THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

Rudolf Otto (1950)

Excerpted from The idea of the holy, 2nd ed.  Trans. John W. Harvey.  London:  Oxford University Press.

‘Numen’ and the ‘Numinous’

(1) ‘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 in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.  The same thing is true (to take a quite different region of experience) of the category of the beautiful.

(2)        Now these statements would be untrue from the outset if ‘the holy’ were merely what is meant by the word, not only in common parlance, but in philosophical, and generally even in theological usage. The fact is we have come to use the words ‘holy’, ‘sacred’ (heilig) in an entirely derivative sense,  quite different from that which they originally bore.  We  generally take ‘holy’ as meaning ‘completely good’; it is the absolute moral attribute, denoting the consummation of moral goodness.  

 
(3)        But this common  usage of the term is inaccurate.  It is true that all this moral significance is contained in the word ‘holy’, but it includes in addition—as even we cannot but feel—a clear overplus of meaning, and this it is now our task to isolate.

(4)        Accordingly, it is worthwhile to find a word to stand for this element in isolation, this ‘extra’ in the meaning of ‘holy’ above and beyond the meaning of goodness. By means of a special term we shall the better be able, first, to keep the meaning clearly apart and distinct, and second, to apprehend and classify connectedly whatever subordinate forms or stages of development it may show.  For this purpose I adopt a word coined from the Latin numen.  Omen has given us ‘ominous’, and there is no reason why from numen we should not similarly form a word ‘numinous’.  I shall speak, then, of a unique ‘numinous’ category of value and of a definitely ‘numinous’ state of mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied. This mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined.  There is only one way to help another to an understanding of it.  He must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of the matter through the ways of his own mind, until he reaches the point at which ‘the numinous’ in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness.  We can co-operate in this process by bringing before his notice all that can be found in other regions of the mind, already known and familiar, to resemble, or  again to afford some special contrast to, the particular experience we wish to elucidate. Then we must add:  ‘The X of ours is not precisely this experience, but akin to this one and the opposite of that other.  Cannot you now realize for yourself what it is?’  In other words our X cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it  can only be evoked,  awakened in the mind; as everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.

‘Mysterium Tremendum’

(5) We said above that the nature of the numinous can only be suggested by means of the special way in which it is reflected in the mind in terms of feeling.  ‘Its nature is such that it grips or stirs the human mind with this and that determinate affective state.’  We have now to attempt to give a further indication of these determinate states. We must once  again endeavour, by adducing feelings akin to them for the purpose of analogy  or contrast, and by the use of metaphor and symbolic expressions, to make the states of mind we are  investigating ring out, as it were, of themselves.

(6)        Let us consider the deepest and most fundamental element in all strong and sincerely felt religious emotion. Faith unto salvation, trust, love—all these are there. But over and above these is an element which may also on occasion, quite apart from them, profoundly affect us and occupy the mind with a well nigh bewildering strength.  Let us follow it up with every effort of sympathy and imaginative intuition wherever it is to be found, in the lives of those around us, in sudden, strong ebullitions of personal piety and the frames of mind such ebullitions evince, in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings, to temples and to churches.  If we do so we shall find we are dealing with something for which there is only one appropriate expression, ‘mysterium tremendum’.  The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its ‘profane’, non-religious mood of everyday experience.  It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and  convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and  to ecstasy.  It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering.  It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and  glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what?  In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.

(7)        It is again evident at once that here too our attempted formulation by means of a concept is once more a merely negative one. Conceptually mysterium denotes merely that which is hidden and esoteric, that which is beyond conception or understanding, extraordinary and unfamiliar.  The term does not define the object more positively in its  qualitative character. But though what is enunciated in the word is negative, what is meant is something absolutely and intensely positive.  This pure positive we can experience in feelings, feelings which our discussion can help to make clear to us, in so far as it arouses them actually in our hearts.

1.  The Element of Awefulness

(8)        To get light upon the positive ‘quale’ of the object of these feelings, we must analyse more closely our  phrase mysterium tremendum, and we will begin first with the adjective.

(9)        Tremor is in itself merely the perfectly familiar and ‘natural’ emotion of fear.  But here the term is taken, aptly enough but still only by analogy, to denote a quite specific kind of emotional response, wholly distinct from that of being afraid, though it so far resembles it that the analogy of fear may be used to throw light upon its nature. There are in some languages special expressions which denote, either exclusively or in the first instance, this ‘fear’ that is more than  fear proper.  The Hebrew higdis (hallow) is an example. To ‘keep a thing holy in the heart’ means to mark it off by a feeling of peculiar dread, not to be mistaken for any ordinary dread, that is, to appraise it by the category of the numinous.  But the Old Testament throughout is rich in parallel expressions for this feeling. Specially noticeable is the ‘emah of Yahweh’ (‘fear of God’), which Yahweh can pour forth, dispatching almost like a daemon, and which seizes upon a man with paralyzing effect. It is closely related to the δεîμα πανιĸόν of the Greeks. Compare Exod. xxiii, 27: ‘I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come…’; also Job ix. 34; xiii. 21 (‘let not his fear terrify me’; ‘let not thy dread make me afraid’).  Here we have a terror fraught with an inward shuddering such as not even the most menacing and overpowering created thing can instill.  It has something spectral in it.

(10)        Of modern languages English has the words ‘awe’, ‘aweful’, which in their deeper and most special sense approximate closely to  our meaning. The phrase, ‘he stood aghast’, is also suggestive in this connexion.  In my examination of Wundt’s Animism I suggested the term Scheu (dread); but the special ‘numinous’ quality (making it ‘awe’ rather than ‘dread’ in the ordinary sense) would then, of course, have to be denoted by inverted commas.  ‘Religious dread’ (or ‘awe’) would perhaps be a better designation.  Its antecedent stage is ‘daemonic dread’ (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a  sort of abortive offshoot, the ‘dread of ghosts’.  It first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny’, ‘eerie’, or ‘weird’.  It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history.  ‘Daemons’ and ‘god’ alike spring from this root, and all the products of ‘mythological apperception’ or ‘fantasy’ are nothing but different modes in which it has been objectified. And all ostensible explanations of the origin of religion in terms of animism or magic or folk-psychology are doomed from the outset to wander astray and miss the real goal of their inquiry, unless they recognize this fact of our nature—primary, unique, underivable from anything   else—to be the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution.

(11)        Not only is the saying of Luther, that the natural man cannot fear God perfectly, correct from the standpoint of psychology, but we ought to go farther and add that the natural man is quite unable even to ‘shudder’ (grauen) or feel horror in the real sense of the  word. For ‘shuddering’ is something more than ‘natural’, ordinary fear.  It implies that the mysterious is already beginning to loom before the mind, to touch the feelings.  It implies the first application of a category of  valuation which has no place in the everyday natural world of ordinary experience, and is only possible to a being in whom has been awakened a mental predisposition, unique in kind and different in a definite way from any ‘natural’ faculty. And this newly-revealed capacity, even in the crude and violent manifestations which are all it first evinces, bears witness to a completely new function of experience and standard of valuation, only belonging to the spirit of man.

 
(12)        Before going on to consider the elements which unfold as the ‘tremendum’ develops, let us give a little further consideration to the first crude, primitive forms in which this ‘numinous dread’ or awe shows itself. It is the mark which really characterizes the so-called ‘religion of primitive man’, and there it appears as ‘daemonic dread’. This crudely naïve and primordial emotional disturbance, and the fantastic images to which it gives rise, are later overborne and ousted by more highly developed forms of the numinous emotion, with all its mysteriously impelling power. But even when this has long attained its higher and purer mode of expression it is possible for the primitive types of excitation that were formerly a part of it to break out in the soul in all their original naivete and so to be experienced afresh.  That this is so is shown by the potent attraction again and again exercised by the  element of horror and ‘shudder’ in ghost stories, even among persons of high all-round education. It is a remarkable fact that the physical reaction to which this unique ‘dread’ of the uncanny gives rise is also unique, and is not found in the case of any ‘natural’  fear  or terror.  We say: ‘my blood ran icy cold’, and ‘my flesh crept’.  The ‘cold blood’ feeling may be a symptom of ordinary, natural fear, but there is  something non-natural or supernatural about the symptom of ‘creeping flesh’.  And anyone who is capable of more precise introspection must recognize that the distinction between such a ‘dread’ and natural fear is not simply one of degree and intensity. The awe or ‘dread’ may indeed be so overwhelmingly great that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making the man’s hair bristly and his limbs quake. But it may also steal upon him almost unobserved as the gentlest  of agitations, a mere fleeting shadow passing across his mood.  It has therefore nothing to do with intensity, and no natural  fear passes over into it merely by being intensified.  I may be beyond all measure afraid and terrified without there being even a trace of the feeling of uncanniness in my emotion.

(13)        We should see the facts more clearly if psychology in general  would make a more decisive endeavour to examine and classify the feelings and emotions according to their qualitative differences. But the far too rough division of elementary feelings in general into pleasures and pains is still an obstacle to this. In point of fact ‘pleasures’ no more than other feelings are differentiated merely by degrees of intensity: they show very definite and specific differences. It makes a specific difference to the condition of mind whether the soul is merely in a state of pleasure, or joy, or aesthetic rapture, or moral exaltation, or finally in the religious  bliss that may come in worship.  Such states certainly show resemblances one to another, and on that account can legitimately be brought under a common class-concept (‘pleasure’), which serves to cut them off from other psychical functions, generically different. But this class-concept, so far from turning the various subordinate species into merely different degrees of the same thing, can do nothing at all to throw light upon the essence of each several state of mind which it includes.

(14)        Though the numinous emotion in its completest development shows a world of difference from the mere ‘daemonic dread’, yet not  even at the highest level does it belie its pedigree or kindred. Even when the worship of ‘daemons’ has long since reached the higher level of  worship of ‘gods’ these gods still retain as numnia something of the ‘ghost’ in the impress they make on the feelings of the worshipper, viz. the peculiar quality of the ‘uncanny’ and ‘aweful’, which survives with the quality of exaltedness and sublimity or is symbolized by means of it. And this element, softened though it is, does not  disappear even on the highest level  of all, where the worship of God is at its purest. Its disappearance would be indeed an essential loss.  The ‘shudder’ reappears in a form ennobled beyond measure where the soul, held speechless, trembles inwardly to the farthest fibre of its being.  It invades the mind mightily in Christian worship with the words:  ‘Holy, holy, holy’; it breaks forth from the hymn of Tersteegen:

 
God Himself is present:
Heart, be stilled before Him:
Prostrate inwardly adore Him.

 
The ‘shudder’ has here lost its crazy and bewildering note, but not the ineffable something that holds the mind. It has become a mystical awe, and sets free as its accompaniment, reflected in self-consciousness, that ‘creature-feeling’ that has already been described as the feeling of personal nothingness and submergence before the awe-inspiring object directly experienced.

(15)        We have been attempting to unfold the implications of that aspect of the mysterium tremendum indicated by the adjective, and the result so far may be summarized in two words, constituting, as before, what may be called an ‘ideogram’, rather than a concept proper, viz. ‘absolute unapproachability’.

2.  The element of ‘Overpoweringness’ (‘majestas’)

(16)        It will be felt at once that there is yet a further element which must be added, that, namely, of ‘might’, ‘power’, ‘absolute overpoweringness’.  We will take to represent this the term majestas, majesty—the more readily because anyone with a feeling for language must detect a last faint  trace of the numinous still clinging to the word,  The tremendum may then be rendered more adequately tremenda majestas, or ‘aweful majesty’.  This second element of majesty may continue to be vividly preserved, where the first, that of unapproachability, recedes and dies away, as may be seen, for example, in mysticism.  It is especially in relation to this element of majesty or absolute overpoweringness that the creature-consciousness comes upon  the scene, as a sort of shadow or subjective reflection of it.  Thus, in contrast to ‘the overpowering’ of which we are conscious as an object over against the self, there is the feeling of one’s own submergence, of being but ‘dust and ashes’ and nothingness.  And this forms the numinous raw material for the feeling of religious humility.

3.  The Element of ‘Energy’ or Urgency

(17)        There is, finally, a third element comprised in those of tremendum and majestas, awefulness and majesty, and this I venture to call the ‘urgency’ or ‘energy’ of the numinous object.  It is particularly vividly perceptible in the όργή  or ‘wrath’; and it everywhere clothes itself in symbolical expressions—vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, excitement, activity, impetus. These features are typical and recur again and again from the daemonic level up to the idea of the ‘living’ God.

(18)        In the first place, it is patent from many passages of the Old Testament that this ‘wrath’ has no concern whatever with moral qualities.  There is something very baffling in the way in which it ‘is kindled’ and manifested.  It is, as has been well said, ‘like a hidden force of nature’, like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near.  It is ‘incalculable’ and ‘arbitrary’.  Anyone  who is accustomed to think of deity only by its rational attributes must see in this ‘wrath’ mere caprice and willful passion.  But such a view would have been emphatically rejected by the religious men of the Old Covenant, for to them the Wrath of God, so far from being a diminution of His Godhead, appears as a natural expression of it, an element of ‘holiness’ itself, and a quite indispensable one.  And in this they are entirely right. This όργή is nothing but the tremendum itself, apprehended and expressed by the aid of a naïve analogy from the domain of natural experience, in this case from the ordinary passional life of men.  But naïve as it may be, the analogy is most disconcertingly apt and striking; so much so that it will always retain its value and for us no less than for the men of old be an inevitable way of expressing one element in the religious emotion.

(19)        Beside the ‘wrath’ or ‘anger’ of Yahweh stands the related expression ‘jealousy of Yahweh’.  The state of mind denoted by the phrase ‘being jealous for Yahweh’ is also a numinous  state of mind, in which features of the tremendum pass over into the man who has experienced of it.

The Analysis of ‘Mysterium’

(20) We gave to the object to which the numinous consciousness is directed the name mysterium tremendum, and we then set ourselves first to determine the meaning of the adjective tremendum—which we found to be itself only justified by analogy—because it is more easily analysed than the substantive idea mysterium.  We have now to turn to this, and try, as best we may, by hint and suggestion, to get to a clearer apprehension of what it implies.

4.  The ‘Wholly Other’

(21)        It might be thought that the adjective itself gives an explanation of the substantive; but this is not so.  It is not merely analytical; it is a synthetic attribute to it; i.e. tremendum adds  something not necessarily inherent in mysterium. It is true that the reactions in consciousness that correspond to the one readily and spontaneously overflow into those that correspond to the other; in fact, anyone sensitive to the use  of words would commonly feel that the idea of ‘mystery’ (mysterium) is so closely bound up with its  synthetic qualifying attribute ‘aweful’ (tremendum) that one can hardly say the former without catching an echo of the latter, ‘mystery’ almost of itself becoming ‘aweful mystery’ to us. But the passage from the one idea to the other need not by any means  be always so easy.  The elements of meaning implied in ‘awefulness’ and ‘mysteriousness’ are in themselves definitely different.  The latter may so far preponderate in the religious consciousness, may stand out so vividly, that in comparison with it the former almost sinks out of sight; a case which  again could be clearly exemplified from some forms of mysticism. Occasionally, on the other hand, the reverse happens, and the tremendum may in turn occupy the mind without the mysterium.

(22)        This latter, then, needs special consideration on its own account. We need an expression for the mental reaction peculiar to it; and here, too, only one word seems appropriate, though, as it is strictly applicable only to a ‘natural’ state of mind, it has here meaning only by analogy: it is the word ‘stupor’.  Stupor is plainly a different thing from tremor; it signifies blank wonder, an astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement absolute.  Taken,  indeed, in its purely natural  sense, mysterium would first mean merely a secret or a mystery in the sense of that which is alien to us, uncomprehended and unexplained; and so far mysterium is itself merely an ideogram, an analogical notion taken from the natural sphere, illustrating, but incapable of exhaustively rendering, our real meaning.  Taken in the religious sense, that which is ‘mysterious’ is—to give it perhaps the most striking expression—the ‘wholly other’ (θáτερον, anyad, alienum), that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the ‘canny’, and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment. 

(23)        It might be objected that the mysterious is something which is and remains absolutely and invariably beyond our understanding, whereas that which merely  eludes our understanding for a time but is perfectly intelligible in principle should be called, not a ‘mystery’, but merely a ‘problem’.  But this is by no means an adequate account of the matter.  The truly ‘mysterious’ object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon  something  inherently ‘wholly other’, whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil  in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb.

(24)        This may be made still clearer by a consideration of that degraded offshoot and travesty of the genuine ‘numinous’ dread or awe, the fear of ghosts.  Let us try to analyse this experience. We have already specified the peculiar feeling-element of ‘dread’ aroused by the ghost as that of ‘grue’, grisly horror.  Now this ‘grue’ obviously contributes something to the attraction which ghost-stories exercise, in so far, namely, as the relaxation of tension ensuing upon our release from it relieves the mind in a pleasant and agreeable way.  So far, however, it is not really the ghost itself that gives us pleasure, but the fact that we are rid of it.  But obviously this is quite insufficient to explain the ensnaring attraction of the  ghost-story. The ghost’s real attraction rather consists in this, that of itself and in an uncommon  degree it entices the imagination, awakening strong interest and curiosity; it is the weird thing itself that allures the fancy. But it does this, not because it is ‘something long and white’ (as someone once defined a ghost), nor yet through any of the positive and  conceptual attributes which fancies about ghosts have invented, but because it is a thing that ‘doesn’t really exist at all’, the ‘wholly other’, something which has no place in our  scheme of reality but belongs to an absolutely different one, and which at the same time arouses an irrepressible interest in the mind.

(25)        But that which is perceptibly true in the fear of ghosts, which is, after all, only a caricature of the genuine thing, is in a far stronger sense true of the ‘daemonic’ experience itself, of which the fear of ghosts is a mere offshoot.  And while, following this main line of development, this element in the numinous consciousness, the feeling of the ‘wholly other’, is heightened and clarified, its higher modes of manifestation come into being, which set the numinous object in contrast not only to everything wonted and familiar (i.e. in the end, to nature in general), thereby turning it into the ‘supernatural’, but finally to the world itself, and thereby exalt it to the ‘supramundane’, that which is above the whole world-order.

(26)        These terms ‘supernatural’ and ‘transcendent’ give the appearance of positive attributes, and, as applied to the mysterious, they appear to divest the mysterium of its originally negative meaning and to turn it into an affirmation.  On the side of conceptual thought this is nothing more than appearance, for it is obvious that the two terms in question are merely negative and exclusive attributes with reference to ‘nature’ and the world or cosmos respectively. But on the side of the feeling-content it is otherwise; that is in very truth positive in the highest degree, though here too, as before, it cannot be rendered explicit in conceptual terms.  It is through this positive feeling-content that the concepts of the ‘transcendent’ and ‘supernatural’ become forthwith designations for a unique ‘wholly other’ reality and quality, something of whose special character we can feel, without being able to give it clear conceptual expression.

5.  The Element of Fascination

(27) The qualitative content of the numinous experience, to which ‘the mysterious’ stands as form, is in one of its aspects the element of daunting ‘awefulness’ and ‘majesty’, which has already been dealt with in detail; but it is clear that it has at the same time another aspect, in which it shows itself as something uniquely attractive and fascinating.

(28)        These two  qualities, the daunting and the fascinating, now combine in a strange harmony of contrasts, and the resultant dual character of the numinous consciousness, to which the  entire religious development bears witness, at any rate from the level  of the ‘daemonic dread’ onwards, is at once the strangest and most noteworthy phenomenon in the whole history of religion. The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own.  The ‘mystery’ is for him not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels a something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication; it is the Dionysiac-element in the numen.

(29)        Religious practice may manifest itself in those normal and easily intelligible forms which occupy so prominent a place in the history of religion, such forms as propitiation, petition, sacrifice, thanksgiving, &c.  But besides these there is a series of strange proceedings which are constantly attracting greater and greater attention, and in which it is claimed that we may recognize, besides mere religion in general, the particular roots of mysticism.  I refer to those numerous curious modes of behaviour and fantastic forms of mediation, by means of which the primitive religious man attempts to master ‘the mysterious’, and to fill himself and even to identify himself with it. These modes of behaviour fall apart into two classes.  On the one hand the ‘magical’ identification of the self with the numen proceeds by means of various transactions, at once magical and devotional in character—by formula, ordination, adjuration, consecration, exorcism, &c.:  on the other hand are the ‘shamanistic’ ways of procedure, possession, indwelling, self-fulfillment in exaltation and ecstasy.  All these have, indeed, their starting-points simply in magic, and their intention at first was certainly simply to appropriate the prodigious force of the numen for the natural ends of man. But the process does not rest there. Possession of and by the numen becomes an end in itself; it begins to be sought for its own sake; and the wildest and most artificial methods of asceticism are put into practice to attain it.  In a word, the vita religiosa begins; and to remain in these strange and bizarre states of numinous possession becomes a good in itself, even a way of salvation, wholly different from the profane goods pursued by means of magic.  Here, too, commences the process of development by which the experience is matured and purified, till finally it reaches its consummation in the sublimest and purest states of the ‘life within the Spirit’ and in the noblest mysticism. Widely various as these states are in themselves, yet they have this element in common, that in them the mysterium is experienced in its essential, positive, and specific character, as something that  bestows upon man a beatitude beyond compare, but one whose real nature he can neither proclaim in speech nor conceive in thought, but may know only by a direct and living experience. It is a bliss which embraces all those blessings that are indicated or suggested in positive fashion by any ‘doctrine of salvation’, and it quickens all of them through and through; but these do not exhaust it. Rather by its all-pervading, penetrating glow it makes of these very blessings more than the intellect can conceive in them or affirm of them. It gives the peace that passes understanding, and of which the tongue can only stammer brokenly.  Only from afar, by metaphors and analogies, do we come to apprehend what it is in itself, and even so our notion is but inadequate and confused.

(30)        It is not only in the religious feeling of longing that the moment of fascination is a living factor.  It is already alive and present in the moment of ‘solemnity’, both in the gathered concentration and humble submergence of private devotion, when the mind is exalted to the holy, and in the common worship of the congregation, where this is practiced with earnestness and deep sincerity, as, it is to be feared, is with us a thing rather desired than realized. It is this and nothing else that in the solemn moment can fill the soul so full and keep it so inexpressibly tranquil. [END]