FOR one who is so predisposed to the Lutheran view of Christianity, Otto’s view of the numinous within Catholicism is somewhat magnanimous. At the same time, he argues that Catholics maintain a deeply rationalistic interpretation of the religion and that this is due to the influence of Aristotelian metaphysics and their intellectual triumph over those of Plato (428/427 – 348/347 BCE). Martin Luther (1483-1546), it will be remembered, criticised the creeping effects of Aristotelianism during the sixteenth-century Reformation:
At that time Plato himself was known (very imperfectly) chiefly through the interpretations—and misinterpretations —of him by Augustine, Plotinus, and Dionysius the Areopagite. Yet it was a true feeling that led the contrasted attitudes of mind to choose the names of Plato and Aristotle as their battle-cries. Plato did indeed make a powerful contribution towards the rationalization of his religion, for according to his philosophy the deity had to become identical with the ‘Idea of the Good’, and consequently something wholly rational and conceivable. (p.94)
Plato nonetheless acknowledged the limitations of both science and philosophy, preferring to present his spiritual beliefs in the context of non-rational mythology. At no time does he attempt to combine religious experience with notions of logic, insisting that the Absolute is beyond rational comprehension.
Conversely, Aristotle (384-322 BCE) – Plato’s former pupil and cerebral sparring partner – adopted a different approach. He was less prone to the “ecstasy” of primitive religion, but considerably more conceptual in terms of developing a theology that became increasingly more rational as it made its way down the centuries. Lactantius, a Roman historian who was active in the third and fourth centuries CE, discussed this worrying tendency in his 313 work De Ira Dei (On the Wrath of God):
He uses the same wholly rational terms, taken from man’s emotional life, as do his opponents, but raises them to a higher power, so that he makes God, as it were, a gigantic mind, quick with an immense vitality. But whoever in this way contends for the ‘living God’ is at the same time contending unwittingly for the divine in God, that which cannot be reduced to idea, world-order, moral order, principle of being, or purposive will. And many of Lactantius’ own expressions point of themselves to something beyond. (p.96)
The fact that Lactantius accentuates the non-rational aspects of Christianity whilst making reference to the “Wrath of God” demonstrates that he was more than aware of the mysterium tremendum and its indecipherable character, something that Aristotle had tried to interpret beneath his own theological microscope.
Another figure that Otto credits with having struggled against the rationalistic tendency within Christianity is the Catholic theologian, Duns Scotus (1266-1308), who accepted certain aspects of Aristotelianism but rejected the assertion by Aquinas that the essence of an object can be separated from its existence. Scotus advanced the alternative concept of “ens inquantum ens” (being qua being), by which the two were fundamentally compatible. Furthermore, Otto was impressed by his predecessor’s insistence that “volition” is superior to “cognition” and this is a good example of how the struggle to preserve the supremacy of the numinous was still alive and kicking in the Middle Ages.
In the sixteenth century, Luther made his own contribution to the stemming of the Aristotelian tide but Otto believes that it was struck from the theological record. Whilst he does not specify the motive for this erasure of Lutheran history, it is likely that the Protestants who wished to break away from the Catholic Church did not wish to present their spiritual leader as a religious reactionary who had come out in defence of the non-rational. Contrary to the more fanatical Lutherans who later tried to appropriate his ideas for their own, when he pinned his famous 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church – or so we are led to believe – he simply intended to stage a protest and did not set out to create a schism in the existing Church at all.
Otto believes that the numinous is to be found throughout Luther’s work, something that has nothing whatsoever to do with the surviving elements of Catholic liturgy found in his doctrine of the Eucharist. On the contrary, in Luther’s mirae speculationes we find an important distinction between what remains “unrevealed” in God and that which is ordinarily associated with the divine “face” that has been revealed to us. Otto is less interested in how far Luther is heir to the theology of Duns Scotus than the fact that he sought to incorporate the non-rational into every facet of his life.
The great reformer even stated categorically that his approach to mysticism, which comes to us by way of the De Servo Arbitrio (1525), was a crucial part of his teaching and this work is a prime example of how he managed to retain the “daemonic character” of the numinous. God is portrayed as a consuming fire in whose power we are perfectly helpless, even as a force that is “more terrible and frightful than the Devil”. Indeed, Otto admits that he even discovered the mysterium tremendum in Luther prior to finding it among the incandescent pronouncements of the Old Testament. As the German concedes, this essential message is lost on most Lutherans and although
it is the unapproachable which becomes approachable, the Holy One who is pure goodness, that it is ‘Majesty‘ which makes itself familiar and intimate—there is the inwardness of the matter, and this finds only very dubious expression in the subsequent one-sided doctrine of the schools, where the mystical character of the ‘wrath’—which is of the essence of ‘holiness’ infused with that of ‘goodness’—is referred simply to the righteousness of God, and taken thus as righteous anger or indignation. (p.100)
The numinous is also apparent in Luther’s approach to the story of Job, which is one of the more puzzling episodes in Christian scripture. However, it remains a good example of how the “mysteriousness” of something as seemingly irrational as God’s unbridled cruelty towards one of his hapless creatures is, more accurately, presented as an illustration of the non-rational at work. That Luther used terminology such as “the whore Reason” is even more significant, bringing into question the dubious attempts to present him as a patriarch of modern enlightenment. Nevertheless, it
is only occasionally that these purely numinous elements in Luther’s religious consciousness are displayed so strongly and forcibly as in the treatise De Servo Arbitrio, But in his battles with ‘desperatio‘ and with Satan, in his constantly recurring religious catastrophes and fits of melancholy, in his wrestlings for grace, perpetually renewed, which bring him to the verge of mental disorder, in all these there are more than merely rational elements at work in his soul. (p.102)
The “wrath” of God is one thing, but this more ferocious quality is counter-balanced in Luther’s work in those instances where he speaks of the Creator filling us with so much happiness that we find ourselves “dancing and leaping for joy”. This, for Otto, is an expression of the mystical “fascination” that was alluded to earlier. Whilst his work often encourages Christians to faith in God, rather than acquiring more knowledge about his actual nature, this rational aspect is also tempered by the fact that Luther’s interpretation of faith relates not simply to fides but to “love” and “knowledge”. Delving further into the nature of God, therefore, is part of one’s more general faith and brings with it a self-fulfilling unity between man and the numinous:
All subsequent mystics from Johann Arndt to Spener and Arnold have always felt these aspects of Luther’s inner life to be congenial and akin to their own, and have carefully collected the relevant passages from his writings as a defence against the attacks of the rationalized doctrine of the Lutheran school. (pp.104-5)
Although Otto suggests that these non-rational elements were preserved in both Protestantism and Catholicism, or at least that they were still evident in the first quarter of the twentieth century, he also contends that Western Christendom never managed to retain the sense of “awe” that one still finds in the Indian mysticisms within Hinduism and Buddhism.
Two important mystics which Otto considers to have nurtured the spirit of the non-rational are Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) and Jakob Böhme (1575-1624). Whilst the former was a controversial medieval thinker who was eventually put on trial for making a distinction between God and the Godhead – i.e. presenting Creation as the representation of a free act of will determined by the threefold nature of the Holy Trinity, not to mention contrasting the “unmanifest” and “manifest” Absolute – the latter, like Otto, was a Lutheran theologian:
With Böhme, as with Luther, the non-rational energy and majesty of God and his ‘awefulness’ appear conceptualized and symbolized as ‘Will’. And with Böhme, as with Luther, this is conceived as fundamentally independent of moral elevation or righteousness, and as indifferent toward good or evil action. It is rather a ‘ferocity’, a ‘fiery wrath’ about something unknown; or, better still, not about anything at all, but Wrath on its own account and without reference to any object; an aspect of character which would be quite meaningless if taken literally in the sense of a real conceivable and apprehensible anger. (p.107)
Otto does not set out to defend what he perceives as an attempt by such mystics to formulate a “science of God,” either through medieval scholasticism or theosophical alchemy, but merely to identify the comparatively more important non-rationalism that thrived in their respective worldviews.
Meanwhile, by advancing the morality of Christianity to a quite ridiculous extent, Lutherism – rather than Luther himself – effectively threw out the baby with the bathwater and thus misunderstood the true nature of “the holy” that is expressed through divine wrath.
Schleiermacher, so often criticised by Otto, is credited with having kept rationalism at bay and developing a “feeling of absolute independence” that gave free rein to the numinous.
