Rudolf Otto

Otto's problem in Das Heilige is that the word holy has been colonised by ethics. In ordinary use it now means morally perfect, and Otto argues that this is a late refinement covering over an older and stranger content: an encounter with something wholly other, before which the appropriate response is not admiration but a kind of terror mixed with helpless attraction.

Since no available word carried that meaning cleanly, he made one. From the Latin numen, a divine power, he formed the numinous, and he described the experience of it with a Latin formula that has been quoted ever since: mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The mysterium is what cannot be grasped or conceived; the tremendum is the awefulness, the overpoweringness, the sense of one's own nothingness that he called creature feeling; the fascinans is the pull, the strange desire to approach the very thing that appals. He gathered examples from the Hebrew prophets, the book of Job, Luther, the Bhagavad Gita and reports of ordinary people in ordinary places.

The influence has been enormous and the criticism is equally serious. If the holy is a category of its own, irreducible to anything else, then it is insulated by definition from psychological, social or historical explanation, and a critic can reasonably ask whether that is a discovery or a fence. The atlas records both the term, which is genuinely useful, and the objection, which has never been answered to everyone's satisfaction.

Otto is remembered for one book, and it distorts him. He was a working comparativist who travelled a great deal at a time when most German theologians did not, through North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, India, China and Japan, and much of his output is an attempt to test whether the category he had described in Das Heilige turns up outside Christianity.

His conclusion was that it does. The study he published in 1926 setting the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara beside the German mysticism of Meister Eckhart argues that two thinkers separated by language, century and religion arrive at strikingly parallel structures, and that the parallels are too specific to be accidental. He also produced work on the Bhagavad Gita and on the devotional theism of Ramanuja and Indian bhakti, insisting against the fashion of his day that Indian religion was not exhausted by monism.

He proposed, without much success, an interreligious body he called the Religious League of Mankind, on the model of the League of Nations, which would speak jointly on moral questions without doctrinal agreement. He assembled a collection of religious objects from his travels which became the museum of religion at Marburg, one of the first of its kind. He died in 1937 after a fall from a tower, in circumstances that have never been fully clarified.