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Numinous Experience and Religious Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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The purpose of this article is to evaluate Rudolf Otto's account of the relationship between numinous experience and religious language in The Idea of the Holy, and this will inevitably also involve some more general discussion of the relationship between all religious experience and discursive reason. In The Idea of the Holy Otto makes a number of controversial claims about the nature of numinous experience and the problems which it creates for anyone wishing to speak about it. Numinous experience, Otto asserts, is qualitatively quite unlike any other experience. It is a religious feeling providing a unique form of religious knowledge inaccessible to our ordinary rational understanding. It is frequently spoken of as ineffable. Moreover because it resists literal description, it must be approached, if at all, then indirectly through analogy. At the heart of this collection of claims about numinous experience is an epistemological assumption about the distance separating religious language and experience. Otto believes that the parameters of numinous experience extend beyond the parameters of religious language, and consequently that it is possible to compare religious experience with language about it in a straightforward way. Indeed, much of The Idea of the Holy is devoted to the struggle of religious experience to cast off what Otto sees as its imprisonment by inadequate religious language.
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References
1 Otto, R., The Idea of the Holy (Second English Edition – Oxford University Press (Galaxy Books, 1958)), p. 135.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., pp. 4, 7, 10, 13, 30, 59, 63, 184–185.
3 Ibid., pp. 12, 34, 35, 77, 107–108, 184.
4 Katz, S. T., ‘Language, Epistemology and Mysticism’, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (London, 1978), ed. Katz, S. T..Google Scholar
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7 What Otto means by the law of the association of analogous feelings is that analogous feelings may excite or stimulate one another. If a non-religious feeling sufficiently resembles a numinous experience, it may arouse it in the mind. The law of reproduction of similar feelings is such that there is an imperceptibly gradual substitution of the non-religious feeling by its like, the numinous or religious feeling, the former dying away as the latter intensifies in corresponding degree.
8 R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, chapters IV, V, VI.
9 By the evocative character of religious language in The Idea of the Holy I mean that the process of speaking of analogies for numinous experience can arouse concrete numinous feelings through what Otto calls the law of association of analogous feelings. (See note 7 above). This is one of the most important functions of Otto's analogical language about numinous experience in The Idea of the Holy. For further extensive discussion of this claim, see my unpublished Ph.D thesis, Rudolf Otto's Theory of Religious Experience in The Idea of the Holy: A Study in the Phenomenology and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
10 See Schleiermacher's On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (New York, 1958), trans. J. Oman.Google Scholar
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16 Which Otto in Mysticism, East and West (Appendix III) explicitly identifies with Ahndung. For further discussion of extravertive mysticism (what Otto called in the above mentioned study ‘the mysticism of unifying vision’), see in particular Stace, W. T., Mysticism and Philosophy (London, 1960)Google Scholar and Wainwright, W. J., Mysticism (Brighton, 1981).Google Scholar
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21 See, for example, Wainwright, W. J., Mysticism (Brighton, 1981)Google Scholar; King, S. B., ‘Epistemological Models for the Interpretation of Mysticism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LV1/2 (Summer 1988)Google Scholar; Forman, R. K. C., ‘Mysticism, Constructivism and Forgetting’, The Problem of Pure Consciousness (New York, 1990), ed. Forman, R. K. C.Google Scholar; Rothberg, D., ‘Contemporary Epistemology and the Study of Mysticism’, The Problem of Pure Consciousness, ed. R. K. C. FormanGoogle Scholar; Perovich, A., ‘Mysticism and the Philosophy of Science’, Journal of Religion 65 (1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horne, J. R., ‘Pure Mysticism and Twofold Typologies, The Typology of Mysticism – James to Katz’, The Scottish Journal of Religious Studies, vol. III, No. 1 (Spring 1982).Google Scholar
22 Katz, S. T., ‘Language, Epistemology and Mysticism’, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. S. T. Katz, p. 26.Google Scholar
23 Ibid., p. 26.
24 R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 113.
25 Katz, S. T. ‘Language Epistemology and Mysticism’, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. S. T. Katz, pp. 26–27.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., pp. 58–59.
27 Ibid., p. 57.
28 Ibid., p. 59.
29 Ibid., p. 62.
30 Ibid., pp. 46–47.
31 Ibid., p. 47.
32 Ibid., pp. 54–55.
33 Ibid., p. 48.
34 Ibid., p. 40
35 P. van Buren, The Edges of Language, pp. 66–67 & 104.
36 Ibid., pp. 62–63.
37 Ibid., pp. 83–85 & 110–113.
38 Ibid., p. 56.
39 Ibid., pp. 81–82.
40 Ibid., pp. 82–83.
41 Bambrough, R., ‘Intuition and the Inexpressible’, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis ed. S. T. Katz.Google Scholar
42 Ibid., p. 206.
43 Ibid., p. 208.
44 Ibid., p. 212.
45 Ibid., pp. 210–211.
46 Kellenberger, J., ‘The Ineffabilities of Mysticism’, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4 (October, 1979), p. 312.Google Scholar
47 See, for example, Forman, R. K. C., ‘Mysticism, Constructivism and Forgetting’, The Problem of Pure Consciousness, ed. R. K. C. Forman, pp. 30–43.Google Scholar
48 See, for example, Sprung, M., ‘Non-cognitive Language in Madhyamika Buddhism’, Language in Indian Philosophy and Religion (Waterloo, Ontario, 1978), ed. Coward, H. G., pp. 43–54Google Scholar
49 We shall return to this issue when considering Katz's discussion of mystical language.
50 See p. 191, as well as ‘The “Wholly Other” in Religious History and Theology’, Religious Essays, A Supplement to ‘The Idea of the Holy’ (London, 1931), trans. B. Lunn, pp. 78–94.Google Scholar
51 P. van Buren, The Edges of Language, pp. 65–66.
52 R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 26.
53 Ibid., p. 28.
54 Although even here some qualification is necessary, since, contrary to Bambrough, these statements about the mysterium moment of numinous experience are not unqualified ineffability claims. This is because in spite of their undeniably predominantly negative tone, Otto still speaks positively of the mysterium as ‘unusual’, ‘filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment’ and as causing us to ‘recoil in a wonder which strikes us chill and numb’. Clearly, although very little is said about the nature of the mysterium moment of numinous experience, Otto's statements about it are not unintelligible.
55 W. J. Wainwright, Mysticism; King, S. B., ‘Epistemological Models for the Interpretation of Mysticism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LV1/2 (Summer 1988)Google Scholar; Forman, R. K. C., ‘Mysticism, Constructivism and Forgetting’, The Problem of Pure Consciousness, ed. R. K. C. Forman.Google Scholar
56 Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LV1/4 (Winter 1988).Google Scholar
57 For further consideration of this issue, see note 54.
58 Otto defines ‘ideograms’ as symbolic statements, which refer to a ‘unique content of (religious) feeling… to understand which, a man must already have had the experience himself’, The Idea of the Holy (p. 60); and he observes, for example, (p. 107) that ‘wrath’, ‘fire’ and ‘fury’ are excellent ‘ideograms’ for the non-rational element of awfulness in numinous experience, the tremendum.
59 I am much indebted in the following account to Sallie TeSelle's provocative work on the use of metaphor in theological discourse, which can be found in her Speaking in Parables (London, 1975).Google Scholar
60 For example, the idea of anger can only be properly understood as an analogy for the tremendum moment of numinous experience once one has had some direct acquaintance with such experience.
61 That numinous experiences are not always interpreted religiously has been frequently suggested. See, for example, Gaskin, J. C. A., The Quest for Eternity (Harmondsworth, 1982)Google Scholar; Hepburn, R., Christianity and Paradox (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Hay, D., Exploring Inner Space (Harmondsworth, 1982).Google Scholar
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