BY formulating his new phraseology as something made perfectly distinct from the broader holiness of which most people speak, Otto brought his “numinous” into existence as a phenomenon that is peculiar to each individual who experiences it. In this remarkable fashion, the German’s philosophical inventiveness effectively lights the touchpaper of human potential and each page of The Idea of the Holy becomes a personal challenge to examine and develop the embryonic possibilities inherent within the soul.

Otto is perfectly cognisant that this early shift of emphasis will alienate some of his readers, even those who would describe themselves as broadly “Christian,” and thus invites those who lack either the ability or the wherewithal to pursue mystical experience without the rationality of everyday consciousness to set his work aside. As he explains, it

is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings. (p.8)

Although it might sound as though there is a slight tinge of elitism in Otto’s frank pronouncement to the faint-hearted, he clearly realises that many people are simply incapable of separating authentic spiritual feeling from the relative profanity of aesthetics. It is akin to a mere spectator trying – and failing – to gain access to the mind of the artist.

Neither, it must be said, can the religious devotion that one finds in basic worship be compared to the deeper experience that is known to the mystic. Whilst the former may evoke within its practitioners a feeling of moral contentedness, the latter involves becoming absolutely subsumed in the moment. Indeed, encountering feelings of love and gratitude may well be compared with Otto’s thoughts on indigestion, albeit in reverse, and what he presents as a more encompassing form of worship was described by one of his philosophical predecessors as a “feeling of dependence”.

The thinker in question is Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), a German Romantic who – like Otto – viewed the world through a decidedly Protestant lens. Having absorbed the ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819), Schleiermacher probed the depths of the human personality to the extent that he concluded that each human being represented the individualisation of universal reason and that the studied appliance of individual self-consciousness can lead to the earthly incarnation of divine reason. There is an Hermetic aspect to this view, too, in that man is perceived as the microcosmic counterpart to the macrocosmic universe.

More importantly, the self-consciousness of which Schleiermacher spoke is equivalent to Otto’s own analysis of mystical feeling. Similarly, Schleiermacher’s interpretation of feeling was different to that which one finds in everyday sensibility. By rejecting the false subject-object dichotomy, Otto’s nineteenth-century counter-part was suggesting that pure religiosity lies at the centre of all human affairs and that the unification of man and God represents the marriage of reason and nature. This consciousness of being, he argued, was a form of absolute dependence in terms of the inextricable relationship that binds us to the divine.

Nonetheless, Otto disagreed with Schleiermacher’s critique of “dependence” on account of the notion that

the feeling or emotion which he really has in mind in this phrase is in its specific quality not a ‘feeling of dependence’ in the ‘natural’ sense of the word. As such, other domains of life and other regions of experience than the religious occasion the feeling, as a sense of personal insufficiency and impotence, a consciousness of being determined by circumstances and environment. (p.9)

Otto was a great admirer of Schleiermacher, but detected an inconsistency in his theory of dependence because it seemed to portray a state of profound religiosity in the context of a more basic and profane sensibility. In other words, to feel dependent at a time of deep mystical experience suggests that the individual undergoing such a process is somehow bound by the restrictions of his immediate environment. Schleiermacher’s error, from Otto’s perspective, is to have confused “absolute” and “relative” dependence.

To simplify, by comparing the mystical state with everyday feelings Schleiermacher had tried in vain to attribute a non-identifiable quality to that which cannot be ordinarily defined. At the same time, Otto provides an example of a mystical situation in which dependance is not the only factor at work:

When Abraham ventures to plead with God for the men of Sodom, he says (Gen. xviii. 27): ‘Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes.’ There you have a self- confessed ‘feeling of dependence’, which is yet at the same time far more than, and something other than, merely a feeling of dependence. Desiring to give it a name of its own, I propose to call it ‘creature-consciousness’ or creature-feeling. It is the emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures. (pp.9-10)

Rather different, in other words, to Abraham feeling inconvenienced or pressured by the whole affair.

The term “creature-feeling” is therefore designed to communicate Otto’s distinction between the purely conceptual and a circumstance in which one is literally overwhelmed by the presence of divine authority. It remains inexplicable, however, because the prophet – in this case Abraham – simply cannot explain his supernatural episode to those who have never experienced anything remotely similar.

Otto unearths a second error in Schleiermacher’s reasoning, that of his contention that self-consciousness leads to the discovery of God. Although, as we have seen, Otto accepts that becoming submerged in mystical experience can engender a “feeling of dependence” in light of one’s own inferiority in the presence of the numinous, in a more psychological regard his theory of “creature-feeling” suggests that there is a more subjective dimension in evidence. Firstly, Otto insists, one’s attention is drawn to an “object outside the self” and this leads to a “depreciation of the subject” in the subject’s own eyes.