BORN into a pious Lutheran family in the town of Peine, Lower Saxony, Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) was a profound German thinker notable for his radical ideas on philosophy and theology. His first two books, Religion and Naturalism (1904) and The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries (1909), approach metaphysics from the perspective that the spiritual realm could not be explained in any tangible sense. Whilst Otto believed that our knowledge of the world is derived from personal experience, he was nonetheless adamant that our mental faculties are intuitive and, thus, non-rational.
The fact that he was so deeply influenced by the aesthetic ideas of the leading post-Kantian, Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-01843), led him to search for a means of developing the notion that mystical insight is itself a form of non-rational thought. Unlike the domain of philosophy, where ideas are both challenged and defended in terms of hard logic, Otto insisted that metaphysics need not be explained by rationalism at all. His remarkable 1917 work, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, set out to examine the “non-rational” or “super-rational” that lies at the heart of our divine nature and led, in 1910, to his travelling throughout Western Europe before heading into Egypt, Palestine, India, China and Japan. From there he visited America, prior to returning to the East to study the artistic and literary symbolism that would stand him in good stead for his later work.
The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige) appeared shortly after Otto had received the Chair of Theology at the university town of Marburg-on-the-Lahn, where he spent the remainder of his life, becoming an immediate success by appealing to the growing sense of alienation felt by those in the West who were concerned at the rise of scientism, atheism and the rapid advance of a dysfunctional technocracy in which religious values had effectively been sidelined.
Otto’s first English translator, John W. Harvey, met him in the early-1920s and found his counterpart to be a delightfully pleasant and genial fellow:
Otto’s figure was tall and erect and suggested the soldier rather than the scholar, with his Kaiser moustaches and his tight, light, military-looking jacket fastened high at the neck. Nor was a diffident foreigner reassured by the touch of formality in his address, which later one came to recognise as merely the scrupulous respect he paid to the strict grammar of courtesy. But in a very short time the thin film of ice was effectively broken, and his, and his household’s, unaffected friendliness had quite won his visitor’s heart, aided by the dry humour that played about persons as well as things, shrewdly yet without malice, and was one of his most endearing qualities. (John W. Harvey, “Translator’s Preface” in Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press, 1958, p.xii)
Despite suffering from a number of debilitating health problems, including painful headaches and chronic asthma, Otto was an eccentric and good-humoured soul with a tendency to become immersed in the minutest detail. As a consequence, his vast and intricate knowledge was called upon again and again. In 1927, for example, he lectured on mysticism in London and spoke of his great love for both English literature and native visionaries such as William Blake (1757-1827). As the aforementioned Harvey explains:
And so when we are told that all Germans are inherently and incorrigibly prepared to prostitute honest scholarship in the service of some ideology; that they are congenitally incapable of understanding the meaning of liberty; that they can never comprehend, still less truly appreciate, England or the English; and that beneath a Christian veneer every German is a pagan in grain: then those who have been fortunate enough to have the friendship of such a man as Rudolf Otto are not likely to accept these glib generalizations with any excessive credulity. (p.xiv)
As I hope to demonstrate, Otto’s The Idea of the Holy explores the more emotional aspects of spirituality and yet when the German used terms such as “the numinous” he was adamant that the mystical experience must not be relegated to the realms of subjective feeling. On the contrary, for whilst this religious phenomenon defies rational explanation it is also an objective reality that merely relies on the senses as a means of distinguishing a better awareness of what can only be described as a transcendent encounter with the divine. The subjectively human, therefore, acts as a signpost to the objectively celestial.
It was this unique interpretation which appealed to various other philosophers and theologians such as Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Julius Evola (1898-1974), Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) and Mircea Eliade (1907-1986).
