OTTO, RUDOLF. - Protestant theologian and philosopher of religion, born at Peine (Hannover) on 25 Sept. 1869, died 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 sojourn in the Orient (India, China and Japan) in contact with the masters of Eastern thought enabled him, at the end of his investigation into mysticism, to trace a great diptych of the two types of mysticism, Western and Eastern, studied respectively in the work of Meister Eckhart (d. 1237) and of Śaṅkara (c. 88 CE), first presented in lectures delivered at Oberlin College (Ohio) and later collected in a volume (West-östliche Mystik, Gotha 1926; French trans., Paris 1951).
The core of his thought on the essence of the religious sentiment is set forth in the volume Das Heilige (1st ed., Breslau 1917, followed immediately by many others and by translations into English, Swedish, Spanish, French, Japanese and Italian [Il sacro by E. Buonaiuti]). The book analyses the essence of the religious sentiment, which is not merely a feeling of dependence upon the Supreme Being, as Schleiermacher held, but, according to O., the effect of the immediate intuition of something that objectively exists outside ourselves and which he defines as irrational, not because it is contrary to reason, but because it is beyond the grasp of reason, as a primary datum of consciousness. The object of this sentiment he defines as “numinous” from numen, a term which in the sacred language of the Romans expresses the will, i.e., the force of the divinity which, for primitives, dominates all individual and social life and gives efficacy to their actions. The numinous first arouses in man a feeling of terror (tremendum), in which is the shudder at its mighty power (maiestas) which demands from the creature respect and obedience; respect which on the one hand can reach the point of self-annihilation and on the other can stir in the individual an impulse of energy as though in contact with a living thing (energicum). All this exerts a special fascination (fascinosum) upon the individual, a source of joy and beatitude for whoever experiences II. Before the numinous, which can rise to such heights as to appear august (augustum), the creature feels its absolute inferiority, which suggests the desire to atone and to suffer in order to bridge the abyss that separates it from the divine and to come into contact with II. These movements or aspects of the numinous (tremendum, majestas, energicum, fascinosum, augustum) 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 have already been studied by eminent psychologists of religion. O. deserves credit for having clearly shown that the numinous springs from the deepest roots of our spiritual being, apart 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 totally other.” He agrees in admitting that this sentiment is from the outset associated with rational ideas and admits that the development of religion consists in the association of the numinous with the rational, so as to avoid the two pitfalls of fanaticism and rationalism respectively. Yet it may be observed that the numinous not only deeply roots itself autonomously in our ego, but is in the end itself a mode of knowledge, the lack of which would deprive us of an objective evaluation of religion itself; so much so that for O. it is the rational element that determines the superiority of a religion.
Other works: Dipika des Nivasa. Eine indische Heilslehre, Tübingen 1916; Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa. Texte zur indischen Göttermystik, 2nd ed., Jena 1923; Siddhānta des Rāmānuja. Ein Text zur indischen Gottesmystik, 3rd ed., Tübingen 1923; Aufsätze das Numinose betreffend, Gotha 1923; Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das Christentum, 1930; Gottheit und Gottheiten der Arier, Giessen 1932.