THE previous section in this series included a discussion of the way in which Otto had found fault with Schleiermacher’s critique of divination, particularly in relation to his assertion that it is a universal phenomenon.
However, another major contention expressed by Otto in relation to Schleiermacher is that he devotes too little attention to the history of religion and the fulfilment of divination through the figure of Jesus Christ:
His concluding ‘discourse’ makes emphatic and significant mention of Christianity and Christ, but Christ is here only introduced as the supreme divining subject, not as the object of divination par excellence. And it is the same in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre. In this, too, the significance of Christ is, essentially, intended to be fully given in the fact that he ‘admits us into the power and beatitude of his consciousness of God’. (p.154)
There is, as always, a light strain of sectarianism running through Otto’s work in that his interest in comparative religion does not preclude him from criticising those who fail to sufficiently accentuate the perceived “superiority” of the Christian message.
Otto is convinced that Christ should be portrayed as the embodiment of the numinous as it has developed during the course of religious history. Jesus, in other words, is seen as the ultimate manifestation of holiness. Despite this, one cannot rely on how Jesus viewed himself because to do so would be to reduce the numinous to an exercise in self-consciousness. The real value, it is suggested lies in what Otto calls the “spontaneous insight” of revealed holiness. Even today, it is still possible to visit those countries in which very little has changed for thousands of years and where
‘holy men’ (and very queer specimens they generally are!) now and then make their appearance, each the centre of a group of disciples, and about them the people come and go, listening to their sayings, looking at their miracles, observing how they live and what they do. Bands of adherents gather round them, more loosely or more closely united as the case may be. ‘Logia‘, tales, and legends form and accumulate; new brotherhoods arise or, if already arisen, extend in widening circles. But the centre of it all is always the man himself, a ‘holy man’ in his lifetime, and what sustains the movement is always the peculiar power of his personality, the special impression he makes on the bystander. (p.157)
This is something that becomes manifest among a religious figure’s closest followers, those fortunate enough to know him or her personally. Not simply to know in the form of a friend or acquaintance, but to actually experience the mystical individual as a living, breathing incarnation of the numinous essence.
Needless to say, this was certainly true in the case of Jesus and the earliest forms of Christianity and yet when “the Word was made flesh, and dwelled among us” (John 1:14) it was He who was far more significant than the miracles recorded in scripture:
To this place belong further the belief in Jesus’s supremacy over the demonic world and the tendency to legend that began to take effect from the start; the fact that His own relatives take Him for a man ‘possessed’, an involuntary acknowledgement of the ‘numinous’ impression He made upon them; and in an especial degree the conviction that breaks spontaneously upon the minds of His disciples as by a sudden impact, won not from His teaching but from the very experience of Him, that He is the ‘Messiah’, the being who stood for the circle in which He moved as the numinous being par excellence. (p.159)
It is for this reason that Otto considers the “mental predisposition” of the first disciples to be of enormous importance, for without those upon whom Jesus could make an impression there would be no impression at all. Again, this relies on the all-important a priori that provides the basis for an understanding of what constitutes the divine. It was only when the divine was recognised in the person of Jesus that His disciples acquired the potential to receive His numinous presence. This was religious divination at first-hand.
