OTTO, RUDOLF. – Protestant theologian and philosopher of religion, born at Peine (Hannover) on 25 September 1869, died at Marburg on 7 March 1937. Privatdozent (1897), then extraordinary professor of systematic theology at Göttingen (1904), full professor at Breslau from 1915, thereafter 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, enabled him, at the end of his investigation of mysticism, to outline a great diptych of the two types of mysticism, Western and Eastern, studied respectively in the work of Master Eckart (d. in 1237) and Sankara (ca. 88 A.D.), first presented in lectures delivered at Oberlin College (Ohio) and then collected in a volume (Westöstliche Mystik, Gotha 1926; French translation, Paris 1951).
The core of his thought on the essence of religious feeling is set forth 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 analyzes the essence of religious feeling, which is not merely a feeling of dependence upon the Supreme Being, as Schleiermacher maintained, but, according to O., the effect of the immediate intuition of “something” that objectively exists outside us and that he defines as irrational, not because it is contrary to reason, but because it cannot be grasped by reason, as a primary datum of consciousness. He defines the object of this feeling 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 first of all arouses in man a feeling of terror (tremendum), in which there is the trembling before its high power (maie-
stas), which demands from the creature respect and obedience; respect which, on the one hand, may go as far as self-annihilation and, on the other, may arouse in the individual an impulse of energy, as at the contact of a living thing (energicum). All this exerts a special fascination upon the individual (fascinosum), a source of joy and bliss for whoever experiences II. Before the numinous, which may attain 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 place itself in a position to bridge the abyss separating it from the divine and to come into contact with II.
These movements or aspects of the numinous (terrible, majestic, energetic, fascinating, august) do not manifest themselves simultaneously 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 distinguished psychologists of religion. O. deserves credit for having clearly shown that the numinous springs from the deepest roots of our spiritual being, independently of 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 beginning associated with rational ideas and accepts that the development of religion consists in the association of the numinous with the rational, thereby avoiding respectively the two pitfalls of fanaticism and rationalism. But it may be observed that the numinous not only strikes autonomous roots in our ego, but is also, at bottom, a mode of knowledge, without which we would lack an objective evaluation of religion itself; indeed, for O., it is the rational element that determines the superiority of one 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.