Rudolf Otto

Rudolf Otto (born Sept. 25, 1869, Peine, Prussia—died March 6, 1937, Marburg, Ger.) was a German theologian, philosopher, and scholar of religion, who exerted worldwide influence through his investigation of the human experience of the holy. Das Heilige (1917; The Idea of the Holy, 1923) is his most important work. His ideas were influential in the development of the study of religion in the 20th century, particularly for the school of phenomenology of religion.

Early life and academic career

Otto was the son of William Otto, a manufacturer. Little is known of Otto’s early life, except that he was educated at the gymnasium in Hildesheim before becoming a student of theology and philosophy at the University of Erlangen and, later, at the University of Göttingen, where he was made a Privatdozent (“lecturer”) in 1897, teaching theology, history of religions, and history of philosophy. In 1904 he was appointed professor of systematic theology at Göttingen, a post he held until 1914, when he became professor of theology at the University of Breslau. In 1917 he became professor of systematic theology at the University of Marburg and for one year (1926–27) served as rector of the university. He retired from his university post in 1929, though he continued to live in Marburg the rest of his life.

Otto took time from his scholarly pursuits, more out of a sense of duty than of preference, to participate in community and public affairs. He was a member of the Prussian Parliament from 1913 to 1918 and a member of the Constituent Chamber in 1918, where he asserted a liberal and progressive influence. And he was later to concern himself with the political questions of the Weimar Republic. Otto also participated widely in Christian ecumenical activities, both as they related to divisions within the Christian community and as they concerned relations between Christianity and other religions of the world.

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Scholarly pursuits

What initially prompted Otto’s inquiry into man’s experience of the holy was a specifically Christian, even Protestant, concern that had awakened in him while studying the life and thought of Martin Luther. This concern—to elucidate the distinctive character of the religious interpretation of the world—is reflected in his first book, Die Anschauung vom heiligen Geiste bei Luther (1898; “The Perception of the Holy Spirit by Luther”). He was to expand his inquiry in his book, Naturalistische und religiöse Weltansicht (1904; Naturalism and Religion, 1907), in which he contrasted the naturalistic and the religious ways of interpreting the world, first indicating their antitheses and then raising the question of whether the contradictions can be or should be reconciled.

Otto resisted an easy reconciliation between the world view offered by the sciences and the religious interpretation but opposed equally the religionist’s hostility toward science and the scientist’s disregard of religion. The two perspectives, he insisted, are to be embraced and heeded for what they purport to disclose concerning the world in which men live. It was clear, however, that Otto’s principal concern was to justify and to clarify what it is that the religious interpretation of the world, even within its rational aspect, conveys to man as a distinctive dimension of understanding beyond the discoveries of the sciences and the generalized knowledge following from them. Five years later came his work, Kantische-Fries’sche Religionsphilosophie (1909; The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries, 1931), a discussion of the religious thought of the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Jacob Friedrich Fries, in which he sought to specify the kind of rationality that is appropriate to religious inquiry.

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During 1911–12 Otto undertook an extended journey, visiting many countries of the world, beginning with North Africa, Egypt, and Palestine, continuing to India, China, and Japan, and returning by way of the United States. These experiences were to set his problem in a worldwide context, turning him to an extended and searching exploration of the diverse ways in which the religious response had manifested itself among various religions of the world. He proved to be remarkably well equipped for such an exploration, both in his mastery of languages and his knowledge of the history of world religions. In addition to being at home with the languages of Near Eastern religions, he had mastered Sanskrit sufficiently to translate many ancient Hindu texts into German as well as to write several volumes comparing Indian and Christian religious thought.

Influence of Schleiermacher

Otto’s initial mentor guiding his inquiry into the specific character of the religious response was the eminent German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. It was Schleiermacher’s early work, specifically his book Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebilden unter ihren Verächtern (1799; On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, 1893), to which Otto gave particular attention. What appealed to him in this work was Schleiermacher’s fresh way of perceiving religion as a unique feeling or awareness, distinct from ethical and rational modes of perception, though not exclusive of them. Schleiermacher was later to speak of this unique feeling as man’s “feeling of absolute dependence.” Otto was deeply impressed by this formulation and credited Schleiermacher with having rediscovered the sense of the holy in the post-Enlightenment age. Yet he later criticized the formulation on the grounds that what Schleiermacher had pointed up here was no more than a close analogy with ordinary, or “natural,” feelings of dependence. For “absolute dependence” Otto substituted “creature-feeling.” Creature-feeling, he said,

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is itself a first subjective 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 of the self.

Otto called this object “the numinous” or “Wholly Other”—i.e., that which utterly transcends the mundane sphere, roughly equivalent to “supernatural” and “transcendent” in traditional usage.