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Rudolf Otto
Rudolf Otto
German Lutheran theologian and historian of religions whose 1917 Das Heilige (translated as The Idea of the Holy) reframed the study of religion around the non-rational core of religious experience. Otto’s central coinage, the numinous, names a primary immediate datum of consciousness — a mysterium tremendum et fascinans that is terrifying, entrancing, and wholly other (Otto 1917). The numinous is not derivable from rational categories and is not reducible to ethics; it is an a priori category of mind that responds to the impact of the divine.
Otto’s importance to the depth tradition is twofold. First, he provides Jung with the vocabulary by which Jung defines religion itself: “Religion is a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto aptly termed the numinosum*”* (Jung 1958, par. 6). Second, he provides Eliade with the affective ground of hierophany and the sacred (Eliade 1957). Both inheritors press Otto’s phenomenology beyond his Lutheran framing: Jung locates the numinous in the autonomous productions of the unconscious; Eliade locates it in the structure of sacralized cultural worlds. Without Otto’s Das Heilige, the twentieth-century recovery of religion as experience prior to creed would lack its central term.