HAVING presented an initial discussion of rationalism and non-rationalism, Otto turns his attention to that of “holiness” and “the holy”. Although he accepts that such language is ordinarily associated with ethical behaviour, or good conduct, there is also something unique about it in terms of it also representing what Otto describes as a non-rational “moment” in which one experiences sublime beauty.

That “holy” has become somewhat detached from its etymological origins, he tells us, should not deter us from recalling that it once had less to do with moral perfection than matters pertaining to the nature of the sacred. Otto detects traces of this confusion in German philosophy:

We generally take ‘holy’ as meaning ‘completely good’; it is the absolute moral attribute, denoting the consummation of moral goodness. In this sense Kant calls the will which remains unwaveringly obedient to the moral law from the motive of duty a ‘holy’ will; here clearly we have simply the perfectly moral will. In the same way we may speak of the holiness or sanctity of duty or law, meaning merely that they are imperative upon conduct and universally obligatory. (p.5)

As far as Kant is concerned, the world has a dual nature. The first aspect, the phenomenal, is comprised of everything we actually know about it through empirical investigation, whilst the second, the noumenal, is an unknowable dimension that is crucial for the application of moral law and practical action. As far as his critics are concerned, whilst it is perfectly acceptable for there to be a realm in which scientific and philosophical knowledge are recognisably apparent, the second notion implies that there is a comparatively more mystical and ethical dimension that can only be accessed through intuition. Indeed, even the idea of moral law is anathema to many people and yet Kant strongly believed that it helps to complement the rational side of our nature.

Freedom, he tells us, is also located outside of the phenomenal realm and its presence within the noumenal allows us – given that we acquire the ability to access it – to fulfil a practical necessity. This, inevitably, opened the door to metaphysics and the idea of a meeting between the philosophical and the spiritual. The only way to make use of the noumenal, Kant argued, is to actually suspend what the phenomenal tells us about more abstract factors such as being, knowing, identity, time and space.

We will return to Kant later on, but for the present it is sufficient to understand that for Otto this usage of the term “holy” is restrictive as a result of the fact that it includes what is described as an “overplus of meaning”. In fact what we recognise as the ethical connotations of the word were far less apparent in the languages of the ancient Latin, Greek and Semitic civilisations. This led Otto to invent his own particular term for a “holiness” that may be approached in lieu of its behavioural considerations:

It will be our endeavour to suggest this unnamed Something to the reader as far as we may, so that he may himself feel it. There is no religion in which it does not live as the real innermost core, and without it no religion would be worthy of the name. It is pre-eminently a living force in the Semitic religions, and of these again in none has it such vigour as in that of the Bible. Here, too, it has a name of its own, viz. the Hebrew qadosh, to which the Greek ἅγιος and the Latin sanctus, and, more accurately still, sacer, are the corresponding terms. (p.6)

As we have seen, the expressions used in the ancient world do not relate specifically to that which is considered good in a moral or ethical regard. Indeed, to provide “the holy” with such an inference is to completely miss the point and wander off into that same conceptual minefield of rationality.

If one consults a modern dictionary, it becomes apparent that we are dealing with two different words: “numen,” pertaining to the spirit or divine power that presides over a thing or place, and “numinous,” which relates to having a strong religious or spiritual quality and suggesting the presence of a divinity. As explained above, this subtle difference called for the deployment of fresh terminology with a view to both identifying and preserving the wider aspects of “holiness” that are so often mislabelled or overlooked:

By means of a special term we shall the better be able, first, to keep the meaning clearly apart and distinct, and second, to apprehend and classify connectedly whatever subordinate forms or stages of development it may show. For this purpose I adopt a word coined from the Latin numen. Omen has given us ‘ominous’, and there is no reason why from numen we should not similarly form a word ‘numinous’. I shall speak, then, of a unique ‘numinous’ category of value and of a definitely ‘numinous’ state of mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied. (pp.6-7)

Otto provides this unique dimension, or mental state, with a supreme character of its own and one which could no longer be reduced to an ethical sideshow. It was this conviction to both retain and accentuate that which is sacred and authentic that enabled Otto to evoke within the minds of his readers the capacity for the development of their inner selves.