This book, first published in 1917, is rightly regarded as a classic of religious philosophy.
Otto's great contribution to Christianity was to assert the importance of a non-rational approach to the divine. Christianity, which is the most dogmatic and moralistic of the major world religions, needed the corrective. Otto created the word "numinous" to stand for the sense of a divine presence that operates beyond rational understanding. He also coined the term "mysterium tremendum" to connote the inchoate sense of awe and dread that humans feel in the presence of the divine. To him, both of these ideas were essential to a full expression of the religious spirit.
One reaction to this book over the years goes something like this: either you've been knocked off your horse like St Paul, in which case you already have a direct experience of the numinous, or you haven't. Why bother to analyze something that by its very nature can't be put into words? Here Otto makes a subtle but crucial distinction. He's not talking about a numinous feeling, but about a feeling of the numinous. In other words, the numinous exists out there, not inside us, so we can approach it as an object to be observed and, at least by analogy to the sensations it excites with us, described.
Otto didn't reject the rational, though. Without rationality, he says, we can't have belief, only feelings. In his view of religion, the rational and non-rational interpenetrate each other like the warp and woof of a fabric, which can't be separated without destroying the very garment it makes. He points out several times that fully understanding the non-rational conception of god deepens our rational religious ideas.
Otto was a Christian, and believed deeply in the superiority of Christianity as the highest synthesis of the rational and moral with a primal sense of awe. (Buddhists might differ.) Fortunately for his reputation as a religious philosopher he was much more than a Christian apologist: he was a close observer of human behavior and of religious practices around the world. If Otto had been born seventy five years later, he might have been Joseph Campbell. He traveled widely, and had a deep knowledge and appreciation of Asian, Arabic and Greek religious thought. He anticipated Campbell by demonstrating that a sense of spiritual awe and mystery is universal to all religions.
In his observations of how mankind divines the presence of the holy, Otto realized the importance of predispositions - a person must be both receptive to divine presence and capable of recognizing when it appears. In this he anticipates neural Darwinism, which also talks about our predisposition toward certain aspects of reality. For instance, we have evolved an ability to recognize sound patterns. This isn't music, but it allows us to hear a song and store it as such in our brain. Similarly, we are capable of conceiving of an overarching force that exists beyond our selves, and are capable of recognizing manifestations of it. This isn't religion, but it's the precursor to any truly religious feeling.
This book strikes sparks in almost every chapter, even the ones settling obscure doctrinal scores. It deserves the high regard in which it's held because Rudolf Otto is a remarkably good guide to the ineffable.
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This jumbled version is irritating to read
This seems to have been scanned in by a computer and never edited. The text should have punctuation, Greek, German, Latin, and other languages, and almost all of this turns into jumbled computer script. After the first chapter or two the random spaces and symbols make the wonderful but complicated ideas increasingly hard to understand because you can't read the words. Also, all the footnotes are missing.BUY A DIFFERENT VERSION!
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Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2013
Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2021
This seems to have been scanned in by a computer and never edited. The text should have punctuation, Greek, German, Latin, and other languages, and almost all of this turns into jumbled computer script. After the first chapter or two the random spaces and symbols make the wonderful but complicated ideas increasingly hard to understand because you can't read the words. Also, all the footnotes are missing.
BUY A DIFFERENT VERSION!
BUY A DIFFERENT VERSION!
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Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2012
Top reviews from other countries
Senani Ephrem
Beaucoup d'erreurs dans le livre
Reviewed in France on February 22, 2019
Milton Verskin
This is an excellent, well-written, and thought provoking book
Reviewed in Canada on August 16, 2013
