The Idea of the Holy

Media:	Paperback
Author:	Rudolf Otto
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Release date:	01 June, 1958
Our price:	$14.95

The Idea of the Holy

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If the Amazon Recommendations has suggested you this book:

The Amazon system is otherwise great, but occasionally I find the Recommendations offensive, and the prime example is this item being Recommended to me by the system. I don't believe in a personal deity. I wouldn't read an item as this that makes assertions ignorant of the views of so many. I've never had this item, but I know enough about it from diverse recommendations.

The Idea of the Holy - Rudolf Otto

Knocked Off Your Horse

This book, first published in 1917, is rightly regarded as a classic of religious philosophy.

Otto's great contribution to Christianity was to assert the importance of a non-rational approach to the divine. Christianity, which is the most dogmatic and moralistic of the major world religions, needed the corrective. Otto created the word "numinous" to stand for the sense of a divine presence that operates beyond rational understanding. He also coined the term "mysterium tremendum" to connote the inchoate sense of awe and dread that humans feel in the presence of the divine. To him, both of these ideas were essential to a full expression of the religious spirit.

One reaction to this book over the years goes something like this: either you've been knocked off your horse like St Paul, in which case you already have a direct experience of the numinous, or you haven't. Why bother to analyze something that by its very nature can't be put into words? Here Otto makes a subtle but crucial distinction. He's not talking about a numinous feeling, but about a feeling of the numinous. In other words, the numinous exists out there, not inside us, so we can approach it as an object to be observed and, at least by analogy to the sensations it excites with us, described.

Otto didn't reject the rational, though. Without rationality, he says, we can't have belief, only feelings. In his view of religion, the rational and non-rational interpenetrate each other like the warp and woof of a fabric, which can't be separated without destroying the very garment it makes. He points out several times that fully understanding the non-rational conception of god deepens our rational religious ideas.

Otto was a Christian, and believed deeply in the superiority of Christianity as the highest synthesis of the rational and moral with a primal sense of awe. (Buddhists might differ.) Fortunately for his reputation as a religious philosopher he was much more than a Christian apologist: he was a close observer of human behavior and of religious practices around the world. If Otto had been born seventy five years later, he might have been Joseph Campbell. He traveled widely, and had a deep knowledge and appreciation of Asian, Arabic and Greek religious thought. He anticipated Campbell by demonstrating that a sense of spiritual awe and mystery is universal to all religions.

In his observations of how mankind divines the presence of the holy, Otto realized the importance of predispositions - a person must be both receptive to divine presence and capable of recognizing when it appears. In this he anticipates neural Darwinism, which also talks about our predisposition toward certain aspects of reality. For instance, we have evolved an ability to recognize sound patterns. This isn't music, but it allows us to hear a song and store it as such in our brain. Similarly, we are capable of conceiving of an overarching force that exists beyond our selves, and are capable of recognizing manifestations of it. This isn't religion, but it's the precursor to any truly religious feeling.

This book strikes sparks in almost every chapter, even the ones settling obscure doctrinal scores. It deserves the high regard in which it's held because Rudolf Otto is a remarkably good guide to the ineffable.

Rudolf Otto - The Idea of the Holy

The best articulation of the genius of Christianity...

I just revisited this book and forgot how absolutely marvelous it is at wrestling with the rational/non-rational element of religion. Rudolf Otto is unabashedly forthright in his admittance that Christianity - not so much the outer dogmatics but the internal mystery, i.e. the 'numinous', it yields to - is the only place where 'light' and 'life' find a balanced home and, with it, a proper experience with the numinous.

While the book is heavy reading and, perhaps paradoxically, weighs heavily on the rational, he ultimately brings a brilliant dissertation on the genius of Christianity as the most viable path for balancing this numinous with the temperance that the rational elements of experience brings.

One of the other elements often overlooked in this book is that he approaches the elevation of Christianity against other faiths from another angle. First, and foremost, he holds high reverence for all faiths. Never tearing down another faith, by comparison with the Christian experience he actually reveals the strengths of other faiths. Allah is pure 'numen'; this actually gives a solid explanation as to the potential for fanaticism (which, by comparison, gives insight into the fanaticism of any faith). Taoism spends almost all of its time in the 'mysterium tremendum'; it is completely impersonal (yet, by comparison, it tempers the tendency towards a total anthropomorphing of God).

These are often leveled as critiques against these faiths yet in this work the strenghts of such religions are revealed. It is not a judgment; the choice is the reader's. And this is the greatest strength of any comparative religious study. While not the overt intent of this book, it is present. If one wishes to experience God as total 'numen', Islam may be deemed that path. If we wish to experience the depth of life in the world, Taoism may be deemed that path. Yet Otto continues to lay out the discussion towards his goal: Christianity is the one religion where all these experiences and feelings find a home.

Perhaps the other factor that stands out - and it could also be rendered a flaw by more biblical literalists - is that he accepts the fact that such accounts as the Empty Tomb are riding the fringe of legendary accounts. He does not say they are false; he does not say they are irrational; he does not write them off as fiction. He accepts their role and admits that, in the framework of Western thinking, we do a disservice to the purpose of these accounts when we view them with our overly empirical mindset.

As a thinker, this is one of the books that helps keep the Christian faith in proper perspective. Having spent a number of years in various denominations and churches of the more fundamentalist kind, I have remained grounded through books such as this one. I have never been able to make the leap of accepting the tenets of such fundamentalism: Biblical literalism; railing against all other faiths as demonic; the sectarian and isolationist mentality that so often arises; the arrogance and superiority that too often stems from such thinking.

Yet, like Otto, I have felt the power of the 'numen' in the Christian path. Otto's work captures this struggle - experiencing such non-rational power within a rational mind - in great detail and with a humble and compassionate power. A must for any thinker's library.

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