Tremendum Et Fascinans

it becomes an almost exact synonym for our ‘numinous’ under all its aspects… it at the same time exercises a supreme ‘fascination’. And this its dual character, as at once an object of boundless awe and boundless wonder, quelling and yet entrancing the soul, constitutes the proper positive content of the ‘mysterium’

Otto articulates the tremendum et fascinans as the constitutive bipolarity of numinous experience — the mysterium’s positive content being precisely this paradoxical union of annihilating awe and irresistible wonder.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

this ‘feeling of reality’, the feeling of a ‘numinous’ object objectively given, must be posited as a primary immediate datum of consciousness… CHAPTER IV MYSTERIUM TREMEN

Otto grounds the mysterium tremendum in a primal datum of consciousness — the felt givenness of a numinous object — prior to any rational elaboration, establishing the experiential foundation of the term.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

he succeeded in determining the content and specific characteristics of religious experience… he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect… He finds the feeling of terror

Eliade frames Otto’s project as the definitive phenomenological account of religious experience, centring the irrational terror — the tremendum — as the core of what Otto isolated in Das Heilige.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The prophetic experience of the mysterium terribile et fascinans was at one and the same time rape and seduction: Yahweh, you have seduced me and I am seduced, You have raped me and I am overcome

Armstrong applies Otto’s paired categories directly to Jeremiah’s prophetic crisis, interpreting the biblical text as a paradigm case of the numinous encounter in which divine terror and compulsion are experientially inseparable.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

never content with anything short of a knowledge of the heart when it came to the ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ (the awesome and bewitching mystery) of the unconscious

Hoeller transposes Otto’s theological formula into Jungian depth psychology, identifying the unconscious itself — rather than any external deity — as the locus of the tremendum et fascinans.

Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

It is the absolute ‘numen’, felt here partially in its aspect of ‘maiestas’ and ‘tremendum’. And the reason I introduced these terms above to denote the one side of the numinous experience was in fact just because I recalled Luther’s own expressions

Otto traces the tremendum’s genealogy through Luther’s theology of divine majesty, showing how the experiential category is continuous with the Reformation’s insistence on God’s terrifying, non-rational sovereignty.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The ‘shudder’ reappears in a form ennobled beyond measure where the soul, held speechless, trembles inwardly to the furthest fibre of its being… It has become a mystical awe

Otto traces the developmental arc of the tremendum from crude shudder to refined mystical awe, arguing that even in the highest worship the tremendum is not dissolved but sublimated.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

No special feeling is implied or to be evoked, neither mysterium tremendum nor fascinans. It would also be totally impossible to call a god himself hieros

Burkert explicitly denies the applicability of Otto’s tremendum et fascinans to the Greek category of the hieros, mounting a structural critique of Otto’s universalising claims about the phenomenology of the holy.

Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

he feels the ‘tremendum’ in the ‘maiestas’ when he asserts that God ‘is wroth’, and demands ‘awe’ as a fundamental characteristic of religion when he says: ‘Ita fit, ut religio et maiestas et honor metu constet’

Otto demonstrates through Lactantius that the tremendum — the wrathful, awe-demanding aspect of divinity — has been a persistent structural feature of theological reflection across centuries.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

terror and ‘fear’ only seize upon us when we gaze down into its depths. So, too, here the Psalmist. When he gazes down into the immeasurable, yawning Depth of the divine Wisdom, dizziness comes upon him and he recoils in terrified wonder

Otto reads Chrysostom’s exegesis of Psalm 139 as a patristic witness to the tremendum’s vertigo — the stupor and terror that mark authentic encounter with the numinous abyss.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil… XI. The Mysterium Tremendum in Robertson and Watts

The paratextual architecture of Otto’s own volume — its Goethe epigraph on shuddering and its appendix on the mysterium tremendum — signals the centrality of the concept to the entire work’s organizing logic.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Theology says the divine is a tremendum, but a tremendum can come in small tremulous ways, a mere tremor, a shake, brush, shrug — the swift reaction to an insect

Hillman appropriates and miniaturizes the tremendum, arguing that the divine terror need not manifest in sublime grandeur but can arrive through the uncanny proximity of small, animal presences.

Hillman, James, Animal Presences, 2008supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

in his battles with ‘desperatio’ and with Satan, in his constantly recurring religious catastrophes and fits of melancholy… we must… hear sounding in them the profoundly non-rational strain of ‘religious awe’

Otto reads Luther’s psychological crises as experiential evidence of the tremendum’s grip on the believer, interpreting religious despair as the phenomenological shadow cast by encounter with the numinous.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the religious ‘feeling’ properly involves a unique kind of apprehension, sui generis, not to be reduced to ordinary intellectual or rational ‘knowing’… itself a genuine ‘knowing’, the growing awareness of an object

Otto frames the numinous feeling — the experiential substrate of the tremendum et fascinans — as a sui generis mode of cognition that is irreducible to rationality yet constitutes authentic knowing.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The knowledge of God is impressed upon the mind of every man by God. Under the sole guidance of nature all men know that God is — without any acquaintance with the arts or sciences

Otto cites Reformers on the universality of the divine impression on human consciousness, providing a theological-anthropological context for the claim that numinous experience is cross-culturally innate.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →