Rudolf Otto coined the numinous, the eerie awe at the heart of religion
A German theologian visiting a Moroccan synagogue in 1911 felt something he spent years trying to name. He called it the numinous: an overwhelming sense of something wholly other, both terrifying and fascinating. The word escaped theology and shaped C. S. Lewis, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley and Mircea Eliade.
Rudolf Otto was born in 1869 in Peine, near Hanover, into a devout family, and studied at Erlangen and Göttingen, writing on Luther and then on Kant. His early books tried to defend religion against naturalism. Naturalism and Religion (1904) argued that consciousness cannot be reduced to physical or neural processes and that reason itself rests on a deeper, intuitive layer. Building on the philosopher Jakob Fries, he later proposed that religious experience forms its own nonrational domain of thought.
His travels of 1911 and 1912 took him through North Africa, Palestine, India, China, Japan and the United States and awakened his interest in other faiths. The result was The Idea of the Holy, among the most successful German theological books of the century, never out of print and translated into about 20 languages. Its central claim is that the core of religion is a feeling that cannot be broken down into ethics or reason: an encounter with something outside the self, utterly unlike anything else, before which a person feels abashed. Otto rejected his early hero Schleiermacher's description of this as a sense of dependence, because it sounded too much like ordinary, earthly dependence.
Otto was no ivory-tower figure. He sat in the Prussian parliament from 1913 through the First World War, pushed to simplify its weighted voting system, joined the post-war constituent assembly and taught at Marburg's famous Protestant seminary from 1917 until retiring in 1929. He even experimented with adding a Quaker-style silence to Lutheran worship so congregations might sense the numinous. In 1936 he fell about twenty metres from a tower; he died of pneumonia the next year.
His reach was vast. C. S. Lewis illustrated the idea by contrasting fear of a tiger with dread of a ghost and awe before a mighty spirit. Jung built it into psychotherapy, Eliade started The Sacred and the Profane from it, and Gandhi praised Otto's work.
Source: Rudolf Otto
