The Numinous and Modernity. An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto`s Philosophy of Religion [Reprint 2012 ed.] 3110167999, 9783110167993

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
I. THE IMPACT OF DAS HEILIGE AND THE PECULIARITY OF ITS RECEPTION
II. A REVIEW OF SELECTED LITERATURE ON OTTO
III. PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF THE PRESENT STUDY
IV. HERMENEUTICAL REMARKS
CHAPTER ONE. OTTO AS HEIR AND INTERPRETER OF SCHLEIERMACHER’S SPEECHES ON RELIGION
I. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF OTTO’S RECEPTION OF SCHLEIERMACHER
II. “HOW SCHLEIERMACHER REDISCOVERED RELIGION”
III. THE ESSENCE (WESEN) OF RELIGION IN THE SPEECHES
IV. BLUEPRINT FOR A THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE OF RELIGION
CHAPTER TWO. THE KANTIAN-FRIESIAN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
I. OTTO, TROELTSCH AND THE SEARCH FOR THE RELIGIOUS A PRIORI
II. RELIGIOUS FEELING AND THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY
III. AESTHETIC JUDGMENT, AHNDUNG AND THE COMMUNICABILITY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
IV. THE THREAT OF HISTORICISM AND THE “TESTIMONIUM SPIRITUS SANCTI INTERNUM”
CHAPTER THREE. THE PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY OF RELIGION IN OTTO’S THOUGHT
I. OTTO’S CRITIQUE OF WUNDT’S THEORY OF ANIMISM
II. OTTO AS PRACTITIONER OF VERSTEHENDE PSYCHOLOGY
III. OTTO AND THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION
IV. THE HISTORY OF RELIGION FROM WITHIN
CHAPTER FOUR. OTTO’S INVESTIGATION OF THE HOLY
I. THE NUMINOUS AS AN INDEPENDENT CATEGORY OF RELIGIOUS VALUE
II. THE VARIOUS MOMENTS OF THE NUMINOUS
III. AESTHETIC ANALOGIES AND THE SUBLIMATION OF THE NUMINOUS
IV. THE RELIGIOUS A PRIORI AND THE HISTORY OF RELIGION
CHAPTER FIVE. DAS HEILIGE AND GERMAN “IRRATIONALISM” AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR
I. OTTO’S ENIGMATIC RELATION TO THE “MOOD OF THE TIMES”
II. THE NUMINOUS, ERLEBNIS AND LEBENSPHILOSOPHIE
III. “THE DIONYSIAN EFFECT OF THE NUMEN”
IV. OTTO’S RESPONSE TO NIETZSCHE AND KLAGES IN THE LECTURES ON ETHICS
CHAPTER SIX. THE CONCEPT OF VALUE IN OTTO’S LATER THOUGHT
I. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS OF VALUE
II. OTTO’S ETHICS OF VALUE
III. ETHICS AND RELIGION IN OTTO’S LATER THOUGHT
IV. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF OTTO'S POSITION
CHAPTER SEVEN. DAS HEILIGE AND THE RELIGIOUS AMBIVALENCE OF MODERNITY
I. OTTO’S DIAGNOSIS OF THE MODERN RELIGIOUS SITUATION
II. THE MARGINALIZATION OF THE NUMINOUS IN THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE WEST
III. HOW OTTO REDISCOVERED “RELIGION”
IV. THEOLOGY IN THE IRON CAGE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX OF NAMES

Citation preview

Todd A. Gooch The Numinous and Modernity

Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

Herausgegeben von Otto Kaiser

Band 293

W DE G Walter de Gruyter · Berlin • New York 2000

Todd A. Gooch

The Numinous and Modernity An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto's Philosophy of Religion

w DE

G

Walter de Gruyter • Berlin · New York 2000

® Frinted on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Gooch, Todd Α.: The numinous and modernity : an interpretation of Rudolf Otto's philosophy of religion / Todd A. Gooch. - Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 2000 (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft ; Bd. 293) Zugl.: Claremont, Univ., Diss., 2000 ISBN 3-11-016799-9

©

Copyright 2000 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin.

All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin Printing: Werner Hildebrand, Berlin Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer-GmbH, Berlin

Preface: Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts The reader of the present volume might be surprised to find a study of Rudolf Otto and his book Das Heilige in a series dedicated to the Old Testament. The current book might indeed have appeared in a variety of other contexts, but its publication within this particular series is by no means accidental, either. As such, a study of Rudolf Otto needs no justification. In light of its importance and ambivalence, Das Heilige has been dramatically understudied: probably the best-selling theological work of the 20th Century, it was often disparaged by the theologians; a world event when it appeared, it was ridiculed by the fashionable students at Otto's own university only ten years later; a book whose success is usually explained by its context, it continues to sell copies every day even today, and it was translated during the past decade into several additional languages. Yet, while there have been a few recent studies of Otto and his work, none has really dealt sufficiently with the full scholarly and socio-political context, Otto's intellectual heritage, and especially with the reception of Das Heilige when the book was first published. Todd Gooch's very readable account does just that. It unites highly sophisticated methodology with very sound documentation. The unpublished material he uses is quite superior to the basis of any previous Otto study (the book dons a too modest cloak and does not make this explicit enough), and the author's impressive competence, not only in the German language as such, but also in the specific idiom and world of thought of Otto's time and place, make the present volume particularly important. But why, again, the Old Testament series? Dr. Gooch's theological — rather than philosophical or religious studies — association with those with an Old Testament background during his two years at Marburg, where the study was written, has something to do with that. More importantly, however, the title of this preface, from Isaiah 6.3, forms for good reasons the inscription on Rudolf Otto's grave in the Marburg Cemetery on Ockershäuser Allee. For those of us who occasionally walk by the simple tombstone in this beautiful last garden, it serves as a constant reminder of the narrative of the call of the Prophet Isaiah as the key text for Das Heilige as a whole.

Preface

We trust that Todd Gooch's book on Rudolf Otto and Das Heilige will be interesting for almost anyone concerned with theology, religion, philosophy, and the modern history of ideas. We hope, however, that it will be particularly rewarding for those with an Old Testament focus, the general audience of this series, lest they forget one of the most important aspects of their study. Marburg, August 2000

Otto Kaiser Wolfgang Drechsler

Contents CONTENTS

ν

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

vii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

viii

INTRODUCTION I.

THE IMPACT OF DAS HEILIGE AND THE PECULIARITY OF ITS RECEPTION

II.

A REVIEW OF SELECTED LITERATURE ON OTTO

1 8

III. PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF THE PRESENT STUDY

19

I V . HERMENEUTICAL REMARKS

25

CHAPTER ONE OTTO AS HEIR AND INTERPRETER O F S C H L E I E R M A C H E R ' S SPEECHES

ON

RELIGION

I.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF OTTO'S RECEPTION OF SCHLEIERMACHER

28

II.

" H O W SCHLEIERMACHER REDISCOVERED RELIGION"

35

III. THE ESSENCE (WESEN) OF RELIGION IN THE SPEECHES

40

I V . BLUEPRINT FOR A THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE OF RELIGION

45

CHAPTER TWO THE KANTIAN-FRIESIAN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION I.

OTTO, TROELTSCH AND THE SEARCH FOR THE RELIGIOUS A PRIORI

52

II.

RELIGIOUS FEELING AND THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY

57

III. AESTHETIC JUDGMENT, AHNDUNG AND THE COMMUNICABILITY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

64

I V . THE THREAT OF HISTORICISM AND THE "TESTIMONIUM SPIRITUS SANCTI INTERNUM"

73

CHAPTER THREE THE PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY OF RELIGION IN OTTO'S THOUGHT I.

OTTO'S CRITIQUE OF WUNDT'S THEORY OF ANIMISM

78

II.

OTTO AS PRACTITIONER OF VERSTEHENDE PSYCHOLOGY

86

III. OTTO AND THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION

96

Contents I V . THE HISTORY OF RELIGION FROM WITHIN

99

CHAPTER FOUR O T T O ' S I N V E S T I G A T I O N OF T H E H O L Y I.

THE NUMINOUS AS AN INDEPENDENT CATEGORY OF RELIGIOUS VALUE

II.

THE VARIOUS MOMENTS OF THE NUMINOUS

104 ILL

III. AESTHETIC ANALOGIES AND THE SUBLIMATION OF THE NUMINOUS

120

I V . THE RELIGIOUS A PRIORI AND THE HISTORY OF RELIGION

123

CHAPTER FIVE DAS HEILIGE

AND GERMAN "IRRATIONALISM"

A F T E R THE FIRST W O R L D W A R I.

OTTO'S ENIGMATIC RELATION TO THE "MOOD OF THE TIMES"

132

II.

THE NUMINOUS, ERLEBNIS AND LEBENSPHILOSOPHIE

138

III. "THE DIONYSIAN EFFECT OF THE NUMEN"

144

I V . OTTO'S RESPONSE TO NIETZSCHE AND KLAGES IN THE LECTURES ON ETHICS

156

CHAPTER SIX THE C O N C E P T OF V A L U E IN O T T O ' S L A T E R T H O U G H T I.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS OF VALUE

160

II.

OTTO'S ETHICS OF VALUE

166

III. ETHICS AND RELIGION IN OTTO'S LATER THOUGHT

174

I V . IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF OTTO'S POSITION

178

CHAPTER SEVEN DAS HEILIGE

A N D THE RELIGIOUS A M B I V A L E N C E OF M O D E R N I T Y

I.

OTTO'S DIAGNOSIS OF THE MODERN RELIGIOUS SITUATION

II.

THE MARGINALIZATION OF THE NUMINOUS IN THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE WEST

184 190

III. HOW OTTO REDISCOVERED "RELIGION"

202

I V . THEOLOGY IN THE IRON CAGE

211

BIBLIOGRAPHY

219

I N D E X OF N A M E S

232

Acknowledgements The following study is a revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Rudolf Otto, Holiness and the Disenchanftment of the World, which was presented to the faculty of the Department of Religion at Claremont Graduate University in August, 1999. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the members of my dissertation committee, Jack Verheyden, Ann Taves and D.Z. Phillips, for their helpful comments on several earlier drafts, and for their support throughout the writing process. I would also like to express my appreciation to Professor Dr. Dres. h.c. Otto Kaiser for reading and commenting on my dissertation, and for allowing the revised version to be published in the Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft. Special thanks are due to Professor Dr. Wolfgang Drechsler, my Fulbright advisor in Germany, without whose initial encouragement and constant input this project could not have been completed, and to the German-American Fulbright Commission for supporting my research in Marburg for two years. I am very grateful to Dr. Martin Kraatz, the former director of the Religionskundliche Sammlung, and to Mrs. Kraatz, for their generous hospitalilty and their years of dedication to the Sammlung and to the study of religion. Earlier versions of material contained in this book were presented in papers delivered to the Schleiermacher Group and the History of the Study of Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion. Thanks are due to Professors Dr. Gregory Alies, Dr. h.c. mult. Kurt Rudolf and Dr. Rainer Flasche for their comments on material from various chapters. I am grateful to Professor Dr. Walther Ch. Zimmerli for allowing me to participate in his graduate student colloquim in the Philosophy Department at Marburg, and to his students, Dorothea Wildenburg, Christian Lötz, Joachim Landkammer, Thomas Wolf, and Rainer Kattel for their feedback and friendship. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their years of support, and, above all, my wife Kathy for bearing with me through a long period of labor. The following pages are dedicated to her.

List of Abbreviations (See Bibliography for complete references.)

AWT

Otto, "Autonomie der Werte und Theonomie," Aufsätze zur Ethik

CPR

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

CJ

Kant, Critique of Judgment

DH

Otto, Das Heilige (Munich: Beck, 1991)

EAG

Otto, Zur Erneuerung und Ausgestaltung des Gottesdienstes

E

Otto, "Ethik I" (OA 2282)

F

Otto, "Fortsetzung [zur Glaubenslehre]" (OA 2292)

G

Otto, "Glaubenslehre I" (OA 2295)

GÜ

Otto, Das Gefühl des Überweltlichen (sensus numinis)

KFR

Otto, Kantisch-Fries 'sehe

MR

Otto, "Mythus und Religion in Wundts Völkerpsychologie"

OR

Schleiermacher, Speeches on Religion

PN

Otto, "Pflicht und Neigung," Aufsätze zur Ethik

RGM

Otto, Reich Gottes und Menschensohn

SG

Otto, "Sittengesetz und Gotteswille" (OA 2288)

SU

Otto, Sünde und Urschuld

ÜR

Otto, Remarks appended to Otto's edition the Speeches

WA

Otto, "Wertgesetz und Autonomie," Aufsätze zur Ethik

WWR

Otto, "Wert, Würde und Recht," Aufsätze zur Ethik

Religionsphilosophie

Introduction I. The Impact of Das Heilige and the Peculiarity of its Reception The following study of Rudolf Otto's philosophy of religion is intended both as a contribution to the history of twentieth-century religious thought, and as a case study in religion and modernity. The ambiguity of the phrase "religious thought" reflects the unusual circumstances surrounding the history of the impact (Wirkungsgeschichte) of the book for which Otto is primarily known. Otto's classic study of the holy, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (1917), is probably the most widely read German theological work of the twentieth century.1 Since its initial publication, it has been translated into many different languages and gone through numerous editions. It has enjoyed a degree of popularity that has rarely been accorded to any academic work in theology or religious studies. In his acclaimed history of comparative religion, Eric Sharpe observes that Das Heilige "aroused an immediate and lasting response in the mind of the twentieth century, and now holds near-canonical status as one of the books which every student of comparative religion imagines himself or herself to have read."2 Moreover, as Mircea Eliade noted in 1969, the influence of Otto's ideas has been at least as enduring among the "cultivated" reading public as it has among professional academics. Over the years, countless readers have responded to Otto's evocative descriptions of the encounter with the holy as Paul Tillich once reported having done - with "an astonishment, an inner sense of enthrallment, a passionate agreement, such as one was no longer accustomed to with theological books." 4 Terms 1

4

Wilfried Härle and Harald Wagner, eds., Theologenlexikon, 2nd ed. (Munich: Beck, 1994), p. 211. The most literal English translation of the title of Otto's book is The Holy: On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. The book is more commonly known to English-speaking readers as The Idea of the Holy, trans, by John W. Harvey (London/Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1958). Eric Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd ed. (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1986), p. 161. Mircea Eliade, The Quest (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 23. Paul Tillich, "Der Religionsphilosoph Rudolf Otto" (1923), Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XII (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1971), p. 179. All translations from German texts throughout this study are my own unless otherwise noted. In cases where a particular

2

Introduction

like "the numinous" and the "Wholly Other," first introduced by Otto on the pages of Das Heilige, have made their way into a vocabulary that extends beyond academic circles in theology and religious studies, and continue to be employed by many who are probably unaware of their origin. Otto's famous characterization of the holy as mysterium tremendum et fascinons - a mystery that inspires dread and fascination simultaneously - seems to strike a chord in the imagination of each new generation of students who are exposed to it as undergraduates. Among academics, the spectrum of responses to Das Heilige has been widely divergent. These responses have arisen primarily within three distinct, though often overlapping, disciplines: theology, Religionswissenschaft or the history of religions, and philosophy.5 Otto was trained as a systematic theologian in the Lutheran tradition, the two university chairs that he held in his lifetime were both in systematic theology, and although it has not always been recognized as such, Das Heilige was clearly intended by Otto as a contribution to Christian theology. Nevertheless, the most enduring impact of Otto's ideas has not been felt among academic theologians, and in relation to the schools that have dominated the history of twentieth-century theology, Otto has remained for the most part an outsider. Where, in a survey of that history, one is almost certain to encounter chapters devoted to the work of Troeltsch, Barth, Bultmann and Tillich, Otto's name is more likely to be mentioned only in passing. In terms of the history of theology, Otto is perhaps best thought of as a transitional figure. While his designation of the divine as "Wholly Other" is terminologically consistent with the emphasis upon the absolute transcendence of God among dialectical theologians, and his rejection of a strictly moral interpretation of Christianity marks an important point of departure from the Ritschlian theology predominant in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, in terms of his underlying conception of the nature and task of the theological enterprise, Otto remains within the tradition of liberal theology that came under heavy attack during the years following the First

word or phrase may be translated in more than one way, I have included the italicized original word or phrase in normal parentheses. Wherever I have added or altered a word or phrase for the purpose of clarity or syntax, I have placed those additions in square brackets. In a few cases where a passage has proven to be especially resistant to translation, the entire passage appears in German in a footnote. Throughout this study, the terms "Religionswissenschaft' and "History of Religions" are used more or less interchangably. Generally, because Otto conceived of religion as possessing an essential unity, I use "history of religion" (singular) when referring to his views and "history of religions" (plural) when referring to the contemporary discipline. A discussion of the reception of Das Heilige in theology and "the humanistic science of religion" is contained in Gregory Alles' introduction to Rudolf Otto: Autobiographical and Social Essays, ed. and trans, by Alles (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996), pp. 1-38.

The Impact of Das Heilige

3

World War. Bultmann, Otto's colleague at Marburg and a leading figure in the new theological developments of this period, spoke of Das Heilige as a reaction against the stagnation of liberal theology that nonetheless failed to break with its fundamental presuppositions. 6 Even as the incredible success of Das Heilige quickly thrust Otto into the international spotlight, at home he was severely criticized for his liberal theological views, and in Marburg he began to lose students in increasing numbers to Bultmann and Heidegger - a fact that probably contributed to his decision to take an early retirement. While the impact of Otto's ideas within academic theology has been relatively marginal, their influence within the field of Religionswissenschaft is widely acknowledged, if not always celebrated. In Das Heilige Otto attempted to identify a universal category of religious value that could be used to interpret phenomena from all different religious traditions. Like many of his contemporaries, he was interested in discovering the "origin of religion," and in identifying or isolating that which distinguishes religion as such from other regions of human experience. At the same time, Otto sought to draw attention to the distinctiveness of religion as a class of historical phenomena, to its ubiquity, and to the multiplicity and variability of its historical forms. On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Otto's birthday, Ernst Benz referred to Otto as "the most significant pioneer of an unexpected blossoming of research in the history of religion in the German universities at the beginning of the twentieth century, the researcher and teacher who created the fundamental categories for this relatively young discipline, and stamped it with a definite orientation (.Fragestellung) and method." 7 Among German scholars, signs of Otto's influence can be detected most readily in the work of such figures as Friedrich Heiler, Gustav Mensching, Kurt Goldammer and Joachim Wach. While Otto's role as a pioneer in the history of religions is indisputable, it was not long before his views came to be strongly criticized by scholars interested in developing the study of religion as an empirical discipline free of theological and philosophical presuppositions. 8 Among the most vocal of Otto's early critics was Walter Baetke, who accused him of having led Religionswissenschaft into a cul-de-sac by emphasizing religious experience and the irrational at the expense of the socio-historical dimension of religion, 6

g

"Die liberale Theologie und die jüngste theologische Bewegung" in Glauben und Verstehen, 9th ed., Vol. I (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1993), p. 22. Ernst Benz, "Rudolf Otto als Theologe und Persönlichkeit," Rudolf Otto's Bedeutung för die Religionswissenschaft und die Theologie heute, ed. by Benz (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), p. 30. The debate surrounding "the holy" as a general category for interpreting religious phenomena is chronicled in Carsten Colpe, ed., Die Diskussion um das "Heilige" (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977), in which several of the most important contributions to the discussion are reproduced.

4

Introduction

and by abandoning empirical research in favor of the speculative pursuit of essences and origins.9 More recently, Baetke's student, Kurt Rudolph, assessed Otto's legacy in the following words: "Otto's influence, which was for a while very great, was certainly detrimental, and has been more harmful than beneficial to the independence of our discipline." 10 Today Otto's ideas have been largely abandoned by representatives of the discipline that he helped to create. Otto's influence upon the academic study of religion in English-speaking countries has been no less significant than it was in Germany. At least indirectly, in the United States, Otto's discussion of the holy played a role in underwriting the legitimacy of religious studies as an independent discipline in public universities. As a paradigmatic statement of the view that religion constitutes a unique and "irreducible" dimension of human culture, incapable of being explained entirely in non-religious (e.g. psychological or sociological) terms, Otto's discussion of the holy has functioned to define the parameters of religious studies in relation to other disciplines. In the field of comparative religion, the influence of Otto in the United States was mediated largely by Wach, who taught at the University of Chicago in the 1940's and 50's, when the identity of this discipline within the American university system was beginning to take shape. In more recent decades, as methodological discussions have come to receive increasing attention among scholars in religious studies, Otto has been criticized with increasing frequency for having contributed to the tacit incorporation into the discipline of theological presuppositions thought to be incompatible with the unbiased investigation of the history of religions." To the extent that Otto's ideas continue to be discussed, it is often in the context of such debates. Unfortunately, references to Otto are frequently limited to the citation of the same two or three controversial passages from Das Heilige, taken out of context and used to illustrate the absurdity of Otto's position and its allegedly pernicious influence. Certainly, Otto's ambitious claim to have discovered (or rediscovered) the historical origin of religion in the experience of the numinous seems highly untenable in light of the cumulative evidence of a large body of careful research conducted by historians of religions since Otto's time. 9 Cf. Walter Baetke, Das Heilige im Germanischen (Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1942). Kurt Rudolph, Geschichte und Probleme der Religionswissenschaft (Leiden/New York/Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1992), p. 24. Cf. J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism from Bodin to Freud ( N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 200. Hans Penner, Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 20-21. Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), esp. pp. 88, 1 Π Ι 18. Essays containing both positive and negative assessments of the value of Otto's ideas for religious studies are included in Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan, eds.. The Sacred and Its Scholars (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996).

The Impact oí Das

5

Heilige

Furthermore, it would be pointless to deny that there is much in Otto's thought that is simply remote to early twenty-first century intellectual sensibilities. Nevertheless, as Gregory Alles has observed, "criticism of Otto is cogent only if it addresses Otto, not some caricature, and only if it does not ignore the specific project in which Otto was engaged." 12 As I hope to show in the following pages, there is a certain danger of failing to appreciate the nature of Otto's argument by adopting a facile disregard for its own historicity. Although Das Heilige (or rather, The Idea of the Holy) has exercised a significant influence within religious studies among English-speaking scholars, it is a work that remained for many years understudied and frequently misunderstood. Many readers of Das Heilige have been unaware of the extent to which Otto's argument in that book draws upon, and is really only intelligible in light of, ideas developed in his earlier writings. This preliminary difficulty is compounded by the fact that Otto's own views were shaped to a large extent by currents of thought with which many contemporary readers are not likely to be familiar. Thus, eighty years after its first publication, Das Heilige presents something of a hermeneutical challenge both to those attempting to understand Otto's ideas in their own right, and to those interested in assessing whatever relevance they may continue to possess. Alles has recently contended that the assessment of Otto's legacy stands at a crucial juncture.13 Insofar as this is the case, there is arguably a need for an investigation that will attempt to illuminate aspects of his thought which have hitherto been neglected or entirely ignored. As Sharpe has observed, "The Idea of the Holy has by its very success obscured the personality of its author, and has thoroughly eclipsed his other works." 14 By interpreting Das Heilige within the context of the development of Otto's thought prior to and after the publication of Das Heilige,15 by incorporating unpublished and previously 12 13

14

Alles, Introduction to Otto's Autobiographical

and Social Essays,

p. 27.

Ibid., p. 1. Sharpe, Comparative Religion, p. 161. The following study does not offer an exhaustive treatment of all of Otto's writings, but focuses primarily on those works which are most important for understanding the methodological and epistemological commitments that inform his interpretation of religion in Das Heilige, or which reflect the further development of ideas associated with that work. Significant texts such as Naturalistische und religiose Weltansicht (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1904; Eng., Naturalism and Religion), Otto's early book on Jesus, Die historisch-kritsche Auffassung vom Leben und Wirken Jesu (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1901; Eng., The Life and Ministry of Jesus), and his individual studies in comparative religion, such as Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das Christentum (Gotha: Klotz, 1930; Eng., India's Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted), Gott und Gottheiten der Arier (Glessen: Töpelmann, 1932), and Reich Gottes und Menschensohn: Ein religionsgeschichtlicher Versuch (Munich: Beck, 1934; Eng., The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man), are not considered at length.

6

Introduction

unexamined archival sources, and by considering Otto's ideas in relation to the intellectual context in which they were developed, the following study aims to provide a more complete picture of Otto than has previously been available to English-speaking readers. The aim of this study is not to offer a defense of Otto's views - except in those cases where I feel they have been misrepresented. I have sought rather to contribute something to their clarification, in the hope that such a clarification might facilitate the responsible assessment of Otto's legacy to the philosophy of religion and to the study of religion generally. One of the most interesting and least appreciated chapters in the history of the reception of Das Heilige is the response to that work among philosophers, particularly in Germany during the tumultuous and fecund period following the First World War. Because discussions of Otto in recent years have been carried out among scholars of religion primarily concerned with methodological issues in their own field of study, the philosophical response to Otto's ideas among his contemporaries has not been widely discussed. Nevertheless, that response was quite remarkable. During the years following its initial appearance, Otto's book attracted the attention of some of the most significant German thinkers of the last century. The philosophical reception of Otto's ideas is somewhat enigmatic in its own right. Prior to the publication of Das Heilige, Otto had been identified with a relatively obscure splinter group within the broadly Neo-Kantian philosophical milieu predominant in Germany around the turn of the century. While Otto employs a number of standard Kantian terms in Das Heilige, those who have attempted to make sense of his views in relation to Kant's own philosophical position have often been stymied. One accomplished Kant scholar, H. J. Paton, who remained appreciative of Otto's penetrating analyses of religious experience, suggested that Kant, had he read Otto's book, would have "shuddered in his grave." 16 Nevertheless, a number of influential philosophical figures of various stripes clearly felt that Das Heilige warranted serious consideration. That so many prominent intellectuals felt compelled to acknowledge Otto's accomplishment in Das Heilige is a fact that has not been sufficiently appreciated, and is an indication of the significance of the influence of Das Heilige as an event in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. Heinrich Rickert, whose philosophy of value, by virtue of its influence on Max Weber, has played a role in methodological discussions within the social sciences, referred to Das Heilige in his own magnum opus as an "outstanding contribution to the philosophy of religion as science of value (Wertwissenschaft)."17 Several of Otto's contemporaries, including H. J. Paton, The Modern Predicament ( N e w York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 140. Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1921), p. 557.

3rd ed.

The Impact of Das Heilige

7

such notable figures as Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, regarded Das Heilige as a pioneering contribution to the phenomenology of religion, even though there is no evidence of Otto's having been directly influenced by the phenomenological movement before the appearance of Das Heilige. HansGeorg Gadamer reports that, several years prior to the publication of Being and Time (1927), Heidegger had "read Rudolf Otto for a period of time with the greatest interest."18 Recently, an incomplete draft of a review of Das Heilige penned by Heidegger has been published in the collected edition of his works. 19 Rüdiger Safranski has even suggested that traces of Otto's analysis of the numinous are recognizable in Heidegger's discussion of Dasein. 20 It is a little-known fact that one of Leo Strauss' earliest publica21

tions was a review of Das Heilige written for a Jewish periodical in 1923. Somewhat less surprisingly, the influence of Otto's ideas is also reflected in the work of such distinguished philosophers of religion as Heinrich Scholz, Johannes Hessen and Romano Guardini.22 In addition to these philosophers, the list of those who expressed appreciation of Otto's accomplishment in Das Heilige includes figures as diverse as Carl Jung, Romain Rolland, C. S. Lewis and Ghandi. In light of the disdain with which Otto has come to be regarded by many scholars of religion in recent years, the fact that Das Heilige was able to capture the attention of such prominent figures as these is somewhat surprising. At the very least, it raises a number of intriguing questions. What was it about Otto's discussion of the holy that his contemporaries found so striking? Were they simply deceived about the significance of Das Heilige, or perhaps taken in by its alluring rhetorical power? Is their response to be regarded as a mere historical curiosity? Or is it possible that they recognized something in Das Heilige that subsequent critics have failed to notice? These questions can only be answered after the attempt has been made to understand Das Heilige in relation both to the development of Otto's thought prior to its publication, and to the broader historical context in which it was able to elicit 18 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, Vol. X of Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1995), p. 249. Martin Heidegger, "Das Heilige," Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, Vol. LX of the Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Claudius Strube (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1995), pp. 33234. 20 Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1997), pp. 224-25. Strauss' review appears in Der Jude 7 (April 1923) 241. Cf. Heinrich Scholtz, Religionsphilosophie (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1921), p. 459; Johannes Hessen, Die Werte des Heiligen, 2nd ed. (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1951); also Johannes Hessen, Religionsphilosophie, Vol. I, 2nd ed. (Munich/Basel: Ernst Reinhardt, 1955), p. 269f.; and Romano Guardini, "Die religiöse Sprache," Die Sprache, ed. by Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959), pp. 13ff.

8

Introduction

such a profound response. Each of these tasks is pursued on the following pages. In order to be able to suggest how the approach adopted here differs from previous discussions of Otto, it will be helpful to conduct a brief review of some of the recent Otto literature.

II. A Review of Selected Literature on Otto The following review of literature on Otto is by no means exhaustive, and is merely intended to indicate those avenues of interpretation that have been most influential in shaping the approach I have adopted in the following study. For many years, the only book-length study of Otto's thought in English remained Robert F. Davidson's Rudolf Otto's Interpretation of Religion, published in 1 9 4 7 Ρ Davidson's book offers a careful attempt to understand Das Heilige in light of the Kantian-Friesian philosophical framework developed by Otto in his earlier publication, Kantisch-Fries'sche Religionsphilosophie und ihre Anwendung auf die Theologie (1909). Otto's use of traditional Kantian terms like "category," "schematism," and "a priori," has been a source of bewilderment for many commentators over the years. One might have thought that Paton's discussion of Otto in his Gifford Lectures of 1950-51 would have put to rest once and for all the attempt to reconcile Otto's use of these terms with the meaning that is given to them in Kant's own writings. Paton observed that "Otto's language, however suited to the description of religious emotion, is logically too imprecise and metaphorical for the purpose of philosophy." 24 Perhaps it would be more generous to suggest that Otto's language is too imprecise for the kind of rigorous Kantianism practiced by Paton. In any case, given the fact that Paton's remarks were published over forty years ago, it is curious that Thomas Ryba should conclude a discussion of Otto's ideas in 1991 with the claim that "committed 'orthodox' Kantians would have difficulty with [Otto's] willingness to dismiss the transcendental deduction of the categories," and that this fact "spells death for his certainty that the Sacred is an a priori category along Kantian lines" - as though he were reporting something new.25 The primary contribution of Adina Davidovich's chapter on Otto in her book, Religion as a Province of Meaning (1993) consists in the attention that she draws to the importance of Kant's Critique of Judgment for understanding Otto's argument in Das Heilige. The failure on the part of earlier Kantian 23 Robert F. Davidson, Rudolf Otto's Interpretation of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947). 25 Paton, The Modern Predicament, p. 142. Thomas Ryba, "The Philosophical Loadings of Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Sacred," Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 3 (1991), 38. ^

Review of Selected Literature

"

critics to recognize the extent to which Otto's discussion of religious experience is informed by Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic ideas is one of the reasons why Otto's argument has appeared to many to be unintelligible. As Davidovich points out, this failure is partly attributable to the fact that prior to the work of Kant scholars like Paul Guyer and Ted Cohen, the reception of Kant among English-speaking academics was limited primarily to the first two Critiques, and, among theologians, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone}6 Davidovich is certainly correct in her observation that Otto's dissatisfaction with Kant's ethical interpretation of religion led him to exploit other resources within the body of Kant's philosophy in his effort to develop the numinous as a distinct category of religious value. While Davidovich's interpretation of Otto in light of Kant's Third Critique sheds light on what Otto was trying to accomplish with his theory of the religious a priori, in the end, her identification of Otto (together with Tillich) as the representative of a "modern Kantian school of theology" that is "firmly at home in the contemporary intellectual scene" proves to be too ambitious. 27 The "surprising message" of this Kantian school, according to Davidovich, is that "once religion confines itself to the limits of reason, it can establish itself as the supreme rational principle through which all the constructions of reason are brought into unity." 2 However, Davidovich's attempt to portray Otto's theory of religious experience as being consistent with Kant's own views overlooks the fact that Otto's entire discussion of the "noeticity" of religious feeling (i.e. its cognitive status) is predicated upon a fundamental deviation from the Kantian understanding of cognition (Erkenntnis). Kant himself once referred to the theory of Ahndung (aesthetico-religious premonition) upon which Otto's theory is founded as "the death of all philosophy Probably the most well informed general study of Otto's thought to date is Philip C. Almond's Rudolf Otto: An Introduction to His Philosophical Theology (1984). Almond's study reflects his extensive familiarity with primary and secondary German sources, and also incorporates unpublished materials from the Rudolf Otto Nachlass, part of which is contained in the Rudolf Otto Archive, and part in the University Library, at the University of Marburg. In addition to providing a succinct interpretation of Das Heilige in relation to the entire development of Otto's thought, Almond's book is also 26

Cf. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer, eds., Essays in Kant's Aesthetics (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1985). Adina Davidovich, Religion as a Province of Meaning: The Kantian Foundations of Modern Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. xiii. Ibid., p. xvii. 29 Immanuel Kant, "Von einem neuerdings erhoben vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie," Kants gesammelte Schriften, Prussian Academy of Sciences Edition, Vol. VIII, p. 398. 27

10

Introduction

an important source of information about various aspects of Otto's life and work. While my own research has been facilitated by Almond's study, the following discussion of Otto differs from Almond's in several important respects. One difference is purely circumstantial, resulting from the availability of certain unpublished documents. Although Almond's book incorporates material from the Otto Nachlass, I have had the opportunity to consult a number of sources, including Otto's lecture notes on Glaubenslehre (dogmatics) and ethics from the 1920's and 30's, as well as several incomplete manuscripts, that were unavailable to Almond, due to the fact that they had been separated from the rest of Otto's Nachlass at the time when Almond was conducting his research in Marburg. 30 I have relied heavily upon these sources at several points, especially in the final section of Chapter Three, and in Chapters Five, Six and Seven. These unpublished writings, as well as several of Otto's publications which remain untranslated, are helpful both for the light that they shed on hitherto neglected aspects of his thought, as well as for clarifying his relationship to certain trends in German intellectual life to which he responded either directly or indirectly. Perhaps the most important difference between the following study of Otto and Almond's study concerns the emphasis that I have placed upon relating Otto's ideas to their historical context. Previous discussions of Otto, including Almond's book, have emphasized the importance of Schleiermacher and Fries for understanding Otto's argument in Das Heilige. These sources certainly play an important role in Otto's approach to religion, and I have attempted to interpret his use of them in relation to broader concerns that defined the theological situation in Germany around the turn of the century. At the same time, as important as these sources are for understanding Otto's own development prior to Das Heilige, they are not particularly helpful for making sense of either the tremendous appeal of Otto's book, both in Germany and abroad, or the relationship of Otto's ideas to other intellectual trends that defined this period. These are concerns that I have attempted to address in Chapters Five, Six and Seven.

The history of the Otto Nachlass was relayed to me by Dr. Martin Kraatz, the former director the Religionskundliche Sammlung, where the Rudolf Otto Archive is housed. The materials to which I refer were separated from the rest of the Nachlass in 1966 and returned in 1988. Although none of these materials have been published either in English or German, a summary of the contents of Otto's unpublished writings on ethics was produced by Otto's colleague at Marburg, Georg Wünsch, shortly after Otto's death. Cf. Georg Wünsch, "Grundriss und Grundfragen der theologischen Ethik Rudolf Ottos," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 19 (1938), 46-70. The contents of Otto's lectures on Glaubenslehre are discussed in two articles by Reinhard Schinzer, "Das Religiöse Apriori in Rudolf Ottos Werk," Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 11 (1969), 189-207; and "Wert und Sein in Rudolf Ottos Gotteslehre," Kerygma und Dogma 16 (January/March 1970), 1-31.

Review of Selected Literature

11

One aspect of Otto's thought which, until recently, remained almost entirely ignored in previous discussions of his work are the ideas contained in his later essays on ethics and the relationship between ethics and religion, which were intended to be delivered as the Gifford Lectures in 1933.31 Otto's published essays on ethics were collected, edited and reissued in German with an introduction written by Jack Stewart Boozer in 1981.32 These essays, together with Otto's unpublished lecture notes on theological ethics, constitute a distinct stage in the development of his thought. They are important because of the light they shed both on his earlier, more familiar views, and on his relationship to other philosophical developments during this period. Above all, they are helpful for recognizing the centrality of the concept of value (Wert) in Das Heilige and in Otto's later thought, as well as Otto's relationship to the phenomenological ethics of value (Wertethik) developed by Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann. The influence of Scheler and Hartmann on Otto's later thought was observed long ago by Joachim Wach, but the clue that Wach's observation offered for the clarification of Otto's relationship to phenomenology was never taken up. 33 Until a few years ago, Otto's ethical writings remained inaccessible to non-German readers. Alles' collection of Otto's Social and Autobiographical Essays includes translations of two of the later essays on ethics. A different translation of one of these essays appears as an appendix to Melissa Raphael's book, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (1997).34 Aside from Boozer's introduction to the Aufsätze zur Ethik, and an essay written by Otto's Marburg colleague, Georg Wünsch, shortly after his death, the only sustained discussion of Otto's attempt to develop his own ethics of value (Wertethik) is to be found in the chapter devoted to Otto in Hartmut Kress' study, Ethische Werte und der Gottesgedanke (1990).35 Melissa Raphael's book certainly presents a new perspective on Das Heilige. Raphael's primary concern is to appropriate Otto's discussion of the holy for the project of developing an emancipatory, feminist theology at the 31

32

33

Otto was forced to forego this invitation due to illness. Cf. Otto, Aufsätze by Jack Stewart Boozer (Munich: Beck, 1981), p. 11.

zur Ethik, ed.

Ibid. Joachim Wach, Types of Religious Experience Christian and Non-Christian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 222. "Freedom and Necessity," trans, by Thorsten Moritz in Melissa Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 210-21. The title, "Freiheit und Notwendigkeit" is not Otto's, but was given to the essay by Theodor Siegfried, who first published it after Otto's death, in 1940. Otto's original title is "Autonomie der Werte und Theonomie" ("Autonomy of Values and Tneonomy"). Cf. Otto, Aufsätze zur Ethik, pp. 215-26. Raphael appears to have been unfamiliar with Boozer's collection of Otto's essays on ethics at the time of the publication of her book on Otto. Hartmut Kress, Ethische Werte und der Gottesgedanke: Probleme und Perspektiven des neuzeitlichen Wertbegriffs (Stuttgart/Berlin/Cologne: Kohlhammer, 1990), pp. 113-38.

12

Introduction

end of the twentieth century. It is to this end that she makes use of Otto's very last essay, "Autonomie der Werte und Theonomie," in which Otto conceives of God as the primordial value (Urwert) underlying the universe. 36 Raphael identifies Otto's discussion of theonomy as a possible point of departure for a prophetic religious discourse that would be capable of responding to today's pressing ecological and political concerns. In contrast to other feminist thinkers who have criticized the ideological implications of the sacred-profane dichotomy, 37 Raphael seeks to reclaim this distinction as a mark of prophetic opposition to oppressive social structures. The holiness of God, and by extension all that he has created with the intention that it should be holy as he is holy, means that far from devaluing creation, an Ottonian model of the holy can (re)sacralize creation as having a value that is 'wholly other' to those mercantile values which the profane 'world' attributes to it.

Raphael's book contains the only sustained discussion of Otto's ethical ideas in English to date, and it suggests how those ideas might be of continuing interest to theologians. However, Raphael considers only one of Otto's essays on ethics at length, and overlooks the other five, first published in the 1930's, which are crucial for understanding how the concept of value is developed in Otto's later thought. Raphael also appears to be unaware of the relationship between Otto's ethics of value (Wertethik) and other discussions centered around the concept of value taking place among his contemporaries. Because Raphael's purpose is not simply to interpret Otto, but rather to discover in his discussion of the holy resources for the development of her own constructive theological proposals, it would be missing the point to suggest that she has taken Otto's views out of context or failed to examine some of the philosophical difficulties surrounding his claims for the existence of "objective values." Furthermore, this is not the place to comment on Raphael's own theological project, except to say that it represents one way in which Otto's mature theological position might continue to be relevant to contemporary discussions in that field. However, other aspects of Raphael's discussion do bear directly upon to the scope of the present study. Aside from drawing attention to Otto's later work in ethics, Raphael's book also succeeds in raising a number of issues with regard to Otto that have received too little attention in the past. Raphael locates Das Heilige within the context of the "efflorescence of modernism" during the years leading up to the First World War, and she emphasizes the affinity that Otto's book 36

The concept of value (Wert) in Otto's later thought is discussed in Chapter Six of the present study. Cf. Victoria Lee Erickson, Where Silence Speaks: Feminism, Social Theory and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), esp. pp. 11-28, 165-88. Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, p. 190.

Review of Selected Literature

shares with other characteristic developments of this period, including the modernist movement in literature and music, the rise of psychoanalysis and the emphasis upon the irrational in avant-garde movements like Dadaism and Surrealism. She argues that "in many ways The Idea of the Holy - an introverted, fragmentary text, dislocated from the continuities of a single tradition and permeated by a sense of crisis - exemplifies and contributed to what is sometimes called the romantic period of modernism." 39 In fact, the continuing theological relevance that Raphael sees in Das Heilige is directly related to the ambivalence she finds expressed in that work toward the de-sacralizing impetus of modernity. But this ambivalence is not only pertinent to the concerns of theologians whose work is informed by postmodernist lines of thought. Raphael's observation is also of fundamental importance for those interested in determining the significance of Das Heilige's widespread appeal as an event in the religious history of the twentieth century. And it is precisely in relation to this task that the limitation of the strategy, employed by previous commentators, of approaching Das Heilige strictly in terms of the internal development of Otto's thinking is most clearly evident. Previous discussions of Otto have failed to take sufficient notice of a puzzling disjunction between the theological agenda developed in Otto's earlier writings and the remarkable impact of Das Heilige among Otto's contemporaries. Read in relation to his earlier work, Das Heilige appears as the culmination of Otto's attempt to re-conceive modern theology as a normative science of religion grounded in a Kantian-Friesian philosophical critique of religious experience. However one may finally choose to make sense of the widespread popular appeal of Das Heilige, one thing is certain: the success of Otto's book does not indicate an endorsement of his NeoFriesian theological agenda (described in the following chapters), which generally did not impress Otto's contemporaries any more than it has his more recent critics. In fact, the more one comes to appreciate the manner in which Otto's argument in Das Heilige builds upon his earlier work, the more difficult it becomes to avoid the impression that the tremendous success of Das Heilige was a fortuitous accident. Otto himself is said to have been surprised by having been catapulted overnight into international notoriety. And yet, the fact remains that for some reason Das Heilige struck a chord among twentieth-century readers as few works in academic theology before or since have succeeded in doing. There are not many works written in that century that can justifiably be called religious classics; but this is certainly one of them. In order to account for the widespread appeal of Otto's evocation of the numinous, one must look beyond the theological argument developed in Das Heilige, in order to recognize how Otto succeeded in articulating religious impulses far more widespread and compelling than his proposal for 39

Ibid., p. 4.

14

Introduction

a theological science of religion has proven to be. To the extent that the following study seeks to relate Otto's ideas to broader trends in twentiethcentury culture, Das Heilige's status as a modern religious classic figures more prominently in the following pages than it has in previous discussions of Otto's work. In the final chapter of this study, the popularity of Das Heilige itself becomes an occasion for asking what Otto's book may have to teach us about the nature of religious subjectivity in the age of Freud, Weber, Kafka and Expressionism. Since the publication of Almond's study in 1984, continuing interest in Otto among English-speaking scholars has been reflected in a consistent stream of articles in which Otto's ideas have been discussed from a variety of perspectives. 40 Foremost among these are the concerns of analytical philosophers interested in the epistemological status of religious experience. Since Steven Katz made his "plea for the recognition of differences" in the academic study of mysticism, increasing emphasis has been placed upon the role of language and inherited conceptual frameworks in the mediation of religious experience.41 Katz's basic contention is that "There are no pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences. Neither mystical experience nor more ordinary forms of experience give any indication, or any grounds for believing, that they are unmediated." 42 Katz' argument is directed primarily against earlier discussions of mysticism that sought to identify an "ineffable," pre-linguistic core of mystical experience, which was assumed to be the same in all religions, although it is subject to various forms of theological (or, as in the case of Buddhism, a-theological) interpretation. Otto is identified by Katz and others as a representative of this earlier approach. As such, he is accused of having posited, either naively or else for apologetic reasons, the existence or presence of an underlying, ineffable "X" allegedly apprehended by the religious subject prior to the application of the interpretive framework of religious concepts transmitted by the specific tradition in which that subject stands. 40

These include Lome Dawson, "Otto and Freud on the Uncanny and Beyond," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57 (1989), 283-311; Robin Minney, "The Development of Otto's Thought 1898-1917: From Luther's View of the Holy Spirit to The Holy," Religious Studies 26 (1990), 505-24; Gregory D. Alles, "Rudolf Otto and the Politics of Utopia," Religion 21 (1991), 235-56; Leon Schlamm, "Rudolf Otto and Mystical Experience," Religious Studies 27 (1991), 389-98; also Schlamm, "Numinous Experience and Religious Language," Religious Studies 28 (1992), 533-51; Lynn Poland, "The Idea of the Holy and the History of the Sublime," The Journal of Religion 72:2 (April 1992), 175-97; and L. Philip Barnes, "Rudolf Otto and the Limits of Religious Description," Religious Studies 30 (1994), 219-30. Steven T. Katz, "Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism," Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. by Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 25. Ibid., p. 27.

Review of Selected Literature

15

There is some justification to this line of criticism as it applies to Otto. It seems pointless to deny, for example, that Otto's discussion of non-Christian religions, both in Das Heilige and in other works, tends to be biased by his own theological orientation. It is also true that Otto sometimes imposes interpretive categories with historically specific theological connotations upon religious phenomena to which they do not properly apply. At the same time, the criticisms of Otto that are expressed in these debates occasionally distort the nature of the claims that Otto actually makes. Consider the following example. In his discussion of the fascinans-moment of the numinous in Das Heilige, Otto suggests that experiences analogous to the Christian experience of grace and rebirth can be found in all the major religions of the world. And here too the completely irrational and totally unique nature of the experience of bliss is immediately noticeable. Certainly, it is in its specific nature very multifarious and completely different from what is experienced in Christianity. However, in terms of the intensity of the experience, it is everywhere rather similar, is everywhere an absolute fascinans, is everywhere a 'salvation,' which, in contrast to all that is 'naturally' sayable or comparable, is, or clearly exhibits traces of, 'exaltation.'

Clearly, the term "salvation" (Heil), which Otto applies (in quotation marks) indiscriminately to all major religions, has a specific meaning in Christian theological discourse, and is likely to be misleading when used to designate the religious aspirations of Buddhists, Muslims or Hindus. Furthermore, it is questionable whether the Christian idea of salvation itself is capable of being understood exclusively or even primarily as a kind of heightened state of religious awareness, since, in the history of Christianity, it has often been understood otherwise. Be that as it may, the point of Otto's remark is not that the same unmediated experience of the divine is to be found in all major religious traditions. In fact, Otto explicitly acknowledges that non-Christian forms of religious experience are "completely different" from Christian ones. His claim is that, despite important differences in the character of the religious experiences that may be observed in particular historical traditions, certain experiences from different traditions exhibit a similarity that is sufficient for grouping them together and distinguishing them from other kinds of experience that are not religious (i.e. do not exhibit any numinous quality). 43 "Und immer ist auch hier das ganz Irrationale und das ganz Art-besondere der Beseligung unmittelbar bemerkbar. Es ist zwar in seinem Wie sehr mannigfach und durchaus verschieden von dem im Christentum erlebten, ist aber hinsichtlich der Intensität des Erlebens überall ziemlich gleich, ist überall ein fascinans schlechthin, ist überall ein 'Heil' das, gegen alles 'natürlich' Sagbare und Vergleichbare gehalten, ein 'Überschwengliches' ist oder starke Spuren davon in sich hat" (DH 51).

16

Introduction

Furthermore, in distinguishing the manner in which religious experience is expressed from "all that is 'naturally' sayable," Otto's point is not, as some commentators have suggested, to consign religious experience to an ineffable, private sphere that is inaccessible to description and analysis, and therefore immune from criticism. To the degree that the remarks cited above do bear upon recent philosophical discussions of the nature of religious language, it might be more helpful to think of the point of them as being that the language used to describe a state of religious exaltation is rather different from the language used to describe more ordinary occurrences. If one were interested in relating Otto's views to the discussions of contemporary AngloAmerican religious epistemologists, one would perhaps do better to suggest that Otto was aware that talk about religious experience makes use of a different "language-game" than the one used to talk about physical objects, or even the objects of speculative metaphysics. Often, however, the tendency among analytic philosophers of religion to make Otto's ideas answerable to their own philosophical concerns exhibits the same lack of hermeneutical discretion of which Otto himself is accused. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in L. Philip Barnes' article, "Rudolf Otto and the Limits of Religious Description." Barnes' claim that Otto regards religious knowledge as being "essentially non-conceptual in form" suggests a lack of familiarity with the philosophical views underlying Otto's argument in Das Heiliget More to the point, Barne's contention that Otto regards the non-rational aspect of the holy as being "beyond description and communication" attests to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the argument developed in Das Heilige itself. In fact, the first half of Otto's book is nothing but a description of the non-rational aspect of the holy, which Otto attempts to isolate by means of an analysis of the religious texts, practices, prayers, hymns and other expressions of religious experience in which he finds it "communicated." By wrenching Otto's views out of the context in which they were developed, and by focusing exclusively upon those passages in which Otto emphasizes that the feeling of the numinous must be experienced directly in order to be understood, Barnes (and others who express similar criticisms of Otto) simply ignores his broader argument. Despite his emphasis upon direct experience, the objects of Otto's analyses in Das Heilige are not his own or 44

Barnes, "Otto and the Limits of Religious Description," p. 221. These views are discussed in Chapter Two of this study. Otto's epistemological claims for religious feeling in Das Heilige (1917) presuppose the framework developed in his earlier book, Kantisch-Fries'sehe Religionsphilosophie (1909). In fact, Otto emphasizes the role of conceptual knowledge in theology, and his claim that religious feeling includes a cognitive component depends upon this emphasis. This is not to say that Otto's religious epistemology is beyond criticism, but only that some of Otto's critics have not taken the trouble to understand his arguments properly.

Review of Selected Literature

1'

anyone else's "intensely private" feelings. In attempting to illustrate the numinous dimension of the holy, Otto draws upon a wide (although admittedly selective) range of texts spanning the course of the history of religions. To that extent, Otto's discussion of the numinous may be said to incorporate a descriptive, "empirical" argument that is distinct from the epistemological claims that he makes for numinous experience, however those may be understood. While this distinction was made by a number of early critics who were impressed by Otto's descriptions of religious experience, even though they remained skeptical of his claims for the religious a priori, it has been ignored by many of his more recent commentators. A more interesting take on Das Heilige is suggested by Lynn Poland in her article, "The Idea of the Holy and the History of the Sublime." By considering Das Heilige as an expression of the sublime in literature, Poland examines the manner in which absence functions in Otto's text to add rhetorical force to his of construction of numinous experience. Her analysis draws upon discussions of the sublime carried out by literary theorists in recent decades in connection with the postmodern emphasis upon the limits of representation. 45 Specifically, Poland undertakes "first, to reflect on the functions of terror in Otto's idea of the holy, and second, to examine his text's rhetorical power." 46 Ultimately, Poland's article presents a demystifying account of Das Heilige that seeks to explain the enduring attraction of Otto's book in terms of a theory of rhetoric informed by French semiotics. Poland's attempt to relate Otto's ideas to broader currents in modern aesthetic theory is both consistent with the theoretical underpinnings of Otto's discussion of the numinous, and instructive in its own right. Clearly, Otto's effort to distinguish the numinous as a religious category of value depends heavily upon a number of analogies that he draws between religious and aesthetic forms of experience and the kinds of judgments that each of them entail. Furthermore, several themes addressed by Poland - most notably her interpretation of the prevalence of the sublime in modern literature as a response to "a culture's anxiety at the waning authority and effectiveness of the Christian economy" 47 - are consistent with the interpretation of Das Heilige that is developed in the final chapter of this study. Nevertheless, the semiotic theory employed by Poland does not provide a satisfying answer to the historical question raised by the tremendous resonance that Otto's ideas have produced among twentieth-century readers. Such an answer requires looking beyond the rhetorical structure of Otto's text to 45

47

Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans, by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford Universtiy Press, 1994). Poland, "The Idea of the Holy and the History of the Sublime," p. 176. Ibid., p. 181.

18

Introduction

consider the historical context within which his ideas were able to produce such a profound resonance. Even less satisfying in this respect is Donald Capps' argument in Men, Religion, and Melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson,48 Capps' book proposes two theses in relation to these four figures, whom he regards as classical representatives of the psychology of religion. The first of these theses is that the interest in the psychology of religion exhibited by each of these authors was motivated by a personal struggle with melancholy (a term that Capps employs in the sense of "chronic depression"). 49 The second thesis is that the melancholic affliction from which they suffered can be traced to an oedipal crisis in each author's childhood. "The sadness, despair, and rage characteristic of melancholy have an object, and in these four cases this object is the author's mother." 50 In relation to Das Heilige, Capps takes his task to be "to penetrate the mystery of Otto's childhood" 51 as it is expressed in Otto's discussion of the numinous. In order to make up for the lack of information about Otto's childhood, Capp's suggests that "the missing particulars may be inferred from the child-rearing manuals that would have been available to Otto's mother." 52 On the basis of such sparse evidence as the fact that Otto's father died when he was young, and that he once referred to the Lutheran piety into which he was raised as having been very strict, Capps finds it reasonable to conclude not only that Otto was beaten as a child, but that Otto also found these beatings to be "strangely exhilarating, perhaps sexually stimulating, particularly if they were the only occasions on which his mother became emotionally involved in what transpired between them." 53 Capps' discussion of Otto is rich in insights that are likely to escape the untrained psychobiographer, who must be content to examine Otto's ideas historically, and is not free to speculate about the details of Otto's Oedipus complex. Unfortunately, in terms of the aims of the present study, which attempts to take seriously the widespread popularity of Otto's discussion of the holy, Capps' argument is not very illuminating. While Capps' attempt to determine Otto's private motivation for writing Das Heilige does not bear directly upon the scope of the present study, the theme of melancholy is nevertheless touched upon in the final chapter, albeit in a different sense than the one employed by Capps. His identification of Das Heilige as a melancholic text arises out of his attempt to decipher "the

( N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Capps, Men, Religion and Melancholy, p. 3. 50 51 52 53

Ibid. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 98.

Purpose and Scope of the Present Study

19

sense of Ί ' " in Otto's book, "to discern the ways in which the author locates himself in the text." 54 It is as a result of this attempt that Capps comes to recognize in Otto's discussion of the holy as an a priori category an expression of Otto's own "repressed personal prehistory." 55 Like Capps, I too have sought to identify the kind of religious subjectivity that comes to expression in Das Heilige. However, the "sense of Ί ' " that concerns me, especially in the last chapter, is not Otto's own. My point of departure is rather the unique impact of Das Heilige upon the "Western cultivated public" (Eliade), and the religious subjectivity that interests me belongs to "the mind of the twentieth century" in which Otto's book was able to arouse such an "immediate and lasting response" (Sharpe). It is precisely by virtue of its widespread popular appeal that Das Heilige recommends itself as an opportunity for reflecting upon the kind of readership that Otto's ideas attracted, and the significance of this attraction for understanding the religious impulses and concerns of that readership. The diagnosis proposed in the following pages is not psychological, but historical.

III. Purpose and Scope of the Present Study Having rendered in broad strokes some of the recent discussions of Otto from which I have benefited, and to which the following study is intended in some measure to respond, I would like at this point to offer a more positive indication of its trajectory. This book seeks to broaden the framework within which Otto's ideas have generally been understood in the past by proposing an interpretation of Das Heilige in relation to the overall development of Otto's thought, and to certain other intellectual trends in Germany before and after the First World War. One of the basic assumptions from which the following study proceeds is that Das Heilige demands our attention by virtue of its unique status as a twentieth-century religious classic. It demands first of all to be understood in its own right, i.e. as a text written by an author living within a particular historical horizon, informed by a specific set of interests and presuppositions that have shaped his approach to the matter at hand, and which are likely to be different from our own. Viewed in relation to Otto's previous writings, Das Heilige appears as the culmination of the program for a theological science of religion that had already begun to take shape in Otto's centennial edition of Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion in 1899. In terms of its underlying methodological orientation, Das Heilige is a work of liberal theology that sought to address a number of concerns facing Protestant theologians in Germany around the turn of the century. 54 55

Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 106.

20

Introduction

These theologians were primarily interested in reconciling the normative claims of Christianity with the results of modern historical research and the modern scientific worldview. The first four chapters of this study, taken together, follow the development of Otto's theological program and the manner of its execution. A better understanding of the theological project underlying Otto's book, however, does not help to account for the tremendous impact of his ideas. In fact, the type of approach to philosophy and theology employed by Otto began to be widely criticized among his contemporaries, precisely during the period when Otto's book enjoyed its greatest popularity. Thus, the reason why Otto's discussion of the holy was able to resonate so profoundly must be sought elsewhere. It has been suggested by some commentators that Das Heilige is best regarded as one manifestation of a broader irrationalist trend in German thought after the First World War, and that the success of Otto's ideas was due to the prevalent sense of crisis during these years. Although there is a certain plausibility to this account, in the end it fails as an explanation for the impact of Otto's book, which remained popular long after the War, not only in Germany, but in a number of other countries as well, particularly England and the United States. Furthermore, attempting to identify Otto too closely with his "irrationalist" contemporaries involves a misrepresentation his intentions. This is especially apparent in light of the development of the concept of value in Otto's later thought, particularly in his essays and lectures on ethics and the relation between ethics and religion. A better explanation of the success of Das Heilige is that Otto succeeded in articulating certain widely held religious concerns characteristic of religious subjectivity among the educated classes during a period extending roughly from the end of the First World War until shortly after the Second. He succeeded, in particular, in describing a dimension of religious experience that has become increasingly rare in the modern world because the intellectual and social conditions of modernity are not conducive to the cultivation of this kind of experience. By identifying the primary concerns that shaped Otto's approach to religion, as well as some of the individual thinkers and schools to which he responded, the opening chapters suggest how Otto sought to address the impasse facing Protestant theologians at the turn of the twentieth century. They also attempt to clarify Otto's conception of the nature and task of theology in relation to philosophy and the academic study of religion (Religionswissenschaft). In 1899, Otto published a centennial edition of Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion, with an introduction, textual commentary and epilogue, which shaped his understanding of the nature of religion and his approach to its investigation. Chapter One examines Otto's reception of Schleiermacher within the context of a broader revival of interest in the philosophy of religion and in Schleiermacher studies among Protestant theologians around the turn of the century. For these theologians, modern

Purpose and Scope of the Present Study

21

theology could only take the form of a normative science of religion capable of securing the autonomy of religious experience against various kinds of naturalistic reductionism, and of identifying criteria for assessing the validity of Christianity in relation to other historical religions. The Speeches offered to Otto the blueprint for such a discipline, and their influence is crucial for understanding the nature of Otto's argument in Das Heilige. This chapter also discusses Otto's reasons for preferring the original edition of the Speeches (1799), and the implications of this preference for understanding his mature views. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Otto came to be associated with a revival of the early nineteenth-century idealist philosopher, Jakob Friedrich Fries, being led at that time by his colleague at Göttingen, Leonard Nelson. Fries' philosophy reproduces the structure and much of the vocabulary of Kant's philosophy, but relies upon Fries' "anthropological method" instead of the Kantian transcendental deduction. Fries' theory of Ahndung (aesthetico-religious premonition) has its source in Kant's discussion of aesthetic judgment in the Third Critique. It suggested to Otto a way of subsuming Schleiermacher's definition of religion as "intuition and feeling of the universe" within the structure of "the Critical Philosophy," thereby appearing to provide a more secure epistemological foundation for the theological science of religion that he intended to develop. The nineteenthcentury biblical scholar and theologian, W. M. L. DeWette (a colleague of Schleiermacher's at the University of Berlin), developed a theory of religious symbolism based on Kantian and Friesian ideas, which is an important source of Otto's theory of the religious a priori, ideograms, and divination in Das Heilige. De Wette's theory was meant to account for the profound impression produced by powerful religious personalities upon their followers, without appealing to supernatural causes. The Kantian-Friesian framework underlying Otto's argument in Das Heilige is discussed in Chapter Two. Chapter Three seeks to clarify Otto's conception of the psychology of religion and the history of religion in relation to broader debates within the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) being carried out in Germany at this time. In 1910, Otto published a lengthy review of Wilhelm Wundt's Völkerpsychologie, a work in which Wundt had sought to explain the origin of myth and religion (as well as language, morality and human culture generally) by extending the principles of empirical psychology to the investigation of prehistoric social groups. Otto rejects Wundt's explanatory psychological theory, and recommends instead an analysis of religious feeling that is similar in certain respects to the descriptive and analytical psychology (beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie) proposed as a foundation for the human sciences by Wilhelm Dilthey (to whom Otto's Schleiermacher book is dedicated). Otto's conception of psychology is rather different from the one that came to predominate within that discipline in the course of the twentieth

22

Introduction

century, and this difference poses an obstacle to the proper understanding of his discussion of the numinous. Furthermore, Otto's conception of the history of religion is self-consciously opposed to a strictly empirical approach, which, he argues, is incapable of addressing the question of the meaning of religious experience. This chapter also attempts to locate Otto's position in relation to the search for the origin of religion being carried out at this time among scholars in a variety of fields. Chapter Four presents an interpretation of Das Heilige in light of the preceding discussion. Many readers of Das Heilige over the years have complained that, beneath such evocative phrases as mysterium tremendum, Otto's argument is inconsistent and unintelligible at crucial points, if not intentionally obscurantist. While there is much about Otto's argument that remains opaque, and some that is almost embarrassingly idiosyncratic, it is nevertheless possible to identify an underlying coherence, the structure of which is more complex than has generally been recognized. In the early chapters of Das Heilige, Otto undertakes an "examination and minute analysis of the moments and psychological states of solemn worship and transport" in order to isolate what is distinctively religious about them. He appears to want to claim that it is possible, by means of an analysis of religious states of mind, to produce knowledge of the religious object to which they are intentionally related. In fact, Otto's epistemological thesis is much more complex than this. Ultimately, Otto claims that the capacity to recognize the holy in its appearances (the sensus numinis) undergoes a process of education in the course of history, similar to the education of taste (the sensus communis) described by Kant in the Third Critique, whereby "false" applications of the category of the holy are gradually recognized and rejected. In this way, the religious a priori is meant to serve as a standard for making normative distinctions in the history of religion. Das Heilige thus proposes a solution to the theological impasse produced by historicism. Otto wants to show, without appealing to supernatural causality, 1) that Christ is the supreme manifestation of the holy, 2) that the experience of Christ as a revelation of the holy is still possible for modern persons, 3) that the religious significance of Christ is the same today as it was for the original Christian community, and 4) that these conclusions are immune to "the accidental fluctuations of exegetical results and the torment of historical justifications." The success of Das Heilige in Germany after World War One was tremendous, and the book continued to attract widespread attention for several decades. Nevertheless, in relation to the tumultuous transitions that shaped German intellectual life during these years, the theological program developed in Das Heilige appears rather passé. Several eyewitness reports from this period indicate that Otto's ideas were regarded by members of a younger generation of philosophers and theologians as being out of touch with the

Purpose and Scope of the Present Study

times (unzeitgemäss). The reason why Otto's book should have been so popular is thus not immediately apparent. It has been suggested that Otto's ideas are best understood as part of a broader irrationalist trend in Germany that gained momentum during the years after the War. 56 Chapter Five explores this possibility by examining the affinity between Das Heilige and some of the themes that defined this trend. The prominence of variations of the terms Erlebnis (experience), Leben (life) and lebendig (living or alive) in Otto's text is discussed in relation to the widespread currency of these terms in Germany at this time, and the various meanings attached to them. A number of Dionysian themes are identified in Das Heilige and discussed in relation to a popular strain of life-philosophy inspired by Nietzsche, as well as the "new mysticism" promulgated by the influential publisher, Eugen Diederichs. It is argued that Otto's ideas bear a certain affinity to these "irrationalist" trends, but that his views must also be distinguished from them in certain important respects. Otto's explicit criticism of Nietzsche and Ludwig Klages from his unpublished lectures on ethics from the academic year 1933-34 is relevant in this context. Das Heilige was regarded by many of Otto's contemporaries as a pioneering work in the phenomenology of religion, even though there is no evidence of Otto's having been influenced by phenomenology prior to its publication. Chapter Six begins by considering Edmund Husserl's response to Das Heilige, contained in a private letter written to Otto in 1919. It also discusses Max Scheler's response, contained in his book, Vom Ewigen im Menschen (Eng., On the Eternal in Man), and relates it to Scheler's criticism of Kantian ethical formalism and his attempt to develop a phenomenological ethics of value {Wertethik). Scheler's ideas are important for helping to clarify Otto's relationship to phenomenology, and also because Otto's own ethical views are developed partially in response to Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann. This chapter goes on to discuss Otto's theory of value, and his approach to ethics, on the basis of lecture notes from the early 1930's, as well as several essays published during the same period, originally intended to be delivered as the Gifford Lectures. Otto's attempt to develop a non-formal ethics of value is examined in relation to a broader discussion of the concept of value and the "crisis of values" that began around the turn of the century and became especially pronounced after the War. The conception of the relationship between ethics and religion in Otto's later thought is addressed, as are the implications of his later thought for the interpretation of his earlier, more familiar views. 6

Cf. Rainer Flasche, "Der Irrationalismus in der Religionswissenschaft und dessen Begründung in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen," Religionswissenschaft und Kulturkritik, ed. by Hans G. Kippenberg and Brigitte Luchesi (Marburg: Diagonal, 1991), pp. 243-57.

24

Introduction

In the final chapter of this study, I attempt to move beyond previous discussions of Otto by developing an interpretation of Das Heilige as a distinctively modern religious classic. This is done, first of all, by examining the concept of modernity as it arises both explicitly and implicitly in Otto's work. Otto's entire approach to religion is determined by his recognition that modernity involves a decisive break with the uncritical acceptance of religious authority that has characterized religion throughout most of its history. The task of modern theology, for Otto, is to conduct a purification of traditional religion, which will distinguish the essential from the inessential, both in religion generally, and in Christianity in particular, and will reconcile what is essential to both with the demands of modern intellectual life. As an advocate of this kind of approach to theology, Otto appears confident in the ability of religion to adapt itself to the conditions of modernity. Nevertheless, Otto's own argument suggests that what is essential to religion (i.e. the numinous) is something that is threatened by the culture of modernity, and by the forms of religiosity that tend to predominate within it. To that extent, Das Heilige may be understood as a response to the "disenchantment of the world" (Entzauberung der Welt) famously identified by Max Weber as the principle tendency of scientific rationalism and the routinization of daily life - a process which, in Ottonian terms, coincides with the marginalization of the numinous. A close reading of Das Heilige together with other of Otto's writings suggests that he himself was aware of this threat to the numinous dimension of religion, and that this awareness functions to undermine his ostensible confidence in the prospects for a rehabilitation of the numinous. For Otto, the disillusioned (entnaivisierte) culture of the twentieth century is an obstacle to the recognition of the holy, and he is aware that most modern persons can regard the charismatic fount of true religion only as something that belongs to "a bygone age." Thus, the numinous origin of religion invoked by Otto on the pages of Das Heilige is one that remains ultimately irretrievable for the modern religious subject. However, this is not to suggest that Das Heilige ought to be regarded simply as an exercise in nostalgia undertaken by one who, in Weber's words, "cannot bear the fate of the times like a man." 57 Otto's book is important for understanding the religious situation among the educated classes in Germany and other industrialized nations during the early and middle part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the recognition of the place occupied by Das Heilige in relation to broader trends in the religious history of modernity reveals the extent to which the emergence and development of the discipline called "history of

57

Max Weber, "Wissenschaft als Beruf," Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, by Johannes Winckelmann, 7th ed. (Mohr/Siebeck, 1988), p. 612.

ed.

Hermeneutical Remarks

25

religions" recapitulates dynamics that extend far back into the religious history of the West.

IV. Hermeneutical Remarks The preliminary goal of this study is to develop an interpretation of Otto's mature theory of religion as it is formulated in Das Heilige. In attempting to do so, it will be helpful to gain some sense of the central intellectual concerns underlying Otto's argument, which are neither explicitly stated, nor immediately apparent in Das Heilige itself. That Otto's intentions stand in need of some clarification is due both to the inherent complexity of his argument, and to the peculiar location of Das Heilige at the intersection of three disciplines: theology, philosophy and Religionswissenschaft,5S Because Otto's influence has been felt primarily within the field of religious studies and among the general reading public, the specifically theological concerns underlying Das Heilige have sometimes gone unnoticed, or else they have not been adequately understood. In the following remarks, written several years after the publication of Das Heilige, Otto sought to clarify the purpose of his investigation of the holy: The leading interest of our investigation was neither the interest of the history of religion (ein religionsgeschichtliches), nor that of the psychology of religion (ein religionspsychologisches), but a theological and admittedly the Christian theological one: namely, by means of an investigation of the holy and its irrational as well as its rational contents, and their combinations and fusions, to prepare ourselves for a sharper and better comprehension of the biblical and especially the N e w Testament experience of God. 5 9

These remarks suggest that our interpretation of Das Heilige, and of Otto's work as a whole, will have to take into consideration the Christian theological interest underlying his investigation of religious experience. For some scholars of religion, the fact that Otto's investigation of the holy is theologically motivated has provided a sufficient warrant for disqualifying its relevance to the impartial or scientific study of religion. The fact that someone maintains "a theological interest," it would seem, is an a priori justification for disregarded anything they might have to say. The aim of the present investigation is not to defend Otto against such critics. Our first task 58

59

On this point, see Georg Pfleiderer, Theologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft: Studien zum Religionsbegriff bei Georg Wobbermin, Rudolf Otto, Heinrich Scholz und Max Scheler (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1992), pp. 105-06; also Wach, Types of Religious Experience, p. 209. Rudolf Otto, Sünde und Urschuld (Munich: Beck, 1932), p. 136. Hereafter cited as "SU." The emphasis is Otto's.

26

Introduction

is simply to understand Otto as far as possible on his own terms. In attempting to do so, the recognition that Otto's primary concern in writing Das Heilige was a theological one does not by itself take us very far. It remains unclear how Otto conceives the nature and goal of theology, and what place Das Heilige is meant to occupy in relation to his theological project as a whole. In the passage quoted above, Otto does not say that Das Heilige itself is or contains a theology, but only that his "leading interest" in writing the book was theological. He emphasizes the preparatory nature of his investigation of the holy. Furthermore, in drawing attention to his underlying theological concern, Otto does not renounce or deny his interest in the history and psychology of religion. He wants only to emphasize that this was neither his only, nor his primary, concern. Otto's remarks suggest that Das Heilige was conceived as part of a larger project, the completion of which may be something yet to come. Thus, to say that Das Heilige is a theological text will not be meaningful until its relation to this larger project has been determined. At the very least, these remarks suffice to indicate that, in attempting to assess the nature of Otto's argument in Das Heilige, a certain degree of hermeneutical discretion may be in order. This kind of discretion has not always been exercised by those who are in a hurry to condemn Otto. Because Otto was motivated by theological concerns, he is said to have produced an analysis of religion that is founded upon untenable theological presuppositions that have subsequently exercised a pernicious influence upon the field of religious studies. By failing to distinguish between the theological and the scientific approach to religion, and by introducing a metaphysically loaded category of interpretation (the numinous), Otto is accused of having intentionally muddied the waters of impartial inquiry in order to "protect" religion from critical scrutiny.60 Aside from the question of whether or not an impartial or presuppositionless investigation of religion is possible in any case, this line of argument suffers from the defect of imposing upon Otto's discussion of the holy a number of presuppositions that Otto himself clearly did not share. Far from contributing to a better understanding of Otto's views, this way of approaching Das Heilige appears rather to inhibit such an understanding insofar as it leaves undetermined the manner in which Otto conceives the relationship between theology, on the one hand, and the philosophy, psychology and history of religion, on the other, and because it simply assumes that since Otto was motivated by theological concerns, the theory of religion presented in Das Heilige is

6

Wayne Proudfoot makes this claim when he writes that "Otto's use of numinous is an example of how one can employ the term to create a sense of mystery and present it as analysis." Proudfoot, Religious Experience, p. 222.

Hermeneutical Remarks

27

theology or is founded upon theological presuppositions (however those may be defined). We might rather expect that, for Otto himself, the claim that his interpretation of religion qualifies as theology was part of the burden of his own argument, rather than something to be assumed at the outset. For the historian of religions, Otto's investigation of the holy is of interest not least of all as an attempt to "do theology" under the intellectual and cultural conditions of modernity. Thus, instead of disqualifying Otto's analysis of religion de jure because of the theological interest underlying it, a more prudent and instructive course will be to determine how Otto conceives the task of theology, and how Das Heilige stands in relation to that conception. Only then will it be possible to determine the sense in which Otto's argument in Das Heilige is a theological one, and whether or not the analysis of religion presented in that work contains insights into the nature of religious phenomena the validity of which is not dependent upon the theological claims that his argument may or may not entail. It is at least logically possible that Otto's argument could fail to qualify as theology in any satisfying sense of that word and still be true (i.e. still have something true and important to say about religion). In developing an interpretation of Otto's ideas in the following pages, the attempt will be made to leave this and other possibilities open. The goal of the first four chapters will be to present the most complete and sympathetic account possible of the development of Otto's approach to religion, and of his argument in Das Heilige.

Chapter One Otto as Heir and Interpreter of Schleiermacher 's Speeches on Religion

I. The Historical Context of Otto's Reception of Schleiermacher The continuity between Das Heilige and Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion has often been observed, and Das Heilige has sometimes been regarded as the Speeches rewritten for the twentieth century. Certainly, the continuity between theses two works is no coincidence. In 1899, eighteen years prior to the publication of Das Heilige, Otto issued a centennial edition of the original version of the Speeches with a new introduction, epilogue, and extensive textual commentary. 1 As the following three chapters will show, the Speeches provided Otto with a blueprint for the theological science of religion that he sought to develop in the years leading up to the publication of Das Heilige. Otto's interpretation of Schleiermacher is important for understanding both the development of Otto's own ideas, as well as the indirect influence of the Speeches upon the subsequent study of religion as it has been mediated by Otto. Before going on to consider Otto's reception of the Speeches in detail, it will be helpful to situate his centennial edition within the broader historical context in which it appeared. The years around the turn of the century bore witness to a renewed concern with the philosophy of religion among Protestant theologians in

Otto published a second edition of his version of the Speeches in 1906, in which the introductory and concluding remarks were substantially expanded. A third edition w a s published in 1913 and a fourth in 1920. Remarkably, Otto's version of the Speeches is still in print. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über Religion: Reden an der Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, ed. by Rudolf Otto, 7th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991). References to Otto's commentary appear in parentheses in the text, indicated by the initials "ÜR," followed by the page number. In most cases I have followed Crouter's translation of the Speeches themselves. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans, and ed. by Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Hereafter cited in the text as "OR."

The Historical Context

29

Germany, and a corresponding resurgence of interest in Schleiermacher. 2 Evidence of this trend can be seen in the publication of several new editions of Schleiermacher's works during this period, as well as an unusual number of studies of various aspects of his thought.3 Heinrich Scholz, a participant in these developments, observed in 1910 that the return to Schleiermacher "is doubtless one of the most important movements in the field of systematic theology since the death of Albrecht Ritschl."4 In constructing the theological program that prevailed in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, Ritschl had tried, as far as possible, to sever the ties between theology and metaphysics. Ritschl's own anti-metaphysical proclivities were consistent with the prevailing intellectual disposition of the age in which he lived. With the collapse of Hegelianism in the middle of the nineteenth century, the positivity of both nature and history had been reasserted. The methodological success of the natural sciences confirmed the pretentiousness of the idealistic philosophy of nature, and this success encouraged the rise of positivism and materialism in philosophy. The historical sciences, which had come into their own during the period of ascendancy of German Idealism, sought increasingly to expel metaphysical presuppositions from the investigation of historical phenomena and to show "what really happened" (Ranke). By the end of the nineteenth century, theologians were faced with two challenges that threatened the very plausibility of their discipline: scientific naturalism, together with the explanatory paradigms inspired by it in psychology and the social sciences, and historicism. In short, the reconciliation between theology and science, or Christianity and modernity, proposed by Hegel no longer appeared tenable. By founding theology upon an independent sphere of religious value judgments, Ritschl had sought to eliminate the possibility of conflict between theology and science, and to obtain an acceptable compromise with the historical disciplines. To be sure, Ritschl himself was an accomplished historian. The result of his extensive investigations into the history of dogma, however, had been to show that the original meaning of Christianity 2

The coincidence of these trends is discussed by Pfleiderer in Theologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft. See also Ferdinand Kattenbusch, Die deutsche evangelische Theologie seit Schleiermacher, 6th ed. (Glessen: Töpelmann, 1934), esp. pp. 91ff. Cf. Johannes Wendland, "Neue Literatur über Schleiermacher," Theologische Rundschau 17(1914), 133-43. Heinrich Scholz, Introduction to Schleiermacher's Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), p. ix. This is a reproduction of the 3rd edition, published in 1910. Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889) is commonly regarded as the most important German theologian of the late nineteenth century. By the time of his death, members of the Ritschlian School occupied most of the important theological chairs in Germany. Cf. James Orr, The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1897).

30

Otto As Heir of Schleiermacher's Speeches

and the simplicity of its gospel had been distorted in the course of its long association with metaphysics. Ritschl's theology emphasized the simplicity of Christian faith and its essentially ethical character. The fundamental message of the Gospel is the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, which Ritschl interpreted along the lines of Kant's idea of a kingdom of moral ends. This simple, ethical proclamation had been obscured in the course of the Church's long association with speculative philosophy. "History of dogma [as conceived by Ritschl] was to show how philosophical, metaphysical and orthodox dogmatics contradicted the Bible and were bankrupt. The history of Protestantism was meant to show the foundations of a theology free from metaphysics in the way Luther thought. Everything else could be left to research to do with it what it liked." 5 In 1891, Otto matriculated at the University of Göttingen, where Ritschl had occupied the chair of systematic theology from 1864 until his death in 1889. Otto remained at Göttingen, first as a student and later as a Privatdozent, until 1914. 6 Although Ritschl's influence was still strongly felt at Göttingen at this time, already by the early 1890's a number of Ritschl's younger students, most of them just a few years older than Otto, had begun to criticize what they took to be Ritschl's narrow biblicism and his inattentiveness to the historical emergence of Christianity in the context of the general religious situation of antiquity. A better understanding of the messianic expectations characteristic of the religious life of Israel during the intertestamental period had shown that Ritschl's ethical interpretation of the Kingdom of God was not consistent with the self-understanding of the early Christian community. Inspired by new developments in philology and historical criticism, these younger theologians were convinced that research into the origins of Christianity should be allowed to follow its course unhindered by dogmatic presuppositions, and that biblical sources should not be given exclusive consideration in the investigation of those origins. They criticized Ritschl and his followers for tacitly according a special status to historical events of doctrinal significance, thereby incorporating presuppositions into their theological method that are not recognized in other disciplines. A theology that is committed to the principles of modern historical knowledge, they argued, cannot regard any particular historical event as absolute. In 5

Ernst Troeltsch, "Half a Century of Theology: A Review," Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, trans, and ed. by Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (Louisville: Westminster, 1977), p. 62. To be precise, Otto began his theological studies at Erlangen in 1888 and studied for one semester at Göttingen in 1889 before deciding to switch permanently in 1891. Cf. Martin Kraatz, "Otto, Karl Louis Rudolph (später: Rudolf)," Neue deutsche Biographie, Vol. XIX, ed. by Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Vol. XIX (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999), pp. 709-11.

The Historical Context

31

opposition to the Ritschlians, these younger theologians insisted that the nature of Christianity could only be established on the basis of a complete and unbiased investigation of the diversity of its historical manifestations, and that such an investigation was in principle no different from the investigation of other historical phenomena. The group of theologians and biblical scholars at Göttingen who shared this commitment to the scientific (wissenschaftliche) investigation of the history of Christianity within the general context of the history of religions came to be known as the religionsgeschichtliche Schule or History-of-Religions School.7 The application of the methods of modern scholarship produced tremendous advances in the understanding of the history of Christianity, but also led to a growing separation between the aims of the historical theological disciplines and the attempt by systematic theologians to produce a normative statement of the Christian faith for practical instruction within the Church. Claude Welch has observed that the central theological challenge at the beginning of the nineteenth century was to determine whether and how theology is possible at all.8 The same challenge was faced by theologians at the turn of the twentieth century, except that, as Ernst Troeltsch remarked, "it is not precisely the same situation; it has, in the meantime, been intensified and become exceedingly complex."9 It is possible to distinguish several factors that contributed to this intensification. Increased insight into the convoluted development of Christianity raised the problem of identifying a single, unitary meaning of the nature (Wesen) of Christianity underlying the 7

The original members of the school, who composed the "little faculty" (kleine Fakultät) at Göttingen from 1888-1893, included Wilhelm Bousset, Ernst Troeltsch, William Wrede, Alfred Rahls and Johannes Weiss. While Otto was personally associated, and maintained long-standing relationships, with individual members of the school (especially Bousset and Heinrich Hackmann), his own work, especially prior to Das Heilige, is generally more philosophical than historical, and is perhaps best thought of as a response to the obstacles that the historical developments associated with this school had presented to the thelogical enterprise. The point is that Otto's understanding o f the nature and task of theology was shaped within this context. Otto's association with members of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule is documented in Gerd Lüdemann and Martin Schröder, eds.. Die religionsgeschichtliche Schule in Göttingen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987). Cf. also Kurt Rudolph, "Religionsgeschichtliche Schule," Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. XII, ed. by Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 293-296; and Anthonie F. Verheule, Wilhelm Bousset: Leben und Werk (Amsterdam: Ton Boiland, 1973), esp. pp. 271-365. The advent of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule is interpreted as a "paradigm shift" in theology (in the Kuhnian sense) by Michael Murrmann-Kahl in Die entzauberte Heilsgeschichte: Der Historismus erobert die Theologie, 1800-1920 (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1992).

8

Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. I ( N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 59. Ernst Troeltsch, "The Dogmatics of the History-of-Religions School" (1913), Religion in History, tr. James Luther Adams and Walter Bense (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), p. 93.

32

Otto As Heir of Schleiermacher's Speeches

variety of its historical forms. Recognition of the diversity of the history of religions in general raised the problem of identifying the place of Christianity within that history, and finding criteria for assessing its validity and truth in relation to other religions. Additionally, the triumph of modern science and the inroads of philosophical positivism threatened to undermine all forms of religious conviction. Thus the possibility of developing a modern Christian theology appeared to be contingent upon the possibility of demonstrating that religion constitutes an autonomous and irreducible region of human experience, which is the source of an independent set of cultural norms. The renewed interest in philosophy of religion and in Schleiermacher among Protestant theologians was motivated by the concern to find a solution to these problems. Troeltsch, who has sometimes been called the "systematician" of the History-of-Religions School, published a series of influential essays around the turn of the century, which, taken together, presented an analysis of the current theological impasse and attempted to indicate the direction in which a solution might be sought. 10 These essays are an important source of insight into the general context in which Otto's thought began to develop. In particular, they indicate that Otto's own recovery of Schleiermacher must be understood within the context of a broader trend among his theological contemporaries.11

10

English translations of several of these essays appear in Adams and Bense, eds., Religion in History, and Morgan and Pye, eds., Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion. Other significant essays of Troeltsch's from this period include "Die Selbständigkeit der Religion," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 5 (1895), 361-436; ibid. 6 (1896), 71110, 167-218; Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1902); and Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie in der Religionswissent ^ schaft (1905), 2nd (photographically reproduced) ed. (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1922). Although the details of Otto's relationship to Troeltsch are not known, the two appear to have been personally acquainted at Göttingen, and shared a life-long mutual friend in Bousset, who later became a member of the Neo-Friesian school with which Otto's name is associated (see Chapter Two). The Rudolf Otto Nachlass at the University Library in Marburg contains four letters from Troeltsch to Otto from 1904-05 (797/800-803), which have been described as among the most "sensitive and understanding" letters to be found in Troeltsch's correspondence. Hans-Georg Drescher, Ernst Troeltsch: Leben und Werk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), p. 219. In them, Troeltsch counsels Otto with regard to vocational concerns and personal doubts experienced in relation to his difficulties in obtaining a professorship. These difficulties are discussed by Almond in Rudolf Otto: An Introduction to his Philosophical Theology, pp. 15-16. In 1914, just prior to moving to Berlin to take over Dilthey's chair in philosophy, Troeltsch favored Otto as successor to his chair of theology at Heidelberg, recognizing Otto as a representative of the same kind of "wissenschaftlich" approach to theology that he himself practiced (although Troeltsch remained critical of Otto's views in other respects). Cf. Troeltsch's

33

The Historical Context

The expression "religionsgeschichtliche Schule," Troeltsch informs us, does not refer to a school in the strict sense of the word, but to a group of theological scholars loosely united in their commitment to the principles of modern historical research. It also refers to a conception of the task of systematic theology that is strictly opposed to traditional attempts to establish theological doctrines on the basis of an appeal to revelation, at least insofar as revelation is thought to entail a supernatural intervention into the course of historical events. In contrast to the dogmatic method, the religionsgeschichtliche method takes as its starting point the recognition "that human religion exists only in multiple individual forms which develop in very complex relations of mutual contact and influence." 12 It emphasizes the importance of the comparative, historical investigation of religion. And it claims that any attempt to develop a Christian theology must begin with the universally valid methods of psychological and historical research. Theology, if it is to be possible in the modern world at all, must take the form of a science of religion that has been subject to philosophical criticism. It must combine the empirical investigation of the facts of religious experience, as these are made available to the psychology and history of religion, with a philosophical critique of religious consciousness that aims to discover its "general laws and graduations of value." The demand for such a science of religion, Troeltsch argued, "was already made by Schleiermacher. . . . The program has never been carried out in Schleiermacher's own sense. It remains to be realized and it is the task of scientific theology today to take it up in complete freedom and with the broadest scientific education." 13 Although Troeltsch was one of the most influential representatives of the attempt to develop a theological science of religion founded upon a philosophy of religion inspired by Schleiermacher, he was by no means its sole author. Motivating this movement was the hope that the solution to the problem of determining a method for modern theology might be found in a reconsideration of Schleiermacher's program. "With increasing frequency one began by going back to the manner in which Schleiermacher had posed the problem, in order to analyze it historically and to test its continuing significance." 14 How, then, had Schleiermacher posed the problem? And what was it about his way of posing the problem that was thought to be of continuing

letter to Bousset, dated July 21, 1914, in Heidelberger lin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer, 1976), p. 50. 12

13

Jahrbücher

XX

(Ber-

Ibid., p. 87. Ernst Troeltsch, "Half a Century of Theology: A Review," Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, pp. 79, 80. Scholz, Introduction to Schleiermacher's Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, p. ix.

34

Otto As Heir of Schleiermacher's Speeches

significance? The answer to both questions is already suggested at the outset of the second of Schleiermacher's famous discourses on religion, first published in 1799: You know how the aged Simonides, through repeated and prolonged hesitation, reduced to silence the person who had bothered him with the question, "What are the gods after all?" I should like to begin with a similar hesitation about the far greater and more comprehensive question, "What is religion?"

In short, what distinguishes Schleiermacher's approach from previous ways of doing theology is that it begins with a general consideration of the nature of religion and its place within the whole of human experience. Traditional theology had made a distinction between general and special revelation. It began by assessing the nature and extent of the knowledge of God that can be obtained by reason alone (philosophical theology), before moving on to develop the traditional doctrines of the faith from biblical sources (dogmatics proper). Because of a general confidence in the possibility of establishing by means of reason alone the existence and attributes of God, this manner of proceeding did not seem controversial. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, this confidence had been lost. However, the existence and ubiquity of religion remained indisputable, and it now became the first task of theology to develop an analysis of religious consciousness. As a result of this way of conceiving the task of theology, the philosophy of religion, which had now to be distinguished from philosophical theology, took on a fundamentally new importance. 16 During the years prior to the publication of Das Heilige, Otto sought to develop an approach to theology along the lines indicated by Troeltsch. Otto shared Troeltsch's conviction that theology must begin with a general investigation of religion, before attempting to determine the nature and validity of Christianity in relation to the history of religion as a whole. Two factors in particular distinguish Otto's approach to this task from similar efforts among his contemporaries: the influence of the first edition of Schleiermacher's Speeches upon Otto's conception of the nature of religion and the study of

'

Crouter, Introduction to Schleiermacher's Speeches, p. 96. According to Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the Speeches "would seem to be the first book ever written on religion as such - not on a particular kind or instance and not incidentally, but explicitly on religion itself as a generic something." Cf. The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), p. 45. Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, trans, by Garret E. Paul (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), pp. 9ff.

"How Schleiermacher Rediscovered Religion"

35

religion, and Otto's attempt to find a more secure epistemological foundation for Schleiermacher's insights in the modified Kantianism of Jakob Fries.

II. "How Schleiermacher Rediscovered Religion" In the introduction to his centennial edition of the Speeches, Otto claims that the primary importance of the Speeches consists in their enduring contribution to the philosophy of religion. Otto's estimation of the significance of that contribution is indicated by the following remarks: The questions [the Speeches] framed were decisive: What is religion? In what spiritual capacities (Geistesfähigkeiten) of man is it rooted? H o w does it arise? How does it appear in history? What are "religions"? What is "Christianity"? What is valid "naturally" or "positively" in religion? What is the meaning of the religious community? And further: H o w is religion related to moral action, how to cognition? What are - and what are the value of - concepts [and] doctrines in religion? And no less [decisive were] the questions about the method of investigation of the science of religion: H o w is the nature (Wesen) of religion to be discovered, both religion in general, according to its universal concept, and religion as concrete, individual, historical phenomenon (Erscheinung; ÜR 9)?

The questions that Otto found raised in the Speeches are the same ones that continued to occupy him throughout his career, even though the answers that Otto proposes to them are often different from the one's proposed by Schleiermacher. Other influences besides Schleiermacher are equally important for understanding the conceptual framework underlying Otto's interpretation of religion in Das Heilige. Nevertheless, the initial stimulus provided by Schleiermacher remains decisive, and it determines to a remarkable degree the trajectory of Otto's subsequent investigations. In the development of his own ideas, Otto sought to retain the forcefulness of the insights first expressed by Schleiermacher in the Speeches, while at the same time making them answerable to the concerns that defined the religious situation in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is the questions that Otto finds raised in the Speeches, and the presuppositions implicit in them, which are most important for understanding the subsequent development of Otto's thinking. The manner in which the questions are posed already indicates the direction in which answers to them will be sought. The questions themselves are mutually determinative, and the order of priority among them is not immediately discernible. For example, the question about the nature of religion, for Otto as for Schleiermacher, is inseparable from the question about the spiritual capacities or faculties from which it arises. And the question about the method of investigation of the science of religion can only be raised after the nature of religion has been

36

Otto As Heir of Schleiermacher's Speeches

established (even though it is not clear now one could decide about the nature of religion without first having spent some time studying it). In the following pages, an attempt will be made to trace the influence of the questions identified by Otto in the Speeches upon the subsequent development of his thinking about religion. The aim of the following discussion is not to evaluate Otto's interpretation of Schleiermacher, or to explore alternative interpretations. It is rather to determine the manner in which Otto's own understanding of religion, the science of religion and its relation to philosophy and theology were shaped in response to the first edition of the Speeches. In attempting to do so, I shall take my initial cue from the questions cited above, and from an article published by Otto in 1903 under the title, "Wie Schleiermacher die Religion wiederentdeckte" ("How Schleiermacher Re-Discovered Religion"). 17 The question, "What is religion?," and the question, "In what spiritual capacities is it rooted?," are closely related in the Speeches, as are the answers given to them by Schleiermacher. Otto claims that the novelty of the first question, i.e. the degree to which Schleiermacher succeeds in making it a real question, is best understood in contrast to the manner in which theological debates had been pursued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It has often been observed that the pioneering discoveries of modern astronomy during this period disrupted the Ptolemaic picture of the cosmos, which had remained unchallenged since antiquity, forming part of the Aristotelian inheritance of the medieval Catholic Church. As Ernst Cassirer has pointed out, however, even more important than the effect of any particular scientific discovery, or the challenge to any individual theological doctrine, was the fundamental transformation of the concept of truth itself that occurred during this period. Science had discovered a domain in which truth could be determined on the basis of human reason alone, without reference to revelation. "Alongside of the truth of revelation comes now an independent and original truth of nature. This truth is revealed not in God's word but in his work; it is not based on the testimony of Scripture or tradition but is visible to us at all times." 18 Motivated by the success of the natural sciences, and by the vivid memory of a century of religious intolerance and bloodshed, the philosophers of the eighteenth century sought to establish the claim of reason to be the sole arbiter of truth in all matters. This assertion of the self-sufficiency of reason entailed a rejection of the Augustinian conception of an essentially sinful and fallen humanity, utterly incapable of finding its way without divine

The article appears in Die Christliche Welt 29 (1903), columns 506-12. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans, by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 42-43.

"How Schleiermacher Rediscovered Religion"

37

assistance, which had characterized the Reformation. During the eighteenth century, many religious doctrines were subject to radical and irrevocable criticism. Generally, however, this did not lead to the complete rejection of religious belief, which was limited for the most part to Hume and the French materialists (e.g. D'Holbach and LaMettrie). In England and Germany, attempts were made by various Deists, metaphysical rationalists, advocates of natural religion, and finally by Kant, to meet and overcome the threat of atheism. Despite the variety of strategies employed, these efforts shared in common a rejection of religious "enthusiasm" or "Schwärmerei," and a strict reliance upon rational argumentation for the purpose of establishing religious truth-claims. The means by which religious truth is known were thought to be no different from the means by which more mundane truths are known. Revelation does not contain any knowledge that is in principle inaccessible to the unaided human mind. It "imparts no new faculties, nor does it appeal to any other faculty than reason, to which natural religion also appeals. . . . Faith is simply a persuasion of the mind concerning the truth of a proposition. . . . it is simply the conviction, based upon rational grounds, that certain things are true."19 The result of these attempts during the Enlightenment to find a rational basis for religious belief was to restrict the terms of the discussion to a consideration of the validity of specific religious doctrines. Thus, even insofar as the reasonableness of Christianity or the moral efficacy of natural religion were thought to have been successfully established, the age had lost sight of those sources within the affective life of human beings from which religion has drawn its vitality over the ages, and to which it has given expression in the diversity of its historical forms and the multiplicity of its cultural objectifications. Otto characterizes the prevailing situation in the following words: "One had proven [the existence of] God, but one no longer knew what to do with him. One experienced nothing of Him in the heart. One possessed the great objects of religion as concepts, but not as something living and real." 20 The question of the spiritual capacity or mental faculty from which religion arises was not explicitly raised. But in taking its task to be the rational affirmation or refutation of the truth of specific religious claims, the Enlightenment discussion implicitly identified the essence of religion with the content of religious doctrine. It follows that the faculty from which religion arises was (pre)supposed to be reason, conceived either theoretically (metaphysics) or practically (moral philosophy). Religion thus appeals to the same sources of insight to which philosophy appeals. It is

19

20

A. C. McGiffort, Protestant Thought Before Kant (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), p. 196. Otto, "Wie Schleiermacher die Religion wiederentdeckte," column 508.

38

Otto As Heir of Schleiermacher's Speeches

therefore not surprising that in the course of these debates, religion had come to be virtually indistinguishable from philosophy. "Its inner spirit, however, which as any pious person feels, is something completely different from cognition of the highest things or compliance with precepts, had dissipated."21 Otto's claim that Schleiermacher had "rediscovered" religion must be understood against this background. The Enlightenment, Otto argues, had completely lost sight of that which makes religion religious and distinguishes it from philosophy. The importance of Schleiermacher's achievement lies in his having rediscovered the object with which the philosophy of religion must concern itself if it is really to be philosophy of religion, and not theological metaphysics. The first task of the philosophy of religion must be to bring the object of its investigation clearly into view. In the opening pages of the Speeches, Schleiermacher criticizes the Enlightenment for having failed to accomplish this task: Where [religion] is present and effective it must so reveal itself that it moves the mind in a peculiar manner, mingling or rather removing all functions of the human soul and resolving all activity in an astonishing intuition of the infinite. Do you feel this way about the systems of theology, about these theories of the origin and end of the world, about these analyses of the nature of an incomprehensible being, where everything amounts to cold argumentation and nothing can be treated except in the tone of an ordinary didactic controversy? In all these systems you despise, you have accordingly not found religion and cannot find it because it is not there (OR 90).

In order to appreciate the importance of Schleiermacher's philosophical accomplishment in the Speeches, it is necessary to distinguish the novelty of his method from the apologetic purpose to which it is put. Behind Schleiermacher's effusive rhetoric lies a sophisticated attempt to isolate a distinct moment of human experience called "religion." Schleiermacher's apologetic aim in the Speeches is to convince his friends, the "cultured despisers" of religion among the literary elite of Berlin, that what they find contemptible in religion does not actually belong to religion at all. In order to achieve this end, he must first succeed in distinguishing "religion" in its pure form from the historical accretions with which it is commonly confused, i.e. what most people normally think of as religion. He refers to this task metaphorically as that of conjuring "a rare spirit that does not deign to appear in any oft-seen familiar guise, a spirit you will have to observe attentively a long time in order to recognize it and understand its significant features" (OR

21

Ibid.

"How Schleiermacher Rediscovered Religion"

39

98). Because religion never appears in its pure form, but is always combined in its historical appearances with various "extraneous parts," Schleiermacher's goal is to isolate the properly religious element within this multiplicity of phenomena in order to be able to determine its essential characteristics. What Schleiermacher undertakes, then, is an imaginative reconstruction of the essence of religion as it is presented in the manifold of its individual expressions. Such a reconstruction is necessary insofar as the imagination alone is capable of grasping "the entire idea behind these qualities, which are encountered only singly as dispersed and mixed with much that is foreign" (OR 97). In attempting to establish the nature of religion, Schleiermacher abandons the implicit identification of the nature of religion with the propositional content of religious doctrines. What Schleiermacher is interested in, according to Otto, is "the unique (eigentümliche) psychic function of the human spirit, which - as he assumes - stirs in all religion and in all religions and expresses itself in countless forms and configurations" (ÜR 208). It is in this "psychic function" that Schleiermacher hopes to discover the principle of unity underlying the multiplicity of religious phenomena. Thus, Schleiermacher does not offer a definition of the concept of religion under which particular religions might be subsumed, and, in contrast to the advocates of natural religion, his goal is not to produce a universal standard of religious truth by identifying those fundamental matters on which all religions are in agreement. In Kantian terms, one might say that, for Schleiermacher, the unity underlying the multiplicity of religious phenomena is not a material unity, but a formal one. Like many of his contemporaries, Otto emphasizes the similarity between Schleiermacher's investigation of religion and Kant's philosophical procedure: "As Kant locates and investigates the faculties of sensibility, judgment, understanding, reason, theoretical and practical reason, in order to find the essence of knowledge, of moral action, of aesthetic taste, so Schleiermacher searches for the faculty of the soul from which religion emerges" (ÜR 208). A similar observation was made by the great scholar of German Romanticism, Rudolf Haym, who remarked that Schleiermacher in effect "extends Kant's Critique in relation to religion through a completely new analysis, not yet undertaken by Kant. He does this insofar as he is clearly aware of the parallelism of his procedure to the Kantian one." 22

22

Rudolf Haym, Die romantische Schule, ed. by Oskar Walzel, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Weidermann, 1914), p. 479.

40

Otto A s Heir of Schleiermacher's

Speeches

III. The Essence (Wesen) of Religion in the Speeches Before going on to consider the specific manner in which Schleiermacher characterizes the essence of religion, it is necessary to review a few salient themes in Kant's philosophy, which are crucial for understanding Schleiermacher's argument. This will also help to clarify the conceptual framework that is implicit in Otto's criticism of Schleiermacher in Das Heilige and in the development of Otto's thinking leading up to the publication of that work. It may be recalled that in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had refuted the traditional metaphysical proofs for the existence of God, and argued that it is impossible for the human mind to obtain knowledge of the existence or attributes of God, which had been maintained in the rationalist philosophical tradition before him. Theoretical knowledge is limited on the one hand to empirical laws established by means of induction, and, on the other hand, to those a priori synthetic judgments which must be true in order for us to be able to produce a coherent account of experience in general. This latter knowledge is obtained by means of a critique of reason, which it is the task of the critical philosopher to undertake, all metaphysicians having been "solemnly and legally suspended from their occupations" 23 by Kant's declaration, until such a critique has been completed. In thus chastening the ambitions of the metaphysicians, however, Kant thought that he had left "the interests of humanity . . . in the same privileged position as hitherto" (CPR Β xxxii).24 The "interests of humanity" to which Kant refers are those interests of reason represented by the ideas of God, freedom and immortality. In fact, Kant believed that these interests were able to be more firmly secured by means of his own critical philosophy than they had been in the metaphysical systems of his predecessors. It is in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that Kant makes his famous claim to have restricted knowledge in order to make room for faith (CPR Β xxx). Knowledge, in the sense in which Kant uses the word, requires the combination of two different kinds of representations (Vorstellungen): intuitions (.Anschauungen) and concepts (Begriffe). The source of intuitions is the faculty of sensibility. Concepts are produced by the understanding. The field of intuition, at least for humans, is limited by the conditions of space and time, which are themselves the "pure forms of intuition" (CPR Β 36). What is capable of being known in the strict 23

24

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Can Qualify as a Science, trans, by Paul Carus (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1902), p. 29. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans, by Norman Kemp Smith ( N e w York: St. Martin's Press; Toronto: Macmillan, 1965). References to the First Critique are indicated by the initials "CPR," followed by the page number from the standard pagination system, where "A" refers to the first edition (1781) and "B" to the second (1787).

The Essence (Wesen) of Religion in the Speeches

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sense, as opposed to what is capable only of being thought, must be able to appear under these forms, in addition to being able to be conceptualized. It is this stipulation which had been overlooked by the metaphysical rationalists, who labored under the illusion that it is possible to extend the domain of knowledge by means of concepts alone. What they failed to recognize is that To think an object and to know an object are . . . by no means the same thing. Knowledge involves two factors: first, the concept, through which an object in general is thought (the category); and secondly, the intuition, through which it is given. For if no intuition could be given corresponding to the concept, the concept would still indeed be a thought, so far as its form is concerned, but would be without any object, and no knowledge of anything would be possible by means of it. So far as I could know, there would be nothing, and could be nothing, to which my thought could be applied (CPR Β 146).

In thus circumscribing the bounds of what can be known, as opposed to what can only be thought, Kant restricted the application of the term "knowledge" {Erkenntnis) to objects that can be apprehended by means of the faculty of sensibility. He calls such objects appearances, the sum of which constitutes the totality of nature. The task of science or theoretical knowledge is to investigate the laws that operate within this realm. Because our knowledge is limited to those objects that are capable of being intuited under the conditions of time and space, and because God, by definition, is not capable of being intuited under these conditions, it is impossible for us to obtain any theoretical knowledge about God at all. This restriction of the scope of theoretical reason does not apply in the same way to practical reason. It is not the task of practical reason to produce knowledge of objects, but rather to identify rational principles for the determination of the will, and our ability to establish such principles is not dependent upon our capacity to form intuitions. In fact, Kant argues, the possibility of discovering such principles depends upon a proper recognition of the limitation of theoretical claims, since even the assumption - as made on behalf of the necessary practical employment of reason - of God, freedom, and immortality is not permissible unless at the same time speculative reason be deprived of its pretensions to transcendent insight. For in order to arrive at such insight it must make use of principles which, in fact, extend only to objects of possible experience, and which, if also applied to what cannot be an object of experience, always really change into an appearance, thus rendering all practical extensions of pure reason impossible (CPR Β xxx).

Thus in order to retain their dignity, and to function as postulates of practical reason, the rational ideas of God, freedom and immortality must be excluded from the realm of what can be known in the strict sense. They must remain instead objects of rational faith.

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Otto As Heir of Schleiermacher's Speeches

Although these postulates of practical reason are not, in the strict sense, knowable, it is nevertheless reasonable for us to assume their truth based on our knowledge of the moral law, which can be deduced a priori. In fact, Kant argues, the assumption of the truth of these postulates is not only possible, but obligatory, since they follow from our conception of the moral law, which has been determined on purely rational grounds. This assertion is related to the notion of the highest good, which can be rather loosely summarized as follows. Kant holds that the highest good is the necessary object of a will determined by the moral law. For such a will, however, the highest good entails the complete conformity of our dispositions to the standard of the moral law. This complete alignment of the dispositions of a rational will with the moral law Kant calls holiness. Yet holiness is impossible for finite beings unless it is conceived of as a gradual progress toward perfection. This infinite progress is possible, however, only under the presupposition of an infinitely enduring existence and personality of the same rational being; this is called the immortality of the soul. Thus the highest good is practically possible only on the supposition of the immortality of the soul, and the latter, as inseparably bound to the moral law, is a postulate of pure practical reason.

A similar argument is developed in relation to the idea of God. In both cases, the postulate in question is derived on the basis of a requirement that arises out of a purely moral consideration. In light of the preceding summary, two aspects of Kant's philosophy of religion may be emphasized with reference to Schleiermacher and Otto. First of all, Kant accords no distinct a priori status to the religious per se. Religion, for Kant, is of practical value insofar as it comes to the aid of universal moral imperatives, which are determined independently of any distinctively religious concept. Rational religion functions as an aid to morality, but the moral law can be recognized and its demands can be met on the basis of reason alone. The second point follows from the first. When Kant speaks of holiness, he actually employs the term as a moral predicate, not as a religious one. The term "holiness" applies above all to the will that conforms perfectly to the moral law. Kant's discussion of holiness does not refer to such characteristically religious attitudes as awe, reverence, humility and devotion, nor does it involve anything resembling a non-discursive apprehension of the religious significance of particular intuitions. He conceives holiness as perfect conformity to the moral law, which itself is determined by reason alone, independently of inclination and feeling. To the 25

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans, by Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. 129/122. The second page number refers to the Prussian Academy of Sciences Edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften.

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extent that holiness may be said to involve feeling at all, it is the feeling of respect for the moral law - a feeling that arises only after rational reflection, and does not function in any way to determine the content of moral obligation. Thus, for Kant, piety is nothing more than "the firm resolve to do better in the future."26 Schleiermacher's attempt in the Speeches to establish the independence of religion in relation to metaphysics and morality requires his having to define religion in such a way that its own jurisdiction does not conflict with theirs. In marked contrast to Kant's philosophy of religion, the term "feeling" (iGefühl) plays a pivotal role in Schleiermacher's discussion of religious experience, both in the Speeches and in his later writings, and it is also crucial for understanding Otto's relationship to Schleiermacher. In the first edition of the Speeches, feeling and intuition (Anschauung) are closely related. Otto observes that they are conceived as "two sides of a unified thing (einer einheitliche Sache), which one can characterize as the 'sympathetic experiencing' (gemütvolles Erleben) of the universe" (ÜR 212). This "unified thing," composed of intuition and feeling together, is itself the essence (Wesen) of religion as defined by Schleiermacher in the Second Speech: [Religion] does not wish to determine and explain the universe according to its nature as does metaphysics; it does not desire to continue the universe's development and perfect it by the power of freedom and the free choice of a human being as does morals. Religion's essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling (OR 101-02).

In thus distinguishing the essence of religion from metaphysics and morality, Schleiermacher remains within the limits established by Kant in his critique of reason. Religion does not consist in knowledge of a supersensible object. In fact, the object of religion is the same as the object of science and morality: "namely, the universe and the relationship of humanity to it" (OR 97). What distinguishes religion is the manner in which its relation to this object is determined. If religion is to be differentiated, it must stand in some other relation [than metaphysics and morality] to the same material (Stoff); it must treat this material completely differently, express or enact a different relationship of humanity to it; have a different

26

Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans, by Theodore M. Green and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 19; Vol. VI of Kants gesammelte Schriften, Prussian Academy of Sciences (Berlin: Reimer, 1907), p. 24.

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Otto As Heir of Schleiermacher's Speeches manner of proceeding (Verfahrungsart) or a different aim. For only in this way can that which is materially the same (dem Stoff nach) receive a special nature and a characteristic existence (ÜR, 43-44; OR, 98).

As a passive experiencing of the world, religion consists neither in the cognition of the causes of physical phenomena and of the laws governing those causes, nor in action upon the world according to moral principles. Religion, in Otto's words, has to do instead with "sympathetic impressions of the world, and in connection with these, a recognition of ideal significance, an experiential understanding (according to higher meaning and value)" (UR 223-224). 17 Otto's use of the term Gemütseindruck (literally, "impressions of the heart") is typical of his interpretation of Schleiermacher. Furthermore, it is a term that Otto retains throughout his later writings. In his lectures on ethics from the 1930's, Otto conceives of Gemüt, next to reason and will, as an independent "capacity (Vermögen) for the recognition {Erkenntnis) of all objective values, in greatness and beauty, in nature, humanity and history, in personal spiritual and moral values." 28 Otto's later discussion of Gemüt is a direct descendent of his interpretation of "feeling and intuition" in the Speeches. In the centennial edition, Otto emphasizes that what is apprehended in the act of religious intuition is a peculiar significance or value attached to a specific event or representation. Schleiermacher remarks at one point in his discussion that, in religion, "the eternal world effects the senses of our spirit as the sun affects our eyes" (OR 110), and he also refers to religion as "the sense and taste for the infinite" (OR 103). Otto clearly understands Schleiermacher's "intuition and feeling" as a general capacity for apprehending the infinite or the eternal (Otto generally uses the latter term) in and among the finite and the temporal. In Das Heilige, Otto regards the faculty of divination as a kind of sense for apprehending the religious significance of individual people, places and events (DH 138).29 He also comes to speak later of a "sensus numinis," to which he attributes the historical origin of religion.30 The influence of the Speeches upon these developments will be addressed in more detail on the following chapters.

?7

29

". . . es handselt sich . . . um Gemütseindrücke von der Welt und in Verbindung damit, um ein ideeles Deuten, ein erlebendes Verstehen (nach höherem Sinn und Wert)." This remark is taken from Otto's lecures notes for a course on ethics offered during the 1933-34 academic year. The notes, entitled "Ethik I" (OA 2282), here p. 305, are found in the Rudolf Otto Archive at the Religionskundliche Sammlung in Marburg, Germany. Hereafter cited in the text as "E." All citations from Das Heilige are taken from the current German paperback edition, unless otherwise noted. Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige (Munich: Beck, 1991), 50th-53rd ed. Hereafter cited in the text as "DH." Cf. Rudolf Otto, Das Gefühl des Überweltlichen (sensus numinis) (Munich: Beck, 1932), esp. pp. 1-10, where Otto identifies Schleiermacher's "Gefühl" with the sensum numinis

Blueprint for a Theological Science of Religion

45

In his remarks appended to the Speeches, Otto emphasizes that the "sympathetic impressions" that lie at the heart of religion, though distinct from knowledge in the strict sense (as defined by Kant), are not merely emotions arising spontaneously within the subject. They are impressions of the universe, produced by a combination of the activity of the universe upon the experiencing subject (Anschauung), and the subject's response to this activity (Gefühl). "Every intuition is, by its very nature, connected with a feeling," Schleiermacher writes. "The same actions of the universe through which it reveals itself to you in the finite also bring it into a new relationship to your mind and your condition; in the act of intuiting it, you must necessarily be seized by various feelings" (OR 109). These feelings, which arise in response to the activity of the universe upon the experiencing subject, are the exclusive domain of religion. In the Second Speech, Schleiermacher specifically discusses reverence, humility, love, thankfulness, compassion and repentance. The nature of religion, which had become completely obscured in the course of the debates of the Enlightenment, is most clearly recognized in such characteristic feelings as these. "The ancients certainly knew this. They called these feelings 'piety' and referred them immediately to religion, considering them its noblest part" (OR 130).

IV. Blueprint for a Theological Science of Religion Schleiermacher's use of the term "universe," and the role that it plays in his definition of religion, are closely related to a number of other terms that recur throughout the Speeches - terms like "individuality," "genius," "the infinite," "history," and "humanity." Together, these terms demarcate the parameters of what Otto refers to in his epilogue as "a characteristic view of the world and humanity [that] forms the background and presupposition of this interpretation and description of religion, without which it would not have been possible" (ÜR 215) - and, we might add, apart from which it is difficult to make sense of Schleiermacher's argument. This "characteristic view" is not capable of being identified with any single thinker. It is a view that gradually came to be articulated in the Sturm und Drang movement, in the works of figures like Hamann, Herder, Jacobi and Goethe. It received a decisive impetus from Rousseau's critique of the cultural ideals of the Enlightenment, from Shaftsbury, and, above all, from the rediscovery of Spinoza's philosophy in Germany during the 1780's and 90's.

identified by Zinzendorf, and associates Zinzendorf's discovery with broader discussions of moral and aesthetic feeling during the eighteenth century.

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Otto A s Heir of Schleiermacher's

Speeches

It was a result of his own study of Spinoza that Schleiermacher came to reject the idea of a personal, supernatural cause of the phenomenal world. 31 Whereas Kant had opposed nature and freedom, the phenomenal and noumenal realms, for the early Schleiermacher, the unconditioned is not to be sought outside of the realm of appearance, but within it. "Religion also lives its whole life in nature, but in the infinite nature of the totality . . . Religion breathes there where freedom itself has once more become nature" (OR 102). Religion is nothing but the capacity to recognize the infinite, unconditioned and eternal in the finite, conditioned and temporal. The noumenal is no longer strictly opposed to the phenomenal, but must be sought within it. Furthermore, where nature and freedom are one, there is no longer a strict distinction between non-human nature and history, conceived as the realm of moral activity. It is the same world spirit that is active both in nature and in history, and humanity is the mediating link between these two realms. Thus, the "universe," as Otto interprets Schleiermacher, is "the totality of being and happening: world, nature, humanity, history" (ÜR 49), the ideal significance of which is intuited and felt in religion. As finite creatures, subject to the conditions of time and space, we are incapable of apprehending the whole universe in a single intuition. But since each individual object of intuition is infinitely determined in its relation to the whole, each is also capable of becoming a symbol of the universe in its totality. "Thus," Schleiermacher claims, "to accept everything individual as a part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite is religion" (OR 105). Otto refers to Schleiermacher's conception of the universe as "a kind of romanticized Platonism" in which the notion of an otherworldly realm of ideas is replaced by the totality of formative worldpowers, which together constitute a "logos" of sorts (ÜR 219). The pantheistic tendency evident in the first edition of the Speeches does not play a role in Otto's thinking, although, as we shall see, the notion of a transcendent realm of ideas does. In the Second Speech, after having presented his definition of the essence of religion, Schleiermacher goes on to consider several different forms of religious intuition. His examples are taken, first, from the realm of nature, and then from the realm of spirit, and they are arranged in order of ascending importance. Schleiermacher first considers objects of natural beauty: "the delicate play of colors that delights your eye in all phenomena of the firmament" and "the most lovely products of vegetative nature" (OR 115116). The immensity of boundless space comes next, but quickly gives way to the impression produced by the lawful uniformity which governs the movements of the celestial bodies and regulates the interaction of organic 31

Cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben 174ff.

Schleiermachers,

Vol XIII of Gesammelte

Schriften,

pp.

Blueprint for a Theological Science of Religion

47

forces. The deeper sources of religious intuition, however, are not found in nature, but in the domain of human spirit, and it is only within this domain that the religious significance of nature is first recognized. Thus, "in order to intuit the world and to have religion, man must first have found humanity" (OR 120). Humanity, for Schleiermacher, is a spiritual ideal that works itself out through the endless multiplicity of individual historical forms. "Eternal humanity is unweariedly busy in creating and in representing itself in the most varied ways in the provisional appearance of finite life" (OR 121). The essence of humanity cannot be identified with any single historical manifestation, even one that claims to have established a system of immutable principles of reason which are not subject to the contingency of historical becoming (e.g. the Enlightenment). Each individual form of humanity, no matter how apparently trivial, expresses something unique and essential. To be sure, religion seeks "to divine the spirit in which the whole is directed" (OR 124). However, this can only be accomplished by maintaining the individuality of each particular historical moment. "History, in the most proper sense, is the highest object of religion. . . . In its realm, therefore, lie also the highest and most sublime intuitions of religion" (OR 125). That the highest intuitions of religion are encountered in the historical realm, and particularly in the history of religion itself, is one of the fundamental tenets of Otto's later thinking, which has important implications for his understanding of the nature of religion, and his approach to the study of religion. In terms of the questions raised by Otto in his introduction the Speeches, the key to understanding the development of Otto's later thought lies at the point where the following three questions intersect: "What is religion?," "How does it appear in history?," and "What is the method of the science of religion?" For Otto, the method employed by the science of religion must conform to the nature (Wesen) of religion, and his conception of the latter is influenced by the definition developed by Schleiermacher in the Second Speech. Religion is intuition and feeling of the universe. The attempt to isolate the "psychic function" from which religion emerges, however, must be complimented by an "inductive" investigation of concrete, historical religious phenomena. The latter task, according to Otto, is only carried out by Schleiermacher to a limited extent in the Speeches themselves, but nevertheless constitutes an integral component of his program. The approach to the historical data, however, is shaped by the psychological account of religion that has already been given. This dual approach to religious phenomena plays a crucial role in determining the direction of Otto's later thinking. In his epilogue to the Speeches, Otto writes:

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Otto A s Heir of Schleiermacher's

Speeches

The essence of religion is to be found by studying its historical manifestations, not in the systems, dogmas, and institutions which it has brought forth, but in the religious personalities and in their original experience (Erleben), especially in the experience of the religiously brilliant personalities, the leaders, "mediators," heroes, the prophets and founders of religions (ÜR 209).

The emphasis placed by Otto upon the role of extraordinary religious individuals reflects his conviction that the nature of religion is most strikingly manifested in the experience of such figures, which then becomes paradigmatic within particular historical traditions. This, Otto claims, is "the significance of the historical for religion and the significance of founders of religion. But their effect is never more than the provocation, awakening, [or] calling forward of another's religious aptitude" (ÜR 215). The ability to respond to the universe in religious intuition and feeling constitutes a kind of universal predisposition for religion, which Schleiermacher claims (according to Otto, "without special examination") exists in all people. However, this aptitude is realized to various degrees among different individuals, and may be recognized most clearly in historical personalities in whom it has become especially pronounced. The references to the "empirical" or "inductive" component of the investigation of religion which appear at various points in Otto's writings also must be understood in light of this underlying conviction. Otto takes the "inductive" investigation of religion to consist primarily in the analysis of the various forms of religious experience expressed in the course of the history of religion, which he regards as possessing an intrinsic unity. The history of religion is, for Otto, the psychology of religion writ large. In order to characterize the influence of the Speeches on Otto, it may be helpful to attempt to identify a kind of circular structure underlying Schleiermacher's interpretation of religion, which re-appears at several points in the development of Otto's later views. Intuitions of the universe result from the activity of the universe upon the religious subject, which calls forth feelings of a distinctively religious nature. These feelings belong exclusively to religion; "they are supposed to possess us, and we should express, maintain, and portray them" (OR 110). The nature of these feelings determines the manner of ones religiosity, and their strength determines the degree of one's religiosity. The latter is exhibited most strikingly in the case of especially "gifted" or "talented" religious individuals, who, as leaders and founders of religions, shape the specific form of religious consciousness that is characteristic of particular, historical traditions. Such individuals, as historical figures, themselves become the objects of further religious intuitions within specific traditions. Thus, one could argue that Schleiermacher develops what might be called a theory of the communicability of religious consciousness. The same theory, however, conceived in traditional theological terms, could be regarded as a theory of

Blueprint for a Theological Science of Religion

49

revelation, where revelation is taken to consist in the capacity to apprehend the divine significance of the objects of religious intuition, particularly as these are disclosed and transmitted within particular religious traditions. This, in any case, is how Otto reads Schleiermacher: Thus is "revelation" the foundation of all religion. It is the act of the universe making itself noticeable and clear to the sensitive view: every truly unique and new religious intuition, every discovery of religious genius, is revelation. And Schleiermacher is in this respect completely justified in emphasizing the "objective" factor of such revelation (ÜR 214).

For Otto, Schleiermacher's most significant accomplishment in the Speeches is to have re-conceived the concept of revelation in such a way that it does not depend upon an appeal to supernatural causality. As a result, Otto claims, the question of revelation "is completely removed from the old dispute about 'the Natural' and 'the Supernatural.' For to be able to find the eternal in the temporal and to be met by its impressions is nothing 'supra naturarti,' but thoroughly a part of the nature and nobility of human beings themselves" (ÜR 214). Several years after the publication of Das Heilige, we find Otto re-iterating this claim. Schleiermacher's most significant accomplishment, Otto suggests, was to have offered to an age in which the concept of revelation had ceased to function a new way of understanding revelation, not as the result of an artificial proof, but as something that "gives itself and shows itself to the experiencing subject" (was sich gibt und was sich dem

Erlebendem kundtut)? To summarize, then, the primary importance of the Speeches, for Otto, consists in the blueprint for the science of religion cum philosophy of religion that he recognizes in them. The task of this discipline is to isolate the religious experience from other kinds of experience with which it is commonly confused (e.g. science and morality), to locate the mental capacities from which it emerges, and to investigate its manifestations in individual, historical religious traditions. This basic structure is taken over by Otto in his subsequent theological science of religion. However, the criticisms of Schleiermacher that already begin to emerge in the centennial edition of the Speeches are also important for understanding the direction of Otto's thinking leading up to the publication of Das Heilige. In his introduction to the centennial edition, Otto claims that the first edition of the Speeches already contains the original conceptions that are more fully and systematically developed in Schleiermacher's later theological works, but that the "meaning, richness and impressiveness" of their initial 32

Rudolf Otto, "Der neue Aufbruch des sensus numinis bei Schleiermacher," Sünde und Urschutd, p. 137. This is a revised version of the article, "Wie Schleiermacher die Religion wiederentdeckte."

50

Otto As Heir of Schleiermacher's Speeches

expression were subsequently lost, both in the revised editions of 1806 and 1821, as well as in the Glaubenslehre, which Otto believed to be in many respects "poorer than the Speeches" (ÜR 9). One of the primary reasons for Otto's having chosen to reissue the original edition of the Speeches is that, in the later editions, the term "intuition" (Anschauung) had been deleted in many passages, especially in those contexts where, in the first edition, intuition was discussed in conjunction with feeling. In the first edition, Schleiermacher entreats his readers "to become familiar with this concept: intuition of the universe," calling it "the hinge of my whole speech" (OR 104). In subsequent editions, this entreaty is omitted, and the "hinge" upon which the Second Speech of the first edition turned appears thus to have been either replaced or removed altogether.33 As a result, the "objective" factor that Otto felt Schleiermacher had been "completely justified in emphasizing" in his re-conception of revelation, is obscured. Otto argues that, in the later editions, Schleiermacher's "polemic against cognition and speculation in religion becomes almost disastrous." Religious experience gives rise to religious convictions, which must make some claim to be true if they "are also really to be taken seriously," and not regarded merely as "a matter of enthusiastic (stimmungsvolle) subjective interpretations - a kind of noble dream to which one has given oneself' (ÜR 224). As we shall have further occasion to observe, the claim that Schleiermacher's analysis of religious experience is unable to do justice to its cognitive or objective dimension is repeated and more fully developed by Otto in his later writings. Elsewhere in his concluding remarks to the centennial edition, Otto expresses his dissatisfaction with Schleiermacher's discussion of religion in the Speeches in terms of the concept of validity (Gültigkeit). While Schleiermacher succeeds in isolating the distinctive psychological features of religious experience (quid facti), he fails to provide a transcendental justification for the facts of religious consciousness (quid juris). Thus, as an attempt to extend Kant's critical procedure to religious experience, Schleiermacher's formal definition of the essence of religion in terms of the faculties from which it emerges fails in one important respect. Kant "does not produce the demonstration of validity (Gültigkeitserweis) by means of an appeal to 'human nature,' but rather to the a priori of the rational spirit. With Schleiermacher, there is no clear insight into this distinction, and the one is confused with the other" (ÜR 209). Like Schleiermacher, Otto believes that Kant's doctrine of the postulates of practical reason fails entirely as a phi-

For a discussion of these terminological revisions, see Crouter's Introduction to the Speeches, p. 55ff.

Blueprint for a Theological Science of Religion

51

losophy of religion. Unlike Schleiermacher, however, in his effort to redress this failure, Otto is led to exploit other resources within Kant's philosophy. It is toward these resources and Otto's use of them that we now turn.

Chapter Two The Kantian-Friesian Philosophy of Religion I. Otto, Troeltsch and the Search for the Religious A Priori Ten years after the appearance of the centennial edition of Schleiermacher's Speeches, Otto published his book, Kantisch-Fries'sehe Religionsphilosophie und ihre Anwendung auf die Theologie: Zur Einleitung in die Glaubenslehre für Studenten der Theologie in 1909.1 This work marks a distinct stage in the development of Otto's thinking prior to the publication of Das Heilige in 1917. In a preface written for the English translation of the KantischFries'sehe Religionsphilosophie several years after its original appearance, Otto characterized that work as follows. I expounded the philosophy of religion as taught by J. F. Fries, supplemented by the thought of DeWette, who, next to Schleiermacher, was the founder in Germany of that 'Modern Theology' which, in its fundamental ideas, I myself follow. My later writings will show how their teachings have developed in my own thought.

Keeping this note in mind, the discussion of the Kantisch-Fries'sehe Religionsphilosophie in the following pages will focus on those ideas that are most important for understanding the continuity of the development of Otto's thought leading up to the expression of his mature position in Das Heilige. The discussion of the Speeches in the last chapter focused on Schleiermacher's response to the question, What is religion? Following Otto's remarks, I attempted to show how that response consisted of a psychological and a historical component. By identifying the essence of religion with intuition and feeling of the universe, Schleiermacher sought to distinguish religion from metaphysics and morality. This psychological definition then became the key for identifying historical religious phenomena. In the opening pages of Kantisch-Fries'sehe Religionsphilosophie, Otto re-affirms Schleiermacher's accomplishment in having thus secured a "paradigm of

2

(Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1909). Eng., The Kantian-Friesian Philosophy of Religion and its Application to Theology: An Introduction to Dogmatics for Students of Theology. Hereafter cited in the text as "KFR." This note appears as an appendix to Otto, Aufsätze zur Ethik, p. 227.

The Search for the Religious A Priori

53

religion" capable of serving as a basis for the inductive investigation of historical religious phenomena. However, Otto now distinguishes that part of the philosophy of religion that consists of the psychology and history of religion from the philosophy of religion "in the strict sense," which is faced with the task of answering the further question, "What is the truth of religion?" This further task of the philosophy of religion is part of the "critique of reason" first undertaken by Kant. Such a critique, according to Otto, is divided into a "lower part" and a "higher part." The "lower part" aims to establish an epistemological basis for the natural sciences by showing how it is possible for us to have valid knowledge of the laws governing physical phenomena. The "higher part" of the critique of reason, to which the philosophy of religion in the strict sense belongs, "examines and discovers how, and through which aptitudes and capacities of reason, religious, ethical and aesthetic convictions and experience are 'possible' for us, and not only possible, but with the claim to validity" ( K F R vii). The presupposition at work here appears to be that, since the psychology and history of religion have succeeded in showing that religion constitutes a distinct realm of human experience alongside the scientific, ethical and aesthetic realms, it must be possible to identify within the religious realm of experience as well a distinct a priori principle, independent of experience, which it is the task of the philosophy of religion to discover. In attempting to secure this principle, the critique of reason must proceed along the lines established by Kant. However, Otto argues that it was Kant's pupil, J. F. Fries (1773-1843), who first carried out this critical task in relation to religious experience, freeing Kant's discussion of religion from its errors and onesidedness, thereby establishing a secure philosophical basis for the science of religion. Fries was philosophically active during the first decades of the nineteenth century, when German Idealism was at the height of its influence, and, historically, his own philosophical achievements were largely overshadowed by those of his contemporaries, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Fries himself was strongly opposed to the direction philosophy had taken in Germany after Kant, and he advocated a return to the scientific rigor of the Kantian method, while at the same time emphasizing the need to correct certain errors which he felt were responsible for the speculative excesses of post-Kantian idealism. Otto is quite fond of emphasizing his view that Fries' philosophy reproduces the sobriety and rigor of the Enlightenment, and that his mathematical training and adherence to the critical method distinguish him "from thinkers who would make inspiration and imagination the instrument of philosophy." Nevertheless, despite his opposition to speculative metaphysics, it is difficult to avoid the impression that Fries' philosophy remains very much a product of the times in which it was written. Around the turn of the century, Fries' thought experienced a small renaissance, led by Otto's colleague at Göttingen, Leonard Nelson. Reinhard Schinzer, who has

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The Kantian-Friesian Philosophy of Religion

produced the most complete biographical sketch of Otto's life to date, reports that Otto was personally sought out at Göttingen by Nelson and his fellow Friesians, who convinced him to join their philosophical movement.3During the years prior to the publication of Das Heilige, Otto was regarded as the most prominent member of the "Neo-Friesian School" in theology, to which his friend, Wilhelm Bousset, also belonged.4 Otto's goal in the Kant-Fries book is to expound the Kantian-Friesian philosophy of religion, and to consider its application to theology as exemplified in the thought of the Friesian theologian, DeWette. In this way he hopes to provide a philosophical foundation for students of systematic theology. In the course of examining this work, it will become clear that Otto's philosophical views have undergone several significant changes since the publication of the Speeches. Despite these changes, however, the KantischFries'sehe Religionsphilosophie continues the project of attempting to develop a philosophical propaedeutic for theology that was discussed in the last chapter. The Kantisch-Fries'sehe Religionsphilosophie belongs to a group of works published in Germany during the first two decades of the twentieth century, which attempted to demonstrate the existence within transcendental subjectivity of something called a "religious a priori." This notoriously elusive term is most commonly associated with Troeltsch, who first employs it in his 1905 essay, Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie in der Religionswissenschaften subsequently became the subject of a fair amount of controversy, and Troeltsch stopped using it after a few years. Otto devotes two chapters of Das Heilige to a discussion of "The Holy as an A Priori Category," and the final chapter of Das Heilige is entitled, "The Religious A Priori and History." Therefore, I shall postpone a complete assessment of Otto's account of the religious a priori until I come to consider the role it plays in his later work. In the Kantisch-Fries 'sehe Religionsphilosophie, Otto uses the term only on a few occasions, referring to it in one place as a "not very fortunate expression, surrounded by misunderstandings" (KFR 3).6 Nevertheless, the theory

Reinold Schinzer, "Rudolf Otto - Entwurf einer Biographie" in Ernst Benz, ed., Rudolf Olio's Bedeutung für die Religionswissenschaft und die Theologie heute, p. 15. The archive of the Social Democratic Party in Bonn contains twenty-six letters written by Otto and addressed to Nelson from 1904 to 1912, which indicate that Otto's identification with the Friesian position developed during this period. Cf. J. Wendland, "Neufriesianismus," Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed., Vol. IV, (Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1930), columns 499-500. Photographically reproduced and reissued in 1922 (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck). That Otto intended his exposition of Fries' philosophy as a contribution to the debate about the religious a priori is confirmed by remarks published in a brief article entitled "Wissen, Glaube und Ahnung" in Die Christliche Welt 34 (1908), 818-22. Fries' book of the same name, which presents a summary of his philosophical views, had been published

The Search for the Religious A Priori

55

presented in Das Heilige must be interpreted in light of a line of thought first developed here. At this point, it may be helpful to distinguish several interrelated issues that the notion of the religious a priori is meant to address. These issues are not always clearly differentiated either by Otto or Troeltsch, and this is one of the reasons why the search for the religious a priori fell into disrepute. As Anders Nygren remarked in 1922, "The concept 'religious a priori' is like a coin that has lost its impression: each person attaches the meaning and value to it that seems fitting to him, or else declares it worthless."7 On one level, the notion of the religious a priori addresses a problem that continues to be discussed today by philosophers, social scientists and others concerned with questions relating to the interpretation and explanation of meaningful behavior, although these contemporary discussions are generally not framed in the terms used by Troeltsch and Otto, and are not founded on the same epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions. In today's philosophical parlance, this problem might be referred to under a more benign heading like "concept formation in the cultural sciences." It involves the need to determine criteria for identifying a discreet sphere of cultural phenomena for the purpose of classification, interpretation and analysis. Otto expresses this concern as follows: The history of religion is expanding in leaps and bounds (wächst ins Ungeheure). But how will it progress from the description of religion to the science of religion, if it remains nothing but the history of religion. . . . Indeed, how can it even be the history of religion, if it does not already possess at least an obscure principle according to which the historical material is selected, let alone arranged (KFR 3)?

Otto's remarks reflect the rapid accumulation of information about the vast diversity of religious phenomena as a result of the birth of ethnography, anthropology and sociology during the second half of the nineteenth century. This proliferation of data, and the variety of methodological approaches brought to bear upon it, seemed to Otto to call for a philosophical clarification of the nature and scope of the science of religion. A similar concern had been expressed by Troeltsch in his essay, "Religion and the Science of Religion" in 1906.

in a new edition by Otto's Friesian colleague, Leonard Nelson in 1905. Otto recommends a serious examination of Fries' philosophy especially to those philosophers of religion and theologians engaged in the effort to identify the religious a priori. "Perhaps one will find in more than one respect [in Fries thought] what is today so eagerly sought" (column 819). Anders Nygren, Die Gültigkeil p. 16.

der religiösen

Erfahrung

(Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1922),

56

The Kantian-Friesian Philosophy of Religion The huge collection of facts which has now been brought together . . . is in our perspective only the source materials for the real enquiry to come. The question is what is the religious quality among all these varied and manifold phenomena which are generally referred to as religion? H o w can one seize hold of the religious factor in them, and what meaning, what depth of development and what implications does this religious factor have in its emergence through history?

For both Troeltsch and Otto, the psychological investigation of religion, exemplified most strikingly by William James' Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), had clearly demonstrated that religion constitutes a distinct region of experience which is not capable of being further reduced into component parts. Furthermore, both of them seem to have regarded the history of religion as the psychology of religion writ large.9 In other words, the history of religion offers a kind of panoramic view of the spectrum of expressions of religious consciousness. If the totality of these expressions is to be regarded as anything more than a haphazard collection of loosely related facts, then it must be possible to identify some principle that lends them an underlying unity, an autonomous potential or capacity of the human mind that has expressed itself in a wide range of forms in various times and places. Both Otto and Troeltsch thought that the discovery of an a priori religious principle within the structure of human reason would provide a means for identifying and classifying the diversity of psychological and historical data confronting the science of religion. This assumption, however, is related to a further claim, which goes beyond the need to classify empirical data. It is the assumption, familiar in one form or another since Lessing, that the history of religion is "a history of the development, unfolding and effects of aptitudes and faculties of the rational human spirit" (KFR vii). The second issue that the notion of the religious a priori is meant to address is related to the fact that, for both Otto and Troeltsch, the science of religion is to be a normative science. In the Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, Schleiermacher had regarded dogmatics as a branch of practical theology, the aim of which is to foster the religious life of a particular community of faith. As practical theology, the task of dogmatics is to determine norms for the guidance of religious practice. If these norms are not to be based on an appeal to supernatural revelation (and both Otto and

g Ernst Troeltsch, "Religion and the Science of Religion," Ernst 9

Troeltsch:

Writings

on

Theology and Religion, p. 82. Cf. KFR 84, where Otto refers to history as "enlarged experience" (erweiterte Erfahrung).

Religious Feeling and the Critical Philosophy

57

Troeltsch thought that they could not), then they must be derived by means of a general investigation of religion. In this way, modern theology takes the form of a normative science of religion. The science of religion is not the description of religion, just as little as the science of law is the description of an existing law or of law in general. . . . The science of religion searches for the validity of religion and for valid religion. Since in this task the retreat to supernatural criteria is denied (for historical-critical reasons and for reasons in religion itself) it must proceed like moral, legal and mental science (Geisteswissenschaft) generally (KFR 193).

Strictly speaking, then, the religious a priori is called upon to accomplish two tasks in relation to the validity of religion. It is meant to establish the validity of religious experience in general as a distinct and irreducible sphere of human experience alongside the scientific, the ethical and the aesthetic, and it is meant to provide a means for determining the relative validity of particular kinds of experience within that sphere. The first of these concerns was addressed by Troeltsch in his essay, Die Selbständigkeit der Religion (1895), and the second was the topic of his book, Die Absolutheitsanspruch des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte (1902). In the latter work, Troeltsch had sought to establish norms for determining the relative value of individual historical religions on the basis of a purely historical method. Later he developed the notion of a religious a priori in an effort to accomplish the same goal. In the Kantisch-Fries'scheReligionsphilosophie, Otto appears to have been influenced by the direction of Troeltsch's thinking, as indicated by his remark that "Supernaturalism and Historicism [both] fail to deliver a standard or principle of the truth in religion" (KFR 3). Otto clearly believes that the identification of such a standard is of the utmost practical importance for the religious life and for theology. "We would in fact have no chance at all of deciding between greater and lesser values of the historical formations, we would not ourselves be capable of accepting, recognizing, having insight into the truth and validity of religious or moral claims, without the 'spiritus sanctus in corde,' without a peculiar principle of truth lying within ourselves, by which we measure and through which we decide" (KFR 2).

II. Religious Feeling and the Critical Philosophy While Troeltsch's influence lies in the background of the Kantisch-Fries'sche Religionsphilosophie, it is equally important to recognize the place of this work in the development of Otto's own thinking. At the end of the last chapter, I noted Otto's criticism of Schleiermacher's failure in the Speeches to address the question of the validity of religious experience, and in the

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opening pages of the Kant-Fries book, this criticism is taken up again. It is precisely in relation to this question that Otto has come to prefer Fries' philosophy of religion to Schleiermacher's. In his effort to distinguish religion from both metaphysics and morality, Otto argues, Schleiermacher had left dangerously little ground upon which the validity of religious judgments might be established. Schleiermacher succeeds only with trouble, and as a matter of secondary importance, in establishing the connection between religious feeling and religious conviction, without which the latter would have no basis or right. A validity of such conviction as cognition (Erkenntnis) is rejected almost from the beginning. Rather to the disadvantage of religion and in contradiction to its elementary nature! The religious conviction must be true and its truth must also be able to be exhibited, i.e. it must raise a claim to be cognition. Otherwise religion itself becomes impossible and can claim to be nothing more than the loose dreams of sensitive hearts (KFR 9-10).

This passage introduces a number of terms which lie at the heart of Otto's argument: cognition {Erkenntnis), feeling {Gefühl), validity {Giltigkeit [sic!]), and truth {Wahrheit). In the following pages, I will attempt to establish the meaning of each of these terms as Otto employs them. Only then will it be possible to determine how a feeling might be capable of guaranteeing the validity of a conviction, or how Otto understands the relationship between validity and truth, which he seems to equate in this passage. At the outset, it may be observed that Otto's contention that religious conviction must make a claim to be knowledge appears to conflict with what was said in the last chapter about the restrictions that Kant had imposed upon the possibility of theoretical knowledge of the objects of religious belief. It was precisely this possibility that was denied by Kant in the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. How, then, does Otto propose to establish a claim for the cognitive validity of religious experience without transgressing the boundaries of the critical method, which he claims the philosophy of religion must follow? The answer to this question must be sought in the revised Kantianism of Jakob Fries, and specifically in the Friesian doctrine of Ahndung (aesthetico-religious premonition). In this doctrine Otto thought he had discovered a means for establishing a more secure epistemological foundation for religious feeling than Schleiermacher had succeeded in producing, and it is this aspect of Fries' thought that is taken up and developed by Otto in his later work. However, since this doctrine cannot be grasped apart from the basic features of Fries' philosophy as a whole, it is necessary to give a brief summary of that philosophy and its relation to the Kantian ideas discussed in the last chapter. For Fries, as for Kant, the task of philosophy is develop a critique of reason. Fries reproduces the basic structure of Kant's philosophy and retains much of his vocabulary. But while Fries arrives at many of the same conclu-

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sions as Kant does, the manner in which he comes to them is different. Fries argues that the method appropriate to the problems of philosophy is a regressive and analytic one. Whereas mathematics proceeds deductively on the basis of intuitions that are able of being exhibited a priori, the objects with which philosophy is concerned (i.e. the underlying structures of thought), are incapable of being intuited and must instead be produced by means of reflection. Philosophy begins with the "facts of inner experience" and seeks to analyze these in order to determine the most fundamental principles of reason. Fries argues that once these principles have been recognized, they cannot be subjected to further justification, and he regards Kant's attempt to provide such a justification as the expression of an underlying "rationalist prejudice," which ultimately led to the abuses of post-Kantian speculative metaphysics. As a result of this criticism, Fries rejects Kant's method of transcendental deduction. His rejection is founded upon a logical claim. A proof, Fries argues, is not capable of producing any new knowledge, but only of drawing out what is implicit in the premises, which must be true in order for the proof to be valid. Kant had sought to deduce the categories of the understanding by showing that they are the conditions for the possibility of experience. What he failed to recognize is that these conditions are incapable of being justified themselves. The logical proof of the fundamental principles of any science is neither possible, nor necessary. In contrast to Kant's method of transcendental deduction, Fries calls his own method "psychic anthropology," which he regards as a "science of inner experience." The aim of this method is to determine by means of analysis the fundamental principles underlying the employment of reason in all its forms. The theory of reason consists of the sum of those principles that are not capable of being analyzed further. No attempt is made to prove the validity of these principles once they have been identified. It is simply shown that these are in fact the principles that we employ unreflectively in our everyday judgments. Although Fries conceives the critique of reason as an "inductive" science, he remains adamantly opposed to philosophical empiricism. The truths that philosophy discovers are a priori truths, even if the means by which they are discovered are a posteriori. So, for example, Fries rejects Hume's view that the principle of causality is derived from the repeated observation that Β follows A, and the expectation, based on this observation, that whenever A occurs, Β will follow. The empiricist view that all knowledge is derived from sense impressions contradicts the facts of mental experience as they are discovered by the anthropological method. What this method shows is that reason spontaneously produces a "necessary objective synthetic unity," which determines all our empirical experience. So, for example, philosophy is incapable of determining whether or not any things exist, which could only be known from experience. But philosophy is able to show that, if something

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exists, it must be subject to the law of quantity, i.e.; it must be either one or many. The spontaneous activity of reason that underlies all empirical experience Fries calls "immediate cognition." Immediate cognition is effective {wirksam) long before it is discovered by critical reason. Otto explains: "Every rational being has in himself mathematical as well as metaphysical cognition and is constantly applying it unconsciously. Everyone knows vaguely that a straight line is the shortest path between two points and acts accordingly when he has to go somewhere" (KFR 41). This unconscious knowledge, before it becomes the object of philosophical reflection, is apprehended in the form of a pre-reflective "feeling of truth" ( Wahrheitsgefühl). The task of philosophy is to make explicit the cognition that is thus applied unreflectively, and to establish its validity. Immediate cognition is not itself capable of being intuited. It is only through mediate cognition, or reflection, that the contents of immediate cognition become available to conscious thought. Reflection thus results in something analogous to a Platonic anamnesis, reproducing in consciousness what is in some sense already "known" by the epistemological subject. Immediate cognition, according to Fries, is incorrigible, though our reflective judgments are capable of being mistaken. The validity of reflective judgments, or empirical truth, consists in the correspondence of these judgments to the contents of immediate cognition. Immediate cognition itself, as Cassirer remarks in his discussion of Fries' philosophy, "appears now to be freed from every suspicion of particularity or one-sided restriction, for it no longer stands opposed to any 'transcendental' truth, but is the highest law for every empirical truth that is comprehensible and available to us." 10 In addition to rejecting Kant's method of transcendental deduction, Fries also criticizes Kant for having failed to establish the unity of reason underlying its various applications. Kant's philosophy is characterized by a strict bifurcation between the realms of nature and freedom, theoretical and practical reason, phenomena and noumena. The members of each of these pairs appear to be separated by an insurmountable gulf, since the principles of reason operative in each of them are different, and Kant's deductions of these principles in the first two Critiques proceed independently of one another. As a result, reason seems to be divided among a number of ultimately irreconcilable faculties, and the individual person is split into an empirical subject and a transcendental subject, which are logically distinct. Yet surely it is the same reason that is employed in the theoretical cognition of the natural world and in the contemplation of moral ends, just as it is the same person who

Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, Vol. III (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1920), p. 461.

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exists in the world, subject to determination by causal factors, while at the same time acting upon the world through freely chosen actions. The problem of resolving this division, which occupied Kant in the Third Critique, became one of the overriding concerns among the generation of German philosophers after Kant. The solution to the problem proposed by Fries is to undertake a "broader deduction" than the one Kant had pursued in attempting to demonstrate the aprioricity of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason. Fries proposes to extend the concept of the unity of apperception to include not only the synthetic unity of the understanding, but the unity of all of the cognitive faculties. Consequently, Fries does not limit the scope of "cognition" {Erkenntnis) to the understanding. Instead, he broadens the application of the term to include knowledge {Wissen), belief {Glaube) and aesthetico-religious premonition {Ahndung), each of which is a form of cognition in its own right, capable of producing convictions which "have completely the same degree of certainty within our spirit."11 Up to now the distinctions between the ways of apprehending truths have been understood in such a way that basically any complete conviction had to be knowledge (Wissen). Against this I maintain that knowledge is only the conviction of complete cognition, the objects of which are recognized through intuition. Belief (Glaube), on the other hand, is a necessary conviction arising from reason alone, which can c o m e to consciousness only in concept, that is, in ideas. Aesthetic sense (Ahndung), though, is a necessary conviction from feeling alone.

Of these three kinds of cognition, the latter two - belief and aesthetic sense are most important for Fries' philosophy of religion. What is cognized in belief are ideas of reason, which Otto defines as follows: "[An] idea is the concept of something that absolutely transcends all experience, and which is also not applied to experience, as [are] the concepts of the understanding (categories); but, at the same time, a concept which we necessarily make for ourselves from pure reason" (KFR 49-50). As discussed in the last chapter, in Kant's philosophy, the ideas of God, freedom and immortality function as postulates of practical reason that cannot be known, the truth of which is believed, however, on the basis of an interest of reason. In his effort to preserve the unity of reason in each of its forms of cognition, Fries arrives at his exposition of the ideas by extending the deduction of the categories of the understanding. The method employed to this end is called "double negation,"

11

Jakob Friedrich Fries, Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft, 2nd ed., Vol. II in Sämtliche Schriften, Vol. V, ed. by Gert König and Lutz Geldsetzer (Aalen: Scientia, 1967), p. 96. Jakob Friedrich Fries, Knowledge, Belief and Aesthetic Sense, ed. by Frederick Gregory, trans, by Kent Richter (Cologne: Jürgen Dinter, 1989), p. 46.

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and it depends upon the doctrine of the schematism of the categories, developed by Kant in the First Critique and taken over intact by Fries. The categories, as pure concepts, are completely a priori. As concepts of the understanding, however, they function to organize the manifold of intuition. "But pure concepts of the understanding being completely heterogeneous from empirical intuitions, and indeed from all sensible intuitions, can never be met with in any intuition. . . . How, then, is subsumption of intuitions under pure concepts, the application of a category to appearances, possible?" (CPR Β 176-77). The doctrine of the schematism is intended by Kant to answer this question. Schematism is a function of the imagination, which mediates between the understanding and empirical intuition, thus making possible the application of the categories to experience. Specifically, it is the means whereby categories are able to be applied to objects intuited in time and space. So, for example, the pure (unschematized) concept of causality expresses the logical relationship between ground and consequent (if A, then B). It is only as a result of the schema of cause that this logical relationship becomes a causal relationship, and is thereby able to express the necessity with which one event follows upon another in time. Kant holds that it is only in their schematized form that the categories are significant for sensible beings, since only in this form are they able to be applied to experience (CPR Β 185). "But it is also evident that although the schemata of sensibility first realize the categories, they at the same time restrict them, that is, limit them to conditions which lie outside the understanding, and are due to sensibility" (CPR Β 185-86). This "restriction" of the categories amounts to a kind of negation. By negating this restriction (hence "double negation"), Fries believes it is possible to conceive of an "ideal schematization" of the categories, whereby reason produces ideas of absolute reality, which become objects of rational faith (Glaube). While the schematized categories apply to appearances that are known by the understanding (Wissen), the ideas "apply" to the nature of things in themselves, as they are thought by reason according to "the principle of completion." So, for example, from the ideally schematized category of modality arises the idea of eternity, from the category of community arises the idea of God as the totality of being, and so on. Unlike Kant, who regards faith in general as a conviction determined by some interest (an interest of reason in the case of the postulates) of the epistemological subject, Fries regards rational faith as a necessary conviction of reason, rooted in our nature as rational creatures, and capable of being established independently of any interest. The ideas of reason are neither innate, as they were for Leibniz, nor are they constructed as postulates of reason. They are simply "there" in immediate cognition, like the categories. And Fries foregoes any attempt to prove them, since the contents of immediate cognition can only be shown or exhibited, not proven. "Thus believing

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God exists was, he thought, like knowing that substance endures unchanged: there are no degrees of belief in a fundamental sense, but only more or less familiarity with one's own cognitive processes." 13 It would appear, then, that according to Fries we all believe that God exists, only some of us don't know it yet. Otto is quick to point out that the conviction expressed in the ideas of reason "is itself thoroughly not religion, but cold and formal metaphysics, while religion, in contradistinction to metaphysics, has its life in the heart (Gemüt) and will" (KFR 73). Nevertheless, religion cannot do without solid conceptions of a metaphysical nature. "There simply cannot be nonmetaphysical religion if God is really to mean God and eternity really something real (ein wirklich Wirkliches)" (KFR 73). Furthermore, Otto claims, all religions create for themselves a primitive metaphysics, wherein the ideas of reason are expressed symbolically. Thus, the truth of the ideas is dimly perceived in the history of religion even before these ideas are consciously established by means of rational reflection. In religion, however, the ideas are not objects of theoretical speculation, but of practical action and aesthetico-religious contemplation. They are experienced in relation to the will and to feeling. However, what is the last and highest achievement of speculative reason has long since been active in practical faith, wherein the highest good is conceived as the goal of moral action and the object of religious devotion. In the practical sphere, the moral and religious significance of the ideas of reason is first made possible by a "practical schematism," whereby the identity of their empty logical validity with the content of the moral law is established. Thus the theoretical idea of absolute being is "schematized" by the moral law of absolute value (which, in Fries' philosophy, is the highest principle underlying our moral judgments) thereby producing the idea of God as the creator of the moral law. "The cold, indifferent 'essential and necessary cause of things in general' now becomes the living, personal, almighty Creator and Father of spirits, the Lord of the eternal kingdom and giver of the highest good" (KFR 74). Furthermore, whereas Kant emphasizes the demand that duty be determined by reason alone, for Fries, who is influenced by Schiller on this point, the highest good toward which our moral efforts are directed is the object not only of practical reason, but also of love.

13

Kent Richter, The Religious University, 1990, p. 166.

Epistemology

of Jakob Fries,

Ph.D.

Dissertation, Stanford

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III. Aesthetic Judgment, Ahndung and the Communicability of Religious Experience Finally we come to that aspect of Fries' thought which is most important for understanding the development of Otto's ideas, and forms the conceptual background of the theory of the numinous, ideograms and the faculty of divination developed in Das Heilige. This is the Friesian doctrine of Ahndung or aesthetico-religious premonition. Ahndung is for Fries a third kind of cognition next to knowledge and belief. Whereas knowledge combines concepts and intuitions, and belief constructs ideas that are incapable of corresponding to any intuition, Ahndung produces judgments without reference to concepts, by means of intuition and feeling alone. As it is developed by Fries, the doctrine of Ahndung is able to serve as a kind of bridge between the natural realm of appearances and the eternal realm of the ideas. In fact, for Fries, and later for Otto, it is the means whereby the eternal is apprehended in the temporal. The seed from which this theory grows, however, is contained in Kant's Critique of Judgment, as Otto himself observes. 14 Kant's Critique of Judgment occupies a unique place, both in relation to his philosophy as a whole, and in relation to the subsequent history of German philosophy. On the surface, it is primarily an attempt to extend the purview of the Critical Philosophy by applying the transcendental method to two classes of judgments not discussed in the first two Critiques. At the same time, it represents one of Kant's most sustained responses to several trends of thought that he regarded as either potential or actual threats to the intellectual accomplishments of the Aufklärung and the cause of Reason championed by its exponents. Implicit in Kant's discussion of aesthetics is a criticism of the cult of genius and inspiration promulgated among the Sturm und Drang movement, which threatened to obscure the distinction between poetry and philosophy. And implicit in his discussion of teleological judgment is a criticism of the hylozoistic interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy that rapidly gained popularity in Germany during the 1780's and 90's, the influence of which is to be detected in Schleiermacher's discussion in the Speeches, as we saw in the last chapter. Most importantly for our purposes, The Critique of Judgment suggested to Otto the possibility of an approach to the philosophy of religion radically different from the one put forward by Kant in his doctrine of the postulates of practical reason, and it provides an important key for understanding Otto's mature views in Das Heilige. As the title already indicates, the question raised by Kant in the Critique of Judgment is, first, whether or not is it is possible to identify a priori principles of judgment, and, second, what the nature of those principles might be. This

14

"Fries doctrine is thoroughly grounded in Kant's Critique of Judgment"

(KFR 122).

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question, however, is related to a number of other concerns that had emerged in the course of Kant's effort to determine the scope of theoretical and practical reason, respectively, in each of the first two Critiques. In the opening pages of the introduction to the Third Critique, Kant speaks of "an immense gulf fixed between the domain of the concept of nature, the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible, so that no transition from the sensible to the supersensible . . . is possible." 15 Theoretical knowledge is knowledge of the physical world and the laws of nature that govern it. The a priori principles underlying that knowledge are discussed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. Practical knowledge is knowledge of the moral world and the laws of freedom that govern it. The a priori principles underlying that knowledge are discussed by Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason. The apparently insurmountable gulf between these two realms presents an enigma insofar as a transition between the sensible and the supersensible is presupposed by our capacity for moral action, which involves an attempt to influence the sensible world in accordance with moral purposes. This fact lead Kant to suppose that "there must after all be a basis uniting the supersensible that underlies nature and the supersensible that the concept of freedom contains practically" (CJ 15/176). At least at the outset, the Critique of Judgment is presented as an attempt to locate this mediating link between nature and freedom in the power (Vermögen) of judgment, and to identify the a priori principles involved in its employment. Only insofar as such principles can be identified does judgment find a place of its own in the enterprise of critical philosophy. Kant's discussion is pursued in two parts, the critique of aesthetic judgment and the critique of teleological judgment. The relationship between these two parts is not immediately obvious, and has been debated extensively by various commentators. The following discussion will focus primarily on Kant's discussion of aesthetic judgment, since it is to aesthetic judgment, rather than to teleological judgment, that Otto primarily appeals in his attempt to establish the numinous as a distinct category of value resulting from judgments determined by feeling (Gefühl) rather than concepts. As mentioned in the previous chapter, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant identifies two sources of human knowledge: sensibility and understanding. Sensibility is the source of intuitions, which, for human beings, are conditioned by space and time. The source of concepts is the understanding. By means of logical judgments, intuitions are subsumed under concepts, and

All references to the Third Critique are taken from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, ed. and trans, by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), here p. 15/175-176; hereafter cited in the text as "CJ." The second page number refers to the 2nd ed. of the Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. by Wilhelm Windelband, which is Vol. V of the Prussian Academy of Sciences Edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften.

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cognition is produced. Concepts function thus as rules for organizing the manifold of appearances in order to produce knowledge. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant calls this kind of judgment "determinative" and identifies for the first time a distinct class of judgments, called "reflective," to which judgments of taste, or aesthetic judgments, belong. Judgments whereby concepts are applied to intuitions are called determinative because they determine which particular intuitions are instances of which concepts. In the case of reflective judgments there is no subsumption of an intuition under a concept. Judgment in general is the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given, then the judgment, which subsumes the particular under it, is determinative (even though [in its role] as transcendental judgment it states a priori the conditions that must be met for subsumption under that universal to be possible). But if only the particular is given and judgment has to find the universal for it, then this power is merely reflective (CJ 18-19/179).

If there is no basis for the universality of aesthetic judgments, then the distinction between what is beautiful and what is merely agreeable or pleasing to the senses is, philosophically speaking, groundless. In that case, aesthetic judgments would be as arbitrary as judgments about what kind of food tastes good, and there could be no rational way to establish any objective standards of aesthetic merit. Earlier in his career, Kant had held just such a view. He believed that it was impossible to determine an a priori principle underlying our judgments of taste, and that, as a result, there could no place for aesthetics in transcendental philosophy. By the time he came to write the Third Critique, Kant had abandoned this earlier position. This was due partly to his recognition of the philosophical problem posed by the grammatical similarity between the application of logical predicates and the application of aesthetic predicates to objects of sense perception. In the judgment that a particular object is beautiful, the predicate "beautiful" appears to function grammatically to indicate a quality of the object in question (i.e. to have objective validity). Thus, the judgments expressed in the propositions "This rose is beautiful," and "This rose is red," appear at first to be structurally identical. On closer examination, however, it becomes apparent that judgments of taste do not involve the application of determinative rules as in the case of logical judgments. Consider the following comparison. Once I am in possession of the concept of a triangle, I am able to make a number of statements that will be true of any particular triangle. It will have three sides, its interior angles will add up to 180 degrees, etc. By way of contrast, there is no guarantee that all epic poems written in iambic pentameter will strike me as being beautiful, or that every time I gaze into the night sky I will be inspired by the sublimity of

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the starry vault. In cases where I am so impressed, according to Kant, I may reasonably expect that others ought to share my admiration; and in fact I implicitly make this claim in saying that the poem is beautiful, or that the heavens are sublime, whether or not others agree with me. But this expectation is not determined by a rule that could be stated beforehand. In each particular case I have to look and see. Thus, in attempting to identify an a priori principle of aesthetic judgment, Kant is faced with the task of having to locate the source of the universality of aesthetic judgments somewhere other than in the concepts of the understanding. Employing the logical parlance of his day, Kant states this fact of aesthetic experience in terms of the "logical quantity" of aesthetic judgments. "In their logical quantity all judgments of taste are singular judgments. For since I must hold the object directly up to my feeling of pleasure and displeasure, but without using concepts, these judgments cannot have the quantity that judgments with objective general validity have" (CJ 59/215). Nevertheless, Kant is committed to the view that aesthetic judgments of taste do involve a kind of claim to universality that is absent in the case of judgments about what is merely pleasant or agreeable. In other words, Kant believes that, when we assert of a particular work of art or of a natural object that it is beautiful, in some sense this assertion entails the expectation that others ought to agree. This expectation distinguishes aesthetic judgments of taste from aesthetic judgments of sense, "For a judgment of taste carries with it an aesthetic quantity of universality, i.e. of validity for everyone, which a judgment about the agreeable does not have" (CJ 59/215). If one person finds a particular type of food delectable, and another finds the same food repulsive, each may be perplexed by the other. Each may claim not to be able to believe that anyone could enjoy or fail to enjoy, as the case may be, the food in question. But we would not generally expect them to be able to produce reasons for holding the beliefs that they do. If, on other hand, two people disagree about the relative merit of a particular work of art, we are not surprised to find them appealing to reasons in support of their view, whether or not they are able to persuade their interlocutor to accept the validity of those reasons. The pleasure produced by an agreeable object is purely subjective, and an aesthetic judgment of sense (i.e. a judgment about the agreeable) is therefore only capable of being subjectively valid. Judgments of taste (i.e. judgments about the beautiful) appear to involve something more than merely subjective validity and something less than the objective validity of logical judgments. They appeal to a sense of pleasure that is experienced in relation to an aesthetic object, but they also make a claim to intersubjective validity. If the experience of pleasure were thought to precede the judgment of taste, the judgment would be the consequence of a strictly subjective sensation, and it could not be the basis for such a claim. "Hence," Kant concludes, "it must be

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the universal communicability of the mental state, in the given presentation, which underlies the judgment of taste as its subjective condition, and the pleasure in the object must be its consequence" (CJ 61/217). This universally communicable mental state "must be a feeling, accompanying the given presentation, of a free play of the presentational powers directed to cognition in general" (CJ 62/217). In other words, the pleasure that determines an aesthetic judgment is not produced by the object per se, but by a peculiar harmony that arises in the cognitive powers of the subject. Since all beings who judge by means of understanding and sense are similarly constituted, the feeling of pleasure in aesthetic experience may be regarded as being subjectively universal. '"Subjective universality,'" in Cassirer's words, "is the assertion and requirement of a universality of subjectivity itself."16 On the basis of this universality it becomes possible to conceive of an a priori principle of feeling underlying our aesthetic judgments. Such a subjective principle, which determines by means of feeling alone, without concepts, Kant claims, "could only be regarded as a common sense" (CJ 87/238). He argues that the existence of such a common sense can be established on purely logical grounds, apart from an appeal to psychological observation, and that such a principle must in fact be presupposed if skepticism is to be avoided (CJ 88/239). Whereas taste is the capacity to judge certain objects to be beautiful, genius is the ability to create beautiful objects. Genius is a talent, and as such it cannot be learned. Its foremost property is originality. "We may call beauty (whether natural or artistic) the expression of aesthetic ideas" (CJ 189/320). Genius, insofar as it is the capacity to produce beauty, is also the ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas (CJ 217/344). An aesthetic idea is "a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e. no concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it" (CJ 182/314). Aesthetic ideas are the counterpart to rational ideas. Whereas a rational idea is a transcendent concept with no corresponding intuition, an aesthetic idea is an intuition that is incapable of being resolved into a clearly defined concept. Aesthetic ideas nevertheless "at least strive toward something that lies beyond the bounds of experience, and hence try to approach an exhibition of rational concepts (intellectual ideas), and thus [these concepts] are given a semblance of objective reality" (CJ 182/314). For Kant, the ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas is most clearly manifested in the art of poetry, where the poet attempts to give sensible expression to ideas (like freedom or immortality) which are really incapable of corresponding to any appearance. 16

Ernst Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought, trans, by James Haden (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 318.

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In Fries' philosophy, Kant's discussion of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic ideas are preserved, only they are given a broader interpretation. For Fries, aesthetic judgment becomes a general capacity to judge by means of feeling. What distinguishes aesthetic judgments from logical judgments is not that they concern "aesthetic" objects in the narrow sense, but that they are judgments determined by the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, and not by concepts. Such judgments do not contribute anything to our knowledge of the object. Rather, they are the means whereby some value is apprehended in an object. Logical judgments produce knowledge of the objects of intuition by subsuming them under universal concepts. They do this by abstracting from the particularity of the given. The particular as such, i.e. the individual object of intuition, is irrational, and it is this particularity which is negated insofar as the object is known through a concept. The theoretical act of logical subsumption, however, is not the only determination of our relation to the object, and the significance of the object is not exhausted in this act. Indeed, the quality of the individual thing and the value that is apprehended in it is not capable of being grasped by means of a logical judgment. The philosophical significance of the term "feeling" in Otto's theory of the numinous has its roots here. Thus, as Otto explains: 'Feeling' is not sense, but a peculiar judgment about something given by sense. Feeling is a power of judgment. . . . The same taste, the same smell, the same sensation of heat can, depending on my inner disposition, elicit completely contrary feelings of satisfaction or disgust. Only the sensation is given from without, while the judging feeling is in no way given from without, but comes from myself (KFR 90).

In distinguishing between the various kinds of value that are apprehended by means of aesthetic judgment, Fries makes use of the distinction developed by Kant between the agreeable (or pleasant), the beautiful and the good. For Kant, these terms designate "three different relations that presentations ('Vorstellungen) have to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, the feeling by reference to which we distinguish between objects or between ways of presenting them" (CJ 52/209). The feeling of pleasure and displeasure determines the like or dislike with which we regard an object. Our liking for the agreeable is determined by the faculty of sensibility, and is connected with a sensual interest. Because the pleasure taken in the agreeable is sensual (i.e. dependent upon experience), the value attributed to it is merely subjective. Our liking for the good is similar to our liking for the agreeable insofar as it too is connected with an interest in the object. But in the case of the good, our interest is not sensual, but intellectual. The good appeals to reason, since it always contains the concept of a purpose {Zweck), insofar as we necessarily regard an object either as good for something or as good in itself. The only thing that is good without qualification, for Kant, is the will that is

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determined by the moral law. The interest that we take in such a good is intellectual because it is related the concept of the good, which is determined a priori by practical reason. The beautiful is distinguished from the agreeable and the good by the fact that our liking of it is not connected to an interest, and the pleasure we take in it is not determined by sensibility or by a concept, but by our faculty of judgment alone. In Kant's account of aesthetic judgment, it is crucial that the pleasure taken in the beautiful be disinterested, and that it be determined neither by sensibility nor by intellect, but only by an a priori principle of judgment. In Fries' doctrine of Ahndung, Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment is integrated with the doctrine of the ideas that was discussed above. The ideas, as transcendental concepts of reason, are not capable of corresponding to any intuition. They are themselves produced by means of a negation of the restrictions whereby pure concepts are able to be applied to appearances in time and space. Nevertheless, the same ideas that are produced by means of a purely negative act of abstraction, and thus cognized in the form of rational belief (Glaube), are capable of being positively experienced in the form of feeling. Ahndung, which is literally translated as "presentiment" or "premonition," involves a kind of "dim" perception of the eternal realm of ideas in the form mental impressions produced by particular objects of intuition. Otto explains: . . . things, events, persons, the existent (Daseiendem) and the becoming (Geschehendem) in general are able to create impressions on our mind where what is intuitively perceived goes far beyond their 'concept,' beyond that which is presented by the individual thing according to concepts. . . . We recognize in them a meaning, a value, which now and then enraptures us entirely (bis zum äussersten entzückt), but which remains completely inexpressible (KFR 113, 112).

Here Kant's discussion of aesthetic ideas is taken over and interpreted in relation to the Friesian doctrine of "immediate cognition." And Schleiermacher's "intuition and feeling of the universe" has been transposed into a Kantian epistemological key. Otto believes that Fries' philosophy makes it possible to overcome the subjectivism of Schleiermacher's discussion of religious feeling. While it is Fries who suggests to Otto the possibility of finding a place for religious feeling within the critical philosophy, it is the Friesian theologian, W. M. L. DeWette, who suggests how this philosophical theory might be applied to the history of religion, and, in particular, to Christianity.17 "In 17

Wilhelm Martin Leberecht DeWette (1780-1849), biblical scholar and theologian, was a contemporary and colleague of Schleiermacher's at the University of Berlin from 18ΙΟΙ 819. Before coming to Berlin, De Wette was influenced by Fries, and employed Friesian concepts in his theology. His work was re-discovered by Otto in the course of his study

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short, De Wette argues in connection with Schleiermacher's Second Speech that the Ahndung of the eternal in the temporal must be aroused not only by natural, but also by historical reality. And this is the thesis that Otto takes up." 18 For DeWette, as for Schleiermacher, the province of religion is feeling. On the experiential level, religion is a private affair, since feeling as such involves a subjective response to the universe. How, then, is one to account for the communication of religious experience that makes possible the emergence of historical religious traditions? In order to answer this question, DeWette developed a theory of religious symbolism on the basis of Friesian philosophical categories. Feelings are not concepts and are therefore incapable of being articulated in the form of logical propositions. Religious feeling, however, can be expressed by means of pictures or symbols, which are able to be intuited {anschauliche Bilder). These symbols serve as means for awakening the reproductive imagination (Erregungsmittel der wiederholenden Einbildungskraft) of those who contemplate them. 19 In this way, religious experience is communicated and transmitted within particular historical traditions. Otto explains: What emerges inwardly in the ideas and feelings of the individual is communicated, becomes a common possession, forming a community, in which these ideas and feelings are stored, passed on, and steadily increased. In this way a context emerges in which religion can develop historically, can assume shape, in which there is now also a space and an effectual sphere for the emergence of outstanding individuals, in whom the religious aptitude is ever more fully revealed, so that progress is made, new forms emerge, and higher levels are attained (KFR 172-173).

The task of the historical researcher is to gain access to the experience that is symbolically expressed and maintained in particular religious traditions. This task requires familiarity with the languages that are the vehicle of such expression. However, philological competence is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for its successful completion. Religious experience, in DeWette's theory, is communicated symbolically. Its most direct expressions are to be found in acts of worship, religious poetry, liturgy, music and hymns. Dogmas are developed subsequently for the purpose of instruction in matters of faith. They combine symbolic and conceptual elements. The codification of religious doctrines, however, is characterized by a tendency toward rationalization and formalization, whereby the originally purely symbolic

19

of Fries. For a discussion of DeWette's views, see Emanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der evangelischen Theologie, Vol. V (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1960), pp. 35-363. Paul Seifert, Die Religionsphilosophie bei Rudolf Otto: Eine Untersuchung über ihre Entwicklung (Düsseldorf: G. H. Nolte, 1936), p. 49. W. M. L. DeWette, Ueber Religion und Theologie, 2nd ed. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1821), p. 75.

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expressions of religious feeling are supplanted by clearly formulated propositions. In order to understand a particular historical form of religion, one must look behind these doctrinal formulations in order to discover the underlying experience from which they emerged. In addition to the requisite historical and philological tools, what is required here is a special kind of psychological insight. The historian of dogma will always have the task of providing himself with a religious psychology which penetrates into the inner workings of religious opinions and shows how they originate in the mind: an investigation which, precisely because it seeks to comprehend religion as something becoming and fluctuating, presupposes a most delicate religious sense and a most intimate familiarity with its true nature, and is thus admittedly not everyone's affair (KFR 179).

These remarks provide an important insight into the nature of DeWette's influence on Otto's subsequent investigations. What Otto takes over from De Wette is not his interpretations of specific theological doctrines. In fact, Otto finds these to be generally unsatisfactory. However, "Once one has the key in hand, one can actually do everything for oneself' (KFR 179). What Otto receives from De Wette is a methodological insight. Religious dogmas conceal as much as they reveal, and as long as they are considered in abstracto, apart from the practical religious contexts from which they arise and in which they are existentially relevant, they may serve to inhibit, rather than to promote, the understanding of religious phenomena. As long as we think of religions as so many metaphysical theories about supermundane truths which are grasped intellectually, we will be unable to consider, for example, "what actually moves and compels people to recognize in a phenomenon such as Christ a divine revelation and to submit themselves to it" (KFR 149). Like Schleiermacher, De Wette emphasizes the role of remarkable individuals whose personal religious experience becomes the center around which a religious community is formed. DeWette's rendering of this idea, however, is informed by Fries' philosophy, and ultimately by Kant's discussion of genius in the Critique of Judgment. There Kant defines genius as the ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas (CJ 217/344). De Wette refers to the religious feelings of enthusiasm (Begeisterung), resignation {Ergebung) and religious devotion (Andacht) as "aesthetic ideas," which are exhibited with unusual forcefulness and depth in those personalities who become founders of new religious movements. This line of thought, which appears at first to be somewhat gratuitous, takes on at least a prima facie plausibility, I think, if we interpret it in light of the following remark of Cassirer' s, which appears in the context of his discussion of Kant's theory of genius: As a temporally unique psychic event, never recurring in the same way, the work of genius testifies straight-forwardly and unambiguously how the most intimate subjec-

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tive feeling at the same time reaches down into the deepest sphere of pure validity and timeless n e c e s s i t y . . . . For just where we stand in the true focus of personality, where the latter gives itself purely without any external consideration and expresses itself in the individuality and necessary law of its creating, all the accidental limitations clinging to the individual in his particular empirical existence and his particular empirical interest fall away.

Of course, as Nygren emphasizes in his criticism of Otto, religion is not art, and religious prophets are not to be confused with artists.21 The degree to which Otto succeeds in distinguishing the numinous from those aesthetic categories which he employs as analogies in his effort to define the numinous as a separate religious category is an issue that will be taken up in the course of our discussion of Das Heilige. At this point it is sufficient to note that the Kantian-Friesian theory of aesthetic judgment is employed by De Wette as a means for understanding the impression that powerful religious personalities are able to produce in the minds of the devout. For the Christian believer, Christ is not merely an object of religious belief, but of aesthetico-religious contemplation. This, according to Otto, is a profound observation, which indicates "a way of escape from the superficial rationalistic interpretation of the person of Christ, and admits the sentiment of pious reverence for him, without falling back on a maze of supernaturalist speculation" (KFR 154). As mentioned in the last chapter, Otto regarded Schleiermacher's greatest accomplishment in the Speeches as having re-conceived the concept of revelation in such a way that it no longer depended upon an appeal to supernatural causality. In Otto's subsequent thinking, the same idea is taken up again, only now it has been subsumed within a Friesian epistemological framework.

IV. The Threat of Historicism and the "testimonium spiritus sancii internum" In light of the preceding exposition of Fries' philosophy of religion and its application to theology, it is now possible to return briefly to the question of the validity of religious experience raised at the outset of this chapter, which Otto's appeal to Fries was intended to address more satisfactorily than Schleiermacher had succeeded in doing. Otto's complaint against Schleiermacher was that he had surrendered religion's claim to involve a kind of knowing {Erkenntnis). In Fries' philosophy of religion, and especially in the doctrine of Ahndung, Otto discovered a way to include religious feeling 20

Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought, p. 322. Nygren, Die Gültigkeit der religiösen Erfahrung, p. 39.

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within a comprehensive critique of reason conceived in (broadly) Kantian terms. However, Otto's argument for the validity of religious experience and the truth of religion ultimately rests upon two philosophical claims that many of his readers have been unwilling to endorse. In order to be persuaded by Otto's argument, one would have to accept both that Fries' deduction of the ideas of reason is correct (which would require accepting his theory of immediate cognition); and that, by virtue of a vaguely conceived "practical schematism," we can safely conclude that the truth of the ideas of reason is the same truth apprehended in the religious experience of humankind throughout history, even before it has been brought to consciousness in the form of philosophical reflection. There is, however, a further problem. Even if we were to suppose, for the sake of argument, that both of these conditions were met, the question would still remain, "How could a philosophy of this kind, which founds the truth of religion on a metaphysical deduction of admittedly 'empty' ideas, do justice to the almost limitless variety of religious beliefs and practices in history?" For several of Otto's contemporaries, what Otto was proposing in the KantFries book was the return to an Enlightenment philosophical position that simply ignored the historical problem which had precipitated the attempt to identify normative criteria for the interpretation of the history of religion in the first place. Karl Dunkmann, another participant in the debate about the religious a priori in the early part of the century, expressed such a view of Otto's appeal to Fries. At bottom, Dunkmann observed, there is for Fries only one true religion, just as there had been for the eighteenth-century Deists, and this rational religion is the standard against which all positive religions, including Christianity, are to be measured. "How is one to arrive at an appreciation of history from this standpoint? . . . Rather, here the actual modern development, which is the source of the crisis, is really jumped over and theology is re-attached to the old, tortured-to-death (totgequälte) problem of the Enlightenment." 22 When all is said and done, Otto's attempt to rescue the cognitive validity of religion depends upon the kind of metaphysical theorizing that Schleiermacher had so emphatically rejected in the Speeches. Those who are familiar with some of the criticisms leveled against Otto over the years for having emphasized the irrational dimension of religion will appreciate the irony of the fact that, at this point in his career, Otto was accused of being a philosophical rationalist. What, then, could have led Otto to pursue this course of argument? The answer, in a word, is historicism. This is the crisis that Dunkmann accuses Otto of having jumped over. As another, more sympathetic, observer of the "Neo-Friesian School" in theology remarked: ". . . today one has grown 22

Karl Dunkmann, Das religiöse Apriori und die Geschichte: Ein Beitrag zur der Religionsphilosophie (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1910), p. 30.

Grundlegung

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tired of mere critique and of one-sided historicism. One wants to get beyond the eternal accumulation of facts and hypotheses, comparison and analysis, groping and questioning, and to secure firm ground under foot." 23 For Otto, and for several of his contemporaries, the recognition that the empirical investigation of the history of religions is incapable of yielding a standard for making normative distinctions among various historical forms of religion threatened to undermine systematic theology entirely. This concern was candidly expressed by Bousset, who by this time had come to regard himself as a Friesian, in his review of Otto's Kant-Fries book. Bousset, himself a professor of New Testament exegesis who had made ground-breaking contributions to the understanding of apocalyptic literature and the christology of the early Church, was deeply concerned about the relativizing consequences of historical research, and remained unconvinced by the solutions proposed by Troeltsch. "The systematician," Bousset wrote, "will in my view only be able to free us from this difficult situation if he is able to lead us over to a storm-free region, which must lie beyond all - even the most important - specific historical research." 24 Bousset's remarks are echoed by Otto himself several years later in Das Heilige, where he insists that the claim of religious knowledge {Erkenntnis) to be true must be founded upon a priori principles "which no 'experience' (.Erfahrung) and no history can give" (DH 202). Thus, it would appear that Otto's Neo-Friesian position is best understood as a reaction to historicism, where that term refers both to the general relativization of cultural norms as a result of the accumulation of historical knowledge in the nineteenth century; and, more specifically, to Troeltsch's attempt in Absolutheit des Christentums to establish normative claims by means of an a posteriori comparison of the great historical formations within the religious history of humankind. 25 As we have seen, for Otto, the capacity for deciding between the greater or lesser validity of these historical formations is only conceivable if it is possible to discover, by means of a critique of reason, "a peculiar principle of truth lying within ourselves, by which we measure and through which we decide (KFR 2)." Such a principle, i.e. the religious a priori, must be independent of history and experience. Nevertheless, both in the Kant-Fries book, and later in Das Heilige, Otto refers to this trans-historical religious principle as the 'spiritus sanctus in corde' (KFR 2, DH 174), a term taken

23

Georg Weiss, "Die neufriesische Schule in der Theologie," Die Christliche Welt 31 (1911), column 730. Wilhelm Bousset, Review of Otto's Kant-Fries'sehe Religionsphilosophie, Theologische Rundschau 12 (1909), 429. Otto appears to use the term in this latter sense when he observes that "Supernaturalism and Historicism [both] fail to deliver a standard or principle of the truth in religion" (KFR 3)·

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from Protestant theology.26 In Das Heilige, Otto identifies the "testimony of the spirit within" as the theological expression corresponding to a general psychological "faculty of divination" that is recognizable throughout the history of religion. He attributes the discovery of this general psychological capacity to Schleiermacher, Fries and De Wette, and he refers his readers to the texts that have been considered in the first two chapters of this study (DH 175). The fact that Otto identifies the universal principle of truth in religion with a term expressive of Protestant religious experience and theology is indicative of a characteristic feature of his approach to the history of religions, which will be addressed further in the next chapter. Here it is sufficient to point out that the a priori principle that is meant to provide a normative standard of judgment is itself taken from a specific, historically localizable tradition. In Das Heilige, Otto acknowledges that his recognition of the numinous began to develop in the course of his early study of Luther's "De servo arbitrio," before he "rediscovered" it elsewhere (DH 123). Otto's emphasis upon the spiritum sanctus in corde can be traced back to his dissertation on Luther's doctrine of the intuition of the Holy Spirit, in which he undertook a psychological analysis of the experience wherein the external spoken or written word is recognized as the living Word of God.27 He emphasized that the effectiveness of the Word is contingent upon the activity of the spirit within, which alone is able to produce a recognition of the Word as holy.28 In Otto's later thought, this Lutheran doctrine is transposed onto the history of religion as a whole, and the testimonium spiritus sanctum internum is conceived as a general capacity for recognizing the holy in history (DH 174), and for distinguishing the relative validity of individual manifestations of the holy. Already in his first published work, it is possible to recognize the beginning of Otto's attempt to identify a general religious aptitude that "is stirred up (regt sich) as soon as the religious object is perceived [and] becomes conscious, according to exactly the same compulsion " 6 The term originates in the Loci theologici (1610-1622) of the orthodox Lutheran theologian, Johann Gerhard (1582-1637). The inner testimony of the Spirit serves as the criterion for the absolute truth of the Word. For Gerhardt, the testimony of the Spirit is present in Scripture, which works upon the believer from without. However, it is also present subjectively as a "vivus piorum sensus" which is something "experienced" (experiri). Cf. Alfred Adam, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 6th ed., Vol. II (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1992), p. 406. 27 Otto's dissertation is entitled Geist und Wort nach Luther (Göttingen: Huth, 1898). An extended version was published the same year under the title, Die Anschauung vom heiligen Geiste bei Luther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1898). Schütte argues that Otto's Luther dissertation is the seed from which his later thought grows. Cf. HansWalter Schütte, Religion und Christentum in der Theologie Rudolf Ottos (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969), footnote p. 12. 28 Cf. Otto, Geist und Wort, p. 8.

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of psychological motivation as when our moral or aesthetic sensibility (Empfinden) is aroused when a corresponding object enters into consciousness." 29 The path leading from the preliminary recognition of the numinous in Luther to the full-fledged theory of the religious a priori in Das Heilige leads through a period characterized by Otto's increasing familiarity with nonChristian religions, and by his response to a broader debate about the historical origin of religion pursued by a number of prominent scholars during the early decades of the twentieth century. In the course of these developments, Otto's own approach to the psychology and history of religion came to be more clearly defined. At the same time, as the following chapters will show, Otto's early investigation of Luther's doctrine of the Holy Spirit lingers in the background of his mature theory of religion, and the Protestant experience of being "in the spirit" continues to function in his thought as the paradigm of religious experience in general.

29

Ibid., p. 6.

Chapter Three The Psychology and History of Religion in Otto's Thought I. Otto's Critique of Wundt's Theory of Animism In attempting to situate Das Heilige within the development of Otto's thought as a whole, the question arises whether that work should be viewed in continuity with Otto's earlier writings, or instead as introducing an entirely new point of departure. Hans-Walter Schütte has observed that, for many of Otto's contemporaries, the appearance of Das Heilige came as something of a surprise insofar as "a theologian apparently interested in the rational foundation of religion turned away from his previous work and attributed an unusual significance to the 'irrational' factors in religious experience." 1 Troeltsch, for example, in his review of Das Heilige, spoke of a "total about-face (Frontwechsel)," which he thought was obscured by Otto's claim that Das Heilige had merely extended his earlier investigation of the rational foundation of religion in the Kant-Fries book to include a consideration of its irrational dimension. 2 Several commentators, including Schütte, who emphasize the continuity of the development of Otto's work, have pointed to his review of Wilhelm Wundt's Völkerpsychologie as a mediating link between the programmatic sketch for a science of religion founded on Friesian principles and the mature position articulated in Das Heilige. In fact, the Wundt review (1910) represents Otto's only significant publication between 1909 and 1917. Schütte observes that, "in the outward sequence of Otto's publications, it alone presents the transition which allows both phases of Otto's thought to appear as belonging together." 3 Similarly, Pfleiderer regards the Wundt review both as an "application" of the program developed in the KantFries book, and as "an important preliminary to Otto's primary work." 4 2

4

Schutte, Religion und Christentum in der Theologie Rudolf Ottos, p. 45. Ernst Troeltsch, "Zur Religionsphilosophie: Aus Anlass des Buches von Rudolf Otto über das Heilige," Kant-Studien 23 (1919), 76. Otto's remark to this effect is contained in a footnote in the 1st ed. of Das Heilige, which was removed in subsequent editions. Cf. Das Heilige, 1st ed. (Breslau: Trewendt & Granier, 1917), p. 5. Schütte, Religion und Christentum in der Theologie Rudolf Ottos, p. 45. Pfleiderer, Theologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, p. 112.

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It is certainly the case that Otto's argument in Das Heilige is nearly impossible to decipher without some prior familiarity with the KantianFriesian conceptual framework upon which it is founded. Nevertheless, Otto's Friesian philosophical commitments do not suffice to account for the originality of his famous descriptions of numinous experience in the opening chapters of Das Heilige. Even those commentators who emphasize the continuity of Otto's thought would agree that these chapters contain something completely new, not only in the development of Otto's work, but in the modern discussion of religion generally. It is therefore important to ask whether it is possible to identify clues in Otto's earlier writings that might shed light on the nature his procedure in those famous chapters. In both the centennial edition of Schleiermacher's Speeches, and in the Kantisch-Fries'sche Religionsphilosophie, Otto's discussion of religion remains for the most part abstract and theoretical. In these works we find him struggling to establish the philosophical foundation for a modern theology conceived as a normative science of religion. While an important place is reserved for an "inductive" component within the programmatic structure of this science, an investigation of concrete religious phenomena has not yet been pursued in any detail. Thus, one might say that the execution of the program remains up to this point only a promise. The significance of the Wundt review is due in part to the fact that in it Otto begins to direct his attention toward an analysis of religious experience. In doing so, he also stakes out a position in the debate about the nature and origin of religion being carried out among a number of prominent anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and theologians around the turn of the century. By the same token, it is not really accurate to call the Wundt review an "application" of the method that Otto had worked out in his previous publications, since, strictly speaking, up to this point he has not proposed a "method" for studying religion, but rather a philosophical theory that is intended to show how religion can be true despite the multiplicity of its historical forms. Although the analysis of religious experience presented in the opening chapters of Das Heilige is foreshadowed in Otto's earlier works, its actual execution is worked out by Otto in direct contact mit der Sache selbst. Over the years, many astute critics have been deeply impressed by the originality and insightfulness of Otto's descriptions of religious experience, while remaining skeptical of the epistemological claims that he makes for that experience, as well as his theory of the religious a priori. Although a great deal of effort has been spent in attempting to decipher the Kantian terminology employed by Otto in Das Heilige, less attention has been paid to Otto's approach to the psychology and history of religion. Despite the originality of Otto's analysis of numinous experience in Das Heilige, that analysis was pursued within the context of a broader debate about of the nature of the Geisteswissenschaften, or human sciences, being carried out in Germany

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around the turn of the century. Part of the value of the Wundt review is that it helps to locate Otto's position within this broader debate. Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who established the first psychological laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig, is sometimes referred to as the founder of experimental psychology. At end of the nineteenth century, psychology was still in the process of distinguishing itself as an independent discipline, distinct from philosophy, and Wundt was instrumental in this process. Wundt's educational background was in medicine and biology. Yet in addition to works on the principles of experimental psychology and animal psychology, he also published works on ethics, logic and the system of philosophy. Wundt regarded psychology as "the common basis for all scientific and cultural knowledge and the bond uniting all the individual sciences, and therefore the 'science directly preparatory to philosophy.'" 5 Between the years of 1900 and 1920, he produced a ten-volume Völkerpsychologie, in which he undertook to explain the origins of language, myth and morals by applying the principles of experimental psychology to the investigation of prehistoric human culture. The three volumes dedicated to myth and religion appeared in 1905, 1906, and 1909. It is the theory presented in these volumes that Otto discusses in his review essay. Völkerpsychologie, as conceived by Wundt, constitutes an independent discipline, different on the one hand from individual psychology, and on the other from history and literature.6 Although Völkerpsychologie involves the application of the principles of individual psychology to the investigation of the origins of human culture, insofar as the term "application" connotes some practical end other than the purely theoretical interest of science itself, Wundt argues, the characterization of Völkerpsychologie as applied psychology is misleading. "The origin and development of language, the formation of mythological and religious ideas (Vorstellungen), the emergence of morals and moral feeling - the treatment of these problems serves immediately only the interests of psychology itself and the theoretical human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) bound up with it."7 Völkerpsychologie is thus not so much an application of individual psychology as an extension of its methods and principles to the investigation of primitive, pre-literate culture. On the other hand, Völkerpsychologie must also be distinguished from the historical sciences. Where cultural innovations and developments can be attributed to the activity of individual social agents, they are no longer

Albert Wellek, "Wundt, Wilhelm," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. Vili, ed. by Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 349. It is difficult to decide how best to translate the term Völkerpsychologie. "Folk psychology" is misleading. "Social psychology" would be more accurate, accept that Wundt is concerned specifically with the origins of human culture in pre-literate societies. Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, Vol. 1.1 (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1900), p. 2.

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suitable objects of this discipline. Since the emergence of the so-called higher religions can only be understood in terms of the historical agency of their respective founders, it falls outside the scope of Völkerpsychologie, which must limit itself to the investigation of those "pre-religious" phenomena out of which religion proper finally emerges at the end of a long process of development. Wundt identifies two criteria for distinguishing appropriate objects of this new science: they must be the product of a collective social unit, and therefore not capable of being attributed to the innovation of any particular individual; and they must exhibit universally valid laws of development. The final source of all artistic and mythological creativity, as well as religious feeling, in Wundt's theory, is fantasy. Fantasy, as Wundt conceives it, incorporates an ideational and affective component. It involves, first, the capacity to rearrange of the contents of sense perception and express them in new forms, according to the law of the association of ideas. But it also involves an act of projection (Einfühlung), whereby the self comes to be identified with the objects of its own imaginative creation. It is through the combination of these two psychological processes that mythological symbols arise. In the act of contemplating the fantastic products of the imagination, their emotional value is heightened by means of an illusion. For Wundt, the capacity to generate myth by means of fantasy is the same, in principle, as the capacity to produce works of art. The difference is one of degree, rather than one of quality or kind. The motivating factor in both cases is "animating apperception." Employing this principle, Wundt offers an explanation of the origin of mythological beliefs similar in many respects to one proposed by the British anthropologists, Ε. B. Tylor and James Frazer. So, for example, in Wundt's theory, the belief in souls first arises when the idea of the soul comes to be associated psychologically with the human breath, which escapes from the body at the moment of death. Later, the breath-soul is identified with the wind and clouds, which in turn are associated with flying birds. In this way there develops the myth of the bird of death, who transports the souls of the dead to the sun. This psychological explanation of the origin of myth is meant to account for the fact that the same myths often arise in several different locations independently. In Wundt's account, religion first emerges at the end of a long evolutionary process, only gradually distinguishing itself from the products of fantasy. The three volumes of the Völkerpsychologie devoted to myth and religion follow this development from the simplest form of animism, through the various manifestations of "primitive," quasi-religious phenomena, to the point at which religion proper can be clearly distinguished. Wundt's aim is not merely to recount the history of this development, but to explain it by means of a few basic psychological principles. The subtitle of his ten-volume

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study is "An Investigation of the Laws of Development of Language, Myth and Morals." In constructing his theory of the origins of the primary forms of human culture, "Wundt modified the categories of explanation by assuming a unique 'psychic causality,' which he sought to distinguish from scientific or mechanical causality as including motivation." 8 By means of the principle of the "heterogeny of ends," he sought to explain how new and more complex mythico-religious forms arise out of simpler ones. According to this principle, "multiply motivated acts lead to side effects which in turn become motivations for new acts."9 So, for example, Wundt argues that the purpose of burial and cremation rites was originally to get rid of the spirit-animals with which the souls of the dead were associated, and which were regarded as threatening. Through a change of motive {Motivwandel), the same rites acquired a new meaning. Gradually, they came to be regarded as necessary for freeing the soul from the body. As a result, a new, more elevated conception of the psyche emerged. In this way, Wundt sought to account for the creativity of religious development without abandoning the principles of causal explanation. Otto summarizes: What from the point of view of psychological development appears as a continual chain of mythological associations and apperceptions presents itself, if we grasp the course of motivation, as a constant exemplification of the principle of heterogeny of purposes, which in this realm too brings to expression the creative nature of mental (geistigen) development.

In Wundt's theory, animism is the most primitive form of belief in souls. As the original idea of the breath-soul comes to be associated with various animals, animism gives way to animalism or totemism, and cultic practices develop in connection with particular animals, who are regarded as protective spirits. Further along the path of development, these protective spirits are transformed into daemons - distinct spiritual beings, which may be either vengeful or protective, and are often associated with specific natural forces or locations. Wundt locates the transition to religion proper at the point where the daemons become gods. He invokes three criteria for distinguishing the latter from the former. Gods are 1) individual beings with personal qualities; 2) they are human-like, but at the same time super-human; 3) and they reside in an ideal world beyond this one. The transition from daemons to gods is accomplished by way of hero-legends, in which the heroes are portrayed as

8

ο

Wellek, "Wundt,' Wilhelm," ' p. r 350. Ibid. Wundt as quoted by Otto, "Mythus und Religion in Wundts Völkerpsychologie," Theologische Rundschau 13 (1910), 268. Hereafter cited in the text as "MR."

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the bearers of ideal cultural values. The final result of this developmental process is the belief in an ideal supersensory world to which the striving of humanity is related, and in which man thinks of the ideals of his striving as realized, whereby the cult is spiritualized into a purely symbolic action, until the mind withdraws completely into itself and no longer has need of such action. In the philosophical ideas of the ultimate ground and purpose of being, the ideal nature of religion finally expresses itself, free from myth and symbol (MR 194-195).

Otto's criticism of Wundt is directed primarily at the methodological principles underlying Wundt's theory, and it reflects a fundamental disagreement about the kind of investigation called for by religious (or pre-religious) phenomena. From the beginning, Otto questions the legitimacy of establishing a community or folk psychology alongside individual psychology. Wundt's attempt to identify the mechanism underlying the evolution of primitive culture does not do justice to the creativity that is the source of every new ideal - a creativity that is ultimately exercised by individuals. "Surely, even the crudest fairy tale presupposes invention and does not arise 'from itself,'" Otto writes. "And that entails an inventor" (MR 254). Similarly, the very possibility of a folkloric tradition's being preserved, of stories being repeated over time and gradually becoming more refined, is inconceivable apart from the creative activity of the individuals who stand within such a tradition. "[A]ll this is already just as much a matter of talent as, at the higher level, poetry itself' (MR 254). Otto also claims that Wundt fails to make a distinction between the genesis of mythico-religious representations and their significance. 11 The task of an explanatory psychology is to formulate the laws governing the processes by means of which certain mental objects are produced. Insofar as it concerns itself with the nature and meaning of those objects, it has transgressed its epistemological domain. If we are really interested in gaining insight into the origin and development of mythology, Otto suggests, we ought to inquire into what it is that compels human beings to communicate myths over generations. "What is it that causes mythical ideas to endure, and not only to endure, but to take on the enormous power that they have exercised over the thought of millennia?" (MR 256). The compelling force of mythical ideas cannot be explained by means of a psychological law of association. Such a law might be able to explain how mythological representations come to be produced by means of the creative combination of residual sense impressions. ' 1 This distinction reappears in Otto's discussion of the faculty of divination in Das Heilige, where Otto argues that divination does not have to do with the causal antecedents of a particular occurrence (whether person, place or event), but only its religious significance, i.e. "with what it means for something to be a 'sign' of the holy" (DH 174).

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It could not, however, help to elucidate what it is that lends to these combinations their peculiar significance. Furthermore, Otto argues, the capacity of the mind to generate for itself the objects of mythico-religious contemplation by means of fantasy is not consistent with Wundt's own definition of fantasy. If fantasy is incapable of producing anything really new - if it can only rearrange what has already been given in sense perception - then the true origin of myth and religion must be prior to fantasy. They must have their source in something encountered directly in the world. For Wundt, mythical ideas are arise from the combination of two sources: the external reality that is perceived in empirical experience, providing the raw material for fantasy; and the self, which projects an emotional value onto that which is produced by fantasy. But, Otto asks, what does it mean to say that this value is projected by the self onto the object? What part of myself, and in what sense, do I project (hineinlegen) my self into the rose that pleases me? What of himself does the Battack project in the intuition (Anschauung) of the smoking volcano, when, as "Sombaon," with dread and horror, he flees from it and reverences it simultaneously? Certainly he regards it - not in clear concepts, but in confused feeling - as somehow analogous with himself, e.g. as living. Insofar as he does only this, however, he does not fear it at all, but rather only insofar as he recognizes something in it that goes beyond every analogy with the 'self' and with all things familiar. It is not a matter of a projection (ein Einfühlen) of the self, but of an overwhelming feeling (ein Durchfühlen) of something inexpressibly more than the self' (MR 260).

Because Otto believes that the key to understanding the origins of mythological ideas and primitive religious practices lies in an analysis of the peculiar feelings that accompany them, he is skeptical of Wundt's reliance upon the principle of association. What distinguishes mythological ideas from other kinds of ideas, Otto suggests, is that they elicit a characteristic kind of feeling-response bearing distinctive features. Wundt directs his attention exclusively to the formation of mythical and religious ideas in order to explain their pre-historical development from soul to spirit to daemon to god. His interpretations of primitive religious practices hinge upon his psychological explanation of the origins of religious beliefs. By focusing his attention exclusively on religious beliefs, Otto claims, Wundt fails to recognize what is most distinctive about these practices, and what therefore ought to be the primary object of investigation. [The primitive] assimilates the dead body or parts of it, devours them, or in some other way makes himself one with them, not as he at other times eats or assimilates his mussels, fish and herbs, but rather with all the attendant feelings of the horriblemagical, the uncanny-otherworldly. Mysticism does not gradually arise from a behavior originally intended simply as medicine or natural assimilation, but rather be-

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cause "dreadful awe" (Scheu) attaches to the power of life and the remains of the dead, which at the same time bears within itself the stimulus of the alluring-uncanny, which is what brought these manipulations into play in the first place (MR 29).

Thus, according to Otto, it is not ideas of souls and spirits that provide the motivating impulse for the development of religion. Rather, it is the peculiar feeling-response elicited by those objects, places and persons that are regarded as possessing a religious significance. Explanations of primitive religious practices that fail to recognize the characteristically religious moment in them, Otto claims, are invariably led astray. Such explanations commonly appeal to some pragmatic end that the religious practice is intended to secure, such as a successful hunt or victory in war. But the point of these practices is not external to the practices themselves. "[T]he accompanying manifestations of the orgiastic, the rapturous {Taumel), the frenetic (Raserei), and the mood of the whole make it clear that these manipulations are above all an end in themselves; and the dreadfulenthralling delight (Genuss) of the 'praesens numens' is actually the heart of the matter (die Sache selbst)" (MR 303). Like Wundt, Otto recognizes a progressive development in the history of religion. However, he argues that the level at which this development is to be observed is not primarily in the progressive complexity of mythological thinking, but rather in the underlying religious feeling that is expressed by means of mythological ideas. If the science of religion is to gain insight into the nature of religious phenomena and their historical development, it must gain access to this underlying religious experience, which is precisely what an explanatory psychology is unable to accomplish. Otto's claim is that . . . if we do not have the means to understand all this through our own experience, then no collection of ethnological facts will do us any good; for they are mute, unless w e are able to bring them to speech through our own empathie understanding (Nachfühlen). There remains for whoever throws away this key only an arbitrary solution, and an interpretation that does violence (MR 301).

For Otto, the possibility of understanding the religious experience of others depends upon an underlying psychological affinity or similarity shared by the interpreter and the subject of the experience that the interpreter is attempting to understand. Otto is aware that many of the expressions of religious experience recorded by anthropologists are likely to strike the modern observer as bizarre. It is the desire to resolve this sense of incomprehensibility that gives rise to explanatory theories. Nevertheless, Otto claims, we may only hope to understand such phenomena to the degree that we are able to recognize similar psychological inclinations in ourselves. Several years after the Wundt review, Otto expressed this thought as follows:

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As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Otto's rejection of Wundt's explanatory theory of the origin of religion is related to a wider controversy concerning the nature of historical knowledge and the epistemology of the Geisteswissenschaften. Wundt is guided by the presupposition that no concrete cultural phenomena simply appears out of nowhere. Rather, cultural events, like natural events, are determined by antecedent causal conditions, which exhibit lawful regularities and are therefore capable of yielding causal explanations. On the basis of this presupposition, Wundt sets out to explain how religious ideas arose in the course of the development of prehistoric culture. Religion, he argues, gradually emerged at the end of a long process, and it developed out of something else, which was originally not religion. It is the task of the student of religion to explain how this happened on the basis of the fewest possible principles. Otto, on the other hand, argues that religion is qualitatively different from other forms of human culture, and that psychological explanations are not helpful for grasping qualitative distinctions of this kind. What is required here is not a causal explanation, but a psychological analysis (psychologische Zergliederungsarbeit; MR 259) of the peculiar sense of awe that characterizes religion from the beginning. "The understanding of religion and also of pre-religion must in the first place be an analysis of feeling (Geßhlsanalyse)" (MR 264). The emphasis placed by Otto on the primacy of feeling over intellect in religion goes back to Schleiermacher. At the same time, in opposing Wundt's genetic and explanatory conception of psychology in favor of empathie understanding (Nachfühlen), description and analysis, in the Wundt review, and later in Das Heilige, Otto was also taking sides in a broader debate about the nature of psychology in relation to the human sciences generally. As Troeltsch observed in his review of Das Heilige, Wundt's psychological method is diametrically opposed to the one employed by Otto, which Troeltsch refers to as the psychology of empathie understanding (verstehende Einfiilungspsychologie). The most influential and innovative representative of this latter position within German philosophy at the turn of the century was Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911). Although it is not possible to gauge the precise extent of Dilthey's influence on Otto, Otto was clearly

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familiar with Dilthey's work. 12 The point of introducing a comparison between Otto and Dilthey is not to show that Otto's investigation of religious experience is dependent upon ideas first developed by Dilthey. It is rather to gain a better sense of the location that Otto's investigation of the holy occupies in relation to other discussions being carried out among German academics at this time.

In his essay, "Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie" ("Ideas on a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology"), first published in 1894, Dilthey had criticized the attempt to extend the application of the methods of the natural sciences to psychology. Natural science is concerned with the typical and quantifiable features of physical appearances, and its aim is to produce a description of these features in terms of causal laws that govern their regularity. To this end, it abstracts from reality, i.e. from the particularity of the given, in order to form hypotheses, which aim to explain a given field of phenomena of the basis of a few constant principles. These hypotheses can be tested against other, competing hypotheses, so that false hypostheses are gradually eliminated until a verifiable explanation finally emerges. Dilthey argued that the conditions that make it possible to test hypotheses in the natural sciences do not exist in the historical sphere. As a result, there had emerged by the end of the nineteenth century a cacophony of mutually exclusive theories of psychological explanation, none of which was capable of being adequately verified. At least in the 1890's, if not later, Dilthey, like Wundt, was of the opinion that psychology lay at the foundation of the Geisteswissenschaften. If psychology were to be capable of serving as a foundational discipline, however, it could not be grounded upon unverifiable hypotheses. As an alternative, Dilthey proposed a descriptive and analytic psychology (beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie) that would aim to present the fullness of the reality of mental life, and to analyze it with the greatest possible degree of precision. Such a descriptive psychology would not concern itself with the kind of elementary processes that might be observed in a laboratory, but instead with the experiences of developed, whole personalities, who are also historical agents, and whose feelings, values, motives and intentions constitute the building blocks of historical understanding. Dilthey took the task of his proposed descriptive psychology to include 12

In 1902, Dilthey sent Otto a copy of his biography of Schleiermacher, and Otto's centennial edition of Schleiermacher's Speeches is dedicated to Dilthey. It is not clear to me why the dedication to Dilthey has been omitted from the 7th edition of Otto's version of the Speeches, which is still in print. The dedication does appear in the 1st (1899), 2nd (1906), 3rd (1913) and 4th (1920) editions. Dilthey sent Otto a copy of the published portion of his Schleiermacher biography, together with an accompanying letter, in 1902. This letter is part of the Rudolf Otto Nachlass at the University Library in Marburg, catalogue number 797/775.

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. . . the presentation of those components and complexes that occur uniformly in every developed human psychic life, as they are bound together in a single nexus, which is not thought up or deduced, but experienced (erlebt). This psychology is thus description and analysis of a complex that is originally and always given as life (Leben) itself. 1 3

The claim that Dilthey raised against explanatory psychology is that it fails to pay attention to what is given in experience, because, instead of concentrating upon the description and analysis of experience (Erlebnis) in its various forms, it abstracts from the given in order to develop explanatory hypotheses governed by general principles. In Das Heilige, we find Otto directing a similar accusation against explanatory theories in the field of religion: with an energy and art that one might almost call admirable, one thus closes one's eyes before that which is entirely unique in religious experience, even in its most primitive expressions - admirable, or rather, astonishing. For if there is any region of human experience that is entirely unique and exhibits occurrences which only appear within it, it is the religious one (DH 4).

The term "religious experience" has played an important and, more recently, an increasingly controversial, role in the academic study of religion in the twentieth century. For Otto, the irreducibility of religion as an object of scholarly inquiry is grounded in the fact that religious experience is recognizably and categorically distinct from other kinds of experience. At the end of the Wundt review of 1910, Otto explicitly identifies the nature of religion with a peculiar kind of experience. "From its beginning, religion is [the] experience (Erlebens) of mystery and the tendency and drive toward mystery, an experience (Erleben).. . that, out of the depths of the life of feeling itself, in response to outside stimuli and causes (Anlässe), breaks through as the feeling of the supersensible" (MR 305). A similar claim is made by Otto several years later in an expanded version of the original Wundt review, where Otto takes Wundt to task for having failed to recognize that religion constitutes a distinct "sphere of experience" (Erlebens-sfäre [sic!]).14 The secular historian of religion, Otto argues, is under no obligation to affirm the claim to validity of religious experience, and may in fact regard it as purely illusory. But he is nonetheless obliged to acknowledge that such experience constitutes the "originary phenomenon" (Ur-fänomen [sic!]) in this field, and to undertake a much more fundamental and intimate investigation of this 13

Wilhelm Dilthey, "Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie," Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, 2nd ed., ed. by Georg Misch (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner and Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957), p. 152. Rudolf Otto, "Der Sensus Numinis als Geschichtlicher Ursprung der Religion" in Das Gefühl des Überweltlichen (sensus numinis) (Munich: Beck, 1932), p. 51.

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"psychic occurrence of a completely distinct kind" than Wundt had succeeded in doing. 15 In claiming that religious experience constitutes the primordial, irreducible datum in the history of religions, Otto was not alone. Troeltsch, for example, in his article, "Christentum und Religionsgeschichte" (1897), had spoken of an irreducible experience (ein nicht weiter zu analysierendes Erlebnis) that constitutes the innermost core {Kern) of the history of religion - "a final, originary phenomenon (Urphänomen), which, like moral judgment and artistic intuition, but again characteristically different from each, is a simple, final fact of psychic life." 16 In emphasizing that the task of the student of religion is to analyze and understand this experience, Troeltsch explicitly identified himself with Dilthey's position in the debate about the foundation of the human sciences. 17 At least as important as Dilthey, however, was the influence of William James. Troeltsch credited James with having shown that "The originary phenomenon (Urphänomen) of religion is the presence of the divine, the reality of the invisible, which . . . is accompanied by a peculiar, incontrovertible feeling of reality {Realitätsgefühl) known only to the religious individual." 18 James' influence was no less important for Otto. In his discussion of the numinous in Das Heilige, Otto appeals to James' analysis of religious experience in support of his own attempt to shift attention from the subjective pole of religious experience toward the numinous object (DH 11). In the present context, I want only to emphasize that the pioneering studies of James and other American psychologists of religion like Starbuck and Leuba, offered to German theologians around the turn of the century an independent confirmation of the autonomy of religion as distinct region of human experience. 19 They also suggested that religious experience is characterized empirically by a sense of the independent reality of the religious object. These theologians sought to integrate James' psychological descriptions with the program for a science of religion suggested by Schleiermacher. So, for example, Georg Wobbermin, in his introduction to the German translation of James' Varieties of Religious Experience, argued that, despite their different philosophical orientations, Schleiermacher and James were in agreement in their fundamental appreciation of the distinctiveness of religious experience. And he 15

Ibid., p. 48. J 6 Ernst Troeltsch, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1925), p. 339. Cf. Troeltsch, "On the Question of the Religious A Priori," Religion in History, p. 33. Around the turn of the century, Troeltsch's thought begins to reflect the influence of Heinrich Rickert, and he distances himself from the relativistic implications of Dilthey's views. 18

Troeltsch, Review of James' Varieties of Religious Experience tung 4 9 (1904), column 3024. Cf. Pfleiderer, Theologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft.

in Deutsche

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claimed that the task of the psychology of religion was to synthesize the approaches of Schleiermacher and James in order "to obtain . . . on the basis of the empirical data, a standpoint that reaches beyond the merely empirical."20 Like Troeltsch and Wobbermin, Otto rejected James' "empiricist and pragmatist" epistemological commitments, which he felt had prevented James from recognizing the presence of an underlying religious a priori (DH 11). For reasons that will become clear in the next chapter, it was crucial for Otto that there be an "inductively" or phenomenologically demonstrable unity underlying the variety of religious experience. 21 Nevertheless, Otto affirmed James' psychological descriptions and employed them in support of his own argument for the qualitative uniqueness of religious experience (DH 11,50).

The words "Erlebnis" and "Erleben," both translated as "experience," occupy a unique place in the history of German thought - one that is closely identified with the name of Dilthey. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that they began to play a central role in philosophical discourse. Gadamer reports that, prior to this time, in the literature of the Goethezeit, the verb "erleben" was used to suggest "the immediacy with which something real is grasped - unlike something which one presumes to know but which is unattested by one's own experience, whether it is taken over from others or comes from hearsay, or whether it is inferred, surmised or 20

Georg Wobbermin, Introduction to James, Die religiose Erfahrung in ihrer Mannigfaltigkeit, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1925), p. xvi. Wobbermin's edition of James' study was first published in 1907. The citation is taken from the preface to the second edition (1914), and is emphasized in the original. Like Otto, Wobbermin also criticizes the "genetic principle" underlying Wundt's Völkerpsychologie (ibid., p. xxvii). Wobbermin was the foremost advocate of the "psychology-of-religion method" in theology, which he developed in his three-volume Systematische Theologie nach religionspychologische Methode. For Wobbermin's criticism of the Neo-Friesian position represented by Otto and Bousset, see ibid., Vol. I, Die religionspsychologische Methode in Religionswissenschaft und Theologie (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1913), pp. 370-88. Almond emphasizes that the unity that Otto sees underlying the manifold of religious experience is "a philosophically grounded unity, but not a phenomenologically discovered one" and that Otto's "account of the essence of religion . . . remains firmly wedded to a philosophical theory." Almond, Rudolf Otto: An Introduction to His Philosophical Theology, pp. 85, 87. While I do not wish to dispute the latter claim, Otto himself clearly believed that the essential unity underlying the variety of religious experience is capable of being exhibited phenomenologically. That this is a crucial aspect of his argument in Das Heilige will be shown in the next chapter. While I agree with Almond in principle, I think that Otto's philosophical theory is more complex than he suspects. Although Otto's theory of the religious a priori is meant to guarantee the unity of religious experience, the content of "the idea of the divine" (i.e. what that idea entails) can only be exhibited by means of an "inductive" investigation of the history of religion, which Otto conceives primarily as a history of the varieties of religious experience.

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imagined." 22 The substantive forms "Erlebnis" and "Erleben" first acquire currency in the 1870's, when they begin to be employed in biographical writings. 23 In this context, "Erlebnis" refers to a moment or unit of experience that stands out from the normal passage of time by virtue of its singular importance in the life of an individual. Experience in this sense is closely related to memory and personality, insofar as particularly momentous experiences become objects of recollection and points of orientation in the understanding (and self-understanding) of historical individuals. Dilthey develops the concept of Erlebnis in his writings on aesthetics, and his widely read book, Erlebnis und Dichtung (Eng., Experience and Poetry), published in 1905, contributed to the popularity of the term. But the concept of Erlebnis also plays a crucial role in his conception of the nature of knowledge in the Geisteswissenschaften.24 As we have seen, Dilthey is concerned with clarifying the notion of "the given" as it functions in historical knowledge. In the natural sciences, the mathematical uniformity of time and space are the conditions for the possibility of experimentation and measurement, and thus for the identification of law-like regularities. But in human life, however, time is not experienced as mathematical uniformity, but rather in the form of reflexivity, recollection and interiority. The object of the human sciences is human experience in the irreducible multiplicity of its historical forms, and the structure of these sciences must reproduce the structure of "the given" with which they are concerned. The most fundamental data of the Geisteswissenschaften are not calculable spacio-temporal events, but units of meaning (Erlebnisse) that arise in particular contexts as life (Leben). In the

22 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans, by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall ( N e w York: Continuum, 1994), p. 61. It is precisely in this sense that Otto regards religious experience as that which distinguishes religious rationalism from "deeper religion" in Das Heilige. Otto's claim that the holy is an a priori category is intended partly to show that this kind of "deeper religion" is still possible in the twentieth century. 23 A m o n g these biographical works is Dilthey's monumental Leben Schleiermachers, the completed portion of which he sent to Otto in 1902. The entire biography is now contained in volumes XIII and XIV of Dilthey's Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Martin Re24 decker. Rudolf Makkreel argues that the roots of Dilthey's theory of the Geistewissenschaften must be sought in his earlier aesthetic writings. "Dilthey's attempt to do justice to the poetic imagination was a catalyst in the development of his descriptive psychology which then had such important methodological ramifications for his theory of the Geisteswissenschaften." Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 15. Makreel's observation bears upon the present discussion insofar as it underscores that Dilthey and others influenced by his ideas (including Otto) looked to aesthetics in their efforts to find an alternative to the method of the natural sciences for the study of human culture.

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essay on descriptive psychology, Dilthey makes his famous remark: "We explain nature, we understand psychic life" (GW V, 144). Corresponding to the concept of Erlebnis in Dilthey's thought is the concept of Ausdruck (expression), which is developed more fully in his later writings, where he attempts to develop a general theory of hermeneutics to serve as a foundation for historical knowledge. Already in the essay on descriptive psychology, however, after having identified several of the methods employed by this science (such as self-observation and the observation of others, comparison, experiment and the study of anomalous appearances) Dilthey identifies the investigation of the "objective products of psychic life" as a crucial extension of these methods. In speech, myth, literature and art, in all historical achievements generally, we have before us, so to speak, psychic life in its objective form (gegenständliche gewordenes psychisches Leben)·, products of the effective powers that constitute psychic nature; fixed forms, structured by psychic components and their laws (GW V, 200).

In Dilthey's later writings, the structure of the historical knowledge is defined in terms of the conceptual trinity, experience-expression-understanding. Because Otto does not explicitly acknowledge Dilthey's influence, one can only speculate about the extent to which his approach to the psychology of religion was influenced by Dilthey. 25 Furthermore, it must be emphasized that Otto's philosophical position is different from Dilthey's in a number of important respects. 6 The preceding exposition of Dilthey's views is intended merely to draw attention to a dimension of Otto's thought that has often been ignored by previous commentators. 27 An important exception in this respect is Gustav Mensching's assessment of Otto's contribution to the history of

25

Perhaps the closest Otto comes to an acknowledgment of Dilthey's influence is in his book, Naturalistische und religiöse Weltansicht (1904), in which he affirms the independence of the Geisteswissenschaften in relation to the natural sciences, and claims that the interests of religion "here go hand in hand with those of the Geisteswissenschaften themselves." Otto, Naturalistische und religiose Weltansicht, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1909), pp. 24, 26. As the previous chapters have shown, Otto is concerned to find criteria for making normative claims about the history of religion. This concern would have prevented him from accepting the relativistic implications of Dilthey's philosophical position, as Troeltsch also did in his later writings. Nevertheless, in Das Heilige, Otto combines a descriptive psychology of religious experience with his theory of the religious a priori. It is in relation to the former that Dilthey's ideas are relevant. Joachim Wach, in his review of Otto's Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das Christentum (Gotha: Klotz, 1930), acknowledged the affinity between Otto's methodological approach and his own, which, as goes on to note, was shaped under the influence of Dilthey's theory of the Geisleswissenschaften. Cf. Joachim Wach, "Ein Meisterstück vergleichender Religionsforschung" in Die Christliche Welt (1931), columns 20-25.

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religion, published shortly after Otto's death. Otto's

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entire effort within the wide field of the history of religion was directed toward understanding and presenting 'life' and 'experience' ('Leben' und 'Erleben' zu erfassen und darzustellen). . . . The great controversies about God within the religious history of India, the parallel development of the [different] religions from mythos to logos, the emergence of the divine unity from the multiplicity of gods - all these 'phenomena' were interpreted by Otto as forms of expression of religious life.

In a manner that is reminiscent of Dilthey, Otto develops an approach to the investigation of religion that has more in common with aesthetic inquiries than it does with explanations in the physical sciences. In the last chapter, the importance of Kant's discussion of aesthetic judgment in the development of Otto's thinking was emphasized. Here, in attempting to elucidate the nature of Ottos' approach to the psychology and history of religion, it will be helpful to consider what might be thought of as the practical or methodological implications of the analogy that Otto draws between aesthetic and religious experience - the numinous, the beautiful and the sublime - in his philosophy of religion. Throughout the pages of Das Heilige there is evidence of Otto's concern for the forms in which religious states of mind come to expression. Otto appears to have cultivated his attentiveness to such forms of expression over many years. Reinhard Schinzer, who has written the most complete biographical account of Otto's life to date, reports that, at Göttingen, in addition to his theological studies, Otto attended seminars in art history and devoted much of his free time to music. Schinzer suggests that, from very early in his academic career, Otto's aesthetic sensibilities exercised an important influence upon his theological work, and that they shaped his method of research in the history of religion. The attention devoted by Otto to the expressions and representations of religious realities, and to the manner in which religious doctrines are shaped by liturgy and art, Schinzer suggests, "led Otto to his unique discoveries. . . . The problem of form (Das Gestaltproblem) - How do religious ideas find expression in concrete form (Form)? - probably moved Otto more than any previous theologian." 29 Schinzer's observation is most strikingly exemplified in Otto's famous account of his experience in a Moroccan synagogue, which, according to Almond, was a pivotal moment in Otto's recognition of the centrality and universality of the holy as the defin-

28 29

Gustav Mensching, "Rudolf Otto's religionsgeschichtliche Arbeit," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 19 (1938), 119. Reinhard Schinzer, "Rudolf Otto - Entwurf einer Biographie," Rudolf Otto's Bedeutung für die Religionswissenschaft und die Theologie heute, ed. by Benz, p. 5.

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ing feature of religious experience. 30 But Otto's consistent concern with the variety of expressions of religious experience is also reflected in trips that he undertook to Egypt and Palestine (1895), India, Burma, Japan and China (1911-12), and Ceylon, India and the Middle East (1927-28). The latter trip, for which Otto received financing from the German Ministry of Education, was used to acquire articles for the Religionskundliche Sammlung, a museum and institute for the study of world religions founded by Otto in Marburg in 1927. In Das Heilige, Otto emphasizes the role of introspection in the investigation of religious states of mind, and he claims that the numinous feeling must be "awakened" and directly experienced in order to be understood (DH 7). This claim has often been criticized on the grounds that it implies that religion can only be understood by those who are themselves religiously inclined. 31 But the attention paid to the role of introspection and immediate experience in Otto's analysis of religious experience has tended to overshadow other aspects of his argument, which ought for that reason to be emphasized. In fact, Otto's discussion of numinous feeling and his attention to the forms in which it is expressed are inextricably linked. Otto's analyses of the various moments of the numinous proceed by means of a comparison of similar or related feelings, in which he attempts to draw attention to the different shades and nuances that they exhibit. Such an investigation, according to Otto, relies upon the method of sympathetic understanding of the experiences of other human beings (Einfühlen durch Mit- und Nach-gefiihl

bei anderen um uns her, DH 13). Nevertheless, the manner in which Otto develops his argument in Das Heilige suggests that the investigation of religious states of mind can only proceed by means of an analysis of the expressions (Stimmungs-äusserungen) in which they become available to the observer. Such expressions are encountered in the various objectifications of religious spirit, for example, "in the solemnity and mood of rites and liturgies, [and] in the atmosphere that clings to religious monuments, buildings, temples and churches" (DH 13). It is not surprising, then, that Otto devotes a relatively long chapter of Das Heilige to a discussion of "Means of Expression of the Numinous" (Ausdrucksmittel des Numinosen; DH 79-91). In another chapter, he attempts to clarify the notion of the mysterium tremendum by means of a comparative analysis of two Protestant religious poems and portions of the Yom Kippur liturgy (DH 38-41). Further evidence of Otto's attention to the forms of religious expression is to be found in writings spanning a number of years, both before and after the

Almond, Rudolf Otto: An Introduction to his Philosophical Theology, p. 17. In his later thought, Otto appears to have abandoned the view that the understanding of religion requires direct experience. Cf. Chapter Six.

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publication of Das Heilige. In a review of a book on Chinese art and architecture, for example, Otto emphasizes the importance of religious art forms for developing a "typology" of religions. In order to grasp the unique character (Sonderart) of a particular religion, Otto claims, the scholar must not limit herself to an investigation of its doctrines. At least as important is the comparative study of the artifacts in which the distinctive spirit of each individual tradition is expressed. So, for example, Otto claims that one must learn to see the 'pax Christi' reflected in the images of Christian saints and believers (Frommer), and to notice how typically differently it impresses itself in gesture, facial expression, the posture of muscles and body, from, say, the 'shanti,' the calmness which is the perfection of Indian piety, or the stillness of nirvana in the countenance and in the 'half smile' of the figures of buddhas and bodhisattvas of the farthest East 6 32

In a book devoted to the issue of liturgical reform, published in 1925, Otto emphasizes that the expressiveness of religious behavior is only one instance of the expressiveness of human behavior generally. In natural life as well [as in religious life] we move ourselves in simple forms of activity of our feeling-life, which fall into the domain of "expressive action." They have no "purpose," but are natural "consequences," and form a part of our very own nature. We laugh when we are happy, we cry when we are sad, we express the movements of our heart (Gemütsbewegungen) in the most diverse ways; and in social life no less.

In his lecture notes on ethics from the 1930's, Otto devotes several pages to a discussion of understanding and communication (Verkehr) as ethical conditions for the possibility of social life. In this context, he refers to the role of bodily semiotics {körperliche Semiotik) in inter-subjective communication. How can I understand the other and "what is in him" or happens [in him]? Surely I am served to a great extent in this respect by an outer 'semiotic' of the gesture, of the 'expression' (der Ausdruckes), especially the facial expression, and so forth (E 172).

32

Rudolf Otto, "Ein Werk zur religiösen Typenkunde," Die Christliche Welt 48/49 (1922), column 919. Rudolf Otto, Zur Erneurung und Ausgestaltung des Gottesdienst (Glessen: Töpelmann, 1925), p. 23.

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Certainly, the passages assembled here do not begin to constitute a fully articulated theory of historical knowledge. They do suffice, however, to indicate a consistent concern on Otto's part with the expression of religious experience in liturgical and devotional language, poetry, sculpture, gesture, music, liturgy, and architecture. And they clearly indicate that, for Otto, religious feeling and religious experience are not capable of being meaningfully discussed apart from the forms of life in which they are expressed, and in which they are made available to the observation of the historian of religions.

III. Otto and the Search for the Origin of Religion While Otto's approach to the psychology of religion reflects broader discussions in Germany concerning the role of psychology in the Geisteswissenschaften, and the role of the psychology of religion in relation to the philosophy of religion and theology, his claim (expressed in the Wundt review) that religion begins with a vague feeling of the supersensible or otherworldly also reflects his response to a broader debate about the historical origin of religion, which occupied a number of prominent anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and theologians around the turn of the century. Several years after the first publication of Das Heilige, Otto reissued an expanded version of the original Wundt review in his book, Das Gefühl der Überweltlichen (1932). In the introduction to that book, Otto refers to Wundt as "the most significant advocate of the animistic explanation of the origin of religion" (GÜ 3), which suggests that Otto's criticism of Wundt was intended as a criticism of the general tendency of which he took Wundt to be the foremost representative in Germany. The theory of animism is usually associated with the name of the British anthropologist, Ε. B. Tyler (1832-1917). Tyler defined animism as the belief in souls and spirits, and he argued that it is the most primitive form of religion. Primitive man, in order to explain the difference between living bodies and corpses, as well as the appearance of the dead in dreams, comes to think of the soul as being distinct from the body, from which it is separated temporarily during sleep and permanently at death. Tyler's theory of the animistic origin of religion led him to two conclusions. "First, that spiritual beings are modeled by man on his primary conception of his own human soul, and second, that their purpose is to explain nature on the primitive childlike theory that it is truly and throughout 'animated nature.'" 3 4 Religion, in Tyler's theory, arises from a theoretical interest; namely, the need to explain natural phenomena. Although animism, as a primitive scientific theory, is clearly mistaken, it is nonetheless a "perfectly rational and intelligible

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product of early science." 35 Tyler's theory of animism is a classic example of the "rationalistic" approach to the study of religion against which Das Heilige is directed. This approach, in Otto's view, shares in common with theological rationalism the assumption that religion is primarily a theoretical affair. Otto was not the first to object to this assumption. Similar objections had already been raised among the ranks of the anthropologists themselves, and the influence of these discussions is reflected in Otto's views. In a footnote in Das Heilige (DH 17), Otto claims to have found the ideas expressed in the original Wundt review confirmed in the subsequent investigations of the British anthropologist, R. R. Marett (1866-1943), and the Swedish theologian and historian of religions, Nathan Söderblom (18661931). 36 Otto also refers in Das Heilige to Andrew Lang's (1844-1912) theory of primitive monotheism, claiming that the "explanation" of Lang's observations is provided by his own theory of the religious a priori (DH 15657). In addition to extending the project of a theological science of religion sketched out in his earlier writings, Das Heilige also develops a response to several influential naturalistic theories of religion proposed by Otto's contemporaries - theories against which Protestant theologians during this period felt compelled to respond. Otto's thesis, described in more detail in the following chapter, is that the historical origin and development of religion can only be understood on the basis of the assumption of the religious a priori (DH 143). Marett criticized Tylor for being too intellectualistic. He rejected Tylor's definition of religion as the belief in spirits, arguing that "savage religion is something not so much thought out as danced out", and he located the origin of religion in a "pre-animistic" stage. 37 Religion does not begin with belief in spirits, but with the veneration of an impersonal force (mana, orenda, etc.) that attaches to individual people, places, and objects. In developing his theory of pre-animism, Marett claimed that he had "not sought to explain so much as to describe." 38 In opposition to Tylor, he held that "man's religious sense is a constant and universal feature of his mental life" and that "its essence and true nature must . . . be sought, not so much in the shifting variety of its ideal constructions, as in that steadfast groundwork of specific emotion whereby man is able to feel the supernatural precisely at the point at which his thought breaks down." 39 In this respect, despite other significant

36

Otto's remark is chronologically misleading, since Marett's The Threshold of Religion (1902) was first published several years prior to the original Wundt review. 37 R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion, 2nd ed. ( N e w York: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 6, xxxi. 38 Ibid., p. xxviii. 39

Ibid., p. 28.

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differences in their aims and assumptions, Otto's criticism of Wundt is parallel to Marett's criticism of Tylor.4 Other important clues to the development of Otto's thinking during the years immediately prior to the publication of Das Heilige are to be found in his 1915 review of Söderblom's Gudstrons uppkomst (1914). 41 Söderblom's book presents an extensive review of three of the most prominent theories of primitive religion current at this time: animism, pre-animism and the High Gods theory developed by Andrew Lang. Söderblom argues that the three theories are not mutually incompatible, but address different aspects of a complex field of phenomena. Otto found in Söderblom's book a confirmation of the ideas expressed in the Wundt review. He was particularly impressed by Söderblom's discussion of pre-animism, in which he recognized the identification of the origin of religion with the emergence of a predicate that is born from a unique, affective act of valuation (aus einem gefühlsmässigen Werten), and is able to attach to the most various objects. . . . In my review of Wundt's animism, I suggested the term "dreadful awe" (Scheu) for this faculty of valuation (Wertungsvermögen), and indicated that the psychological analysis of this awe in its negative and positive aspects, and the discovery of its path of development and the stimuli which drive it forward, is the real task.

For Otto, Söderblom's improvement upon previous theories of primitive religion was to have offered the first extensive analysis of "the chain of feelings and valuations from the 'uncanny' upwards to the holy." 43 Otto refers to the experience of the uncanny, which he (like Marett and Söderblom) took to be characteristic of primitive religion, as an unrefined premonition (Ahnung) of the supernatural. The significance of this remark is that it

40

41

Martin Riesebrodt, in a recent article on Marett, emphasizes the difference between Marett's concept of "awe" and Otto's "tremendum et fascinosum." However, Riesebrodt makes no distinction between Otto's descriptions of the numinous and the philosophical claims he attaches to them. In light of the argument presented in the last chapter of this study, it is interesting that Riesebrodt distinguishes Otto and Marett on the basis of the difference in their reactions to the effects of modernity upon religion. "In contrast to some representatives of the 'phenomenological' Religionswissenschaft, one finds in Marett an emphatic affirmation of the process of disenchantment (Entzauberung) and civilization. Here Marett is much closer to the admittedly more skeptical and rather pessimistic Weber than to an Otto or Eliade. " Riesebrodt, "Robert Ranulph Marett (18661943)," Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft, ed. by Axel Michaels (Munich: Beck, 1997), p. 184. Theologische Literaturzeitung 40 (January 9, 1915), columns 1-4. A German translation of this work (Das Werden des Gottesglaubens) first appeared in 1916. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 3.

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indicates the point at which Otto sought to fuse together the theory of the religious a priori that he had begun to develop in the Kant-Fries book with the pre-animistic theory of the origin of religion. Equally important is Otto's confirmation of Söderblom's claim that the origin of religion is concomitant with the emergence of the holy as a distinct category of value. 44 Söderblom's discussion of holiness in Gudstrons uppkomst, and in his influential article in Hasting's Encyclopedia (1913), are surely important sources of Otto's use of the term. For Otto, as for Söderblom before him "Holiness is the great word in religion; it is even more essential than the notion of G o d . . . . Not the mere existence of the divinity, but its mana, its power, its holiness, is what religion involves." 45

IV. The History of Religion from Within The preceding sections of this chapter have attempted to clarify Otto's conception of the psychology of religion and his reaction to theories of primitive religion. It remains to say a few words about his approach to the history of religion. As discussed in Chapter One, Otto's theological education was influenced by the ideas of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, which advocated the application of standard methods of historical research to the Bible and the history of Christianity. The efforts of Otto and Troeltsch to identify a religious a priori were a response to the impasse in systematic theology resulting from the progress of philological and historical research during the nineteenth century. Similar concerns are reflected in Otto's conception of the "inductive" component of the theological science of religion proposed in the Kant-Fries book. One important source of Otto's approach to the historical study of religion is the Fifth of Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion. In that Speech, Schleiermacher recommends that, in order not to be mislead by "vulgar concepts," the student of religion must learn to "survey the true content and actual essence of the individual religions according to a correct standard, . . . to distinguish the inner from the outer, the native from the borrowed and foreign, the holy from the profane according to determinate and firm ideas" (OR 194). Religion, for Schleiermacher, exhibits a "principle of individualization," according to which it manifests itself in an infinite variety of determinate forms. One must be careful not to lose sight of "the difference

44

45

Ibid., p. 3 Nathan Söderblom, "Holiness," Encyclopedia of Religion Vol. VI (Edinburgh: Τ & Τ Clark, 1913), p. 731.

and Ethics, ed. James Hastings,

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between that which makes up the essence of an individual religion insofar as it is a determinate form and presentation of religion generally, and that which designates its unity as a school and holds it together as such" (OR 209). Schleiermacher does not conceive of the unity of an individual religion as a function of doctrinal agreement, and he counsels against looking for the spirit of a religion "among rigid systematizers or superficial indifferentists, but [rather] among those who live in it as their element" (OR 210). One must attempt to identify the particular intuition of the universe that stands at the center of each individual religion, as it is revealed in the paradigmatic experiences of its founders and heroes. Otto was dissatisfied with an approach to the history of religion that limits itself to the accumulation of empirical data. 46 Just as he believed that the nature of religion is most clearly exhibited in the personalities and experiences of unusually "gifted" or "talented" religious individuals, he believed also that the capacity to recognize the essential structures of religion in history demands a kind of sensitivity that is not available to everyone. This task requires not only the mastery of foreign languages and historical methods of research, but also "an inner faculty of congeniality." 47 Where this capacity is lacking, "one doesn't understand the inner sense of the matter at all" (F 1). One fails to arrive at an intuition of essence (Wesensschau) of the phenomena in question, which instead disappear "behind a zigzag and hodgepodge (Vielerlei) of mere changes [and] reformulations, through Parsiism, Egyptism, Assyrianism, Hellenism and sixteen other isms, bound together only through the contact of [historical] transformation" (F 2). Otto wanted to develop an approach to the history of religion that would be capable of illuminating the "profound inner unity of a magnificent inner logic and necessity" (F 2) behind its individual historical manifestations. This calls for something more than historical acumen. It requires a "feeling of style for religious becoming and the spontaneity of religious creativity" {Stilgefühl für religiöses Werden und religiöse Urzeugung; F 6).

46

In an early essay on Otto, Tillich observed that "Otto's significance does not lie in the area of detailed historical work (historischen Kleinarbeit), toward which he often expressed the suspicion that it passes by life, which must be grasped intuitively, and, thus, despite all correct individual observations, finally becomes unrealistic." "Der Religionsphilosoph Rudolf Otto" (1925), Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XII (Stuttgart: Evangelischer Verlagswerk, 1971), p. 180. The following discussion draws heavily upon a manuscript in the Otto Archive which is simply labeled "Fortsetzung" (Eng. "Continuation;" OA 2292, here p. 1), and appears to be a continuation of Otto's Glaubenslehre lectures from Summer Semester, 1927. Hereafter cited in the text as "F."

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In various places Otto distinguishes between two approaches to religion, one which views religion "from without," the other "from within." 48 The first approach he sometimes refers to as the religionskundliche approach. This is the manner in which the "profane" scholar approaches religion. The other approach Otto calls "theological." It is the one that religion employs in relation to itself. The theologian is necessarily concerned with many of the same objects with which the profane scholar of religion is also concerned. Theology, however, is distinguished by a different "inner attitude" (¡innere Einstellung), and this difference in attitude corresponds to a difference in the nature of the object of inquiry (G 7). Whereas the profane historian is concerned with the observable, external features of religion, the theologian attempts to isolate the fundamental experience underlying the diversity of forms in which this experience has been articulated in the course of the development of a particular religious tradition. In this way, Otto believes it is possible to overcome the fragmentary, disjointed and tentative conclusions of a purely philological-historical approach. It is in this context that he refers to the "naive confidence of earlier exegetes" 49 who thought it was possible "to discover purely by the empirical means of source criticism and historical, rational methods a small remainder of historical certainty (des Geschichtlichgesicherten)" (F 6). The possibility of identifying the original or true meaning of Christianity, for these scholars, was contingent upon the possibility of arriving at a final layer of historical bedrock, a task which Otto clearly regards as futile. Otto proposes instead to approach the history of religion in general, and the history of Christianity in particular, from the point of view of the prophetic-pneumatic experience itself. In the lecture notes on Glaubenslehre, Otto refers interchangeably to "the specifically numinous faculty (Vermögen)," "the mantic-divinatory faculty" and "the mantic vision," which he identifies with the Prophets, Christ's premonition of his Passion, and the charismatic gifts of the early Christian community. These remarks appear in the context of a section entitled, "The Pneumatic-Numinous [Aspect] of Theological Knowledge," in which Otto emphasizes the need for the theologian to regard the Biblical documents from the vantagepoint of numinous experience. It is the attempt to approximate this vantagepoint that distinguishes the attitude of the theologian from that of the profane historian. At least for the numinously inclined theologian, the idea of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte), which had been threatened by the advent of historical consciousness, reemerges in the form of an intuitive grasp of the inner unity and necessity of the paradigmatic religious experiences transmitted within the 48

This distinction is discussed explicitly in the third chapter of Das Gefühl des weltlichen, entitled "Religionskundliche und Theologische Aussagen," pp. 58-63. The words "liberal theology" are crossed out at this point in the manuscript.

Über-

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Biblical tradition. In short, the mantic-divinatory faculty allows the theologian to transcend the "merely historical" in order to achieve an intuition of the essence of the salvific events to which the biblical tradition bears witness (F 4). Rather than being thought of as a series of supernatural interventions into the course of historical events, salvation history is re-conceived in terms of the gradually increasing clarity with which the biblical idea of God is recognized in the historical development of religious experience recorded in the Bible. For Otto, there is an experiential unity characteristic of each particular religion, which it is possible for the congenially predisposed theologian to discover and analyze. One suspects, however, that what distinguishes the theologian from the "profane" scholar is the conviction that it is possible to discover a unitary principle beneath the variety of concrete forms that a particular religion has taken in the course of its history. As Otto himself acknowledges, apart from this conviction, theology, broadly conceived as the activity of self-reflection in which all religions engage, would be impossible. In the case of Christianity, he writes, unless we are able to presuppose the existence of a "mysterious living principle, which proves itself most powerfully and uniformly in that it always reemerges, irrepressibly, after the most difficult crises, reestablishing itself anew, then church history is nothing but a bundle of arbitrary preferences, and theology is nonsense" (G 15). One thing is clear from the beginning: If there is not something ever-present, as living and real today as it was a thousand years ago, from which I can proceed in order to find the nature and meaning of Christianity, then the fundamental meaning of Christianity is completely abolished. For a truth that is dependent upon the artificial methods of scholarly (wissenschaftliche) textual criticism and the transitory standpoint of the critic would certainly not be the truth . . . that Christianity and Christian faith claim to possess (G 15).

To grasp the inner meaning of any particular religion, one must come to view the historical materials from the perspective of those who have undergone the experience of salvation (Heilserlebnis\ F 4) that is characteristic of the religion in question, since the historical materials themselves are nothing but the expressions of this experience. To reiterate, for Otto, the unity that characterizes each individual religion is an experiential unity. The truth that Christianity and the Christian faith claim to possess was expressed in the form of prayer, preaching, hymn and liturgy before it came to be formulated systematically in theological doctrines. The task of the modern Christian theologian is to recover the "religious problematic" that manifests itself in the fundamental experiences of grace, repentance, conversion, justification and reconciliation (F 6), before these categories have been subject to theological rationalization. Otto is thus able to speak of "the most concentrated experiential unity" that is character-

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istic of Pauline Christianity in the New Testament, and which it is the task of theology to identify and analyze. Systematic theology is defined by Otto at one point as a "science of the Christian religion in the sense of a divinatory intuition of essence and truth on the basis of historical theology" (F 8). The theologian takes his point of departure from the historical data, but must move beyond the paucity and fragmentation of that data in attempting to give systematic expression to the essential underlying significance of the whole. Needless to say, Otto's intuitive approach to the study of religion involves a significant departure from the standard procedures of historical scholarship. Furthermore, there are good reasons to suspect that Otto's attempt to consider religion "from within" was a response to the burden that had been placed upon the theological enterprise as a result of the application of critical methods of historical scholarship to the authoritative documents of Christianity, which had disrupted the traditional, dogmatic self-understanding of modern Protestantism. The members of the History-of-Religions School had criticized the Ritschlians for distinguishing between salvation history and profane history. In order to locate a single, essential meaning of the fundamental forms of Christian religious experience, Otto was forced to develop an alternative to the methods of "profane" historical scholarship, without according supernatural status to certain historical events, as traditional, dogmatic theology had done. Otto's emphasis upon religious experience, and his attempt to develop an intuitive approach that us capable of identifying stable essences behind the shifting multiplicity of concrete historical phenomena thus appears to be a response to the fragmentation produced by critical historical scholarship. In Otto's approach, the unity that had been disrupted by historical consciousness is restored at the experiential level. But this unity is not disclosed to standard methods of historical research. It is Otto's theologically motivated attempt to move beyond those methods that has invited the criticism of subsequent historians of religions.

Chapter Four Otto's Investigation of the Holy I. The Numinous as an Independent Category of Religious Value The first three chapters of this study have traced some of the major themes in the development Otto's thought prior to the publication of Das Heilige. In doing so, it was necessary to review a number of Kantian terms that are crucial for understanding the influence of Schleiermacher and Fries upon Otto's conception of the philosophy of religion. The purpose of this exposition was to lay the foundation for the interpretation of Das Heilige that will be developed in this chapter. From beginning to end, Otto's argument in that work presupposes the philosophical framework that I have attempted to describe in the preceding chapters. This is already suggested in the subtitle of his study: "On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational." As the following passage illustrates, Otto's distinction between the rational and the irrational in the idea of the divine must be understood in light of the Kantian-Friesian distinction between logical judgments and aesthetic judgments discussed in Chapter Two. We mean by the 'rational' in the idea of the divine that part of it which is amenable to (eingeht in) the clear comprehensibility of our conceptual faculty, to the domain of familiar and definable concepts. Furthermore, we claim that around this domain of conceptual clarity there lies a mysterious, obscure sphere, which withdraws from our conceptual thinking, though not from our feeling, and which we call to that extent 'the irrational' (DH 76).

Another passage from Das Heilige makes it quite clear that, in attempting to isolate the numinous as a distinct category of religious value, and the faculty of divination as a capacity for the apprehension of this kind of value, Otto's strategy is to extend Kant's original discussion of aesthetic judgment in order to identify a separate class of religious judgments that is in many respects similar to, but ultimately different from, aesthetic judgments in the narrow sense (i.e. judgments about the beautiful and the sublime).1 Although Kant In a letter to Otto dated Dec. 12, 1916, Bousset expressed his reaction to Das Heilige as follows. "You have fulfilled once and for all the first and greatest desideratum that re-

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distinguishes between an "aesthetic" power o f judgment ( U r t e i l s k r a f t ) and a "logical" power of judgment, Otto argues, it w o u l d be w r o n g to assume that the former term is meant to apply only to judgments o f taste. Kant's primary intention is simply and in general terms to distinguish the faculty of judgment based on feeling (des gefühlsmässigen Urteilens) from that of the understanding, from discursive thinking and inference; and the predicate 'aesthetic' is meant to mark as the peculiarity of the former that, in contrast to logical judgment, it is not executed according to (nicht vollziehe nach) clear principles of the intellect, but rather according to 'obscure' principles, which cannot be explicated in conceptual propositions, but are only 'felt' (DH 177). The fact that Otto refers to his study of the holy as an investigation of "the irrational in the idea o f the divine and its relation to the rational" indicates that Otto takes the idea of the divine to consist of a rational and an irrational part. A s w a s discussed in Chapter T w o , in the Critique of Judgment, Kant distinguishes t w o different kinds o f ideas. "One o f these is referred to an intuition, according to a merely subjective principle o f the mutual harmony o f the cognitive powers (imagination and understanding); and these ideas are called aesthetic. T h e other kind is referred to a concept, according to an objective principle, . . . they are called rational ideas" (CJ 2 1 5 / 3 4 2 ) . G i v e n that Otto u s e s the term "irrational" to refer to religious j u d g m e n t s that are carried out in accordance with principles "which cannot be explicated in conceptual propositions, but are only felt," it is reasonable to assume that, in referring to "the irrational in the idea o f the divine," Otto has in m i n d s o m e thing like the aesthetic ideas discussed by Kant in the Third Critique,3 The mained in relation to Fries, the presentation of the unique position (Sonderstellung) of religious Ahndung in contrast to the beautiful and the sublime." The letter appears as an appendix in Schütte, Religion und Christentum in der Theologie Rudolf Ottos, here p. 127. The date of the letter indicates that some copies oí Das Heilige were released prior to 1917, which is commonly regarded as the year of its initial publication, or that Bousset had read a copy of the book before it was made available to the general public. "Kant hebt mit diesem Prädikate 'ästhethisch' zunächst nur ganz allgemein vom Vermögen des Verstandes als des diskursiven begrifflichen Denkens Folgerns und Schliessens das Vermögen des gefühlsmässigen Urteilens überhaupt ab und bezeichnet als dessen Eigenart dass es im Unterschiede vom logischen sich nicht vollziehe nach verständig klaren sondern nach 'dunklen' Prinzipien die nicht in begrifflichen Sätzen auswickelbar sondern nur 'gefühlt' sind." Sharpe's contention that "Rudolf Otto's English translator was foolish (or at least unwise) to render Das Heilige as 'The Idea of the Holy'" appears to be exaggerated. Eric Sharpe, Nathan Söderblom and the Study of Religion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 211. While I agree that the title of Otto's book would have been better translated simply as The Holy, Sharpe does not recognize the importance of Kant's Third Critique for Otto's argument. In fact, Otto's attempt to identify a standard for making normative distinctions in the history of religion depends upon his claim that there is an a priori idea of the divine or holy which contains both rational and irrational moments. Cf.

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idea of the divine, then, would include both a rational part, which is able to be conceived in terms of clearly defined concepts, and an irrational part, understood in the Kantian sense of an "inner intuition to which no concept can be completely adequate" (CJ 182-83/314). The importance of this distinction for understanding the theory of the religious a priori presented in the second half of Das Heilige will be discussed later in this chapter. As that discussion will show, the first "phenomenological" chapters of Das Heilige and the later epistemological chapters are more closely related than has generally been recognized. However, since Otto's theory of the religious a priori is presented only after his description of the numinous has been developed, we have first to consider the latter. In the opening lines of Das Heilige, Otto emphasizes the importance of rational categories for the development of theology in theistic religions generally, and especially for Christianity. In doing so, he implicitly reaffirms the criticism of Schleiermacher expressed at the beginning of the Kant-Fries book. Religion, to the extent that it regards itself as something more than a purely subjective response to the universe, must insist upon the claim to involve a kind of knowledge (Erkenntnis). Having reaffirmed this point, however, Otto immediately goes on to emphasize the limitations of a purely rational understanding of the kind of knowledge involved in religion. While it is true, in the case of Christianity, that the divinity is known by reason, the nature of the divinity is not exhausted by those rational predicates that apply to it. Although these rational predicates do indeed apply to the object of Christian faith, that object "is not yet recognized in them, and cannot be recognized in them, but must be recognized in some other way" (DH 2). In other words, the theoretical affirmation of the existence of God, defined philosophically as a single, infinite, omniscient being, is not in and of itself a religious affirmation, and we need not think of a person who is prepared to make such an affirmation as a religious person. What characteristic would such an affirmation have to exhibit in order for it to qualify as a religious affirmation? For Otto, as for Söderblom before him, the beginning of religion coincides with the emergence of the category of the holy. A religious judgment is one in which the predicate "holiness" is applied to an object of some kind. To recognize something as holy is to attach a distinctively religious value to that thing. Judgments about the holy may reach over (übergreifen) into

DH 137,173. The importance of Kant's discussion of aesthetic ideas for Otto's theory of the religious a priori is foreshadowed in a footnote from the Kant-Fries book: "Especially Kant's chapter on the sublime comes in question here, in which there begins to emerge in his great doctrine of ideas seeds of a doctrine of religion that are much more genuine than the forced and artificial product brought forth in the doctrine of the postulates" (KFR 122).

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other spheres (e.g. the theoretical, the ethical or the aesthetic), but do not originate in them. And as long as they are judgments about the holy, they necessarily exhibit a unique moment (ein völlig artbesonderes Moment), which, as in the case of judgments about the beautiful, is incapable of being grasped conceptually. That which is regarded as holy is characterized by a recognizable surplus (Überschuss) of meaning beyond the moral connotation that is commonly associated with that word. It is this non-ethical and nonrational surplus that Otto is interested in isolating. In order to do so, he has first to free the term "holiness" from a misleading connotation that it has acquired in the course of time. Most native speakers of the English language are familiar with the expression, "holier than thou," which is used to refer to a particular kind of moralistic or judgmental attitude. The person who is, or who thinks they are, "holier than thou," is a person who exhibits little tolerance or compassion for the shortcomings of others, a person who employs a standard of moral judgment toward others which they would be hard-pressed to meet themselves. It is an attitude that is typically "puritanical," i.e. characteristic of the moralistic type of religiosity commonly associated with Puritanism. When we accuse a person of being "holier than thou," we mean that they are quick to cast judgment upon the moral shortcomings of others. To the extent that such a person in fact is, or believes that they are, "holier" than others, what they really are, or believe themselves to be, is morally superior. The misleading connotation of the term "holiness" that Otto contests, it seems to me, is reflected in this idiomatic expression. Otto argues that the moral connotation of "holiness" is a later development in the history of religion. That this is the case, he claims, is borne out by an examination of the oldest meaning of the Hebrew, Greek and Latin terms corresponding to the German word, "heilig," and the English word, "holy." In order to facilitate the attempt to isolate "the holy minus its moral moment" (DH 6), Otto coins the term "numinous." He proposes, furthermore, to draw the attention of his readers to a "uniquely numinous category of interpretation and valuation (Deutungs- und Bewertungs-kategorie), and, in the same way, [to] a numinous state of mind (Gemiits-gestimmtheit) which always occurs where the former is applied, that is, where an object is thought of (vermeint worden ist) as numinous" (DH 7). In attempting to isolate the non-moral aspect of the holy, Otto invites his readers to direct their attention to the most powerful and pronounced moment of religious awareness that they are capable of imagining. Whoever is unable to do so is invited to read no further. Such a person, Otto suggests, is to be excused for attempting to proceed as far as possible with the explanatory principles (Erklärungs-prinzipien) at her disposal. However, she will be unable to do justice to that which is most characteristic of religious experience in contrast to other kinds of experience. This passage in Das Heilige

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has been widely discussed by various commentators. However, it has generally not been understood in light of the distinction between explanatory psychology and descriptive psychology discussed in the previous chapter. That Otto has such a distinction in mind is shown by the fact that he goes on to invite his readers to pursue with him an "examination and careful analysis (Zerlegung) of such moments of solemn worship and transport (Ergriffenheit)" (DH 8) as they have been asked to call to mind, in which the attempt will be made to direct attention toward that which distinguishes them from other kinds of experience. What distinguishes religious experience from other kinds of experience, Otto argues, is "a peculiar difference of quality in the mood and the feeling-content of the pious state of being itself' (DH 3). It is this qualitative difference that Otto sets out to describe. In another often-cited, controversial passage, Otto claims that the category of the numinous, "like every original and fundamental datum, is not capable of being defined in the strict sense, but only discussed" (DH 7). In order to help someone to recognize and understand this irreducible category of valuation, one must attempt, by means of the exhibition of perspicuous examples, "to lead them to that point in their own mind where it must begin to stir, emerge and become conscious" (DH 7). In short, Otto claims that the numinous must be directly experienced in order to be understood, and he attempts to facilitate this understanding by evoking the sense of the numinous in his readers. On the basis of this passage, some critics have suggested that Otto's primary intention is not to pursue a philosophical discussion of religion at all, but rather to convert his readers. The evocative descriptions of the numinous that Otto pursues in Das Heilige have thus been regarded as an apologetic strategy used to "protect" religion from impartial analysis. Because Otto does not actually have an argument, these critics suggest, he engages in distracting rhetoric that is intended to prevent uncritical readers from recognizing the vacuity of his claims. This criticism of Otto, however, is short-sighted, and reflects a failure to understand Otto's argument in Das Heilige in relation to the philosophical framework developed in his earlier publications. It may be recalled that, according to Kant, one does not become persuaded of the aesthetic value of a particular object on the basis of definitions and syllogisms. "This is why there can be no rule by which someone could be compelled to acknowledge that something is beautiful. No one can use reasons or principles to talk us into a judgment on whether some garment, house, or flower is beautiful" (CJ 59/216-17). Since Otto claims that judgments about the numinous are formally similar to judgments about the beautiful, it is not surprising to find him making a similar claim with regard to the possibility of being compelled to recognize a particular phenomenon as exhibiting a numinous quality.

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If, as Otto contends, it is on the basis of a distinct kind of feeling that we apprehend the religious significance of a particular object, then it will not be possible to demonstrate this significance to others by means of a rational demonstration or definition any more than it would be possible to convince someone of the beauty of a particular painting or poem in this way. We can only attempt to persuade an interlocutor to see in it what we do by seeking to isolate what it is about the aesthetic (or religious) object that we find so striking. The fact that we do distinguish between the aesthetic merit of different paintings, poems and musical compositions, and that we are able to discuss the grounds of our preferences in these matters and, at least sometimes, to reach a modicum of consensus, is what lead Kant to make a distinction between judgments of taste and judgments about what we find pleasing (das Angenehme) in the first place. One may object to the philosophical account of aesthetic judgment presented by Kant in the Third Critique. One may also object, on Kantian grounds or otherwise, to Otto's attempt to extend Kant's original account to include a distinct class of religious judgments. The problem is that Otto's argument in Das Heilige is often made to look foolish by those who have failed to grasp the nature of the claims that it entails. Otto's proposal at the beginning of Das Heilige to conduct a systematic analysis of religious feeling represents a further development of ideas first expressed in the Wundt review. But it also reflects concerns that reach back to the very beginning of his theological career. In the epilogue to his edition of the Speeches, Otto claimed that Schleiermacher's definition of religion in the Second Speech is merely asserted (literally, "shot from the pistol"), instead of resulting from a careful psychological-historical investigation of religion (ÜR 209). This remark already foreshadows the opening chapters of Das Heilige, in which Otto develops his famous descriptions of the different moments of the numinous. Although Otto does not use the term "essence (Wesen) of religion" in introducing the numinous, his intention, as we have seen, is to isolate a distinct "category of interpretation and valuation" which appears only in the religious sphere, and apart from which no religion would be worthy of the name (DH 6-7). In the Wundt review, Otto had criticized Wundt's psychological explanation of the origin of religion, and appealed to Schleiermacher in support of his claim that the understanding (Verständnis) of religion must proceed from an analysis of religious feeling. "This claim of Schleiermacher's, as inadequately as it was carried out by him, proves itself precisely in the attempt to illuminate the historical development (Werden) of religion" (MR 264). The opening, "phenomenological" chapters of Das Heilige may thus be regarded as Otto's attempt to rectify what he saw as a lacunae in the Speeches, and the realization of a programmatic intention which Otto appears to have maintained for almost two decades. What distinguishes Das Heilige from Otto's earlier works is that the blueprint for a

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normative science of religion, conceived in Kantian-Friesian terms, is now combined with the kind of descriptive psychology of religion discussed in the last chapter. By means of a detailed psychological analysis (Zerlegung) of typically religious states of mind, as these are expressed in certain paradigmatic documents from the history of religion (primarily the Bible and later Christian sources), Otto hopes to provide an empirical or phenomenological confirmation of what Schleiermacher had merely asserted. The opening chapters of Das Heilige would thus appear to contain the "inductive" psychological and historical investigation of religion, which, in the foreword to the Kant-Fries book, Otto said he intended to undertake in the future (KFR viii). However, the method of investigation employed by Otto in Das Heilige can only be called "inductive" in a strained sense of the word. Otto's book was regarded by many of his contemporaries, including such notable figures as Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, as a pioneering work in the phenomenology of religion.4 However, there is no evidence of Otto's having been influenced by Husserlian phenomenology prior to the publication of Das Heilige, and it is more likely that Otto's attempt to isolate the various moments of the numinous was inspired by Schleiermacher's discussion of religion in the Speeches, which, according to one commentator, may be said "to anticipate Husserl and the later phenomenologists in significant respects." 5 As was indicated in Chapter One, Schleiermacher's apologetic aim in the Speeches is to convince his friends, the "cultured despisers" of religion among the literary elite of Berlin, that what they find condemnable in religion does not actually belong to religion at all. In order to distinguish the essence of "religion" from the "extraneous parts" with which it is commonly confused, Schleiermacher undertakes an imaginative reconstruction of the essence of religion as it is presented in the manifold of its individual appearances. "Only the imagination can grasp the entire idea behind these qualities, which are encountered only singly as dispersed and mixed with much that is foreign" (OR 97). In Das Heilige, we find Otto applying a similar metaphor. The numinous cannot be completely captured at a glance, nor is it entirely present in any individual historical phenomenon. Rather, the various moments of the numinous gradually unfold in the course of the history of religion, and in order to grasp the numinous as a whole, one must traverse that course in its entirety. This, Otto claims, is why the classification of religions according to genus and species is such a problematic undertaking. 4

Husserl and Schelers' responses to Das Heilige are discussed in Chapter Six. C. W. Christian, Friedrich Schleiermacher (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1979), p. 146. Otto himself appears to have regarded the Speeches as containing a "phenomenology of religion," but the meaning that he attaches to the term "phenomenology" is not clear. Cf. Otto, Das Gefühl des Überweltlichen, p. 5.

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It is as though a great fish first began to become visible over the surface of the water in parts, and one attempted then to classify according to species and genus the curve of the back, the tip of the tail, and the head spouting water, instead of developing an essential understanding (Wesensverständnis) of these appearances in such a way that one recognized them in their place and in their context as individual parts of a single whole, which one must first have understood as a whole before one understands its parts (DH 161).

For Otto, as for Schleiermacher, the essence of religion must be sought behind the multiplicity of its concrete historical expressions. The various "moments" of the numinous are capable of being isolated and analyzed in the different historical phenomena in which they are especially pronounced. For example, the fascinans-moment may predominate to the point where the trememdum almost disappears, and vice versa; and it is precisely in such cases where the distinctive qualities of each are most readily observable. Furthermore, each moment has its more primitive and its more sublimated or "schematized" forms. Nevertheless, for Otto, each of these moments, and each of the particular shades that they are capable of assuming, remain different aspects of a single, underlying whole.

II. The Various Moments of the Numinous Otto's preference for the first edition of the Speeches was discussed in Chapter One. The underlying reasons for this preference emerge again in the opening pages of Das Heilige, and in the criticisms of Schleiermacher's "feeling of absolute dependence" that are to be found there. Otto begins his book by introducing the distinction between the rational and the irrational in religion, and he claims that this distinction is not adequately conceived as a distinction between the affirmation or denial of the truth of some belief, such as the belief in miracles. Rather, as we have seen, Otto conceives the difference between religious rationalism and its opposite as "a peculiar difference of quality in the mood and in the feeling-content of the pious state of being itself' (DH 3). Otto credits Schleiermacher with having identified one of the constitutive features of religious consciousness in his discussion of the feeling of absolute dependence, but he believes that the term "absolute dependence" fails to express the nature of the qualitative distinction that is here at issue. What makes the religious feeling of dependence religious, Otto claims, is that is it is elicited by a religious object. The sense of insignificance or nothingness that characterizes the pious state of being arises only in relation to just such an object.

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And this 'such,' this quality of the intended object (dieses Wie des gemeinten Objektes) itself is not able to be grasped in rational concepts, is 'unsayable'; it is only able to be shown by means of a detour, namely, by self-reflection and by directing attention to the characteristic tone and content of the feeling-reaction that the experience of it [i.e. the numinous object] arouses in the soul (Gemüt; DH 10).

According to Otto, then, religious feeling is structurally determined by its intentional relationship to a religious object, and Otto's strategy will be to shed light on the nature of that object by means of an analysis of the feelingact in which it is given.6 Thus, Otto's primary interest is not the psychology of religious feeling per se, but rather the object toward which religious feeling is directed. In case his intention in Das Heilige had been misunderstood, Otto reiterated this point in the foreword to his collection of essays, Aufsätze das Numinose betreffend, in 1923, where he emphasized that self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) is only a means to reflection upon the matter at hand (Sachbesinnung), i.e. the nature of the numinous object that "casts its shadow" in religious feeling. Otto conceives of the analysis of religious feeling as a preparatory task that first enables us to direct our attention along the "line of sight" (Blickrichtung) of the experience upon which we have reflected. Once our attention is directed in this way, "we look no longer at our experience of the thing, but at the thing itself (die Sache selber), and with ever more expectant vision (mit immer gespannterer Sehe) we penetrate into the essence of the thing itself and display its nature (Art) and its moments. We are now object-related (Gegenstands-bezogen), no longer self-related." 7 The strategy employed in Das Heilige constitutes a novel development in Otto's thinking, which is only hinted at in his previous writings. At the same time, this development is consistent with a line of thought that first began to emerge in Otto's centennial edition of Schleiermacher's Speeches. In his interpretation of Schleiermacher, Otto had emphasized that intuition and feeling are two sides of a single, unified whole, and that religious feeling first arises in response to the activity of the universe upon the experiencing 6

In an appendix to Das Geßhl des Überweltlichen, Otto clarifies his use of the term "feeling" ( G e f ü h l ) as follows. "We mean here with 'feeling' not subjective mental states (Zuständlichkeilen), but an act of reason itself, a manner of knowing ( d e s Erkennens) which is different from the manner of knowing from the 'understanding' . . ." ( G Ü 327). Otto does not explicitly employ the phenomenological concept of intentionality. Clearly, however, something like that concept is at work in his discussion of the numinous, and it is probably Otto's attempt to display the "suchness" ("Sosein," in Scheler's vocabulary) of the object intended by religious consciousness that led many of his contemporaries to regard Das Heilige as a pioneering contribution to the phenomenology of religion. Cf. Chapter Six of this study. Rudolf Otto, Foreword to Aufsätze Andreas Perthes, 1923).

das Numinose

betreffend

(Stuttgart/Gotha: Friedrich

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subject. Now, in Das Heilige, his argument turns upon the claim that religious feeling is both subjectively and objectively determined, and that it is possible to gain access to the numinous object by way of an analysis of numinous feeling. Otto wants, "in contrast to Schleiermacher," to investigate the "primary object-related determination of feeling (Geßhlsbestimmtheit), [from] which . . . the creature-feeling only follows secondarily as its shadow in se//-feeling" (DH 13). In the first chapters of Das Heilige, Otto's argument appears to be 1) that religious feeling is not merely a subjective state, but arises in response to a religious object; 2) that religious feeling involves a noetic or cognitive dimension, by virtue of which it may be regarded as a kind of cognition (Erkenntnis); and 3) that by means of the analysis of numinous feeling, it is possible to produce knowledge of the numinous object that is apprehended in it. In fact, as will be shown further on in this chapter, Otto's epistemological thesis is far more complex than this. However, before going on to discuss that thesis in its entirety, it is necessary first to consider the description of the numinous object that Otto produces from his analysis of numinous feeling. "Mysterium tremendum" is the preliminary designation that Otto applies to the objective pole of the numinous experience, i.e. to the religious reality that is encountered as something independent of the subject. The substantive, "mysterium," refers to the form of the numinous. Conceptually, this designation performs a purely negative function, since mysterium, by definition, is that which resists or eludes conceptualization. "What is thereby meant, however, is something absolutely positive. Its positive aspect is experienced purely in feelings. And we can discuss these feelings, and even clarify them, insofar as we simultaneously bring them to awareness (zum Anklingen

bringen)" (DH 14). While the term "mysterium" refers to the form of the numinous, the positive content of the numinous is composed of a peculiar "contrastharmony" (DH 57) to which the entire history of religion, according to Otto, bears witness (DH 42). This contrast-harmony consists of the simultaneous presence of two antithetical tendencies that can be observed in the kinds of reactions to which the numinous gives rise. The numinous is both terrifying and fascinating. It exhibits a power that is simultaneously repulsive and attractive, threatening and captivating, horrendous and alluring. It is this bipolar structure of the numinous that is indicated by the designation myste-

rium tremendum et fascinans. In his discussion of the tremendum, Otto distinguishes three different moments. The principle characteristic of the tremendum is its terrifying or dreadful aspect. In his review of Wundt's Völkerpsychologie, Otto had argued that religion begins with the feeling of religious awe or dread (Scheu; MR 302). This claim is reiterated and more fully developed in Otto's discussion of the tremendum in Das Heilige. Otto produces illustrations of the

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tremendum from the Hebrew Bible and from Greek religion. Originally, however, the tremendum enters into the history of religion in the form of the primeval feeling of the uncanny (das Unheimliche), which Otto regards as "the most characteristic feature of the so-called 'religion of the primitives'" (DH 17). The entire development of the history of religion takes its point of departure from this 'dreadful awe' (Scheu) in its unrefined form (ihrer 'Roh'-form), from this feeling of the 'uncanny,' which breaks through and begins to stir at some point, appearing as something strange and new in the hearts of primeval man (in den Gemütern der Urmenschheit). With its emergence there began a new epoch of humanity ( D H 16).

One important difference between Otto's discussion of religious awe in Das Heilige and his earlier discussion in the Wundt review is that this feeling is now explicitly identified with a phenomenologically distinct act of valuation and a corresponding category of value. With the feeling of the uncanny, there arises for the first time in history "a completely unique, new function of experience and valuation (Erlebens- und Wertungs-funktion) of the human spirit" (DH 17). Otto's reference to "a new epoch of humanity" is an expression of his conviction that the first apprehension of a distinctively religious value in connection with particular objects, persons and places marks the emergence of religion as an independent force in human life. The subsequent development of the myriad forms of religious consciousness and their various cultural manifestations, Otto claims, can be traced back to this first primitive apprehension of religious value. To say that the numinous constitutes a sui generis category of interpretation and valuation (Deutungs- und Bewertungskategorie·, DH 7) is to claim that among the forces that have shaped human history are distinctively religious interests, which are only capable of being understood in terms of the religious values to which they are directed. The actions that are determined by these interests may affect other areas of human life (e.g. morality, economic practice, etc.), but the motivation underlying these actions themselves is not thereby capable of being understood in nonreligious terms. Otto's emphasis upon the qualitative differences that distinguish different types of feeling expresses his conviction, described in Chapter Two, that feeling is not merely a subjective mental state, but a kind of cognitive act or judgment through which values are apprehended. It is for this reason that he is critical of Kant's having relegated the entire life of feeling to pleasure (Lust) and displeasure (Unlust) (DH 18). Otto concedes that the mental states (Zustände) variously characterized by the presence of feelings of sensual pleasure, aesthetic delight, ethical regard (Achtung) and religious devotion exhibit certain affinities which allow them to be grouped together for the

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purpose of philosophical reflection, but they are not thereby capable of being distinguished on the basis of quantitative criteria. The religious awe associated with the tremendum, Otto insists, does not result from an intensification of normal fear. In that case, the most frightening experience would also be the most religious one. But even in its more subtle manifestations, the experience of religious dread is qualitatively distinct from normal fear. In addition to the terrifying (schauervoll) aspect of the tremendum, Otto identifies two other moments. The first of these he refers to as the moment of overwhelming majesty, in light of which the tremendum may be further qualified as a "tremenda majestas" (DH 22). "The moment of the majestas may remain vividly present [even] where the first moment, that of unapproachability, recedes and grows fainter, as is the case, for example in mysticism" (DH 22-23). The moment of majestas predominates in those expressions of mystical awareness where the insubstantiality of the self is made to stand out in contrast to the hyper-substantiality of the divinity. It may also come to expression in the "schematized" form of mystical, ontological speculation. Otto wishes to emphasize the difference between speculation that is motivated by purely theoretical concerns, and speculation that is fundamentally religious in nature. In the latter case, metaphysical categories are employed in the service of a primarily affective apprehension of the numinous object. They are properly regarded as "ideograms" which bring to symbolic expression an irrational religious feeling. The third moment of the tremendum distinguished by Otto is the "energie" (das Energische). Otto uses this term to refer to those characteristics of the divine that are expressed in terms of willfulness, dynamism and overpowering compulsion. The energie moment of the tremendum is recognized above all "in the ideograms of vitality, passion, affective essence, will, power, movement, arousal, activity and urge" (DH 27). The energie is what distinguishes the God of religion (i.e. the "living God" of the Bible) from the God of philosophy, as well as a mere belief in spirits from the apprehension of mana or "power" in connection with some person or place. Having distinguished these three moments within the tremendum, Otto turns his attention back to the mysterium, which he now identifies as the "Wholly Other" (das Ganz Andere; DH 28). The two terms, mysterium and tremendum, are closely related. Nevertheless, Otto argues, the mysterium sometimes predominates to the point where the tremendum almost disappears, and is to that extent capable of being isolated. "We can designate the mysterium minus the tremendum more precisely as the mirum or the mirabile" (DH 29). Otto translates mirum with the German word, "Wunder," which is generally translated into English as "miracle." What Otto wishes to emphasize, however, is the sense of stupefaction or astonishment in the face of the totally unfamiliar, the absolutely strange or "wholly other." Mirum is thus not yet admirandum. The experience of admiration involves the recog-

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nition of a positive value of some sort in the object that is admired. In distinguishing wonder from admiration, Otto's aim is to isolate a moment of experience which is characterized by the sheer disjunction resulting from the confrontation with the extra-ordinary - the amazement that arises in response to "something that cannot be ordered within our circle of reality" (DH 33). The theme of the Wholly Other is taken up again by Otto in Das Gefühl des Überweltlichen, where it is developed in response to the views of certain "naturalistic explainers of religion." Appealing to the saying of Xenophanes, that if oxen could paint, they would paint their gods as oxen, these theorists (who are not explicitly identified by Otto) argue that humans created the gods, and later God, in their own image. Otto claims that, on the contrary, the origin of the gods must be sought in the unfamiliar and uncanny. It is precisely when the gods become too familiar that they begin to loose their religious power, as was the case, for example, in ancient Greece. "Where the goddesses and gods became all-too noble and all-too charming and all-too human-like, belief in them was not at its highpoint, as one would have to assume according to the doctrine of anthropomorphism" (GÜ 213). Rather, Otto argues, by that point, belief in the all-too human gods had begun to show signs of diminution, making way for a re-appropriation of the strange and exotic deities of Egypt and the far East, in whom the presence of the Wholly Other was more palpable, and whose power of attraction was for that reason more compelling than the domesticated inhabitants of Olympus. Even within the classical Greek pantheon, Otto claims, the uncanny origin of religion never completely recedes behind the anthropomorphized figures of the Olympian gods. The vestiges of this origin can be recognized in the animal emblems used as symbols to represent the deities of the classical pantheon (e.g. the owl of Pallas Athena). Furthermore, Otto claims, the history of religion speaks generally against the claim of Xenophanes and his modern heirs who argue for the anthropomorphic origin of the gods. The pictures of the gods of the world, brought together in one heap, would put to shame all of today's museums of futuristic artists in terms of the imagination (Fantastik), strangeness and inexhaustibility of the wholly means of expression of the wholly unfamiliar (des ganz Befremdlichen) that they display. If the oxen strove to see their gods as oxen, humans would appear on the contrary to have had quite the opposite ambition, portraying their gods as half or whole cows, calves, horses, crocodiles, elephants, birds, fish, as marvelous hybrids, hermaphrodites and hideous beings, as weird, confused forms (Schling- und Zeichen-gebilde) and who knows what else (GÜ 215).

Otto's emphasis upon the uncanny origin of the Greek divinities (and of religion generally), and his recognition of a diminution of religious power in the anthropomorphized, domesticated forms that they assumed in their later development, presents an interesting reversal of the understanding of Greek

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religion that is characteristic of German classicism. Friedrich Schiller, for example, in his "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man," identifies the decisive moment in the spiritual accomplishment of Greek religion at the point where Chronos, who represents time, necessity and dependence upon nature, is overthrown by Zeus. For Schiller, the older generation of gods bear the vestigial traces of their "oriental" pedigree, and represent the oppressive forces of nature that keep humanity in servitude. With the emergence of the Olympian pantheon, the human spirit rises in revolt against its ancient gods, asserting its freedom and independence from nature. "The monstrous divinity of the Oriental, which rules the world with the blind strength of a beast of prey, shrinks in the imagination of the Greeks into the friendly contours of a human being. The empire of the Titans falls, and infinite force is tamed by infinite form." 8 Hegel attributes a similar accomplishment to the Greek religion of beauty. 9 For him, the idealized Olympian figures portrayed in classical Greek sculpture constitute the complete and harmonious representation of Spirit at peace with itself. Only the form of the human body is capable of providing an adequate sensual representation of the spiritual. Greek art distinguishes itself in this respect from Egyptian art, in which the human form has not yet completely emerged, but continues to be combined with animal parts, as, for example, in the figure of the Sphinx. Hegel argues that the Greeks inherited their deities from previous civilizations, but that these ancient gods were transformed by the Greeks in the course of their cultural development. Thus, what had remained enveloped in the darkness of an Egyptian night, sealed in the hermetic indecipherability of the hieroglyph, now steps forth into the clear light of day. Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx, and the answer to that riddle is Man. The point at which the strange, uncanny monuments of Egyptian religion give way to the classical, human figures of the Olympian pantheon marks a breakthrough in the development of Spirit. To that extent, however, the same event that Schiller and Hegel regard as a pivotal moment in the evolution of religion is taken by Otto to be an indication of its waning influence as a vital force in Greek culture. Otto's awareness of an underlying irrational dimension in Greek religion that is in some sense prior to, and was subsequently obscured by, the harmonious images of classical Greek culture is reminiscent of similar observations made by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche argues that the true accomplishment of the Greeks was their discovery of tragic drama, and interprets the rationalism of the Athenian Enlightenment as a symptom of g Friedrich Schiller, "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man," Essays, trans, and ed. by Walter Hinderer and Danial O. Dahlstrom, (New York: Continuum, 1993), p. 163. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Introduction to Aesthetics, trans, and ed. by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 36-38.

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cultural decline. Similarly, Otto finds the genuine source of Greek religion exemplified in the song of the chorus in Sophocles' Antigone, in which he recognizes an expression of "genuine numinous awe" (DH 53). The object of this numinous feeling is humanity itself. Otto translates the Sophoclean verse as follows: "There is much that is monstrous. But nothing is more monstrous than man" (DH 53). 10 Rather than identifying the essence of Greek religion with the harmonious self-recognition of spirit represented in the idealized human forms of classical sculpture, Otto identifies it with the primitive experience of the uncanniness of human existence to which the Sophoclean chorus bears witness. Thus far, we have considered the negative, formal designation of the numinous (mysterium) and one aspect of the contrast-harmony identified by Otto as its positive content (tremendum). It remains to consider the second aspect of this contrast (fascinans). Both in the Wundt review and in Das Heilige, Otto identifies the origin of religion with the experience of "daemonic dread," which bears a certain affinity to natural fear. In the earliest stages of its historical development, the tremendum-aspect of the numinous predominates. In the course of the historical development of religion, however, the numinous ceases to be regarded merely as a wrathful force to be propitiated and appeased. "Just as horrible and terrible as the daemonic-divine is capable of appearing to the mind, so alluring and captivating does it become. And the creature who trembles before it in the most humble despondency has always at the same time the impulse to turn toward it, or rather even to appropriate it" (DH 42). The numinous comes to be regarded as a positive good, the acquisition or allegiance of which becomes the aim of the most diverse forms of ritual and ascetic practice. Furthermore, contact with the numen is not sought merely as a means to the attainment of non-religious ends. Rather, it comes to be regarded as an end in itself. Special techniques are employed for no other purpose than the inducement of numinous consciousness. "And to remain in these strange, often bizarre, states of numinous transport itself becomes a good (ein Gut), even a way of salvation, that is completely different from the profane goods (profanen Gütern) that are sought through magic" (DH 45). Insofar as Otto defines the numinous itself as a "category of interpretation and valuation," the concept of value may be said to underlie his entire

In the German version of Das Heilige, Otto devotes a separate chapter to the monstrous (das Ungeheuer), which he identifies closely with the uncanny ( d a s Unheim-liche). In Harvey's English translation, these pages are included at the end of the chapter entitled, "The Element of Fascination" (Chapter VI). In his rendering of the verse from Antigone, Harvey translates "Ungeheuer" as "weird." For an insightful comparison of das Unheimliche in Otto and Freud, see Lome Dawson, "Otto and Freud on the Uncanny and Beyond," 283-311.

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discussion of the numinous. Nevertheless, Otto devotes a separate chapter of Das Heilige to the discussion of "The Sanctum as Numinous Value." Creature-feeling, which constitutes the subjective pole of the numinous experience, involves a devaluation of the self in the presence of the numinous object. Implicit in this experience is the recognition of a supreme religious value to which the self stands opposed. This positive value is not capable of being resolved into predicates of perfection, beauty, sublimity or goodness (DH 67). To designate this uniquely religious value-modality, Otto coins the term "augustum." Only because the augustum constitutes an essential moment of the numinous is it possible to conceive of a form of obligation that is strictly religious, apart from any moral "schematization" of the numinous. Such obligation does not arise in response to the demand of a capricious divine will, but follows instead from a spontaneous act of recognition of the religious value of the numen, as expressed, for example, in the words of the Psalmist: "You alone are worthy to receive honor and glory and praise." Worship is not an activity motivated primarily by moral concerns, but rather in response to the recognition of a strictly religious order of value. Apart from the recognition of an independent category of religious value, Otto argues, it would be impossible to understand many of the most important categories of religious thought, and the actions with which they are associated. "Upon a purely moral basis, there arises neither the need for 'salvation,' nor the need for such strange things as 'consecration' or 'protection' (Bedeckung) or 'atonement"' (DH 70). These ideas, which for Otto express "the most profound mysteries of religion," are bound to appear to religious rationalists and moralists as mere "mythological fossils" (DH 70). It is a fundamental defect of Christian dogmatics, Otto claims, that these religious ideas have been stripped of their numinous significance and reduced to a purely moral connotation. Sin and atonement are ideas that belong properly to the religious, not the moral, sphere. "And they are as genuine and necessary in the former as they are apocryphal in the latter" (DH 70).

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III. Aesthetic Analogies and the Sublimation of the Numinous Throughout Das Heilige, in attempting to distinguish the numinous as an independent category of religious value, Otto develops a number of analogies between religious and aesthetic experience. "As completely different as the affective experiences (Gemüts-erlebnisse) are when an object is recognized {erkannt) as 'beautiful' or as 'horrifying' (grausig), both cases nevertheless coincide insofar as I attach to the object a predicate (namely, a meaningpredicate) which sense experience does not give me, and is incapable of giving me, and which I rather attach to it spontaneously" (DH 162). In both cases, an axiological significance (Wertsinn) is attributed to the object that does not arise from the application of concepts of the understanding. Rather, judgments about the numinous arise from a disinterested feeling (in the Kantian sense), determined neither by reason (as in the case of judgments about the good), nor by sensibility (as in the case of judgments about the pleasant or agreeable). Thus, the relationship between natural fear and numinous dread is analogous to the relationship between the feeling of pleasure that is experienced in connection with the agreeable (das Angenehme) and the feeling of delight (Freude) that arises in response to the beautiful (DH 162), even though the numinous and the beautiful constitute distinct axiological categories. Apart from the formal similarity that Otto identifies between judgments about the beautiful and judgments about the numinous, Otto's argument in Das Heilige also rests upon an analogy between the numinous and the sublime. The sublime, like the numinous, Otto claims, is an "unauswickelbarer Begriff" - literally, a concept that is incapable of being unraveled; "or, as we say, and as Kant also could say: something that is able to be felt but not conceptually defined" (DH 36).11 In the Third Critique, Kant identifies the sublime as a distinct aesthetic category next to the beautiful. The sublime, like the beautiful, arises from a reflective judgment, and the liking of it does not depend on a sensation or a determinate concept, but on "the mere exhibition or power of exhibition, i.e. the imagination" (CJ 97/244). Whereas the beautiful involves the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, the sublime involves the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of reason. Furthermore, "what is sublime, in the proper meaning of the term, 11

Otto puts the term "unauswickelbarer Begriff' in quotation marks, as though he were quoting directly from Kant, but does not indicate where the quote is from. In the second addition of his book, Naturalistische und religiose Weltansicht (Tiibingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1909), which contains additions reflecting Otto's identification with the Friesian position, Otto cites a passage from the pre-critical Kantian work, "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels" (1755), in which Kant uses the term "unausgewickelte Begriffe" in describing the sublimity of the night sky, in order to suggest that Kant himself had recognized Ahndung as a distinct cognitive faculty (Erkenntnisvermögen).

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cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason, which, though they cannot be exhibited adequately, are aroused and called to mind by this very inadequacy, which can be exhibited in sensibility" (CJ 99/245). Strictly speaking, it is incorrect to call a natural object sublime, because natural objects are only occasions for exhibiting the sublimity of reason. Apart from the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, Kant also makes a distinction between the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. The mathematically sublime arises when the imagination is confronted by a magnitude that it is incapable of grasping in a single intuition. Reason demands that all magnitudes be given in their entirety. However, the human mind is limited in its capacity to apprehend large magnitudes at once. The mathematically sublime is experienced when the capacity for comprehension outstrips the capacity for apprehension. Whereas judgments about the beautiful are determined by a feeling of disinterested pleasure that arises in response to the aesthetic object, the feeling involved in the experience of the sublime is more complex. It is "a pleasure that arises only indirectly: it is produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger" (CJ 98/245). Kant also refers to this feeling as a "negative pleasure" (CJ 98/245). Here the mind finds itself in a state of agitation resulting from "a rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object" (CJ 115/258). Otto identifies this ambivalent structure, or "contrast-harmony," as a second analogy between the numinous and the sublime. Whereas the mathematically sublime is experienced in relation to overwhelming magnitude, the dynamically sublime is experienced in relation to natural phenomena that are overwhelming by virtue of their might (Macht; e.g. volcanoes, hurricanes, etc.). Insofar as such phenomena present a direct threat to our well-being, they are incapable of producing the experience of the sublime. In that case, we are simply afraid of them. The dynamically sublime arises only when we "consider an object fearful without being afraid of it, namely, if we judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case where we might possibly want to put up resistance against it, and that any resistance would in that case be utterly futile" (CJ 119-20/260). What this experience reveals is the superiority of reason over nature, since we are brought to the recognition that, despite its overwhelming might, there is nothing in nature before which we would have to bow "if our highest principles were at stake and we had to choose between upholding or abandoning them" (CJ 121/262). For Kant, the significance of the sublime is that it makes us aware of our moral vocation as rational beings, and it is the manner in which Kant's interpretation of the sublime is integrated with his moral philosophy that distinguishes it from previous discussions. Kant quite

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explicitly distinguishes the feeling of the sublime from the "mental attunement" of submission, prostration, and self-abasement that is characteristic of the kind of religion of which he, and the Enlightenment generally, disapproves. The latter attitude is not conducive to the admiration of divine greatness, "which requires that we be attuned to quiet contemplation and that our judgment be completely free" (CJ 122/263). For Kant, it is this difference of mental attunement that distinguishes true religion from superstition. It is arguably the case that the absence of personal dignity implicit in the dust-and-ashes sort of "creature-feeling" identified by Otto as a characteristic feature of religious consciousness is incompatible with the mental attunement which, according to Kant, is appropriate to the contemplation of divine greatness. In attempting to isolate the numinous as a non-moral category of religious value, Otto is faced with the problem of having to reconcile religion and morality without sacrificing either the qualitative distinctiveness of the former or the concept of autonomy upon which the latter is founded. In his attempt to achieve this reconciliation, Otto describes a process of development in the history of religion in which those aspects of the numinous that are incompatible with moral autonomy are gradually rejected. Religion begins with itself and does not first evolve out of something else that is not religion (DH 160). The first primitive recognition of the uncanny, in which the numinous emerges as a distinct category of value, is the point from which the entire subsequent history of religion develops (DH 16). This, as we have seen, is the thesis that Otto develops in response to the evolutionary theories of Wundt and other "naturalistic psychologists." At the same time, Otto argues, the content of the numinous only unfolds gradually, as a result of a long chain of stimuli. The first, primitive expressions of daemonic dread, viewed in isolation, provide only a distorted image of the numinous, which at first appears rather to be the "opposite of religion than religion itself' (DH 160). However, these early manifestations of the numinous can only be properly understood when viewed in light of the subsequent development of numinous experience. In its earliest stages, in the experience of daemonic dread, the numinous feeling is closest to natural fear. Later, the terrifying aspect of the numinous subsides, and fear gives way to worship and adoration. To that extent it is possible to speak of a process of sublimation of the numinous in the history of religion. The numinous comes increasingly to resemble the sublime insofar as it tends increasingly to instill admiration and awe rather than tenor and dread. "As the element of dreadfulness (das Fürchterliche) is gradually overcome, the association and schematization with the sublime remains and maintains itself legitimately unto the highest forms of religious feeling: an indication that there is a hidden relationship and bond {Zusammengehörigkeit) between the numinous and the sublime that is more than just a coincidental similarity" (DH 82). Otto uses the term "schematization" to

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refer to an association between certain feelings and ideas that is not empirical, but is determined by an a priori principle which binds them together (Prinzipien innerer wesensmässiger Zusammengehörigkeit-, DH 61). Such a relationship of schematization, he maintains, exists between the rational and irrational moments in "the complex idea of the holy," as well as between the numinous and the sublime (DH 61). To the degree that Otto provides evidence of this a priori relationship, however, that evidence is empirical (i.e. historical). "Genuine schematization distinguishes itself from merely accidental association insofar as is does not fall apart again and is not rejected in the progressive development of the religious feeling of truth, but is recognized with increasing definiteness and clarity" (DH 61). Otto recognizes a process of sublimation in the history of religion whereby the primitive, dreadful, horrifying moments of the numinous are gradually recognized as being incompatible with religious truth and are rejected to the degree that the ethical dimension of religion comes increasingly to the fore. At the most primitive stages, the trememdum appears as a blind, unpredictable force, like an electrical charge that attaches to certain objects and people. Later, with the emergence of ethical monotheism, the tremendum is schematized by the concept of divine justice and the "wrath of God" acquires a moral connotation. Similarly, whereas the fascinans, in its primitive form, is encountered in the form of orgiastic practices and exalted states of religious mania, it is later schematized by the concepts of divine love and mercy. In addition to the schematization of rational and irrational aspects of the holy, however, Otto also identifies a process of sublimation within the numinous itself, apart from its rational schematization. 'Daemonic dread,' itself progressing through various stages, raises up to the stage of 'fear of the gods' and the fear of God. Daimonion develops into theion. Dread develops into worship. Dispersed and confused palpitations of feeling develop into religio. Horror develops into holy reverence (Erschauern; DH 134-35).

IV. The Religious A Priori and the History of Religion In the opening chapters of Das Heilige, Otto develops a description of the numinous object by means of an analysis of the religious states of mind in which that object is given. For many commentators, Otto's argument has appeared to be that religious feeling contains a noetic or cognitive aspect which is capable of yielding knowledge of a religious object that exists independently of the experiencing subject: and this argument has been defended and, more often, criticized in various ways. In the later chapters of Das Heilige, however, it becomes apparent that Otto's epistemological thesis is much more complex than appears at first sight. The feeling of the numi-

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nous (Otto now uses "feeling" in the singular form) is not produced by an object outside of the self. It arises in response to stimulation from the objects of sense perception and empirical experience. "However, it does not arise out of them (aus ihnen), but only through them (durch sie)" (DH 138). Schleiermacher had made a similar claim in the first edition of the Speeches: . . . that an activity is brought forth in you, that the internally generated activity of your spirit is set in motion, surely you will not ascribe this to the influence of external objects? You will, of course, admit that this lies far beyond the power of even the strongest feelings and must have a completely different source in you (OR 109).

In Otto's theory, the ultimate source of the numinous feeling is independent of the specific occasions that may call it forth. These occasions act as stimuli (Reize) of a hidden aptitude (Anlage) of the human spirit, which is "awakened" by them. The numinous feeling originates in the deepest cognitive ground (Erkenntis-grund) of the soul. It involves a kind of dormant knowledge, hidden in the depths of the rational spirit, and incapable of being brought to clear, conceptual expression. The holy, for Otto, is a "complex category," consisting of rational ideas of the divine, like absoluteness, necessity, perfection, on the one hand, and the irrational moments of the numinous, on the other. Otto insists that both the rational and the irrational aspects of the holy are a priori. "[T]he moments of the numinous and the feelings that are called forth in response to them (die ihnen antwortenden Gefühle) are, just like the rational ones [i.e. the rational ideas], absolutely pure ideas and feelings" (DH 137). Otto claims that the criteria for aprioricity identified by Kant in his discussion of the moral feeling of respect (Achtung) are equally applicable to the ideas and feelings of the non-rational aspect of the category of the holy (although he does not support this claim with an argument). Otto's reference to the moments of the numinous and the feelings aroused by them as "ideas" must be understood in light of the Kantian distinction between rational ideas and aesthetic ideas discussed briefly in Chapter Two. The former are concepts that are incapable of corresponding to any intuition. The latter are "inner intuitions to which no concept can be completely adequate" (CJ 182-83/314), but which nonetheless strive to give sensual expression to ideas of reason. Otto claims that the historical origin and development of religion can only be understood on the basis of such an a priori religious aptitude. To the extent that he may be said to produce arguments for the existence of such an aptitude, however, it is generally through an appeal to history, and not by means of any transcendental or anthropological (in the Friesian sense) procedure. So, for example, Otto is aware of historical instances in which the forcefulness of the numinous impression is disproportionate to the cause (Veranlassung) that precipitates it (DH 152), and he recognizes in such

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instances evidence of a kind of "anamnesis" or obscure awareness of the eternal, which may be triggered by relatively minor occurrences. He is also able to speak of false applications of the category of the holy, which result from a "confusion of the category of the holy with something only outwardly resembling it, but which was not a genuine 'anamnesis,' a genuine recognition (Wiedererkenntnis) of the holy itself in its appearance" (DH 172). It is in relation to this possibility that Otto's mysterious "law of the association of feelings" (DH 57) is to be understood. In fact, this law is intended to explain how it is possible for such mistaken applications of the category of the holy to occur. The numinous feeling is qualitatively distinct from other kinds of feeling, and actually originates in the "ground of the soul" (Seelengrund). Nevertheless, it contains moments that bear an affinity to certain non-religious feelings, and is capable of being aroused by them or in place of them: "I can respond to an impression with the feeling X, to which the feeling Y more properly corresponds" (DH 58). In other words, something that resembles an appearance of the holy may succeed in calling forth the numinous feeling, even though the category of the holy has been falsely applied (DH 151, 172). How, one might ask, do false applications of the category of the holy come to be recognized and distinguished from genuine ones? The answer to that question is found in Otto's discussion of the faculty of divination. In the Speeches, Schleiermacher conceives of miracles as "signs" (Zeichen) indicating "the immediate relation of an appearance (Erscheinung) to the infinite or universe" (OR 133). In Das Heilige, Otto refers to the appearances (Erscheinungen) of the holy as "signs" (Zeichen). "Since the time of the most primitive religion onward, everything that was capable of stimulating the feeling of the holy in man has been regarded as a sign" (DH 172). The faculty of divination, which Otto claims was discovered by Schleiermacher, Fries and DeWette (DH 175), is the capacity to recognize the holy in its appearances. For Otto, however, it is also the capacity to distinguish between more and less adequate or complete manifestations of the holy. As the faculty of divination is developed in the course of the history of religion, false applications of the category of the holy gradually come to be identified and rejected. The sensus numinis undergoes a process of education similar to the education of taste, or the sensus communis, described by Kant in the Third Critique. As a result of this gradual refinement, "outer revelation" (i.e. the "signs" in which the holy is recognized) is brought into increasing conformity with "inner revelation" (or, in profane terms, the religious a priori). The religious a priori thus functions as a standard of judgment within the history of religion, even though the rule governing the application of the standard is incapable of being formulated conceptually, and is given only in feeling (DH 196). The standard is discovered, not by means of an a priori deduction, but rather through an investigation of the history of the

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variegated forms of human religious experience and the more or less complete apprehension of the holy that is disclosed in them. What distinguishes Otto's theory of the religious a priori in Das Heilige from the theory presented in the Kant-Fries book is that the attempt to identify an a priori faculty of religious feeling has now been complimented by an analysis of the different moments of the numinous and their various gradations and fusions, as these are made manifest in the course of the history of religion. Otto maintains his earlier assertion that the standard for making normative distinctions within the history of religion must itself be independent of history (i.e. a priori). At the same time, this a priori standard, if it is to be religious, cannot be arbitrarily imposed through the application of an abstract rational criterion that bears no relation to concrete, historical religious phenomena. Rather, the standard of value must be found within religion itself. "Only that which is its actual innermost [essence] (ihr eigenstes Innerstes), the idea of the holy itself, and how perfectly a given, individual religion does justice to this or not, can provide the standard here" (DH 200). Knowledge of the "content" of the idea of the holy, according to this line of reasoning, can only be obtained on the basis of an investigation of the concrete forms in which it gradually struggles toward expression in the course of history. Thus, although the idea of the holy is itself independent of experience (a priori), our knowledge of it is not. It is in this context that Otto quotes Kant's famous words from the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason at the outset of his own discussion of "The Holy as an A Priori Category:" "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience (Erfahrung). . . . But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience" (DH 137; CPR Β 1). In other words, Otto claims that, although we only become familiar with the content of the idea of the wholly by means of an "empirical" investigation of the history of religions, the knowledge that is thereby acquired is nevertheless a priori. At the outset of the historical development of religion, the numinous feeling is awakened by objects of sense perception which function as stimuli that call forth (veranlassen) a qualitatively distinct class of religious judgments. At more primitive levels of religious development, the numinous feeling is awakened by natural objects. Later on, these come to be recognized as false applications of the category of the holy. A turning point occurs with the emergence of representations ('Vorstellungen) of daemons, and later, gods, in connection with whom the locus of the numinous is transferred into another world, in which these numinous entities are mythologically depicted as residing. Furthermore, the religious a priori is not only aroused in response to external stimuli. It is itself an "independent source of the formation of representations and feelings" (DH 139) - a kind of mythological imagination, constantly generating new sensual images in which the various moments

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of the numinous emerge, and the idea of the holy struggles toward expression, even though it is incapable of corresponding completely to any particular sensual intuition. Gradually, these mythico-religious expressions come to be defined and interpreted in increasingly abstract philosophical categories. Underlying this historical development, Otto claims, is a religious drive that, "in undirected, groping emotion, in the fantastic shaping of representations, in a continually forward-driving generation of ideas, seeks to become clear about itself, and becomes clear, through the unfolding of the obscure ideal foundation from which it originated" (durch Auswicklung der dunklen Ideen-grundlage selber aus dem er auch selber entsprang; DH 141). The history of religion, for Otto, exhibits an essential unity because it involves the progressive unfolding of an underlying idea of reason (i.e. the idea of the divine). It is this "obscure ideal foundation" which guarantees the unity of the numinous, the various moments of which must be regarded as moments of a single whole. This is also why the "phenomenological" investigation of the holy and the theory of the religious a priori are inextricably interwoven in Otto's thought. The unity of the holy must be exhibited, so to speak, both from within and from without. In the First Speech, Schleiermacher argued that "Every expression, every product of the human spirit can be viewed and apprehended from a dual standpoint" (OR 88). If religion is regarded "from its center according to its essence," it must be recognized as one of the necessary drives (Triebe) or activities of human nature. If it is regarded from without, according to the various individual forms that it assumes, it must appear instead as "a product of time and history" (OR 88). When Otto's argument in Das Heilige is considered as a whole, and in relation to the previous development of his thinking, it becomes clear that Otto's understanding of religion is determined by this "dual standpoint" from beginning to end. "Thus, to be sure, religion is thoroughly a product of history, but only insofar as history, on the one hand, develops the aptitude (Anlage) for the cognition (Erkenntnis) of the holy, and, on the other hand, is itself the manifestation (Erscheinung) of the holy in [it's various] parts" (DH 204). In my discussion of the Speeches in Chapter One, I identified an embryonic theory of the communicability of religious experience underlying Schleiermacher's argument, and attempted to indicate its basic structure. In the final chapters of Das Heilige, this structure reappears, and Otto's discussion of the numinous, ideograms and divination find their place within it. Religion is the capacity to recognize the holy. The holy is most clearly recognizable in the history of religion. However, it is most completely recognizable at certain points within that history, and, for Otto, it becomes supremely recognizable at one point in particular. Toward the end of Das Heilige, in the chapter entitled, "Divination in Primitive Christianity," Otto

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refers again to the Speeches, arguing that Schleiermacher did not pay sufficient attention in them to the "most worthy" object of divination, namely, "the history of religion itself, and above all the biblical [religion] and its highest object, Christ himself' (DH 183). In the Fifth Speech, Otto observes, Schleiermacher discusses Christ as the supreme divinatory subject, but not as the unsurpassed object of divinatory awareness. The situation is not improved in the Glaubenslehre, where Schleiermacher emphasizes Christ's role in receiving the community of believers into his own God-consciousness. Otto argues that this way of putting the matter neglects the fundamental significance of Christ as the one in whom the power and holiness of the reign of God is revealed. "For the Christian, the question is important whether, in relation to the person and life of Christ, a divination, an immediate and direct apprehension (Auffassen) of the holy in its appearance, whether 'intuition and feeling' of the holy arises - that is, whether the holy is able to be experienced independently in him, and he is thus a real revelation of the same" (DH 183). This question cannot be answered by means of an appeal to Jesus' selfconsciousness, which itself remains inaccessible. That Jesus was in fact the object of such a spontaneous act of divination among his early followers, Otto claims, is attested to by the explosiveness with which the early Church arose and spread. "One can only fail to recognize this by attempting one-sidedly to approach the phenomenon of the origin of the Christian community solely through philological means and reconstructions, and with the slackened feelings and sensibilities of our present-day disillusioned (entnaivisierten) culture and mentality" (DH 185). The methods of historical research and biblical criticism must be complemented by a recognition of the charismatic force with which new religious communities are propelled into existence. Such communities are formed around some particular holy person and derive their vitality from the numinous impression that this person instills in his or her followers. In such numinous personalities, the holy is experienced directly, "and only from such experiences . . . do religious communities come into being" (DH 186). The most striking manifestations of the holy are to be encountered in those powerful religious individuals who become the founders of new religions and religious reformations. Here, as elsewhere, the impression of holiness results from the combination of a stimulus from without, and a response that is called forth from within. Here, to gain an impression of someone means . . . to cognize or recognize in them a peculiar significance, to be seized by it, and to humble oneself before it. But that is only possible through a responsive (entgegenkommendes) moment of cognition, understanding and valuation from within, through the 'spirit within.' To 'revelation' there belongs, according to Schleiermacher, the corresponding 'Ahndung' (DH 188).

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This passage itself is "revealing" in several respects. First of all, it indicates the extent to which Schleiermacher's original discussion in the Speeches continued to influence Otto's mature theory - especially Schleiermacher's reconception of revelation, which Otto emphasized both in his remarks appended to the Speeches, and in his discussion of De Wette in the Kant-Fries book. It also indicates that Otto has read the Friesian theory of Ahndung back into the Speeches, or that the Speeches are now interpreted in light of Friesian ideas (Although Schleiermacher does occasionally employ the term Ahndung in the Speeches, it does not have the same philosophical significance for him as it does for Otto). Finally, it indicates the direction in which the ideas of Schleiermacher, Fries and De Wette have been developed by Otto in his own effort to overcome the theological impasse that was described in the second section of Chapter One. Otto is persuaded that Christ was, for the early Christian community, "the absolutely numinous being" (DH 187). His ultimate concern, however, is to show that it is still possible for Christ to be experienced as a revelation of the holy by modern Christians (DH 189). Otto's goal is to convince his readers that religion, as an independent region within the psychic (geistig) life of human beings, reaches its classical expression in Christianity, in which the rational and irrational aspects of the holy are most completely and harmoniously realized. However, that Christianity is the highest manifestation of the holy in history cannot be logically demonstrated. It can only be recognized by submitting oneself to the aesthetic-religious impression that arises from the contemplation of the religious experiences recorded and transmitted in the biblical tradition conceived as an undivided whole, from the first, primitive encounters with the numinous contained in the Pentateuch, through the ethical development initiated by the Prophets, and finally in the life and work of Christ, in whom this development reaches completion. Here, in the last pages of Das Heilige, where Otto's underlying theological motivation becomes most clearly recognizable, it is possible to detect another similarity between Otto and Schleiermacher. In the Speeches, Schleiermacher recognizes that "all communication of religion cannot be other than rhetorical" (OR 101). He invites his readers to consider religion under a different aspect than the one to which they have become accustomed, so that they will be able to recognize in it what he has. He wishes to lead them "to the pinnacles of the temple" (OR 87), to bring them into acquaintance with humanity's most noble possession. He is unable, however, to compel their assent. He can only extend an invitation, which may be either accepted or rejected. If, after having presented his case, Schleiermacher's audience is still able to despise "this bent of the mind toward the eternal . . . then I shall believe that your disdain for religion is in conformity with your nature and shall have nothing further to say to you" (OR 92). At the end of Das Heilige,

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Otto makes a similar appeal. Whoever gazes contemplatively and without prejudice upon the figure of Christ, this unwavering personality, grounded in God, this fortitude (Unbeirrbarkeit), this mysteriously profound certainty of conviction and action, this spiritual force, this struggle, this faithfulness and devotion, this suffering, and finally this victorious death, [whoever sees this] must judge: that is god-like (gottgemäss), that is the holy. If there is a God, and if he wanted to reveal himself, that is exactly how he would do it ( D H 197).

But Otto also realizes that this "must" is not, and cannot be, the "must" of a logical determination or a categorical imperative. It remains, in fact, a rhetorical imperative - one that does not use arguments to persuade, but appeals instead to a pure "feeling of truth" that has to be experienced directly by those to whom the invitation has been extended. At this point it will be helpful to recall the theological context that was described at the beginning of this study, within which I attempted to situate the publication of Otto's centennial edition of the Speeches in 1899. The renewal of interest in the philosophy of religion and in Schleiermacher among German Protestant theologians at this time was motivated by an increased awareness of the historical complexity of the origin and development of Christianity and of the history of religions generally. These theologians were persuaded that theology could only proceed on the basis of a general investigation of religion capable of securing the autonomy of religious experience against naturalistic theories, and of providing a means for establishing the superiority (Überlegenheit) of Christianity without appealing to a supernatural intervention into the course of historical events. On the basis of the discussion presented in the first four chapters of this study, it is possible to identify a consistent attempt on Otto's part to respond to these concerns by developing ideas contained in the first edition of the Speeches. The theory of divination that is presented in Das Heilige, which has its roots in Schleiermacher's discussion of "feeling and intuition of the universe," is intended to show that Christ is the supreme revelation of the holy in history. In the figure of Christ, Otto argues, the various rational and irrational moments in the idea of the divine, which are exhibited individually to different degrees throughout the history of religion, find their most complete and harmonious expression. The standard with reference to which this completeness is determined is a complex a priori idea, the knowledge of which is obtained by means of an posteriori investigation of the history of religious experience. Because it is a priori, this idea of reason is supposed to serve as an archimedian point from which to overcome the theologically debilitating effects of historical relativism. By virtue of the fact that it is not arrived at as the result of a logical deduction, but rather as the outcome of a

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broadly conceived historical investigation of religious experience, it is meant to overcome the Enlightenment antipathy to "positive religion," which had resulted in a rationalistic and religiously ineffectual concept of divinity. In addition to providing a standard of value with which to make normative distinctions within the history of religion, Otto's theory is also intended to demonstrate that the religious significance of Christ's person and work is the same today as it was for the original Christian community. Despite the complexity and heterogeneity of the historical development of Christianity and Christian doctrine, Otto claims, it is nevertheless possible for the intuitive observer to recognize an underlying experiential unity which guarantees the availability to modern Christians of the same experiences of contrition, devotion and numinous exaltation elicited among Christians of all ages by their recognition of the supreme manifestation of the holy in Christ. It is this unchanging experiential unity, and the universality of the human capacity for its recognition through the faculty of divination, that Otto hopes will make the truth and validity of Christianity immune to "the accidental fluctuations of exegetical results and the torment (Qual) of historical justifications" (DH 200-01).

Chapter Five Das Heilige and German "Irrationalism" after the First World War I. Otto's Enigmatic Relation to the "Mood of the Times" Otto's famous analysis of the holy exercised a significant influence upon subsequent academic discussions of religion. In order to facilitate the assessment of Otto's legacy to religious studies, in the preceding chapters I have sought to illuminate his argument by relating it to the concerns that shaped his thinking during the years prior to the publication of Das Heilige. As the preceding argument has clearly shown, however, Das Heilige is not only a book about religion. It is also a religious book - one that succeeded in capturing the imaginations of twentieth-century readers as few others have done. For that reason it occupies a unique place in the religious history of modernity. While familiarity with the theological concerns and philosophical presuppositions underlying Das Heilige is essential for understanding Otto's theory of religious experience and the problems he intended for it to address, for reasons that will be described shortly, even after the exegetical task of interpreting Otto's ideas has been completed, a number of important questions remain to be answered. Understanding the manner in which Das Heilige brought to fruition the plan for a theological science of religion developed in his earlier writings does not take us very far in attempting to understand the tremendous impact and popular appeal of Otto's discussion of the numinous. While the preceding four chapters have focussed primarily on the internal development of Otto's views, in the next three chapters, the focus shifts toward Otto's relationship to broader cultural trends that are important for understanding both the popularity of Das Heilige and the subsequent development of Otto's thought, including certain later revisions of Das Heilige itself. It may be difficult for readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century to appreciate the amount of attention that Das Heilige received during the years following the First World War, both in Germany and abroad. In a review of the eighth edition of Das Heilige (1923), written in 1924, Adolf von Harnack wrote: "Seldom is a theological work in such accordance with

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the mood of the times and seldom so completely absorbed (eingesogen) as this one. That this is not only a propitious sign, no one knows better than the author."1 Otto's book was immensely popular from the moment of its first appearance, and continued to attract widespread attention among the general reading public, as well as within academic and non-academic intellectual circles, for several decades. Almost overnight, Otto was propelled into international notoriety, and students began to arrive from around the world to study with him in Marburg (even as his reputation among German students waned in the wake of new theological developments). By 1926, the fifteenth edition of Das Heilige had appeared, and by 1929 the twenty-second. One of the most outspoken of Otto's early critics, Friedrich Feigel, writing at the end of the 1920's, observed that Otto's book had become "almost a fashion" in Germany, and was "for this time-frame the most successful scholarly work in the field of theology and philosophy of religion."2 The simple fact of the tremendous impact of Otto's book, Feigel went on to note, is "astonishing enough for the cultural historian," and calls for some explanation. Feigel, who felt that Das Heilige had received far more attention than its scholarly merit warranted, was quick to offer one. "War," he suggested, "is the manifestation of the ««holy. With the necessity of - one would like to say a reaction determined by natural law - with the intensity and passion of the defeat, which received its vigor from the horror vacui, the emaciated soul of the German people turned toward the 'holy.'" 3 For Feigel, the tremendous success of Otto's book was attributable to the fact that it had provided a source of consolation to the German people, whose psychological, spiritual and financial resources had been exhausted by the War and the ensuing economic crisis. This exhaustion had made them susceptible to the evocative, quasi-scientific twilight of Otto's prose, and kept them from recognizing the lack of depth beneath the shimmering surface of Das Heilige - and this not only among the philosophically and theologically untrained, but within the scholarly community as well. The War was widely regarded as a condemnation of modern European culture, which had given rise to an unprecedented "historical despair" (Verzweiflung an der Geschichte).4 The de-familiarized world of ecstatic religious transport portrayed by Otto suggested a means of escape from this overwhelming catastrophe, and Otto's invitation to "living religion" seemed a comforting alternative to the inexorable reality of the historical moment. For Feigel, Das Heilige was only one

1

3 4

Adolf von Harnack, Review of Das Heilige, 8th ed., in Deutsche Literaturzeitung column 993. Friedrich Feigel, "Das Heilige:" Kritische Abhandlung über Rudolf Otto's namiges Buch (Haarlem: Bohn, 1929), pp. 5, 1. Ibid. Ibid., p. 4.

(1924), gleich-

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manifestation of a more general trend toward irrationalism during this period, and his criticism of Otto was intended to draw attention to the superficiality of Otto's views. "It is always dangerous to submit oneself to the magic of clever intuitions. Happy is he, who, like Faust, recognizes in time: 'What a spectacle! But, ah, only a spectacle!'" 5 Over the years, an increasing number of scholars in religious studies have come to share Feigel's estimation of Otto, and some, like Feigel, have taken it upon themselves to dispel the allure exercised by his discussion of the numinous upon unsuspecting readers. Relatively little work has been done, however, to investigate Otto's discussion of the holy in relation to other cultural developments of this period. Such an investigation might help both to make sense of the tremendous popularity of Das Heilige, and to illuminate Otto's relationship to the "mood of the times" (to use Harnack's expression). At the outset it may be observed that Feigel's account of the success of Das Heilige fails to make a number of important distinctions, and it leaves several complicating circumstances unexplored. Most importantly, it is unable to account for the fact that the popularity of Otto's book was not limited to Germany during the years immediately following the War. Otto's book remained popular, not only in Germany, but throughout Europe, and especially in England and the United States (not to mention Japan and India), for many years, and continues to be purchased in significant numbers today. Furthermore, as I shall argue in this and the following chapter, the identification of Otto as a typical representative of German irrationalism during the Weimar period turns out to be misleading. While it is true that Otto's discussion of "the irrational in the idea of the divine" bears a recognizable affinity to other discussions of the irrational among his contemporaries, Otto sought explicitly to distance himself from those discussions. Although Otto's repudiation of irrationalism need not be taken at face value, the attempt to identify him too closely with his contemporaries nevertheless involves a significant misrepresentation of his position. Indicative of the complexity and ambiguity of Otto's relationship to the post-War intellectual milieu is the trepidation with which Harnack regarded the success of Das Heilige, and which, as Harnack's remarks indicate, Otto apparently shared. Harnack observed that no one recognized more clearly than Otto that the unsurpassed popularity of Das Heilige was "not just a propitious sign," suggesting that Otto himself may have been somewhat disconcerted by it. The tone of Harnack's remark is mildly ominous, and, although he does not elaborate upon the reason for his uneasiness, it is not difficult to identify the cause of his concern. The years following the War bore witness to a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the liberal theological tradition of which Harnack himself was perhaps the foremost representative, 5

Ibid., p. 7.

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and, more generally, the nineteenth-century bourgeois culture with which that tradition was identified. 6 One of the puzzling aspects of the success of Das Heilige is that, in many respects, Otto stood squarely within the same theological and cultural tradition represented by Harnack. The untimely popularity of Otto's book must be understood in spite of this fact. Otto's book appeared at a turning point in twentieth-century intellectual history - a period characterized by an acute sense of crisis accompanied by a decided attempt to break with the past in theology, philosophy, literature, architecture, music and the plastic arts. And yet, as the preceding chapters have shown, Das Heilige was not conceived as a direct response to the War, as, for example, Barth's commentary on Romans was. Rather, as Otto himself indirectly acknowledges, Das Heilige was the culmination of a theological program that had begun to take shape almost twenty years earlier. 7 To that extent, the success of Das Heilige was coincidental in a sense in which Barth's Römerbrief was not. In light of Otto's previous works, on the one hand, and in relation to the tumultuous cultural developments of this period, on the other, it is not immediately apparent why Otto's book should have attracted so much attention. On the contrary, Otto's theological orientation and his philosophical views, as set forth in his earlier writings, had become rather unfashionable in the post-war intellectual milieu. 8 Although Das Heilige represents both a rejection of the ethical interpretation of Christianity propounded by the Ritschlians, as well as an attempt to overcome the theological paralysis induced by historicism, Otto's book was by no means intended to challenge the fundamental principles of liberal theology per se. In fact, in the course of the 1920's and 30 's, Otto was frequently criticized for his adherence to those principles. This criticism was due in no small part to the presence in Marburg at this time of Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Heidegger, each of whom protested against what he regarded as a petrified cultural idealism that could no longer address either the crisis of faith or the radical questioning and demand for authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) that had begun to define a new era of theological and philosophical discourse. Several eyewitness reports from these years

6

For an illustration of these developments, see Friedrich Gogarten, Illusionen:

Eine

Auseinandersetzung mit dem Kulturidealismus (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926). Cf. also Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, "Die 'antihistorische Revolution' in der protestantischen Theologie der zwanziger Jahre," Wissenschaftliche Theologie und kirchliche Lehre: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Wolfhart Pannenberg, ed. by Jan Röhls and Gunther Wenz (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), pp. 377-405. Otto, Aufsätze zur Ethik, p. 227. Alles has remarked that, "compared with the vast changes in religious epistemology that others were making, Otto's deviations merely seemed to be epicycles designed to save an archaic theory." Alles, Introduction to Otto's Autobiographical and Social Essays, pp. 67.

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indicate that Otto's reserved manner did not stand up well in the face of these new developments. Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was a student and later a Privatdozent in Marburg at this time, recalls that " . . . one went first in the morning to Rudolf Otto, in order to receive an hour later, in the sharply gripping exegesis that Bultmann taught, the weapons against the fortified dogmatics just heard."9 Karl Löwith, also in Marburg at this time, wrote that Otto "bore his own anachronism (Unzeitgemässheit) with proud dignity."10 The following remarks, contained in a manuscript left behind by Otto, confirm Löwith's observation, and illustrate Otto's lack of sympathy for the new theological trends. "Christ did not come to 'solve existential problems (Existenzprobleme)' or to save skeptics from their doubts. . . . Whoever wants to get rid of woúd-ángste would do better to consult his physician."11 On the same page, Otto refers to Kierkegaard, the champion of dialectical theologians and existentialists alike, as a "hysteric." Ernst Benz reports that Otto's ideas were ridiculed by students under the sway of a "youthful, simplified Barthianism," Bultmann's theology and Existentialism. The Religionskundliche Sammlung, founded by Otto in 1927 as a museum and institute for the study of world religions, was referred to scornfully as a "temple of idols" {Götzentempel)}2 Obviously, a good number of the theology students at Marburg did not share the same sense of enthusiasm with which Otto's views had been received in other quarters. The disparity between this reaction and the one described by Harnack is striking, and raises the following question: How could Otto's ideas have produced such diametrically opposed responses, both of which seem to have been in some way characteristic of the times? A similarly enigmatic situation emerges when Das Heilige is considered in relation to philosophical developments of the post-War years. The reaction against theological liberalism after the First World War was paralleled by a no less radical disruption of the philosophical status quo that had prevailed in the German universities for several preceding decades. The collapse of Hegelianism in the middle of the nineteenth century had given way to a markedly anti-metaphysical period in which positivism and materialism arose as philosophical corollaries of the triumph of the natural sciences. With the rise of Neo-Kantianism beginning in the 1870's a sober strain of idealism gradually came to predominate within German academic philosophy, taking 9 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre: Eine Rückschau (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1977), pp. 36-37. Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1989), p. 65. These remarks are contained in the manuscript, "Sittengesetz und Gotteswille" ( O A 2282), hereafter "SG," pp. 58-59. Benz, "Rudolf Otto als Theologe und Persönlichkeit," in Benz, ed., Rudolf Otto's Bedeutung für die Religionswissenschaft und die Theologie heute, p. 33.

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its point of departure from the empirical sciences. The Neo-Kantians attempted to develop a theory of knowledge that would provide a transcendental foundation for the positive sciences and establish the boundaries of their respective domains. In an age of scientific progress, philosophy had been able to justify itself by assuming the role of "conscience of the sciences," defining the nature and limits of scientific knowledge, and ensuring that these limits not be overstepped. The attempts of both Otto and Troeltsch to develop an independent normative science of religion must be understood within this context. The history and psychology of religion, they argued, constitute a distinct field of empirical data, the integrity and irreducibility of which can be attributed to a unique principle within the structure of human reason (i.e. the religious a priori). The influence of Neo-Kantianism in its different forms diminished rapidly after the War. The primary forces which began increasingly thereafter to define the new philosophical situation included several popular varieties of life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), the phenomenological movement, which began to attract increasing popular attention, and existentialism (Existenzphilosophie) as represented by Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. The fact that Otto was not directly associated with any of these movements makes the success of Das Heilige that much more remarkable. As mentioned in Chapter Two, the epistemological framework underlying Otto's argument in Das Heilige, which is spelled out in his earlier work, Kantisch-Fries'sche Religionsphilosophie, reflects his participation in the Neo-Friesian movement led by his Göttingen colleague, Leonard Nelson. Strictly speaking, Neo-Friesianism and Neo-Kantianism must be distinguished. In fact, Nelson's advocacy of Friesian epistemology involved him in a rather unfriendly polemical exchange with several prominent NeoKantians.13 Nevertheless, while the Neo-Friesians criticized the Neo-Kantian attempt to develop a theory of knowledge, they themselves reproduced the structure and much of the vocabulary of Kant's philosophy. In short, their conception of the aim of philosophy was essentially the same as that held by the Neo-Kantians. The goal of philosophy is to develop a critique of reason intended to discover the system of all a priori principles of knowledge. The Friesians differed mainly with regard to the manner in which this aim was to be achieved (i.e. Fries' anthropological method rather than the Kantian transcendental deduction). Several recent studies of Otto's thought have emphasized the importance of his Kantian-Friesian philosophical background for understanding the argument developed in Das Heilige. These studies have helped to elucidate many of the hidden epistemological presuppositions underlying Otto's 13

Cf. Leonard Nelson, Über das sogenannte Erkenntnisproblem & Ruprecht, 1908).

(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck

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discussion of the holy. As the preceding analysis of Das Heilige has confirmed, the claims that Otto makes for the role of feeling (Gefühl) in religious experience, the meaning of the term "irrational" in his thinking, and his theory of ideograms and divination are only intelligible in light of that background. What Otto's Friesian background is unable to account for, however, is the overwhelming impact of Das Heilige among Otto's contemporaries. Whatever the reason(s) for the success of Otto's book may have been, it was certainly not his Friesian philosophical views. The sources of Otto's attunement with "the mood of the times" must be sought elsewhere.

II. The Numinous, Erlebnis and

Lebensphilosophie

During the years after the first publication of Das Heilige in 1917, Otto continued to make revisions as each new edition of the book appeared. In the final German version, Chapter Ten is entitled, "Was heisst irrational?" ("What does Irrational Mean?"). In the standard English translation by John Harvey, these pages do not appear as a separate chapter, but are included instead at the end of the chapter entitled, "The Holy as a Category of Value" (Chapter Eight). Interestingly, the chapter, "Was heisst irrational?," was not included in the original German version of the book, nor in any of the editions up to and including the eighth edition, published in 1922. The chapter does appear in the fifteenth edition, published in 1926. The fact that Otto only added this chapter several years after the original publication of Das Heilige is of considerable significance for gaining a sense of the nature of Otto's position in relation to contemporary trends in German thought during the years following the First World War. The contents of this chapter indicate that Otto felt it was necessary to clarify his use of the term "irrational" in the title of his book, and in his investigation of the holy. Such a clarification had apparently become necessary in order to prevent Otto's use of the term from being confused with other contemporary usages. "Today there is almost a sport played with this word," Otto writes. "One searches for 'the irrational' in the most various regions" (DH 75). Otto goes on to indicate several different ways in which the term "irrational" might be understood. It could be taken to refer to the individual fact, in contrast to the laws under which facts are ordered by concepts in the natural sciences (as, for example in Wilhelm Windelband's distinction between ideographic and nomothetic sciences). Or it might be used to characterize the empirical in contrast to the rational, the a posteriori in contrast to the a priori, or the psychological in contrast to the transcendental distinctions which played an important role in Neo-Kantian epistemologies. Or the term "irrational" may be taken to refer to "urge (Drang), instinct, and the dark powers of the unconscious," in contrast to insight, reflection and

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rationally determined action, as, for example, in certain popular forms of philosophy (discussed later in this chapter), as well as in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Finally, Otto observes, the irrational may be taken in the most general sense to signify "the restless urge (Drang) and the general fermentation of the times, the groping after the unheard and the unseen in poetry and the plastic arts" (DH 75). Here, Otto appears to be referring to the Expressionist movement in literature, painting and sculpture, which was characterized by its revolutionary pathos, and strove to "expand the present frontiers of the capacity for artistic expression." 14 Elsewhere, Otto refers disapprovingly to the "expressionistic type of spirit," which he regards as being symptomatic of the age, and which he also recognizes in certain popular forms of theological protest (G 10). "The irrational can be all this and still more, and is, as modern "Irrationalism," either praised or condemned accordingly" (DH 75). In the new chapter added to Das Heilige, Otto seeks to distinguish his own use of the term "irrational" from each of these. He emphasizes that his use of the term is meant to characterize the apprehension through feeling of certain definite qualities that lend to particular people, places and events their peculiar religious significance. Otto's descriptions of the various moments of the numinous had been intended to isolate these qualities. The moments of the numinous are to be understood as being irrational in the same way as "the 'beauty' of a composition, which also eludes all rational analysis and concept-formation" (DH 77). Otto is interested in locating and analyzing that which lends to religious experience its unique depth, and escapes the view of the investigator whose attention is directed solely to the concepts in terms of which religious beliefs are expressed. He is at pains to show that his own conception of the irrational does not accord free license "to the arbitrary and to fanatical claptrap (schwärmenden Gerede)" (DH 77),15 but calls instead for careful "ideogrammatic" description and analysis. Nevertheless, the fact that Otto found it necessary to issue this kind of clarification suggests that he recognized the danger of his own intentions being misunderstood and confused with other people's views, with which he clearly did not want to be associated. Furthermore, Otto's remarks give us some indication of which views those were. Is it possible that the popularity of Das Heilige was partly due to a case of mistaken identity? Or is it rather the case that Otto "doth protest too much" - that his attempt to distance himself from "modern 14

This quotation is taken from the first edition of Der Blaue Reiter, an influential almanac presenting the views of one of the more prominent groups of Expressionist painters, first published by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1912. Cited here from Johannes Langer, "Der Blaue Reiter," Der Deutsche Expressionismus, ed. by Hans Stefan (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), p. 200. In Harvey's translation of Das Heilige this phrase is rendered, "to all the vague and arbitrary phraseology of an emotionalist irrationalism." Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 59.

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Irrationalism" betrays an underlying affinity? In order to be able to suggest an answer to these questions, it will be helpful to look more closely at a few of the characteristic trends of this period, and to consider Otto's position in relation to them. In 1920, the Baden School Neo-Kantian, Heinrich Rickert, published a work in which he sought to develop a criticism of several popular strains of thought, which he grouped together under the heading "Lebensphilosophie" (life-philosophy). For the concept that today controls average opinions in an especially large measure, the best designation seems to us to be the expression life. It has been ever more frequently used for some time, and plays an important role not only among journalistic writers, but also among academic philosophers. "Experience" (Erlebnis) and "living" (lebendig) are favored words, and no opinion is regarded as so modern as that which takes the task of philosophy to be to provide a theory of life that is truly and vitally (lebensvoll) shaped from experiences, and that is usable for the living person.

Rickert's observation is confirmed by Gadamer, according to whom the words "Erlebnis" and "Erleben" had become "almost sacred clarion calls" in Germany during the early decades of the twentieth century. Gadamer identifies several sources of this development. "The rebellion of the Jugend Bewegung (Youth Movement) against bourgeois culture and its institutions was inspired by these ideas, the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson played its part, but also a 'spiritual movement' like that around Stefan George and, not least, the seismographical accuracy with which the philosophy of Georg Simmel reacted to these events, are all part of the same thing."17 The term Lebensphilosophie does not designate a single, unified philosophical position, much less an identifiable school of philosophical thought. It is most often used to refer to a number of (primarily German, with the notable exception of Bergson) thinkers for whom the concept "life," in one form or another, played a central role. The Lebensphilosophen did not aim to produce a philosophy of life in the sense in which one might speak of a philosophy of art or a philosophy of nature. Rather, among the various representatives of Lebensphilosophie, "life" functions as the starting point for philosophical reflection of all kinds - epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, religious and metaphysical. Ultimately, for these thinkers, life is not only a central philosophical concept, it is itself the organon of philosophical knowledge. Philosophy, thus understood, begins from the experiences (Erlebnisse) 16

Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1922), p. 4. The second edition, from which this quote is taken, is the same as the first except for minor stylistic alterations. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 63.

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in which life is immediately given, prior to reflection. In many cases, this emphasis upon the immediacy and primacy of what is "given" in experience is closely linked to a criticism of rationalistic theorizing. "Dead," "cold," "abstract" is that knowledge which subjects life to a preconceived conceptual system, instead of attempting to grasp the dynamism of its various expressions directly. This criticism of philosophical rationalism, as well as the ideological tendencies that it exhibited, took a number of different forms in German thought during the first decades of the century. Especially after the War, Lebensphilosophie was often associated with a virulent criticism of mercantile values, technology, mechanization and calculative reason. The persuasiveness of these criticisms of modern European culture was doubtlessly augmented by the murderous efficiency with which the War had been conducted. The enduring intellectual significance of the various thinkers commonly referred to as Lebensphilosophen has proven over the years to be far from homogeneous. While the views of some of the thinkers associated with this term continue to be discussed, others have been accused of contributing to or facilitating the rise of National Socialism. 18 There is not to be found in Otto's works an explicit discussion of lifephilosophy per se, or an extended thematization of the concept of Erlebnis. Nevertheless, Otto was clearly aware of the development referred to by Rickert, and there are scattered throughout his writings occasional remarks directed toward this development generally, as well as to specific thinkers associated with it. One such place is Otto's address, entitled "The Meaning and Task of the Modern University," delivered upon the occasion of the fourhundredth anniversary of the Philipps University in Marburg. 19 In that address, Otto distinguishes three periods in the history of the modern German university since its inception during the age of German classicism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first period he calls the period of Idealism, which occupies the early decades of the nineteenth century. The second period, around of the middle of the nineteenth century, is characterized by the rejection of speculative idealism and aestheticism, and the rise of realism and empiricism. "It stands in parallel and in interaction with the simultaneous movements in the domain of external culture, with industrialization and technologization and advancing capitalism. It is reproached by its critics as the de-spritualization, bourgeoization and mechanization of the life of the spirit."20 The third period identified by Otto is characterized by the

18 Cf. Georg Lukács, Von Nietzsche zu Hitler oder Der Irrationalismus und die deutsche Politik (Frankfurt a. M: Fischer, 1966). Rudolf Otto, "Sinn und Aufgabe moderner Universität: Rede zur vierhundertjährigen Jubelfeier der Philippina zu Marburg," Marburger Akademische Reden Nr. 45 (Marburg: 20 Elwert, 1927). Ibid., p. 11

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protest against the specialization and petrification of the second period in the name of "the living, full humanity of the 'whole person.'" The present in which Otto addresses his listeners stands under the continuing influence {Nachwirkung) of this third period, which is distinguished by "the demand for immediate experience (unmittelbaren Erlebnis), for intuition and profound insight (Tiefblick)." 21 In his address, Otto does not exclusively endorse the claims of any of the three periods, arguing instead that each contains a moment of truth, and that the university has rightfully incorporated impulses from all three. Against the critics of the second period, however, Otto emphasizes two contributions of lasting importance arising from it. First, he locates in this period the emergence of the ideal of methodological precision which had become the standard of modern scholarship, and which Otto finds exemplified in a figure like the Old Testament scholar, Julius Wellhausen. Second, he affirms the realistic sensibility of the second period. It calls for a certain kind of respect or reverence for the object of research, which demands to be grasped "in the breadth and depth and fullness of its reality and autonomy," 22 and not merely to be subsumed within a preconceived theoretical system. Otto's remarks are pertinent to the present discussion insofar as they suggest that he sought to reconcile the insights offered by each of the three periods that he identifies. In particular, they indicate an inclination on his part to combine the demand for "immediate experience" and "profound insight" with the kind of broad and meticulous research that had come to distinguish nineteenth century German historical scholarship. Generally speaking, the term "Leben" has tended to assume a polemical connotation in the history of its philosophical employment, and it has often been associated with revolutionary cultural movements. 23 Nevertheless, it is possible to distinguish between a more academic form of this polemic, where the attempt is made do lend to the concept of "life" the degree of precision required to make it an effective category of philosophical analysis, and a less academic form, where the polemical connotation tends to mitigate against careful philosophical thought. The most important representative of the

22

23

Ibid., p. 12. Cf. Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie (Berlin/Göttingen/Heidelberg: Springer, 1958), p. 5. Bollnow identifies Rousseau's critique of modern European civilization as an important point in the historical development of Lebensphilosophie. Rousseau exercised a profound influence upon the Sturm und Drang movement at the end of the eighteenth century, in relation to which the critical tendency introduced by Rousseau finds its most complete philosophical expression in the thought of Jacobi. Jacobi, in turn, exercised an important influence on Fries. This line of development suggests how Otto's ideas could have come to share certain thematic affinities with the trends discussed in this chapter, while at the same time having rather different historical sources.

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former tendency is Dilthey, some of whose views were discussed in Chapter Three in an effort to elucidate Otto's conception of the psychology of religion. To be sure, Dilthey's thought does not lack a polemic dimension of its own, which is directed primarily against the methodological hegemony of the natural sciences that developed in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dilthey's ideas were also capable of generating a certain degree of popular appeal. In particular, his collection of essays, Erlebnis und Dichtung (Experience and Poetry), was widely read and played an important role in popularizing the term Erlebnis,24 Dilthey's most enduring philosophical contribution, however, consists in his attempt to establish a philosophical foundation for the autonomy of the human sciences, and it is in relation to this attempt that the concepts of Leben and Erlebnis are developed in his thought. Dilthey's groundbreaking contributions to hermeneutical theory and the epistemology of the human sciences continue to be widely discussed. Although he had already died several years before the publication of Das Heilige, his ideas were instrumental in shaping the period in which we are presently interested. Tillich, writing in 1926, observed that Dilthey's writings . . . have become historical, and to a degree that Dilthey himself could hardly have expected. Everywhere in the philosophical literature one detects their influence, so that it is not too much to say that Dilthey's work has played a decisive role in the development of the general intellectual situation since the beginning of the last century.

Variations of the terms Leben, lebendig and Erleben (which Otto usually uses rather than Erlebnis) are scattered throughout the pages of Das Heilige. Otto speaks of religion as a distinct "region of human experience" (Gebiet des menschlichen Erlebens). On several occasions he compares and contrasts religious and aesthetic Erleben in his effort to distinguish the numinous as a separate category of interpretation and valuation (DH 8). He recognizes an application of this category in those cases where the numen is experienced (erlebt) as "praesens" (i.e. something immediately present; DH 11). He claims (to the chagrin of many readers) that the distinctive tone and quality of the different moments of the numinous must be directly experienced (erlebt) in order to be recognized (DH 10). He speaks of the "Wholly Other" as something that is "alive in feeling" (lebendig im Gefühl·, DH 35), and he sometimes refers to numinous feeling itself as something that "lives" (lebt) in certain hymns, liturgical actions and symbols (DH 47, 116). He says of the moment of "the energie" (das Energische) in the numinous that it is recognizable "in the ideograms of vitality (Lebendigkeit), passion, affective essence, of will, force, movement, arousal, activity [and] urge (Drang)" (DH 24

25

Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 61. In Deutsche Literaturzeitung (1926).

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27). Ultimately, it is Erleben that lies at the basis of Otto's distinction between rationalism and "more profound religion" (tieferer Religion), which he tells us in the opening pages will be his concern throughout the book (DH 2). "It is one thing merely to believe (nur glauben) in a supersensible [reality] and another to experience it as well (auch erleben)" (DH 172). Finally, Otto's attempt to identify a distinct "faculty of divination" appears to be intended to demonstrate that this more profound kind of religion is still possible in the twentieth century. Thus, Otto begins his chapter on "Divination in Christianity Today" with the words: "More important for us than the question whether the original [Christian] community experienced and was able to experience (erlebte und erleben konnte) the holy in Christ is the question whether we are still able to as well" (DH 189). An examination of the different contexts in which Otto employs variations of the terms Erleben and lebendig indicates that these terms serve both an analytic purpose and a rhetorical one. They are applied both in the attempt to develop a descriptive psychology of religious experience, and in order to distinguish between an uninspired, rationalistic form of religion, and a form of religion based on immediate contact with the divine - at the obvious expense of the former. In order to gain a better sense of the significance of Otto's use of these terms, it will be helpful to consider briefly the manner in which they were employed by some other thinkers from the same period.

III. "The Dionysian Effect of the Numen" In Dilthey's philosophy, the concept of life is developed in conjunction with an attempt to identify the structure of historical experience underlying the Geisteswissenschaften. In the thought of Dilthey's contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche, "life" becomes one of the central terms in a fundamental critique of traditional morality and a concomitant "revaluation of values." While Nietzsche's ideas remained largely unnoticed during his own lifetime (at least until the onset of his madness in 1889), they attracted increasing attention after the turn of the century, and their influence in Germany during the period with which we are presently concerned is difficult to overestimate. Rickert, in the same book cited earlier, wrote: "Before Nietzsche's influence began, the word life probably did not have for anyone the magic that is attached to it in Germany today, and which also prevails where it remains unknown that Nietzsche is the source of this 'life-wisdom'". The following discussion of Nietzsche will be limited to the elucidation of a few themes that are important for understanding the "mood of the times" with which Das Heilige appears to have resonated so profoundly. 26

Rickert, Die Philosophie

des Lebens,

p. 20.

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The concept of life plays a number of different, though related, roles in the development of Nietzsche's thought. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche interprets the emergence of Greek drama as the victory of artistic creativity over pessimism and despair. The ideal of beauty embodied in Greek art and revered in classical German aesthetic theory is not, as Schiller had claimed, the expression of an idyllic naïveté. It is instead the result of a struggle between two antagonistic principles, represented by the contrasting gods, Dionysos and Apollo. Beauty is commensurate with the triumph of form, harmony and order over chaos. It is only attained at the expense of great suffering. The significance of the aesthetic achievement of the Greeks, Nietzsche argues, is that it enabled them to overcome the horrors and absurdity of nature and history, and to celebrate life in spite of them. It Greek tragedy, one comes to recognize "the highest art in yes-saying to life" (II, l l l l ) . 2 7 In the second Untimely Meditation, "On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life," usefulness for life becomes the standard against which the value of historical knowledge is to be judged. Nietzsche criticizes the nineteenth-century German preoccupation with the historical past, and argues that the study of the past is valuable only to the extent that it contributes to the pursuit of greatness in the present. He rejects the bourgeois ideal of progress, and argues instead that humanity is justified by its highest specimens. In his later writings, Nietzsche's project of a revaluation of values is closely linked to his claim that Christianity and the morality that it has underwritten are the expression of a profound hatred and devaluation of life. He recognizes in the Christian concept of God a declaration of enmity against "life, nature, and the will to life" (II, 1178), and he interprets Christianity as a slave rebellion in morals, motivated by envy and ressentiment masquerading under the guise of kindness and humility. Weakness becomes a virtue for those who lack the power to act, and this virtue is used to justify the vilification of all that is noble and strong. Traditional morality is itself an expression of the will to power, but it is the will to power in decline. When w e speak of values, w e speak under the inspiration, under the optic of life: life itself compels us to set values, life itself values through us, when w e set values. . . . From this it follows that this contrariness to nature (Widernatur) of morality, which conceives (fasst) God as the counter-concept and condemnation of life, is [itself] only a value-judgment [on the part] of life - which life? . . . declining, weakened, exhausted, condemned life (II, 968).

27

All Nietzsche citations are taken from Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Bänden, ed. by Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1955). Citations appear in the text, the volume number indicated by Roman numeral, followed by the page number.

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The hatred promulgated by Christianity against humanity, against animality and materiality, against the entire realm of appearance, change and becoming, is at bottom "a will to nothing, a counter-will against life, a revolt against the fundamental presuppositions of life, but it is and remains a will" (II, 900). Against the Christian values of asceticism and otherworldliness, Nietzsche identifies self-overcoming as the fundamental tendency of the will to power. "To have and to want to have more; in a word, growth - that is life itself' (III, 470). To symbolize this imminent, vibrant, indefatigable process of becoming, Nietzsche chooses Dionysos. In his later philosophy, however, Dionysos is no longer contrasted with Apollo, but with the Crucified. Whereas Christianity demands the renunciation of the fundamental impulses in which life expresses itself, the Dionysian personality is able both to affirm them, and to avoid being overcome by them, i.e. to harness their force and make it serve his own creative ends. The degree to which Nietzsche is properly regarded as an "Irrationalist" has been widely debated in the twentieth century, particularly among those interested in determining the extent to which his ideas may have contributed to the rise of National Socialism. The weight of scholarly opinion today supports the view that the interpretation of Nietzsche's ideas and their historical influence must be distinguished. Clearly, Nietzsche rejected the traditional dichotomies between intellect and sense, spirit and matter, reason and the passions, which form part of the Platonic inheritance of Christianity. In certain places he appears to represent instinct and reason as mutually antagonistic and irreconcilable: "'Rationality' against instinct. 'Rationality' at any price as dangerous, as a force undermining life!" (II, 1109). Elsewhere he seems to subject truth itself to the will to power, or to regard it as an expression of that will. "Truth is a certain kind of error, without which a certain kind of living being could not live. Ultimately it is the value for life that decides" (III, 844). Read in isolation, such passages give credence to the claim that Nietzsche was an irrationalist. But such a claim, if it is taken to mean that Nietzsche advocated life or instinct against reason, fails to do justice to the complexity of his thought. Kaufmann argues that, with his discovery of the will to power, Nietzsche overcame the dualism that characterized his earlier philosophy. Reason, in Nietzsche's mature thought, is not an independent principle opposed to instinct. Reason itself is an expression of the will to power, only it is a more sublimated form of that will. Life is that which must overcome itself (II, 371), and reason is one of the strategies that it employs in doing so. Kaufmann suggests that Nietzsche's philosophy "is 'irrationalistic' insofar as the basic drive is not reason; it is not 'irrationalistic,' however, insofar as reason is given a unique status." 28 28

Kaufmann, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 229.

Psychologist,

Antichrist,

4th ed. (Princeton:

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147

At present, we are not faced with the task of proposing an interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy. The history of the interpretation and influence of Nietzsche's ideas is itself a complex topic. 29 For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that, during the years following the War, Nietzsche's ideas inspired a number of currents of thought among philosophers, writers, artists, and the younger generation generally, which took a variety of forms and assumed a bewildering array of antithetical ideological tendencies. Uniting these various tendencies was a "new pathos," which, as Stefan Zweig observed, was heavily indebted to the rhetorical style developed by Nietzsche, and exemplified above all in the figure of Zarathustra. 30 One of the more influential of these tendencies was an anti-democratic, often anti-Semitic, polemic against rationalism, progress, and Zivilisation on behalf of intuitive experience, life and Kultur. Before going on to consider briefly the ideas of a few characteristic representatives of this trend, it will be worthwhile to examine what is at least a superficial resemblance between certain ideas developed by Otto in Das Heilige and some of the Nietzschian themes outlined above. In his discussion of the fascinans-moment of the numinous, Otto argues that, beside the overwhelming, dreadful, repellant moment of the tremendum, there exists a contrasting moment that is "captivating to the senses (das Sinnberückende), enrapturing, producing a peculiar delight, often enough rising up to frenzy and intoxicated transport, the Dionysian effect of the numen" (DH 42). It is in relation to this experience of Dionysian transport that many of the more eccentric practices in the history of religion are to be understood, including "magical self-identification with the numen" and shamanic practices intended to produce states of "'possession,' indwelling, [and] the filling of the self (Selbsterßllung) in exaltation and ecstasy" (DH 44). Such practices, Otto claims, cannot be understood as means toward some non-religious end, as in the case of magic. Rather, they exhibit a purely religious motivation insofar as the value that they seek to realize is a purely religious value. They are not utilitarian actions performed as a means to the realization of ulterior, non-religious ends. "Possession of and by the numen (Das Innehaben selber und das Ergriffensein vom numen) becomes an end-in-itself and is sought for its own sake, through the exertion of the most refined and wildest ascetic procedures. The 'vita religiosa' begins" (DH 44). For Otto, the historical appearance of such practices testifies to the arrival of religion as an independent force in the cultural life of human beings. This is the line of

29

Cf. Deesz, Gisela, Die Entwicklung des Nietzsche-Bildes in Deutschland (Würzburg: Konrad Triltsch, 1933); also the excellent study by Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Stefan Zweig, "Das neue Pathos," D a i literarische Echo 11:24 (Sept. 15, 1909), columns 1701-09. Cited here from Paul Raabe, ed., Expressionismus: Der Kampf um eine literarische Bewegung (Zürich: Arche, 1987), p. 18.

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thought underlying Otto's claim that numinous experience is the historical origin of religion. It is the origin of religion insofar as it discloses an order of religious value that is qualitatively distinct from the values that are realized in other forms of human activity and experience. While Otto clearly regards the seeking out of ecstatic transport by religious specialists as a significant turning point in the emergence of religion as an autonomous region of cultural, he does not relegate the Dionysian effect of the numen to the earliest periods in the religious history of humankind. Insofar as the fascinons constitutes an integral component of the numinous per se, it must be regarded as an enduring characteristic of a unique kind of experience that "lives in all religions as their actual innermost core (ihr eigentlich Innerstes), and apart from which they would not be religion at all" (DH 6). Otto recognizes a consistent line of development reaching from the first primitive eruption of "daemonic dread" to the most sublimated forms of mysticism. To be sure, in its "higher" forms, the numinous feeling no longer resembles its earliest manifestations. "But even here it does not disown its pedigree and familial relation" (DH 19). In fact, Otto even finds evidence of this Dionysian inheritance on the pages of the New Testament. '"What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, what has not come into any human heart' - who does not feel the exalted sound of these words of Paul and the element of Dionysian transport in them?" (DH 45). In the teaching of Jesus, the ethical impulse within biblical religion, first introduced by Moses and further developed by the Prophets, finally reaches its completion. It would be mistaken, however, to suppose that the numinous dimension is thereby eliminated from Christianity. On the contrary, Otto claims that Jesus was, for the early Christians, "the absolutely numinous being" (DH 187). But if that is the case, then the following paradoxical possibility emerges. Nietzsche ends one of his last books, Ecce Homo, with the words, "Dionysos against the Crucified," in order to emphasize the absolute irreconcilability of these two antithetical principles. And yet, in Das Heilige, Otto appears to want to bring these two principles together. What Otto describes is not Dionysos against the Crucified, but Dionysos and the Crucified as one. It is finally also clear that precisely the suffering and death of Christ must become the object of an especially powerful feeling-valuation ( G e f l i h l s b e w e r t u n g ) and intuition. . . . The cross becomes the quintessential speculum aeterni patris. But not only of the 'patrisnot only of the highest rational moment of the holy, but of the holy in general [i.e. including its irrational, numinous dimension] (DH 199).

Nietzschian resonances are also to be found in Otto's discussion of divination. The "faculty of divination," Otto tells us, is the capacity "genuinely to recognize and appreciate the manifestation of the holy" (DH 173). Otto acknowledges Schleiermacher's "feeling and intuition of the universe" as a

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precursor to his own theory of divination, and, like Schleiermacher before him, he emphasizes the role of forceful, individual religious personalities in the historical development of religion. Thus, Otto distinguishes between divination as a general, passive capacity for apprehending the religious significance of particular people, places and events from what he calls divination actu." "Only divinatory natures have this faculty of divination in actu" (DH 178). Otto doubts whether Schleiermacher himself ought to be regarded as having possessed such a divinatory nature. A better example, he suggests, is Goethe. Specifically, Otto refers the reader to Goethe's discussion of the "daemonic," contained in Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (which, incidentally, Nietzsche once referred to as the greatest German book ever written). "One sees how here the moments of the numinous which we found [i.e. in the opening Chapters of Das Heilige] all reappear: the wholly irrational, which cannot be grasped through concepts, the mysterious and the fascinons, the trememdum and the energicum" (DH 180). It is to the older Goethe, in whom Nietzsche saw his ideal of the Dionysian personality realized, that Otto too appeals as the exemplification of a divinatory nature. And in doing so, Otto appears to have some of the same characteristics in mind. The Dionysian personality, for Nietzsche, is the one who is able to subdue his passions, to master the forces at his disposal and to make them instruments of his own creative drive. In a passage quoted by Otto, Eckermann asks Goethe whether Mephistopheles ought to be regarded as a "daemonic" character. Goethe answers, "No, he is a much too negative being {Wesen). The daemonic, however, expresses itself only in a thoroughly positive, active power (Tatkraft)" (DH 180). The impression made by a "numinous personality," Otto claims, is even more perfectly captured in the following passage from Goethe's autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit: This daemonic [quality] appears most dreadfully (am furchtbarsten) when it stands out overwhelmingly in some particular person. They are not always the most excellent men, either in spirit or in talents, rarely recommending themselves by virtue of their goodness of heart (durch Herzengüte), but they exude an incredible power, and they exercise an incredible authority (Gewalt) over all creation, yea even over the elements (DH 181).

Otto himself emphasizes that the character described in these words of Goethe is not, properly speaking, "holy," but only "numinous" (i.e. lacking the moral dimension which makes the holy complete). The type of divination exemplified by the "pagan" Goethe is indeed genuine divination, but it remains at the "preliminary stage (Vorstufe) of the daemonic, not at the stage of the divine and holy" (DH 182). Otto's qualification, however, obscures a fundamental ambiguity underlying the argument of Das Heilige as a whole. The numinous, which he defines as "the holy minus its moral moment" (DH

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6) - and which would therefore appear to be "beyond good and evil" - is the innermost core of all religion, apart from which it would not be religion at all. Here, however, and in other passages as well, Otto refers to the numinous, prior to its ethical "schematization," as something preliminary to religion proper (eine Vorstufe). In attempting to isolate that which makes religion religious and distinguishes it from morality, Otto problematizes the relationship between religion and morality, and appears in several places to have accorded primacy to the amoral religious moment.31 This ambiguity did not escape several of Otto's early readers. Harnack, whose uneasiness with the success of Das Heilige has already noted, politely expressed his hope that Otto's illumination of "the primitive in religion" would help readers toward an appreciation of "the truly holy, which is only given in conjunction with the moral" 32 (and thereby also his apparent concern that it might fail to do so). Feigel was somewhat less diplomatic. "One thing is indisputable," he wrote, "the numinous is not yet even for a moment useable as a criterion for distinguishing even between God and Satan." 33 That Otto himself was aware of the affinity of certain of his own views to "the general urge and fermentation of the times" is attested to by remarks contained in his lecture notes on dogmatics (Glaubenslehre) from the 192425 academic year. "God is holy will (heiliger Wille). And God is [the] will to salvation (Wille zum Heil) in the form of the Kingdom of God" (G 135). This, Otto claims, is the fundamental meaning of the living God of the Bible, the God of Isaiah, Job, Jesus, and Luther: The overwhelming (urgewaltige), terrible-powerful, eternally active, pulsating (drängende), effective world-will; something terrible (ein ungeheures), unimaginable, inconceivable, unconceived, always springing forth, creating, driving (treibendes), [the] mysterious, primevally living. . . . The primeval will under its pneumaticnuminous aspect (Überschattung; G 136).

Otto goes on to observe that such a "voluntaristic" conception of the divinity bears a resemblance to certain "anti-Christian ideas," and he refers specifically in this connection to the views of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Having acknowledged this affinity, however, Otto immediately adds that there is an insurmountable gulf separating the idea of God described above and the 31

Otto does this, for example, when he observes that daemons precede the gods in the order of religious development, and that what is properly regarded as religious worship first emerges out of 'daemonic dread.' Cf. DH 134-35, 160. An important criticism of Otto's account of the moral and non-moral aspects of the holy is contained in Walter Baetke, "Das Phänomen des Heiligen," Die Diskussion um das Heilige, ed. by Carsten Colpe (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977), pp. 373-77. Harnack, Deutsche Literaturzeitung (1923), p. 993. Feigel, "Das Heilige: " Kritische Abhandlung, p. 133.

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views of these thinkers. The holy will of the living God of the Bible is not a will to being or a will to power. Neither is it an unconscious, physical urge, instinct or drive. It is rather "the primeval will to the highest values themselves" (G 136). And the God depicted in the Lord's Prayer, Otto claims, is one engaged in a struggle against all that is opposed to the realization of the those values. Otto's designation of God as a "will to holiness," and his identification of holiness with the highest values, are among the central themes of his later thinking, which will be examined in the next chapter. First, however, it is necessary to turn our attention briefly to a few figures whose views played an important role in shaping the intellectual climate of the period in which we are interested. We will then be in position to examine Otto's response to some of these trends, and to determine the extent to which he ought to be regarded as a typical representative of German Irrationalism. The most widely read German philosophical book during the years immediately following the War was Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (iUntergang des Abendlands), the first volume of which appeared in 1918 and quickly went through numerous editions. The success of Spengler's book reflects the profound historical pessimism of these years. Spengler, who cites Goethe and Nietzsche as his primary influences, develops a conception of history that stands in sharp contrast to the cultural optimism of the late nineteenth century. He rejects entirely the notion that world history has a goal, or that it exhibits a progressive development. Rather, history presents a repetitive cycle in which individual cultures emerge, develop, decline and die, "like flowers in the field," manifesting a sublime purposelessness. " L i f e is the first and last, the cosmic out-pouring in microcosmic form . . . . History is a matter of life and always and only of life, the races, the triumph of the will to power, and not the victory of truths, inventions or money." 34 Spengler appeals to Goethe's morphological method in his attempt to distinguish several basic cultural forms that have appeared throughout the course of history. Among these forms he includes the Chinese, the Indian, the Egyptian, the "Apollonian" (Greek), the "Magical" (Arabic), and finally, the "Faustian" (Western Europe). He regards each individual, historical culture is an organism driven into existence by instinctual forces that struggle toward expression before eventually exhausting themselves. History consists of "the drama of a multitude of powerful cultures, which blossom with primeval force from the lap of a maternal landscape to which each is strongly bound in the course of its existence; which impresses upon the matter of each . . . its own form; from which each receives its own ideas, its own passions, its

34

Oswald Spengler, Die Untergang des Abendlands, Vol. II (Munich: Beck, 1922), pp. 62930.

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own life, will, feeling, its own death."35 The last phase of the life-cycle of a culture Spengler calls "civilization." Civilization is the destiny toward which every culture is inevitably drawn. It is what remains after the process of becoming has run its course. The destiny of the modern Western world has been pre-ordained within this cosmic cycle, and one need only study the past in order to glimpse the future. "The transition from culture to civilization occurs in the ancient world in the fourth, in the West in the nineteenth century."36 Like other Lebensphilosophen, Spengler makes a distinction between intuitive experience (Erlebnis) and intellectual cognition (Erkenntnis). The former consists of an immediately felt contact with the realm of becoming. The latter manifests itself in relation to the quantifiable world of mathematics and physics, which arrests the flow of becoming in order to identify those universally valid principles which determine the course of physical events. Intellectual cognition makes possible the technical mastery of the world, which increases as civilization develops. The distinction between Erlebnis and intellect in Spengler's thought thus corresponds to the typological distinction between culture during the period of its ascendancy, and civilization in decline. "The cultured person (Kulturmensch) lives within, the civilized person without, in space, among bodies and 'facts'. What the one feels as destiny, the other understands as [a] connection between cause and effect."37 The Kulturmensch lives in harmony with the earth and is rooted in tradition. The civilized person is a cosmopolitan parasite - pragmatic, clever and irreligious. Among the symptoms of civilization, Spengler cites the petrifaction of the "religion of the heart" and its replacement by "wissenschaftliche religion."38 Next to Spengler, another Lebensphilosoph whose books were widely read during the years after the war was Ludwig Klages (1872-1956). Klages, a notorious anti-Semite, has frequently been regarded as the leading representative of a dangerous form of irrationalism, and as one whose ideas helped prepare the way for the rise of National Socialism.39 During the years after the war, Klages published a number of popular works in which he developed a polemical critique of the modern ideals of technology, progress, culture and personality. Klages was associated for some time with the poet, Stefan George, who was regarded by his close circle of followers as the founder of a new aesthetic religion, which was influential among German intellectuals 35

36 37 38

39

Oswald Spengler, Die Untergang des Abendlandes, 1923), p. 28. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 449. Ibid., p. 44.

Vol. I, 66th-68th ed. (Munich: Beck,

Cf. Kurt Wuchterl, Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der Philosophie des 20. (Bern/Stuttgart/Wien: Haupt, 1995).

Jahrhunderts

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during this period.40 Klages' essay, "Mensch und Erde" (Man and Earth), which contains in an abbreviated form several of his characteristic views, was first delivered before a historical gathering of the German youth movement (.Jugendbewegung) in 1913, and was widely circulated after its publication in 1920. In his address to the German youth, Klages takes an inventory of the exploitation of natural resources and wildlife by a civilization possessed by the value of utility. "Under the pretexts of 'profit', 'economic development', 'culture,'" Klages argues, the modern ideal of progress "amounts in truth to extermination of life."41 The connection between human beings and the earth has been severed in the course of the development of industrial society. Not only have entire species been brought to the brink of extinction in order to satisfy the decadence of modern Europe, traditional cultures have also been sacrificed upon the altar of capitalism. Klages regards capitalism as the logical outcome of Christianity, which attributes value only to the realm of the supernatural and devalues life accordingly. Ultimately, however, Christianity is itself only the most recent occurrence in a long chain of events that was set in motion from the first moment when "an other-worldly power broke into the sphere of life"42 In the course of this development, spirit (Geist) has come increasingly alienated and opposed to life and soul (Seele). It would never have occurred to the "old peoples" to have subjected nature to domination through technology, Klages claims, because they recognized that the forests and rocks and springs were full of "holy life" (heiliges Leben). The opposition between spirit and soul is further developed in Klages' later writings. Spirit is the source of judgment and conceptual thinking. It is what makes possible the projection and measurement of time. Klages contrasts extended, mathematical time with the "real" time of cosmic life. And he contrasts the spiritual or intellectual act of knowing, which necessarily removes its object from the flow of life, with experiential impressions (Eindruckserlebnissen), which participate directly in the realm of becoming. Only experience (Erleben) is able to make contact with the real, but experience excludes consciousness and reflection. "No experience is conscious and no consciousness is able to experience (erleben)." 3 Klages also contrasts conscious willing, which he associates with spirit, since it requires the intellectual representation of an aim, with unconscious drives (Triebe), which are causes immanent within life itself. Since willing involves the diversion of 40 Cf. Stefan Breuer, Asthethischer Fundamentalismus: Stefan George und der deutsche Antimodernismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995). Ludwig Klages, "Mensch und Erde," reprinted in Der Mensch und das Leben (Jena: Diederichs, 1940), p. 20. 42 43 Ibid., p. 23. Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 1 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1969), p. 229.

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vital forces towards a consciously determined end, Klages sees in it the inhibition of life. Spirit and life thus constitute two antagonistic originary principles (Urprinzipien) at work in the individual and in history. Klages sees in history the progressive extermination of life by spirit, and he identifies Socrates as the turning point in that struggle. Another cultural phenomenon that deserves to be mentioned in the present context is the "new mysticism," associated with the names of poets like Heinrich and Julius Hart, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille, which enjoyed popularity during the same period. The works of these authors were published by Eugen Diederichs, who envisioned his publishing house as a "gathering place for modern spirits," and sought, during the early decades of the century, to promulgate his own pessimistic diagnosis of modernity, shared by many contemporary artists and intellectuals, as well as his conviction that the discontents of modern civilization called for a rediscovery of "living religion." 44 "Whichever 'sicknesses' of modern culture Diederichs diagnosed, he always recommended as therapy 'new religion' or 'new myths.'" 45 This recommendation was combined with a condemnation of existing forms of religion, and, above all, the spiritual bankruptcy of modern Protestantism, which had deadened the vital impulses of religion by attempting to reconcile Christianity with modern rationalism. In addition to publishing popular editions of the works of Tolstoy and Kierkegaard, Gogarten's condemnation of Kulturprotestantismus, as well as a popular series of classic mystical texts from various non-Christian traditions, Diederichs assembled a colorful assortment of malcontents, visionaries, and ecstatic prophets exhibiting diverse ideological and religious tendencies, but united in their protest against the status quo. Wilhelm Friedrich Graf has characterized the unorthodox approach to religion of the Diederichs coterie as "the avant-garde reaction to the 'modern theologies' of the academic religious experts, the university theologians and the modern criticism of religion of rationalist devotees of science." 46 The enigmatic nature of Otto's relationship to his times is reflected in the fact his own translations of Indian religious texts were published by Diederichs, even though Otto regarded himself as one of the "modern theologians" against which Diederichs' publishing

44

46

Cf. Hans G. Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: ReligionsWissenschaft und Moderne (Munich: Beck, 1997), pp. 245-47. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, "Das Laboratorium der religiösen Moderne: Zur 'Verlagsreligion' des Eugen Diederichs Verlag," Versammlungsort moderner Geister: Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag - Aufbruch ins Jahrhundert der Extreme, ed. by Gangolf Hübinger (Munich: Diederichs, 1996), pp. 243-44. Ibid., p. 247.

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efforts were directed. 47 In his Glaubenslehre lectures, Otto refers pejoratively to "our modern 'mystics,' who are really no such thing, but abandon themselves to mystified aesthetic feelings" (G 126). The popular impact of the new mysticism promoted by Diederichs was considerable enough do warrant an entry of its own in the first edition of the momumental encyclopedia of religion, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart in 1913. Walther Hoffmann, who contributed the article, regarded the success of Diederichs' publishing house as a sign of the urgent need for interiority and depth in an age overwhelmed by science and technology. At the same time, he observed that "this new movement is thoroughly independent and in no way a direct continuation of older mysticism," and he regarded it primarily as an expression of opposition to "the entire spirit of our times." 48 Above all, Hoffman observed, the new religiosity lacked an appreciation of the ethical dimension of Christianity. Despite his general disapproval of the new mysticism, Hoffmann credited the movement with having brought to the awareness of mainstream Christians the truth "that living religion cannot live either from mere reflection, or from mere imperatives, not to speak of an inflexible, doctrinaire dogmatism, but must be born anew in each person out of the divine depths of the soul." 49 It would seem that Das Heilige represents an attempt to make academic theology answerable to this awareness, and Hoffmann's remarks suggest that the time was ripe for a book like Otto's. Tillich, writing in 1923, captured the sense in which Otto's investigation of the irrational in religion had struck a spiritual nerve among his contemporaries. "It was indeed a breakthrough, as the primeval fire of the living began to stir beneath all the rational ossifications and burdens born not only by the ecclesiastical, but also the idealistic philosophical consciousness of the previous decades, and the hardened layers began to quake and brake apart." 50 Spengler, Klages and Diederichs, each of whom drew inspiration from Nietzsche, are typical representatives of a popular, ideological form of Lebensphilosophie that enjoyed widespread currency in Germany around the same time that Das Heilige did. Each denounced what he took to be a moribund civilization in the name of "life." Each advocated intuitive Erlebnis against abstract, calculative reason. And each criticized (albeit with varying degrees of emphasis) existing forms of religion in the name of an inspired, vitalistic, experiential form of religiosity that is opposed to ration47

Cf. Otto, Siddhanta des Ramajuna: Ein Text zur indischen Gottesmystik (Jena: Diederichs, 1917) and Vischnu-Narayana: Texte zur indischen Gottesmystik (Jena: Diederichs, 1917). Walther Hoffman, "Mystik, Neue," Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 1st ed., Vol. IV, column 608. 49 Ibid., column 611. Paul Tillich, Theologische Blätter, Ausgabe A, Nr. 1 (Leipzig: Hinrich, Jan., 1923), p. 11.

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alism. In some respects, the content of Otto's book bears little resemblance to the works of these figures. Certainly Otto's style is less polemical than that of the authors whose views we have been considering. Nonetheless, it is possible to detect a certain thematic affinity shared by Das Heilige and the current of thought described on the preceding pages. Otto's book presents a sustained criticism of the "tendency toward rationalization" (DH 3) which he felt had come to dominate the theology and the academic study of religion of his day. Otto often employs vitalistic metaphors, as, for example, when he attributes the development of the history of religion to an underlying "religious drive" (Trieb), which manifests itself "in undirected, groping emotion, in the fantastic shaping of representations, in a continually forward-driving generation of ideas" (DH 141). Otto makes rhetorical use of the distinction between religion that is "merely believed" and religion that is also experienced (erlebt). He emphasizes the energy, vitality and urgency of numinous experience throughout. And although "life" remains for him an ideogrammatic expression, and not a metaphysical category, Otto is clearly interested in reclaiming what might be called the Dionysian element within the history of religion in general, and within Christianity, in particular, which had been obscured by the ethical emphasis of the Ritschlians. Thus, whatever qualifications may be in order, Otto's opposition to rationalism in religion and his emphasis on immediate experience (Erlebnis) were consistent with a more general criticism of rationalism that formed one of the most significant cultural trends in Germany after the First World War.

IV. Otto's Response to Nietzsche and Klages in the Lectures on Ethics I have already referred to Otto's attempt to clarify his use of the term "irrational" several years after the original publication of Das Heilige. In 1923, in the foreword to the first English edition of The Idea of the Holy, Otto underscored that he did not seek "to promote in any way the tendency of our time towards an extravagant and fantastic 'irrationalism', but rather to join issue with it in its morbid form." 51 Unfortunately, apart from the passages from Das Heilige that have already been considered, in none of his published works does this issue appear to be joined at any length. However, Otto's unpublished papers do provide some further insight into the nature of his views with regard to some of the developments described in the preceding pages. In the academic year 1933-34, Otto delivered a lecture course in ethics. The following remarks appear in his lecture notes, which are to be found in the Otto Archive at the Religionskundliche Sammlung in Marburg: 51

Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. xxi.

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Today's slogan: soul against spirit. Or life (vita) against spirit. The spirit as the disrupter, perhaps even the enemy, of vitality. Back from the abstraction and sickness of a false spirituality (Geistigkeit) to the immediacy of life itself and its primeval forces, its primeval and essential values (seiner Urwerte und eigentlichen Werte; E 287).

Otto identifies Nietzsche and Klages as the primary representatives of this struggle between life and spirit. The most significant mistake made by these thinkers, Otto argues, is that their protest against spirit is combined with an unwarranted "glorification of the free independence of the so-called life instinct (Lebenstrieb)" (E 289). Nietzsche and Klages claim that life wills only itself and its own actualization. The inhibition of this drive they regard as a form of sickness that results in the atrophy of vital impulses. Otto argues that this view is mistaken, not only for its failure to recognize an autonomous sphere of spiritual values (geistige Werte), but also because it misconstrues the true nature of vital values themselves. Otto's argument runs as follows. The living is distinguished from the nonliving by virtue of its being present in the form of organisms. Organisms maintain themselves through the assimilation of foreign matter. Their existence, however, is not due to this matter alone, but to a purposeful (zweckmässig) formative power that regulates the assimilation and distribution of foreign matter in the life of the organism. Otto calls this purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit) of the organism a life-line (Lebenslinie·, E 291). The lifeline is the standard of valuation in the sphere of the vital. Whatever inhibits or is contrary to the lifeline is a negative value (Widerwert). "An organism is sick, then, when it itself or one of its parts does not function within the lifeline" (E 292). Otto distinguishes four value-predicates within the sphere of the vital: health, perfection, beauty and life-truth or genuineness of life (Lebens-echtheit; E 291). By virtue of its being manifest in self-regulating organic structures, life constitutes a different order of being (Seinsordnung) than inorganic matter, which is governed by the laws of mechanics. "Its un-mechanical higher nature is distinguished in the psychic moments of sensation, perception, the feeling of pleasure and pain, feeling in general, of striving, instinct and drive, from which arise in ever-increasing form the psychic moments of interests that are free from mere instinct" (E 295). To the degree that freely chosen interests distinguish themselves from merely instinctual aims, a new order of values emerges, which can no longer be classified within the sphere of the vital. At this point, spirit begins to distinguish itself from life. Spirit thus presupposes life and is founded upon it. But, at the same time, spirit subordinates life to its own values and interests, applying it as a means to the realization of spiritual ends. "It is, on the one hand, itself the highest fruit of the teleology of life, and on the other hand it breaks through the mere life-line

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with the new and higher teleology of its own line - the line of the life of spirit" (Linie des Geisteslebens-, E 304). Otto takes Nietzsche and Klages to task for failing to recognize an autonomous sphere of spiritual values. This failure, he argues, results in "a dangerous overestimation of the purely animal - which is also the basis of our human being, and has it's own definite value - at the expense of the human" (E 287). In particular, he criticizes Klages' conception of the soul as an unconscious formative principle opposed to spirit. The concept of the soul, Otto argues, presupposes insight into values that are capable of being consciously understood and realized. Thus, the soul cannot be an unconscious principle. "It must be a cognizing and value-cognizing principle" (E 310). Otto concedes that the critique of rationalism among his contemporaries is justified to some extent. What this critique calls for, however, is not the rejection of spirit altogether, but rather a broadened conception of spirit that moves beyond a one-sided identification of spirit with intellect. It is not possible to construct a simple definition of spirit. "Spirit is recognizable only as the felt unity in and behind its manifestations (Hervortretungen) and moments, which are capable of being grasped in themselves, and which, when they are brought together comparatively, are able to be felt (uns ßhlbar werden) as moments and aspects of a unified, indefinable essence (Wesenheit)" (E 304). What spirit is becomes apparent when compared to life, just as what life is becomes apparent when compared to inorganic matter. Otto identifies three parallel moments wherein spirit is distinguished from life. The first is reason, conceived of as the ability to abstract from sense perception, to form concepts, and to recognize consequences and conclusions within the order of knowledge. The second is will, which Otto distinguishes from "blind instinct." Will is the capacity to contemplate, choose and affirm a specific course of action that aims toward the realization of consciously intended values. As such, it is the foundation of moral agency. The third moment whereby spirit distinguishes itself from life Otto calls Gemüt. Otto uses this term to refer to a distinct faculty of noetic affect. Gemüt is differentiated from the "lower feelings" by virtue of its cognitive dimension. First through Gemüt is real experience (Erleben) of the environment possible. But Gemüt is at the same time itself a profound cognitive function: it is the experiential recognition (erlebendes Erkennen) of the other as an affective being (als Gemüthaften). It is thus above all the capacity to recognize affective relationships (Gemütsbeziehungen) to the other, like love, respect, esteem, and thus to respond with the same affective attitude (Gemütshaltung). And Gemüt is the capacity for the recognition of all objective values, in greatness and beauty, in nature, humanity and history, in personal spiritual and moral values (E 305).

Reason, will and Gemüt thus constitute three distinct aspects or moments of a single, unified whole. Their convergence is the necessary condition for the

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possibility of the development of the autonomous moral personality, wherein the essence of spirit is most clearly discernable. The moral agent is able to affirm or deny her instinctive impulses, to subordinate them to an independent realm of objective values, and to establish practical aims on the basis of those values. Finally, for Otto, spirit is the finitum capax infiniti - finite being that is capable of receiving the infinite. 52 "Spirit too [i.e. like non-living matter and organic life] is finite and restricted by nature, and confined (hineingebannt) to a finite world. But it is nonetheless capable of the infinite, whereby one actually means the other-worldly [and] divine" (E 308). Spirit, moral personality, conscience, character, and openness to the transcendent - in short, all that distinguishes humanity and constitutes the distinct nobility of human beings - are predicated upon the capacity for insight into a universe of autonomous, objective values, which, at least for the person of faith, are ultimately of divine origin. "All values and rights - thus do we proceed from the standpoint of faith - have their source in the sacrosanct primeval values (Urwerte) of the divinity, in which the being of the world itself has its source" (E 337). Here, in a nutshell, is Otto's mature theological position, which will be further examined in more detail in the following pages. As that discussion will show, the concept of value comes to play an increasingly central role in Otto's later thought, and the manner in which it is developed by Otto indicates that his views must be clearly distinguished from those of figures like Spengler and Klages. In fact, the role played by the concept of value in Otto's later writings, including certain revisions of Das Heilige itself, is best understood within the context of a broader discussion of values and the "crisis of values" that occupied a number of prominent German thinkers during the early part of the twentieth century.

52

The term is taken from Lutheran Orthodoxy, and means that the finite creature is capable of receiving the infinite. This doctrine was rejected by Reformed Orthodoxy, which employed the contrary formula, finitum non est capax infiniti. Cf. Alfred Adam, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 6th ed., Vol. II (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1992), pp. 402, 396.

Chapter Six The Concept of Value in Otto's Later Thought

I. The Phenomenological Ethics of Value In the last chapter, Otto's discussion of religious experience in Das Heilige was examined in relation to one strain of philosophical thought that gained popularity in Germany after the First World War. This chapter examines Otto's ideas in relation to another intellectual movement that came to play an increasingly important role during the same period: the phenomenological movement. Over the years, Das Heilige has often been regarded as a pioneering work in the phenomenology of religion, and Otto has frequently been regarded to as one of the founders of that discipline. Nevertheless, Otto never explicitly identified himself as a phenomenologist, and his relationship to the primary representatives of the phenomenological movement has remained rather obscure. This chapter explores the concept of value in Otto's later writings in relation to the phenomenological ethics of value ( Wertethik) developed by Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, which represents one of the most notable philosophical developments in Germany during this period. In addition to clarifying Otto's relationship to phenomenology, this chapter continues the argument of the last chapter by showing that Otto's position in the debate about values must be clearly distinguished from the position of thinkers like Spengler and Klages. The manner in which the concept of value is developed in Otto's later work also has implications for the interpretation of Das Heilige, since Otto continued to revise that book in light of his later views up until the final revision in 1936. The rapid decline of Neo-Kantianism in Germany after the War coincided with increasing public recognition of the phenomenological movement, which had already begun to take shape around the turn of the century. Its inception is often identified with the publication of Husserl's Logical Investigations in 1900-01, though intimations of Husserl's discoveries are to be found in the work of Franz Brentano and Alexander Meinong. Although phenomenology had already existed for almost two decades as a fairly esoteric form of academic philosophy, after the War it received increasing

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public attention, and came to be regarded by some as a means for restoring European culture. Among those to have regarded Das Heilige as a contribution to phenomenology were two of the movement's leading representatives, Husserl and Scheler. Husserl had been professor of philosophy at Göttingen around the turn of the century, when Otto was also there, and the two appear to have been personally acquainted. However, since this is precisely the period when Otto was coming under the influence of the Neo-Friesian movement led by Nelson, it is unlikely that his approach to philosophy was greatly influenced by Husserl at this time. Be that as it may, in a letter written to Otto in 1919, Husserl refers to Das Heilige as "a first beginning of a phenomenology of the religious, at least those parts which do not go beyond a pure description and analysis of the phenomena." In the same letter, Husserl predicts that Otto's book will "occupy a lasting place in the history of the genuine philosophy of religion, i.e. phenomenology of religion."1 Unfortunately, Husserl's remarks do not offer much in the way of substantive insight into his reasons for regarding Otto's book as a contribution to phenomenology. Gadamer, in his philosophical memoirs, recalls his first meeting with Max Scheler, who visited Marburg in 1922, and whom Gadamer describes as one of the most dynamic and captivating representatives of the new philosophical developments at that time.2 Upon meeting Scheler, Gadamer was surprised to hear him ask for news about Otto. Scheler apparently didn't think that Otto's ideas were as irrelevant as the students at Marburg did. Scheler's response to Das Heilige is contained in his book, Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1920; Eng., On the Eternal in Man). Like Husserl, Scheler makes a distinction between the earlier, "phenomenological" and the later, "epistemological" chapters of Otto's book. He locates this distinction at the point where Otto begins to discuss the holy as an a priori category. "As little as I am able to follow Otto's religious epistemology . . . I welcome in the purely descriptive section of his book the first serious attempt to exhibit, by means of the phenomenological discussion of essence, the most important qualities of the value-modality of the holy - which determines the object (die . . . Gegenstands-bestimmtheit ist) of all and every religion." 3 Scheler specifically affirms Otto's allegation that the numinous constitutes a primary datum sui generis, which, as such, is incapable of being defined and must be approached instead by means of description and comparison. Furthermore, he

2

Husserl's letter, dated May 3, 1919, is printed as an appendix in Schütte, Religion und Christentum in der Theologie Rudolf Ottos, pp. 139-42. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Philosophische Begegnungen," Gesammelte Werke, Vol. X, pp. 381-82. Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. V, ed. by Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke, 1954), p. 166.

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suggests that Otto's method of successively exploring, comparing and contrasting the various layers and nuances of the experiences that he describes, in order thereby to isolate and exhibit the numinous, "is the way that leads to the phenomenological intuition of essence (Wesensschau)."* Scheler's response to Das Heilige is important for the light that it sheds on the location of Das Heilige in relation to other intellectual developments that defined the period with which we are presently concerned. But his response to Otto is important for another reason as well. Although Otto never unequivocally endorsed the program of phenomenology, his later writings clearly exhibit evidence of his familiarity with the phenomenological value-ethics of Scheler and Hartmann, and his own position is developed partly in response to theirs. In order to appreciate the increasing importance of the concept of value (Wert) in Otto's later thought, it will be helpful to begin with a brief overview of the manner in which this concept was developed by Scheler. Husserl had been trained as a mathematician and logician, and in his own work he was primarily concerned to develop phenomenology as a rigorous philosophical science. It was Scheler who first made the phenomenological method fruitful in the fields of ethics, value theory and the philosophy of religion. The work that established Scheler as one of the leading representatives of the phenomenological movement was his Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Eng. Formalism in Ethics and the Non-Formal Ethics of Value) the first half of which was published in the famous Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1913, the second half, delayed by the outbreak of the War, following in 1916. In that work, Scheler undertook both a fundamental criticism of Kant's moral philosophy, and sought to develop his own ethics based on the concept of value (Wert). For Kant, the task of moral philosophy is to discover the a priori principles underlying our everyday moral judgments. Only if it is possible to identify universal principles independent of experience can ethics be brought within the scope of pure reason. Kant had argued that the only thing that can be called "good" in an unqualified sense is the will of a rational being. An action may be said to be good insofar as the maxim governing it is determined by the concept of duty, and therefore only in a derivative sense. Because Kant conceives of goodness as conformity of the will to the moral law, the terms "good" and "evil" only acquire meaning for him after the nature of the moral law has been established by pure practical reason. Kant rejects every attempt to found the moral law upon some particular good (e.g. happiness) or end (e.g. the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people). "All practical principles which presuppose an object (material) of the faculty of desire as the determining ground of the will are without excep-

4

Ibid., p. 167.

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tion empirical and can hand down no practical laws." 5 Because Kant rejects every attempt to define the moral law in terms of a particular (i.e. material) value, and because he equates universality with formalism, he is led to conceive the concept of duty as a formal rule for determining the will. This is the famous categorical imperative. Underlying Kant's rejection of every non-formal ethics, according to Scheler, is a particular understanding of the psychology of volition, and a corresponding conception of desire, pleasure and feeling, which Kant inherited from the eighteenth-century British empiricists. Kant conceives of desire as the ability to cause the reality of an object by means of the mental representation of that object. Desire itself can be determined either by a sensual interest (i.e. the feeling of pleasure or pain) or by an interest of reason. In the former case, it involves the expectation of pleasure in connection with a certain behavior. Pleasure and pain, however, are not subject to reason. Their presence or absence depends upon experience, and is therefore incapable of producing universal moral principles for the determination of the will. Furthermore, Kant claims that it is not possible to make distinctions between "higher" and "lower" desires on the basis of the pleasure that is associated with them. Thus, for Kant, the sole criterion of the moral value of any action is conformity of the will to the concept of duty, which is purely formal, and which alone is capable of furnishing universal moral principles. Scheler shares Kant's conviction that all attempts to ground ethics upon a particular good or end have failed. However, he rejects the consequences that Kant draws from this conclusion. In opposition to Kant, Scheler insists upon the recognition of a strict distinction between values and the objects in which values are present (Güte or goods). The values expressed in predicates like pleasant, charming, friendly, and noble are in principle accessible in themselves. There exist, according to Scheler, genuine value-qualities which constitute a separate domain of objects of phenomenological analysis, and which manifest definite relations among themselves, independent of the existence of the bearers in which they appear. "Just as little as the color blue becomes red when a blue ball is painted red, so little are the values and their order affected by changes in the value of their bearers." 6 While it is true that ethics cannot presuppose the primacy of a particular, empirical good, it is nonetheless possible to discover an order of material values that is independent of the changes in the empirical world of goods, which is subject to the vicissitudes of history. To discover this order by means of a phenomenological analysis of the acts of consciousness wherein values are given, and the a

5

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 19/21. Scheler, Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, Vol. II of Werke, ed. by Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke, 1954), p. 41.

Gesammelte

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priori relations among these acts and their intentional correlates, is the task of the phenomenological ethics of value ( Wertethik) as Scheler conceives it. Scheler's criticism of Kant's ethical formalism is closely related to his rejection of the psychology of motivation upon which it is founded. Kant had argued that only a formal ethics that eschews all reference to feeling in the determination of ethical principles is capable of avoiding the errors into which every conceivable from of eudaemonism is inevitably led. Kant himself does not undertake an investigation of the relationship between pleasure and value. Rather, Scheler claims, he assumes that the ascription of value to any object is a function of the pleasurable effect produced by the object upon the psycho-physical organism. That acts of will are directed toward pleasure is regarded by Kant as a law of nature. Kant assigns the feeling of pleasure and displeasure to the faculty of sensibility, and makes no distinction between qualitatively different kinds of pleasure. "Only by means of the presupposition that all feelings except for 'respect' (Achtung) are of sensual origin is it also conceivable that Kant makes no essential distinction, either of quality or depth, among sensual pleasure, joy, happiness [or] bliss (Seligkeit)."1 This emphasis upon the qualitative differences exhibited by various feeling states (Geßhle) and acts of feeling (Fühlen) is an important point of agreement between Scheler and Otto.8 The distinction between feeling (Fühlen) as an intentional act (i.e. the feeling of something) and feeling (Gefühle) as a discreet psychological state plays an important role in Scheler's account of value-cognition (Werterkenntnis). Whereas the latter refers to a particular content, the former refers to the manner in which some content is apprehended. It is possible for acts of feeling (Fühlen) to be intentionally related to feeling-states (Geßhle), but they need not be so related. Scheler distinguishes between three kinds of feeling-acts: 1) the feeling of a particular feeling-sensation (e.g. a localized pain); 2) the feeling of emotional characteristics (e.g. the sadness of a gesture); and 3) the feeling of values like goodness, agreeableness or beauty. The third case is distinguished by a cognitive function that is absent in the first two. Feeling, in this third sense, is neither a state, nor an association, nor a symptom. It is an act of consciousness intentionally related to a valuecorrelate in the same way that a representation (Vorstellung) is related to an object (Gegenstand). Such feeling-acts are different from affects (e.g. anger).

7

8

Ibid., p. 255. In Das Heilige, Otto writes: "Here we would see more clearly if psychology (Seelenforschung) generally would make a more decided effort to investigate 'feelings' according to qualitative differences, and to sort them accordingly. We are still hindered by the far too course division of feelings into either 'pleasure' or 'displeasure"' (DH 18).

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In the act of feeling, one does not have a feeling about something. Rather, one feels something directly, namely, a value-quality. A psychology of feeling that takes feeling to consist exclusively of inner states completely overlooks "what is revealed to us of the world, and of the value-content of the world, in feeling, in preferring, in loving and hating, but instead [sees] only what we encounter in inner perception, i.e. in 'ideational' behavior, when we feel, when we prefer, when we love and hate, when we enjoy a work of art, when we pray to God." 9 Apart from developing a criticism of Kant's ethical formalism, Scheler's non-formal ethics of value also involves an attempt to respond to Nietzsche's challenge to morality. Scheler argues that, since Nietzsche, there are only two paths open to ethics. Either moral values must be reducible to lifevalues, in which case they apply to human beings, not by virtue of their humanity, but rather by virtue of their being living beings; or it must be acknowledged that human experience discloses an order of values that transcends the vital, and is ultimately of divine origin. "The moral values are either less than or they are more than merely 'human' (ein bloss 'Menschliches')."10 If life-values are the highest values, then reason must be regarded as an aberration. Human capacities that are generally taken to be expressions of human transcendence of the animal condition, like the tool-making capacity, must be viewed instead as symptoms of a deficiency or lack - as impediments to the realization of goals established in accordance with life-values. In fact, Scheler claims, the ethical experience of human beings manifests a variety of values that cannot be understood on the basis of vital interests alone. What distinguishes human beings from other living creatures on Scheler's account is that they are "the bearer[s] of acts, which are independent of [their] biological organization, and that [they] see and realize values corresponding to these acts." 11 Here, the fundamental distinction is not between man and animal, but rather between person and organism, Geisteswesen and Lebewesen. Ultimately, Scheler argues, the ethical dimension of human existence first becomes intelligible in light of the idea of God. In response to Nietzsche's doctrine of the Übermensch, Scheler argues that humanity is "only the movement, the tendency, the crossing-over to the

divine (der Übergang zum Göttlichen)."12 Next to Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann is also regarded as one of the founders of the non-formal ethics of value. In his own Ethik (1926), Hartmann sought to systematize and further develop the insights contained in Scheler's For9 10 11

12

Scheler, Formalismus in der Ethik, p. 274. Ibid., p. 289. Ibid., p. 302. Ibid.

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malismus. Like Scheler, Hartmann rejects Kant's identification of formalism and aprioricity, arguing for an intuitive, affective apprehension of values, and a material value-apriori. The feeling of value ( Wertgefühl) is a priori insofar as it is the presupposition for the possibility of moral judgments. "A feeling of value and a standard contained in it are the absolute presupposition for the moral phenomenon and thus cannot arise empirically." 13 Hartmann moves beyond Scheler in attributing "ideal being" to the sphere of values. Values themselves are not subject to change, and do not exist in time, even though the awareness of values is historically determined. By introducing this perspectival dimension, Hartmann sought to avoid both value-absolutism and value-relativism. 14 Hartmann, who began his philosophical career under the influence of Marburg Neo-Kantianism and was subsequently influenced by Husserlian phenomenology before going on to develop his own "New Ontology," was professor of philosophy at Marburg from 1919-25. It is not clear whether Hartmann and Otto were in personal contact during this period. However, according to Theodor Siegfried, Otto had been occupied with Hartmann's Ethik since its first appearance, and it "belonged to the few books that were always at hand on his desk." 15 Unlike Scheler, Hartmann, does not recognize holiness as the highest value modality. In fact, the final section of Hartmann's Ethik presents a number of irreconcilable antinomies between ethics and religion. Otto's very last piece of writing is a response to the ideas expressed on those pages.

II. Otto's Ethics of Value The extent to which Otto may have come to regard himself as a phenomenologist in his later years is not entirely clear. According to Heinrick Frick, Otto's colleague at Marburg and successor as director of the Religionskundliche Sammlung, Otto personally acknowledged his increasing movement away from his earlier Friesian views, and toward phenomenology. 16 As late as 1931, Otto still identified his own method of investigation with the "an13

Hartmann, Einfährung in die Philosophie, 5th ed. (Hannover: Hanckel, no date), p. 169. Cf. Eva Hauel Cadwallader, Searchlight on Values: Nicolai Hartmann's TwentiethCentury Value Platonism (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1984). Theodor Siegfried, Afterword to Rudolf Otto, Freiheit und Notwendigkeit: Ein Gespräch mit Nicolai Hartmann über Autonomie und Theonomie der Werte (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1940), p. 20. "Es ist ebenso von Otto selbst deutlich gemacht, dass er nach und nach sich vom Friesianismus entfernt und immer mehr der modernen Phenomenologie zugewandt hat." Heinrich Frick, "Zur Diskussion um 'das Heilige' nach Rudolf Otto," Theologische Literaturzeitung 1/2 (1944), column 4.

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thropological method" discovered by Fries. However, he rejected Fries' characterization of this method as a form of empirical, introspective psychology. Furthermore, some of his remarks appear to indicate a significant departure from certain (controversial) views expressed in Das Heilige. There Otto had claimed that the different moments of the numinous must be experienced directly in order to be understood. Now he argues that the analysis of the "essence" and "structure" of ethical and religious phenomena does not require first-person familiarity with the experiences in which those phenomena are given. An ethicist can understand the most delicate moral stirrings of the soul, interpret them according to their "idea," disregard their accidental characteristics and describe them according to their essence, and nevertheless perhaps himself possess or have possessed them to a very small degree. Someone else can perhaps even analyze the holy itself and still be far from holiness. A third [person] can depict the complications of the most serious transgressions, say in the form of a novel, or discover "life-truths," and nonetheless be himself completely free of such stirrings, perhaps even completely incapable of them.

In the same way, Otto claims, it is possible to "grasp 'the idea' of values and anti-values, descriptively portray them in reflection, penetrate into their structure, [and] indicate their essential relations to other [values]," without having to depend upon the psychological observation of direct experience. 18 The methodological remarks contained in Otto's lectures on ethics suggest that, at least by 1933, Otto had come to regard some form of phenomenological analysis as a starting point for philosophical reflection. But reflection must eventually proceed beyond description. Otto characterizes his own procedure as follows. "We set before ourselves a simple example [and] first direct our attention in self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) to the manner and way in which the moral feeling simply, genuinely and immediately appears {ausbricht). Our procedure is thus at first purely phenomenological" (E 3637). However, this attempt to grasp moral phenomena as they are given in experience is only a preparation for the further task of attempting to draw out the principles that are implicit in these phenomena, and to formulate them conceptually. "Thus, we pass over from mere phenomenology to an investigation {Betrachtung) that Kant would call metaphysical (metaphysics of morals)" (E 37). Like Scheler and Hartmann, Otto emphasizes that values are simple qualities given directly in intuition. They cannot be derived from or reduced

17

Rudolf Otto, "Das Schuldgefühl und seine Implikationen" (Eng., "The Feeling of Guilt and its Implications"), Aufsätze zur Ethik, p. 134. The words "far from holiness" appear in English in the original.

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to component parts. Value-qualities, like colors, are apprehended directly. "Our knowledge {Erkenntnis) of values arises from a special kind of act of intuition (Erschauungsakt); it is not of a discursive, but of an intuitive nature" (E 112). Otto emphasizes the importance of examples for developing the capacity to distinguish between different value-qualities. "I juxtapose (stelle nebeneinander), I compare, I see in this comparison differences, and by further self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) I notice that I thereby see differences of value, and thus values (ich dabei Unterschiede des Wertes sehe und also Werte sehe)" (E 112). By means of this procedure, Otto hopes to develop a value-ethics based upon concrete insight into the variety and multiplicity of distinct values and value-categories. "We will attempt an ethics which is not just a doctrine of the abstract idea of objective value in general, but which introduces us to the rich, concrete, vital and life-related (lebensvolle und lebensbezogene) abundance of concrete value-objects" (E 52-53). In an article published in 1931, entitled "Wert, Würde und Recht" ("Value, Dignity and Right"), Otto introduces a number of distinctions that help to clarify his own position in relation both to Kant and to the phenomenological ethics of value as represented by Scheler and Hartmann. 1 At the outset of this article, he acknowledges the widespread currency of the term "value" in the fields of ethics, the cultural and human sciences, sociology, epistemology and even logic. While Otto concedes that the concept of value has become indispensable for ethics, he claims that it has come to be used in such a wide variety of ways that it is in danger of losing its meaning. He the proceeds to clarify his own use of the term, and to indicate the role that it plays in his ethical reflection. Before applying himself to this task, Otto pauses to consider the significance of the fact that there exist beings for whom the question of the nature of a value such as moral goodness is able to arise at all. In doing so, he invokes the image of Adam and Eve as the prototypical representatives of this kind of being. "To know what is good and evil - that is was the first great interest" (WWR 57). That a living being should be capable of entertaining such an interest, Otto claims, is not capable of being explained by any theory of evolution. And it is on the basis of "the spiritual characteristic of the capacity for such interests to be aroused [that] we distinguish 'Adam' from all that exists {da ist) around him and beneath him" (WWR 58). In fact, to say that human beings are able to take an interest in a question like the nature of good and evil already seems to imply a sort of anthropomorphism that is misleading. It would be more accurate to say that "The question poses itself {stellt sich), and imposes itself {stellt sich ein), from time to time, apart from, even in opposition to, all interests" (WWR 58). The question of the nature of moral value is a question that is asked of us, 19

This article is included in Otto, Aufsätze zur Ethik, pp. 53-106. References to this article are indicated in the text by the letters "WWR."

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apart from any interest we happen to take in it. Ethical reflection, Otto suggests, first emerges as a response to questions that are encountered in this way. Kant had argued that the only thing that can be called good in an unqualified sense is the will of a rational being, and that goodness consists in the conformity of the will to the moral law, which is formal and a priori. Scheler and Hartmann maintained that good and evil are material values, but that they stand in a peculiar relation to other values. Morally good is whatever tends toward the realization of a higher value. Like Scheler and Hartmann, Otto recognizes a variety of objects, apart from the will, to which value-predicates may be applied. At the same time, he maintains that the value of the good will is qualitatively different from other kinds of value. The value of a will that is capable of standing in relation to other values, either affirming or negating them, striving to realize them or failing to do so, belongs to a categorically different order than those values themselves. Furthermore, the capacity for insight into values is not the same as the willingness to subject oneself to them (or the refusal to do so), and to determine one's actions accordingly. Strictly speaking, when we inquire into the moral value of the will, we are concerned with the latter. In order to maintain this distinction, Otto introduces the term "dignity" (Würde), which he applies to the will of the moral agent, and which is intended thereby to distinguish the sphere of morality proper from the broader sphere of ethics. The predicates good-evil, for Otto, have their application within the sphere of morality proper. The predicates good-evil, which are properly applied only to the will of a moral agent, Otto argues, must be distinguished from the predicates goodbad, which can be applied to a much wider variety of objects, and which are often applied in acts of judgments that posses no moral significance. This occurs, for example, when we make judgments about what we find pleasing or agreeable. Such judgments and the values recognized in them constitute a distinct value-category that Otto designates as the agreeable (das Angenehme). Values in this class are subjective. "A thing can always only be agreeable when it is agreeable to someone" (WWR 66). The interest that we take in objects that we find agreeable is due to the pleasure associated with them. Nevertheless, the value of the agreeable is not to be equated with the pleasure produced by objects that are the bearers of this value, and there are cases in which the value of something agreeable increases even though the pleasure associated with it diminishes. A person who has collected stamps for many years may not experience the same degree of pleasure with each new acquisition as she did when she first began her collection, even though the value of the stamp collection for the collector has subsequently increased (Otto's example). The pleasure associated with the agreeable admits of different grades and different kinds. We are accustomed to making distinctions between things that we find charming, delightful, pleasing, joyful, etc.

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as well as between the feelings of contentment, happiness, ecstasy, etc. Furthermore, Otto argues, we distinguish between "crude, course, common pleasure, sensual, mental, spiritual and intellectual pleasure, and noble pleasure" (WWR 66). These distinctions correspond to sub-categories within the value-sphere of the agreeable. A second class of values identified by Otto is the suitable or fit (das Taugliche). Whereas objects that are agreeable are always agreeable to someone, value-objects that are suitable or fit are always suitable or fit for something (i.e. for some purpose). In the latter case, the interest we take in an object is a function of its usefulness as a means to some end. Consequently, Otto observes, "The value of suitability cannot yet exist for a merely sensible creature, capable of pleasure, but first for an actively willing, purpose-setting creature" (WWR 67). Values in which an interest is taken because of the pleasure they produce Otto calls subjective values. They are valuable for someone. Otto argues that there exist other values which are valuable in themselves (Selbstwerte). These he calls objective values or "demanding values" (fordernde Werte). The objects that are the bearers of these values make claims upon our recognition. They are a source of moral imperatives. Otto sometimes refers to these values as "comprehensible" (einsichtig - literally, capable of being "seen into"). The recognition of such values requires an intellectual act which "has its own object-sphere, distinct from that of sense-perception" (E 5). Nevertheless, Otto speaks of the act whereby objective values are recognized as a kind of seeing. The following remarks appear in the lectures on ethics, in the context of a discussion of the recognition of the beauty of a flower. The outer eye, as [a] mere sense-faculty, perceives only the ontological predicates (color, form, contrast of colors). It sees, but it does not comprehend (es sieht nicht ein). But the inner eye of insight (Einsicht) comprehends something here in the perceptually given, namely the beauty [i.e. of the flower]. This comprehension, however, does not consist in fantasizing something into the object (ein Hinzufantasieren), but is really also a seeing, only of a mental (geistiger) kind (E 57).

The inability to recognize value in this way Otto regards as "a kind of stupidity and blindness, namely a value-blindness" (E 57). Elsewhere, Otto suggests that the capacity to notice or to be alive to the kinds of impressions wherein values are disclosed is one that cannot be taken for granted, but must be exercised and cultivated. The neglect of this capacity he regards as a form of moral carelessness or negligence. 0 20

Cf. Karl Küssner, ed., Verantwortliche Lebensgestaltung: Gespräche mit Rudolf Otto über Fragen der Ethik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1941), p. 35. Eng., Responsible LifeFormation: Talks with Rudolf Otto on Questions of Ethics. This book was edited by one

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In both the lectures on ethics, and in his conversations on ethics with Karl Küssner, Otto identifies seven classes of objective values. 1. values of inanimate nature 2. values of unconscious life 3. values of psychic life 4. spiritual values 5. natural aesthetic values 6. values of the beauty of the living 7. values of spiritual beauty The first four Otto refers to collectively as values of being (Seinswerte). The last three he refers to as values of beauty (Schönheitswerte). Although Otto recognizes objective values as one source of moral obligation, he recognizes a second source of moral obligation which is not determined by any relation to values. In fact, he claims, most of the duties that we have toward our fellow human beings do not arise from values, but from rights. Every person, by virtue of his or her being an autonomous individual, possesses rights that are not contingent upon his or her value. Whereas the value of individuals may vary greatly, each person possesses a common moral dignity (Würde) that is the source of binding moral obligations. The most fundamental obligation arising from the right of the individual Otto calls "consideration" (Rücksichtnahme). "Every person has in relation to every other person the right to consideration of his own interests." 21 The violation of this right constitutes an assault upon the freedom of the individual. The concept of right is the foundation of any state based upon the right of law (ein Rechtstaat), and the primary task of the state is to protect the rights of its members. A state can only be regarded as moral to the degree that it is founded upon the right of law. 2 Otto recognizes two distinct kinds of moral "ought" (Sollen), which he calls desiderates and postulates. Desiderates are "optative." They are expressed in the form, "X ought to be or to exist." Postulates are "imperative." They are distinguished from desiderates by the fact that they are able to be applied to the will of a moral agent. They are expressed in the form, "X ought to be done" or "You should do X." Otto uses the term "moral law" to designate "the sum of all humanly recognizable value-laws, [together] with the desiderates for existence and postulates for the will and action arising of Otto's students, and is written in the form of a dialogue between Otto and Küssner on various ethical topics. Almost all of the content, and in many cases entire sentences or phrases, appear to have been taken verbatim from manuscripts left behind by Otto. Since these manuscripts were in Kiissner's possession after Otto's death, it seems likely that he made use of them in the preparing the book. There is no reason to suspect that the v i e w s expressed in the book are not Otto's own. Otto, Verantwortliche Lebengestaltung, pp. 75-76. 22

Ibid., p. 191.

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from them." 23 He also retains the term "Gesetzgebung" (literally, "giving of the law"), which Kant uses to refer to the self-legislation of the autonomous, rational will, which "gives the law to itself." But this term no longer has the same meaning for Otto that it does for Kant. In Otto's ethics, it is no longer practical reason that is self-legislating. The ethical demands encountered in the form of postulates and desiderates are not stipulated by our practical reason, but "given" to it. They are discovered in the world as something already existing, independently of our awareness of them. At this point, it may be observed that the ethical position developed by Otto must be distinguished both from Kant's ethical formalism and from the non-formal ethics of value developed by Scheler and Hartmann. Clearly, Otto rejects Kant's view that only the will is good, and then only to the degree that its form is consistent with an a priori principle. Otto argues that no will can be regarded as good unless it is determined by a material content which is itself good in an objective sense. To that extent Otto develops a material ethics of value. At the same time, Otto also argues that what qualifies the will as good is not the material value to which it is directed. The goodness of the will consists in the autonomous acknowledgment of a valid demand made by an objective value or right, and the free act of obedience in response to that demand. "This moment of the will, namely the form of the will as a free act of obedience, we call justifiably a 'formal' moment" (WA 126). In Kant's thought, the question of good and evil is closely linked to the problem of ethical motivation. Ultimately, Kant recognizes only two kinds of motivation. Either the will is determined by the feeling of respect for the moral law (duty), and is morally good, or it is determined by some empirical interest (inclination), in which case it cannot be regarded as possessing moral value. Only in the former case, Kant argues, is it possible to speak of a free will, since in the latter case, the will is determined by a natural law of association between certain kinds of actions and the satisfaction derived from them. Kant's attempt to reduce the multiplicity of ethical phenomena to the single concept of duty was severely criticized by Scheler. Otto maintains the Kantian distinction between motivation from duty and motivation from interest. He argues, however, that this distinction does not correspond to the distinction between freedom and unfreedom of the will, and that there are feelings and interests beside respect for one's duty that possess moral value. Otto rejects the view that all interests not determined by the concept of duty are egoistic, and he deviates from Kant's hedonistic psychology of motivation in ways that are reminiscent of the criticisms developed by Scheler.

23

Rudolf Otto, "Wertgesetz und Autonomie" ("Value-Law and Autonomy"), Aufsätze Ethik, p. 124. Further references to this essay are indicated by the letters "WA."

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Otto argues that not all forms of interest should be regarded as selfinterest, and not all forms of self-interest are hedonistic. As we have seen, he regards objective values as valuable-in-themselves, apart from any relation to a subject for whom they are valuable. The interest taken in such values, and the actions determined by that interest, possess a definite moral value, even where the concept of duty does not come into play. Like Scheler, Otto emphasizes the phenomenological distinction between motivation from duty and motivation from inclination or love. "For duty demands (drängt) and drives; in inclination, love, desire for something (Lust zu etwas), we are drawn, pulled", and fear or horror tear us away from an action. We feel the pressure of duty, but we follow the pull of the heart." 24 At the same time, Otto appears to reject Scheler's negative assessment of duty as something that only becomes necessary to the degree that positive motivation is absent. No amount of love can replace the respect for the other that is required by the concept of right, and love itself would be incomplete if that respect were lacking. Although interest associated with pleasure is a form of self-interest, and although one can certainly take an interest in one's own pleasure, not all forms of self-interest are determined by pleasure. Some forms of self-interest are determined by objective values. Interest in the preservation of one's own existence, health and security, for example, is determined by certain vital values that are not reducible to sensual pleasure. Similarly, it would be absurd, Otto claims, to say that someone who is passionately interested in her own moral development is thereby an egoist or hedonist. Love, broadly speaking, is a kind of interest, but it is different from the interest taken in objective values. Like other kinds of interest, and unlike duty, love has a bi-polar structure (its opposite is hate). Love, however, does not depend upon the presence of some value in the beloved, and is in this respect different from the interest taken in objective values. "Interests are only noble in relation to some value, insofar as [the value] lends to them a certain hue and ennobles them (dieser sich auf jene abschattet und sie adelt). Love has its own nobility, or beauty, or whatever we may call it, in itself' (PN 185). In attempting to characterize the relationship between love and self-interest, Otto rejects the idea that love involves a renunciation or devaluation of self-interest. In fact, he argues, in a certain sense, love serves self-interest. "Love opens me for my environment, and opens my environment to me, and builds in me a new world that is richer than my own was. In this way love serves my self-interest" (PN 186). Just as Otto recognizes a variety of qualitatively different kinds of interest that are capable of serving as motives of morally valuable actions, he also 24

Rudolf Otto, "Pflicht und Neigung" ("Duty and Inclination"), Aufsätze zur Ethik, p. 179. Further referenced to this article are indicated by the letters "PN."

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distinguishes a variety of qualitatively distinct feelings that cannot be accurately grouped together under the single heading of "pleasure," and which exhibit varying degrees of ethical significance. For example, Otto claims, there is clearly a difference between the sensual pleasure that we receive from eating delicious foods and the pleasure we take in the appreciation of a noble deed. For one thing, the appreciation of a noble deed presupposes the understanding of the value that is expressed in it (i.e. what it is that makes it noble). At the same time, our appreciation contains an emotional moment. This moment, however, is phenomenologically distinct from the pleasure we take in eating delicious foods (it is closer, perhaps, to the admiration we might have for the chef). There is, in our appreciation of the noble deed, a moment of admiring joy (bewundernde Freude) that distinguishes it from simple enjoyment (Genuss), and is akin to humility. Otto uses words like "reverence" (Ehrfurcht), "homage" (Huldigung) and "veneration" (Verehrung) to characterize the emotional dimension of the experiences in which certain objective values are apprehended, and he claims that they exhibit a similarity to religious worship (PN 208). As a result of his recognition of the phenomenological complexity of emotional life, Otto refuses to limit the attribution of moral value to the will alone, as Kant had done. "Not primarily and not only the good will, namely the will motivated by the good, possesses goodness (hat Güte), but also the person who is experientially open to objective values in the depth of feeling, who is capable of inner participation (Anteilnahme) [in them] and abides in this participation" (PN 212).

III. Ethics and Religion in Otto's Later Thought The preceding discussion gives some indication of how the concept of value is developed in Otto's ethical thinking after the publication of Das Heilige. The same concept is important for understanding his conception of the relationship between ethics and religion. In Otto's thought, Gemüt is the capacity not only for recognizing ethical and aesthetic values, but religious values as well. Faith, Otto argues, is a conviction and a kind of cognition (Erkenntnis). "But this cognition is not in the first place a dead, intellectual one, but rather a value-cognition: Deus sicut est pro nobis" (SG 52). It is the affective dimension of the religious act of faith that distinguishes it from metaphysical speculation. The God of faith - of the Prophets, Jesus and Luther - is not the God of the philosophers. And theology does not begin with speculation about the existence of God, but with the experience of salvation (Heil). "That God [is the] causa mundi has no independent religious value, but [only] a subordinate one. . . . The fundamental definition (Grundbestimmung) of God in the religious sense is not causa mundi, but salus mundi" (G 97). The manner in which expressions of faith arise bears

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little resemblance to the manner in which theoretical propositions arise. "Religion in itself is not at all (garnicht) born from the desire to understand the world, [or] to discover [its] final explanatory grounds or principles. Its leading idea is not the idea of science, but of salvation (Heil)" (G 95). Theology concerns itself with judgments regarding the being of God (Seins urteile) only to the degree that such judgments are implicit in those judgments of value (Werturteile) that are constitutive of the primary religious experience of salvation. 25 Metaphysical speculation about the existence and attributes of the divine being "is of no religious interest whatsoever if it is not essentially schematized or saturated (erfüllt) by the . . . specific numinous value-moments of holiness (numinosen Heiligkeitsswertmomenten)" (G 44). The idea of the absolute, insofar as it is a religious idea, emerges in response to the recognition of an absolute value that is apprehended through feeling in the act of faith. The idea of an absolute value, however, implies the existence of an absolute being that is the bearer of this value, and as this latter idea is developed, the primary, absolute value of the holy may become "schematized" by the rational ideas of speculative metaphysics. 26 Salvation (Heil) is both a subjective and an objective value. Subjectively, it is experienced as the "excitation (Aufregung) of a peculiar desire and thirst for blessedness (Seligkeitsverlangen), and its satisfaction" (G 80). This desire is different from sensual desire (Eudaemonie) insofar as it is intentionally directed toward "an absolute and effusive (überschwängliche) good", and its satisfaction consists in "the certainty that there is such a thing, and that the way to it has been found" (G 80). As an objective value, salvation (Heil) is expressed in the demand that the highest values, by their very nature, ought to be realized. Otto claims that this demand underlies the Christian idea of the eschaton, which he interprets axiologically, and which, he claims, is too often mistakenly regarded as a theological appendix or afterthought. The orientation (Einordnung) of the temporal and mundane toward the eternal and super-natural is a fundamental characteristic of the Christian idea of salvation (Heilsidee). The encounter with the holy produces an "anticipatory becoming-alive (Lebendigwerden) of the eternal world" in the present, which is characterized by a sense of belonging to, or participation in, the divine, and which results in a tremendous dispensation or infusion of numi25 A concise and informative discussion of this distinction is to be found in Reinhard Schinzer's article, "Wert und Sein in Rudof Ottos Gotteslehre," Kerygma und Dogma 16 (January/March, 1970), 1-30. The article discusses several major themes from Otto's unpublished lecture notes on dogmatics. In his article, "Autonomie der Werte und Theonomie," Otto expresses doubt as to the possibility of distinguishing between between the value of the holy and its bearer (i.e. between holiness and God): "wenn anders man in dieser Sphäre unterscheiden darf zwishen Wert und Wertträger und sie hier nicht vielmehr identisch sind." Aufsätze zur Ethik, p. 223. However, Otto offers no insight into the nature of his doubt.

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nous value in the life of the believer (G 83). The encounter with the holy, and the relation to absolute value that is enacted in it, produces a radical transformation that manifests itself in a complete reorientation of interests, and a corresponding devaluation (Abwertung) of what had previously been regarded as valuable. In this way, the idea of sin emerges as that which stands opposed to, or mitigates against, the realization of the highest values. Sin is not a moral category, and the devaluation that it entails is only conceivable in relation to the transcendent realm of value that is disclosed in the religious act of faith. Salvation entails the dissolution of antagonism toward the divine. In several places, Otto speaks of the value of moral goodness becoming "overshadowed" by "sacral values" (e.g. G 113; DH 135), or of goodness being subsumed within the purely numinous value, which, in Das Heilige, he called the augustum. This is not to say simply that moral obligations receive a religious justification, or that moral imperatives come to be regarded as divine commands. Rather, Otto claims, there is a recognizable change in the quality of the underlying values themselves. This difference in quality becomes especially apparent in the negative terms in which it is expressed, like blasphemy, transgression, damnable, horrifying, etc. Positively speaking, individual objective values and rights, which are the source of moral obligations, acquire a deeper significance to the degree that they are "overshadowed" by religious values. So, for example, one's fellow human being may become an object of esteem, not only by virtue of the right which is hers as a moral person, but additionally insofar as she herself "is there from God (selber aus Gott da ist), and thus with a power of entitlement (des Anspruches), of obligation and, at the same time, of interest, that would otherwise never be possible (erreichbar)" (SG 55). Because Otto was unable to bring to completion his writings devoted to ethics and religion, his views in this area remain somewhat fragmented. His intention appears to have been to develop a more or less systematic theological ethics. He understood the task of (Christian) theological ethics to be to come to an understanding of the will of God as revealed in Christ, and to develop its implications for human conduct (E 1). Theological ethics, however, presupposes a prior knowledge of good and evil which is not specifically Christian, and which must be developed by means of an independent analysis of moral phenomena (e.g. conscience, guilt, the feeling of responsibility) as they are given in experience. Otto's plan was to develop a doctrine of the good that is not specifically religious, and is binding for believers and non-believers alike. Then this doctrine of the good would be related to, or situated (eingeordnet) within, the theological doctrine of the holy, since theological ethics "stands under the idea of the holy" insofar as its object is "the life justified and sanctified (geheilt) through God" (E 30). Thus Otto regarded ethics per se, or non-theological ethics, as a self-sufficient

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body of knowledge, containing ethical norms that remain binding for the religious believer, even though their significance is in some sense deepened to the degree that moral values acquire an additional religious dimension. As a result of this manner of conceiving the relationship between ethics and religion, Otto was faced with the following dilemma, which he discusses at some length, both in the lectures on dogmatics, and in his very last essay, "Autonomie der Werte und Theonomie." If the will of God, in order to be good, must conform to an autonomous standard of goodness, then it cannot be absolute, i.e. it cannot be the will of God. If, on the other hand, the highest values themselves, including the value of moral goodness, are determined by the will of God, then they are not autonomous, and there can be no justification of moral obligation that is not the result of a divine prerogative, and therefore heteronomous. The solution proposed by Otto to this antinomy may be briefly stated as follows. God is not contingently holy, he contends but necessarily holy. Thus, the caricature of God as a capricious despot, arbitrarily declaring what is good and evil is inaccurate. Instead, Otto proposes the image of an "immeasurable depth of value (Werttiefe), resting in itself, which bursts out of itself and erupts (auf- und ausbricht), and from the impulse of a self-giving will to love (Liebes-willens), as well as from the impulse to the creative formation of meaning and value in creation, becomes creator, and, as creator, also savior, in relation to a creation that strays from [its] end." 27 Out of this primeval, restless will, there emerges a universe of autonomous values which are themselves reflections of the eternal glory of God (Ehre Gottes). It is this dimension of axiological transcendence that distinguishes the religious believer's disposition toward moral values. There is no violation of something valuable (Verletzung eines Wertvolles) that would not violate the glory of God, and no respect or demand for something valuable that would not be respect or service [rendered to] God. He himself is, if not all things, then most truly the value in all things, and thus they are only truly loved when they are loved either as him or in him (G 122).

The will of God is not capricious, and the values that God wills are comprehensible in themselves (einsichtig). Furthermore, the religious obligation to glorify God is not imposed as a demand from without, but arises instead from an autonomous recognition of the absolute value of the divinity.

27

Rudolf Otto, "Autonomie der Werte und Theonomie" ("Autonomy of Values and Theonomy"), Aufsätze zur Ethik, p. 223.

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IV. Implications for the Assessment of Otto's Position Since Friedrich Feigel first accused Otto of irrationalism in his criticism of Das Heilige in the 1920's, a growing number of scholars have come to share his assessment of Otto, and to regard Otto's ideas as having exercised a negative influence upon subsequent discussions of religion. One outspoken critic, Rainer Flasche, has suggested that Otto "not only took up the irrational tendencies of his time, but he deepened them and thus led the study of religion (Religionswissenshaft) down the path of irrationality."28 Whether Otto can be held responsible for having led an entire discipline astray is not a question that will be taken up here. In light of the preceding discussion, however, it is safe to say that, as a historical judgment, Flasche's observation stands in need of qualification. While there are indications that Otto's discussion of the numinous shares certain themes in common with some of "the irrational tendencies of his time," and while this similarity may have something to do with the tremendous popularity of Das Heilige in Germany after the War, to say that Otto "took up these tendencies" is, at best, an oversimplification, and it is probably simply false. That Otto's ideas do not make for good Religionswissenschaft by today's standards and that he is a typical representative of German Irrationalism during the Weimar period are two rather different claims which need to be kept distinct. There may be a number of good arguments that can be brought to bear in support of the first claim. The second, however, cannot be maintained without misrepresenting the nature of Otto's position in relation to his contemporaries. Ultimately, to identify the tenor of Otto's thought with that of figures like Klages and Spengler is to drastically misconstrue the nature of his concerns, and to make unintelligible the enduring appeal of Das Heilige. The essays on ethics published by Otto during the last decade of his life, considered together with his unpublished lecture notes on ethics and Glaubenslehre, while they do not fundamentally alter the picture of Otto that one might get from reading Das Heilige alone, do tend to complete that picture. Furthermore, the development of Otto's views after Das Heilige has some implications for the interpretation of his earlier, more familiar analysis of the holy. Jack Stewart Boozer, the editor of Otto's Aufsätze zur Ethik, writes in his introduction that Despite a few isolated passages that are capable of being interpreted to the contrary, Otto was from the beginning fundamentally of the opinion that the holy is a complex value-category, which includes, next to the numinous, the rational, the ethical and the aesthetic moment. Even if this position were not unambiguously clear in Das Heilige, it shows itself quite clearly in the [later] essays. 28 M

Flasche, "Der Irrationalismus in der Religionswissenschaft," p. 245. Boozer, Introduction to Otto's Aufsätze zur Ethik, p. 13.

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The fact that the centrality of the concept of value emerges more clearly in Otto's later work is an indication that his ideas continued to develop in response to broader debates being pursued in Germany during this period. Already in Das Heilige, however, Otto had conceived the holy as a "complex category," and he defined the numinous as a "category of interpretation and valuation." In 1923, Otto explicitly affirmed Rickert's assessment of Das Heilige as a "contribution to the philosophy of religion as science of value."30 These factors, together with later revisions of Das Heilige reflecting the subsequent development of his thinking, suggest that Das Heilige ultimately needs to be understood in relation to other discussions of the concept of value, including its role in the cultural sciences, the possibility of a value-free social science, the crisis of values resulting from historicism and the "death of God," as well as various attempts to develop philosophical and theological responses to this crisis. Although the concept of value is more fully developed in Otto's later writings, and acquires in the process a significance that is not yet explicit in Das Heilige itself, Otto clearly came to understand Das Heilige in light of the doctrine of value described in the earlier sections of this chapter. In the 1917 edition of Das Heilige, in the chapter entitled "The Sanctum as Numinous Value," Otto had argued that the characteristic sense of devaluation of the self in the presence of the numen corresponds to the recognition of a supreme religious value (the augustum) in the religious object. In the later editions of Das Heilige, Otto describes the augustum as "an objective value, and at the same time an absolutely unparalleled, an infinite value. It is the numinous value, the irrational primeval ground and origin of all possible objective values in general" (DH 67). 31 For an elucidation of the distinction between objective and subjective values, Otto refers his readers to the essay, "Wert, Würde, und Recht" (DH 69). The later essays on ethics confirm that Otto was deeply concerned with the relationship between ethics and religion, and that the task of developing a theological ethics consistent with the views expressed in Das Heilige occupied his attention for several years. They help to offset the possible impression that Otto had excluded ethics from the essence of religion. If, as Feigel had claimed, the numinous fails as a criterion for distinguishing between God and the Devil, Otto's later conception of God as the source of all values does at least appear to allow for such a distinction. Clearly the charge of immoralism is not applicable to Otto. Is he thereby spared from the charge of irrationalism as well? 30 Cf. Otto's foreward to Aufsätze das Numinose betreffend. In the 15th ed. of Das Heilige (Gotha: Klotz, 1926), the last sentence reads: "It is the numinous value, to which there corresponds on the side of the creature a numinous unvalue (Unwert)."

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In the last piece of writing prior to his death in 1937, Otto reaffirmed that the holy is "a designation from the axiological sphere" (AWT 223). He also reaffirmed his contention that the bearer of this absolute value "remains completely irrational . . . behind a wreath of rational terms . . . This irrationality simply belongs to its essence" (AWT 223). In the final edition of Das Heilige, Otto speaks of the value of the numinous as "a purely ¡national value . . . above all rational value" (DH 68). But if the numinous value is the source of all values, and if it is itself "purely irrational," then it must follow that the source of all rational values is irrational. It is not immediately apparent how this can be thought of as an improvement upon Otto's earlier position. In the original edition of Das Heilige, Otto had maintained that both the rational and the irrational dimensions of the holy constitute independent and irreducible moments of a single "complex category." He appears now to want to collapse the former into the latter, although it remains unclear how the rational values are supposed to arise from their irrational source. It also remains unclear whether it makes sense to speak of an absolute value without having to invoke an absolute being who is the bearer of this value. And this seems to require a return to the kind of "onto-theology" criticized by Heidegger and a number of subsequent thinkers. Insofar as Otto explicitly regards the source of all value in the world, and of the being of the world itself, as irrational, the term "irrationalist" is not an entirely inappropriate designation of his theological position. Having said this, however, it must be emphasized that what separates Otto from his irrationalist contemporaries is at least as important as what they share in common. During the years leading up to and immediately following the First World War in Germany, the concept of value and the "crisis of values" were widely discussed, both inside and outside the university. The advent of this crisis did not coincide with the War. The "devaluation" of the highest values had already been announced by Nietzsche several decades earlier. It is debatable whether Nietzsche's aim was to introduce a new "table of values" {Werttafel). Nevertheless, for many of Otto's contemporaries, the First World War appeared to validate Nietzsche's prognosis, and, in its aftermath, his ideas inspired a number of attempts to identify a new standard of value, immanent within life itself, independent from, and generally opposed to, the traditional location of the source of value in a transcendent region. The term "life," as it is employed by representatives of this trend, has a decidedly antitranscendental connotation. What distinguishes Otto's views from the representatives of this trend is the fundamentally different meaning that he attaches to the terms he shares in common with them. Certainly, Otto too is interested in "life." And he is aware that "Whoever says 'life' says at the same time something irrational." 32 Ultimately, however, the life with which Otto is concerned is neither the life

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that struggles to overcome itself, nor is it the will to power. "Life," for Otto, refers to "something more and other than life in the sense of natural existence." 33 The vitality that concerns Otto is spiritual vitality, and the life in which he is interested is the life of the spirit {pneuma). In his characterization of the prophetic personality, Otto clearly has in mind Nietzsche's interpretation of saintliness and asceticism as a renunciation of vital impulses founded upon an underlying hatred of the conditions of life, and therefore life itself. Otto argues that the caricature of the religious life (vita religiosa) as being "stuffy, spineless, a sign of unmanliness, lack of vitality, plebian instinct, as ressentiment of the slave-soul," etc. is founded upon a grievous misunderstanding (SU 73). Prophetic personalities like Isaiah and Jesus, in whom the nature of religion is most clearly recognizable, Otto argues, are anything but spineless and emasculated. In fact, as mentioned earlier, Otto's characterization of the numinous personality bears a certain resemblance to Nietzsche's description of the Dionysian character. Whereas Nietzsche had extolled the will to power in response to the Christian ideal of self-renunciation, Otto emphasizes that the experience of ruach or pneuma that is characteristic of the encounter with the "living God" of the Bible is itself the experience of an ever-increasing "intensification of creative power" (SU 65). And the God from whom this power flows forth is defined by Otto as the will to the realization of the highest values - a definition that is clearly intended to ring a Nietzschian bell. Of course, Otto does not mean to suggest that this is the same will to power extolled by Nietzsche, and yet, it is difficult to avoid the impression that, in his own subdued fashion, Otto seeks to enlist Nietzsche's "new pathos" (Zweig) in his own defense of "living religion." Like Scheler, Otto rejects the identification of Christianity with nineteenth-century bourgeois morality, and seeks to recover a vital, passionate, inspired dimension of religious experience that had been neglected or forgotten in the course of the modern development of Christianity. Thus, Otto appropriates certain tendencies of his contemporaries, while at the same time subverting them in order to make them serve his own apologetic aims. Whereas for Klages, life and spirit are mutually irreconcilable, antagonistic principles, in Otto's thought they are ultimately the same: "Only the 'living God' has 'the' life. And He 'is' the life itself. . . . However, God bestows this life with His 'spirit.' And this participatio, this gaining of participation

32 Rudolf Otto, West-östliche Mystik: Vergleich und Unterscheidung 2nd ed. (Gotha: Klotz, 1929), p. 249. Otto, Aufsätze das Numinose betreffend, p. 144.

zur

Wesensdeutung,

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(.Anteilgewinnen) in the spirit of God and in the 'life,' is participation (Anteilhaben) in the divine itself.34 A similar observation can be made with regard to Otto's discussion of spirit (Geist), in which he distinguishes the three essential moments of reason, will and Gemüt. In a sense, it is accurate to say that Otto participates in the criticism of rationalism that is characteristic of this period. For Otto, however, what this criticism calls for is not a rejection of spirit in the name of life or soul, but rather the recovery of a broader conception of spirit than the one that had come to predominate within the modern scientific conception of rationality and its technical application. In identifying Gemüt as the faculty for the cognition of objective values, Otto hearkens back to the archaic meaning of this term in the German mystical tradition. In that tradition, before a strict distinction had been drawn between thinking, the understanding and reason, on the one hand, and the heart, soul and sentiment, on the other, the term Gemüt, as a synonym for (or else in conjunction with) spirit (Geist), was used to designate "the entire inner world of man," including mental representations (Vorstellungen) and ideas.35 Only after the Enlightenment does Gemüt take on a subjective connotation (in contrast to empirical observation and discursive reasoning) and later come to be associated with sentimentality. The fact that Otto's discussion of Gemüt hearkens back to Eckhart and Böhme, and not to Nietzsche, is an indication that the motivation for his own criticism of philosophical rationalism is significantly different from those of thinkers like Klages and Spengler, despite their superficial affinity. Clearly, the development of Otto's views after the publication of Das Heilige attests to the theological motivation underlying that work, as well as the theological significance attached by Otto to the central ideas contained in it. Those who regard Otto's discussion of the numinous as having exercised a negative influence upon the study of religion may find their suspicions confirmed by these facts. Be that as it may, the tremendous success of Otto's book is an event of considerable importance, not only in the history of the study of religion, but ultimately in the modern history of religion itself. The understanding of that event, like historical understanding in general, is facilitated by the attempt to exclude as far as possible presuppositions that prevent the historical phenomena from speaking for themselves. In the present case, such presuppositions only hinder our effort to determine what

14 " Otto, West-östliche Mystik, p. 241. P. Lasslop, "Gemüt," Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. III, ed. by Joachim Ritter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), p. 258.

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the tremendous resonance of Otto's discussion of the holy may have to teach us about the nature of religious subjectivity in the twentieth century.

Chapter Seven Das Heilige and the Religious Ambivalence of Modernity

I. Otto's Diagnosis of the Modern Religious Situation Das Heilige is by all accounts one of the most widely read books about religion written in the twentieth century. Whatever one may think of its scholarly merit, by virtue of the longevity and scope of its influence alone it qualifies as a religious classic in a century that produced few of these. As Lynn Poland has observed, "Das Heilige has from the outset survived its critics." The peculiar power of Otto's book, she goes on to suggest, "lies in part in its curious doubleness: the work is not only about religion; it is also, willy-nilly, religious writing." 1 For a number of Otto's detractors, the doubleness identified by Poland is attributable to an intentional obfuscation. Otto's analysis of the numinous, according to this line of thought, is "classic" only insofar as it is a classic example of theological subterfuge intended to protect religion from the discomforting intrusion of impartial scrutiny. Accordingly, these critics tend to regard Otto as a competing theorist, or at least a rhetorical antagonist, whose views call for a refutation or debunking of some kind. For them, the vacuity of the numinous as a category of analysis must be exposed and its mystifying influence dispelled so that the scientific study of religion may proceed without further interference from theologians. For the aspiring "scientist" of religion, the fact that Das Heilige is religious writing may be sufficient to warrant its disqualification from further consideration. For the historian of religions, however, and for the student of modern culture, the recognition of Das Heilige as a modern religious classic is a significant fact in its own right. In this chapter, I will attempt to develop an alternative to the kind of interpretation of Das Heilige described above. This attempt proceeds from the following consideration. If we choose to regard Otto's book as a historical document, recognizing its unparalleled success as a significant event in the religious history of the twentieth century - if, moreover, we are no longer distracted by the need to refute Otto - then it may be possible to explore other interpretive options. Rather than either condemning Otto on the basis of his failure to conform to a scientific agenda 1

Poland, "The Idea of the Holy and the History of the Sublime," p. 175.

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that was clearly not his own, or attempting to defend him against his naturalistic critics, it might be more interesting to inquire into the kinds of religious concerns that come to expression in Das Heilige. The interpretation of Das Heilige developed in the following pages will aim to show that the popularity of Otto's book is at least partially due to the fact that Otto succeeded in articulating widespread religious impulses that are important for understanding the religious situation during this period. If only inadvertently, Otto's book has something to teach us about the nature of religious consciousness in the twentieth century. In fact, by virtue of its widespread and enduring popularity, Das Heilige itself may be regarded as a paradigmatic expression of that consciousness. By approaching Das Heilige in this light, it will be possible to recognize how Otto's book reproduces themes that are characteristic of other texts commonly regarded as classical expressions or diagnoses of modernity and its discontents. In order to develop an interpretation of Das Heilige along these lines, we need first to examine the idea of modernity as it is constructed both explicitly and implicitly in Otto's work. There is an amusing story told about Ernst Troeltsch that runs as follows. In 1896, at a meeting of the "Friends of the Christliche Welt" - a periodical committed to stemming the tide of secularization among the educated classes in Germany by providing a forum for the discussion of theological and cultural issues from a liberal Protestant perspective - after Julius Kaftan, a respected member of the older generation of Ritschlian theologians, had delivered a rather dry lecture on the doctrine of the Logos, a young Troeltsch assumed the podium and opened his address with the following words: "Gentlemen, everything is tottering." 2 Troeltsch then proceeded to outline the obstacles that Protestant theologians would have to overcome if they were to articulate a statement of the Christian faith that was consistent with the modern worldview. Troeltsch's remarks were not warmly received by the more theologically conservative members of the audience, and after one of them referred to his as a "horrid theology," Troeltsch stormed out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him. By this time, Troeltsch had become the unofficial spokesperson for a new generation of theologians who recognized the need for a theological method that would be "modern," wissenschaftlich and "historical," in contrast to the antiquated, unwissenschaftlich, and "dogmatic" method to which they were opposed, and which seemed to them to be hopelessly anachronistic. What distinguished these younger theologians from their older contemporaries was the conviction that they were living in a changed world - that the intellectual and social conditions of modernity called for a fundamental re-conception of the nature and task of theology. If theology were to continue to be taken 2

"Meine Herren, es wackelt alles." Cf. Drescher, Ernst Troeltsch, pp. 144-51.

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seriously in this new historical context, it would have to accommodate itself to the same metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions operative in other disciplines. And if Christianity were to continue to play a vital role in the development of Western culture, it would have to adapt itself to new social conditions. In the opening chapters of this study, I sought to locate the development of Otto's program for a normative science of religion in the context of the theological impasse diagnosed by Troeltsch in a number of influential essays published around the turn of the century. Unlike Troeltsch, who devoted several hundred pages to analyses of the origins of modernity in European history, Otto does not pursue in any of his published works a sustained discussion of modern culture or the challenges that it presents to Christianity. Nevertheless, that the obstacles confronting the religious worldview in the modern age were a consistent source of motivation for Otto, and a concern that underlies his entire theological enterprise, is clearly evident from remarks scattered throughout his published and unpublished writings. Otto's most explicit assessment of "the modern religious situation" (die moderne Lage der Religion) is to be found in his lecture notes on dogmatics (