IN order to avoid the simplifying lure of conceptualisation, the inner workings of the harmonious combination involving the mysterium tremendum and what Otto calls “fascination” can only be outlined to a certain extent. To further develop the nature of this relationship, therefore, he offers his readers an analogy that sheds further light on it by talking about something else.

Otto’s indirect methodology involves using an example from the domain of aesthetics, insisting that what we recognise as the effect on the consciousness by the “sublime” may be loosely compared to the impact of the numinous. Fully accepting that aesthetic feeling is not the same as religious feeling, he is nonetheless convinced that it encounters the same broad situation in which an object appears to us as something inexplicable which cannot be adequately described:

Certainly we can tabulate some general ‘rational’ signs that uniformly recur as soon as we call an object sublime; as, for instance, that it must approach, or threaten to overpass, the bounds of our understanding by some ‘dynamic’ or ‘mathematic’ greatness, by potent manifestations of force or magnitude in spatial extent. But these are obviously only conditions of, not the essence of, the impression of sublimity. A thing does not become sublime merely by being great. The concept itself remains unexplicated; it has in it something mysterious, and in this it is like that of the numinous. (p.41)

The seductive quality of aesthetic sublimity bears another interesting similarity to the way we experience the numinous in that it can seem both “daunting” and “attracting” at the same time, creating a deep impression upon our minds and leaving us hungry for more.

The excitement that is generated by an experience of this kind, Otto tells us, are part of a psychological law by which ideas are attracted to one another and then form part of our consciousness. Just as an idea becomes attractive to the human mind, so too can a feeling generate a similar effect as like recognises like. In other words, there is an unwritten law which relies on the means of attraction to secure identification and, ultimately, unity. At the same time, Otto declares that one must not assume that it is the feeling itself which undergoes this process but the self. As he points out, a

transition of the actual feeling into another would be a real transmutation and would be a psychological counterpart to the alchemist’s production of gold by the transmutation of metals. (p.43)

The feeling does not simply evolve or transmute into something else, but is replaced in the way that a Hegelian thesis might perish alongside its antithesis in a mutually beneficial synthesis.

Otto is determined to establish precisely how certain “stimuli” or “excitations” are used to bring the numinous into consciousness. Whilst his law of feelings accounts for the intense attraction that operates in both aesthetics and religion, the basic potential for this state of affairs was already present in the human condition in the sense of being a priori. As a consequence, the German propounds the notion that within the realms of aesthetic sublimity there dwells the same fundamental “schema” that acts as the driving-force behind our attraction to the numinous. This psychological programming may operate in two different fields, rational and non-rational, but Otto attributes this phenomenon to an “historical genesis” by which humans are naturally imbued with an eschatological blueprint that bears the mystical hallmarks of religious capability.

Similarly, what Otto refers to as the “sex instinct” operates in a similar fashion and may be regarded as the non-rational component in human relations. Although the attractive force of the numinous appeals to the consciousness from above and the desire to sexually reproduce from below, as animal instinct, they have a certain degree in common as a result of the twofold character of the latter:

Whatever falls within the sphere of the erotic is therefore always a composite product, made up of two factors: the one something that occurs also in the general sphere of human behaviour as such, as friendship and liking, the feeling of companionship, the mood of poetic inspiration or joyful exaltation, and the like; and the other an infusion of a quite special kind, which is not to be classed with these, and of which no one can have any inkling, let alone understand it, who has not learnt from the actual inward experience of eros or love. (p.46)

This second characteristic also relies on an unspoken affinity by which human love is comparable to that expressed towards God. Otto believes that the language used by men and women in love, just like the words offered in praise of the Creator, are perfectly inferior to the feeling of attractiveness itself. He cites as one example the effect of a song, the words of which may take a particular form and yet arouse feelings that transcend the lyrical framework and bring about an emotional response of a very specific and personal kind. A song may thus be rational in terms of having a basic structure, but can nonetheless inspire a non-rational response on a more supreme and meaningful level.

On the other hand, one cannot deny the existence of more formulaic music that is designed to appeal to the most basic of human impulses and which bears no transcendent qualities at all:

Programme-music, that is to say, misinterprets and perverts the idea of music by its implication that the inner content of music is not—as in fact it is—something unique and mysterious, but just the incidental experiences—joy and grief, expansion and repression—familiar to the human heart. And in its attempt to make of musical tones a language to recount the fortunes of men programme-music abolishes the autonomy of music, and is deceived by a mere resemblance into employing as a means what is an end and substantive content in its own right. (p.48)

Authentic music, therefore, is said to contain something far beyond the content of human experience and this he attributes to that same “wholly other”. Not that the non-rational in music is remotely equivalent to that of the numinous in a more tangible sense, of course, each operates within its own particular context.