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The Idea of the Holy

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The Idea of the Holy m THE IDEA OF THE HOLY AN INQUIRY INTO THE NON-RATIONAL FACTOR IN THE IDEA OF THE DIVINE AND ITS RELATION TO THE RATIONAL AA BY RUDOLF OTTO PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF SIARBl RO TRANSLATED BY JOHN W. HARVEY PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT ARMSTRONG COLLEGE X EWCAST1.E-ON-TYN E REVISED WITH ADDITIONS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD ^ 3 / <- First Impression DEDICATED TO THEODOB VON HAKING Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil. Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefiihl verteuere, Ergriffen fiihlt er tief das Ungeheuere. CONTENTS PAGE FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR .... vii TRANSLATOR S PREFACE ix TRANSLATOR S NOTE TO THE THIRD IMPRESSION . xx CHAP. I. THE RATIONAL AND THE NON-RATIONAL . 1 II. NtJMEN AND THE NUMINOUS ... 5 III. THE ELEMENTS IN THE NUMINOUS Creature-Feeling 8 IV. MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM : THE ANALYSIS OF TREMENDUM . 12 1. The Element of Awefulness . 13 2. The Element of Overpoweringness . 20 3. The Element of Energy or Urgency . 23 V. THE ANALYSIS OF MYSTERIUM : 4. The Wholly Other .... 25 VI. 5. THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION . 31 VII. ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS . 42 The Law of the Association of FeelingsO 43 Schematization 46 VIII. THE HOLY AS A CATEGORY OF VALUE : Sin and Atonement 52 IX. MEANS OF EXPRESSION OF THE NUMINOUS: 1. Direct Means 62 2. Indirect Means ..... 64 3. Means by which the Numinous is ex pressed in Art 68 X. THE NUMINOUS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT . 74 XI. THE NUMINOUS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT . 85 XII. THE NUMINOUS IN LUTHER .... 97 XIII. THE Two PROCESSES OF DEVELOPMENT . 113 XIV. THE HOLY AS AN A PHI OKI CATEGORY. PART I 116 XV. ITS EARLIEST MANIFESTATIONS . 121 XVI. THE CRUDER PHASES . 136 vi CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE XVII. THE HOLY AS AN A PRIORI CATEGORY. PART II 140 XVIII. THE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE HOLY AND THE FACULTY OF DIVINATION . 147 XIX. DIVINATION IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY . 159 XX. DIVINATION IN CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY . 166 XXI. HISTORY AND THE A PRIORI IN BELIGION : SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION . .179 APPENDIXES : I. Chrysostom on the Inconceivable in God . 183 II. The Numinous in Poetry, Hymn, and Liturgy 191 III. Original Numinous Sounds .... 194 * IV. Spirit and Soul as Numinous Entities . 198 V. The Supra-Personal in the Numinous . 201 VI. The Mystical Element in Luther s Conception of Faith 209 VII. Signs Following 212 VIII. Silent Worship ... 216 IX. A Numinous Experience of John Ruskin . 221 X. The Expression of the Numinous in English 222 XI. The Mysterlum Tremendum in Robertson and Watts 226 XII. The Resurrection as a Spiritual Experience . 228 XIII. Religious Essays, A Supplement to The Idea of the Holy (O.U.P.) : table of contents . 235 INDEX 237 FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR IN this book I have ventured to write of that which may be called non-rational or supra-rational in the depths of the divine nature. I do not thereby want to promote in any way the tendency of our time towards an extravagant and fantastic irrationalism but rather to issue with it in its , join morbid form. The irrational is to-day a favourite theme of all who are too lazy to think or too ready to evade the arduous duty of clarifying their ideas and grounding their convictions on a basis of coherent thought. This book, recognizing the profound import of the non-rational for meta- physic, makes a serious attempt to analyse all the more exactly the feeling which remains where the concept fails, and to introduce a terminology which is not any the more loose or indeterminate for having necessarily to make use of symbols. Before I ventured upon this field of inquiry I spent many years of study upon the rational aspect of that supreme we call God and the results of are Reality , my work in contained my books, Naturalietische und religiose Welt- antacid Tr. Naturalism and and (Eng. Religion , London, 1907), Die Kant-friesisclie Religions-Philosophic. And I feel that no one ought to concern himself with the Numen ineflabile who has not already devoted assiduous and serious study to the Ratio aeterna . This foreword gives me a very welcome opportunity to express my thanks to the translator for his care, his remark able delicacy of interpretation, and for the valuable supple mentary pages he has added. An English critic has said that the translation is much better than the and to this original ; I have nothing to object. RUDOLF OTTO. MABBUBQ. TEANSLATOR S PREFACE THIS translation of Dr. Rudolf Otto s Das Heiliye has been made from the ninth German edition, but certain passages, mostly additions to the book in its first form, have been omitted with the concurrence of the author. The chief of these are certain of the appendixes, especially a long one upon and in Wundt s and some Myth Religion Volkerpsycltologie , citations in the text from German and other hymns and liturgies which, besides defying adequate translation, appeared to be of less interest to the English than to the German reader. On the other hand, I would refer the Englisho reader to the brief appendix (No. X) that I have ventured to add, in which I have noted some points relevant to the subject discussed in the book suggested by the usage of English words, and added one or two illustrative passages from English writers. My warmest thanks are due to the author, not only for the many corrections he has made in the text of the translation, the whole of which he read in manuscript, but more for his generous and patient encouragement, without which it would have been neither undertaken nor completed. My best thanks are also due to the readers of the Oxford University Press for many helpful suggestions and corrections in my English text. * * * In the six years since its first publication in 1917, Das lleilifje has already passed through ten editions. At a time when circumstances are as adverse to writers and purchasers of serious books as they have been for the last few years in Germany, this fact would alone suggest that the author s work has met a need in his own land and one who has genuine ; any followed the movement of religious thought abroad during this period is aware that the success of his book is much more x TRANSLATOR S PREFACE than a mere vogue, and that it is exerting no little influence upon religious thought in Germany and North Europe at the present time. It may be of interest to consider briefly where its chief significance may be found from the point of view of the English reader. One of the most unmistakable points of contrast between the thought of to-day and that of the later nineteenth century is the increased comprehensiveness and adequacy with which the study of religion is being pursued. Not only has the older, harder, more dogmatic tone on all sides given place to one more tolerant and sympathetic, but the study of religion has come to claim a much wider reference and to draw material from far more diverse sources than would at one time have been and the frontiers of the have been recognized ; subject enormously extended in consequence. Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, and the history and comparative study of religious forms and institutions, if they have at once modified and com plicated the problems of religious inquiry, have definitely increased the range of observations likely to throw light upon them. If we consider only the English-speaking countries, a future generation may perhaps judge that no writer did more to introduce or render more effective this new spirit in the study of religion than William James in his famous Gifford lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience, published just over twenty years ago (1902). In any case the title of that book might be taken as giving the chief characteristics of that spirit, the preoccupation with religion in all its manifold forms as a specific experience, rather than as either the vehicle of a system of dogma or metaphysics on the one hand or as simply the emotional heightening of morality on the other. This latter view is well represented by Matthew Arnold, himself in many respects a very typical child of his age; and Arnold s well- " known phrase that the true meaning of religion is morality " touched by emotion is a fair expression of the limita- TRANSLATOR S PREFACE xi tions and bias of the nineteenth-century mind. It suggests rational even when the fundamentally rational temper ( rationalism of an interested almost in attacking ) age wholly practice and conduct, which, rightly reacting against views tending to identify religion with creed and dogma, was content to correct them by one that practically reduced it to an ethic. l It has been justly noted that such an account leaves un answered the question, which to-day so obviously needs asking and wliich is in part the theme of this book, what sort of feelings or emotions it is by which morality is enkindled into religion. For to-day this almost purely rational and ethical approach to the study of religion has been abandoned. Modern in quiries into the nature of religious experience have indeed tended to overweight the opposite scale. Feeling has, perhaps, something more than come into its own. Instinct, emotion, intuition, the more obscure and the more subjective aspects of religious experience it is these that are to-day the main centre of interest. The vogue (perhaps now already declining) of M. Bergson s philosophy, in which instinct and intuition are put in fundamental contrast to, if not actually opposed to, rationality and the needs of practical life, has been one, but only one, of the influences making in this direction.
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