers from Otto's book, The Idea of the Holy, are given in the text of this article,

and the quotations are made from the Oxford University Press Galaxy Book edition, New York,
1958, John W. Harvey, translator.
140 CHAPTER EIGHT

fluence was Immanuel Kant's notion of the a priori. Otto was also influenced
by the interpretation given to Kant's epistemology by Jakob Fries and by the
argument of Ernst Troeltsch that religion was a unique and valid category of
meaning. 2
Kant spoke of the a priori as a predisposition of the human mind to
knowledge of the sensory world. Utilizing the a priori Otto argued there is a
religious a priori or predisposition of mind to religious knowledge. That a
priori, he named the holy (Das Heilige), and identified it as "a category of in-
terpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion." [5] We should
understand Otto here to mean that the holy, which is part and parcel of our
mind's working, makes it possible for us to recognize and appropriately re-
spond to religious experience as religious. This recognition occurs in the ex-
perience of certain numinous feelings such as creatureliness, dread, awe, and
wonder.
Otto quotes with warm approval Kant's famous opening words of the Cri-
tique of Pure Reason:
That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how
is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise oth-
erwise than by means of objects which affect our senses? . . . But, though all
our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises
out of experience." (112-113 J
Adapting Kant's proposition about knowledge to religion, Otto wanted to ar-
gue that religion comes into being as the result of numinous feeling that is the
experience of both an objective numinous reality (which seems to occasion
religion) and an inner numinous, a priori mind (which causes religion). The
connections here between exprience, mind, and object as affecting religion,
so far as I can judge, is not made clear in Otto's major book on the holy or any
of the other books which deal with the holy. In supposing that there is a con-
nection between the experience of numinous feeling to the religiously cogni-
tive and a priori capacity of mind, without actually explaining that connec-
tion, much of the confusion in Otto's account of religion occurs. The
confusion becomes acute when one asks about the numinous object which
Otto acknowledges [IO-II] as necessary to religious knowledge but never ex-
plains in its relation to the a priori working of the religious mind. Confusion
might have been avoided had Otto made a clear distinction between what in
religion is a matter of a priori knowledge and what is apprehended a poste-
riori, through experience. That he did not do. Repeatedly what we find in
Otto's book is a hazing over of the difference subject and object, exerience

2 For useful discussion of the infuence of Luther, Schleiermacher, Kant, Fries, and Troeltsch

on Otto, see Robert Davidson, Rudolf Otto s Interpretation of Religion (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1947) and Philip C. Almond, Rudolph Otto: An Introduction to His Philosophical
Theology (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).