What is the numinous?

The numinous names the non-rational core of religious experience — the encounter with something that is not merely unusual or impressive but wholly other, a reality of a different order entirely. The word itself is Jung's adoption of a coinage by Rudolf Otto, who derived it from the Latin numen (divine power, hint, sign — the nod of a god's head, the moment an image moved). Otto introduced it in Das Heilige (1917) to designate what liberal theology had been systematically rationalizing away: the irreducible, pre-moral, pre-conceptual something at the heart of every genuine religious encounter.

Otto's formulation is precise and worth sitting with:

'Holiness'—'the holy'—is a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion. It is, indeed, applied by transference to another sphere—that of Ethics—but it is not itself derived from this. While it is complex, it contains a quite specific element or 'moment', which sets it apart from 'the Rational'… and which remains inexpressible—an arrêton or ineffabile—in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.

This ineffabile element Otto calls the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: a mystery that is simultaneously terrifying and entrancing, that seizes the subject rather than being summoned by the subject's will. The numinous is not a feeling the ego generates; it is an objective presence that impresses itself upon consciousness. Otto's crucial insistence is that this experience is sui generis — it cannot be derived from moral reasoning, aesthetic pleasure, or ordinary cognition. It is a primary datum, as irreducible as the experience of beauty.

Jung adopted the term wholesale and made it the operational definition of religion itself. In Psychology and Religion he writes that religion is "a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto aptly termed the numinosum, that is, a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will" (Jung 1958, par. 6). The numinous seizes — the human subject is always "rather its victim than its creator." And then, in a formulation that carries the full weight of his clinical experience:

We might say, then, that the term "religion" designates the attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has been changed by experience of the numinosum.

This is the hinge on which Jung's entire psychology of religion turns. Creeds, dogmas, rituals — these are secondary formations, "codified and dogmatized forms of original religious experience" (Jung 1958, par. 10). The numinous is the living encounter; everything else is the institutional casing built around it. When the casing loses its connection to the original experience, religion becomes what Edinger calls mere "belief" — a cramp of the will trying to achieve by assertion what can only be given by encounter (Edinger 1996).

There is, however, a fault-line between Otto and Jung worth naming. For Otto, the numinous is the wholly other — God as absolute transcendence, before which the human creature feels its own nothingness. Jung accepts the phenomenology but resists the metaphysics. He notes that it is "psychologically quite unthinkable for God to be simply the 'wholly other,' for a 'wholly other' could never be one of the soul's deepest and closest intimacies — which is precisely what God is" (Jung 1944, par. 11, n. 6, as cited in Papadopoulos 2006). Where Otto emphasizes unqualified submission before the transcendent, Jung insists that consciousness must be maintained: individuation requires that the encounter with the numinous unconscious devalue neither the numinous nor the ego. The numinous, for Jung, is not purely out there — it is the quality that marks the appearance of an archetype, the felt charge of the collective unconscious breaking into personal experience.

Hillman presses this further still, noting that numen in its classical Latin context referred specifically to the animation of an image — the moment a cult statue nodded or opened its eyes. This is, he argues in Healing Fiction (1983), "quite a different experience from Rudolf Otto's abstract feeling of a transcendent unimaged Wholly Other." For Hillman, the numinous is inseparable from the image; it is the soul-charge of a particular figure, not the abstract trembling before formless transcendence. This is where Hillman breaks most sharply from the Otto-Jung inheritance: numinosity is not a quality that descends from above but one that inheres in the image itself, in the animated particularity of psychic life.

The pneumatic current in Western religious thought — the preference for spirit over soul, for the transcendent over the immanent, for the wholly other over the intimately present — has consistently tried to capture the numinous for its own purposes, to make it evidence for ascent. Otto's formulation, for all its phenomenological precision, participates in this: the mysterium tremendum points upward and away. Jung's correction, and Hillman's radicalization of it, insist that the numinous is equally available in the downward direction — in the dream image, the symptom, the fantasy figure, the thing that will not leave you alone. The encounter is real in both directions. What changes is where you look for it.

  • numinosum — the glossary entry on Otto's term and its Jungian reception
  • Rudolf Otto — portrait of the theologian who coined the concept
  • religion — how Jung defines religion through the numinous encounter
  • James Hillman — portrait of the archetypal psychologist who relocated the numinous in the image

Sources Cited

  • Otto, Rudolf, 1917, The Idea of the Holy
  • Jung, C.G., 1958, Psychology and Religion: West and East
  • Edinger, Edward F., 1996, The New God-Image
  • Papadopoulos, Renos K., 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology
  • Hillman, James, 1983, Healing Fiction