IT seems rather surprising, given long-term interest in the nature of the inner and outer worlds, that more has not been made of a priori thought in terms of it providing a good basis for the complementary relationship that exists between the mental and external states as they become active within religious history:

Every religion which, so far from being a mere faith in traditional authority, springs from personal assurance and inward convincement (i.e. from an inward first-hand cognition of its truth)—as Christianity does in a unique degree—must presuppose principles in the mind enabling it to be independently recognized as true. But these principles must be a priori ones, not to be derived from ‘experience’ or ‘history’. It has little meaning, however edifying it may sound, to say that they are inscribed upon the heart by the pencil of the Holy Spirit ‘in history’. For whence comes the assurance that it was the pencil of the ‘Holy Spirit’ that wrote, and not that of a deceiving spirit of imposture, or of the ‘tribal fantasy’ of anthropology? Such an assertion is itself a presumption that it is possible to distinguish the signature of the Spirit from others, and thus that we have an a priori notion of what is of the Spirit independently of history. (p.177)

As for history itself, we must remember that it often harbours a particular aspect – labelled by Otto as a “quale,” or what might be described as an individual instance of subjective, conscious experience – which contains the potential to “become”. In other words, just as the Biblical mustard seed grew into a tree it is the case with certain objects, animate rather than inanimate, that they can possess an innate history of their own and this demonstrates how the object itself had to “be” something if it was to “become” anything. This relies on an acting-from-within, rather than being subject to a cause-from-without. The same is true of the human personality:

Biography is only a real narration of a real life where, by the interplay of stimulus and experience on the one side and predisposition and natural endowment on the other, something individual and unique comes into being, which is therefore neither the result of a ‘mere self-unfolding’ nor yet the sum of mere traces and impressions, written from without from moment to moment upon a tabula rasa. (p.176)

In Otto’s view, religion enters history in three distinct ways: (i) the interaction between predisposition and stimulus discussed above, (ii) the recognition that certain aspects of history are manifestations of “the holy,” and (iii) the unification of the first two components in a display of “knowing, feeling and willing”.

Religion is therefore a crucial part of history which leads us to both recognise the numinous and to realise that it is, in itself, a constant manifestation of the same thing. This is not to suggest that religion is somehow innate, of course, only that our access to the realm of the a priori provides us with a degree of potential. This does not operate to the same extent, however, meaning that some people will always be more capable of ascending to a higher spiritual consciousness than others:

In relation to these the universal ‘predisposition’ is merely a factor of receptivity and a principle of judgement and acknowledgement, not a capacity to produce the cognitions in question for oneself independently. This latter category is confined to those specially ‘endowed’. And this ‘endowment’ is the universal disposition on a higher level and at a higher power, differing from it in quality as well as in degree. (p.177)

Otto compares this to art, whereby the painter is the “inventor” and “creator” and the critic who comes into contact with his work exercising nothing more than an aesthetic response and judgement. The latter, in other words, is an example of mere predisposition and one may observe that the

prophet corresponds in the religious sphere to the creative artist in that of art: he is the man in whom the Spirit shows itself alike as the power to hear the ‘voice within’ and the power of divination, and in each case appears as a creative force. (pp.177-8)

Nonetheless, it would be incorrect to assume that the prophet himself has reached the absolute pinnacle of spiritual attainment. A prophet, after all, is simply a herald of something to come and the true culmination of the divinatory process – and, thus, revelation as it develops through the course of history – is, for Rudolf Otto, nothing other than the redeeming figure of Jesus Christ.