The feeling of absolute dependence and creature-feeling

Otto's first set of criticisms includes those that claim that dependence is the wrong sort of notion to employ in delineating the type of feeling that is at the heart of religious consciousness. One can discern three strands to this complaint in Otto's text. The first concerns the fact that, according to Otto, by a feeling of dependence Schleiermacher means feeling oneself to be conditioned or caused (21).Footnote ¹ Otto objects that such a sense of causality finds no place in original – i.e. numinous – religious consciousness. Causality certainly finds a place in our developed concept of God according to Otto: God is, indeed, all-causing, or all-conditioning. This, however, is an aspect of the rational side of our idea of God. It is not to be found in the essentially non-rational numinous experience itself, which is where Otto is looking for the original, non-rational, indeed pre-rational, basis of religion:

This is not an impressive criticism of Schleiermacher's position. It is true that Schleiermacher asserts that ‘all the divine attributes to be dealt with in Christian Dogmatics must somehow go back to the divine causality, since they are only meant to explain the feeling of absolute dependence’ (§50.3).Footnote ² The fact, however, that, according to Schleiermacher, dogmatics, a discursive discipline that extrapolates from the nature of religious consciousness, should employ the notion of causality in no way suggests that Schleiermacher thought that an invocation of causality was an ingredient in religious consciousness itself. Indeed, it could hardly be such, since causality is a concept having its roots in the understanding, whereas the feeling of absolute dependence is, well, a feeling – or what Schleiermacher calls ‘immediate self-consciousness’. Schleiermacher, as much as Otto, is looking for the non-rational essence of religion; and, again like Otto, he locates it in feeling, not ‘cognition’. Both The Christian Faith and the earlier Speeches begin by dismissing cognition as the right ‘faculty’ to investigate, if religious consciousness is our concern. Dependence originally enters Schleiermacher's account only as a feeling of absolute dependence. We sense our dependence in immediate self-consciousness, a mode of consciousness that is for Schleiermacher, as we shall see shortly, non-objectifying and pre-conceptual.

This first criticism of Otto's is also intrinsically puzzling. The application of causality to God, we have just seen him claim, comes from ‘quite a different source’ from numinous experience. I take it that Otto means that it arises from the rational side of our nature, and is applied to God when numinous experience is, as he puts it, ‘schematized’ by rational concepts. However, unless the schematization in terms of causality is not simply inappropriate, it must be a schematization of something that is genuinely ingredient in numinous experience itself. What could this be? A sense of dependence is a natural suggestion.

This, however, brings us to the second aspect of Otto's first criticism. Otto suggests that an emphasis on divine causality, since this is essentially creative causality, would emphasize the being of the creature. What we find in religious experience, however, is rather a sense of our own nullity. ‘I am naught, Thou art all!’, he writes (21). Otto therefore wishes to replace Schleiermacher's sense of our createdness (Geschaffenheit) with the sense of our creaturehood (Geschöpflichkeit): a sense that he terms ‘creature-feeling’. ‘In the one case’, he writes, ‘you have the creature as the work of the divine creative act; in the other, impotence and in general nothingness as against overpowering might, dust and ashes as against “majesty”’ (21). What this element in numinous experience gives rise to in later speculative thought about God is the conception of God as a plenitude of being, and the ‘sole and entire reality’, and, correspondingly, a conception of ourselves as less than fully real, or even as being a nullity.Footnote ³

This adds to the puzzling character of the previous strand of criticism. For now it looks as if causality ought to be excluded even from a developed rational conception of God. Otto's ‘creature-feeling’ is the only thing in numinous experience that could plausibly serve as the non-rational basis for the application of the rational notion of causality; but now it appears that this sustains a notion of a plenitude of being rather than of causality. Moreover, Otto's treatment of such plenitude is intrinsically odd for two reasons.

First, when Otto refers to the kind of speculative thought that really does grow out of the numinous experience and brings forward the notion of divine plenitude, he always refers specifically to mysticism. The understanding of absolute being now in question is, indeed, ‘peculiar to and characteristic of mysticism’ (90). Mysticism is not, however, the only form of developed religious thinking about the divine; nor even the only form that Otto respects. Indeed, Otto himself points out certain distinctive and atypical features of mysticism as compared with more widespread, even central, forms of religious thought. For example, although the mysterium tremendum is at the heart of Otto's account of the numinous, the element of unapproachability that is usually an aspect of it can, he says, recede and even die away – as in mysticism, which is exceptional in this respect (20). Elsewhere Otto writes that mysticism leads to an ‘extreme point’, it involves ‘exaggerating to the point of paradox’ certain elements in religious consciousness (29). It is strange, therefore, for Otto to base a criticism of Schleiermacher on specifically mystical speculative modes of thinking, as if these were now the benchmark for religious thought in general.

The second oddity in Otto's criticism resides in the fact that, as Otto would surely have known, the contrast between being all-causing and being the plenitude of being on the part of God, and between being created and being a nullity on the part of creation, are not contrasts between necessarily exclusive conceptions. The contrasting conceptions would be exclusive if a certain understanding of causality were presupposed. If an effect were conceived as being distinct from its cause, having its own independent existence once brought into being, then Otto might have a telling point. But there is no good reason why divine causality should be conceived this way; traditionally it was not; and Schleiermacher himself certainly did not understand divine causality in this way. According to Schleiermacher, divine causality issues from a single, timeless act – or, rather, from the single pure activity that is divine being; and there is but a notional difference between creation and preservation (§§36–39). Creation is not, for Schleiermacher, the establishing of a realm of being independent of God, but rather a matter of God continually sustaining finite being in existence. Such an understanding of divine causality precisely emphasises the nothingness of creation independent of God. When Schleiermacher discusses the immediate deliverances of religious consciousness, he stresses, not our sense of createdness, as Otto suggests, but our finitude. He refers, for example, to ‘this feeling of absolute dependence, in which our self-consciousness in general represents the finitude of our being’ (§33); and elsewhere he asserts that ‘our fundamental feeling [sc. of absolute dependence] rests solely on the finiteness of being as such’ (§46, Postscript).

Ironically, Otto says essentially the same thing in connection with his own notion of creature-feeling: it, and not any feeling of createdness, he writes, is a ‘consciousness of the littleness of every creature in face of that which is above all creatures’ (22). Indeed, Otto himself relates the development of mystical approaches to the divine, which issue in the notion of a plenitude of divine being, to an original appreciation of the numen as an active cause (89–90). And when his sights are not on Schleiermacher, Otto employs the language of dependence. For example, when discussing a certain development within religion, he writes that ‘the feelings of dependence upon and beatitude in the numen, from being relative, become absolute’ (110).

Finally, what Schleiermacher emphasizes on the part of God as correlative to our experience of absolute dependence is not primarily His creative causality (though, as we have seen, this does develop in later dogmatic explication of the data of faith), but His absolute power (§52.1). I need hardly remind the reader how important such a sense of absolute power is in Otto's own account of numinous experience. Creature-feeling, for example, is described as a sense of our own nothingness ‘before an overpowering, absolute might’ (10). If power and might connote causality, Otto's criticism of Schleiermacher on this point applies to himself. The truth of the matter, however, is that it applies to neither, since both are concerned with a non-rational, pre-schematized sense of power or might.

It is, however, the third strand of this first general criticism of Schleiermacher on which Otto places most weight. Otto assumes – and Schleiermacher would agree – that religious consciousness presents us with a unique and unparalleled form of experience. The notion of a sense of dependence, Otto claims, fails to capture this. Dependence is all too common, and is a feature of natural experience. Schleiermacher attempts to avoid this objection, Otto recognizes, by emphasizing that the dependence that is in question in religious consciousness has an absolute character. This, however, is deemed to be inadequate by Otto, on the grounds that the difference between absolute and relative is one of degree (9), whereas what we require is something that marks out a difference in kind, or quality. If there were anything to this criticism, it would be one that in fact applies equally to Otto, since he himself freely employs the term ‘absolute’ to characterize numinous experiences. The overpowering might that constitutes the majestas of the numen is ‘absolute’ (10); the ‘fascination’ that the numen exercises upon the subject is ‘absolute’ (41, though ‘supreme’ is used in the English translation); and I have already quoted a passage in which feelings of dependence are said to ‘become absolute’ (110). In fact, however, there is nothing to Otto's complaint. The difference between what is absolute and what is not is not a matter of degree; and Schleiermacher himself makes it abundantly clear that he does not regard it as such. What distinguishes a feeling of absolute dependence from a feeling of relative dependence is that in the former there is no feeling of freedom at all, whereas there is always some element of freedom, however small, in every other sense of dependence. The difference between nothing and something, however small, is not a matter of degree. It is precisely because of its unique character that it is impossible, according to Schleiermacher, to have this feeling in relation to anything in the world, or, indeed, to the world as a whole (§4.4), but only to ‘God, as the absolute undivided unity’ (§32.2).

Although, as I have said, the feeling of absolute dependence originally gives us a sense of absolute power, rather than of causality, it is eventually reflectively articulated in terms of causality; and a qualitative difference between divine causality and any other is repeatedly affirmed by Schleiermacher. They are, he plainly says, different ‘in kind’, ‘entirely different’ (§52.1, §49.2; cf.§56.1). Indeed, he underscores the qualitative difference at length and in several complementary ways. Divine causality involves eternity, and Schleiermacher stresses that the difference between eternity and non-eternity is not merely quantitative (§52.1). The divine attributes of unity, simplicity, and infinity are also employed to express the radical difference between divine and natural causality: they ‘negate, if only in a pictorial way, the similarity of divine and finite causality’ (§56.1). Indeed, Schleiermacher implies that there is not even an analogy between divine and worldly causality: ‘The concept of the infinity of God is useful … as warding off analogy with finite causality’ (§53, Postscript). Schleiermacher refers to divine causality as ‘absolute causality’ (§51), doubtless with an eye on the feeling of ‘absolute dependence’ that alone can correlate with it.

It was clearly Schleiermacher's view that the qualitative difference between God and world – between the infinite and the finite, the timeless and the temporal, the simple and the complex, the unconditioned and the conditioned, the absolute and the relative – correlates with a qualitative difference in the sort of feeling of dependence that is possible in relation to each. Indeed, this must be the case for Schleiermacher, since it is feeling alone that can put us in relation to God. If the feeling were not qualitatively different from the relative feelings of dependence that we can have in relation to the world, it could not possibly put us relation to that which is qualitatively different from – ‘wholly other’ than – the world.

Primary and secondary religious feelings

Otto's second basic, and to my mind more interesting, criticism of Schleiermacher is wholly independent of the first. Suppose, as I have suggested is actually the case, that there is no significant difference between Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence and Otto's creature-feeling. Otto's second fundamental criticism is that such a feeling, whatever we call it, although indeed an element in, perhaps even an essential element in, numinous experience, is not, as Schleiermacher supposes, fundamental, but secondary to a more fundamental element in numinous experience. Creature-feeling is ‘a first concomitant and effect of another feeling-element, which casts it like a shadow, but which in itself indubitably has immediate and primary reference to an object outside the self’ (10). It is the experience of the numinous object that is primary; and the feeling of dependence, or creature-feeling, is a consequence of this. Otto writes,

Hence, according to Otto, Schleiermacher ‘takes as basis and point of departure what is merely a secondary effect’ (20). The chapter in which this criticism is voiced ends with the statement that ‘the numinous is thus felt as objective and outside the self’ (11).

This is presented, at least by implication, as a criticism of Schleiermacher: the suggestion is that the feeling Schleiermacher focuses on cannot itself embody the objective reference of numinous experience. The reason why Otto believes this is clear: the feeling of absolute dependence (like Otto's own feeling of creature-feeling) is primarily and fundamentally a form of self-consciousness: indeed, of self-valuation (10). In having such a feeling we are directed to ourselves rather than to any external object. Otto therefore suggests that for Schleiermacher we come across God only by virtue of an inference to a cause of our feeling: ‘According to Schleiermacher, I can only come across the very fact of God as the result of an inference, that is, by reasoning to a cause beyond myself to account for my “feeling of dependence”’ (10).

Before considering the merits of this criticism, I should perhaps clarify the claim on which it is based. Otto's claim is not that creature-feeling (or a feeling of absolute dependence) is a response to something else, whereas Schleiermacher claims that it is not. If this were the criticism, it would completely misfire, since Schleiermacher himself allows the feeling of absolute dependence to be secondary or responsive to other elements of consciousness. The feeling of absolute dependence never, according to Schleiermacher, exists as a self-contained feeling or emotion. It is always ‘united’ or ‘conjoined’ with some mode of ‘sensible’ or ‘lower’ self-consciousness – the self-consciousness that relates to what is of this world and that variably involves both a feeling of freedom and a feeling of dependence (§9.1). Only when these two ‘levels’ of self-consciousness unite do we have a ‘religious emotion’ (fromme Erregung) as an actual state of consciousness (§5.4). Significantly, Schleiermacher frequently speaks of the feeling of absolute dependence being ‘aroused’ by a state of sensible self-consciousness (e.g. §30.1, §46.2), and he states that its emergence in an actual moment of consciousness is ‘dependent on some other fact of consciousness’ (§62.1). Since a state of sensible self-consciousness will itself be aroused by some object in the world, this object itself can be seen as what arouses the feeling of absolute dependence, though only insofar as the subject responds to that object by ‘sensible’ feeling.

So, if Otto's complaint against Schleiermacher were simply that a feeling of dependence (or creaturehood) is a response, it would have little force, since Schleiermacher can simply accept it. What Schleiermacher cannot accept, however, is that such a feeling is a response to something that is independently religious in character. Religiousness in all its forms essentially involves the feeling of absolute dependence, according to Schleiermacher. Although this feeling can be aroused by a state of sensible consciousness, this latter is in no way itself religious in character. Such a character arises only when the feeling of absolute dependence is united with such a ‘secular’ feeling so as to produce a ‘religious emotion’. And this is, indeed, the basis of Otto's criticism: he claims that the feeling of absolute dependence (or creature-feeling) is a response to an object insofar as it is recognized as numinous. It is this suggestion that there may be something of an intrinsically religious character that is prior to the feeling of absolute dependence that is incompatible with Schleiermacher's account.

That said, let us turn to a consideration of Otto's criticism. The last part of the criticism – the claim that, according to Schleiermacher, we gain a relation to God, or the divine, through an inference – is, I trust it hardly needs saying, a serious misrepresentation of Schleiermacher's position.Footnote ⁴ The whole purport of his account of religious experience, from beginning to end, is that we relate to God through feeling, not cognition (or, as Otto suggests, ‘reason’). Although feelings, according to Schleiermacher, are modes of self-consciousness, they intrinsically and essentially give us a sense of something other than the self: ‘In every self-consciousness there are two elements …. The latter of these presupposes for every self-consciousness another factor besides the Ego, a factor which is source of the particular determination, and without which the self-consciousness would not be precisely what it is’ (§4.1). Feelings that are at least predominantly passive in character, of which the feeling of absolute dependence is of course one, are essentially feelings of ourselves as determined in a certain way by something other than ourselves: the ‘co-determinant’, as Schleiermacher sometimes calls it (e.g., §4.2). There is, he insists, an intrinsic dual directedness of such feeling: both to ourselves and to that which determines us. And yet, as if in response to a criticism such as Otto's, Schleiermacher stresses that ‘though, of course, the double constitution of self-consciousness causes us always to look objectively for an Other to which we can trace the origin of our particular state, yet this search is a separate act with which we are at present not concerned’ (§4.1). Indeed, in this same section Schleiermacher stresses that the ‘Other’ that is disclosed in feeling ‘is not objectively presented [gegenständlich vorgestellt] in the immediate self-consciousness with which alone we are here concerned’. The same is true of the subject. Although feelings are modes of self-consciousness, they – unlike reflective states that involve a ‘contemplation’ (Betrachtung) of the self – are not, and do not involve, objectifying acts that take the self as object. Joy and sorrow, for example, are pure feelings, whereas self-approval and self-reproach involve such an ‘objective consciousness of the self’ (§3.2). Feeling, Schleiermacher bluntly asserts, ‘is not a representation’ (Vorstellung) (§3.2).

This, indeed, is what Schleiermacher means by characterizing feeling as ‘immediate’ self-consciousness: it is not mediated by cognition (§3.2). An inference, however, would precisely involve the objective representation of the inferred object. In feeling, the ‘co-determinant’ is given in no other way than as such a determiner; and it is given by the feeling itself. Feeling is not, for Schleiermacher, as for so many others, something wholly inner that gets a reference to anything other than the self only through the offices of some ‘cognition’ to which it is harnessed. Schleiermacher is, indeed, to be credited with an appreciation of the intrinsic intentionality of feeling: something that we are more familiar with from the writings of the later phenomenological tradition – of which, in this respect, though not only in this respect, Schleiermacher should be seen as an important precursor.

It is true that the form of religious consciousness in which Schleiermacher is principally interested is what he calls ‘God-consciousness’, which involves more than feeling. Such consciousness essentially involves, in addition to feeling, an idea (Vorstellung) of God (§4.4). So it may be suggested that God-consciousness, at least, involves, in virtue of this idea or representation of God as the determinant of one's feeling of absolute dependence, an inference to an outside cause. Even this cannot be said, however. Schleiermacher makes it quite clear that this idea has no content whatever that is not derived from the feeling of absolute dependence itself. It is, he writes, ‘nothing more than the expression of the feeling of absolute dependence’. The idea is something over and above the feeling simply because it arises through reflection: it is ‘the most direct reflection upon’ the feeling (§4.4). The representation of God in God-consciousness is based on no inference, since the immediate feeling of which it is the ‘expression’ contains no such inference – nor, indeed, any representation. God-consciousness is simply this feeling, this non-objectifying mode of consciousness, made explicit, or, as Schleiermacher also says, ‘clear’ (§4.4).

Why did Otto so seriously misrepresent Schleiermacher on this point? It is certainly not that Otto held feeling as such to be a self-enclosed state without any reference to what is beyond the self. For Otto, as much as for Schleiermacher, it is feeling that directs us to, indeed gives us an awareness of, the divine (or the numinous). Although creature-feeling is, for Otto, a secondary response to a numinous object already given, what, as he puts it, ‘casts this shadow’ is ‘another feeling-element’ (10). For Otto, therefore, it is feeling that functions in a primary way to disclose an object as numinous. ‘The nature of the numinous,’ he clearly states, ‘can only be suggested by means of the special way in which it is reflected in the mind in terms of feeling. “Its nature is such that it grips or stirs the human mind with this or that determinate affective state”’ (12). Although the term ‘mysterium’ conceptually represents in a merely negative way, the reality that it denotes is ‘absolutely and intensely positive’, and ‘this pure positive we can only experience in feelings’ (13). Indeed, in the first edition of Das Heilige Otto characterizes the numinous as ‘nur ein Fühlbares’: something that can only be felt (56 n).Footnote ⁵ What, for Otto, most fundamentally discloses the numen as the mysterium tremendum are awe and stupor, which are certainly feelings, and are regarded as such by Otto.

It is, rather, that for Otto feelings come in two varieties, and one variety is what he calls ‘self-feeling’ (Selbstgefühl). In the German editions of his work, the sub-title of chapter 3, which deals with Otto's concept of creature-feeling – his supposedly improved version of Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence – characterizes that feeling as a reflex to a numinous object that occurs ‘in self-feeling’. A particularly instructive passage in this connection is one in the original edition of Das Heilige, but which was omitted from later editions (and hence from the English translation). Here Otto praises certain passages in Schleiermacher's Speeches for nicely indicating the character of numinous experience. In particular, he praises Schleiermacher for directing us to ‘wonderful, dreadful, mysterious emotions’, and for his use of terms such as ‘holy reverence’ and ‘pious awe’. Otto, however, immediately goes on to insist that such expressions, contrary to what Schleiermacher claims, have nothing to do with any sort of self-feeling, but with ‘the feeling of a real object outside the self’ (Das Heilige, 20n). Here we are clearly presented with a contrast between feelings that have the self as object and feelings that have ‘a real object outside the self’.

For Schleiermacher, however, all feelings, even those that concern some external object or situation, are modes of self-consciousness. And surely he is right on this point. Consider awe, for example, on which Otto himself places so much weight as disclosive of a numinous object. According to Otto, this feeling operates at the first, fundamental level in numinous experience. And yet, when we feel awe, we feel ourselves to be in awe. An object is doubtless disclosed to us in such an experience; but we also, and essentially, feel ourselves to be modified in the process. I cannot think that if the matter had been put to Otto in this way, he would have denied it. But if so, Otto must have something more than this in mind when he denotes a particular class of feelings as ‘self-feelings’. These feelings must concern the self in such a way that a disclosive function in relation to an external object is excluded. A feeling of absolute dependence is supposed to fall into this class. When Otto writes that Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence, in virtue a being a mode of self-feeling, is ‘merely a category of self-valuation, in the sense of self-depreciation’ (10), the ‘merely’ suggests that this is indeed his view.Footnote ⁶

In fact, however, the matter is not so straightforward, since Otto himself allows a disclosive function, in relation to the external numinous object, to the secondary feelings that are, according to him, self-feelings. A genuinely religious numinous object, for Otto, possesses an intrinsic value. It is, most fundamentally, augustus. Something appears as ‘august’, however, only on the basis of a feeling that is a secondary response to a numinous object, ‘like a direct reflex movement at the stimulation of the numinous’. This reflex is not Schleiermacher's feeling of dependence, nor even Otto's ‘creature-feeling’. It is, he says ‘another sort of self-disvaluation’ (50). It is a sense of one's profaneness (51). Like the first two, it is a response to something given, and it is a self-valuation. This one, however, is essential for the appreciation of the object itself as ‘august’, and therefore as properly numinous. Otto does not, in this connection, use language that suggests that the feeling of profaneness is itself a reflex to an object antecedently given or experienced as holy (or ‘august’): it is, he suggests, the feeling itself that so discloses the object. He writes of one who experiences profaneness that ‘at the same moment he passes upon the numen a judgement of appreciation of a unique kind by the category diametrically contrary to “the profane”, the category “holy”, which is proper to the numen alone’ (51, my emphasis).

Note the contrast with the passage cited earlier in which Otto describes the feeling of absolute dependence, or creature-feeling, as ‘following very closely upon’ an awareness of the numinous object. Here Otto seems to be viewing the value of the numen as but the reciprocal to the feeling of one's own profaneness. The latter is in no way presented as a reflex to a numinous object already regarded as possessing this unique value. Indeed, there seems to be nothing other than, and prior to, the feeling of profaneness in Otto's inventory of feelings that could possibly reveal the numen as augustus, and to which (or to the intentional object of which) the feeling of profaneness itself would be a secondary reaction. It is certainly not a reflex to the unapproachable and overwhelming power of tremenda majestas. The latter gives rise to creature-feeling, rather than a sense of profaneness. A sense of profaneness, as Otto plainly says, is not a response

It is this note of objective value that is new in ‘augustness’ – something that goes beyond the ‘fascinating’ character of the mysterium tremendum, since this, Otto tells us, concerns only the numen's subjective value (52). So, here in Otto's own account, we find a feeling that is both a self-valuation and yet at the same time disclosive of an object as having a certain character. Indeed, on phenomenological grounds it would be difficult to support any other view. It seems as true to say that that we find something to be holy because we feel profane in its presence as to say that we feel profane because we sense ourselves to be in presence of that which is holy.

This shows that Otto cannot base his opposition to Schleiermacher on the idea that a self-feeling can concern only oneself. So what was fuelling Otto's second basic criticism of Schleiermacher? It is significant that the example Otto gives of a feeling that discloses something both about an external object and about oneself specifically concerns a value characteristic of the numinous object. ‘Augustness’ relates to the value of the numen ‘rather than its being’ [Wesen], Otto states (52).Footnote ⁷ The ‘being’ of the numen itself would, therefore, have to be disclosed by some other, primary feeling. An obvious candidate would be awe (together, no doubt, with ‘stupor’). The ‘original’ object as disclosed through awe would simply be uncanny, unearthly, absolutely unapproachable and mysterious power, to which the value of ‘augustness’ attaches when and only when the subject reacts to such an object in terms of a sense of profaneness. Awe can have a primarily disclosive function because, although it is a feeling, and therefore a mode of self-consciousness, is not in Otto's narrower sense a ‘self-feeling’. Though a feeling, it is purely and simply outwardly directed. Or, if this is too strong, the subject enters into the picture only as an ‘awe-struck’ person. In particular, this feeling does not involve a ‘self-valuation’ – something that could at most relate to a value in the external object to which it is a response.

This does not, however, justify, or even explain, Otto's treating creature-feeling as a secondary reflex to a prior awareness of a numinous object. Perhaps the sort of value and disvalue that attach to ‘augustness’ and profaneness presuppose some prior appreciation of the ‘being’ of the objects involved. But although Otto characterizes creature-feeling as a ‘self-feeling’ and a ‘self-valuation’ (10), this time it is, plainly, an ontological valuation that is involved: I am a nullity, ‘dust and ashes’. Why should this feeling not ‘at the same moment’ involve a corresponding positive valuation of an external object, as with the feeling of profaneness? Since the valuations now in question are ontological, there is no reason why there should be a prior awareness of the ‘being’ of the object to which this ‘value’ is attached. The positive valuation may simply disclose the numen in its essential ‘majesty’.

Otto simply offers no justification for his claim that two emotions or feeling states are involved here, in contrast with what he himself recognizes to be the case with augustness and profaneness: he just asserts it. ‘In contrast to the “overpowering” of which we are conscious as an object over against the self’, he writes, ‘there is the feeling of one's own submergence’ (20). And yet we are conscious of the ‘august’ as an object over and against the self, though the corresponding sense of our own profanity is not regarded by Otto as a ‘reflex’ to this. Indeed, we may ask, is a sense of the ‘majesty’ of an object so much as intelligible without creature feeling (or a sense of absolute dependence)? Otto's own characterization of the numen's power as ‘overpowering’ itself suggests not. To feel overpowered is, surely, to pass a (pre-cognitive) ‘valuation’ on ourselves in relation to such an object. Conversely, is a sense of one's own nullity so much as conceivable except in connection with a sense of overpowering might?

To echo what I said earlier in relation to Otto's own account of ‘augustusness’ and profaneness: is it not as true to say that we find something to have majestas because we feel totally dependent (or a nullity) in its presence as to say the converse? Otto's feeling of awe may simply be one aspect – the ‘objective’ aspect – of the feeling of absolute dependence (or creature-feeling) itself – or, perhaps, of a particular way of experiencing it. One should, in this connection, recall the passages in the Speeches, praised by Otto, that emphasize ‘wonderful, dreadful, mysterious emotions’, and that employ terms such as ‘holy reverence’ and ‘pious awe’. It is true that such an emphasis hardly features in the Glaubenslehre. In the latter about all that Schleiermacher says in this connection is that ‘reverence for God’ is an expression of the feeling of absolute dependence (§47.1), and that such a feeling is ‘stern’ (streng) (§33.2). The first may seem platitudinous, and the latter laughably inadequate. There is, however, no reason in principle why the richer, more Ottonian language of the Speeches should not have been employed in the Glaubenslehre in connection with the feeling of absolute dependence – especially when one bears in mind that the passages in question occur in the later editions on the Speeches, when Schleiermacher was already developing his mature position.

In fact, not only does Otto offer no justification for rejecting the foregoing suggestion that awe and creature-feeling may simply be two aspects of one and the same feeling, he cannot himself deny it without introducing incoherence into his own account. Otto says that the numinous tremendum is ‘rendered more adequately’ as tremenda majestas (19–20). Such ‘majesty’ is, therefore, a primary characteristic of the numen. Indeed, it is, according to Otto, specifically this that gives rise to creature-feeling: ‘It is especially in relation to this element of majesty or absolute overpoweringness that the creature-consciousness, of which we have already spoken, comes on the scene, as a sort of shadow or subjective reflection [Reflex] of it’ (20). If, however, creature-feeling is a response to an object revealed in its majesty, what is the feeling that primarily reveals such majesty itself (or reveals an object as ‘majestic’)? There is, in fact, nothing in Otto's account to fulfil this role other than creature-feeling itself. The feeling of awe cannot do it, since this feeling, as Otto makes clear, accounts only for the ‘absolute unapproachability’ of the numen. That this is seen by Otto as being distinct from majestas is made clear when he claims that the former can exist in the absence of the latter, as in mysticism (20). The only other primary numinous feelings recognized by Otto are ‘stupor’ and fascination. The former can hardly be what reveals the numen in its majestas, since it concerns, rather, the mysteriousness of the numen; the latter stands to the former as form to matter (31); and the ‘elements of meaning’ involved in them are ‘definitely different’ (25).

Fascination is also clearly a different aspect of numinous experience from that which would reveal majestas. Fascination concerns the value of the numen, and hence eventually relates to ‘augustness’ rather than ‘majesty’; it is in itself, however, only a matter of subjective value; and it need not arise at all until the level of the daemonic has been reached (31). The only feeling recognized by Otto, therefore, that could possibly reveal the majestas of the numen is creature-feeling itself – and yet such feeling is supposed to be a response to a ‘majestic’ object. The only way for Otto to avoid this incoherence is to allow that creature-feeling (or the feeling of absolute dependence) reveals both ourselves as a nullity (or as absolutely dependent) and an object of absolutely overpowering might – just as Schleiermacher claimed.

The relation between Schleiermacher and Otto

I suggested at the beginning that Otto's work is best seen as a continuation and elaboration of Schleiermacher's. I shall conclude by considering two doubts that one might have about this claim. The first arises from the fact that, as I have pointed out, Schleiermacher insists that the feeling of absolute dependence never exists as a moment of consciousness as such. In itself it is not a ‘datum’ of consciousness; and so, it may be claimed, is hardly a proper subject for the sort of phenomenological, indeed introspective, procedure that Otto brings to bear on numinous experiences.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, one might go further, and point out that there are echoes in the pages of the Glaubenslehre of Schleiermacher's treatment of immediate self-consciousness in his Dialektik, where it clearly has a transcendental function, analogous to Kant's transcendental unity of apperception. As such, it is ‘prior’ to any psychological realities of the sort that are of concern to Otto. In fact, however, and perhaps because of this, in the Glaubenslehre itself Schleiermacher makes it clear that he is concerned with immediate self-consciousness, and the feeling of absolute dependence in particular, when it has made, as he puts it, ‘an appearance in time’ (§5.2). There is an innate tendency for it ‘to break through into consciousness’ (§5.3). It enters consciousness precisely in virtue of uniting with modes of sensible self-consciousness: ‘The feeling of absolute dependence …, in order to realize itself in an actual moment, must first unite with a sensible stimulation of self-consciousness’ (§9.1).

However, one may perhaps wonder if the feeling, even when psychologically real, is the sort of thing that is at all comparable with the kind of psychological states with which Otto concerned himself. After all, the feeling of absolute dependence

How is this at all comparable with Otto's numinous experiences and their constituent elements, which are evoked on specific occasions, often by definite stimuli? The answer to this is that, although the feeling of absolute dependence is unalterable as far as its essential character and presence is concerned, it can vary, in human consciousness, both in its clarity and its strength (§5.5, §68.2). It can, indeed, be present in an ‘infinitely small degree’ (§62.1). It is when the feeling of absolute dependence has attained some degree of clarity, and when it is present in some degree, perhaps a considerable degree, of strength, that it is comparable with Otto's creature-feeling, and is amenable to phenomenological reflection and identification.

Still, the fact that the feeling of absolute dependence never itself constitutes a moment of consciousness, and that it is always invariably the same in character, may lead one to doubt that it possesses its own distinctive psychological character, unlike Otto's numinous experiences and their constituents. Such a doubt would be misplaced, however. When the feeling unites with a mode of sensible self-consciousness, it becomes ‘a constituent factor’ of the person's conscious state at that time (§5.4), and the contribution that it makes to that state can be identified and characterized. If this were not so, it would be inexplicable how Schleiermacher could write of people being ‘gripped’ by the feeling at particular moments and not at others (§6.1) and of lamenting the absence of the feeling in moments of their life (§5.5). Indeed, it is the essentially unchanging nature of the feeling that in part accounts for its availability for phenomenological identification – since its unchanging absoluteness can be appreciated in contrast to the variable contributions of freedom and dependence in all sensible self-consciousness.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of this is Schleiermacher's discussion of polytheism. This is, for him, an under-developed form of religious consciousness, because the feeling of absolute dependence has not yet appeared ‘in its complete unity and indifference to all that the sensible self-consciousness may contain’. Although the feeling of absolute dependence is always united with some mode of sensible self-consciousness, only when it is appreciated as making the self-same contribution to any mode of sensible self-consciousness with which it may be united is the feeling ‘fully developed’ (§8.2). As he says later, this depends upon a ‘contrast’ being apprehended in consciousness (§33.1). When this has happened, the ‘higher self-consciousness’, the feeling of absolute dependence, has ‘become quite distinct from the lower’ (§8.2). Although determinate religious emotions vary enormously, in virtue of having this unique and invariable element they are homogeneous; and it is this homogeneity of religious emotions that furnishes the ‘principle of monotheism’ (§56.1).

Although, as we have seen, Schleiermacher emphasizes that the feeling of absolute dependence is not, in and of itself, a state of consciousness, and enters into consciousness only as an element in a more complex state, such passages as these demonstrate that this feeling is no mere abstraction for Schleiermacher. When it ‘enters’ consciousness, it makes itself consciously felt as an actual constituent of consciousness, and it has its own distinctive phenomenological character. Otherwise the ‘homogeneity’ that its presence lends to all religious emotions could not, as Schleiermacher here insists that it should, be clearly appreciated.

The second worry is over whether a theory such as Schleiermacher's, which operates with a single essential religious feeling – that of absolute dependence – is really able to account for the rich variety of religious feeling, and its complex nature – as Otto, for one, delineates it. Will not such an exclusive focus on a particular sort of feeling result in Schleiermacher's account being, as Otto himself claims in an earlier work, ‘a very one-sided and inadequate description of religious feeling’?Footnote ⁹ I said at the outset that I would not be claiming that Otto adds nothing new to Schleiermacher's account of religious consciousness. What we now see is that no genuinely new, intrinsically religious element of feeling can be simply grafted on to Schleiermacher's account. Every such element, in order to count as religious at all, must be determined as such by the feeling of absolute dependence.

But is this really true? If it is not, Schleiermacher's position would ultimately be inconsistent with Otto's procedure. In fact, however, the ability of Schleiermacher's account to incorporate such a variety of genuinely religious feeling should not be underestimated. It is important, in particular, to bear in mind that, since the feeling of absolute dependence never exists as an independent state of feeling, but is always united with some mode of sensible self-consciousness so as to constitute a ‘religious emotion’, actual religious feeling can be as varied as sensible self-consciousness can be, since there is no mode of sensible self-consciousness with which the feeling of absolute dependence cannot be united. The feeling of absolute dependence is, therefore, in this sense not just ‘one sort of feeling’. It enters into actual consciousness only by contributing its own distinctive character to the overall phenomenological character of more complex states of feeling. Moreover, the feeling of absolute dependence itself can enter into consciousness in complex and multiple ways. To give just one example of how complex a religious feeling can be for Schleiermacher, consider his account of conscience. Conscience, the painful sense of our own sinfulness, is not possible except in what he terms ‘teleological’, rather than ‘aesthetic’, religion (§9.1, §63.1). The former, unlike the latter, relates God-consciousness to the demand for action and therefore to responsibility and the possibility of guilt. In order for religious conscience to be experienced, we require not only the feeling of absolute dependence to have been made clear in the form of God-consciousness, we also need this feeling to be incited primarily in relation to actions that are to be performed in response to such consciousness, we need an appreciation of a ‘discrepancy’ between such a stimulus to action and our actual will, and we need a sense of this failing as a ‘hindrance to life’, and we need a consequent sense of pain. As a result of all this we feel ‘the divine causality, in virtue of which conscience exists’ (§83.1). In other words, we feel our absolute dependence in and through this complex state of consciousness: a complex state consisting of several levels where the feeling of absolute dependence is involved on more than one level.

Nevertheless, is it really true that there cannot be recognizably religious feelings in the absence of a feeling of absolute dependence? To take a crucial example, is not religious awe possible without any feeling of absolute dependence? It will, in fact, be difficult for Otto, at least, to maintain this, once we have set aside the misinterpretations of that feeling discussed in the first part of this paper. Otto certainly never suggests that creature-feeling may be absent from numinous experience. Indeed, when he moves on from discussing the tremendum to discussing the majestas that evokes creature-feeling, he says that the latter ‘must be added’ (19). Perhaps a feeling of mere eeriness, or dread, may lack it; but these are merely proto-religious feelings for Otto. If such feelings do exist in the absence of a sense of absolute dependence (or creature-feeling), they would not be even proto-religious feelings for Schleiermacher, but merely modes of sensible self-consciousness.

It is difficult to adjudicate this issue. Are these primitive feelings non-religious or do they, as Otto puts it, form ‘the vestibule at the threshold of the real religious feeling’ (122)? It should be noted that Otto opts for the latter only because he discerns an ‘unnatural’, non-worldly aspect to such experiences, primitive though they may be. ‘Not even the most menacing and overpowering created thing can instil’ the sort of feelings that are now in question (14). In an eerie shudder, ‘the mysterious is already beginning to loom before the mind, to touch the feelings. It implies the first application of a category of valuation which has no place in the everyday natural world of ordinary experience’ (15). Otto is not content, however, to remain on the phenomenological level. These primitive experiences are deemed proto-religious because he sees in them the first stirrings of an innate tendency in the human soul to develop a fully fledged sense of a reality transcendent to the whole world. In such primitive experience we find ‘the obscure basis of meaning and idea … of a transcendent Something’ (126).

Otto stresses not only the variety and richness of numinous experience, but also its variability. Not only is there a development of religious experience in the history of mankind, so that certain elements of numinous experience emerge later than others, but some elements of numinous experience can be effectively absent even from developed religious traditions – as, for example, ‘awefulness’ can be absent from certain mystical forms of numinous experience (25). What, however, binds all these elements together as genuine aspects of ‘the numinous’ is that they emerge from that innate tendency in the human soul to develop a sense of a ‘wholly other’ reality that completely transcends the world and worldly experience. Emotions are religious (or proto-religious) only to the extent that they are expressions of this. ‘Only gradually,’ writes Otto, ‘does the obscure content [Gehalt] of the feeling [sc. numinous feeling], with its reference to absolute transcendent reality, come to light in all its integrity and self-subsistence’ (133).

I have elsewhere detailed the extraordinarily close parallels between Otto's thoughts on these matters and Schleiermacher's.Footnote ¹⁰ What is important in the present context is that Schleiermacher ties together all these elements, as pointing to a transcendent reality, through the feeling of absolute dependence. For him, the innate tendency is towards a clear presence of the feeling of absolute dependence, in the form of ‘God-consciousness’, in human experience. For him, as for Otto, this tendency can be expressed in obscure, faltering, and even perverted ways – as his remarks on primitive idolatry indicate (§33.2). Otto's interpretation of all religious feeling in terms of the development of the ‘meaning and idea’ of a wholly transcendent reality is precisely paralleled by Schleiermacher's interpretation of them in terms of the development of God-consciousness. Since, for Otto, the developed ‘idea’ that represents the full teleological development of the numinous tendency in mankind certainly contains the element of creaturehood, it seems that the latter must be seen as obscurely present in such primitive feelings as that of eeriness, if they are to be related to religion at all.

Hence, all the elements in Otto's account that are not explicitly there in Schleiermacher could be seen as fuller, perhaps more adequate, specifications of how the feeling of absolute dependence is concretely realized psychologically – or, at least, as fuller specifications of how it may be. All that would block Otto's acceptance of such a wholesale Schleiermacherian reading of his own project is his insistence that the feeling of absolute dependence (or creature-feeling) has but a secondary role to play in the numinous œconomy. But this, I have suggested, has to be excised from Otto's account anyway, if only on grounds of consistency.