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For a review of Otto's key ideas, scroll down.
For a brief introduction from a different website, click here.
For biographical information, photographs, selections from his writings, and a good bibliography from a different website, go here.
Otto is focusing on the numinous experience. For examples from primary texts, click here.
Images that portray aspects of what Otto is talking about include Bernini's
sculpture, The Ecstasy
of St. Theresa at the Cornaro Chapel in Rome, and this image of the
Aztec god Xochipilli, the Aztec "Prince
of Flowers" from approximately 1450 A.D. The god's body is adorned with
carved flowers. The face of Xochipilli is contorted as if seeing visions in
ecstasy, and the head is tilted as if hearing voices. Other aspects of what
Otto is talking about are hinted at in paintings by Goya and Munch.
Who is Rudolf Otto? Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. He was a German citizen, a scholar of history and the "phenomenology of religions." He devoted his life to identifying, describing, and trying to understand the behavior of people of various religious traditions. He noticed similarities among religious folks, regardless of their historical context. Those similarities seemed to form a pattern, and it's different from the one Freud identified, with his emphasis on the lingering wishes for a protective father, safe world, life after death. It also differs from Lasch's speech. Otto has other concerns. (Source for this and below: The Encyclopedia of Religion).
Why are we reading him? Otto was the first scholar to attempt to understand and describe the "non-rational" aspects of spiritual life. To do so he investigated other traditions as well as his own. He learned Sanskrit, the classical language of India, and translated several Hindu scriptures; he traveled to Burma, China, Japan, Egypt, Jerusalem, and India, seeking to understand "the religious experience." This trip led to the ideas included in the text; The Idea of the Holy (1917) is his greatest hit. Otto contends that there is such a thing as "religious experience" and that it is unlike any other experience. He tries to identify what is uniquely, distinctively religious. He pays most attention to the non-rational factor. In other words, a person describing a religious experience can explain many things about it, verbally or in writing, using words to clarify what happened. If you can describe something using language, it is rational to the extent that you can discuss it. Yet Otto saw that at some point language fails. He said that aspects of the religious experience cannot be verbalized or explained -- they are non-rational, ineffable. The book reveals the heavy influence of Martin Luther on Otto, and "the idea of religious intuition and the sense of the inward presence of God" and the importance of "feeling" in religious experience.
Why does Otto use so many fun new words? No one had ever done this sort of work before, so Otto had to create the vocabulary to discuss what he was observing.
Holy and holy Otto reclaims the word holy, which had come to mean simple "ethical and moral self-righteousness." Otto restores the older, deeper meaning to describe "the special religious dimension which eludes apprehension in conceptual terms." In other words, holy represents fathomless meaning, shorthand to describe in a general way the quality of a religious event or experience that one cannot verbalize.
Numinous Another word, numinous, was developed to describe what is left in the idea of holy once the moral factor and "rational" aspects are removed. Otto is saying that most of the time we think of religion in a crabbed, minimal, narrow, manageable way -- what we can understand (the rational), including what is moral or ethical. But Otto says that the oldest meaning represented by the word holy goes far beyond that. The word "holy" has shrunk, to stand for what is ethical, moral, good, rational. What is not contained in the contemporary meaning of the word -- the "overplus" -- is the numinous; it is fundamental, irreducible, and must be experienced it before one can begin attempting to understand it, Otto suggests.
Mysterium tremendum & mysterium fascinans The mysterium tremendum is that to which the "numinous consciousness" is directed -- "numinous consciousness" being, let's say, that part of humans that is tuned into, and preoccupied with, the ultimate power, or God, or Something, or the Other. It is the "mystery" which causes a dramatic and unprecedented response, often profound fear, before which one trembles, overcome with what Otto calls creature feeling. Someone having this experience is caught between two opposite and overwhelming feelings -- an element of shaking fear, awe, dread, and even repulsion (mysterium tremendum), and an element of powerful attraction or fascination (mysterium fascinans).