THE NUMINOUS AS a CATEGORY of VALUES in 1932, Rudolf Otto Built on the Argument of His Idea of the Holy1 and Ad
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CHAPTER SIX THE NUMINOUS AS A CATEGORY OF VALUES In 1932, Rudolf Otto built on the argument of his Idea of the Holy1 and ad vanced the claim that the sensus numinus constitutes "the historical basis of religion."2 His contention that the numinous may be made the basis of a sub stantive definition of religion was widely endorsed by the phenomenological school of the history of religions (Religionswissenschaft). Otto's position was variously adopted, augmented, amended, and misappropriated; but it was not seriously challenged until 1970, when Hans Penner published an article entitled "Is Phenomenology a Method for the Study of Religion?"3 Claims about the numinous have since been one of the foci of the on-going method ological crisis in religious studies. This article will both defend and extend the position taken by Otto, that the phenomenology of the numinous provides the basis of a secular humanis tic approach to the history of religions. Otto's Phenomenology of the Holy Penner's paper drew attention to discrepancies between the philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Gerardus van der Leeuw's phenom enology of religion. Penner's major objections to the phenomenology of reli gion were nominalistic,4 but he also expressed the substantive concern that the phenomenological method is self-contradictory. If we take the widely quoted work of Rudolph [sic] Otto as our example, it does become clear that the sacred as such can never be known ... .if the sacred is in deed the religious reality, the religious a priori, the reality wholly other, an ob ject, or subject in-itself... , the study of religion is a contradiction in itself... .If then, a phenomenology of religion can be actualized, it would seem that the sa- 1 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational [1st German edition, 1917], 2nd ed., trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 13-28 2 Rudolf Otto, "The Sensus Numinis as the Historical Basis of Religion," Hibbert Joumal 30 (1932), 283-97, 415-30. 3 Hans H. Penner, "Is Phenomenology a Method for the Study of Religion?", Bucknell Review 18 (l 970), 29-54; idem, Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion (New York: Peter Lang, 1989). 4 Claas Jouco Bleeker, "Comparing the Religio-Historical and the Theological Method," The Rainbow: A Collection ofStudies in the Scienceof Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975); R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, 'Is There a "Phenomenology of Religion" in the Study of Religions?', Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 8/1 (1983), 55-60. THE NUMINOUS AS A CATEGORY OF VALUES 105 cred as a subject, or reality wholly other must be denied. Or, conversely, if the history of religions is grounded upon the sacred as in principle wholly other, be ing in-itself, then a phenomenology of religion becomes an impossibility.5 Penner's point is well taken. If, as van der Leeuw claimed,6 the sacred "can be approached only per viam negationis," there can be no phenomenol ogy of the sacred. What has not been recognized, what needs to be stressed, is, however, that van der Leeuw misread Otto, and Penner failed to revert to the original. To begin, it has not been adequately appreciated that Otto presented a du alistic classification of the numinous. His work took for granted the tradi tional metaphysical dualism of German Romanticism.7 His references to the fascinans as "the Dionysiac element"8 allude unmistakably to the symbolic significance that the Greek god had acquired in late German Romanticism, a generation prior to Otto. J. J. Bachofen had contrasted Apollonian and Dionysian principles in Greek religion;9 and Friedrich Nietzsche had re-inter preted Bachofen's principles for cross-cultural purposes as classes of reli gious experience and ideology. 10 Otto is misread when mysterium, tremendum, andfascinans are treated as three distinct items.11 Otto's phe nomenology is similarly misread when the numinous is reduced to a unity. 12 As a clergyman, Otto certainly maintained that God was both holy and one; but Otto's phenomenological writings as a historian of religion should not be confused with his philosophical theology. Whatever may be said of the numinous in the abstract, as a principle, as a nuomenological ding-an-sich, the numinous that Otto discussed phenomenologically pertained to two types of experience. 5 Penner, 36-8. 6 Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, 2 vols., trans. J.E. Turner with Hans H. Penner (1963; rpt. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1967), 681. 7 Cf. Dan Merkur, "Mythology into Metapsychology: Freud's Misappropriation of Romanti cism," The Psychoanalytic Study of Society 18, eds. L. Bryce Boyer, Ruth M. Boyer, & Stephen M. Sonnenberg (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1993), 345-60. 8 0110, Idea of the Holy, 31, 34. 9 J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 63-4. 1°Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1887] and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956). 11 Harold W. Turner, Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: A Guide For Students. Commentary on a Shortened Version (1974; rpt. Aberdeen: Aberdeen Peoples Press, 1979), 20; Willard Gor don Oxtoby, "Holy, Idea of The," The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan & London: Collier Macmillan, 1987), Vol. 6. 12 Robert F. Davidson, Rudolf Otto's Interpretation of Religion (Princeton: Princeton Univer sity Press, 1947); Erwin R. Goodenough, "Religionswissenschaft," Numen 6 (1959), 77-95; David Bastow, "Otto and Numinous Experience," Religious Studies 12 (1976), 159-176; Al mond. .