The Holy in a Pluralistic World
Rudolf Otto’s Legacy in the 21st Century
Edited by
Ulrich Rosenhagen [+–]
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ulrich Rosenhagen is Director of the Center for Religion and Global Citizenry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 2012 and is author of Brudermord, Freiheitsdrang, Weltenrichter: Religiöse Kommunikation und öffentliche Theologie in der amerikanischen Revolutionsepoche (De Gruyter, 2015). He edited Nostra Aetate and the Future of Interreligious Dialogue with Charles Cohen and Paul Knitter (Orbis, 2017). He has written in academic and non-academic journals on Jewish-Christian relations, Social Protestantism, and interreligious dialogue. His main interests are interreligious literacy, religion and social justice, and the work of Rudolf Otto.
Gregory D. Alles [+–]
McDaniel College
Gregory Alles is professor of religious studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He is co-editor of Numen, the journal of the International Association for the History of Religions, and a member of the steering committee of the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Alles has served as President of the North American Association for the Study of Religions. His research has focused widely on rhetoric in Greek and Sanskrit epic, the history of the study of religions in Germany, particularly the work of Rudolf Otto, the study of religions in a global context, and most recently on adivasi (tribal) people in Gujarat, India, known as Rathvas. He edited Religious Studies: A Global View and is author of The Iliad, The Ramayana, and the Work of Religion: Failed Persuasion and Religious Mystification as well as a number of articles.
Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) was one of the most important contributors to the study of religions at the beginning of the 20th century. His book, The Idea of the Holy, became a sensation in its time, and his account of numinous experience as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans (“a mystery that both repels and attracts”) had an effect equalled by few other ideas in the study of religions. His vocabulary broke through narrow disciplinary bounds and was taken up by scholars in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences.
Since the 1960s, Otto has been increasingly overlooked and neglected. As thinkers and scholars have turned in many other intellectual directions, they have tended to see Otto as representative of a past to be rejected. The Holy in a Pluralistic World gathers essays from a variety of perspectives – theology, religious studies, intellectual history, and cultural studies – to address what Otto’s legacy for the 21st century might be.
This volume explores Otto’s ideas and their contexts, then turns to the area that Otto, more than any other German theologian or philosopher of religion, opened up: an engagement with the world of religions. However, Otto’s influence has never been confined to systematic religious thought and the study of religions. His ideas have resonated more widely, and essays presented here examine this wider impact, in architecture, poetry, politics, and the contemporary world more generally.
The Holy in a Pluralistic World is not an attempt to revivify Rudolf Otto, nor offer a magisterial statement about Otto’s significance today. It issues an invitation to those with an interest not just in religions but also in cultural phenomena to take another look at Otto and his ideas. Perhaps they will find more than they expect, and something that they can use.
Table of Contents
Introduction
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ulrich Rosenhagen is Director of the Center for Religion and Global Citizenry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 2012 and is author of Brudermord, Freiheitsdrang, Weltenrichter: Religiöse Kommunikation und öffentliche Theologie in der amerikanischen Revolutionsepoche (De Gruyter, 2015). He edited Nostra Aetate and the Future of Interreligious Dialogue with Charles Cohen and Paul Knitter (Orbis, 2017). He has written in academic and non-academic journals on Jewish-Christian relations, Social Protestantism, and interreligious dialogue. His main interests are interreligious literacy, religion and social justice, and the work of Rudolf Otto.
McDaniel College
Gregory Alles is professor of religious studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He is co-editor of Numen, the journal of the International Association for the History of Religions, and a member of the steering committee of the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Alles has served as President of the North American Association for the Study of Religions. His research has focused widely on rhetoric in Greek and Sanskrit epic, the history of the study of religions in Germany, particularly the work of Rudolf Otto, the study of religions in a global context, and most recently on adivasi (tribal) people in Gujarat, India, known as Rathvas. He edited Religious Studies: A Global View and is author of The Iliad, The Ramayana, and the Work of Religion: Failed Persuasion and Religious Mystification as well as a number of articles.
Introduction to the volume.
Part 1: Theological, Philosophical and Contextual Considerations
1. Rudolf Otto’s Post-Kantian Platonism [+–] 11-32
Eastern Kentucky University
Todd Gooch is Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion (De Gruyter, 2000), as well as several other publications on Otto and related figures. He has also contributed chapters and articles on Ludwig Feuerbach and other nineteenth-century philosophical critics of religion to The Oxford History of Nineteenth-Century Germany Philosophy, The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, The Oxford History of Modern German Theology, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and The Journal for the History of Modern Theology.
In this chapter I investigate the philosophical-theological background of some of Rudolf Otto’s central ideas. I examine, first, Otto’s broadly Platonic use of the term “idea” in expressions such as “idea of the divine” (Idee des Göttlichen or Idee der Gottheit); second, Otto’s anti-empiricism, and the role of anamnesis in his account of religious knowledge and of the religious a priori; and third, his reliance on the Platonic concept of methexis (μέθεξις) or participation in the idea of the divine for his soteriology. I argue that recognizing Otto’s Platonism, as well as his use of post-Kantian idealist Jakob Fries’ epistemological theories, is central for understanding Otto’s religious epistemology and his treatment of a number of central theological topics.
Ludwig Maximilians-University
Peter Schüz is Lecturer in Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion in the Department for Protestant Theology at the Ludwig Maximilians-University in Munich. His research interests are theological dogmatics, hermeneutics, ecumenism, and aesthetics with a focus on the history of Protestantism in the 19th and early 20th century. His Dissertation on the relationship between fear and religion in Rudolf Otto’s thought is titled: Mysterium Tremendum: Zum Verhältnis von Angst und Religion nach Rudolf Otto (Mohr Siebeck, 2016). Schüz is also co-editor of the conference volume Rudolf Otto: Theologie – Religionsphilosophie – Religionsgeschichte (De Gruyter, 2014).
In the following chapter, I focus on Otto’s relation to the liberal tradition of Protestantism: after a brief overview of the basic motifs of the so-called Liberal Theology in Germany, I will discuss the relations between Otto and Liberal Theology, examining his biographical background, key aspects of his theological works, and passages from Otto’s correspondence that convey some apprehension about Liberal Theology. I claim that that, in the end, Otto was both inside and outside of the Liberal Theology tradition, and his relationship toward it is ultimately ambivalent: as a liberal thinker who found his academic home in the liberal climate of Göttingen, Otto finally became what can be called a crisis diagnostician of Liberal Theology, pitting the irrational and mysterious dimensions of Christian piety against the later so-called liberal Cultural Protestantism. In this way he became a key figure in the transformation of theology in the early 20th century and in the crisis of German Liberal Theology after the First World War that is still relevant for the debates about the future of theology today.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ulrich Rosenhagen is Director of the Center for Religion and Global Citizenry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 2012 and is author of Brudermord, Freiheitsdrang, Weltenrichter: Religiöse Kommunikation und öffentliche Theologie in der amerikanischen Revolutionsepoche (De Gruyter, 2015). He edited Nostra Aetate and the Future of Interreligious Dialogue with Charles Cohen and Paul Knitter (Orbis, 2017). He has written in academic and non-academic journals on Jewish-Christian relations, Social Protestantism, and interreligious dialogue. His main interests are interreligious literacy, religion and social justice, and the work of Rudolf Otto.
A key development in early 20th century Protestantism was the ecumenical movement, combining missionary impulses, a striving for international peace, and interdenominational efforts towards social justice and welfare. Otto reflected on the ecumenical movement’s reach and structure especially in his correspondence with the Swedish archbishop Nathan Söderblom, one of its early, towering figures. Because of the interreligious encounters during his first world journey, Otto considered the ecumenical movement too limited and exclusive. In response, he created the Religious League of Humanity, an interreligious organization that was meant to morally complement the sprouting League of Nations. And he suggested a unique approach that Protestantism, Anglicanism, and Eastern-Orthodoxy ought to be three distinct pillars of the movement’s foundation. Otto intended to collaborate with Söderblom, but in the end failed in his overtures to the Swedish archbishop who neither shared Otto’s approach nor imagination.
4. Rudolf Otto and the Theory of Religion [+–] 99-112
Boston University
Robert Cummings Neville is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Boston University where he taught for thirty-one years and was Dean of the School of Theology and Dean of Marsh Chapel. He has published widely, the thirtieth book being the Metaphysics of Goodness: Harmony and Form, Beauty and Art, Obligation and Personhood, Flourishing and Civilization.
In this essay I attempt to say in deep appreciation why Otto’s description of the holy is so fascinating. Nevertheless, he is needlessly “transcendental” in a sense close to Kant’s use of that term, which I shall claim is a bad thing. How then can we have a non-transcendental, naturalist, theory of religion that supplies the background he needs for his description of the holy? I shall draft a sketch of an appropriate naturalistic theory that also accommodates the philosophic traditions of many of the world’s cultures.
Part 2: Otto and “The Religions”
5. Rudolf Otto and the Problem of Categories [+–] 115-134
McDaniel College
Gregory Alles is professor of religious studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He is co-editor of Numen, the journal of the International Association for the History of Religions, and a member of the steering committee of the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Alles has served as President of the North American Association for the Study of Religions. His research has focused widely on rhetoric in Greek and Sanskrit epic, the history of the study of religions in Germany, particularly the work of Rudolf Otto, the study of religions in a global context, and most recently on adivasi (tribal) people in Gujarat, India, known as Rathvas. He edited Religious Studies: A Global View and is author of The Iliad, The Ramayana, and the Work of Religion: Failed Persuasion and Religious Mystification as well as a number of articles.
When scholars of religions think about Otto at all, they think of him as embracing simplistic, essentializing views of religion and religious categories. In this chapter I try to demonstrate a more sophisticated and nuanced relationship Otto has with religious categories, starting with the category of “religion” itself, showing how he used this concept not to isolate a distinct essence or unity to all religion, but in part to preserve religion’s diversity. Though Otto had substantially less access to Indian sources as we do now, he was ahead of his time in thinking through “Hinduism’s” diversity. He also insisted that we acknowledge the diversity of experiences under the banner of “mysticism,” and his own mysterium tremendum. At the end I bring to bear contemporary philosophy of language onto our consideration of Otto, encouraging us to read him with a bit more nuance.
6. Nostalgia, Trauma, and the Numinous: Twentieth-Century Jewish Readings of Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige [+–] 135-159
University of Gloucestershire
Melissa Raphael is Professor of Jewish Theology at the University of Gloucestershire and teaches modern Jewish thought at Leo Baeck College, London. She has been the Sherman Lecturer in Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester and the Hussey Lecturer in the Church and the Arts at the University of Oxford. She is the author of numerous articles and books. Her books include Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (Oxford, 1997) and Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art (Continuum, 2009). She is currently working on a new book on gender, idol-breaking and liberation.
Over the course of the twentieth century, Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (translated as The Idea of the Holy) was widely cited in Jewish religious thought, including Orthodox thought, to affirm the existential immediacy of revelation, even in a modern secular age. Other modern Jewish thinkers retained some liberal wariness of, even antipathy to, numinous experience as a threat to the moral integrity of the holy. But those alienated from the tradition after the modernization, and later eradication, of European Jewish life, were particularly receptive to Otto’s account of the numinous. Otto’s romanticism named their nostalgic encounter with Jewish observance as a primarily aesthetic experience of the uncanny: something both repudiated and longed for; something present in its absence. In the post-Holocaust era, several theologians made further use of Otto’s account of the morally equivocal numinous to (more or less) reconcile a loving God with the mysterium horrendum of the Holocaust.
7. Wonderstruck: Otto, Vision, and Modern Hinduism [+–] 160-183
Emerson College
Tulasi Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology, Religion and Transnational Studies at the Marlboro Institute at Emerson College. She is the author of several monographs, including Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (University of California, 2012) and The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder (Duke, 2018). Srinivas’ research has been supported by prestigious fellowships at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Germany, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Harvard University, among others. She is an award-winning teacher-activist and is an expert with the World Economic Forum, Geneva. Her work has been featured on The Conversation, The Revealer, The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, National Public Radio, and The Boston Globe.
Central to Rudolf Otto’s thought is that we can apprehend, in a limited way, the essence of religion through feeling. In this chapter I follow this thread, interrogating Otto’s idea of the numinous through contemporary Hinduism, where the act of vision or darshan of the holy is the central moment of communion between worshipper and worshipped. Through three distinct divine visions in Hinduism, two textual and one ethnographic, I explore the phenomenology of visionary experience to rethink our understanding of the numinous, Hinduism, and religion more broadly, ultimately arguing that we can understand Otto’s numinous as a breakthrough of “wonder” which interrupts ordinary life.
8. Looking Bodhidharma in the Eye: The Beginnings of Otto’s Interreligious Encounters with Japanese Buddhists [+–] 184-212
University of Leipzig
Katja Triplett is Associate Fellow at the Humanities Center of Advanced Studies „Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities, “ University of Leipzig. She is an affiliated Professor of the Study of Religions at Marburg University, where she curated the Religionskundliche Sammlung from 2007 to 2012. She received her Doctorate in the Study of Religions from Marburg University where she also studied Japanese Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology. Her main fields of interest are Buddhism, religion and medicine, and visual and material culture. She has published widely on Japanese religions. Among her recent publications is Buddhism and Medicine in Japan (De Gruyter, 2019).
Rudolf Otto’s legacy is more than his written oeuvre, but also includes the collection of religious artifacts he assembled in Marburg (what would become the Religionskundliche Sammlung) and his wide network of acquaintances in many parts of the world including Japan. Examining contemporary sources such as personal letters and photos as well as other materials from the Religionskundliche Sammlung, the following chapter will shed light on the little explored connection between Otto’s academic writings on Japanese Buddhism, the Religionskundliche Sammlung, and his personal German-Japanese encounters. I examine how formative his contact with Japan was for his interest in the parallels and convergences in the development of different religions, in Zen as a noteworthy case of a religion stripped of its ‘rational’ elements, and for the blossoming of Zen Buddhist study in 20th century Marburg.
9. The Idea of the Holy in African Religions [+–] 213-229
Dartmouth College
Robert M. Baum is Associate Professor of Religion and African and African-American Studies at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. He focuses his research on the history of African religions. Baum is the author of the award-winning Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (Oxford, 1999) and West African Women of God: Alinesitoue and the Diola Prophetic Tradition (Indiana, 2015). For seven years he served as Executive Editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa. He is currently completing the first volume of a planned three volume continent-wide history of African religions.
In this chapter I discuss the relationship between Rudolf Otto’s concept of numinous experience and certain African religious traditions, relying primarily on my field research among the Diola of West Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast. Accounts of Diola religious life offer clear evidence of the experience of the wholly other that both evokes awe and simultaneously draws people into intimate connection and more normalized communication with the supreme being, in which It ceases to be “wholly other” or incomprehensible. In this way, I argue that African religious traditions both support Otto’s description of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, and would have strengthened it as well, making it more inclusive of the wide array of the world’s religious experiences. My analysis also challenges those areas of Otto’s (or anyone’s) theory of religion where he allows evolutionary schemas to creep in and relegate African religious life to the “pre-religious” or “primitive.”
Part 3: Contemporary Applications
Diné College
Karla Cavarra Britton is Professor of Art History, School of Arts, Humanities, and English, Diné College (Navajo Nation) in Tsaile, Arizona, where she directs a National Endowment for the Humanities grant addressing Navajo art and is researching art and architecture in Native America more broadly. After receiving her PhD at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she co-directed Columbia’s New York/Paris Program. She taught at the Yale School of Architecture, addressing modern sacred architecture, resulting in Constructing the Ineffable: Contemporary Sacred Architecture (Yale, 2011). In 2017 Britton was resident at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton. She recently co-edited Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld (Thames & Hudson, 2020).
Architecture occupied a particularly important position in Rudolf Otto’s analysis of the holy, as he recognized it as a major expression of the numinous. I argue that this idea lies behind much of the attention paid to the “ineffable” in modern and contemporary religious architecture. I track this influence, examining how Otto’s ideas are expanded in 20 and 21st century architecture—and theological reflection about that architecture—first examining Paul Tillich’s theology of architecture, then the ineffable in modernist architects Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, and finally in monuments to atrocities: Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero in New York City, with reference to the World Trade Center itself as sacred architecture. I close by a consideration of the sacred’s indeterminacy in the largely secular Western world, which offers both challenges and opportunities for architecture.
11. Devotional Poetry’s Mysterium Tremendum [+–] 257-279
Indiana University
Constance M. Furey is Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Recipient of a multi-year Luce Foundation grant for a collaborative project, “Being Human,” she is also the author of two monographs, most recently Poetic Relations: Faith and Intimacy in the English Reformation (University of Chicago, 2017). Among other projects, she has written multiple essays on the Immanent Frame blog and has a forthcoming book, co-authored, entitled Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination.
In his desire to preserve religion’s transformative potential, Rudolf Otto consistently privileged God’s ‘otherness’ over familiarity, decrying social and personal representations of God. And yet Otto vacillates on this point, at times insisting on the importance of human-divine connection. In this essay, I follow Otto’s lead by considering something he himself does not fully develop: a conflation of the personal and the impersonal, of self and other in relation. To help understand Otto’s view, I examine how Martin Luther envisioned the duality of divine otherness and intimacy. I then consider devotional poetry, showing how it similarly combines an awareness of alterity with the solace of proximity, enabling intimacy that is something other than “merely” personal—thereby offering what Otto suggests he was seeking.
Youngstown University
Michael Jerryson† (1974-2021) was Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at Youngstown State University, Ohio. An expert on religion and violence, Jerryson published extensively on comparative religion, religion in South and Southeast Asia, and Buddhist traditions. He co-editored The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence (Oxford, 2013) and authored If you Meet the Buddha on the Road: Buddhism, Politics, and Violence (Oxford, 2018). Jerryson co-founded Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence through the American Academy of Religion and served as a consultant on Southeast Asian conflicts.
Through the example of ISIS and its religiously-justified violence, this chapter examines the relevance of Rudolf Otto’s work on the study of religion and violence. Psychologists have long dismissed any psychopathology as an explanation for why people commit religious terrorism or religiously justified violence. Rather, it is about people’s individual experiences and rationales. It is in this way that Otto’s focus on the religious experience provides insights into the relationship between religion and violence. Particularly, Otto’s focus on religion’s nonrational component, the emotional dimension of the numinous, and people’s reactions to the perceived view of the numinous in a state of deterioration elucidates instances of religiously-justified violence. This chapter concludes with the placement of Otto’s perspective within the larger discourse of other theorists in order to better understand the lure of ISIS’ recruitment.
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Jörg Lauster is Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion at Ludwig Maximilians-University in Munich. He studied Protestant Theology, Philosophy and Romance Studies in Munich, Tübingen, and Heidelberg. He wrote his Dissertation on Marsilio Ficino (1996) and his Habilitation on modern transformations of the Protestant scriptural principle (2002). He was Assistant Professor in Mainz from 1999 to 2005 and Professor in Marburg from 2006 to 2015. He wrote Gott und das Glück (Gütersloher, 2005) and Die Verzauberung der Welt: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Christentums (C. H. Beck, 2014). He is also co-editor of the conference volume Rudolf Otto: Theologie – Religionsphilosophie – Religionsgeschichte (De Gruyter, 2014).
Jörg Lauster argues for the continuing relevance of Rudolf Otto’s ideas in contemporary religious studies and theology. Against the backdrop of the contributions to this volume, he shows how Otto’s thought may inspire future research. Lauster also outlines some conceptual limits of Otto’s program.
End Matter
Index 309-311
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ulrich Rosenhagen is Director of the Center for Religion and Global Citizenry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 2012 and is author of Brudermord, Freiheitsdrang, Weltenrichter: Religiöse Kommunikation und öffentliche Theologie in der amerikanischen Revolutionsepoche (De Gruyter, 2015). He edited Nostra Aetate and the Future of Interreligious Dialogue with Charles Cohen and Paul Knitter (Orbis, 2017). He has written in academic and non-academic journals on Jewish-Christian relations, Social Protestantism, and interreligious dialogue. His main interests are interreligious literacy, religion and social justice, and the work of Rudolf Otto.
McDaniel College
Gregory Alles is professor of religious studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He is co-editor of Numen, the journal of the International Association for the History of Religions, and a member of the steering committee of the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Alles has served as President of the North American Association for the Study of Religions. His research has focused widely on rhetoric in Greek and Sanskrit epic, the history of the study of religions in Germany, particularly the work of Rudolf Otto, the study of religions in a global context, and most recently on adivasi (tribal) people in Gujarat, India, known as Rathvas. He edited Religious Studies: A Global View and is author of The Iliad, The Ramayana, and the Work of Religion: Failed Persuasion and Religious Mystification as well as a number of articles.
