CONTINUING with our discussion of the a priori as a categorical reality, Otto states that the non-rational aspects of religion are not beholden to the rationalism of morality or teleology and retain their own autonomy.

Moreover, as contradictory as it sounds the numinous and the conceptual form a necessary union. The development of the one is enhanced by the development of the other, at least as far as they remain complementary and do not threaten to upset the overall balance:

The histories of religion recount indeed, as though it were something axiomatic, the gradual interpenetration of the two, the process by which the divine’ is charged and filled out with ethical meaning. And this process is, in fact, felt as something axiomatic, something whose inner necessity we feel to be self- evident. But then this inward self-evidence is a problem in itself; we are forced to assume an obscure, a priori knowledge of the necessity of this synthesis, combining rational and non-rational. (p.136)

One would expect an atheist to regard the a priori as something “obscure,” and yet when Otto is prepared to accept that philosophical interpretation of this kind seems vague he is suggesting that it is necessarily so and cannot be explained in rational terms.

It is also the case that axioms of this kind inspire such devotion among their religious protagonists that they are both received and passed on to others as something perfectly self-evident. Otto finds this tendency at work in Plato’s Republic, Book II, 382, where Socrates (470-399 BCE) and Adeimantos of Collytus (432-382 BCE) are shown discussing the obvious nature of divine truth:

The most interesting point in this passage is not the elevation and purity of the conception of God, nor yet the lofty rationalization and moralization of it here enunciated, but, on the side of Socrates, the apparently ‘dogmatic’ tone of his pronouncement—for he does not spend the least pains in demonstrating it—and, on the side of Adeimantos, the ingenuous surprise and, at the same time, the confident assurance with which he admits a truth novel to him. And his assent is such as implies convincement; he does not simply believe Socrates; he sees clearly for himself the truth of his words. (p.137)

This is a perfect example of the a priori at work, i.e. knowledge passing from one to the other with absolute certitude. Otto believes that such mysteries have often been encountered by Christian missionaries, when African or Asian natives have found it easy to accept the truth of a new religion that immediately strikes them as plain and obvious. In many cases, especially among African tribes and the Tibetans, men and women have converted to Christianity due to a marriage between the “barbaric” numinosity of their own belief-systems and the importation of a rationalism through which it is tempered. The “primitive” tremendum, in other words, is said to be met with the principles of love, justice and moral will:

And this is all the more remarkable when one considers at what widely different dates the imaginative creation of the figures of gods had its rise in different cases, and under what diverse conditions of race, natural endowment, and social and political structure its evolution proceeded. All this points to the existence of a priori factors universally and necessarily latent in the human spirit: those, in fact, which we can find directly in our own religious consciousness, when we, too, like Adeimantos, naively and spontaneously concur with Socrates’ saying, as with an axiom whose truth we have seen for ourselves: ‘God is single, and true in deed and word.’ (p.140)

What makes this possible, in Otto’s view, is the “absoluteness” of the rational principles themselves and the fact that they are universally recognised as truth. Human love, human justice and human will are each relative and differ from person to person and from context to context, but those imparted by God are formally absolute. This represents a subtle difference between the actual content inherent within such values and the more important element of form that marks them out as divine.

Meanwhile, the fact that the numinous lies ultimately beyond our comprehension provides the unity of the rational and non-rational with a “mysterious” quality:

The absolute is that which surpasses the limits of our understanding, not through its actual qualitative character, for that is familiar to us, but through its formal character. The mysterious, on the other hand, is that which lies altogether outside what can be thought, and is, alike in form, quality, and essence, the utterly and ‘wholly other’. We see, then, that in the case of the moment of ‘mystery’, as well as those of ‘awefulness’ and ‘fascination’, there is an exact correspondence between the non-rational element and its rational schema, and one that admits of development. (p.141)

Only God is able to grasp the wider nature of the spiritual plan as it operates on a more transcendent level. The numinous itself, in other words, contains the decisive element of rationality that both counteracts and complements its own non-rationality as the latter appears in the context of “primitive” religion. Nonetheless, the non-rational elements are retained to prevent the religion from straying too far into the environs of rationalism.

Although Otto insists that this is testimony to the vast “superiority” of Christianity, or at least in its more Lutheran guise, his great familiarity with mythology undoubtedly introduced him to the twofold aspects of Apollonianism and Dionysianism that one finds in Ancient Greece. With the former symbolising peace, stability and order, the latter relates to the unbridled ecstasy of licentiousness and chaos. Consequently, as Nietzsche also demonstrated, the one is always undermined by the other.

In Otto’s system, or at least that which he attributes to the numinous, this endlessly swaying pendulum is halted by what he terms the “harmony of contrasts”. There is, of course, a strongly Hegelian aspect to the concept of establishing unity through opposition