OTTO, RUDOLF. - Protestant theologian and philosopher of religion, b. at Peine (Hanover) on 25 Sept. 1869, d. at Marburg on 7 March 1937. Privatdozent (1897), then extraordinary professor of systematic theology at Göttingen (1904), ordinary professor at Breslau from 1915, then at Marburg from 1917, and emeritus from 1929.
A long stay in the East (India, China and Japan) in contact with the masters of Oriental thought allowed him to trace, at the end of his investigation into mysticism, a great diptych of the two types of mysticism, the Western and the Eastern, studied respectively in the work of Master Eckhart (d. 1237) and of Sankara (ca. 88 A.D.), first presented in lectures given at Oberlin College (Ohio) and then collected in a volume (Westöstliche Mystik, Gotha 1926; French trans., Paris 1951).
The core of his thought on the essence of religious feeling is set out in the volume Das Heilige (1st ed., Breslau 1917, immediately followed by very many others and by translations into English, Swedish, Spanish, French, Japanese and Italian [Il sacro by E. Buonaiuti]). The book analyses the essence of religious feeling, which is not merely a feeling of dependence on the Supreme Being, as Schleiermacher held, but, according to O., the effect of the immediate intuition of "a something" that objectively exists outside us and that he defines as irrational, not because it is contrary to reason, but because it is ungraspable by reason, as a primary datum of consciousness. The object of this feeling is defined by him as "numinous," from numen, a word that in the sacred language of the Romans expresses the will, that is, the power of the divinity which for primitive peoples dominates all individual and social life and gives efficacy to their action. The numinous arouses in man first of all a feeling of terror (tremendum), in which lies the trembling of its lofty power (*maiestas**) which demands from the creature respect and obedience; a respect that on the one hand can go as far as self-annihilation and on the other can arouse in the individual a surge of energy as at the contact of something living (energicum). All this exercises on the individual a special fascination (fascinosum), a source of joy and beatitude for whoever experiences it. Before the numinous, which can reach such a height as to appear august (augustum), the creature feels its absolute inferiority, which suggests to it the desire to atone and to suffer in order to be able to bridge the abyss that separates it from the divine and to come into contact with it.
These movements or aspects of the numinous (tremendous, majestic, energetic, fascinating, august) manifest themselves not at the same time, but gradually, according to the evolution of the spirit; and, apart from the originality of the terms and the concatenation of the concepts, they had already been studied by able psychologists of religion. O. has the merit of having brought well into light that the numinous springs from the deepest roots of our spiritual being, prescinding from the historical and ritual formations of the various religions; and that "the idea of God is not a projection of our ego but something wholly other." He agrees in admitting that this feeling is from the very beginning associated with rational ideas, and he admits that the development of religion consists in the association of the numinous with the rational, so as to avoid respectively the two reefs of fanaticism and of rationalism. But one may observe to him that the numinous not only sinks autonomous roots in our ego, but is also at bottom a mode of knowledge, lacking which there would be lacking in us an objective evaluation of religion itself; so true is this that for O. it is the rational element that determines the superiority of a religion.
Other works: Dipikā des Nīcāsa. Eine indische Reillehre, Tübingen 1916; Vischna Narayana. Texte zur indischen Göttermystik, 2nd ed., Jena 1923; Siddhanta des Ramanuja. Ein Text zur indischen Gottesmystik, 3rd ed., Tübingen 1923; Aufsätze das Numinose betreffend, Gotha 1923; Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das Christentum, ibid. 1930; Gottheit und Gottheiten der Arier, Giessen 1932.