25 September 1869 A.D. Rudolf Otto Born—Lutheran Theologian
25 September 1869 A.D. Rudolf
Otto Born—Lutheran Theologian
Meland, Bernard. “Rudolph Otto.” Encyclopedia Britannica. N.d.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/434884/Rudolf-Otto. Accessed 23 May 2014.
Rudolf Otto, (born Sept. 25, 1869, Peine, Prussia—died March 6,
1937, Marburg, Ger.), German
theologian, philosopher, and historian of religion, who exerted worldwide
influence through his investigation of man’s experience of the holy. Das
Heilige (1917; The Idea of the Holy, 1923) is his most important work.
Early life and academic
career.
Otto
was the son of William Otto, a manufacturer. Little is known of Otto’s early
life, except that he was educated at the gymnasium in Hildesheim before becoming a student
of theology and philosophy at the University of
Erlangen and, later, at the University of Göttingen, where he was made a Privatdozent
(“lecturer”) in 1897, teaching theology, history of
religions, and history of philosophy. In 1904 he was appointed professor of
systematic theology at Göttingen, a post he held until 1914, when he became
professor of theology at the University of Breslau. In 1917 he became professor
of systematic theology at the University of Marburg and for one year (1926–27)
served as rector of the university. He retired from his university post in
1929, though he continued to live in Marburg the rest of his life.
Otto took time from his
scholarly pursuits, more out of a sense of duty than of preference, to
participate in community and public affairs. He was a member of the Prussian
Parliament from 1913 to 1918 and a member of the Constituent Chamber in 1918,
where he asserted a liberal and progressive influence. And he was later to
concern himself with the political questions of the Weimar Republic. Otto also
participated widely in Christian ecumenical activities, both as they related to
divisions within the Christian community and as they concerned relations
between Christianity and other religions of the world.
Scholarly pursuits.
What
initially prompted Otto’s inquiry into man’s experience of the holy was a
specifically Christian, even Protestant, concern that had awakened in him while
studying the life and thought of Martin Luther. This concern—to
elucidate the distinctive character of the religious interpretation of the
world—is reflected in his first book, Die
Anschauung vom heiligen Geiste bei Luther (1898;
“The Perception of the Holy Spirit by Luther”). He was
to expand his inquiry in his book, Naturalistische und
religiöse Weltansicht (1904; Naturalism and Religion, 1907),
in which he contrasted the naturalistic and the religious ways of interpreting
the world, first indicating their antitheses and then raising the question of
whether the contradictions can be or should be reconciled.
Otto
resisted an easy reconciliation between the world view offered by the sciences
and the religious interpretation but opposed equally the religionist’s
hostility toward science and the scientist’s disregard of religion. The two
perspectives, he insisted, are to be embraced and heeded for what they purport
to disclose concerning the world in which men live. It was clear, however, that
Otto’s principal concern was to justify and to clarify what it is that the
religious interpretation of the world, even within its rational aspect, conveys
to man as a distinctive dimension of understanding beyond the discoveries of
the sciences and the generalized knowledge following from them. Five years
later came his work, Kantische-Fries’sche
Religionsphilosophie (1909; The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries, 1931), a discussion of the religious thought of the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Jacob Friedrich
Fries, in which he sought to specify the kind of rationality that is
appropriate to religious inquiry.
During 1911–12 Otto
undertook an extended journey, visiting many countries of the world, beginning
with North Africa, Egypt, and Palestine, continuing to India, China, and Japan,
and returning by way of the United States. These experiences were to set his
problem in a worldwide context, turning him to an extended and searching
exploration of the diverse ways in which the religious response had manifested
itself among various religions of the world. He proved to be remarkably well
equipped for such an exploration, both in his mastery of languages and his
knowledge of the history of world religions. In addition to being at home with
the languages of Near Eastern religions, he had mastered Sanskrit sufficiently
to translate many ancient Hindu texts into German as well as to write several
volumes comparing Indian and Christian religious thought.
Influence of Schleiermacher
Otto’s
initial mentor guiding his inquiry into the specific character of the religious
response was the eminent German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. It was Schleiermacher’s early work,
specifically his book Über
die Religion. Reden an die Gebilden unter ihren Verächtern (1799; On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, 1893), to which Otto gave particular attention. What appealed to him in
this work was Schleiermacher’s fresh way of perceiving religion as a unique
feeling or awareness, distinct from ethical and rational modes of perception,
though not exclusive of them. Schleiermacher was later to speak of this unique
feeling as man’s “feeling of absolute dependence.” Otto was deeply impressed by
this formulation and credited Schleiermacher with having rediscovered the sense
of the holy in the post-Enlightenment age. Yet he later criticized the
formulation on the grounds that what Schleiermacher had pointed up here was no
more than a close analogy with ordinary, or “natural,” feelings of dependence.
For “absolute dependence” Otto substituted “creature-feeling.”
Creature-feeling, he said,
is
itself a first subjective concomitant and effect of another feeling element,
which casts it like a shadow, but which in itself indubitably has immediate and
primary reference to an object outside of the self.
Otto
called this object “the numinous” or “Wholly Other”—i.e.,
that which utterly transcends the mundane sphere, roughly
equivalent to “supernatural” and “transcendent” in traditional usage.
The Idea of the Holy.
Various influences had played upon Otto’s reflections
through the years, aiding him in reformulating the religious category that was
to carry him beyond Schleiermacher. His early teacher at Göttingen, Albrecht Ritschl, had located religion in the
realm of value judgments, whereas, more significantly, his theological
colleague at Göttingen, Ernst Troeltsch, sought for a religious a priori
as the ground of religious interpretation and judgment. Otto was impressed by William James’s shrewd insights in The
Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), yet he found James’s empirical method inadequate for interpreting
such phenomena. Otto was particularly attracted to the thought of J.F. Fries, already mentioned, whose notion of Ahndung
(obsolete form of Ahnung;
literally, “presentiment,” or “intuition”),
a yearning that yields the feeling of truth, opened up to him a way of dealing
with religious phenomena sensitively and appropriately. These “feelings of
truth” Otto sought to schematize in his The
Idea of the Holy.
In that work, however, Otto
was conscious of moving beyond his previous efforts, exploring more
specifically the nonrational aspect of the religious dimension, for which he
coined the term numinous, from the Latin numen
(“god,” “spirit,” or “divine”), on the analogy of
“ominous” from “omen.” The numinous, the awe-inspiring element of religious
experience, Otto contended,
evades
precise formulation in words. Like the beauty of a musical composition, it is
non-rational and eludes complete conceptual analysis; hence it must be
discussed in symbolic terms.
Thus, The
Idea of the Holy, while benefiting from earlier studies,
represented for Otto a new venture and a radical shift in the nature and ground
of his inquiry. The concern here was to attend to that elemental experience of
apprehending the numinous itself. In such moments of apprehension, said Otto,
we
are dealing with something for which there is only one appropriate expression, mysterium tremendum. . . . The feeling
of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide pervading the mind with a
tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting
attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant,
until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its “profane,” non-religious
mood of everyday experience. . . . It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and
early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful
and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless
humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of
that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.
Although the mysterium,
which Otto represents as the form of the numinous
experience, is beyond conception, what is meant by the term, he insists, is
something intensely positive. Mysterium can be experienced in feelings that convey the qualitative content of the
numinous experience. This content presents itself under two aspects: (1) that
of “daunting awfulness and majesty,” and (2) “as something uniquely attractive
and fascinating.” From the former
comes the sense of the uncanny, of divine wrath and judgment; from the latter,
the reassuring and heightening experiences of grace and divine love. This dual
impact of awesome mystery and fascination was Otto’s characteristic way of
expressing man’s encounter with the holy.
Later works.
Otto
employed the method he had developed in The
Idea of the Holy in three major publications that
followed: West-Östliche Mystik (1926;
Mysticism East and West, 1932);
Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das Christentum (1930; India’s Religion of Grace and Christianity, 1930); and Reich Gottes und Menschensohn (1934; The Kingdom of God
and Son of Man, 1938). Of the three books, the latter is
especially important for glimpses of new insight that seem to point beyond the
earlier, more widely acclaimed volume; it renders the hint of ultimacy that
appears in present history.
Otto’s concern with
experiencing the numinous also gave rise to experimenting with new forms of
liturgy designed to give urgency and vividness to such experiences in
Protestant services of worship under critically controlled conditions. Here he
employed a “Sacrament of Silence” as a culminating phase, a time of waiting
comparable to the Quaker moment of silence, which he acknowledged to have been
the stimulus to his own innovation.
Otto
took all religions seriously as occasions to experience the holy and thus
pressed beyond involvement in his own historical faith as a Christian to engage in
frequent encounter with people of other religious traditions. He had much
respect for the distinctive characteristics of the various religions and thus
resisted universalizing religion in the sense of reducing all to the lowest common
denominator. Yet he strongly argued for a lively exchange between
representatives of the various religions. It was this concern that led him to
create in Marburg the Religious Collection of religious symbols, rituals, and
apparatus on a worldwide basis for purposes of inspection and study and to
advocate establishing an Inter-Religious League as “a cultural exchange in
which the noblest . . . of our art and science and of our whole spiritual
heritage would be mutually interpreted and shared.”
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