Rudolf Otto (1869–1937)

This book was developed from Otto’s lectures presented at Oberlin College in 1923-4. It principally consists of a detailed attempt to compare and contrast two prominent mystics: Śankara from the Indian East and Meister Eckhart from the European West. In so doing, Otto proposes to demonstrate that there are distinct forms of mysticism which reach across boundaries of religion, culture and geography, and also that any mysticism will be essentially inflected by its particular religious show more basis—the soil in which it grows, to use Otto’s recurrent metaphor.

“Part A” of the text emphasizes similarities between Śankara and Meister Eckhart, and Otto manages to detail many of these. First, he points to their shared orientation to ontological ideas, and develops the technical and theological parallel
Śankara:Brahman:Isvara:Ātman::Eckhart:Godhead:God:Soul (14, 77-78). He also compares Śankara’s “Maya” to Eckhart’s “creare” (95). Otto emphasizes the religious, salvific, and theistic qualities of both thinkers’ systems, and points out that neither prescribes a “method” of attainment (29). He proposes a couple of idealized “schemas” of mystical experience, claiming that Śankara and Eckhart each engage both schemas (52).

In the process of comparing Śankara and Eckhart to each other, he distinguishes their type of (speculative) mysticism from other usual sorts: affective mysticism (72-73) and nature mysticism (73-74). Then, in the “Transition from Part A to Part B,” he uses specific schools of Indian mysticism to demonstrate the “differentiation of mystical experience in general,” showing that the similarities between Śankara and Eckhart are not common to all mysticism. Other individual mystics who play supporting roles for contrast include Plotinus and Hallaj.

Finally, in Part B, Otto provides some contrasts between Śankara and Eckhart. In these (generally shorter) chapters, the difference is usually expressed as a valuable quality or sensibility that is present in Eckhart but absent in Śankara. According to Otto, Śankara’s mysticism lacks dynamism, vitality, religious conscience, sense of righteousness, positive regard for the world, agape-love, and pastoral sensibility. In this portion, Otto remains engaged in the sort of “comparative religion” that he produced in Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy, 1923) : he creates a basis for comparison in order to conclude which is better, and it is no surprise that a German Christianity is better on the scale of this theologian from the University of Marburg.

Otto notes that Mysticism: East and West presupposes ideas and positions that he advanced earlier in Das Heilige (vi). That work has become especially identified with “the discourse of sui generis religion,” which has been criticized (e.g. by Russell McCutcheon) for setting arbitrary boundaries between “religious” phenomena and other spheres of personal and/or social activity and ideas, as well as a tendency to abstract religions into essences. Such problems remain evident here, e.g. in the hypothesized/ hypostasized doctrinal conflict (82), the valuation “peculiar to all religion” (94), and the elision of economics and politics from caste doctrines (120).

The “soil” metaphor persists in this book's efforts to characterize the source of differences between instances or types of mysticism—apparently, the “seed” is mystical capacity or aspiration, and the soil is the religious and cultural context. Otto claims, “the very different ground upon which mysticism rose in Europe also colors the highest mystical experience in a way which is Christian and not Indian” (162). But he does not demonstrate a relevant, describable difference between “the soil of Palestine” and “the soil [of the entire subcontinent!] of India” (206) I don’t doubt that this trope is either a conscious or an unconscious invocation of the parable of the sower in Matthew 13:18-23. Note also: Eckhart had been a poster-child of the ‘German mystique’ since the early 19th century, and Alfred Rosenberg called him a paragon of the “new, reborn Teutonic man” in 1938.

Otto insists, “The difference between [Brahman mysticism and Atman mysticism] is not to be reproduced in intellectual conceptions and is only comprehensible in the mystical experience itself.” (146) I find myself dubious that he has experienced all of these diverse mystical attainments among which he professes to discriminate for scholars! If “intellectual conceptions” cannot effectively communicate the differences between various mysticisms, what possibility is there for scholarship to assert or explain such differences? Ultimately, I must suspect Otto of using a globe-spanning erudition to reinforce his own metaphysical prejudices. show less

I'm curious about what percentage of people who go into raptures about Otto's numinous and mysterium tremendum checked out after the first few chapters, and didn't stick around for the Christian triumphalism that takes up more and more space as the book goes on.

I enjoyed the unfolding of Jungian analysis, the concepts of holy terror and awe, and above all, the feeling of absolute sincerity. This wasn't a book of flowery nonsense, nor was it remotely a self-help book. I believe I'll be thinking about it for years down the line and appreciate a few of the nuances. We shall see.

I decided to read The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto when I saw that it was on C.S. Lewis' top-ten list of books that influenced him, reasoning that if it was good enough for Lewis, it was probably worth my time to read. All I can say after having read several of the list's books is that Lewis has strange tastes!

The Idea of the Holy is Otto's attempt to pick up where systematic theology leaves off. That is to say, while systematic theologies treat the rational aspects of God, The Idea show more discusses the non-rational divine aspects. How does one describe that which is by definition indescribable? Otto does so by using the via negativa (what it is not), metaphor (what it is like) and appeal to personal experiences in the believer's life, including one's a priori understanding of the holy. For Otto, the non-rational aspects of God, which he dubs "the numinous," can be explained (as best as one can) by the mysterium tremendum. Mysterium refers to the "wholly other" aspect of God--elements that differ in essence from everything that humans know and can describe. Tremendum refers to God's awefulness, His majesty, His overpoweringness, and all that causes humans when confronted with Him to experience what the Bible calls "the fear of the LORD." Taken together, we see that deep in God's nature there is something that we cannot ever fully understand, something which instills soul-shaking fear and respect, yet something for which we yearn, and indeed something which we as a race have felt from the beginning of history.

After discussing the concept--or feeling--of the mysterium tremendum and its means of expression in some detail, Otto turns to the expressions of the numinous in the Old and New Testaments and in Luther's works. The chapter "The Numinous in the New Testament" is especially worthwhile because of Otto's thoughts on the kingdom of God and predestination. He does an excellent job reaching past the "rational" mindset of the post-Enlightenment West and viewing those key theological concepts as part of God's supra-rational plan. Specifically concerning election, he writes

"The idea of 'election'…is an immediate and pure expression of the actual religious experience of grace. The recipient of divine grace feels and knows ever more and more surely, as he looks back on his past, that he has not grown into his present self through any achievement or effort of his own, and that, apart from his own will or power, grace was imparted to him, grasped him, impelled, and led him. And even the resolves and decisions that were most his own and most free become to him, without losing the element of freedom, something that he experienced rather than did." (p. 87)

Any true follower of Christ will at once recognize the truth of this statement--although it may defy rational analysis--because he or she has experienced it and knows it is true a priori.

Otto goes on to discuss how the idea or feeling of the numinous developed throughout humankind's history to become what it is today in "civilized" religions such as Christianity, and how its origins can still be seen in "primitive" tribal religions today. Here Otto writes under the assumption that religion evolved gradually from primitive humans, a theory also adopted by C.S. Lewis. As I find it hard to rationalize this view with my own interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis (namely, that Adam was a real man who had a close relationship with God, at least prior to the Fall), this part of the book remained fairly unhelpful to me. To one with a different interpretation of Gen 1-11, it may provide much more benefit.

Overall, this is a very difficult book to read. As Otto himself states in the forward, no one who has not mastered the rational aspects of God (i.e. systematic theology) should venture into the numinous. I could also add that to get the most out of this book, one should also have some familiarity with philosophy (and esp. early-1900s German philosophers and theologians such as Schleiermacher), biblical Greek, Latin and even some German, and be accustomed to the writing style of circa 1920. As someone with some but not all of this knowledge, the book was especially challenging for me. However, I did gain some valuable insights from it, and I plan to read it again at a later date. All in all, I felt the book was worth reading, but its appeal will ultimately be limited to a very specific audience. show less