This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores questions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical conditions for Christian belief.
The preceding essay described the theological synthesis that arose from the two principal schools of neo-Kantianism. From Marburg came the conviction that an object is never simply given apart from the conceptual activity through which it becomes an object of knowledge. From Baden came the distinction between existence and validity, together with an account of value and historical individuality that allowed religious judgments to retain objective significance even after speculative metaphysics had been placed under critical restriction. The resulting theology could continue to speak of God without saying clearly that God existed and acted independently of the moral, historical, or religious consciousness through which God became significant.
Rudolf Otto belongs immediately after this development because he recognized, perhaps more clearly than most theologians of his generation, what had been lost. A theology of value could explain why religious beliefs mattered. It could explain the moral seriousness of faith, the historical significance of Jesus, and the normative power of Christian judgment. What it could not adequately explain was the experienced otherness of the holy. It could not account for the sense that the religious subject had not merely conferred significance upon an object but had been grasped, overwhelmed, fascinated, and judged by a presence not reducible to the subject’s own activity.
Otto’s Das Heilige, published in 1917 and later translated as The Idea of the Holy, was an attempt to recover this dimension of religion without simply abandoning the critical philosophy. He did not return to pre-Kantian metaphysics, nor did he offer a traditional doctrine of divine attributes under another name. He sought instead to identify within religious consciousness a distinctive capacity for apprehending what ordinary theoretical and moral categories could not contain. The supersensible, excluded from theoretical knowledge, would return through a mode of awareness more primitive than conceptual determination and more fundamental than ethical valuation.
This return was one of the most important developments in twentieth-century theology and the study of religion. It was also deeply ambiguous. Otto restored the objectivity and otherness of the holy, but he restored them phenomenologically rather than ontologically. He showed that religious consciousness presents itself as responsive to an irreducible object. He did not finally show how the reality of that object is to be distinguished from the peculiar structure of consciousness through which it is apprehended.
The supersensible returned, but it returned as feeling.
Beyond the Reduction of Holiness to Moral Goodness
Otto begins The Idea of the Holy with a criticism of the way Christian theology had come to speak about God. The traditional rational predicates—spirit, reason, purpose, goodness, love, wisdom, and moral will—are not false. They are indispensable to any developed Christian doctrine of God. Yet when these predicates are treated as exhausting the divine, they produce what Otto regards as a rationalized and impoverished conception of religion. God becomes the supreme moral personality, the perfect embodiment of attributes whose meaning is already familiar from ordinary human experience.
What disappears from such theology is the element by which the holy is holy.
Otto’s complaint was directed especially against the tendency, characteristic of much post-Kantian Protestant theology, to identify religion with morality and holiness with ethical perfection. If God’s holiness means only that God is morally good without qualification, then religious awe becomes intensified moral respect and worship becomes reverence before the highest ethical ideal. Religion has not been abolished, but its distinctive object has been absorbed into categories already available to practical reason.
Otto believed that this could not account for the actual history or phenomenology of religion. The experience of the holy includes moral reverence, but it also includes dread, astonishment, fascination, abasement, attraction, silence, and the sense of standing before something wholly other than the ordinary world. These elements cannot be derived from the concept of goodness. They possess their own quality and must therefore be identified before their relation to rational and ethical religion can be understood.
To name this irreducible element, Otto coined the term numinous, drawing upon the Latin numen. The numinous is neither a metaphysical substance nor one divine property among others. It names both a distinctive category of value and the state of consciousness in which that category is apprehended. It is encountered as mysterium tremendum et fascinans: mystery, overwhelming majesty, daunting power, and fascination gathered into a single complex experience whose unity cannot be produced by adding ordinary emotions together.
The non-rational character of this experience does not mean that it is irrational, contradictory, or opposed to thought. Otto’s point is that the numinous cannot be exhaustively rendered into concepts. It lies outside the ordinary rational predicates by which objects are classified and judged, while nevertheless supplying the experiential depth from which distinctively religious language arises. The non-rational is not meaningless. It is that dimension of meaning which cannot be wholly translated into determinate concepts without remainder.
In this respect Otto’s achievement was substantial. He refused to allow religion to be reduced to an ethical appendix of the critical philosophy. He insisted that the religious object possesses a depth and otherness that moral consciousness alone cannot generate. Religion is not simply morality spoken in a more exalted vocabulary. The holy does not become holy because the subject recognizes in it the highest realization of values already known from elsewhere.
Something prior to moral interpretation is encountered.
Creature-Feeling and the Priority of the Object
Otto’s account of “creature-feeling” is particularly important because it distinguishes his position from a purely subjectivist theory of religion. The feeling of creatureliness is the sense of one’s own nothingness, dependence, and ontological insignificance before the overwhelming majesty of the numinous. It is not merely fear in the ordinary sense, nor is it simply the intellectual judgment that one is finite. It is the felt collapse of self-sufficiency in the presence of that which infinitely exceeds the creature.
At first glance, this appears close to Schleiermacher’s description of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence. Otto acknowledges the connection, but he alters its direction. For Schleiermacher, the feeling of dependence can appear to be the fundamental datum from which the consciousness of God is inferred or within which it is contained. Otto insists that creature-feeling is secondary. The subject does not first discover a feeling of dependence and then posit an object upon which it depends. The feeling arises as the subjective response to the apprehension of the numinous.
The object has priority.
This reversal matters greatly for the present argument. Otto understands that theology cannot secure the reality of God by beginning with a description of the subject and then treating “God” as the name for the ultimate depth of that subject’s experience. The subject feels creaturely because it apprehends something before which it is a creature. The religious response is elicited rather than spontaneously generated. Consciousness bears the mark of having been addressed or confronted.
Otto’s language is not always as careful as one might wish, and the term “feeling” has encouraged generations of readers to interpret him psychologically. Yet his intention is not to locate the holy inside the subject as a peculiar emotional state. The numinous is experienced as objective, as standing over against the self and imposing upon it a characteristic response. One does not simply feel religiously; one feels oneself to be in the presence of the holy.
Here Otto moves beyond the theological settlement described in the preceding essays. The holy cannot be understood merely as a value constituted within religious consciousness. The structure of the experience points toward a reality that gives rise to the consciousness and cannot be reduced to it. The subject does not create the numinous by assigning religious significance to an otherwise neutral object. Rather, the numinous awakens the subject to a dimension of reality that ordinary cognition and moral judgment cannot disclose by themselves.
Yet the gain is not complete. To say that an experience presents its object as objective is not yet to establish that the object exists independently of the experience. A hallucination may also present itself as caused by something external. A powerful state of consciousness may possess an intentional object without that object obtaining as the subject takes it to obtain. Otto is aware that the numinous cannot be reduced to an ordinary feeling, but he never fully explains how one moves from the sui generis character of the experience to the actuality of its object.
The priority of the object is phenomenologically affirmed. Its ontological status remains unsettled.
Kant, Fries, and the Religious A Priori
This ambiguity becomes clearer when Otto’s philosophical background is considered. Although he taught at Marburg and developed his mature work within the intellectual world shaped by neo-Kantianism, his most direct philosophical lineage ran through Kant and Jakob Friedrich Fries. His earlier Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries attempted to show how religion might possess a distinctive rational legitimacy even after the Kantian critique had denied theoretical knowledge of supersensible objects.
Fries offered Otto a way of expanding the critical philosophy without returning to speculative reason. Human cognition, on this account, is not exhausted by empirical knowledge and conceptual understanding. There is also Ahndung—usually rendered as presentiment, divination, or intuitive apprehension—through which finite consciousness becomes aware of the eternal within the temporal and of the supersensible through its appearance in the sensible world.
Otto’s mature language of the numinous retains this Friesian structure. The capacity to apprehend the holy is a priori in the sense that it cannot be derived from ordinary sensory experience or produced through conceptual inference. Religious experience presupposes an original disposition or capacity that can be awakened but not manufactured. One cannot teach the numinous by supplying a definition. One can only evoke it, direct attention toward it, and appeal to experiences in which the reader may recognize it.
This is why The Idea of the Holy often proceeds less by argument than by evocation. Otto calls upon the reader to remember solemn worship, the silence of sacred places, the dread awakened by ancient ritual, the sense of majesty in prophetic speech, the attraction of mystical beatitude, and the uncanny quality that remains present even in highly developed religion. The examples do not prove the existence of the numinous by deduction. They are meant to awaken recognition in those who possess the relevant capacity.
The strategy is recognizably transcendental. Otto does not derive the category of the numinous from empirical generalization. He identifies it as a condition under which specifically religious experience is possible. Just as ordinary cognition requires forms and categories that are not themselves extracted from experience, religious apprehension requires an a priori capacity by which certain experiences can be received as manifestations of the holy.
At this point Otto both continues and modifies the Kantian paradigm. He continues it because the possibility of the religious object is still approached through an examination of the subject’s capacity to apprehend it. The inquiry asks what must be present in consciousness for religion to occur. Yet he modifies Kant because the religious a priori does not merely regulate thought or answer to a demand of practical reason. It purports to disclose something objectively present. The capacity exists in order to receive a reality that exceeds it.
Otto therefore places himself at the unstable border between transcendental idealism and religious realism. The a priori is not simply constitutive of an object; it is receptive to an object. But because the object is available only through the a priori response, Otto never fully escapes the correlation between what appears and the structure through which it appears. The holy is not reduced to consciousness, yet neither is it described independently of the phenomenology of consciousness.
One can see why Otto was so attractive to theologians dissatisfied with liberal moralism. He reopened the door to transcendence without requiring them to abandon the critical philosophy. The supersensible no longer had to remain a bloodless postulate of reason. It could be encountered as mystery, majesty, dread, and fascination.
But what had returned was not yet the God of Christian predication. It was the objective correlate of the religious a priori.
Schematization and the Making of the Holy
The most philosophically significant feature of Otto’s account is his use of schematization to explain how the non-rational numinous becomes joined to the rational and ethical predicates of developed religion. Otto borrows the term from Kant, though he does not use it in precisely the same way. In Kant, schematism mediates between the pure concepts of the understanding and sensible intuition. In Otto, rational concepts provide schemas through which the otherwise non-conceptual numinous becomes articulated as the complex idea of the holy.
The numinous by itself is not yet the full Christian conception of holiness. It includes the moments of mystery, overwhelming majesty, energy, dread, and fascination, but it does not yet include the determinate ethical predicates by which Christians confess God as righteous, good, loving, faithful, and merciful. These rational predicates are not derived from the numinous as conclusions are derived from premises. Nor are they merely added to it from outside. They are associated with it through relations of analogy and affinity, so that the numinous becomes ethically and conceptually formed while the ethical concepts acquire a depth they could not possess on their own.
The tremendum, for example, may be schematized through the concept of divine wrath or moral severity. The fascinans may be schematized through love, grace, mercy, and goodness. The mysterious majesty of the numinous is thus united with moral perfection, yielding the developed religious category of holiness.
Otto’s purpose is to protect both sides of the relation. If the numinous is forgotten, religion becomes rationalistic and morally commonplace. God is reduced to the supreme instance of predicates already understood apart from God. If the rational and ethical elements are abandoned, religion remains primitive, demonic, or morally indeterminate. The holy requires both the irreducible non-rational depth of the numinous and the ethical articulation through which that depth becomes worthy of mature worship.
This is perhaps Otto’s most constructive theological achievement. He understands that Christian faith cannot simply celebrate overpowering otherness. A presence may terrify or fascinate without being good. Religious intensity does not establish holiness, and the experience of transcendence does not by itself distinguish God from a demon. The numinous must be joined to the ethical, just as the ethical must be deepened by the numinous.
Nevertheless, schematization introduces the central difficulty of Otto’s position. What precisely is the relation between the rational predicate and the divine reality to which it is applied? When Christians confess that God is good, does “good” refer analogically to an actual determination of God’s being, or is goodness the conceptual schema through which an otherwise ineffable experience is interpreted? When God is called just, loving, or merciful, do these predicates disclose what God truly is, or do they organize the numinous response into a form suitable for developed religion?
Otto wants to say more than that religious communities project moral concepts upon an indeterminate experience. Schematization is not supposed to be arbitrary. The rational and non-rational moments belong together through an internal affinity. Yet he does not explain this affinity ontologically. He describes how the elements of religious consciousness become associated, but he does not provide an account of why the predicates thereby formed are true of the object.
The relation between experience and language remains primarily evocative. Ordinary emotions and concepts can arouse analogous numinous responses, and religious language can call forth the awareness it seeks to express. Such language performs an indispensable function. It awakens, directs, deepens, and organizes religious consciousness.
But evocation is not satisfaction.
A sentence may awaken the experience of divine goodness without being true that God is good. A symbol may call forth awe without referring successfully to the reality it symbolizes. An analogy may disclose a dimension of experience without establishing that the object possesses the character attributed to it.
Otto gives a rich account of how religious language arises from and returns to numinous experience. He gives a much less developed account of how that language is made true by the reality to which it refers.
From Reference to Satisfaction
This limitation can be stated more precisely. Otto restores reference more successfully than he secures satisfaction.
The religious consciousness in The Idea of the Holy is intentional. It is directed toward something. The feeling of dread, fascination, dependence, and creatureliness is not presented as a self-enclosed psychological occurrence. It is the response to the numinous object. Otto therefore preserves the distinction between the subject and what the subject apprehends. The holy is not simply another name for a state of mind.
This distinguishes him from the most thoroughgoing constructivist versions of the Kantian inheritance. He does not say that God is constituted as an object through the lawful activity of religious consciousness in the Marburg sense. The numinous confronts the subject and evokes a response the subject could not produce from its ordinary conceptual resources.
Yet the intentional direction of consciousness does not answer the semantic question. To what exactly does the term “numinous” refer? Is it a feature of divine reality, the manner in which divine reality affects finite consciousness, the distinctive quality of the resulting experience, or the a priori category under which the experience is received? Otto’s exposition moves among these possibilities without always separating them.
The term sometimes appears to name the object: the numinous is the mysterious and overwhelming reality encountered by religion. At other times it names a category of value. At still other times it describes a state of mind or the characteristic quality of an experience. The mobility of the term gives Otto’s analysis its evocative power, but it also produces philosophical instability. Object, category, value, and response remain too closely intertwined.
This is exactly the ambiguity the present series has been tracing. The reality apprehended and the conditions of its apprehension are never entirely separated. Otto resists the reduction of the object to the subject, but he does not develop the semantic and ontological distinctions required to prevent the two from sliding back together.
A realist theological account must be able to say that the language of holiness is true because God is holy, not merely because the experience of God is received under the numinous category and then schematized through ethical predicates. It must distinguish the reality of God from the mode in which God is experienced, while also explaining how the mode of experience can genuinely disclose the reality.
This does not require univocal predication or exhaustive comprehension. It does not require that God become an empirical object or that divine holiness be analyzed as one property alongside others. It requires only that the theological predicate be answerable to God rather than to the structure of religious consciousness alone.
Otto approaches this position but does not reach it. He knows that the subject is responding to an object. He does not show with sufficient clarity how the object determines the truth of the response.
The Wholly Other and the Problem of Christian Determinacy
A further difficulty appears in Otto’s celebrated language of the “wholly other.” The numinous is experienced not merely as greater than ordinary things but as belonging to an entirely different order. It evokes astonishment because it breaks the categories by which familiar objects are understood. The mystery is not simply something temporarily unknown which might later be explained. It is other in principle, exceeding conceptual mastery.
This language powerfully restores divine transcendence after the moral domestication of God. God is not the highest instance of a genus whose other members are creatures. Divine holiness is not human goodness magnified without limit. The qualitative difference between Creator and creature must be preserved if worship is to remain worship.
Yet absolute otherness creates a problem for theological determinacy. If the object is wholly other than every concept available to finite reason, how can any predicate apply to it? Schematization permits rational concepts to be associated with the numinous, but association alone does not establish reference. The more radically Otto insists upon the wholly other character of the object, the more difficult it becomes to explain how the rational schemas genuinely disclose rather than merely domesticate it.
The Christian theologian cannot remain satisfied with the claim that an ineffable mystery has been encountered. Christian faith makes determinate assertions. It confesses that the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead, that the Word became flesh, that the Father sent the Son, that Christ forgives sins, and that the Spirit creates faith through the proclaimed Word. These claims do not merely evoke the numinous. They identify agents, actions, relations, and events.
Otto’s account can illuminate the religious depth with which such claims are received. It can explain why the confession of divine judgment involves more than moral disapproval and why grace fascinates in a manner exceeding ordinary attraction. It can recover the awe, dread, and creatureliness too often absent from modern theology.
But the numinous cannot supply the determinate content of Christian proclamation. Nor can the intensity of numinous experience establish which theological claims are true. Many religious traditions evoke mystery, dread, and fascination. Even destructive powers may be experienced as overwhelming and wholly other. The category does not by itself distinguish revelation from idolatry or divine holiness from demonic power.
Otto knows this, which is why he insists upon rational and ethical schematization. Yet once more the question returns: by what reality are the schemas judged? If they are judged by their capacity to develop, purify, and deepen religious consciousness, then consciousness remains the final court. If they are judged by God’s actual being and action, then Otto requires an ontology and semantics that his phenomenology does not provide.
The wholly other must be capable of making itself specifically known. Otherwise transcendence is purchased at the cost of revelation.
What Otto Recovered
It would therefore be unjust to treat Otto simply as another example of the Kantian mischief under examination. His work is an internal protest against the very reduction this series criticizes. He saw that a theology confined to value, morality, and religious significance had lost the object capable of evoking worship. He understood that religion begins not with the autonomous subject legislating the conditions of experience but with a subject whose autonomy is shattered by encounter.
Otto also recognized that conceptual determination does not exhaust intelligibility. The holy may be genuinely apprehended even where it cannot be brought fully under a determinate concept. In this respect, his work anticipates the importance of reflecting judgment for the position developed in these essays. One may be oriented toward a reality, drawn by it, and rendered capable of recognizing it without possessing in advance the universal under which it must be subsumed.
There is also something profoundly right in Otto’s insistence that religious language is often evocative. Theological speech does not merely transfer information. A sermon, hymn, liturgy, or biblical narrative may awaken recognition and place the hearer within a reality that discursive exposition alone cannot communicate. The Word does not simply state propositions about God; it addresses, judges, absolves, and creates faith.
But none of this requires the conclusion that evocation replaces reference or that experience constitutes truth. The performative and affective power of theological speech presupposes rather than abolishes its semantic relation to reality. The absolution can do what it does only because Christ has authorized it and because God forgives. The proclamation of resurrection can create hope only because the one proclaimed has been raised. The hearer may experience dread and fascination before the holy because the holy one actually confronts the hearer.
Otto recovered the phenomenological priority of the object. What he lacked was a sufficiently robust account of the ontological priority of the referent.
The Supersensible under Another Description
The place of Otto within the Kantian story can now be stated. Kant had shown why the supersensible must be thought, while denying that theoretical reason could establish it as an object of knowledge. Marburg radicalized the constitutive activity of thought until the thing-in-itself became the limiting concept of an endless process of objectification. Baden preserved validity and value without restoring the independently existing referent required by theological realism.
Otto refused to accept the resulting absence. The supersensible returned in the experience of the numinous. It was not inferred as the remote cause of appearances or postulated as the condition of moral striving. It was encountered as mystery, majesty, dread, fascination, and the power before which the subject knew itself to be a creature.
This was a decisive advance. Yet Otto’s philosophical inheritance did not permit him simply to say that an actually existing supersensible reality had disclosed itself under determinate conditions. He approached that claim through the structure of religious consciousness. The holy was objectively intended, but its actuality remained bound to the a priori capacity through which it was apprehended.
The critical prohibition had been breached but not overcome.
The difference between Otto’s position and the theological realism toward which these essays move is therefore not that Otto takes experience seriously while realism does not. The difference concerns the direction of dependence. For Otto, the reality of the holy is established primarily through the distinctive quality of the numinous response. For theological realism, the numinous response is possible because the holy one actually exists, acts, and gives himself to be known.
The numinous does not ground God. God grounds the numinous.
Creature-feeling does not establish the Creator. The Creator evokes creature-feeling.
The experience of mystery does not constitute the supersensible. The supersensible confronts the subject as mystery because it exceeds the subject without being unreal.
Otto came nearer than much modern theology to restoring this order. His lasting importance lies precisely in the incompleteness of the restoration. He saw that theology could not live upon value alone and that the subject must be encountered by something it does not constitute. But because he returned to reality through feeling, he left theology uncertain whether it had encountered God or only the a priori form under which God must be experienced.
The supersensible had returned. It had not yet been permitted to speak its own name.
The next essay will examine what happened when the phenomenological recovery of otherness gave way to existential interpretation. In Bultmann, the object of proclamation would not simply disappear, but its theological meaning would be relocated into the event of self-understanding awakened in the hearer. The vocabulary changed from numinous feeling to existential decision. The unresolved question remained the same: whether the conditions under which revelation becomes meaningful are also the conditions by which its truth is constituted.
No comments:
Post a Comment