ONCE Otto had outlined the precise manner in which religious experience manifests in the human mind as a unique type of feeling, he turned his attention to the actual character of the mystical state itself.

He begins by explaining that all true religious emotion must involve “faith unto salvation, trust [and] love,” but in addition to these more commonplace tenets there must be something that grips us with the unprecedented force of a mighty spiritual power:

Let us follow it up with every effort of sympathy and imaginative intuition wherever it is to be found, in the lives of those around us, in sudden, strong ebullitions of personal piety and the frames of mind such ebullitions evince, in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings, to temples and to churches. (p.12)

What Otto describes as the “mysterium tremendum” can also manifest as something more gentle, occupying our soul for a few minutes or hours before disappearing altogether. On the other hand, the philosopher compares its more forceful and compelling moments to a “sudden eruption” that leads to a condition of total ecstasy. Notwithstanding, either, that comparatively more frightening and unnerving experience that some have described as the “dark night of the soul”:

It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures. (p.13)

Naturally, he accepts that his efforts to conceptualise the experience are like witnessing the very tip of the iceberg and that any “mysterium” worthy of the name is necessarily esoteric and, consequently, defies categorisation.

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The first of the three states discussed by Otto, and in some detail, is what he calls the “Element of Awefulness”. This involves defining what is meant by his use of the word “tremendum” in relation to the mystery itself, an adjective which is ordinarily associated with fear and terror. Conversely, for Otto the word conveys an emotional response that transcends our more basic allusions to horror and trepidation. It is here that he draws upon his extensive knowledge of other spiritual disciplines:

The Hebrew hiqdish (hallow) is an example. To ‘keep a thing holy in the heart’ means to mark it off by a feeling of peculiar dread, not to be mistaken for any ordinary dread, that is, to appraise it by the category of the numinous. But the Old Testament throughout is rich in parallel expressions for this feeling. Specially noticeable is the emah of Yahweh (Tear of God’), which Yahweh can pour forth, dispatching almost like a daemon, and which seizes upon a man with paralysing effect. (pp.13-14)

This particular form of terror, or dread, is different to the more commonplace experience of becoming frightened in the face of something more commanding or compelling than ourselves. Otto likens it to an “inward shuddering” which, ironically, fears nothing and yet is paralysed at the same time.

The English word, “awe,” is used to suggest the presence of a more numinous aspect that appears when the individual undergoing the mystical episode encounters something unnerving or out of the ordinary. Otto believes this to be the primary stage of subsummation, the first inkling that something is not altogether consistent with our more general understanding of reality:

It implies that the mysterious is already beginning to loom before the mind, to touch the feelings. It implies the first application of a category of valuation which has no place in the everyday natural world of ordinary experience, and is only possible to a being in whom has been awakened a mental predisposition, unique in kind and different in a definite way from any ‘natural’ faculty. And this newly-revealed capacity, even in the crude and violent manifestations which are all it at first evinces, bears witness to a completely new function of experience and standard of valuation, only belonging to the spirit of man. (p.15)

Otto locates the origins of this mystical fundament in the spiritual practices of “primitive man,” arguing that our ancestors were in regular contact with a more basic religiosity and therefore the numinous as it appeared in its less developed form. Whilst this opinion may seem a little patronising, and perhaps what one might expect from a Lutheran analysis of pagan antiquity, Otto nonetheless values this rudimentary principle in the sense that it remains the mystical basis for what he would regard as more nuanced examples of religious experience. The object of one’s devotion, be it God or a tree, should not preclude one from appreciating the preliminary force that hastens the approach of the supernatural happening. The force may have softened somewhat, at least in the modern Christian, but it remains pure and unadulterated.

It is important to consider that feelings of “awe” within the mystical process are not frightening merely on account of being intense. Some eighty-five years after Otto’s death the word “awesome” has become a mainstay of American slang and is hurled around with a certain degree of abandonment. It remains, however, at least in the more appropriate renderings, a term that is used to highlight one’s sense of astonishment.

The German laments the fact that feelings and emotions are so firmly divided into the rigid categories of “pleasure” and “pain,” making it difficult to convey the more precise character of each experience. In the case of pleasure, for example, it

makes a specific difference to the condition of mind whether the soul is merely in a state of pleasure, or joy, or aesthetic rapture, or moral exaltation, or finally in the religious bliss that may come in worship. Such states certainly show resemblances one to another, and on that account can legitimately be brought under a common class-concept (‘pleasure’), which serves to cut them off from other psychical functions, generically different. (p.17)

In other words, despite the proliferation of adjectives these phrases-within-categories are merely different ways of saying the same thing and make no attempt to describe the essence of the thing itself.

There are many terms for the feelings and emotions that sweep through the mind of the mystic in the presence of the numinous, but what are we to make of the temper or disposition projected by the object of one’s affections? Otto is keen to address the “Wrath of God” that one finds in the Bible, something he separates from all notions of morality. This, presumably, is the result of the Creator’s tendency to either suspend or transgress all earthly laws in the way that an antinomian might rely on faith alone. Otto is not interested in the behavioural connotations of God’s wrath, at least not in any legalistic sense, and his chief concern is the manner in which divine power can discharge itself in such an arbitrary and unpredictable fashion:

Anyone who is accustomed to think of deity only by its rational attributes must see in this ‘wrath’ mere caprice and wilful passion. But such a view would have been emphatically rejected by the religious men of the Old Covenant, for to them the Wrath of God, so far from being a diminution of His Godhead, appears as a natural expression of it, an element of ‘holiness’ itself, and a quite indispensable one. And in this they are entirely right. (p.18)

God’s “wrath” is thus connected to the “tremendum” that one finds in the mystical encounter, something which might sound controversial to many theologians but which nonetheless presents God’s more violent actions in a consistent light. Interestingly, Otto suggests that his interpretation is not a conceptual device but an effort to frame divine anger – or holy justice, from the perspective of the Christian – as an emotional “ideogram” in which godly indignation retains its intrinsic love and intimacy. God’s “wrath” is not a natural phenomenon, in the way that one might perhaps scold a disobedient child for treading mud into the house, but something both numinous and non-rational that can only be appreciated if we exchange notions of everyday anger for the enduring paradox of mystical “awe”.

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The second component in Otto’s detailed analysis of the awe-inspiring experience, or mysterium tremendum, is the “Element of Overpoweringness,” something that must also be viewed in non-conceptual, ideogrammatic terms.

Otto connects the idea of being completely overpowered to his previous discussion of the total absorption that one finds in “creature-feeling,” and adds to this the term “majestas” to convey the sense of humility and submission that one experiences in the face of the numinous. Otto, it will be remembered, had already criticised Schleiermacher’s “feeling of dependence” on the basis that it merely alludes to the secondary effect that religiosity has on self-consciousness. Another issue that Otto has with this analysis of mystical experience is that Schleiermacher implies that consciousness is in the process of “being conditioned” in the way that one is subject to a cause other than oneself. Although this suggests that God is responsible for exerting some kind of impact on the mystic, however, Otto explains that

a sense of this does not enter at all into that immediate and first-hand religious emotion which we have in the moment of worship, and which we can recover in a measure for analysis; it belongs on the contrary decidedly to the rational side of the idea of God; its implications admit of precise conceptual determination; and it springs from quite a distinct source. (p.20)

One may be forgiven for assuming that Otto is discounting the idea of God as both prime mover and all-conditioning power in the universe, but the reason behind his divergence of opinion with Schleiermacher is that the latter’s “feeling of dependence” does not compare with Otto’s insistence that within the mystical encounter there lies a religious dependence that is qualitatively different to the dependence that is felt in a more everyday context. As he explains, this represents a difference

between the consciousness of createdness and the consciousness of creaturehood. In the one case you have the creature as the work of the divine creative act; in the other, impotence and general nothingness as against over-powering might, dust and ashes as against ‘majesty’. In the one case you have the fact of having been created; in the other, the status of the creature. And as soon as speculative thought has come to concern itself with this latter type of consciousness—as soon as it has come to analyse this ‘majesty’ —we are introduced to a set of ideas quite different from those of creation or preservation. (pp.20-1)

There are interesting similarities with Zen Buddhism here in that the self is annihilated in the face of the sole reality, meaning that the self – often described as the ‘I’ – only reaches fulfilment by way of coming to terms with its own nullity.

Conversely, this acceptance of one’s place in the grand scheme of things adds to the unlimited might and power of the transcendent object. Unlike with Schleiermacher’s “feeling of dependence,” therefore, no causal relationship exists between subject and object. In fact the very suggestion of God-as-cause and man-as-effect would reinforce the reality of the self and this would undermine the entire process.

It is only now that Otto feels obliged to define mysticism, although this in itself is hardly easy for a philosopher who has already stated that it is impossible for us to actually grasp its essential nature without straying into the terminological swamp of conceptualism. In addition, we must recall that any inquiry into mysticism involves pinpointing the “non-rational” or “super-rational” aspects of the supernatural experience:

A characteristic common to all types of mysticism is the Identification, in different degrees of completeness, of the personal self with the transcendent Reality. This identification has a source of its own, with which we are not here concerned, and springs from ‘moments’ of religious experience which would require separate treatment. ‘Identification’ alone, however, is not enough for mysticism; it must be Identification with the Something that is at once absolutely supreme in power and reality and wholly non-rational. And it is among the mystics that we most encounter this element of religious consciousness. (p.22)

Otto quote American philosopher William James to the extent that the latter’s 1902 work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, mentions a mystical episode in which an unseen force appears to be more apparent than the person experiencing it and that the subject felt “the less real of the two”. In short, the mystic experiences “identification” in that he or she is poised on the very cusp of relinquishing self-consciousness and encountering the nature of the true self as the not-self.

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Thirdly, and lastly, Otto reveals the character of the tremendum in what he calls the “Element of ‘Energy’ or Urgency”. This is the dynamic force that one ordinarily associates with the passion and excitement of the mystical experience, something that simply cannot be accepted by those who posit spirituality in purely rational terms.

Indeed, many philosophers dispute the power of the numinous to the extent that they present such experiences as little more than instances of excitable anthropomorphism. Otto is adamant that, by rejecting the vitality and impetus of the non-rational in this fashion, those who seem fearful of entertaining the idea that there is a purposeful wildness and unpredictability within mysticism are forgetting that such energy is required to prevent religion from being transformed into nothing but rationalism. In other words, that it acts as a counterbalance. As he claims, this

element of ‘energy’ is a very living and vigorous factor, at any rate in the ‘voluntaristic’ mysticism, the mysticism of love, where it is very forcibly seen in that ‘consuming fire’ of love whose burning strength the mystic can hardly bear, but begs that the heat that has scorched him may be mitigated, lest he be himself destroyed by it. And in this urgency and pressure the mystic’s ‘love’ claims a perceptible kinship with the ὀργή itself, the scorching and consuming wrath of God; it is the same ‘energy’, only differently directed. ‘Love’, says one of the mystics, ‘is nothing else than quenched wrath.’ (p.24)

Otto tells us that this same force is discussed in the work of Fichte and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), although in their efforts to appeal to a more scientific audience both Idealist thinkers fail to retain the ideogrammatic aspects of numinous energy and thus strip it of its more ‘natural,’ non-rational attributes until it is made rational. Unlike with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who preserves this energy in the form of the “daemonic,” in Fichte and Schopenhauer the feeling and emotion of the religious experience is tamed.